the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

same time reveals to deeper analysis, ‘expressions of revenge, of rebellion, and of triumph.’ 73
All of these emotions and tropes are common in dramatic textual forms, but the idea of the
pleasurable spectacular consumption of pain is compelling in the context of contemporary war
cinema. The performance of wounding and pain, be it physical or psychological, and the
transformation of bodies into objects of violence, is central to war films, and hence the
masochistic pleasures to be accessed in this context are worth investigating.
By far the most profoundly influential work on masochism within film and cultural studies is
Gilles Deleuze’s Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. His primary contribution was to reject
the notion of any link between sadism and masochism, stating that the one inflicting the pain
in a masochistic beating scene is not a sadist, and instead they are just a component of the
masochistic scenario. 74 Also, crucially, the Deleuzian masochistic model states that power and
agency is deferred and displaced onto exterior objects. 75 For Deleuze, death is associated with
the figure of the ‘cold, oral mother’, 76 and is a condition of the formulation of masochistic
subjectivity, since it signals the belittling and expulsion of paternal power. This marks the
primacy of maternal power which is figured as ambivalent in that it brings both pleasure and
pain. 77 In the most radical re-write of Freudian notions of masochism, Deleuze makes it clear
that he does not believe the fantasy revolves around ‘a child being beaten’, but rather ‘it is not
a child, but a father that is being beaten’ 78 and hence masochism rests on a ‘double
disavowal’; one that idealises the mother, and ‘a disavowal of the father who is expelled from
the symbolic order’. 79 Hence, once again we can see oppositions and contradictions
73 Ibid., 145
74 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 42-3
75 Ibid., 105
76 Ibid., 55
77 Gaylyn Studlar, “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema,” Movies and Methods: Volume Two,
ed. Bill Nichols, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 606
78 Deleuze, Masochism, 66
79 Ibid., 68
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