the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

Returning to Studlar, she discusses the ‘primal scene’ which the infant must bear witness to,
like ‘Ulysses tied to the mast or Tantalus on whom is imposed the spectacle of parental
intercourse’, and therefore posits masochistic subjectivity as bound up with spectacle, desire
and fantasy. 103 Studlar also confirms a theme revisited many times already; that ‘masochistic
desire depends on suspension to guarantee a pain/pleasure structure’ and that there is a
requirement to restrain desire and ‘suspend consummation.’ 104 She goes on to draw
comparisons with the masochistic subject position and the location of the cinematic spectator,
declaring that
Like the masochist, the spectator must avoid the orgasmic release that destroys the
boundaries of disavowal, takes him/her outside the limits of normal spectatorship and
into the realm of the voyeur, and disrupts the magical thinking that defines the
infantile use of the cinematic object. 105
Therefore, we can see through Studlar’s model of masochistic spectatorship that ‘the formal
structures of masochism overlap with the psychological mechanisms that are implicated in the
cinematic apparatus’, namely, disavowal, fetishism, fantasy, and voyeurism/scopophilia. 106
But there is more to it than this, and what is more, it specifically relates to the contemporary
war film. War films depend on scenes of carnage and traumatic events for their narrative
impact, they also deal with historical events, and to an extent channel historical trauma. Also,
as is the case with horror films, spectators wish to constantly repeat these scenarios of trauma,
carnage and violence and so there exists a certain repetition compulsion when it comes to
traumatic events, and hence cinema ‘makes available the pleasure of loss, suffering, and
submission’ (although this obviously doesn’t have to just refer to war and horror films, there
are still many losses and instances of suffering in melodramas, for example). 107 This repetition
103 Gaylyn Studlar, In The Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich and the Masochistic Aesthetic (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 221
104 Ibid., 27
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 178
107 Ibid., 182
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