the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

eing. Thus the entrenchment of the myth of innocent victimhood informing a dominantly
white male authentic US national identity is established.
It is important to point out that what I describe as masochistic aesthetics is not a new
phenomenon by any means. Numerous systems of representation and depictive styles
throughout the history of visual culture attest to this. 93 Clearly, also, cinema is littered with
numerous historical examples of aesthetics of pain, shattering, decay, self-endangerment, the
grotesque, and making a spectacle or performance out of abjection. One need only look at the
formative films of German Expressionism (such as Nosferatu (Friedrich Murnau, 1921) and
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri (Robert Wiene, 1919)), the zombie cycle of horror movies by
George Romero, or the earlier works of David Cronenberg (for example, Shivers (1975)) to
see this. The historical precedent for this aesthetics is mostly rooted in corporeal horror, a
transgression or violation of the human body, or the ‘shocks’ associated with the modern
urban experience. 94 In particular, Barbara Creed maps Julie Kristeva’s notions of the abject
onto the horror film in order to, at first, demonstrate that these films are ‘an illustration of the
work of abjection’. 95 The point of this is to show that their aesthetic regimes (which includes
bodily waste and putrefying flesh) in conjunction with the notions of monstrosity produced
through the transgression of certain borders and categories of difference (for example, the
crossing of gender roles in Psycho or the racial connotations associated with the man/beast
dichotomy in King Kong) produce a simultaneous revulsion and ‘pleasure in breaking the
taboo on filth’. 96 Creed’s notion of an aesthetics of abjection is, in a way, a precursor to my
notion of masochistic aesthetics, due to the similar thematic material (a cinema of corporeal
93 For example, the macabre, demonstrated by Michael Wolgemut’s woodcut print, Danse Macabre (1493), or
the gothic art of the Medieval period.
94 Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror
Film (New York; Columbia University Press, 2005), 16
95 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 10
96 Ibid., 13
32