the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

Given the alignment of pleasures, seduction, spectacle, performance, and aestheticization
outlined above, how might one conceive of a masochistic spectatorship of contemporary war
films? As mentioned earlier, it is not only the ideological functions and uses of the damaged
male that are under scrutiny in this thesis, but also what spectator positions are hailed by the
usage of the damaged male and the masochistic aesthetics outlined above. This thesis builds
towards an account of the spectatorship of contemporary war films, one that is initially and
necessarily inflected with masochistic subjectivity. This is due to the oscillations of pain and
pleasure, and mastery and submission. It is also due to the tactile pleasure in revelling in the
textures of images of abjection and pain, and the looking on at the wounded male as spectacle.
Before we can address the masochistic spectatorship of contemporary war films, and the
models and trajectories this thesis will explore, a brief survey of relevant theorisations of
masochistic film spectatorship is required.
Gaylyn Studlar radically altered Laura Mulvey’s theory of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’ 97 by proclaiming that the spectator filled a masochistic position in relation to the
cinema screen. Her argument was based on the fact that the key concepts of disavowal and
fetishism, for Mulvey central to the female symbolising ‘lack’ in the cinema, were in fact
more aligned to the concept of masochism than castration anxiety or sexual difference.
Instead, fetish and disavowal are linked to the child coping with the mother’s departures and
returns. Fetish fills in for the absent mother, not the absent phallus. As such, the spectator is in
a masochistic position when implanted into the cinematic apparatus and ‘must comprehend
the images, but the images cannot be controlled’. 98 In this way, the spectator crucially submits
to the power of the cinema, and since ‘masochism savours suspense and distance’ 99 , our
97 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, 16:3 (1975), 6-18
98 Gaylyn Studlar, “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema”, 613
99 Ibid., 612
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