the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

memory (whether these be clearly delineated, or torn and frayed beyond recognition) in order
to shape its aesthetics and style.
It is the uses and functions of this contemporary visual style (or mode), in conjunction with
the damaged male, that is under sustained analysis in this thesis. I refer to this throughout as a
“masochistic aesthetics”, most simply due to the oscillating sense of pain and pleasure that
emerges in relationship to images of disaster, catastrophe and corporeal ruination (and which
shall be explored later at greater length). It describes a certain aesthetic and narrative regime
unified by its formal qualities and its ideological functions, namely, mediating and
contextualising the damaged male in contemporary American war films. This is achieved in
order to centralise the damaged male’s pain and victimhood, use narratives of innocence,
paranoia and suffering to mask US imperial belligerence, and to hail, or signal a certain form
of white, middle class, and sometimes, neo-liberal 68 spectatorship (explored later in this
thesis). Before I outline what constitutes masochistic aesthetics, and its historical and cultural
precedents, I shall look here at what is meant by “masochism”.
Far from being a sign of resignation and passivity/weakness, masochism is an index of
mastery and domination. But it is also the site for a radical subjectivity that exposes and
mocks the patriarchal basis of power and cultural authority. In this way it is an appropriate
tool for critiquing and dismantling the stratified cultural power that permits the disavowal of
68 Neo-liberalism is a normative political theory that asserts the supremacy of market freedom and private
enterprise over state intervention and control, espouses an inherent ideological linkage between capitalism and
democracy, and consistently stresses the sovereignty of the individual in determining their economic and
physical health. See Steven L. Lamy, “Contemporary mainstream approaches: neo-realism and neo-liberalism,”
The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations (2 nd Edition), ed. John Baylis
and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 182. Jean Grugel has emphasised the important role
‘economic liberalization’ has played in undermining the democratization process through siphoning power away
from the state, welfare and labour organisations and into the hands of private business and multinational
economic interests. Jean Grugel, Democratization: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 87-90
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