the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

each in subject formation that must be enacted in our negotiations of mainstream hegemonic
forms of cultural and patriarchal authority. It also provides a critical tool for deconstructing
and critiquing the power base of US national identity and its aesthetic and narrative
embodiments in the corporealities and psychologies of US masculinity in contemporary film.
The idea of the damaged soldier and his relationship to normative subjectivity in the context
of the contemporary war film is explored in Deleuzian terms by Tania Modleski. She asserts
that the ‘practice of war films is to show sexual domination and wartime aggression’ and that
there exists a fear of ‘dissolution through union with women’ which is ‘compensated with
violence and homosocial bonds.’ 82 Echoing the dichotomy of the attraction and repulsion of
the abject, Modleski states that soldiers possess ‘a desire for and a fear of fusion or
explosion’ 83 and resultantly ‘yearn for the paternal law that will rescue (them).’ 84 It is this
desire for paternal law which is so pertinent in Modleski’s analysis, since it is refracted
through a Deleuzian masochistic lens. Since, in Deleuze’s concept of masochism, the father is
expelled from the symbolic economy, but remains as a foremost point of reference, Modleski
notes that ‘the father is a closeted yet potent force in contemporary war films.’ 85 But what
Modleski misses, which is crucial in other accounts of masochism, cinema and spectatorship,
is the pleasure/pain dichotomy; it is in the radicalisation of pain and its transformation to
pleasure that the system of patriarchal authority is mocked and exposed and provides the most
subversive challenge to normative behaviours and gender stereotypes. In the light of this
challenge, I shall move on to precisely delineate what is meant by masochistic aesthetics.
82 Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (New York and
London: Routledge, 1991), 62
83 Ibid., 67
84 Ibid., 68
85 Ibid., 70
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