the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

assertions of America’s lost innocence. The ability for US mass culture to encounter public
collective traumas and effectively erase them and create a collective amnesia is remarkable.
US culture is stuck in a perpetual loop oscillating between damaged and then swiftly
recuperated innocence. This manufactures the condition whereby in the context of a
government that enacts ‘imperialist and unilateralist ventures’, Americans ‘see themselves as
innocent and passive victims, rather than aggressors, in relation to world politics.’ 51
The maintenance of this self-perception is an act performed by contemporary Hollywood war
films. In fact, they go further, not just stressing the victimized nature of the US male soldier,
but also specifically and pleasurably offering up his suffering and torment for consumption.
These fantasies and pleasures aid the entrenchment of an exceptionalist 52 account of the US’s
global status, and the exceptional nature of American pain and victimhood. This entrenchment
is achieved through a central privileging of the white damaged male, rendering his ruination
and the mise-en-scene of his crisis pleasurable. It is also achieved through narratively
coercing spectators into privileging US accounts of victimized subjectivity and national
identity (for example, focusing on the guilt of soldiers, rather than the people they have
killed).
It is specifically where the white male figures in US fantasies of victimhood that is of crucial
concern to this thesis, since as stated previously, the premier emotive trope for emblematising
and offering up the damaged, victimised male as spectacle and political tool is the American
51 Ibid., 7
52 Earlier defined as the doctrine by which the US asserts itself as ‘an extraordinary nation with a special role to
play in human history; not only unique but superior among nations’ and, according to Kaplan, as ‘the apotheosis
of the nation-form itself and as a model for the rest of the world’. So the specialty or uniqueness of the US is
partly founded on its self-belief in a perfected model of government and state organization. See Trevor
McCrisken, American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam: US Foreign Policy since 1974 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 1, and Amy Kaplan The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 16
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