University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Screening masculine protest: reflections on Hollywood response to men’s movements in the 1990s

(USC Thesis Other)

Screening masculine protest: reflections on Hollywood response to men’s movements in the 1990s

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content University of Southern California
Los Angeles
SCREENING MASCULINE PROTEST:
REFLECTIONS ON HOLLYWOOD RESPONSE TO MEN’S
MOVEMENTS IN THE 1990’S

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
In the Division of Critical Studies
In the School of Cinematic Arts
by
Yungshun Tang
December 2013
Dissertation Supervisor: Dr. Michael Renov
2
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
Chapter One
Toward a Socio-Psychoanalytic Analysis: A Masculinist Approach 20
New Areas of Exploring Cultural Codes After Poststructuralism 22
Reconditioning Men Studies Within Feminism 28
Appropriating Adler’s View of Masculine Protest and Its Social Practice 烉 44
Is Masculine Protest Biological or Sociological? 48
What Constitutes Masculine Protest? 54
Compensation, Overcompensation, and Undercompensation 56
Social Interest, Social Community, and Social Understanding, 61
The Application of Alderian Thought to Cinema Studies 65
Chapter Two
The Four Tendencies of Masculine Representation 83
The Hegemonic Representation 89
The Negotiated Representation 93
The Oppositional Representation 105
The Representation of Personal Conscious and Collective Unconscious 115
3
Chapter Three
The Changing Masculinity in America from the Counterculture to the Nineties 烉
Boomers' Adolescence (60’s and 70’s), Adulthood (80’s), and Parenthood (90’s) 132
The Counterculture Movement (1960’s-1970’s) 134
1980’s 144
1990’s 165
Chapter Four
Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and Celluloid Shamanism 175
Dances with Wolves 185
Forrest Gump 217
Chapter Five
Profeminist Men’s Engagement and Surrogate Motherhood 251
Big Daddy 263
Chapter Six
Men’s Rights Movement, or New American Nazism 286
Falling Down 292
Epilogue 318
Bibliography 335
4
Introduction
The aim of this study is to introduce a masculinist critique of male representation in
a particular time frame, and illustrate how my strategy differs from a feminist approach.
The basic thrust of my analysis will be on two axes of orientation: the diachronic axis
(men’s movements in American social history) and the synchronic axis (Adler's view of
"masculine protest"). The two axes converge in denaturalizing the Hollywood myth, its
interaction, reverberation, and reorientation of the contemporary American social ethos,
in tune with the masculine protest endured and reacted by men. To contribute to this
understanding, I will first articulate Adler's framework of masculine protest which I
develop into four tendencies of masculine representation.
Chapter 1, “Toward a Socio-Psychoanalytic Analysis: A Masculinist Approach,”
presents a theoretical framework to reinforce the structures in the textual analyses of the
core films examined in this study. I will first propose that there exist new areas of
exploring cultural codes after post-structuralism. Just as post-structuralism offers varied
perspectives on language, culture, and identity, so does feminist film theory seek to view
language (in place of history) as a site in which social and cultural differences are
displayed. Yet in this ‘inside out’ format (a surmise from text to real world), language is
5
highly credited as a vehicle/window through which differences between and within
identity categories (e.g., gender, race, sexuality, class) are created and realized. The
reader relates the text to his or her own world, cultural codes allegedly shaped by and
endowed with a visual and auditory "fullness.” Cinema as language is equated with
history, history thus wrongly inferred from the signified world.
My project will present a model that takes into account an 'outside-in' approach
(from real world to text) to decoding male representation in film, a process reverse to the
feminist assumption of what lived world is. In what follows I am apt to clear the ground
for a better understanding of the limits of post-structuralism and feminism in their
preoccupation with reality-image interaction, that is, to naturalize the visual and auditory
images of gender displays to the utmost importance.
Secondly, I will examine the problematic status of masculinity within feminism and
recondition its men’s studies. Truly, the feminist-oriented men’s studies has shown how
difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational
system. But their theories have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the
motivating force (that drives men’s masculine behavior) at the core of the system. The
study here brings about issues that the film theorists who are engaged in men studies
within feminism have exclusively linked to the feminine and not the masculine: spectacle,
6
masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered,
racial, class and generational differences. Although a fair amount of men studies within
feminism emerged in the 1990’s, none of it was built on addressing and analyzing
authentic social changes in America.
To redress the image/sign mystique in feminist film criticism, my solution goes as
far as I suggest that there are multiple representations of masculinity, the relationship of
men and masculinity being not fixed but in a fluid and relational way, and men’s power
not fully restrained to men’s gaze, body and spectatorship, but also referred to other
non-visual gender displays. Based on this assumption, I develop what I take to be the four
tendencies of masculine representation.
With recourse to social studies, my approach will be more carefully connected to the
films with extra-linguistic cultural conditions, observing how men have changed in recent
popular histories and how they responded socially to the changing relations of diverse
social factors.
My third concern is how to appropriate Alfred Adler’s view of masculine protest and
adapt its social practice to film criticism. Alluding to Adler, I will argue that men and
women each have the impetus of "masculine protest" in gender displays. The foundations
of Adler's theory were initially biological. If in a certain organism one organ is diseased,
7
then the balance will be restored by adaptation of this inferior organ to the new, and more
difficult circumstances. Adler then transferred this idea of overcompensation to the area
of psychic training. That is how Adler soon found himself moving from the biological
into the sociological sphere.
The first constituent that embraces masculine protest was the aggression drive,
which was the first phrase Adler accredited with the motivating force, referring to the
reaction we have when other drives are frustrated. Another constituent that went into
masculine protest is narcissism. Adler's theory of social interest permits subsumption of
narcissism under lack of social interest rather than acceptance of it as an expression of
innate socially negative tendencies.
The core value of Alder’s masculine protest is, in all cases, compensation, a basic
motivation, or striving to overcome. There is quite a bit of choice in how an organ
inferiority can be used, because there can be an acceptance, there can be a denial, there
can be a doubt, there can be a compensation, and even an overcompensation, or
undercompensation. Whatever the causes, there was always a strenuous striving for
overcoming the deficit, the inferiority, and for mastery of the situation (Adler, 1994, p.
134).
8
Adler viewed the masculine protest from a nondeterministic perspective as well.
What these situations have in common are adults whose inferiority feelings seem so
overwhelming and in whom the feeling of community is so underdeveloped that they
retreat to protect their fragile yet inflated sense of self. In Adlerian psychology, men have
their own choice: they can learn to rid an exaggerated inferiority feeling and increase an
insufficiently developed feeling of social community. Therefore, the feeling of
community is both inborn and cultivated just as the feeling of masculine protest.
In my project, the reciprocal nature of Alder’s social interest has a significant impact
on gender displays: each sub-gender group (whether hegemonic masculinity or militant
femininity) that makes no social contacts (the willingness to contribute and cooperate)
with the opposite sex soon finds itself isolated. If the dominant gender group members
approach the other sex coldly they will be hard and cold with their own community
members as well ʇ the underprivileged gay and black male community, for instance.
In Chapter 2, “The Four Tendencies of Masculine Representation,” I doubt if some
kind of coherent shape about a common ‘masculine representation’ is becoming visible,
since the formulation of such a paradigm will be quite as solemnly mystifying as it
sounds. Instead, I prefer to think about what the use-value is in handling masculine
representation through cinema. The use-value is rather an intrinsic process of
9
construction that develops and changes as the filmmaking interacts with the social world.
It always fulfills the evolving needs, interests, values, and value systems tied to the ones
who encode the text and the ones who decode it. Also, the use-value corresponds to their
unique mixed identities of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. The method,
thus, for me is to acknowledge the diverse tendencies of masculine representation and
their limits, so as not to overinterpret what represents and is represented as a unifying
discourse.
In this format, I will underline some notions that the four tendencies paradoxically
mediate each other, a truth that they are produced and hybridized intertextually rather
than textually or chronologically, and the fact that they exist not as essence but as cultural
differences without positive terms.
The masculine image may be represented in a variety of ways. Each has emerged
and taken form in response to a variety of modern civil rights movements (feminist
movement, in particular). Each has thus developed into a genuinely contemporary
perspective on masculinity. There is quite a bit of choice in how men react to the social
challenges, because there can be an acceptance, there can be a denial, there can be a
doubt, there can be a negotiation, there can be a compensation, and even an
overcompensation, or undercompensation, to extend the Alderian thought.
10
The use-value of hegemonic representation is to secure white male supremacy. It
was the most prevalent form of male expression in classical Hollywood, and it staged a
comeback in the Eighties as the most socially endorsed that always contributed to the
subordinate position of women and other men they perceived. Its proponents point to
characteristics such as aggressiveness, strength, drive, ambition, and self-reliance, which
they argue are encouraged in males but discouraged in females and other males.
Negotiated representation is an alternative tendency to hegemonic representation.
It examines the dilemma-driven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the
face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. This negotiated position involves
contradictions in the viewer’s mindsight. It guarantees no political correctness, only
political compromise.
The negotiated representation can further be divided schematically into three minor
groups: either negative compensation (or undercompensation in Alderian language),
namely, self-effacing maleness; or reflexive awareness of manhood, that is, self-restraint
of power; or syncretizing Otherness, an attempt to reconcile and meld disparate or
contrary beliefs.
Men’s oppositional representation is a tendency of demonizing Others. The mode
largely concurs with negotiated representation of masculinity, but, on the dark side, it
11
defines the principal harm as directed against men rather than women as in feminist
concerns. This tendency of masculine representation perfectly resonates with Alder’s
definition of overcompensation: there is always an aggressive drive for men overcoming
the deficit, the guilt, the inferiority, and for mastery of the situation.
The oppositional representation is a double-bladed plow for men. Men use
safeguarding devices in attempts both to excuse themselves from failure and depreciate
women. On the other hand, the oppositional representation is also centered upon a
self-contained reflection of the male character’s masculine hysteria and self-abnegation,
if not self-destruction.
Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. Jung
distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious, on the grounds
that the personal unconscious is a personal reservoir of experience unique to each
individual, while the collective unconscious collects and organizes those personal
experiences in a similar way with each member of a particular species.
Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as
being similar to Emile Durkheim's use of collective representation. Notably, what
constitutes Durkheim’s collective representation is collective conscious, at variance with
12
Jung’s collective unconscious.
To expound it through a noir filter, for example, men’s collective unconscious (the
abiding fear of strong women in noir men's psyche) both ‘reflect’ or ‘fit in’ the history
with which they are inseparably bound up. Neither collective representation (a candid
projection of collective conscious), nor collective unconscious (surfaced mostly in
discursive analysis), can be ‘untrue’ to history in that both are actually part of it ʇ who
can deny that noir films did exist, chiefly produced as a reaction to American history?
Oppositional to collective unconscious, personal conscious, in some cases (as auteur
theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision), can be
variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the
executive control system of the individual mind. An art film that has never reached a
mass audience mostly carries the author’s personal conscious, coupled with a bit of
personal unconscious, while a popular film is characteristic of the collective unconscious
that has never been individually acquired.
“Chapter Three: The Changing Masculinity Prior to 1990,” gives a brief sketch of
changing masculinity in Hollywood prior to 1990 and how men’s chameleonic
representation adapts itself to the dynamic transformation of the American history and
society. The chapter admits that some of the mainstream films do not respond to the
13
social transitions consequently.
Hollywood, in the two decades of American Counterculture (the 1960’s and 1970’s),
began to stay away from imagining the U.S. society as a utopia. The radical movements
in the late Sixties and the turmoil of the Seventies fostered the eclipse of the heroes.
Film genres underwent a radical transformation and ideological negotiation. In the
westerns, a spectrum of critical films emerged in the era and all depicted the West as dirty,
hostile, decadent, and violent, or a macho misogynism at the other extreme. In the combat
films, a genre also replete with legal violence, the motif of anachronism repeats itself
again and again. American heroism has become thus completely identified with American
lunacy in this self-effacing representation of masculinity. In conjunction with the
anarchic vision of the Liberal Age is a theme of the hero's betrayal and psychotic
behavior, one emphatically recurring in a wide range of cop and private detective
thrillers.
The strong male heroes in Hollywood of the Eighties (Rocky, Rambo, Superman,
Batman, Conan the Barbarian, Pale Rider, Mad Max, etc.) are directly linked to a wider
range of social factors, including change through the policies in the Reagan, Bush, and
Clinton administrations (signs for collective conscious) ʇ it’s essential to recognize how
popular movies and the political tidal shift were both tied so closely, but not limited, to
14
the desires and anxieties of the audiences/voters ʇ and the booming interest of
homosocial institutions in America (that spell out the nation’s collective unconscious):
such as fitness clubs, college fraternities, Boy Scouts, the NBA Revolution, Olympic
Games craze, and so forth, each supposed to be a perfect showcase for the nationalism
that was provoked by competition.
There is a distinction in redefining the "trust me" image between the 1980’s and the
1990’s. The "trust me" archetype needs to be remolded on both sides in Nineties’
Hollywood. On the one side, hyper-spectacular masculinity still prevails in the 1990’s in
a large number of the superhero series and sequels. The focal point, however, shifts
gradually from the externalized male physique to the inner emotional involvement of the
hero.
In the 1990’s, the star image of Tom Cruise (Far and Away), Daniel-Day Lewis (The
Last of the Mohicans), Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump), and Kevin Costner (Dances with
Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), coupled with their screen personae, reflects
the affable portrayal of the Mythopoetic Man (in negotiated masculinity). In striking
contrast with the hard-boiled masculinity of Rocky, Rambo, and the cartoonized
Superman/Batman/Robocop, the mystified Conan the Barbarian, or the deadpan face of
Pale Rider, the new hero is a more bland, sophisticated man ʇ always in the tendency of
15
negotiated representation, accommodating the post-feminist ideals of empathy, tolerance,
and care that are tended to the traditionally repressed.
In the late-1980’s, another spectrum of the family sitcoms redefine the hero as
`feminine’ in varying degrees, the image of which conforms, more probably, to the
masculinity of Profeminist men. Instead of being considered as feminist-inspired, these
family sitcoms candidly suggest that the bachelor father can be the real father and
surrogate mother simultaneously; he is supplanting the female parent to reinvent
`masculinity’ that is placed in disorder by the late Sixties and Seventies.
Chapter 4, “Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and Celluloid Shamanism,” introduces
Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and examines how its principal spiritual perspective of
masculinity is performed by John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) in Dances with Wolves and the
title character of Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks).
The mostly heterosexual, middle-class white men that comprise the American
boomer generation have encountered the women's movement personally in the1960’s and
1970’s. They were searching for compatibility strategies to deal with changes in gender
displays in the 1990’s. The Mythopoetic men's movement, inspired and led by poet
Robert Bly, began quietly in the 1980’s and seized the public imagination with the
publication of Bly's best-selling book, Iron John, in 1990.
16
The new hero is capable of using his supernatural energy (the shaman’s `medicine’
even rendered verbally in the script of Dances with Wolves) to achieve an ethnic utopia,
on the assumption that individualism is more natural than something like rational state
planning. The new male dignity and self-assurance (mirrored in Forrest Gump and
Dances with Wolves) is largely centered in his ability to recuperate the lost manhood, and,
no less, his willingness to recondition the conservative male legacy.
Chapter 5, “Profeminist Men’s Engagement and Surrogate Motherhood,” carries the
discussion into male femininity and surrogate motherhood ʇ both labeled as new men's
consciousness in Profeminist Men’s Engagement, and then examines its representation in
Big Daddy. The new gender perspective of the Profeminist Men’s Engagement resides in
its incipient revisioning of Western masculinities. They tend to articulate an entirely new
perspective on men, masculinity, and their relationship to women, nature, spirit, and
culture.
Not all the men in the boomer generation are attracted to the Mythopoetic men’s
movement, or respond enthusiastically to wild man and urban warrior’s imagery at
weekend. ! In fact, many postfeminist men actively support women's demands for social,
political, and economic equality.
17
Profeminist Men’s Engagement advanced the revolution of men's thinking in a slow
transformation of the reasons that men have supported feminism. The present-day
profeminist men supported feminism, not because of abstract conceptions of morality, but
for more concrete moral reasons. Women, they argued, actually expressed a higher level
of morality. Extending rights to women, therefore, would create a moralizing force to
temper male excess and help men resist the temptation to vice. By keeping the mother
from the audience’s sight, the scenario of Big Daddy effectively de-realizes her as
virtually nonexistent, thereby suggesting that since the (biological) mother is the
surrogate, the father must be `the real thing.’ ! The male femininity, or role reversal, in Big Daddy implicitly elicits other attentions
to ethnicity, class, and female subjectivity. Although the film centers around the family
ties, it certainly marks a continuum of slavishly contrived set pieces: its characters
represent almost every conceivable demographic group. It connotes a profeminist
syncretism looming large in the Nineties America. Sonny (Adam Sandler) reached
maturity, in regard to his comprehensive assimilation, in which he performs with as strict
an authorial control over his comic charisma, and has everybody on his side in the final
courtroom scene.
18
Chapter 6, “Men’s Rights Movement, or New American Nazism,” takes up the
problems of a Men's Rights Movement campaign that makes distinct claims about male
disempowerment awareness. I will further look into how Falling Down dramatizes the
repressed anger of men lost in the alienating ranks of management culture.
The Men's Rights Movement (MRM) is a subset of the larger men's movement,
focused on addressing perceived discrimination against men. It branched off from the
men's liberation movement in the early 1970's, antithetic to that movement in its focus
and rejection of pro-feminist principles.
The Men’s Rights Movement upholds an ideology based on the premise that women
have more power than men in our society, mainly concentrating on things like alimony
and custody disputes, false rape accusations, laws biased towards women, and so on. Men
have several father's issues: such as parental alienation syndrome, unequal recognition,
and men are also given lesser opportunity to adopt a child. Plus, the father has no right
toward his unborn infant. However, he can be forced to become a provider, even when
he's been given forth no legal rights.
Falling Down is part of a relatively small set of the films that echoed Men’s Rights
Movement, but were produced in increasing numbers in the mid-to-late 1990’s. Like the
other films in the same sub-genre, Falling Down tells the story of violence born of class
19
conflict in an economy unkind to its Caucasian workers, while their supposed cultural
dominance evaporated accompanyingly. The narrative gives voice to the unemployed
white male's angst and then blows its anti-hero away. The film also reenacts the
agonizing conflicts in public between bourgeois boomer protestors, the family from
which the white anti-hero has grown estranged, and the police arrayed against him.
20
Chapter One
Toward a Socio-Psychoanalytic Analysis: A Masculinist Approach
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses
towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced,
the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
ʇ Alfred Adler
1
Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
ʇ Carl Jung
2
In quoting Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, this chapterrr ġ tends ġ to argue that the
collective unconscious in American society predates Hollywood filmmaking and
spectatorship. The collective unconscious is the repository of all the values and social
experiences. Any single film's interests, however wide-ranging, are nevertheless limited
and influenced by way of the simple process of socialization. Each Hollywood film
shares distinct and universal "psychic" archetypes: American dreams, nightmares,
fantasies, "hopes," fears, and so forth. Each filmmaker is to a certain extent, determined
by those specific items of the collective unconscious that (s)he directly and most strongly

1
Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher, eds, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic
Presentation in Selections from His WritingsNew York: Basic Books, 1956), ch. 4, sec. 3.
2
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe (New York: Vintage
Books, 1962).
21
identifies with (due to such factors as race, class, sex, sexuality, family upbringing,
environment, genetic predisposition, personality type, etc.). ġ ġ It is an underlying assumption that ġ Alfred Adler’s concept of inferiority complex
speaks to the problem of male self-esteem branded in American postwar years. So much
as in the Counterculture Movement of the Sixties and Seventies, the incorporation of a
psychoanalytic frame of reference serves both to explicate and to contextualize the
growing interest in the excesses provoked through masculine protest. Its negative effects
on masculinity (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving) has been
recognized as a crucial characteristic of film noir in the 1940’s and the 1950’s, and its
revival in the horror films of the Seventies, in line with the deranged cop and detective
movies of the same decade.
Film scholars have often written about the text’s relationship to its social and
political context from the 1980’s onwards; yet aside from some implicit statements, there
is truly very little discussion on the methods and theories about text/context relations.
What can be sure is that we are really confronted with the living interactions of cinema
(media and other arts) and history. Our theory must definitely grow from social reality
besides the scientific analysis of social formations; it must definitely stand the test of
22
critical appropriation, a gesture to authenticate our assumptions about text/context
relations. Put simply, we are living amongst these interactions and we have the strongest
challenge to find a point of view capable of being attested.
The tension between text and world has been equally a persistent issue in feminist
film theory as well and it has emerged as a result of social change. Although a fair
amount of masculinity studies within feminism emerged in the 1990’s, none of them were
built on addressing and analyzing social changes in America. The challenge of the
feminist debates about masculinity is its lack of enough consideration of men’s
performance embedded in social practices. Without reference to social history, the
penetrating analysis in cine-feminism constantly raises a question: To what extent can
they interpret the popular history in textual parameters and how are the limits of those
representations in a cause-effect narrative chain considered a function of politics or
cinema per se? Put another way, will this narrative closure in a popular film also
circumscribe the critical constraints as if the feminist film scholars were writing a
theoretical closure due to the gender-conscious telos to achieve a critical consensus?
New Areas of Exploring Cultural Codes After Poststructuralism
In a well-known quotation from a 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland
23
Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or
fabric] of quotations," drawn from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one,
individual experience. The phrase ‘cultural code,’ coined first by Barthes in S/Z (1970),
which in fact is a classic of what today we understand by initial post-structuralism,
purports originally to be an exhaustive structuralist reading of Balzac’s short story
“Sarrasine.” The five codes in S/Z do not slavishly track down some single meaning or
dominant structure but, rather, play with the signifiers so as to produce the text anew. To
be true, it is slightly confusing to refer to this particular code as the cultural code, as it is
practiced today. Though all the codes are cultural, Barthes reserves this designation for
the storehouse of knowledge we use in interpreting everyday experience, i.e., the voice of
science or knowledge. It is this code that one might qualify as the most direct entry into
the ideology of a given historical epoch, for it is through this code that the text anchors
itself most strongly in its historical context. In seeking to equate all discourse about a
work with the work itself, Barthes is really making a statement about culture, not about
literature, and it is the kind of statement that S/Z is historically located at the crossroads
of structuralism and post-structuralism.
Equally concurrent is Michel Foucault’s characterization of the appearance and
function of the modern concept of the author, which has provided poststructuralists a
24
target for their theoretical critique. Foucault began his essay “What is an Author?” by
questioning our tendency to imagine "authors" as individuals isolated from the rest of
society. According to Foucault, “the function of an author is to characterize the existence,
circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society [my italics]” (“What is an
Author?” 124). To elaborate, the author function valorizes a text as something to be taken
under serious appreciation, a work that is to be studied and remembered as a significant
cultural artifact. “The author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from
the modern novelist” (127). “All these operations vary according to the period and the
form of discourse concerned” (127). Near the end of the essay, Foucault argues that the
author is not a source of infinite meaning, as we often like to imagine, but rather part of a
larger system of beliefs that serve to limit and restrict meaning. That “larger system of
beliefs” clearly alludes to culture. At this point a parallel can be drawn between Foucault
and Barthes in that both stress the interaction between author and society.
Following their steps, poststructuralists emphasized a methodological shift, a move
away from fixed or closed signification, and the person as a unified subject. In response
to structuralism, the feminism of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous or Luce Irigaray, etc. can
also be traced in cultural and ideological analysis. The feminist engagement after
post-structuralism obviously embodies this shift. In direct contrast to structuralism's
25
claims of culturally independent meaning, feminist-friendly poststructuralists typically
view culture as inseparable from meaning. In reading the cultural codes, (feminist)
post-structuralism opens arms to a practice of intertextual reading that can “take in
philosophy (semiotics and Marxism), or psychoanalysis, not on the reckoning that these
are 'meta-languages' or ultimate sources of truth, but in order to see how texts relate and
produce new dimensions of sense" (Richard Machin & Christopher Norris, p. 18).
It is the focus on difference that provides post-structuralism with the tools to study
diverse marginalized groups typically labeled as "other" by dominant forms of power.
Since the intertext rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or
facts about the world, the cultural codes in poststructuralist views are often constituted by
discourse, which, in Foucault’s account, stresses the effects of power. In regard to the
discursive construct, some gendered representations are more likely to be articulated
together than others because cultural codes determine whether a given discursive
construct will “make sense” or not within a given culture.
Significantly, poststructuralists hold that in fact even in an examination of social
reality, a slew of biases introduce themselves, based on the conditioning of the examiner.
At the root of post-structuralism is the rejection of the idea that there is any truly essential
form to a cultural product, as all cultural products are by their very nature formed, and
26
therefore artificial. In this way, poststructuralists conceptualize the determination of
subjectivity as partial or incomplete, seeing that discourses also create the possibilities for
autonomy and resistance.
On the other hand, the post-structural discourses are as much defined by what they
exclude as by what they include. They simultaneously feature what is not sayable or not
thinkable in a given cultural context; what does not constitute authoritative knowledge or
truth and who is not an authoritative producer of such knowledge or truth; how subjects
should not act; and what institutional configurations are not present. It is of this particular
note that the conceptual modes in post-structuralism endorse an auto-critique of its own
discursive imbalance and unneutrality, mostly lacking social and historical inscription.
Most importantly, limitations imposed by these founding concepts preoccupied with
reality-image interaction mean that current varieties of post-structuralism need to
incorporate interpenetration to social-investigating methods inasmuch as human sexual
attitudes are shaped by many individual and socio-cultural factors. In spite of their
research efforts on social interests, the socio-cultural aspect of masculinity studies has
surprisingly not received as much attention as it deserves from feminist film criticism. It
is not surprising that no matter how highly a diverse corpus, none of the (pro-)feminist
criticisms of Rocky (1976) or First Blood (1982), both starring Sylvester Stallone, deal
27
with Rambo’s masculinity in allusion to rapid growth in the fitness center industry in the
late 1970’s. To coincide with the blooming trend in healthcare and recreation, the fitness
industry continued its growth into the 1980’s. No longer was it unfashionable to be
athletic, strong, or healthy į ġ Gym owners tailored their facilities to attract customers and
new gyms opened around the United States. A healthy lifestyle was becoming a part of
popular culture. Innovators such as Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons were able to bring
their exercise programs to a new population.
3
ġ The critical force of feminism was
obviously restricted to what they thought to be politically correct, not essentially the
outcome of rationally inevitable trends.
Reconditioning Men Studies in Feminism
Feminist film criticism holds the poststructuralist assumption that an individual
comprises tensions between conflicting knowledge claims (e.g. gender, race, class, sexual
orientation, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text a reader must understand how the
work is related to his or her own personal concept of self. The overemphasis on this

3
Kris Lee, “The Fitness Boom,” accessed July 3, 2008,
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Fitness-Boom&id=1346512.
28
self-perception plays a critical role in a feminist interpretation of masculinity in cinema.
While different feminist film views on masculinity vary, it is often constituted by
discourse(s). In brief, gender is an effect of what feminist criticism does (in large part
with language) and not just who men are (e.g., Deborah Cameron, 1997; Susan Ehrlich,
1997). The gender identity in the text’s discursive construct is directly transformed into
the feminist concept of what masculinity is in real world.
Within this context, the feminist-inspired consciousness awakening allows them to
chart masculinity’s vicissitudes in their own political correctness, not culturally and
ideologically neutral. The exclusive observance of feminist theoretical framework thus
provides only a partial/partisan view on cultural diversity.
There is an increased sensitivity to language-conditioned understandings in feminist
film criticism, which takes place without locating its object in time. The feminist focus is
directed at symbolic order (systems or structures), rather than at individual concrete
practices (changing men in changing societies). It is problematic, for instance, that one
could interpret the masculine representation in Dances with Wolves (1990) or Forrest
Gump (1994), without slightest reference to the fiery effect of Robert Bly’s influential
book, Iron John: A Book About Men, which spawned the Mythopoetic Men's Movement
in the early 1990’s and enjoyed over half a year on the national top ten best-sellers list.
29
Neither do feminists observe that the “masculine role” does not exist as singular.
Rather, at any given time, there is a multiplicity of masculinities (Michael Messner, The
Politics of Manhood, 98). Masculinity is not a fixed concept: It has different meanings
and significances within different discourses. Thus there is not given relationship or
history of men and masculinity. It is probably fair to say that the dominant way of
relating men and masculinity within social history has been the sex (gender)-conscious
role perspective. This vision will also lead us to the recognition of the importance of
speaking of masculinities rather than just masculinity.
4
To historicize these particular
masculinities in feature films also invites a persistent conception that the staged
masculinities exist and persist not as fixed formulas but rather they are combinations of
actions and signs,
5
part powerful, part arbitrary, performed in reaction and relation to
ideology, or a strand of complex material relations and emotional demands in the social
world and/or textual world.
Much of the theoretical basis relating to 'post-structuralism' is summarized in the
name that pins the writer down, but this name also begs the question of another, previous
name: 'structuralism.' It is often when post-structuralism attempts to shift our attention

4
For further understanding, please read T. Carrigan, R.W. Connell, & J. Lee, “Toward a New Sociology of
Masculinity,” Theory and Society 14.5 (1985): 551-604.
5
In association with signs only in feminist film criticism.
30
away from 'primary' literary texts, and toward the 'secondary' works of the critics
themselves, that it meets most resistance. A preoccupation with language is evidenced in
the provocative use of metaphors in its critique of universal notions of objectivity (In my
initial project, the mutilation of Dunbar’s leg in Dance With Wolves signifies the
Freudian castration anxiety; in other words, I couldn’t have resisted the lure of language
and signification).
Evidently, poststructuralists still employ methods gleaned from structuralism
(semiotics, in particular). But they no longer share the structuralist certainty in the ability
to reveal the defining structures of society (a reminder to Claude Levi-Strauss’s liberal
use of what he called a “mytheme”), or narrative (exemplified in Vladimir Propp’s
morphological study of folklore), or the mind (Sigmund Freud's evolving theory of
unconscious process). Even linguistics, the basis for structuralism in the work of
Ferdinand de Saussure has undergone a major revision since his time. Texts are read to
expose the techniques and social
6
interests in their construction.
In Saussure’s semiotics, nothing inside the mind or outside language accounts for
the “arbitrary” binding of signifier (a sound or graphic image) and signified (the concept
designated) in the sign’s operation. The meanings we attach to words/signs are produced

6
My emphasis.
31
within language through differences between other signs in a self-regulating language
system. Poststructuralists, particularly through the work of Derrida (1982), utilize these
ideas but radicalize them by amplifying the system’s dynamism and instability.
Through this “play of differences” (cf. différance, coined by Derrida), neutrality and
objectivity in Saussure’s ordered system is undermined. At face value, meanings in
post-structuralism become provisional and the boundaries between linguistic and
extra-linguistic factors erased. Instead of focusing on intrinsic properties of words, or
relations within a fixed system, poststructuralists often investigate extrinsic
conditions—the social intentions of language users—in their critical analyses of texts.
These ways of conceptualizing language and texts are then transposed upon culture.
Insofar as meanings are produced within language, “meanings” of self and others are
produced within discourses—systems of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1982) that regulate
and assign value to all forms of semiotic activity. Insofar as language is provisional and
indeterminate, self-understanding, or subjectivity (e.g., Foucault; Norton, 2000), is
viewed as having comparable instability in its discursive realization. The lived world
similarly becomes textualized, cultural codes deconstructed to reveal the discourses that
have displayed it.
32
The appeal to a sealed and self-evident model also provides the (feminist) theorist
with the authority to categorize and evaluate the texts according to an interested axiology
of approved critical practices, which are often undermined and challenged by the actual
process of historical change.
Feminist (film) criticism, enclosed in its preoccupation with language and its
relation to the body, decidedly focuses on gaze, spectatorship and (female) subjectivity,
each a linguistic gesture that has conceptually isolated the text/discourse from the
extra-linguistic culture. In a famous passage, Judith Butler (1990) reworks Jane Austin’s
concept to describe gender as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts
within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance
of substance, of a natural sort of being” (33). It is thus proposed that masculinity can be
demystified by attacking a dominant ideology of vision (the character’s body, gaze,
spectatorship ʇ looked-at-ness) and addressing the spectator by means of promoting a
kind of textual empiricism, or textual reality.
Feminist film scholars, with ever greater intensity, tend to naturalize these critical
visual and auditory images of gender displays by ignoring what theoretical framework
can be used as a foundation for conceptualizing the struggle in historic position and
knowledge in a popular film. The musical film, in such feminist reading, offers a stage to
33
watch the female physical anatomy `through-the-legs.’ The genre’s emphasis on
`spectacle’ ʇ an occasion to display the female body ʇ is crucial to the discussion of
sexual difference. Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” further indicates that whatever the source of the look in the musical ʇ the
camera, the characters within the film, or the spectators--all looks are funneled to the
performer as “star,” thus creating a spectacle.
Formally, Mulvey claims, film relies on a division or “split” between looking, which
she calls the active role, and being looked at, which she claims is its passive opposite. On
a narrative level, one of the ways in which this division is reproduced is by shots
representing the view of one figure by another. In Hollywood films, Mulvey maintains,
women occupy the passive position of being looked at, whereas men possess the active
power of looking.
Mulvey’s concern in the western film is with the female audience response in
viewing the male heroes: how women deal with the identification in a male system.
Consequently, Mulvey draws on Freud for an argument about the trans-sexual
identification of women with male heroes. What Mulvey sees at work is a fictional
indulgence of the fantasy of omnipotence belonging to the pre-oedipal phase, experienced
by both boys and girls, before the socially required gender positions are taken up. The
34
rejection by the western hero to marriage, Mulvey finally contends, “personifies a
nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence” (Mulvey, 1989, 33).
The problem in the case of Mulvey’s essay, as Marian E. Keane has put it, rests with
Mulvey’s knowledge of the films she calls upon as evidence (Keane, 231). Yet it’s not
evidence, but rather a perspective. It also rests with Mulvey’s inadequacy in her
perception of the camera, its power, and the nature of its gaze (Keane, 232). The
consequence of this inadequacy weakens Mulvey’s cognition of culture, or the nature of
what becomes of textual empiricism on film.
The fact that Mulvey’s views have impressed themselves on so many feminist critics
and theoreticians surely means that something is right about them. Films can be used as
she says; some films do work in these ways. Yet, these critiques present a perspective, a
fantasy, or Jung’s notion of ‘persona,’ instead of the nature of the medium to require this.
In her article, “Gynesis: Postmodernism and the Science Fiction Horror Film,”
Barbara Creed focuses on SF horror film in relation to the woman’s body as metaphor for
the uncertainty of the future. In the two Alien films (Alien [1979] and Aliens [1986]),
Creed states, this coding is taken to extremes ʇ virtually all aspects of the mise-en-scene
are designed to signify the female: “womb-like interiors, fallopian-tube corridors, small
claustrophobic spaces” (Creed, 215).
35
It is well-known too that the noir film’s visual and narrative work forges the genre’s
repression of woman principally through a male voice-over in flashback, an
expressionistic visual style, and the emphasis on sexuality in the photographing of
women. The 30-minute presence of the female voice-over (auditory image) in Mildred
Pierce, in Pam Cook’s reading, indicates that Mildred’s take-over of the place of the
father has brought about the collapse of all social and moral order in her world. The
voice-over is returned to the detective (the symbolic order) at the end of the second
flashback. Mildred’s subversion, in Cook’s rationale, does not signify her autonomy; “we
have irony, instead.”
E. Ann Kaplan, in her monograph, “Is the Gaze Male?” registers a controlling power
in the `male gaze’ as it works to relegate women to marginality, silence, or absence.
Therefore, it is significant that “to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the
structure of the unconscious, is to be in the ‘masculine’ position” (Kaplan, 30). Yet,
Kaplan’s tone is filled with helplessness and self-effacement in acknowledging that “this
substitution is made to happen relatively easily in the cinema, in real life any such
‘swapping’ is fraught with immense psychological difficulties.” “At any rate, such
‘exchanges’ do not do much for either sex, since nothing has essentially changed: the
roles remain locked into their static boundaries” (29-30). In a word, showing images of
36
mere reversal visually or aurally is a textual fantasy, rather than a social reality.
Tania Modleski’s auteur study of Hitchcock underpins the filmmaker’s misogynist
meaning by offering such an example: Vertigo begins with a close-up of a woman’s face;
spiral shaped figures emerged from her eye and form themselves into the names of the
credits, and then the camera moves directly into the eye as the spirals continue to shape
themselves into words. At the end of the sequence the camera returns to the eye and the
final credit emerges from it: “Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.” (Modleski, 88)
Modleski’s reading of the credit sequence in Vertigo is presented in a number of
remarks summarizing the film’s events and meanings. A problematic consequence of this
method is that the film’s specific framings, lines of dialogue, non-visible gender displays,
and authorship are neglected and lost. Again, Modleski’s view of Vertigo can be read as
echoing Mulvey’s remarks on Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Mulvey finds Vertigo “far from
simply an aside on the perversion of the police,” because the film takes as its subject “the
active/looking, passive/looked at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the
male…encapsulated in the hero” (16).
The gaze-pivotal criticism further prevails in feminist literature. The Female
Spectators anthology, edited by E. Deidre Pribram, also constantly questions how `we’
have come to perceive all forms of filmic gaze as `male’ when women have always taken
37
up their proportionate share of seats in the cinema. However, the most ingenious is
probably Linda William’s notion that the presence of the monster in the classical horror
films should not be interpreted simply as an eruption of the repressed sexuality of the
civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and the characters in the film)
but as the site of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the woman alike)
(Linda Williams, 83-99) .
In film melodrama, despite the fact that the melodrama is about female desire and
female point of view, the process of spectatorship, in feminist reading, is definitely
governed by `masculinity,’ the female being pseudocenter, for sure. “To retrieve and
reestablish women as agents of history,” says Mary Ann Doane, “is to construct one’s
discourse upon a denial of the more problematic and complex aspects of subjectivity and
sexuality” (Doane, 68). Here Doane attempted to address the sexual specificity of the
intended spectator; namely, she perceived a female spectatorship emerging in these
women’s films, and she examined the influence of generic convention and found in the
genre a continual inability to sustain a coherent representation of female subjectivity in
the context of phallocentric discursive mechanisms” and a denial to women of the “space
of a reading” (Doane, 80).
38
In like manner, the cultural codes encircled on vision (gaze, body, spectatorship and
subjectivity) have been given so much attention to the deconstruction of masculinity by
the burgeoning of men studies within feminism since the late Eighties. As Kaja Silverman
entitled her essay, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image,”
she promised to “provide a theoretical articulation of the field of vision within which
every subject is necessarily held.” (Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 125).
Silverman even argued that the essay would “differentiate the gaze from the look, and
hence from masculinity” (125). To follow her logic, Silverman is soliciting temporary
suspension of disbelief in assuming that the masculine view and power relations can be
reduced as a textual process of image identification.
Peter Lehman’s Running Scared was well situated among the works of the 1980’s on
masculinity and the male body by such scholars as Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark, Dennis
Bingham, Kaja Silverman, Susan Jeffords, and Ann Kaplan. Lehman theorizes
extensively on men’s anxiety about their bodies, especially the penis. Lehman’s
contribution is unique in that he offers a pro-feminist perspective on the sexual
representation of the male nudity and the role of phallic masculinity. I share the
aspirations of pro-feminist criticism, but I am in disagreement with the lop-sided body
discourse without recourse to men’s other social performances in time.
39
The most representative of the feminist faith, however, is the statement made by
Constance Penley and Sharon Willis in their preface to Male Trouble: “one recurring
theme in this volume is straight masculinity caught between fear of women and fear of
homosexuality” (viii), whereas the essays printed “aim to examine the structure and bases
of those fears rather than hesitating over the value of turning our attention to them.”
Undisputedly, this is a critical feminist consensus that the telos-oriented schema for men
studies within feminism is not merely performing a false analogy of textual empiricism to
real life (image-deduction), but unanimously dealing with male privilege and female
suffering. Granting that some feminist critics and theorists felt the study of masculinity
was as crucial as that of femininity, they still expressed consternation about what it means
for feminists to be giving so much attention to the complex and conflicted construction of
masculinity. The feminist critics cherished masculine protest ( in Adler’s nomenclature)
in invalidating multiple masculinities, which emerged with deep anxiety in their
collective unconscious: Will that necessarily involve positing male subjectivity as capable
of positive moments? Consequently, men studies within feminism tends to foster a model
of overwhelming deconstruction of masculinity as dominating, aggressive, oppressive,
and status quo.
40
What draws me to address the limits of feminist and pro-feminist criticism
(Mulvey’s essay, among others) is certainly not an argument about the importance and the
necessity of feminist criticism. The roles women play in films and the ways films
understand and present women are of central importance. None of my views are meant to
be a rejection of the critique of the ideology of vision in cinema studies. The strategy,
albeit in a limited multitude, embraces gender relations, but not all. Even the phrase
“field of vision” derives from the title of Jacqueline Rose’s classic feminist text, Sexuality
in the Field of Vision (1986). But if we look at (and listen to) a film in such a way as to
gain secure knowledge, the nature of that knowledge ʇ its appeal ʇ cannot simply be split
from the investigation of perceptual investment. It is not uncommon that feminist film
theory and research on men and masculinity too often defines “masculinity” almost
entirely in terms of gender displays (i.e., styles of talk, look, dress, and bodily
comportment), while ignoring men’s structural positions of power and privilege over
women, and certain groups of men’s positions of subordination to other men.
7
Scott
Coltrane, in his 1992 research of gender display and power, suggests that men’s public
gender displays are not grounded in some essential “need” for men to dominate others but,

7
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A. Messner, “Gender Displays and Men’s Power: The “New
Men” and the Mexican Immigrant Man,” in Theorizing Masculinities, 200.
41
instead, tend to vary according to the extent of power and privilege that men hold
vis-a-vis women.
8

In this science of reasoning, we can clearly notice that feminist film criticism
severely limits the gender-displaying to being-looked-at-ness and equates the `male’ gaze
with men’s ġ power, while ignoring that the social constructions of power are more than
(visible) gender displays ʇ they include the institutional ordering of personality, the
development of life histories, and the relation between the two of them, whose type
unfortunately rejects visualization.
Of course, an interest in Oedipal narratives and family romance helps to overcome
such dangers. However, there is still the question of the interpenetration of these
discourses with other discourses. One of the chief among these other discourses may
suggest social analytic studies of gender displays.
The alternative approach in cultural feminism is instrumental, too: such as Luce
Irigaray’s introduction of economic impact on the role-playing in gender, Julia Kristeva’s
interest in woman’s time, Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological reading of woman’s place
in the SF film, Susan Jeffords’s media-based study of the Persian Gulf War, to name a
few.

8
Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner, “Gender Displays and Men’s Power,” 201.
42
As a matter of fact, whether we underlie a corpus of critical factions, such as
Freudian theory, Althusserian ideological thought, Saussure’s linguistic format, or
Nietzsche’s subversive reception (each being modified to varying degrees, though), we
first, last and foremost in all have to connect the popular films to important currents of
surrounding history.
To redress the image/sign mystique in film criticism, the rudimental solution may
consist in our awareness that there are multiple representations of masculinity, the
relationship of men and masculinity being not fixed but in a fluid and relational way, and
men’s power not fully restrained to men’s gaze, body and spectatorship, but also referred
to other non-visual gender displays.
Although film criticism is invariably linguistic-confined, my approach, with
recourse to social studies, will more carefully connect the films with extra-linguistic
cultural conditions, observing how men have changed in recent popular histories and how
they responded socially to the changing relations of gender, thus finally able to develop a
socio-psychoanalytic methodology on an outside-in basis. This ‘outside-in’ approach will
reject a critical consensus and give a clear picture that some of men’s social changes
support feminism, some express a backlash against feminism, and some others appear to
be attempts to avoid feminist issues together.
43
Also, I will be fully aware that the actual presence of history is unable to place a
cinematic counterpart in all cases. Some American films were quick to respond to social
changes. But even though collectively, these films reflected merely some of the most
important political, social, and gender issues of the time. In some cases, the popular films
recreated history while still others articulated a partisan view, a cognitive twist, and some
even challenged current social values and political assumptions. Neither will I assume
that a blockbuster movie will be simply tailor-made to echo a theory. To explore the
Hollywood interest in topical filmmaking and social initiatives, I will pragmatically look
into the existence of men’s movements in American society in the 1990’s, as prerequisite
to each textual analysis. I might inevitably employ a discursive construct in selecting the
target films and symbolically encode historic position and knowledge into cinematic form
and dramatize it as allegory. But in adopting an ‘outside in’ approach, I will easily avoid
creating a textual fantasy when conceptualizing history in a sealed text, as long as my
textual criticism is preceded by the introduction of the surrounding history—for example,
a critique of Little Big Man is well to the point if linked to the U. S. Congress motion that
struck George Armstrong Custer's name off the list of Frontier Heroes in Hallmark Hall
of Fame in1992.
44
Appropriating Adler’s View of Masculine Protest and Its Social Practice
Due to his special background and unique experiences, the Austrian medical doctor
Alfred Adler links psychoanalysis to social studies. This is the reason I take his theory as
a model to analyze the cinematic forms of masculine representation. In psychoanalysis,
Adler was a socialist doctor convinced of the importance of social factors in disease. In
1911 Adler became president of the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna at the time of his
split with Freud, and it is a remarkable fact that their centerpiece of the conflict was a
theory of masculinity.
Adler’s theoretical system became one based upon social interactions and dynamics
rather than upon the sexual and instinctual process described by Freud. He indicated that
in the light of the cultural values of the time, males were perceived as superior and
females as inferior. In fact, in America, specifically in 1926 – when Adler formulated his
theory of masculine protest, men were considered rational, aggressive, capable, and
independent, traits which were regarded as pluses, while women were supposedly
irrational, emotional, intuitive, dependent, and passive, characteristics which were often
felt to be negative traits. Given this cultural bias, many women did envy men. They did
not, however, desire the male’s penis, as Freud thought, but did wish for the preferred
45
status of the male.
In this regard, citing Freud’s biological determinism will be controversial. For
example, an Asian male, like me, should assumedly have the same castration anxiety as a
Caucasian male. Adler did not ascribe this fake universality, with no regard to cultural
specificities, to his concept of masculine protest. On the contrary, he understood the
masculine protest from a social-interpersonal perspective, not from the instinctual,
physiological orientation of Freud. Society’s values, rather than the individual’s
biological makeup, were the primary influences in the individual’s choice (Harold Mosak
& Seymour Schneider, 195). In a nondeterministic psychology, Adler observed that there
were women who did not envy the male’s status, and there were men who felt
comfortable with and did not doubt their masculinity. It is a matter of choice, rather than
destiny. Since society values vary in different nations, periods, and circumstances,
masculine protest ends up a constant social adaptation for each person’s enhancement of
self-esteem.
Drawing upon Adler, I tend to illustrate that men and women each have the impetus
of "masculine protest" in gender displays. The centerpiece of the conflict in feminist
criticism and other critical studies is probably our indifference to Adler’s discovery of
`masculine protest’ active in women’s psychology as well as in men’s. Consequently, it
46
almost, and at worst, naturalizes the familiar polarity between masculinity and femininity,
immediately emphasizing that one side of the polarity is devalued in culture and
associated with weakness.
! In Adler's view, men would like to share power with the marginal groups only when
men's power is not challenged by the opposite sex or other men. Adler didn't put human
nature on a pedestal by offering transcendental values. Rather, he warns that the negative
effects of masculine protest will continue until masculinity and femininity are redefined
to remove them from identification with superiority and inferiority.
Although psychoanalysis has a paradoxical position in discussions of masculinity, it
has enriched almost every current of radical thought in the 20
th
century, from Marxism to
post-colonialism, feminism, and gay liberation. Paradoxically too, psychoanalysis as a
practice increasingly became a technique of normalization, attempting to adjust its
patients to the gender order. Between 1930 and 1960, psychoanalysis moved far to the
right on most issues, and the theory of gender evolved into a medical technology of
surveillance and conformity, acting as a gender police. In the 1950’s, psychoanalysts such
as Theodor Reik became popular writers on gender issues. They no longer stressed the
contradictory character of gender or the clash between social order and desire. Rather,
their message identified mental health with gender orthodoxy, especially conventional
47
heterosexuality and marriage. The Seventies, however, saw the advent of radical
feminism and post-structuralism. The dissident versions and unexpected applications of
psychoanalysis multiplied. The course towards adult heterosexuality, which Freud had
seen as a complex and fragile construction, was increasingly presented as problematic.
Since then there have been many discussions about the differences between the various
schools of thought in psychology and a number of them have influenced recent
psychoanalytic writing on child development, homosexuality, and the discussions of
masculinity (Stoller 1968, 1976; Fiedman 1988).
Adler was the first dissident analyst engaged in a polemic against Freud’s ideas. He
contended that the whole oedipal constellation rests on a cultural exaltation of
masculinity and overvaluing of the penis. Yet, what interested me most was the fact that
Alder developed a psychology able to account for the social function of the individual’s
masculine protest. This social application, in my observation, is capable of incorporating
the film text’s relationship to its social history, by which I can move between real world
and the text’s diegesis. The most important part of Adler’s psychology is the synthetic
unity of understanding, where he relates one thought with another and thinks in
movements rather than in dimensions. I use this framework to interpret the American
men’s movements in the Nineties, and the ensuing Hollywood response to this social
48
phenomenon.
As a socialist doctor, Adler was the first to create a social science of masculinity. In
his vivid sketches of the masculine protest, Adler started to merge Freudian theory and
social radicalism. While not drawing a sharp distinction between neurotic and normal,
Adler saw the masculine protest as active in normal mental life, neurosis breaking out
only when it failed to be gratified and turned sour. Adler’s framework of masculine
protest and some of its paradoxes in practice will be examined in diverse issues.
Is Masculine Protest Biological or Sociological?
While Freud’s ideas rapidly became a means of social control and developed
conservative gender practices and normalizing theories of masculinity, the intellectual
history of psychoanalysis was bound to become a history of splits. The first of these
involved Adler, who rejected Freud’s biologism and the theories that identified
psychological health with a narrow orthodoxy in sexuality and emotion. Even so, Adler
was one of the few who reacted favorably in the early stage to Freud’s book on dream
interpretations. In 1902, Freud sent Adler a hand-written postcard suggesting he join the
circle which met weekly in Freud's home to discuss newer aspects of psychopathology. At
49
that time Adler had already started collecting material on patients with physical handicaps,
studying both their organic and psychological reactions to them. Adler did not accept the
invitation until Freud assured him that in his circle a variety of views, including Adler's,
would be discussed.
Five years later, in 1907, Adler published a book on organ inferiority and its
compensation. From then on, the difference between Freud's and Adler's views became
steadily marked. For one thing, Adler had never accepted Freud's original theories that
mental difficulties were caused exclusively by a sexual trauma, and he opposed the
generalizations when dreams were interpreted, in each instance, as sexual wish
fulfillment. After prolonged discussions, during which each of the two tried to win the
other over to his own point of view, Adler left Freud's circle in 1911 with a group of eight
colleagues and formed his own school. Freud and Adler never met again. The break was a
serious loss for both sides. Orthodox psychoanalysis from that point on became an
increasingly closed system, resistant especially to the issues of social power that Adler
had emphasized.
9

9
For further readings, see R. W. Connell’s “Radical Psychoanalysis,” in Masculinities (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 15-21.
50
Initially, the foundations of Adler's theory were biological. The compensation and
overcompensation of organ inferiority: if in a certain organism one organ is diseased, then
the balance will be restored by adaptation of this inferior organ to the new, and more
difficult, circumstances. Adler saw in this adaptation an ongoing training, which often
plays a role of such enormous proportion that eventually more work is being done than
would be the case if the organ were healthy. It is also possible that, to relieve the inferior
organ, a healthy organ takes over the extra exertion. All this was known in biology.
Adler then transferred this idea of overcompensation to the area of psychic training.
Eventually the whole of culture was considered to be an overcompensation for the
difficulties of human existence in a world for which the human being is equipped badly
enough. And that is how Adler soon found himself moving from the biological into the
sociological sphere. The compensations for the difficulties caused by the environment are
not always necessarily in harmony with the demands made by the community. Because of
a number of aggravating circumstances, particularly an unfavorable atmosphere in the
family, the individual may lose the courage to reach his/her goal of attaining some
appreciation and value, and fail to get on the way to useful achievements. And basically
neurosis and crime are nothing but a system of excuses, the evasion of one’s duties in the
face of the community. The best excuse is the one that refers to an unhappy destiny, with
51
all its individual variations. This is how one of Adler's earliest phrases “masculine protest”
was coined.
An examination of Adler's (1910) original theory of masculine protest and psychic
hermaphroditism will further reveal that masculine protest is not a biological determinism,
but rather a social transformation. In a way that was far ahead of many others of his day,
Adler recognized the destructive influence of the culture's archaic view of gender roles.
The over-valuing of men often leads to extremely high expectations, and when men begin
to see that they cannot meet these expectations, their inferiority feelings also increase.
Adler described this as a "masculine protest." Men's exaggerated emphasis on the
macho image is discussed as an expression of masculine protest. Such deviant behavior
as violence toward women, abuse of children, and the bashing of gays are suggested to be
related to men's fear of their feminine radical within.
Adler noted something pretty obvious in his culture: Boys were held in higher
esteem than girls. Boys wanted, often desperately, to be thought of as strong, aggressive,
in control - i.e. "masculine" - and not weak, passive, or dependent - i.e. "feminine." The
point, of course, was that men are somehow basically better than women. They do, after
all, have the power, the education, and apparently the talent and motivation needed to do
"great things," and women don't.
52
You can still hear this in the kinds of comments older people make about little boys and
girls: If a baby boy demands to have his own way, they will say he's a natural boy; if a
little girl is quiet and shy, she is praised for her femininity. If, on the other hand, the boy
is quiet and shy, they worry that he might grow up to be a sissy; or if a girl is assertive
and gets her way, they call her a "tomboy" and will try to reassure you that she'll grow
out of it.
As a matter of fact, in the pre-cultural stage, females may reject the feminine role
and attempt to become more masculine. The feminine radical in men is traced through
history, and confirmation of the essential bisexuality of human beings is posited in
psychoneuroendocrinology (Marven Nelson, 1991).
10
Adler felt that the healthiest
arrangement is a recognized equality of value between men and women, which would
then result in a higher level of cooperation between them (Adler, 1980). As long as men
are accorded preferential treatment in the culture and have rights, obligations, privileges,
and opportunities that women do not possess, men may believe that for them to have a
place in the world, they should be or have the privileges of a (real) man (Patricia H.
Miller & Ellin Kofsky Scholnick, 144).

10
Psychoneuroendocrinology is the clinical study of hormone fluctuations and their relationship to human
behavior. It may be viewed from the perspective of psychiatry, where in certain mood disorders, there are
associated neuroendocrine or hormonal changes affecting the brain.
53
The above argument may not be unique today. But in Alder’s years it was. Freud and
his followers – Wilhelm Reich, the most original mind in the Freudian left between the
wars, and the Frankfurt School theorists who picked up Reich’s idea of character analysis
in the 1920’s – each lacked the appreciation of feminism that illuminated Adler’s work.
Adler took a highly critical view of hegemonic masculinity and men’s domination of
women, cued by the contemporary feminist and socialist critiques of women’s
subordination. In discussing children’s uncertainties about their sexual roles, Adler
remarked: “To this is added the arch evil of our culture, the excessive pre-eminence of
manliness. All children who have been in doubt as to their sexual role exaggerate the
traits which they consider masculine, above all defiance” (Adler, 1956, 55).
In addition, Adler did not see men's assertiveness and success in the world as due to
some innate superiority. He saw it as a reflection of the fact that boys are encouraged to
be assertive in life, and girls are discouraged. The opposition of masculinity and
femininity was found in Adler’s Three Essays. Adler treated this as a basic polarity in
mental life. He differed in stressing that the feminine side of the polarity is devalued by
the culture. Children of both sexes, being in a position of weakness vis- ǡ -vis adults, are
thus forced to inhabit the feminine position; they necessarily develop a sense of
femininity and doubts about their ability to achieve masculinity. Submission and striving
54
for independence thus coexist in the child’s life, setting up an internal contradiction
between masculinity and femininity. “This usually initiates a compromise,” says Adler. In
normal development some kind of balance is struck. The adult personality is thus a
balance under tension. But if there is weakness (and Adler had the idea that neurosis often
was triggered by some physical inferiority or other), there will be anxiety that motivates
an exaggerated emphasis on the masculine side of things (Connell, 1994, 18). This
‘masculine protest,’ in Adler’s phrase, is central to neurosis. It is basically a matter of
overcompensation in the direction of aggression and restless striving for triumphs.
What Constitutes Masculine Protest?
While not in a fixed state, the discrepancies between a self-ideal of this type and a
self-concept in the form of "I am a man," "I am a woman," or "I am a child" give rise to
inferiority feelings that constitute the masculine protest. A person with a masculine
protest must keep persons of the other sex at an emotional distance, for they are a
constant threat that points out the person's own feeling of inadequacy.
"Perfection" and "ideal," for Adler, are troublesome words. On the one hand, they are
very positive goals. Shouldn't we all be striving for the ideal? And yet, in psychology,
55
they are often given a rather negative connotation. Perfection and ideals are, practically
by definition, things you can't reach. Striving for perfection was not the first phrase Adler
used to refer to his single motivating force. His earliest phrase was
the aggression drive, referring to the reaction we have when other drives, such as our
need to eat, be sexually satisfied, get things done, or be loved, are frustrated. Yet
masculine protest does not always mark a physical denotation. What Adler initially
termed aggression drive might be better called the assertiveness drive, since we tend to
think of aggression as physical and negative. But it was Adler's idea of the aggression
drive that first caused friction between him and Freud. Freud was afraid that it would
detract from the crucial position of the sex drive in psychoanalytic theory.
Another constituent that went into masculine protest is narcissism, in a different
format from Freud, though. As the development of the Freudian and Adlerian theories is
traced, some similarities between Freud’s narcissistic personality and Adler's neurotic
personality are also outlined. A critique of the concept of narcissism is hence presented.
Heinz L. Ansbacher discusses Adler's significance for the concept of narcissism in the
context of 4 assertions: (1) Adler's (1910) theory of masculine protest was evidently a
factor influencing Freud to turn toward the phenomenon of narcissism. (2) Present-day
understanding of narcissism shows remarkable similarity to Adler's views on
56
psychodynamics and neurotic egocentricity. (3) Some contemporary criticisms of Freud's
theory of narcissism are very similar to Adler's criticism. (4) Adler's theory of social
interest permits subsumption of narcissism under lack of social interest rather than
acceptance of it as an expression of innate socially negative tendencies.
11
Adler's
foremost contribution to the understanding of narcissism was showing that this
phenomenon can be regarded from a more optimistic and a more socially and
therapeutically relevant view of human nature and the human condition than that of Freud.
The significance for Adler's concept of narcissism is in the assertions that his theory of
masculine protest (1910) was evidently a factor influencing Freud to turn toward the
phenomenon of narcissism.
Compensation, Overcompensation, and Undercompensation
What is at the core of Alder’s masculine protest is, in all cases, compensation, a
basic motivation, or striving to overcome. Since we all have problems, short-comings,
inferiorities of one sort or another, Adler felt that our personalities could be accounted for

11
This comparative study is further developed by Heinz L. Ansbacher in “The Significance of Alfred
Adler for the Concept of Narcissism,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 142 (2) (Feb 1985): 203-207.
57
by the ways in which we do - or don't - compensate or overcome those problems. The
idea derived from his early writing still plays an important role in his theory, but he
rejected it as a label for the basic motive because it makes it sound as if it is your
problems that cause you to be what you are (C. George Boeree, 1997).
Taking his starting point from the organ inferiorities and their compensations, Adler
started to work with cognitive ideas of inferiority and their resulting feelings of
inferiority that people so generally hold about themselves. They may have developed
these feelings on the basis of some realities, or from childhood-based misinterpretations
about their body, or from their social or physical relationship with their environment.
12
There is quite a bit of choice in how an organ inferiority can be used, because there can
be an acceptance, there can be a denial, there can be a doubt, there can be a compensation,
and even an overcompensation
13
, or undercompensation. Whatever the causes, there was
always a strenuous striving for overcoming the deficit, the inferiority, and for mastery of
the situation.

12
From "Socialist Influences on Adlerian Psychology," by Kurt A. Adler, New York, 19th International
Congress of Individual Psychology Budapest, Hungary August 1-5, 1993, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.
13
From a transcribed, tape recorded seminar given by Sophia de Vries on 5-21-76, in the AAISF/ATP
Archives.
58
Adler further explains in a1927 article, "The Feeling of Inferiority and the Striving
for Recognition" that the mechanism of the striving for compensation with which the soul
strives to neutralize the torturing feeling of inferiority has its analogy in the organic world.
It is a well-known fact that those organs of our body which are essential for life produce
an overgrowth and over-function when through damage to their normal state their
productivity is lessened. Thus in difficulties of circulation the heart enlarges and becomes
more powerful, seeming to draw its new strength from the whole body, until it reaches a
stage in which it is more powerful than a normal heart. Similarly does the soul under
pressure of the feeling of inferiority, of the torturing thought that the individual is small
and helpless, attempt with all its might to become master over this inferiority complex.
14
From his understanding of organ inferiority, Adler began to see each individual as
having a feeling of inferiority. Where the feeling of inferiority is highly intensified to the
degree that a child believes that he will never be able to compensate for his weakness, the
danger arises that in his striving for overcompensation, will aim to overbalance the scales.
The striving for power and dominance may become exaggerated and intensified until it
must be called pathological. The ordinary relationships of life will never satisfy such
children. Well adapted to their goal, their movements will have to have a certain

14
A journal article by Alfred Adler, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.
59
grandiose gesture about them. They seek to secure their position in life with extraordinary
efforts, with greater haste and impatience, with more intense impulses, without
consideration of any one else. Through these exaggerated movements toward their
exaggerated goal of dominance these children become more noticeable, their attacks on
the lives of others necessitate that they defend their own lives. They are against the world,
and the world is against them.
15
This goal has a starting point in a combination of factors found in early childhood.
With his inheritance and the thousand-fold impressions given by his physique, his
environment (people and surroundings), as well as the influences of climate, culture, and
society, the child creates his very own way of survival and development. The chances are
that he not merely is "on his way," but that he protects or defends himself in his very own
way ʇ according to Adler, with his "life style."
The negative side of compensation can be divided schematically into two major
groups: Overcompensation, which has the goal of superiority, and undercompensation,
which entails the demand for help. Actual or presumed weakness is employed in order to
gain the services of others.
16

15
Ibid.
16
From the translation of an unpublished manuscript, "Principles of Individual Psychology," by Alexander
Mueller, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.
60
The reinforced tendency toward security, from which negative forms of
compensation develop, leads via overcompensation to a striving for power, dominance,
self-esteem, and the tendency toward self-deprecation. Undercompensation, which
includes a demand for help, leads to a lack of courage and to a fear of life.
Individuals can use safeguarding devices in attempts both to excuse themselves from
failure and depreciate others. Safeguarding devices include symptoms, depreciation,
accusations, self-accusations, guilt, and various forms of distancing. Symptoms such as
anxiety, phobias, and depression, can all be used as excuses for avoiding the tasks of life
and transferring responsibility to others. In this way, individuals can use their symptoms
to shield themselves from potential or actual failure in these tasks. Of course, individuals
may be able to do well in one or two of the tasks of life and have difficulties in only one,
e.g., in work, community, or love.
Depreciation can be used to deflate the value of others, thereby achieving a sense of
relative superiority through aggressive criticism or subtle solicitude. Accusations attribute
the responsibility for a difficulty or failure to others in an attempt to relieve an individual
of the responsibility and to blame others for the failure. Guilt may create a feeling of
pious superiority over others and clear the way for continuing harmful actions rather than
correcting them. Distancing from tasks and people can be done in many ways including
61
procrastination, avoiding commitments, abuse of alcohol and/or drugs, or suicide.
Social Interest, Social Community, and Social Understanding
Adler, unlike Freud, viewed the masculine protest from a nondeterministic
perspective. What these situations have in common are adults whose inferiority feelings
seem so overwhelming and in whom the feeling of community is so underdeveloped that
they retreat to protect their fragile yet inflated sense of self. They employ what Adler
called safeguarding devices to do this. These are similar to Freud's ego defense
mechanisms.
"All of my efforts are devoted toward increasing the feeling of community of a
person. I know that the real reason for his malady is his lack of cooperation," says Adler
in an interview.
17
In Adlerian psychology, men have their own choice: they can learn to
rid an exaggerated inferiority feeling and increase an insufficiently developed feeling of
community. Man is seen as a social being. Man and all his capabilities and forms of
expression are inseparably linked to the existence of others. Man would not be able to

17
From a transcribed, tape recorded interview with Sophia de Vries on 5-3-80, in the AAISF/ATP
Archives.
62
survive by himself or to reach the present level of civilization all alone, but “borrows
rows and receives values from others constantly, he also is co-responsible for his fellow
men.”
18
Emphasis is thus stressed on his way of living with and cooperating with his
fellow men in relationships, work, and love.
When one of the English translators of Adler asked him if he could translate the
word "Gemeinschaftsgefuehl" as Social Interest. Adler said yes, but many of his followers
have found the translation not an equivalent but only a pale rendering of the German term.
They came to prefer the phrase "Feeling of Community," a concept that denotes a
recognition and acceptance of the interconnectedness of all people.
This process of association, itself the result of personal weakness and insecurity, indicates
a precondition that must be met in every way just as does the will to live, as life itself,
must tacitly be accepted. Therefore, the feeling of community is both inborn and
cultivated just as the feeling of masculine protest. In "Origin of the Striving for
Superiority and Social Interest," Adler articulates:
What about social interest, is that also inborn or does one have to instill it in
people? Of course, it is also inborn, but it can only become developed when the
child is already exposed to life around him….There are inborn faculties and

18
Sophia de Vries, “Some Basic Principles of Individual Psychology.” Originally published in the
"Individual Psychology Bulletin," Vol. 9, 1951.
63
functions, which carry through almost completely on their own, for instance,
breathing. We are not that far at all with social interest, we have not developed it
in the same way as breathing, yet we have to expect the development of social
interest as an end goal of completeness intensely enough that mankind in the
future will possess it and use it as he does breathing.
19
In my project, the reciprocal nature of Alder’s social interest has a significant impact
on gender displays: each sub-gender group (whether hegemonic masculinity or militant
femininity) that makes no social contacts (the willingness to contribute and cooperate)
with the opposite sex soon finds itself isolated. While extremists in both gendered groups
discount the other, the underlying facts suggest that both points of view are valid and
remain in a dialectic tension with each other. Society makes the same mistakes toward the
isolated individual as toward the isolated sub-gender group. If the dominant gender group
approach the other coldly they will be hard and cold with their own community members
as well ʇ e. g., the underprivileged gay and black community. Like the individual, the
hegemonic gendered group may individualize more and more instead of developing in the
direction of belonging to a larger community - the development of functioning outside of
the total, against one’s "complement," where the subgroup’s own prestige counts more
than progress of mankind, which is the beginning of the neurotic attitude.

19
From a new translation of "Origin of the Striving for Superiority and Social Interest," IZIP, Vol. XI,
1933, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.
64
Inspired by Adler, we must evaluate the inborn foundation of social community as
too insufficient and not strong enough to develop and unfold without social
understanding. If people truly understood and felt this gendered interconnectedness, then
many of the self-created problems of life - prejudice, persecution, sexual discrimination,
and other gendered tensions - might cease to exist.
There is much work to be done to bridge the gender divide. However, given the
dynamics of the relationship between dominant and subordinated groups, real and lasting
change requires the thoughtful work of the dominant group. In this case, it means that the
responsibility for creating lasting change in the culturally-installed patriarchy is the work
of men in modern society. This important work of extending privilege, power, and
influence to women as a group does not require the disadvantaging of men. The feeling of
community renders most men able to gain a balanced view of the gender issues. The
social interest requires men to reflect that women have “come a long way” in establishing
their basic worth and value in modern society. The work also requires men to self-assess
and to address the issues of overt oppression of women (including domestic violence,
workplace disparity, and other gender equity issues).
Success in closing the gender gap also requires the partnership of women. What
women can do is learn to partner with dominant group allies to alleviate the negative
65
impact of the dominant group’s masculine protest and culturally-installed oppression on
all groups. It also requires the feminists not to feel that the study of masculinity is
legitimating numerous attacks on hegemonic masculinity ʇ it is always a challenge to
make a fair presentation of all perspectives on masculinity. Women’s feeling of
community further needs cultivating in excess of their masculine protest. Feminists
should not worry that a theoretically sophisticated study of masculinity would necessarily
involve positing male subjectivity and entail a significant digression from a feminist
project (Constance Penley and Sharon Willis, Male Trouble, vii). With complete lack of
social understanding, each gender group will regressively retreat to protect one’s own
fragile yet inflated sense of self, and employ what Adler called safeguarding devices to
do this.
The Application of Alderian Thought to Film Criticism
Film noir is well-known for its treatment of women in distortion. It illustrates the
gendered tensions that surfaced in post-World War II America. Because of the war’s
demand, women had entered the nation’s work force in unprecedented numbers, taking
over what had formerly been male jobs and, in the process, showing their ability to do
66
that work as well as men. Along with the masculine displacement that this situation
threatened came a radical shift in the family structure, due partly to the absent male, but
also to the new-found independence, ambition, and authority of the female as
breadwinner and head of house. It follows that the placement of new women in this way
would disturb the patriarchal system, and furnished a challenge to that world view. Given
the media and most of the artifacts still in male control and authorship, the ideological
work of film noir thereby transformed the new role of women into a negative image.
Passed through the noir filter, the ‘new woman’ emerged on screen as wicked, scheming
creature, sexually potent and deadly to the male.
While the radical feminists propose a reverse reading of the femmes fatales in film
noir as a ‘male fantasy’ and historically untrue, it also comes into question – isn’t the
postwar male anxiety part of history and socially true? It is very probable that both the
male fantasy and the female corrective forces make up the whole of social reality in a
causal link with each other. Both gendered expressions mirror the tension and anxiety of
the other and can be just as ideologically performative and creative as they can be.
I do not contend that the popular film’s transformation of reality is a false
consciousness (in Marx’s terminology). Instead, my emphasis is on how masculine
protest is at work in collective gender displays and how their role-playing changes in
67
accordance with the anxiety that disguises itself in otherwise innocent representations.
It is true that the new women existed in postwar America who in real life were
strengthened by their wartime experience – this can be viewed as the first sign system in
the Peircean semiology. According to Charles Sanders Peirce, the secondary sign
(interpretant) has recycling force. The Peircean semiosis also results in a “series of
successive interpretants” (N Ƿ th, 43). There is no “first” nor “last” sign in this process of
unlimited semiosis. The noir film’s parade of weak, uncertain, woefully neurotic men and
their nightmarish desire for demonizing women is, beyond doubt, a historical record of
the abiding fear of strong women in the postwar male psyche – let’s call it the secondary
sign system. Just as the feminist critique of male fantasy – a central theme in
contemporary gender studies – is part of social reality as well (the third sign system), so
is the male response to the women’s rights movement in the Seventies (the fourth sign
system), largely redefined in the Nineties’ men’s movements. In a chain reaction cycle of
gendered performances, the successive feminist backlash
20
against the men’s movements
(Robert Bly’s mythopoeticism and Men’s Rights Movement, in particular) is considered
once again to justify a certain aspect of reality (the fifth sign system). Each ‘signified’ in

20
See Kay Leigh Hagan, ed., Women Respond to the Men’s Movement: A Feminist Collection (San
Francisco, CA: Pandora, 1992).
68
the previous system turns into a signifier in the following system; each new sign activates
and leads to an unfinalized sign process. The ideological work situated in each of the sign
systems – from the secondary to the fifth – is an act of masculine protest and, no less than,
part of history. What is a sign in a feminist reading of the noir films is equivalent to a
Peircean interpretant in a post-feminist masculinity discourse. The gender
consciousness-raising adopted in both women’s and men’s movements sprang from the
sense of masculine protest in psychoanalytic thought. In an Alderian approach, the female
assertive drive and the men’s aggressive drive can each be read simply as expressions of
life: they are parts of the whole of life. And we begin to understand their reciprocal
relations in that whole. The development of the dominant society can easily be disturbed.
The way to negative compensations is open when failures seriously affect the
self-confidence of those who fail to get the better part of cultural identity. The negative
compensation no longer is directed to remedying real shortcomings and insufficiencies.
The reinforced inferiority feeling in the male citizens awakens a need for greater security,
i.e. to create a myth. An important turning takes place from reality to appearances.
Instead of dealing with the real demands of life, the gender discourse strives after
unreachable goals: to be successful in every way, or absolutely to avoid failure.
The Adlerian concept of masculine protest has the potential of dissolving a style of
69
life – not in the way who the winner is or the winner takes all – but with it the
compensatory bridge between the inferiority feeling and fictional final goal.
21
The social
understanding of masculine protest in all respects enables to develop the feeling of social
community and avoid the deficiency anxiety in gender, racial, ethnic, sexual, and class
identities. A new level of motivation can then emerge, similar to what Abraham Maslow
described as the transition from deficiency motivation to growth motivation. No longer
struggling between two opposing poles, and the pressure of either overcompensation or
undercompensation, each gender group pursues a new direction guided and pulled by one
of the higher values.
The glaring threat of femmes fatales to men in the noir canon provides a causal link
with the threat in the horror films of the Seventies, which can therefore be seen as
expressing a profound insecurity about men themselves, and accordingly the monsters of
the period are increasingly represented as part of an everyday contemporary landscape.
That is why all horror movie creatures of the period – monsters and victims alike – are
psychotic.

21
Adler’s fictional finalism is a concept by the individual who has a faulty style of life and expects others
to conform to their self-centered wishes.
70
These horror films have been striking the interest of feminist critics insofar as they
establish the “anti-classicism” of the horror films (Karen Hollinger, 1989; Judith Spector,
1986; Tania Modleski, 1986; Barbara Creed, 1990). What is crucial to the ideological
work is that these populist thrillers and their sequels initiate a growing permissiveness in
matters of onscreen sex and nudity and a propensity for portraying sexually active
women and teenagers as killers or victims – in films like Lady in a Cage (1964), Night of
the Living Dead (1968), Frankenstein on Campus (1971), The Other (1972), The Exorcist
(1973), The Omen (1976), Carrie (1976), Audrey Rose (1977), Halloween (1978), Friday
the 13
th
(1979), American Werewolf in London (1981), and the disaster subgenre: Jaws
(1975), Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983), etc.
A feminist critic may well argue that horror is produced by repression and the
monster has become essentially a superego figure, avenging itself on liberated female
sexuality or the sexual freedom of the young. These films focus on the agony inflicted
upon the libidinal teenagers and the independent women, suggesting that the male/adult
monster is something of a moral superego, reaffirming through vicious murder the
mechanics of repression and punishment of the ‘rebels’ so necessary for a patriarchal
society.
71
This interpretative position is what Stuart Hall calls the moment of decoding, which
is certainly not to be thought of as ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ linked to the conveyance of a
‘message’ that is the exclusive vehicle of meaning. Instead, the feminist decoding is the
moment of reception regarded by most theorists as closer to a form of “construction” than
to the passivity suggested by the term “reception.”
For the other social groups, it is not easy to be convinced that the feminist reading is
preferred within a plurality of possible readings of the horror films. The fact that many
decoders will come up with the same reading does not make that meaning an essential
part of the meta-discourse. It can be misleading to search for the determinations of a
preferred reading as unique, and politically correct. The openness of connotative codes
may mean that we have to replace the notion of ‘preferred reading’ with another which
admits a range of possible alternatives open to the audience. A feminist model could
encourage the essentialism of readers (e.g. as ‘the resistant reader’) whereas reading
positions are, as Robert Stam posits, “multiform, fissured, schizophrenic, unevenly
developed, culturally, discursively and politically discontinuous, forming part of a
shifting realm of ramifying differences and contradictions” (Stam 2000, 233).
Aside from the moment of decoding, feminist scholars often pay much attention to
the moment of the text - a phase in Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication
72
that features symbolic construction, arrangement, the form and content of what is
published or broadcast. A typical textual criticism favored by feminists is to engage in the
sexual politics. The paradigmatic sexual dimension articulated in The Exorcist is
graphically detailed in its ‘rampage section’ shock effects – the indulgent close-ups of the
head revolving on the girl’s shoulders; her plunging of a bloody crucifix into her vagina;
the verbal obscenity on an unprecedented scale; and the famous green bile that coils from
her mouth.
Friday the 13
th
is another case study as such. The feminist tends to critique the film
by inquiring the subject positioning in relation to the male gaze: why the killer turns out
to be a woman who is seeking revenge because her son died in an earlier summer camp
swimming accident, while in the next two sequels, the psychotic is her inexplicably
resurrected son, Jason, himself. All the early three films of the Friday the 13
th
cycle build
the tension on the frenzied killing of isolated victims, and the female nudity and love
making. The cycle climaxes with the pursuit of the solitary surviving female. The threat
articulated is that of a male-upon-female pursuit with the male as predator and the female
as prey, whereas the potential identification of sexual and physical violence remains
largely submerged.
73
There are certain forms of knowledge – notably the self-knowledge of an exploited
social group. The female textual protest is certainly able to lay bare the limits of other
ideologies, and so to figure as an emancipatory force. But the female textual protest is
inseparably bound up with women’s collective masculine protest – a social consciousness
interconnecting both sexes within the social institution and transformation.
Unlike scientific reality, social reality is always relative to a particular historical
situation, never an absolute, metaphysical affair beyond history altogether. The feminist
protest is so historically positioned as to be able in principle to unlock the secret of
patriarchy as a whole. There is thus no longer any need to remain trapped within the
sterile antithesis of male masculine protest as false consciousness on the one hand, and
female consciousness as some absolute, unhistorical mode of knowledge on the other. For
each gendered consciousness is not false consciousness, and female consciousness is
simply an expression or encoding of ‘true’ social consciousness in her own right.
The textual protest, albeit useful to delineate the female subject as spectator, remains
an isolated, abstract construct. The crisis arises by ignoring the text’s relationship to other
social contexts – that is, the thought and existence of man’s masculine protest as relevant
as the woman’s consciousness-raising. The binary contrast between merely partial
ideological standpoints on the one side, and some dispassionate views of the social
74
totality on the other, is radically misleading.
In a word, the male character’s view of insanity has been secularized, returned to
themselves. This sense of insecurity and anxiety in the counterculture lifestyle continues
to dominate during the years of economic recession and the rise of new conservatism in
the Eighties. They are similar to the ego defense mechanisms in the postwar noir films -
whatever the causes, there was always a strenuous striving for overcoming the
disadvantage point, and for mastery of the situation. Comparatively, Hollywood seems to
have staged more psychotic men and women in the immediate postwar years and the
Counterculture (the Sixties and Seventies).
If women are to genuinely emancipate themselves, they need to have a better
understanding of the reciprocal nature of social interest, which is quintessential in gender
displays – i.e., any gender group who makes no social contacts with the opposite sex soon
finds themselves isolated – according to the Adlerian psychology. The solution of the
female marginality has to be linked with the solution of the male inferiority anxiety.
Jane Gaines, among the few feminist scholars, argues that feminists lost their best
argument by ignoring the social, as opposed to the textual, construction of gender (Gaines,
1984, 24-27). Gaines observes that with the rise of psychoanalysis, feminist theories
depart from the historical conjunctures.
75
Christian Gledhill pursues the same line of argument in an earlier critique of
feminist criticism. She charges that because women were construed as textual constructs,
the result was a “hiatus between women as constructed in language and women as
produced by historical, social and economic forces” (Gledhill, 1978). In other words,
feminists have put too much stress on the constitutive force of language, and displaced
the effectivity of the forces and relations of (ideological) production.
In an Adlerian perspective, the feeling of social community is to be cultivated just as
the feeling of masculine protest. The gendered tolerance cannot exist alone without
reciprocal understanding of the deficiency anxiety of the opposite sex. The social
understanding of the male chaos caused by the major counter-culture movements of the
Sixties and Seventies is pre-requisite to developing the gendered altruism, reinforcing the
feeling of social community, and defusing the tension between the two sexes. The Sixties
were characterized by the Afro-American struggle for civil rights, the defeat in the
Vietnam War, the feminist movement, and the New Left student movement, coupled with
a high level of disaffection on the part of white middle class youth from the values and
ideals of the Fifties America, the world of suburban houses, corporate jobs, “straight”
76
dress and behavior, sexual repression, and social conformity
22
. In the Seventies, the
feminist, black, gay, and student movements would have a further lasting impact on U.S.
society. The feminist and black movements, specifically, gained ends (affirmative actions)
which would become objects of great debate and struggle in the late Seventies and
Eighties, as white male conservatives counterattacked against the inroads made on their
traditional prerogatives and power.
Take another example. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) was protested against
during shooting by gay advocacy groups for its purported stereotyping of gay people as
psychos - a protest that screenwriter Joe Eszterhas himself joined. Although Hollywood is
fearless in portraying predatory female psychos, or lesbians as killer dykes, Basic Instinct
still pushes a far more radical political and sexual envelope than the previous thrillers.
Examples includeJagged Edge (1985), Fatal Attraction (1987), Sea of Love (1989),
Fried Green Tomatoes (1992), to name a few. Also, the film inspired an entire subgenre
of imitators of psycho-thrillers featuring killer women and torrid sex. The list includes
such films as Body of Evidence (1993), Crush (1993), Traces of Red (1993), Sliver (1993),
Blindfold: Acts of Obsession (1993), Color of Night (1994), Blood Run (1994), Tunnel

22
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner develop the important argument about the male alienation and
rebellion in the counterculture. See Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
77
Vision (1994), Never Talk to Strangers (1995), Tainted Love (1995), Eye of the Beholder
(1999), Jill the Ripper (2000) and Mercy (2000). Additionally, Basic Instinct was
parodied in Fatal Instinct (1993), Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993), The Silence of the Hams
(1994) and Scary Movie (2000).
Starring Sharon Stone as Catherine Tremell, Basic Instinct spotlights a kinky
seductress with the kind of cold, challenging verbal style that many men take as a
challenge. She is wealthy and bisexual, a sometime girlfriend of a rock star, who has been
stabbed with an ice-pick during sex in the bedroom of his San Francisco mansion.
Catherine becomes an immediate suspect when it is found that she wrote a novel
describing an identical murder. During the police questioning of her, Catherine flirts
shamelessly and toys with their male libidos. The woman may be a killer and is obviously
twisted and manipulative, and yet the male detective is mesmerized - attracted by the
danger as much as by her sensuous magnetism. As his investigation progresses, the
detective finds the woman is more complicated than he suspected. Her friends include an
insanely jealous fratricidal lesbian lover and husband-whacking buddy. What provokes
the gay community most is the denouement - when the actual perpetrator is uncovered,
there is no enlightenment as to why the killing occurred. The outcome is so arbitrary that
it depends not upon the personality traits or behavior of the characters; rather, it’s the
78
writer's toss of the dice, as it were. The gay activists may have been giving away the
ending if the last shot had provided the opposite answer, insofar as it still would have
been consistent with everything that had happened in the film. This way the film is a
calculated package of sex served up as conspicuous consumption and aimed straight at
the public mainstream pleasure.
For the heterosexuals, however, the film is far from an attack on lesbians. What the
audience have here is a movie with not just one, but a family pack of psychos. As for the
allegedly offensive homosexual characters, the gay protesters seem to have ignored that
the film's heterosexuals, starting with the psychotic hero Nick Curran (Michael Douglas),
are equally offensive. Nick is a San Francisco detective living on the edge. He has the
usual, jaded detective problems: he drinks, does a little cocaine and accidentally shot
some tourists in the line of duty. He's in therapeutic remission now, reporting regularly to
a female police psychologist. This troubled police detective has been up before Internal
Affairs, and gets involved in the investigation of the kinky murder of the rock star. As
Catherine starts to taunt and seduce him, weaving a convoluted web around him, Nick is
entranced and finds himself yearning to be tied up and tied down. In the mainstream
criticism, the addictive personality of the tainted detective gets even with the twisted
construct of the castrating seductress. Sex and violence bind the pair together as if they
79
were made for each other.
A tension arises here with the text’s relationship to its social context. What could we
make use of the films – especially those not directly offering us images of ourselves?
We could practice on the film’s images what L Ǫ vi-Strauss has termed bricolage
(Levi-Strauss, 1969), that is, playing around with the elements available to us in such a
way as to bend their meanings to our own purposes. The oppositional reading of gay
activists is seeking their social identities – the gay and lesbian perspective reintegrates
sexual difference, to some extent, in their gender-specific constructions. But how can we
interpret the world and texts based on the individuation of the relationships of empathy
that link people of different ideologies? Through imaginary identifications that relate to
the desire for social identity, each sub-gender or sexual-oriented group becomes a
full-fledged subject by taking up a position as a speaking subject in the symbolic meaning
systems of a specific society. The ‘real’ in this manner is not reality (which is accessible
to consciousness) but a thing which resists all articulation – that “which may be
approached, but never grasped” (Jacques Lacan, ġ The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis ĭ 1978, p. 280). In Lacan’s characterization, “The real is
distinguished…by its separation from the field of the pleasure principle, by its
desexualization, by the fact that its economy, later, admits something new, which is
80
precisely the impossible” (167). For what this oppositional reading of gay activists fails
to take into account is the situation of the oppressed groups who need to get some view of
the social system as a whole, and of their own place within it, simply to be able to realize
their own partial, particular social interests.
To seize social reality as totality is to grasp it in its dynamic, contradictory
development. To this extent, we should not take a social determinist position in which the
individual ‘decodings’ of a text are reduced to a direct consequence of a certain social
group’s position. As David Morley comments in his studies of how different social
groups interpreted a television program, “it is always a question of how social position, as
it is articulated through particular discourses, produces specific kinds of readings or
decodings. These readings can then be seen to be patterned by the way in which the
structure of access to different discourses is determined by social position” (Morley 1983,
113; cf. Morley 1992, 89-90). Morley’s point about differential access to discourses can
be related to the various kinds of ‘masculine protest’ outlined by the Adlerian psychology
– notably negative compensation. An interpretative repertoire is part of the symbolic
capital of members of the relevant ‘interpretative community’ and constitutes the textual
and interpretative codes available to them (which offer them the potential to understand
and sometimes also to produce texts which employ them). Our masculine protest (or
81
intentionality) suggests conscious manipulation and organization of texts and images, and
implies that the visual, technical and linguistic strategies work together to secure one
preferred reading of a text to the exclusion of others.
In Adlerian psychology, man and all his capabilities and forms of expression are
inseparably linked with the existence of others. Each other perspective of masculine
protest is not false consciousness, but a commitment toward increasing the feeling of
social community. Because parts make a whole. The self-knowledge of the limits of each
group’s social consciousness is building a self-reflexive masculine protest. Each social
group’s reflexive understanding is of a piece with their conception of the interpenetration
of ideology and text. Reflexivity, citing Pierre Bourdieu, is precisely what enables us to
escape overinterpretation “by uncovering the social at the heart of the individual, the
impersonal beneath the intimate, the universal buried deep within the most particular”
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, 44).
It is worth dwelling on this point, for it is the switch in perspectives that makes us
continually reflect theoretically upon our own critical factions so that we could recognize
and capture the discordance between text and its social context. A reflexive masculine
protest is a constant social adaptation and self-compensation. It tends to create a
recognized equality of value between contradictory social groups, which would then
82
result in a higher level of cooperation between them. The negative effects of masculine
protest will finally diminish when masculinity and femininity (among perspective groups)
are redefined to remove them from identification with superiority and inferiority.
83
Chapter Two
The Four Tendencies of Masculine Representation
A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that
this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that
point of view.
ʇ Alfred Adler
The chapter’s title alludes to Michael Renov’s essay, "Toward a Poetics of
Documentary," in which Renov describes the four fundamental tendencies of
documentary and calls for the “active voice appropriate to their role in a poesis, an active
making” (21). Renov here hopes to show the constitutive character of each tendency:
these categories “are not intended to be exclusive or airtight; the friction, overlaps ʇ even
mutual determination ʇ discernible among them testify to the richness and historical
variability.” What is distinctive of such a grouping concept is that tendency conceptually
approximates the modality engaged with the “wider potential, repressed but available”
(22).
Taking a cultural-defined reading of the Hollywood films will no less than articulate
the major transformations of gender performance in the matrix of cultural, economic,
political, and psychological factors. My ethnic background has given me insights and
84
perspectives that I wish to provide balance to the American vision of men and
masculinities. My analysis will not exalt one part of the Western-trained academia over
another (feminism, in particular), but rather witness the forthcoming movement of gender
justice in America that will consider the needs of both genders equally in all the
institutions. I use Hollywood to exemplify how Asian men could profit by the Western
experience, and improve ourselves to be liberated from the restrictive gendered roles, and
open the possibilities of sexual relations among equals.
I will take Michael Messner’s view of gender identity not as a “thing” that people
“have,” but rather as a process of construction that develops, comes into crisis, and
changes as a person interacts with the social world. Through this perspective, it becomes
possible to speak of “gendering” identities rather than “masculinity” or “femininity” as
relatively fixed identities or statuses.
23
In this construction people are not passively shaped by their social environment.
Instead, as recent feminist analyses of the construction of feminine gender identity have
pointed out, “girls and women are implicated in the construct of their own identities and
personalities, both in terms of the ways that they participate in their own subordination

23
Michael Messner, “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities,” in Men’s Lives,
second edition, eds. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 161.
85
and the ways that they resist subordination” (Jessica Benjamin, 1988; Frigga Haug, 1987).
Yet this self-construction is not a fully conscious process. There are also deeply woven,
unconscious motivations, fears, and anxieties at work here. So, too, in the construction of
masculinity.
24
In examining the textual masculinity, I realize that “people” in the film, in all
likelihood, are shaped passively by critics in reference to gender identities, ideologies,
and signs. I begin to think: Why couldn’t we breathe life into some noir women as if they
may have socially defined their own personalities consciously and/or unconsciously?
Why should we presume that these heroines were obediently inured to the role of
dragon-lady or spider woman in Sunset Boulevard, for instance? I should have believed
that a theorist’s use-value is more significant than his/her critical tool; our interpretive
motivation actively bolsters a sagging ideology into the inanimate characters in the text.
With this vision in mind, I reimagine Kevin Costner’s New Manhood in Dances with
Wolves as a gradual and incremental process of construction, mostly spawned by his fear
of mutilation in the opening sequence. To historicize him is not necessarily to fix him in a
uniform masculinity to reconstitute the masculine representation.

24
Ibid.
86
Although masculine dominance is almost universal, not all masculinities have the
same relation to discourses and institutions of power. Masculinity must be seen as
reacting to changing definitions of femininity (Michael Kimmel, 1987). Masculine
representation also clearly invites a rationale to articulate the slippage between its status
quo and dynamic transformation. The masculine image may be represented in a variety of
ways. Each has emerged and taken form in response to a variety of modern civil rights
movements (feminist movement, in particular). Each has thus developed into a genuinely
contemporary perspective on masculinity. There is quite a bit of choice in how men react
to the social challenges, because there can be an acceptance, there can be a denial, there
can be a doubt, there can be a negotiation, there can be a compensation, and even an
overcompensation, or undercompensation, to extend the Alderian thought.
The spectrum of masculine representations hence aids a social understanding by
providing the filmmakers with an arsenal of preconceived cultural reference that can then
be manipulated to achieve the desired effect.
With all these properties of textual analysis, I doubt if some kind of coherent shape
about a common ‘masculine representation’ is becoming visible, since the formulation of
such a paradigm will be quite as solemnly mystifying as it sounds. Instead, I prefer to
think about what the use-value is in handling masculine representation through cinema.
87
The use-value is rather an intrinsic process of construction that develops and changes as
the filmmaking interacts with the social world. It always fulfills the evolving needs,
interests, values, and value systems tied to the giver and the receiver. Also, the use-value
corresponds to their unique mixed identities of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual
orientation. The method, thus, for me is to acknowledge the diverse tendencies of
masculine representation and their limits, so as not to overinterpret what represents and
what is represented as a unifying discourse, or a non-discursive activity embedded in the
text. The use-value I wish to consider here concerns what I take to be the four tendencies
of masculine representation. These categories are partly the work of the filmmaker and
filmmaking, and partly the product of viewer expectations.
The masculine representation in Hollywood, in my final thought, is a conglomerate of
myth created by the media (the representing tool), the elitist (filmmaker, film critic and
theorist), the mass audience (measured by the box-office receipts and voting result), and
the political leaders (who, as a mobilizer of public energies, may use television, radio,
and the press to consolidate both presidency and political agenda, creating a collective
yearning for a strong American nation-ness), in conjunction with the political tidal shift.
If we use Lacan’s real/symbolic signification, then myth is the representing mirror,
sometimes a magic mirror, sometimes a standard mirror, and at some other times a
88
fish-eye lens mirror. In all cases it’s not the real, but based on the real; it reflects the
social reality to a considerable degree, but with a twist.
To avoid the structuralist categoricalism, the classification here is not intended to be
exclusive or comprehensive, or even diachronic. It suggests that men’s public gender
displays are not grounded in some essential need for men to dominate others but, instead,
tend to vary according to the extent of power, privilege, and challenge that men hold
vis-a-vis Otherness (women and other marginalized minority groups). The different
strategies of masculine representation may emerge in the same decade, either reflexive to
men themselves, or compromising & negotiating, or even vindictive in demonizing their
competitors. I will center upon the aspect of each tendency's reflexivity.
Since masculine representation exists as a part of a given convention, each tendency
at once modifies it and is modified by it. Meaning, hence, is seen to arise from the
conjunction (or collision) of various discursive codes at work in the text. I will
subsequently illuminate each tendency's `auto-critique' in a manner to conceal and then
reveal its mythic edifices, interpreting its own anti-interpretation.
I could only exemplify how I use my critical tool and how it may produce some
desirable practical results. I do not seek to be exhaustive in interpreting all the inclusive
films; nor would I dismiss that some of my categories or the hermeneutic moods remain
89
theoretically suspect, thereby being open to challenge.
In this format, I will underline some notions that the four tendencies paradoxically
mediate each other, a truth that they are produced and hybridized intertextually rather
than textually or chronologically, and the fact that they exist not as essence but as cultural
differences without positive terms. This awareness could lend stature to the argument that
those places within and between texts where tendencies collide reveal the connections
between the masculine status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value within/out
the text.
1. The Hegemonic Representation
Antonio Gramsci's basic premise of the theory of hegemony is one with which few
would disagree: that man is not ruled by force alone, but by ideas. It is of particular
salience to the exploration of men’s hegemonic representation in the popular films in that
it focuses on culture and ideology. Unlike Marxist theories of domination, Gramsci
relegates particularly to 'everyday' routine structures and 'common sense' values in trying
to locate mechanisms of domination (Todd Gitlin, 1994, 517).
90
The use-value of hegemonic representation is to secure white male supremacy which
relates to Gramsci's idea of 'spontaneous consent' (Dominic Strinati, 1995, 165) or
'consensual control', whereby individuals voluntarily assimilate the world-view or
hegemony of the dominant group' (Paul Ransome, 1992, 150). It’s in this vein that
hegemonic masculinity refers to the belief in the existence of a culturally normative ideal
of male behavior and posits that society strongly encourages men to embody this kind of
masculinity. It is marked by a tendency for the white male heterosexuals to dominate
other males and subordinate females. It was the most prevalent form of male expression
in classical Hollywood, and it staged a comeback in the Eighties as the most socially
endorsed that always contributed to the subordinate position of women and other men
they perceived. Its proponents point to characteristics such as aggressiveness, strength,
drive, ambition, and self-reliance, which they argue are encouraged in males but
discouraged in females and other males, as evidence of the existence of hegemonic
masculinity. The tendency gives a particular inflection to ethical considerations.
According to the conservative mind, it is perfectly natural for men to be polite and
socially dominant. Masculine behaviors and attitudes are manifestations of male nature.
According to moral conservatives, masculinity is created by society in order to override
men’s natural antisocial tendencies; it is the civilized role men play when they are fathers,
91
protectors, and providers. Virtually all social behavior is a manifestation of men’s natural
tendencies as selected through an evolutionary process.
Consequently, the proponent readers/viewers fully shared the text's hegemonic
representation and accepted and reproduced the preferred reading in such a stance that the
masculine code seemed 'natural' and 'transparent.' This tendency assumes that the
subjugated groups willingly accept their exploitation by their rulers in society. The
hegemonized groups happily accede to their oppression.
Women exist in hegemonic representation through two mechanisms: either as the
cause of violence/revenge as in The Searchers (1956) and Straw Dogs (1970), or as a
middle ground between two masculine individuals or parties to abate the violence ʇ It
Happened One Night (1934), Duel in the Sun (1946), and El Dorado (1967), for instance.
The Manichean treatment of the virtuous woman and the moll (My Darling Clementine
[1946] comes to mind) pervades in the tendency of hegemonic representation.
Notoriously, the script of The Wild Bunch (1969) is littered with common Mexican
prostitutes while the men of The Wild Bunch use them as sexual objects and bullet
shields.
In The Searchers (1956), Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) engaged in an obsessive
five-year search for his niece Debby, captured by the Comanches. What embodies the
92
core of the storyline is Edwards’s consumed racism and blind hatred toward the
Comanches so that he is determined, until the last minute change of heart, to kill Debby
for having become a “squaw.” The film, indeed, is focused on the hero’s fear of
miscegenation instead of the captured woman’s feelings regarding her ordeal. This format
continued into the Sixties in Two Rode Together (1961), Duel at Diablo (1966), and The
Stalking Moon (1969). Although the Sixties and Seventies were a time of political
activism for civil rights and these movies attempt to portray a sympathetic attitude toward
native Americans,
25
it seems that society was not yet ready to sympathize with raped
women.
El Dorado (1967) opens with the "W. C." sequence in which the two pals, Cole
Thornton (John Wayne) and sheriff J. P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) almost failed to
recognize each other and confront each other at gunpoint. It is through Maudie, later on,
that shows the audience that they get involved in a `triangle.' Yet Maudie passed the
remark that she would leave them both if they quarreled over her. Her existence is, clearly,
to soothe the dramatic tension launched in the opening. At the conclusion of the film,
Thornton suggests that he will quit wandering and settle in town 炼 with Maudie, perhaps.
But in the last shot, J. P. and Cole walk along the street, each with a (phallic) crutch to

25
Initiated by Broken Arrow (1950).
93
assist a wounded leg, in a strong `pals' note: woman might mitigate brutalism but she
never partakes in the two men's story. The buddy system in hegemonic representation
facilitates the creation of masculine homosociality by developing a sense of community
and trust, and perpetuates certain kinds of American masculine traditions. It facilitates
and inhibits negotiations over social boundaries and hierarchies of class, race/ethnicity,
and sexuality.
The masculinity in hegemonic representation should not be understood as the "male
role" but as a particular variety of masculinity to which women and others (young,
effeminate, or homosexual men) are subordinated. As Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and
John Lee (1987) argue in “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity,” hegemonic
masculinity is a question of "how particular men inhabit positions of power and wealth
and how they legitimate and reproduce social relationships that generate dominance." (86,
92)
2. The Negotiated Representation
Negotiated representation is an alternative tendency to hegemonic representation.
It examines the dilemma-driven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the
94
face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such
collaboration means not only interpreting diverse signifying systems based on values,
experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in
the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.
The textual analysis of the main male characters in this tendency reveals that a
transformation is occurring in the representation of male gender roles. These findings
indicate a negotiating process of the masculinity in American society. The negotiations of
violence are complicated when introducing alternative gender identities and expressions
into the marginal subculture.Negotiating strategies served a variety of functions,
including avoiding xenophobia, anti-gay violence, living up to expected images of
masculinity, and creating unique images of personhood free of gender role expectations.
Take a Hollywood silent classic for example. The Cheat (1915) was one of the most
sensational films of the early cinema. Edith Hardy, a society woman addicted to gambling,
loses charity funds at a card game and borrows money from Hishuru Tori, a Japanese
collector and art connoisseur. The service she is expected to provide in return is implied
in the bargain. When her husband makes money in the stock market and she is able to
repay the debt in cash, Tori insists that she carry out their agreement. She refuses; he tears
the gown from her shoulder and brands her like an object in his collection. She shoots
95
and wounds him but her husband takes the blame. In the trial scene, the husband is on the
point of being convicted when she rises and, baring her shoulder, reveals the
incriminating brand. Tori is protected with difficulty against the fury of the mob.
The villain in The Cheat was originally calculated to represent the height of evil as a
Japanese threat to American identity in those years. Yet Japanese associations in
California protested the picture vigorously on the grounds that the branding scene would
embitter people against Japan.26 The director Cecil B. DeMille received an official
protest from the Japanese Embassy. As Japan was an ally of Great Britain and France,
apologies were made, but not until the 1918 reissue (by which time the United States was
in the war) were the titles changed, Hishuru Tori becoming Haka Arakau, a “Burmese”
ivory merchant (Kevin Brownlow, 1990, 348). In this case, the representation of ethnic
masculinity is negotiated insofar as the popular movie and the political tidal shift were
tied closely to the desires and anxieties of the society then.
Here the social context poses a serious problem with textual empiricism: the
reception theory guarantees no political correctness, only political compromise. Each
perspective is actually part of social reality - a performative act (in Homi Bhabha’s

26
Moving Picture World, February 19, 1916, III4.
96
language) of masculine protest on behalf of each party’s own interests.
The American reader engaged in the dominant reading (in Stuart Hall’s taxonomy)
may fully share the original text’s code and broadly accept the preferred reading that
social order is recovered in the denouement when Edith’s enraged husband bursts through
the screen door to stop the potent Asian rapist. This classic gesture of the chivalrous
white patriarch (in hegemonic representation as protector) coming to “save” the
threatened white woman from the “fate worse than death” seems ‘natural’ and
‘transparent’ in such a stance.
However, this tendency is least possibly taken by an ethnic viewer. An Asian
audience will, more likely, take a negotiated or even oppositional reading, depending on
his/her sense of marginality and need for mental compensation in lived experience. The
ethnic reader may partly share the text’s code and somehow accept the preferred reading,
but sometimes resist and modify it in a way which reflects his/her ethnic position,
experiences and interests – this negotiated position involves contradictions in the reading
process. An ethnic negotiated reader might recognize the ways in which the
early-20
th
-century immigrants had to live with racism. He or she understands that even
though many of them accepted attitudes they couldn’t correct, they may nevertheless
have longed for change.
97
If one takes this mild ethnic reading mode, one might agree that the film features a
negotiated representation, given that both parties, Edith and Tori, seem vindicated. Both
have been “cheated” and both have “cheated.” Each has exacted revenge on the other. In
fact, both find themselves in this position because of the overpowering control of the
white, bourgeois, patriarchal status quo, which forbids any resolution of either Tori’s
desire for Edith or Edith’s desire for independence, wealth, and sensualism through any
means other than violence.
There is a third desirable reading position. If the ethnic reader’s social situation is
placed in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, he or she, albeit
understanding the preferred reading, does not share the text’s code and rejects this
reading, bringing to bear another alternative frame of reference – This new alternative
reading will accent the reinforced masculine protest; in the quest for autonomy, he or she
will develop via what Adler called safeguarding devices into a striving for re-writing the
dominant narrative. With such emotional reference, The Cheat is likely to be read as
unashamed racist film.
27
By placing Edith in the shadow of the Asian villain, who both
threatens and embodies all those secret desires that put the white patriarchy on unsteady

27
The film was referred to in Stephen Bush’s review as “the beastliness in the Oriental nature.” See
Moving Picture World, December 25, 1915, p. 2384.
98
ground, the film denies the gateway into American society that excludes those who
cannot fit in because of their race or ethnicity. The white woman is given the charge, then,
to exclude the foreign, the alien, and the unacceptable through her sexuality, whereas Tori,
getting wounded, exposed, and nearly lynched at The Cheat’s conclusion, returns to his
place as the emasculated Asian male. The threat he has posed to the white status quo has
been finally obviated.
The hierarchies of ethnic and gender status get reconditioned/negotiated in The
Cheat through competitive cultural significations. Male gender roles enact, contradict,
negotiate, and challenge a society's masculinities in complex and diverse ways. The
negotiated character of male identities explains how men can adopt multiple subject
positions and what the implications of this are for the negotiation of male identities.
In 1961 the Task Force on Indian Affairs, commissioned by U.S. Secretary of the
Interior Stewart Udall, issued a report that recommended a shift away from the policy of
tribal termination in favor of greater self-determination for Native Americans. These
followed the January 1961 preliminary report by the Commission on the Rights, Liberties,
and Responsibilities of the American Indians, one of many reports on the subject of
Native Americans issued in the early Sixties that suggested new attention be given to the
issues important to American Indians (Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, 1999, 65). In March 1968,
99
President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave an address to Congress on the “Problems of the
American Indian: The Forgotten American.” In that statement, he recognized the need for
Native American self-determination: “I propose a new goal for our Indian programs and
stresses self-determination; a goal that erases old attitudes of paternalism and promotes
partnership self-help….”
28
It was in this changing social and political climate that Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
was made. Like Broken Arrow (1950), Cheyenne Autumn used the American Indian as a
metaphor for the oppressed. The blame for what is graphically depicted as attempted
genocide in Cheyenne Autumn was placed on the system of control over long distance
with little or no real knowledge on the part of those in control. The film registers a
negotiated representation in its attempt to use the Cheyenne language, which is one of the
most striking and positive aspects. But Cheyenne Autumn also loses some veracity (again,
its contradictory aspect) in that its actors were of almost every ethnic background except
the American Indians.
The negotiated representation can further be divided schematically into three minor
groups: either negative compensation, namely, self-effacement; or reflexive awareness,

28
See “President Johnson, Special Message to Congress,” Documents of United States Indian Policy,
248-49.
100
that is, self-restraint of power (as in The Cheat and Cheyenne Autumn); or syncretizing
Otherness (mostly in the Nineties Hollywood films), an attempt to reconcile and meld
disparate or contrary beliefs.
Masculine representation in this tendency can be considered as the reflex of
constructive social interactions between text and context. The consciousness that some of
the films made during the Counterculture has shown how many marginalized social
groups and subcultures produce their own textual meanings, moving away from the
WASP, heterosexual male domination toward a plurality of voices.
The depiction of homosexuality in Little Big Man quintessentially raises a dispute.
The gay man, Little Horse (Robert Little Star), is seen, in Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s review,
as a caricature of a drag queen who bats his eyes and dances coyly away (92). In the
Cheyenne culture of that time, homosexual men were revered and feared. “They lived in
special parts of the village and warriors might live with them without loss of dignity. At
certain times, the homosexuals were sought out to perform specific rituals and other times
they were studiously avoided (Dan Georgakas, 1972, 139). Little Horse’s presence in
Little Big Man is reduced to a comic effect, which is insulting and a disservice to the
Cheyennes and to the gay community.
101
In a nutshell, the film’s negotiated representation partly shares the text's code with
the marginal groups. But on a broader scale, it still conducts a preferred reading of the
mainstream narrative, albeit sometimes resisting and modifying it in a way that reflects
men’s own position, experiences and interests. As always, this negotiated representation
involves contradictions.
Self-effacement is another perspective on negotiated representation. The title of The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) implies such a symbolic ambiguity. The hero in
the film is no more a symbol of dignity, grace, and power as the old-style West
disappeared. Instead, he transforms into a bum character, Tom Doniphon, who shot a
dreadful outlaw Liberty Valance, but died forgotten. The glory of the deed goes to Tom's
friend Ransom Stoddard, who becomes a senator and witnesses the squalid last rites
administered to the man who made him unjustly famous. The brutality of the Western
environment was shown together with the inability of man to cope with that environment.
In the last scene, as the editor decides not to print the true story told by Ranse, the mythic
hero is dead with the West. What took the place is a new elitist ideology of corporate
capitalism represented by the lawyer-senator, whose impact is certain to loom large in the
future. Yet metaphorically, the fallible entrepreneur Ranse, as always dressed in grays,
shows the true colors of the corporate culture and its moral state of ambiguity.
102
According to this definition, the self-effacing man can suffer from anxiety,
self-doubt, self-martyring, shyness, insecurity, and gullibility; and can be overly
impressionable (with explosions after things have gone too far), over-giving (and
resentful afterwards), impulsive, fearful and defensive.
A Vietnam War film in the late Seventies, Apocalypse Now (1979), in the same
manner of self-seeking and effacement, takes the form of a journey from the world of
civilization to the world of the savage jungle. Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph
Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness.
Both the two main characters in Apocalypse Now are defined as psychotic military
officers from the outset. Throughout the narrative, the moody assassin Captain Willard
(Martin Sheen) is closely identified with his prey, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). In the
voice-over narration, Willard says of Kurtz, “There is no way to tell his story without
telling my own, and if his story is really confession, then so is mine.” In Frank
Tomasulo’s observation, both characters are introduced reclining in bed, heavily
shadowed but lit by an odd orange light. Similarly Willard grasps at a fly in the opening
scene and Kurtz repeats the gesture later on. Willard becomes more like Kurtz as the film
progresses, his gradual immersion into physical darkness (including black camouflage
makeup) corresponding to Kurtz’s silhouetted or darkly shadowed physiognomy
103
(Tomasulo, 1990, 150). In the finale, Willard mimics Kurtz's last, weak words ʇ “the
horror, the horror,” photographed in a symmetrical shot/reverse shot. Willard also acts on
Kurtz’s “fatherly” advice ʇ “Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all.” ʇ by calling in the
air strike that decimates the Cambodian compound. The reenactment of their
doppelgänger status seems to make Willard politically equivalent to the father figure he
succeeded. Willard’s supplanting of Kurtz does not represent a change in American
policy.
On the other hand, Kurtz ghastly allegorizes the hallucinatory American idealism in
the Seventies and the horrific self-awareness of its hollowness. In the Vietnam setting
Willard becomes traumatized by the apparent decadence of his society and so searches
for the grail of its lost purposeful idealism.
29
Being afflicted with post-traumatic stress
disorder in medias res, Willard lacks the war hero’s certainty of his own moral positions.
In the opening scene, Willard has already been to Vietnam, and upon leaving has found
that home “just didn’t exist anymore.” Furthermore, his return to Vietnam is without
clear purpose: “When I was here I want to be there, when I was there all I could think of
was getting back into the jungle.” As Willard moves through the trenches, he keeps
asking if anyone knows who is in charge. No one answers. Willard’s quest becomes an

29
See Hellmann, “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film,” 70.
104
investigation of either corrupted American reality or the American view of its ideal self.
Along the way Willard encounters napalm and Wagner fan Col. Kilgore, draftees who
prefer to surf and do drugs, a USO Playboy Bunny show turned into a riot by the raucous
soldiers, the sudden gunfire that kills everyone on the sampan and even Willard’s own
blatant murder of the innocent Vietnamese woman, coupled with a jumpy photographer
telling wild, reverent tales about Kurtz. By the time Willard sees the heads mounted on
stakes near Kurtz's compound, he knows Kurtz has gone over the deep end. Willard’s
diminished version of the Vietnam war hero clearly asserts the self-effacing traits of
negotiated masculinity that apparently connotes conflict and contradiction.
The negotiated representation embodies a third component of positive compensation
ʇ subtle syncretism. This mode of masculinity is able to express and contain elements of
liberal feminist ideology while remaining complicit with dominant gender ideology. As a
strategy of representation, it also operates by leveling some gender differences, effacing
ideological "critique," and framing ideas of "self," friendship, and loving in terms of
middle-class, therapeutic culture and ideology.
In the late-1980s family sitcoms such as Three Men and a Baby, its sequel Three
Men and a Lady (1990), and Mr. Mom (1989), plus a corpus of television sitcoms like My
Two Dads, Full House, Paradise and Who's the Boss, the hero is portrayed as `feminine,’
105
to varying degrees. Instead of being considered as feminist-inspired, these family sitcoms
are simply to give a manifestation that the bachelor father can be the real father and
surrogate mother as well; he is supplanting the female parent, `femininity’ being the
means to justify the end ʇ to reinvent `masculinity’ that is placed in disorder in the late
Sixties and Seventies (initiated by feminism, antimilitarism, antiracism, and gay
activism).

3. The Oppositional Representation
Men’s oppositional representation has a tendency of demonizing Others. The mode
largely concurs with negotiated representation of masculinity, but, on the dark side, it
defines the principal harm as directed against men rather than women as in feminist
concern. Its adherents maintain that feminism, instead of helping men or providing a
model for male liberation, has actually made things worse. Although the feminist
movement has created new options for women, men have not been given the same range
of choices. Thus, a new sexism has come into existence, with men as the victim. In
addition, feminism has created guilt in men for their own socialization, which is not their
fault. It has not only contributed to false negative images of men but also exacerbated the
106
double binds that afflict them.
This tendency of masculine representation perfectly resonates with Alder’s
definition of overcompensation: there is always a strenuous striving for men overcoming
the deficit, the guilt, the inferiority, and for mastery of the situation. The negative
compensation reaches the pinnacle schematically into a form of overcompensation, which
has the goal of superiority. The reinforced tendency toward security, from which negative
forms of compensation develop, leads via overcompensation to a striving for power,
dominance, self-esteem, and the tendency toward self-deprecation.
Film noir is a good example of the oppositional representation, in which beautiful
spider women proliferate in striking contrast with the real women's social power and
evasion of domesticity during the World War II. Undoubtedly, film noir is a nightmarish
distortion of the contemporary realities. In the lived world, the Second World War
brought out the women in a wide variety of professions. The fact that many women
appear in uniform and are often officers, that they competently drive cars, jeeps, and
planes, and even appear in combat zones, that they demand their rights and insist on a
certain amount of independence, marks them as modern self-sustaining women.
As Jeanine Basinger argues, this self-confidence and ability, in combination with
women’s archetypal qualities as lover and mother, make them in themselves and the
107
home they represent values worth fighting for (240). This significant autonomy,
unfortunately, did not evolve and reappear so frequently that it became readily
recognizable. On the contrary, it disappeared after World War II. Not only did the need
to see women in war go away, but apparently the need to teach them to go back home
became important. The noir films made in the immediate postwar years simply
accentuated an oppositional representation, emblematic of men’s fear of strong women.
Consequently, men’s reinforced inferiority feeling awakens a need for greater security
ʇ to create a myth, in which women are punished, victimized, driven crazy, or presented
as evil.
Since the placement of new women in this way is so necessary to bourgeois society,
it follows that the placement of new women in this way would disturb the patriarchal
system, and furnished a challenge to that world view. Given the media and most of the
artifacts still in male control and authorship, the ideological work of film noir thereby
transformed the new role of women into a negative image. Passed through the noir filter,
the ‘new woman’ emerged on screen as wicked, scheming creature, sexually potent and
deadly to the male.
The dark thrillers, in oppositional representation, consider women a threat 炼 like
Mildred Pierce in Mildred Pierce (1945), the fire-breathing dragon ladies 炼 Norma
108
Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or women who steer men off their course,
beckoning them to a life of crime 炼 Phyllis in Double Indemnity (1944). This treatment of
women is thus symptomatic of the way in which the genre transforms reality
diametrically and maliciously: women who in real life were strengthened by their
wartime experience, appear in noir films as malevolent temptresses, their power confined
almost entirely to a sexual realm, their strength achieved only at the expense of men.
The oppositional representation is a double-bladed plow for men as well. In the noir
films, men use safeguarding devices in attempts both to excuse themselves from failure
and depreciate women. Alluding to Adler’s overcompensation, this way men can employ
their symptoms to shield themselves from potential or actual failure in these tasks.
Depreciation is thus used to deflate the value of others, thereby achieving a sense of
relative superiority through aggressive criticism or subtle solicitude. Men’s accusations of
women attribute the responsibility for a crime to others in an attempt to relieve
themselves of the responsibility and to blame others for the failure. On the other side, the
oppositional representation is also centered upon a self-contained reflection of the male
character’s masculine hysteria and self-effacement. In Double Indemnity, the last
embrace of Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson is a bitter, sardonic realization that
negative forms of compensation develop, and lead to self-destruction on both sides – as
109
they first clasp their bodies together then shoot each other in a deadly parody of sexual
climax. Like their alienated counterparts, they do not perish alone – their aggressive
gender performances were often felt to be negative traits of masculine protest.
To a certain extent, all of the figures who act similarly in film noir, whether they are
obsessed sexually or otherwise, concurrently know at some level that they need not act in
that way. For a man or woman whom “the absurd may strike in the face,” psychological
trauma follows from being in a double bind: unable and unwilling to choose between
equally bleak alternatives.
Film noir’s parade of weak, uncertain, woefully neurotic men strains to the utmost
extent of oppositional representation. The anti-heroes, corrupt characters and villains
included down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters,
government agents, a lone wolf, sociopaths and psychopaths or killers, crooks, war
veterans, politicians, petty criminals, murderers, or just plain Joes. These male
protagonists were often morally-ambiguous lowlifes from the dark and gloomy
underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they were cynical, tarnished,
obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned,
frightened and insecure loners, struggling to survive 炼 and in the end, ultimately losing.
110
In oppositional representation, amnesia suffered by the male protagonist was
basically a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent Everyman who fell
victim to temptation or was framed. Revelations regarding the hero were made to
explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life. The noir films (mostly shot in
gloomy grays, blacks and whites) thematically showed the dark and inhumane side of
human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasized the brutal,
unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience. An
oppressive atmosphere of menace, pessimism, anxiety, suspicion that anything can go
wrong, dingy realism, futility, fatalism, defeat and entrapment were stylized
characteristics in this tendency. The men in film noir were normally driven by their past
or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes. The hero’s success or failure depends
on the degree to which he can extricate himself from the woman’s manipulation.
Although the man is sometimes simply destroyed because he cannot resist the woman’s
lures 炼 as the Orson Welles character does in Lady from Shanghai (1946), often the
work of the genre is the attempted restoration of order through the exposure and then
destruction of the sexual, manipulating temptress.
To pose a reflexive masculine protest, the male voice-over in flashback in film noir
ideologically takes the form of a male confession, by implication, either to another
111
person 炼 Out of the Past (1947) and Double Indemnity, or to oneself/the male audience
炼 The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Such a procedure presages a spiritual
salvation of the male character/audience, as opposed to the voiceless, wicked, and
unremorseful female character, who hopelessly is doomed to destruction for ever. The
flashback also constructs a male investigation of female sexuality and male desire in a
bourgeois society, in which the moral judgment of a male voice-over brings to the
surface for salvation.
It is one of the ongoing complaints of feminists that the flashback plot in Sunset
Boulevard is told by the posthumous narrator 炼 a dead man floating face-down in a
swimming pool in Hollywood Hills. The cynical retrospection emanates from the corpse
of writer Joe Gillis as if to an audience of fellow ghosts. The resulting narrative stands
witness to the man’s impelling desire for a voice even in death, for a say in and about
the truth of the world. Again, this justifies Adler’s coinage of masculine protest in that
there is always a strenuous striving for overcoming the disadvantage point, and for
mastery of the situation.
The vindictive traits in oppositional representation also reached another historical
peak in the horror films of the Seventies. The radical liberal movements in the late Sixties
(feminism, antimilitarism, antiracism) and the turmoil of the Seventies associated with
112
the malaise of economic recession, military defeat in Vietnam, and distrust of leadership
(in the Nixon administration) fostered the rejection of mainstream culture. The
Counterculture Movement allows a much greater role for resistance to the dominating
influences from within the hegemonized groups, and recognizes the opportunity for social
change within a capitalist system.
Although their traditional prerogatives and power suffered a severe setback, the
white middle-class men still monopolized top management in media. As a result, the
horror films of the Seventies can be read as metaphoric representations of male anxieties
generated by contemporary social movements. A conglomerate of Otherness embraces
women, children and youth, gays, ethnic groups, the working class, rival political systems
and ideologies. All the Others function in the guise of the monster, which the bourgeois
male mentally cannot recognize or accept but must deal with by annihilating, rejecting, or
assimilating.
The Exorcist concerns the possession of a helpless girl-child Regan MacNeil and
plays on her double Otherness. After consulting medical and psychiatric authorities,
Regan’s mother Chris calls in a priest to rid her of the demon. Throughout the film, the
girl behaves like a willful child. At the conclusion of the exorcism, she submits to the
priest’s power by crying out and becoming a good little girl again. Regan is again a sweet
113
and submissive girl, returned to a state of innocence. She smiles at a priest, looks at his
clerical collar, impulsively kisses him and runs off, a perfect example of devoted
submission to patriarchal authority. The demonic possession can therefore be decoded as
sexual aggression against men, and the exorcism can be interpreted as an attempt to
repress a threatening female sexual power. ġ Symbolically, overcompensation, in Alderian
logic, is derived from whatever lifts men above their present inadequate state which
makes them superior to all others. This brought the mentally challenged male in the
Counterculture decades to setting a goal, a fictitious goal of superiority (the
priest-exorcist as men’s alter-ego collectively in the Seventies), which would transform
his comedown into dominance.
Despite the fact that women’s distortion in the noir films and horror films of the
Seventies characterizes ‘false’ consciousness, I am ready to remind the feminist scholars
that each cultural movement has its reaction. In the act of understanding its real
conditions, the oppressed group has begun at that very moment to fashion the forms of
consciousness which will contribute to changing them. Our act of knowing something has
already transformed it into something else.
30
As Georg Luk Ǣ cs has taken the full account

30
In his great History and Class Consciousness (1922), Luk Ǣ cs took this point to ascertain that the
cognition of the revolutionary proletariat is part of the situation it cognizes, and alters that situation at a
stroke.
114
of this concept,
31
the recognition of cognitive consciousness as essentially active,
practical and dynamic will force us to revise any too simplistic notion of false
consciousness as some lag, gap or disjunction between the way things are and the way we
know them. This is at least one reason why the widespread view that ideology is
synonymous with false consciousness is simply paradoxical.
Consciousness (false or not) is much more obviously part of social reality, a
dynamic force in its potential transformation and/or distortion. In such a case, it would
not seem entirely appropriate to speak of whether such thought ‘reflects’ or ‘fits’ the
history with which it is inseparably bound up. If consciousness is grasped in this way as a
transformative force at one with the reality it seeks to change, then there would seem to
be no ‘space’ between it and that reality in which false consciousness might germinate –
viewed at a distance, of course. Ideas (ideology or false consciousness) cannot be ‘untrue’
to their object if they are actually part of it (history).
Moreover, oppositional representation, assimilated with negotiated representation,
centers on self-effacement and reflexive awareness, albeit to a varying extent. In
negotiated representation, the effacement is in the same manner of self-seeking and
self-conditioning, that is, self-restraint of power, an attempt to reconcile and meld

31
Georg Luk Ǣ cs owes much of the concept of cognition to the work of Hegel.
115
disparate or contrary beliefs. While in oppositional representation, the effacement is
submitted to degrading exercises that involve invalid and undesirable distortions of the
self and others.
4. The Representation of Personal Conscious and Collective Unconscious
A. Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung.
It is proposed to be part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life
forms with nervous systems, and it describes how the structure of the psyche
autonomously organizes experience. Jung defined the unconscious as including both the
individual's own unconscious and that which he inherited from his ancestors.
For Jung, archetypes constitute the structure of the collective unconscious - they are
psychic innate dispositions to experience and represent basic human behavior and
situations. Thus mother-child relationship is governed by the mother archetype,
father-child - by the father archetype. Birth, death, power and failure are all controlled by
archetypes. The religious and mystique experiences are also governed by archetypes.
116
The collective unconscious, simply put, consists of mythological motifs or
primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact,
the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective
unconscious. We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in
mythology or in the analysis of the individual (The Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par.
325).
Consequently, rare is the discussion of a blockbuster film that does not take into
account collective unconscious which lurks behind the film’s phenomenal popularity.
Although audience expectations have varied from decade to decade, the audience
response always interacts with the pattern of change and development of social values
which in turn correspond to changes in the structure of dominant institutions and cultural
movements. On this account, the highly-prescribed Hollywood narrative may have
always been a shifting marker of history and its troubled relation with the way it
represents itself ʇ the so-called “Myth Archetype,” in Jung’s words.
It is also well-known that in Jung’s theory, the most important of all is the Self,
which is the archetype of the Center of the psychic person, his/her totality or wholeness.
The Center is made of the unity of conscious and unconscious reached through the
117
individuation process. Among others, Jesus Christ and Billy the Kid are the two famous
archetypes of the Self in American Cinema.
Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious on the
grounds that the personal unconscious is a personal reservoir of experience unique to
each individual, while the collective unconscious collects and organizes those personal
experiences in a similar way with each member of a particular species.
In his seminal work Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung stated, “My
thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a
thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if
we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic
system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all
individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It
consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious
secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents” (43).
Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as
being similar to Emile Durkheim's use of collective representation.
32
From Durkheim's
sociology, collective representation refers to a symbol having common-shared meaning

32
The term was first use in Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1910).
118
(intellectual and emotional) to members of a social group or society. Durkheim saw the
society as an inherent product of facts and experiences consequence of collective life
(Durkheim, 2004). Collective representations reflect the history of a social group; the
collective experiences of a group over time. Collective representations refer not only to
symbols in the form of objects (such as the American flag), but also to the basic concepts
that determine the way in which an individual views and relates to the world in which he
lives. God is a collective representation, as are time and space, for example.
In other words, what constitutes Durkheim’s collective representation is collective
conscious, at variance with Jung’s collective unconscious. The collective idea, for
Durkheim is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to
idealize. For a society to become conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree
of intensity the sentiment which it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate itself.
The particular function that collective representations serve for society or social groups in
expressing the collective sentiments or ideas that give the social group or society its unity
and uniqueness is that of producing social cohesion or social solidarity. This is not
surprising, for one of the central concerns of Hollywood (in the dimension of collective
representation) is social solidarity or social order.
119
A closer examination will reveal that there is a clear contrast between the concepts
of Durkheim’s 'collective consciousness' and Jung’s 'collective unconsciousness.'Jung
highlights the Self as the internal source of this collective and impersonal force, which he
associates with elements of the “collective unconsciousness.”To the contrary,
Durkheim’s sociological method pointed to Society as a priori, the external force
expressed in “collective representations” revealing the “collective consciousness” of the
group as a whole.
33
Durkheim’s starting point, as Michelangelo Paganopoulos points out,
34
is “society,”
morally acting upon each individual, Jung’s internal concept of “collective
unconsciousness” begins with the Self that subconsciously functions from within through
dreams and mythsIn this sense, the participant audience may recognize the Church,
church rituals, national anthem, or generic icons (such as horse, cowboy, buffalos in the
western film) as collective representations. By contrast, the image of Christ (discursive
construct) is constantly changing in cinema and critically reflecting upon the psychic
innate dispositions of a society, i.e., collective unconscious.

33
Durkheim’s sociological method has been severely criticized for its emphasis on a homogeneous and
unifying concept of a ‘sacred.” See Michael J. Sallnow, “Communists Reconsidered,” MAN 16 (1981).
34
“Jesus Christ and Billy the Kid as Archetypes of the Self in American Cinema” is a web-based essay by
Michelangelo Paganopoulos from Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (March 22, 2010).
120
Take Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) for example. ġ The film’s liberal approach sets the
tale of the Christ to rock. It is not just some dumbing down way of presenting the story of
the death of Jesus to the hippies in the 60’s, but also a new look at it. ġ This new
perspective was told mostly from that of Judas, with a satirical look at not only Judas's
outlook on Jesus, but of his followers, who turned on him after he was arrested for merely
preaching the word of God. The film is also a liberal version of the telling, combining
gospel fashions with that of camp 70’s clothes, and machine guns, hard helmets, tanks,
and airplanes, creating a film that is camp and satirical. It’s no coincidence that the only
black star in the movie, Carl Anderson, happened to be cast as Judas and that the film
revealed him to be a tragic hero, like some sort of Brutus.
In brief, cinema offers in terms of the imagery, narratives and the dynamics of film
both a means and a space to witness the collective unconscious—almost literally in
projection. The rock gospel Jesus Christ Superstar elicits a new awareness of Jesus that
corresponds to social changes in the structure of collective unconscious in the Seventies
with its troubled relations with the Counterculture Movement ʇ among others, linked
with black civil rights and the emergence of the Black Power Movement.
To argue further, a popular film has always been refined into formulas (namely,
collective representations) and repeated as a genre (sticking rigidly to a prescribed style
121
in accordance with the collective conscious) as long as they satisfy audience demand and
turn a profit for the studios. As the product of audience and studio interaction, a series of
popular films gradually impresses itself upon the culture until it becomes a familiar,
meaningful system that can be named as such. The filmmaker and the audience both have
become aware that he or she exists as a part of a given tradition, at once modifying it and
modified by it. The contemporary genre criticism has further intensified the issue by
adding a political context to the historical and discursive perspectives. Meaning
(inscribed in the collective unconscious) is now seen to arise from the collision of various
discursive codes at work in the text and context of a popular film. Eventually, this
emphasis on collective unconscious brings about a renewed interest in the popular films,
and they in particular exist as mythic edifices to be deconstructed. The general view of a
popular film now is that it reveals a cultural expression around us, in sync with popular
unconscious, albeit conservative in both style and theme. A generic analysis of the
popular film could easily involve collective unconscious - the consideration of
consumeristic and historical contexts (conditions of production and censorship),
conventions and mythic functions (dominant codes and structural patterns). A generic
reading will make a convincing case for reading collective unconscious as critiques of
American society while the latter institutionalizes its fear and repressions of the
122
underprivileged as the Other.
It is worth noting too that the semiotic focus in reading a popular film has shifted
from Saussure to Peirce in that the idea produced in collective unconscious is not similar
to Saussure's signifier/signified dyad, but confirmed by the affinity to Peirce’s signifying
process (signification). On the one hand, social history informs and troubles diverse
genres; on the other, genre enacts a counter-pressure to the effect that, as Stephen Neale
argues, “each new genre film constitutes an addition to an existing generic corpus and
involves a selection from the repertoire of generic elements available at any one point in
time.”
35
In addition, each new popular film tends to extend this repertoire of collective
representation, either by adding a new element or by transgressing one of the old ones.
A road picture, Easy Rider (1969), for instance, both echoes the anarchic ethos of
the Counterculture Movement of the Sixties and performs a deliberate transgression
against the classic western myth. It is, in fact, about two Easterners, Wyatt (Peter Fonda)
and Billy (Dennis Hopper), who chronicle a journey back from the California frontier
toward the East. On the road, the two latter-day cowboys (the Billy figure registering a
twisted archetype of cowboy and hippie, in particular) are assailed by the anarchic
dangers once associated with the wilderness. The film reverses the generic icons in the

35
Stephen Neale, “Questions of Genre,” Screen 31:1 (Spring 1990): 56.
123
westerns (the cowboy and horse replaced by hippie and motorcycle). As Seth Cagin &
Philip Dray have posited, “the westward expansion celebrated by the frontier is gone, and
at trail’s end they reach not the opportunity represented by unsettled lands but death at the
hands of a couple of rednecks who don’t like their long hair.” (1984, 68) The camera in
Easy Rider does not pan in long shots of the heroes against the landscape. They are
always kept relatively close to the camera, and when we are looking at them, the scenery
is off-screen. We see the landscape, instead, from their moving viewpoint, with no figures
in the composition. Such shots, in a montage editing, express a vastly different attitude to
the landscape of the typical collective representation in the western, the difference
stressing the impermanence of the human presence on the landscape, a self-awareness of
existentialism/nihilism of the post-1968 liberal movement (collective unconscious)
The same insecurity characterizes a recurrent motif of shooting from behind in El
Dorado (1967). One such ambush costs the hero Cole Thornton (John Wayne) the agony
of a spine injury through the rest of the film, and he is thus periodically doubled up in
pain. Ironically, the hero himself also perpetrates a deliberate trick 炼 displaying his lame
hand first, Thornton grabs a hidden rifle, shooting it with his good left hand 炼 and this is
the only means by which he can win over the villain, Nelse Macleod, giving the
‘professional courtesy’ an ignoble embellishment (again, the collective unconscious of
124
the Counterculture).
Consequently, masculine representation ingrained in the popular films is not a
personal acquisition. The psychic contents of the collective unconscious have never been
in the stage of consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but
owe its existence exclusively to pre-existent forms 炼 either the introspectively
recognizable form of Durkheim’s collective representation, or Jung’s collective conscious
炼 while in cinema, it lurks behind the generic conventions (icons and settings). This
collective unconscious does not develop individually but is shared, motivated by social
community (in Adler’s taxonomy), and finally converted to a natural reality.
To expound it through a noir filter, men’s collective representation (such as
expressionistic lighting and male voiceover in flashback 炼 its generic conventions) and
men’s collective unconscious (abiding fear of strong women) both ‘reflect’ or ‘fit’ in the
history with which they are inseparably bound up. Neither collective representation (a
candid projection of collective conscious), nor collective unconscious (surfaced in
discursive analysis), can be ‘untrue’ to history in that both are actually part of it.
Also, it’s worth signaling that any blockbuster film involves collective
representation, considering that it consists with audience expectation. In this respect, film
noir concurrently accounts for both oppositional representation and collective
125
representation. The different strategies of masculine representation may emerge in the
same genre or decade. These categories are not intended to be exclusive but rather
accommodate overlaps. I initially hope to show the constitutive trait of each tendency of
masculine representation, the creative and rhetorical possibilities engendered by these
several modalities. I use the word ‘tendency’ to specify the dynamic force of men’s
gender displays, and equally testify to the richness and historical variability of masculine
representation.
B. Personal Conscious
Oppositional to collective unconscious, personal conscious is variously defined as
subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of
the mind. There is no disagreement between Freud, Jung, and Adler that the conscious
level is the level on which all of our thought processes operate. Anything that is thought,
perceived or understood resides in this conscious level. This is the aspect of our mental
processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory,
which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and
brought into our awareness. The ego is the term given to the organization of the
conscious mind, being composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, and
126
feelings.
The personal unconscious is well defined only in Jung’s theory, which is made up
essentially of contents that have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared
from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed. Indeed, there is not much
difference between Jung’s personal unconscious and Freud’s unconscious except that
Jung's great contribution is to divide the unconscious itself into two very unequal levels:
the more superficial personal, and the deeper collective, unconscious.
Whereas the personal unconscious consists of complexes, for the most part, the
personal conscious mind continually impresses the immutable, immensely powerful
unconscious mind with deeply rooted and learned beliefs, expectations, biases, prejudices
and so on, arising from programming of parents, society, and later greatest influence of
all 炼 the popular media, including, but not limited to newspapers, TV , films/movies, and
their corresponding websites. The unconscious mind then applies those "experience
filters" to the composite image received from the organic brain, and then presents the
conscious mind with a corresponding experience that it can accept as "real," consistent
with its sphere of expectations and current experience. For an art house filmmaker, who,
in general recognition, has greater mastery of constructing the conscious mind, his/her
personal presentation is a mix of personal conscious (accounting for the major part) and
127
personal unconscious (given a smallholding), and vice versa as well for the blockbuster
filmmaking.
It is clear from the literature that both Freud and Jung were interested in exploring
the key elements of personal worlds. At a basic level, the core of a personal world harbors
a specific sense of consciousness and the flow of consciousness is characterized by the
dimensions of time, space and emotional tone 炼 a reminder to the complex, interwoven
fabric of time, space, and emotion in Last Year at Marienbad. In our multifarious
experiences of the world around us our consciousness is engaged by, and moves from,
one frame of meaning to another.
In an art film, the filmmaker, in like manner, is interested in exploring the key
elements of personal worlds. The ‘auteur’ presents the thoughts, impressions, emotions
and reminiscences of his/her characters often disregarding the social interests to a large
degree.The masculine representation in the art film is henceforth rooted in the
filmmaker’s personal conscious, that is, an elitist’s self-awareness, while in a popular
film, anchored in the shared collective unconscious. The art film is typically a serious,
independently made movie aimed at a niche audience rather than the mass audience.
Albeit acclaimed internationally, most of the art films are box-office failures, thus
becoming an unconvincing model to represent the collective unconscious of a social
128
group. The emphasis on the authorial expressivity of the director reveals that masculine
representation in this tendency is held to be the result of the auteur’s personal conscious
plus a small portion of personal unconscious, which is mostly hidden in the segments
lacking any dramatic linking.
In his review of Nights of Cabiria, Andre Bazin contends that in the films of Fellini,
the scenes that establish the logical relations, the significant changes of fortune, the major
points of dramatic articulation only provide the continuity links, while the long
descriptive sequences, seeming to exercise no effect on the unfolding of the “action”
proper, constitute the truly important and revealing scenes (Bazin, 1971, 90) 炼 this
proposition is based on the fact that most of the art films characterize the auteur’s
personality and philosophy (personal conscious) infused in the art work. Through this
medium, the auteur director controls the aesthetical world of the audience, taking the role
of the charismatic prophet of a whole generation. Through his/her eyes, the visual
metaphors of a film can transform each viewer from within, and at the same time,
establish, reproduce, and critically reflect upon the collective consciousness of the
viewers’ understanding of “society” as a whole, and more specifically, of the film
industry that produces them.
129
It is controversial that Blow Up (1967) has been adversely criticized in Britain, on
the grounds that “Antonioni’s picture of an anyway largely mythical ‘Swinging London’
falls somewhat short of objective documentary verisimilitude,” or that “he has seized
only on its most obvious and superficial aspects” (Ian Cameron & Robin Wood, 125).
The first of these objections needs to bother us no more than the equivalent complaints
that Shakespeare’s Hamlet has its shortcomings if judged as a documentary of the early
13
th
century Denmark. Not being a British filmmaker, or even a Londoner, Antonioni has
shown very little concern about the British collective unconscious, or its social values.
Instead, Antonioni’s depiction of contemporary London doesn’t go beyond the
simplification and intensification of his accepted personal conscious. The masculine
representation of the photographer Thomas in Blow Up tends to express such universal
modernist themes as the incapacity and melancholy of the modernist endeavor, the
sufferings of the individual whose expression of self is thwarted, his despair and
disconnection, his alienated personality, and last but not least, the quest of the hero’s
self-appropriation and self-adjustment – none of these related to a Londoner, specifically,
nor essentially. In the last sequence of Blow Up, when Thomas returns to the park for the
final time, he sees the mimes playing tennis. Thomas walks over and is slightly amused
by the fact that they are playing without a ball or rackets. After tossing the imaginary ball
130
back to the players, Thomas continues to watch the game with the other mimes, his eyes
moving back and forth. He “hears” the sound of the rackets hitting balls as does the
viewer. In contrast with the opening scene where Thomas has meager interaction with the
mimes, his final collaboration with them in playing the imaginary tennis game marks a
decisive stage in the hero’s evolution 炼 although the struggle with despair in life and in
art is continual and unavoidable, the dilemma of the male protagonist is not necessarily
resolved by overcoming confusion, but lies in his acceptance. In this rationale,
Antonioni’s use of particular localities and their atmosphere counts for quite a lot in their
emotional effect. He selects only what is relevant to his central compositional principle,
while the Spirit of Place in London has never been of essential importance to Antonioni’s
concerns 炼 those concerns would not be fundamentally affected by transplantation to
other cities or other countries, either. To decode the indigenous, or nation-oriented,
collective unconscious in an art film like Blow Up is invalidated as if running amok.
Even according to the most stringent standard of Foucault in “What Is an Author?”
36
he maintains that the ‘author-function’ is characterized by the plurality of egos. He puts
emphasis on the variation in accordance with the period and the form of discourse

36
Foucault's "What Is an Author?" was originally delivered as a lecture in 1969, two years after the first
English publication of Barthes' famous essay "Death of the Author" (1967).
131
concerned. There are, as it were, transhistorical constants in the rules that govern the
construction of an author. Governing this function is the belief that there must be 炼 at a
particular level of an author’s thought, of his [personal] conscious or unconscious desire
(Foucault 1977, 128).
Neither do I have objection to the feminist reading of Buñuel, who has a cameo
appearance in Un chien andalou (1928), as "a happy sadist." In her article “Feminism and
Buñuel: Points of Contact,” Virginia Higginbotham comments that Buñuel's women are
fabulous masochists, who love being maimed, tortured, and degraded. In the famous
opening scene of Un chien andalou, she notes, the director himself slices the eye-ball of
an apparently willing female who sits in a chair gazing passively straight ahead. This
razor-slicing image seems to confirm this cliché. What I tend to articulate is that this
psychological projection remains in Buñuel’s personal conscious, albeit, in all likelihood,
reflecting upon his unconscious desire 炼 it can’t be referred to as collective unconscious
that brings to light common-shared meaning to members of a social group or society.
To conclude, an art film that has never reached mass audience mostly carries the
author’s personal conscious, coupled with a bit of personal unconscious, while a popular
film, such as Forrest Gump and Dances with Wolves, is characteristic of the collective
unconscious that has never been individually acquired.
132
Chapter Three
The Changing Masculinity in America from the Counterculture to the
Nineties: Boomers' Adolescence (60’s and 70’s), Adulthood (80’s), and
Parenthood (90’s)

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
ʇ Roland Barthes
37
Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.
ʇ Carl Jung
38
In Mythologies, Roland Barthes plays on the notion of Nature/Culture as a
manifestation of the distinction between Universal/Historical. All mythologies portray the
ideological face of universality (naturalness) when they in fact promote a
historical/particular set of ideas. Mythologies erect a "universal wisdom, which is in fact
nothing but their own brand of wisdom" (43).
In regard to wrestling, Barthes makes the important observation that "what the
public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself" (18). The desire for the spectacle,

37
“Le monde où l'on catche,” in Mythologies (1957).
38
Carl Jung, “Four Archetypes,” The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung 9, Part 1, The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 61.
133
for the image, for the archetype, pervades the mentality of the viewing public. We want
the image of violence in the movies but not violence itself ʇ this is how the real differs
from the representation of the real, or put another way, how collective representation is
dissimilar to collective unconscious. We want the imaginary passion of the American
Counterculture Movement, but not the real passion of the families who lost their loved
ones in the Vietnam war. The spectator does not wish for the actual suffering in the
cultural wars; “he only enjoys the perfection of the iconography" (20).
This chapter will seek to investigate how the masculine image changed in the
Nineties in America and how it differed from the male representation in the
Counterculture and Eighties. It is no coincidence that the four decades shaped a collective
and historical process, roughly parallel to the life cycle of the baby boomer generation ʇ in such periods as boomers' adolescence (60’s and 70’s), adulthood (80’s), and
parenthood (90’s).
First, I will reiterate and rephrase Michael Kimmel’s argument in Changing Men:
masculine dominance is universal, but not all masculinities have the same relation to
discourses and institutions of power. Masculinity must be seen as reacting to changing
definitions of gender displays. The chameleonic representation of masculinity adapts
itself to the dynamic transformation of the American society. It admits that some of the
134
films do not respond to it consequently.
The Counterculture Movement (1960’s-1970’s)
As the 1960’s progressed, the American Counterculture Movement gained
momentum during the government’s extensive military intervention in Vietnam.
Widespread tensions developed worse in American society that tended to flow along
generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women's
rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and
differing interpretations of the American Dream. New cultural forms emerged, including
the pop music of the British band The Beatles and the concurrent rise of hippie culture,
which led to the rapid evolution of a youth subculture that emphasized change and
experimentation.
Opposition to the Vietnam War began in 1964 on United States college campuses.
In an article entitled "Two Sources of Antiwar Sentiment in America," Howard Schuman
found that students were more likely than the general public to accuse the United States
of having imperialistic goals in Vietnam. Students in Schuman's study were also more
135
likely to criticize the war as "immoral" (Schuman, 2000). Student activism became a
dominant theme among the baby boomers, growing to include many Americans. This
new culture, which fostered the tenets of rebellion, spread rapidly during the late
1960’s. It showcased an alternate lifestyle symbolized by drugs, sex, and antiwar protest.
Exemptions and deferments for the middle and upper classes resulted in the induction of
a disproportionate number of poor, working-class, and minority registrants. The role of
women as full-time homemakers in industrial society was challenged in 1963, when
American feminist Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, giving momentum to
the women's movement and influencing what many called Second-wave feminism.
The assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and doubts as to the
validity of the official government findings regarding this event, led to further diminished
trust in government, especially among young people. The post-war "baby boom"
constituted an unprecedented number of young, affluent, and potentially disaffected
people as prospective participants in a rethinking of the direction of American society.
On college and university campuses, student activists fought for the right to exercise
their basic Constitutional rights, especially freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
The need to address minority rights of women, gays, the handicapped, and many other
136
neglected constituencies within the larger population came to the forefront as an
increasing number of primarily younger people broke free from the constraints of 1950’s
orthodoxy in a desire to create a more inclusive and tolerant social landscape.
.
The availability of new and more effective forms of birth control was a key
underpinning of the sexual revolution. A new culture of "free love," beginning in San
Francisco in the mid-1960’s, arose with millions of young people embracing the hippie
ethos and preaching the power of love and the beauty of sex as a natural part of ordinary
life. By the start of the 1970’s it was acceptable for colleges to allow co-educational
housing where male and female students mingled freely (Allyn, 2000). This aspect of the
Counterculture continues to impact modern society.
As members of the hippie movement grew older and moderated their lives and their
views, and especially after US involvement in the Vietnam War ended in the mid-1970’s,
the Counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, leaving a lasting impact on
philosophy, morality, music, art, alternative health and diet, lifestyle and fashion (Gordon
Kennedy and Kody Ryan, 2003).
What was the impact of LSD on the American Counterculture? The Culture's
spiritual quest was for inner peace, through raised consciousness, and beyond that, unity
137
with all peoples, and thus, global harmony. Smoking hemp was a vehicle toward this
consciousness, as well as psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid (LSD) and peyote.
During the 1960’s, the second 'group' of casual LSD users evolved and expanded into a
subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the
drug's powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness. The
personalities associated with the subculture such as Dr. Timothy Leary
39
and psychedelic
rock musicians such as The Beatles soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating
further interest in LSD (Martin Lee, 1985, 157-63).
Social anthropologist Jentri Anders observed that a number of freedoms were
endorsed within a countercultural community in which she lived and studied: "freedom to
explore one’s potential, freedom to create one’s Self, freedom of personal expression,
freedom from scheduling, freedom from rigidly defined roles and hierarchical statuses..."
(Anders, 1990).
The Counterculture Revolution was affected by cinema too. Films like Bonnie and
Clyde struck a chord with the youth as “the alienation of the young in the 1960’s was

39
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons
throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in
America".
138
comparable to the director's image of the 1930’s.”
40
Films of this time also focused on
the changes happening in the world. Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969) focused on the
Counterculture of the time. Medium Cool portrayed the 1968 Democratic Convention
alongside the 1968 Chicago police riots which has led to it being labeled as “a fusion of
cinema-vérité and political radicalism.”41 Hippie exploitation films
42
often depicted
drug-crazed hippies living and freaking out in “Manson family” style communes, such
films as The Hallucination Generation (1967) and Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) portrayed
“hippie” youths running wild in an orgy of group sex, drugs, crime and even murder.
Other examples include The Love-ins, Psych-Out, The Trip, I Drink Your Blood, and Wild
in the Streets. The music of the era was represented by films such as Woodstock (1970), a
documentary of the music festival.
To what extent can we confirm that the Counterculture films made by Hollywood
(the Hippie exploitation films, among others) reproduced American social reality, or
perhaps simply masqueraded as cautionary public service announcements? Or more

40
American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, edited by John E.
O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1979), p.237.
41
J. Pym, 2002, p. 741.
42
Sometimes also known as hippie exploitation films.
139
likely, were they in fact aimed directly at feeding a morbid public appetite while
pretending to take a moral stance ŀ ġ ġ It's far beyond the scrutiny of images/signs in text for their authenticity. The
Hollywood scenario rose to the surface of cultural consciousness mainly from the bottom
up: Hollywood received its support from the average audience and most invisible classes
in the American society. Undeniably, some of the popular films did not reflect the most
important political, social, and economic issues of the time. But most of the mainstream
films quickly responded to the public history collectively. The box-office popularity is an
indicator of the significance the viewers demand of the national myth. A popular
blockbuster hence aids a social understanding by providing the filmmakers with an
arsenal of preconceived cultural reference that can then be manipulated to achieve the
desired effect.
In retrospect, Hollywood, in the two decades of American Counterculture (the
1960’s and 1970’s), began to stay away from imagining the U.S. society as a utopia. The
radical liberal movements in the late 1960’s (feminism, antimilitarism, antiracism) and
the turmoil of the Seventies (the malaise of economic recession, military defeat in
Vietnam, and distrust of leadership in Watergate wrongdoing) fostered the eclipse of the
140
heroes. The idealized cultural representations of public authority could no longer hold in
a society where the young people scorned public figures and repudiated authority ʇ Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1977) is emblematic of the distorted view of history
presented in the Wild West.
Film genres underwent a radical transformation and ideological negotiation. In the
westerns, a spectrum of critical films emerged in the era: The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance (1962), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), The Professionals (1966), El Dorado (1967),
Death of a Gunfighter (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), Little
Big Man (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Shootist (1976), The Missouri Breaks (1976),
Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1977), coupled with Sam Peckinpah's dystopian
car-westerns (Ride the High Country [1962], The Wild Bunch [1969], The Ballad of
Cable Hogue [1970], Junior Bonner [1972], Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid [1973]) ʇ all
depicted the West as dirty, hostile, decadent, and violent, or a machismo misogynism at
the other extreme.
The loathing of authority initiated by the Counterculture makes Little Big Man relay
a disordered, hypercritical, and nihilistic West with people living in constant fear and
tension. The same appeal provides Buffalo Bill and the Indians the subject matter for
debunking the national hero, Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman), who, like Custer, bears the
141
burden of the charge with distrust in government and public figure in his absurdity and
callous opportunism ʇ the antithesis of the mythical knight-of-the-Wild-West image that
popular culture manufactured through the heroic creation of stars like Errol Flynn in They
Died with Their Boots On (1942).
In the combat films, a genre also replete with legal violence, the motif of
anachronism again repeats itself in Dr. Strangelove (1964). The one-dimensional and
negative portrait of the white American military leaders and their men resonates with the
late Sixties and Seventies distrust in government and authority, reminiscent of the
deranged General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, who initiates the fatal action against
the Soviet Union just because he believes the Russians are polluting his `vital bodily
fluids,' depriving his male potency, so to speak. The motif of self-effacement again
repeats itself in Dr. Strangelove. At the film's close, a Texas pilot Major "King" Kong,
who takes off his helmet and puts on a ten-gallon cowboy hat, is mounting a hydrogen
bomb and riding it down to the grim destination by yahooing and waving his hat like a
Beat rebel. Kong has never realized that if his bomber goes down after dropping its
atomic load, the crew will not have to worry much about survival, to say nothing of the
survival kits. American heroism has become thus completely identified with American
lunacy in this self-effacing representation of masculinity.
142
The absurd "utterance" also echoes the illogic of General Kilgore in Apocalypse
Now (1979), who in one sequence, wearing a cowboy hat, is about to offer a dying
Vietcong suspect a canteen of water but, when told that a surfing champion Lance
Johnson is now in his unit, forgets his humanity and tosses the water onto the ground as
the pleading Vietcong prisoner reaches for it. This controversial representation of
masculinity undermines the mythology of the war hero and subverts the generic
idealization that legitimates the violence of the hero against the enemies or villains.
In conjunction with the anarchic vision of the Liberal Age is a theme of the hero's
betrayal and psychotic behavior, one emphatically recurring in a wide range of cop and
private detective thrillers. The alleged righteousness is abating at such a given time
whereas the boundary between lawmaker and gangster collapses, generically, in Harper
(1966), Point Blank (1967), Gunn (1967), Tony Rome (1967), P . J. (1967), the Dirty
Harry cycle starring Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry [1971], Magnum Force [1974], The
Enforcer [1977]), The French Connection II (1974), and to a lesser degree, The Long
Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974). The revival of the noir style in the cop and
detective films coincides with the breakdown of the conservative morals by defining the
hero as a flawed man who cannot deal with the issues of deception, treachery, murder,
and sexuality. The unsuccessful private detectives, Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) in The
143
Long Goodbye and J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown, both see themselves as
something of a pawn and a loser. In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe's failings stem from the
erroneous belief that his self-deluded sense of morality will ensure his success. Marlowe's
obsession to prove the innocence of a friend accused of murder attests only to the friend's
betrayal of his trust. Yet the vast moral gulf dividing the detective and villain is finally
invisible in the last segment in which Marlowe kills the friend, as the final shot indicates,
and faces no legal retribution for his act. Gittes's cut on the nose (an image of castration)
in Chinatown is another striking metaphor of the authority as defective; the bandage over
Gittes's face stayed with him through the rest of the film, and allegorized liberalism as
impotent. Their increasing loss of control within an overall structure gains resonance
through the generic affiliations in the decade.
The Counterculture brought about great challenges to the institutions of the time to
become more relevant in a society that looked upon these entities with increasing
skepticism. Values held by the older generation and their institutions were largely
rejected- being happy was a goal in itself, and society became increasingly intolerant of
social injustices.
The triumph of new-left liberals in the political circle in the mid-Seventies occurred
unfortunately with economic recession, and the negative critical spirit of liberalism in the
144
Seventies could not conform to the psychological needs for reassurance generated by this
crisis. The legacy of the Counterculture is still actively contested in debates that are
sometimes framed, in the U.S., in terms of a "culture war."
1980’s
In the early 1980’s, Betty Friedan announced the arrival of a “quiet revolution
among men” (Friedan, 1982), and William Goode cited what he saw as a “grudging
acceptance” by men of more egalitarian gender relations (Goode, 1982). These views
make a point that masculinity and femininity are not fixed, static “roles” that individuals
“have,” but rather, they are dynamic relational processes. Moreover, masculinity and
femininity are viewed as contradictory and paradoxical categories, internally fissured by
class, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and other systems of inequality. The facts that
women often contest men’s power, and that some men oppress other men, create
possibilities for change (Michael Messner, 1993, 725).
One thing is clear: masculinity and femininity are constantly re-constructing themselves
in a context of unequal, but shifting, power relations.
145
Steve Neale, in his article “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and
Mainstream Cinema,” uses the term spectacle to describe masculinity. This term signifies
directly a performance or display, as Laura Mulvey also suggests the “to
be-looked-at-ness.” Steve is therefore in his essay, centering on how “heterosexual
masculinity” representations are created in mechanisms such as mainstream film (Neale,
1992, 9). Neale suggests that “heterosexual masculinity” is a “structuring norm” that is a
part of gendered representations, alongside that of representations of women, and gay
men. He uses John Ellis’s “Visible Fictions” to describe how these representations are
complex through terms of identification. Ellis states that “cinema draws on… many
forms of desire,” which cause there to be many forms of identifications from the
audience.
Different from Mulvey’s stress on the voyeur’s looking at spectacle, Neale’s
discussion makes reference to how the spectacle of male bodies are not marked as
‘objects of erotic display’ and their function is not for the ‘gaze of the spectator.’ The
look of the audience, Neale suggests, is indirect, which is heavily influenced by the looks
of the other characters in the film. As an audience, our attention is averted from any
146
erotic displays of the male body as the other characters looked are not marked by desire,
‘but rather by fear, or hatred, or aggression’ (18).
My question here is: why do the ideas of identification, voyeuristic looking,
fetishistic looking, or reverse looking in relation to the images of men that Neale presents
to us, always highlight the male gaze and/or the gaze of the male? What has been
identified and pushed forward as the social norm in media and film as well should not be
simply confined to the gaze and its bearer.
In my socio-analytic observation, the strong male heroes in Hollywood of the
Eighties (Rocky, Rambo, Superman, Batman, Conan the Barbarian, Pale Rider, Mad Max,
etc.) are much directly linked to a wider range of social factors, including change through
the policies in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations (the nation’s collective
conscious) ʇ it is essential to recognize how popular movies and the political tidal shift
were both tied so closely to the desires and anxieties of their audiences/voters ʇ and the
booming interest of homosocial institutions in America and sports craze: fitness clubs,
college fraternities, Boy Scouts, the NBA Revolution, Olympic Games, and so forth (the
nation’s collective unconscious), each supposed to be a perfect showcase for the
nationalism that was provoked by competition.
147
All these social factors above may well contribute to Rambo’s muscle-as-costume
image in First Blood, which conforms to the social adaptation of changing masculinity,
tied to a profound "crisis of masculinity" and specifically experienced by white,
middle-class men in the early 1980’s. They perceived a threat to the meaning of
hegemonic masculinity and positions of power in relation to women and lower-class men.
This is largely brought on by modernization of social life (Rambo’s maladjustment to the
urban life in the opening sequence of First Blood is quintessential) and by the rise of
organized feminist movements. According to Michael Kimmel, men's organized
responses to this crisis of masculinity varied and could be categorized ! as "masculinist,"
"antifeminist," or "profeminist" (1987).
The modernization of capitalistic societies also had a major impact on changes of
masculinity. Those who believe in moral conservatism hold that there is an absolute set of
values that is exemplified in the pre-modern social order built around the traditional
family, and that the preservation of the traditional family is necessary to the continuation
of that order. As a response to complex social needs and role of family under capitalism,
modernization resolves not crises of order but creates crises within the order. By
addressing pressing social problems modernization features industrialization,
urbanization, the rise of modern bureaucracies (with the resultant decline of the
148
significance of physical strength in most middle-class occupations), and the fact that
modern urban boys were increasingly separated from their fathers and placed in the care
of mothers (in homes) or female schoolteachers. The resultant changes in work and
family life brought on by modernization led to fears of social feminization, especially
among middle-class men. Some men responded to these fears with the creation of
homosocial spheres of life such as the Boy Scouts of America, organized sports, fraternal
orders and lodges, and college fraternities.
A fitness craze swept the country in the 1980’s, an obsession with health, beauty,
youthfulness and sex appeal that had profound effects on American culture. In the 1970’s,
the country's 76 million baby boomers focused on getting their "heads together"; in the
Eighties they followed Olivia Newton-John's advice in her pop hit "Let's Get Physical,"
the video of which showed flabby males magically transformed into hunks in a health
club setting.
43
Critics complained that Americans were becoming narcissistic; from
trying to improve society they turned to improving themselves, both physically and
financially. The "Me Generation" retreated into "purely personal preoccupations,"
according to Christopher Lasch. "Indeed Americans seem to wish to forget . . . the sixties,

43
See Jason Manning, “The Eighties Club: The Politics and Pop Culture of the 1980s,” accessed 2000,
http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id314.htm.
149
the riots, the new left, the disruptions on college campuses, Vietnam, Watergate, and the
Nixon presidency," said Lasch, and instead were living only for the present.
44
While the worlds of sports and fitness were intertwined, it was not until the late
1970’s that popular culture was ready to accept fitness as eagerly as it had accepted sports.
No official requirements or standards of physical training had existed until the fitness
boom of the 1980’s. The International Sports Sciences Association was founded in 1988.
Fitness began to take on its importance for improving health, and popular opinion likened
fitness to work and manual labor. It is no wonder that the muscle-hungry heroes
(Hercules and Conan the Barbarian, to name a few) and their unfulfilled fantasies flooded
the big screen in the decade. The fitness boom in the 1980’s was further augmented by
the membership of celebrities and sports stars ʇ working out at sports clubs meant an
opportunity to "star-gaze" as well as slim down. With a star-studded membership list, the
Sports Connection began to receive attention in media stories covering the fitness boom
of the 1980’s. In 1985, the Sports Connection chain inspired a major motion picture about
the fitness lifestyle, Perfect, starring John Travolta as a journalist and Jaime Lee Curtis as
an aerobics instructor. Jane Fonda's aerobics videos of the early 1980’s also helped

44
Christopher Lasch, "The Culture of Narcissism," in The Eighties: A Reader, ed. Gilbert T. Sewall
(Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1997).
150
popularize the idea of working out to achieve supreme physical fitness.
In other areas of health, the AIDS epidemic surfaced. Deepa Channaiah's essay,
"The Ryan White Story: A Shift from Fear, Confusion, and Ignorance to Acceptance
and New Found Knowledge of AIDS" focuses on teenager Ryan White's experience
with the fatal disease. As a result, the widespread ignorance of AIDS among the
general public evolved into a better understanding and acceptance of the disease and
its victims. ! ! The medical questions raised by AIDS have also been entwined with many ethical
issues as well. The first cases of AIDS among African Americans were identified in the
early 1980’s. From this point on, the AIDS epidemic began spreading rapidly amongst
the African American population. Women were particularly affected and by 1988,
African Americans accounted for half of all AIDS cases identified in females in the
U.S.
45
Initially HIV and AIDS mainly affected gay men and intravenous drug users
within the black community. Much of the problem in the early years was the American
media's portrayal of AIDS as a disease of white gay men. Restaurants in gay districts of
San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles were shunned by many people. Fears are also

45
“AIDS in blackface: 25 years of an Epidemic,” The Black AIDS Institute (June 2006).
151
being expressed in "gay bashing" attacks on homosexuals, parents pulling children out of
schools where students have AIDS, job and housing discrimination against AIDS patients
and the reluctance by some to donate blood in the mistaken belief that it can cause AIDS.
AIDS anxiety probably has further made people less likely to have sex with multiple
partners. As awareness of that increases, a social backlash in neo-Conservative America
was forcing women back into traditional notions of feminity and was provoking new
forms of accepted homophobia.
A booming interest in athletics also came with the Eighties which increased
exponentially over the decade as sports evolved. This addiction in athletics reflected the
decade's prevalent values of competition, success, ! and self-image. The same values
helped define the Eighties' yearning for the ideal New Man. Americans took a superior
attitude towards other nations in sporting events, as was evident in the international
competitions of the decade. ! ! During the 1980’s American Football enjoyed unprecedented levels of success. By
the 1970’s and 1980’s, the popularity of the Super Bowl as a sporting event has become
unparalleled within the United States. The Super Bowl accounts for 28 of the top 50
watched television events of all time by percentage of American households, a list that
152
also includes the 1981/1982 NFC Championship Game between the Dallas Cowboys and
the San Francisco 49ers.
46
In Donald Sabo’s critical perception, the ‘pain principle’ in football and other sports
teaches boys and men that to endure pain is courageous, to survive pain is manly. The
pain principle encourages us to “take the feelings that boil up inside us ʇ feelings of
insecurity and stress from striving so hard for success ʇ and channel them into a bundle
of rage that is directed at opponents” (Messner & Sabo, 1994, 85). Sabo also contends
that after being rewarded by coaches, peers and fans for the successful utilization of
violence, football players come to view the constant pain and the possibility of serious
injury as “part of the game” (97). Concerning this, becoming a football player fosters
conformity to male-chauvinistic values and self-abusing lifestyles. It contributes to the
legitimacy of a social structure based on patriarchal power (87).
College fraternity is another homosocial sphere of life. The war in Vietnam and the
cultural changes that followed had a negative effect on college fraternities. As Michael A.
Grandillo observes, their traditional and historic loyalty to the college was in direct
contrast to social movements of the time. As in the past, fraternity and sorority

46
Read more: Andrew Sylvia, “The History of the NFL,” accessed,
http://www.ehow.com/about_5333497_history-nfl.html#ixzz23GiYHXdU.
153
membership rebounded. During the period between 1977 and 1991 students joined at a
greater rate than at any time in the system's history.
47
In spite of this, Nicholas Syrett has challenged us to look critically at college
fraternity issues. He affirms that college fraternities are built on exclusion. The
fraternities have been exclusive organizations for men who want to spend time with
others like themselves: usually straight white men. Men in these organizations have
identified with what sets them apart from those they exclude, their manhood. Fraternal
masculinity, Syrett states, has valorized athletics, alcohol abuse and sex with women.
Some fraternities became quite organized in their hostility toward women, with protests
against coeducation, and coordinated ostracism of the first classes of female students.
48
By the 1980’s, a number of studies have shown that there was a widespread movement
among fraternities toward alcohol-fueled sexual aggression and assault, whereby
victimized women are understood as vehicles for men’s pleasure and bonding.
49

47
Michael A. Grandillo, “Social Fraternities and Sororities - History, Characteristics of Fraternities and
Sororities, Reforms and Renewal,” accessed 2013,
http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2429/Social-Fraternities-Sororities.html
48
Nicholas Syrett, “Schools Are Culpable,” accessed May 5, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/05/05/frat-guys-gone-wild-whats-the-solution/colleges-cond
one-fraternities-sexist-behavior.
49
See also: Syrett, "The Company He Keeps."
154
Crucially, the Boy Scouts of America's emphasis on the simultaneous conservation
of boyhood and natural resources, as the gender historian Ben Jordan articulates,
prompted its phenomenal growth and broad range of popular and governmental support,
challenging studies arguing that popular environmental activism and cooperation between
men and women environmentalists declined along with modernization. Early Boy Scout
officials claimed that conserving natural resources taught members the expert
management, scientific efficiency, and civic responsibility needed to balance virility and
Victorian self-control and to maintain leadership of a modernizing society. The Boy
Scouts' “modest manliness” also suggests a different mainstream resolution to
middle-class men's anxieties in this era from the virile primitivism through strenuous
sports or playing Indians and pioneers outdoors stressed by most gender historians
(Jordan, 2010).
Jeffrey Hantover holds the same opinion by claiming that changes in work, the
family, and adolescent life threatened the development of manliness among boys and its
expression among men. The supporters of the Boy Scout movement perceived and
promoted Scouting as an agent for the perpetuation of manliness among adolescents; the
Boy Scouts provided an environment and “opportunity to counteract the perceived
155
feminizing forces of their lives and to act according to the traditional masculine script.”
50
Alexis Siggers' paper "Nationalism and the Olympics in the Eighties" examines the
Olympic Games as prime examples of the intense competition on which Americans
thrived. In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, U.S. won the maximum number of
gold medals unprecedentedly. The extensive television coverage of the Games has
brought them to millions of viewers all over the world, making household names out of
these Olympic greats. After the medals are given out by an IOC member, the national
flags of the three medalists are raised while the national anthem of the gold medalist's
country plays. "The Star-Spangled Banner" competed for popularity during the medal
ceremonies. As a world event with political undertones, the Olympics have had their
share of controversy. On that account, the Olympics in the Reagan era were a great
display of how entrenched nationalism and patriotism sustained. Throughout the decade,
the Olympics were a perfect showcase for the nationalism that was provoked by
competition.
Not only did the attitudes about sports change in the Eighties, but the actual sports
also went through drastic change. Josh Levin's paper "The NBA Revolution" points out

50
Jeffrey Hantover, “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity,” in Men’s Lives, third edition,
comps, Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1995), 74.
Reprinted from Journal of Social Issues 34, no. 1 (1978).
156
that one of these most noticeable changes was the emergence of professional basketball.
From the Eighties onward, professional basketball was transformed into an exciting game
that captured the hearts of millions of Americans. To them, basketball was more ! than a
sport. Along with the health craze which had emerged in the late Seventies (as
exemplified in the first of the Stallone's Rocky films) and Americans' changing attitude
towards college and professional athletics, came an increase in the marketing of athletic
apparel and bodybuilding. The sneaker industry became the driving force behind this
increase and not only became important to athletics, but also took the fashion scene by
storm. In a word, the last two decades of the twentieth century revolutionized cultural
views of society through distinct changes in masculine values that have been feminized,
industrialized and liberalized in corporate America.
As Donald Sabo has noted, the bonds that develop among male athletes are often
premised on the devaluation of women and homosexual men (49). To add another plateau
of thought, it is clearly evident that the rapid development of Boy Scouts and college
fraternities with popularity aims to combat social feminization. Besides modernization,
sports craze, fitness boom, and AIDS anxiety, the other social factor changing
masculinities is the rise of organized feminist movements. The growing concern with the
“problem of masculinity” takes place within a social context that has been partially
157
transformed by feminism. Like it or not, men today must deal, on some level, with gender
as a problematic construct, rather than as a natural, taken-for-granted reality.
51
Just as
feminist thinking accommodates several species under its genus – many feminist theorists
identify their approach as essentially liberal, Marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, socialist,
existentialist, or postmodern, men are equally changing in a multiplicity of directions –
although they are different in some important ways, a deeply internalized distrust of
women is reflected in many – though not all – of the “men’s movements.” They share a
commitment to re-building bonds among men, to overcoming men’s fear of each other –
in this line, among others, Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, Profeminist Engagements, and
Men’s Rights Movements. ! ! By 1980, conservatism resumed the dominant position in the American political
sphere; feminism would be defused; civil rights for minorities would be under attack
from the conservatives. The Iran hostage crisis of 1979 helped revive a pre-Vietnam
sense of patriotic jingoism and militarism. At the same time, triumphantly militant war
films came back after the rising antimilitary sentiment that peaked with Apocalypse Now

51
Michael Messner, “’Changing Men’ and Feminist Politics in the United States,” Theory and Society, no.
22 (1993): 723; R. W. Connell, “A Whole New World: Remaking Masculinity in the Context of the
Environmental Movement,” Gender & Society, no. 4 (1990): 452-477; R. W. Connell, “An Iron Man: The
Body and Some Contradictions of Hegemonic Masculinity,” in Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical
Feminist Perspectives, eds. M. A. Messner and D. F. Sabo (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers,
1990).
158
(1979), the most popular of which might include First Blood (1982), Uncommon Valor
(1983), Missing in Action (1984), Red Dawn (1984), Missing in Action II (1985), Rambo:
First Blood Part II (1985), and Top Gun (1986). These films both assuaged the
guilt/shame of the military failure in Vietnam, and bulked up the white male heroic figure
with muscles and weaponry. Action films like Die Hard (1988), Lethal Weapon (1987),
and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) elevated the white American everyman; even cops and
archaeologists could be, it would seem, physically unstoppable, as they careened around
the cinematic frame, muscles glistening with sweat, guns permanently cocked.
In First Blood, Sylvester Stallone plays a returned Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret
skilled in the art of jungle survival and fighting, and after a small-town police force
sadistically mishandles him, he single-handedly declares war on the cops. All of this is set
up in scenes of great physical power and strength. At one point, First Blood has a speech
in which Rambo cries out against the injustices done to him and against the hippies who
demonstrated at the airport when he returned from the war, an act serving as a
counteraction to the Counterculture. By the end of the film, Rambo has taken on a whole
town and has become a one-man army.
The new hero on Hollywood in the late 1970’s and 1980’s (from Luke Skywalker to
Indiana Jones) is primarily characterized as an individualist who combines the essential
159
components of the post-AIDS conservative social climate. The new day brought a
renewed sense of moral purpose for America and its actions both at home and abroad.
The strong male hero Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) in Rocky (1976), allows an
affirmative vision of masculinity that promises the remasculinization of America ʇ with
the Bicentennial celebration coming up, the super-boxer Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers)
must find a "Cinderella" opponent for the big July 4th bout ʇ some unknown whom
Creed can "glorify" for a few minutes before knocking him cold. The film proves that
America is still a land of opportunity. It wants to involve the audience on an elemental, a
sometimes savage, level. It's about heroism and realizing men’s potential, about taking
your best shot and sticking by your girl (as protector), a mission to be deployed by
conservatists of the sort that liberals seemed at this time incapable of generating. The
hero's muscle is costume enough for his masculinity reconstructed.
The metaphor of mystic loners in First Blood and Superman series, Pale Rider,
Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, and Mad Max takes on meaning only when the
American economic system is based on a "free" market of competing individuals, whose
conservative ideals and defense of the traditional gender roles convincingly offer
themselves as solutions to its ills.
160
In response to a yearning for strong leadership and a society suffering from a
two-decade political anarchism, military defeat, economic recession, and the increasing
AIDS-phobia, Hollywood once again transformed itself as warranting the traditional
masculinity that manifested a tendency towards hegemonic representation in such films
as Superman II (1980), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Heaven's Gate (1980), Mad Max
2: The Road Warrior (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Rocky III (1982), First
Blood (1982), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1982), All the
Right Moves (1983), Superman III (1983), Return of the Jedi (1983), Lone Wolf McQuade
(1983), Conan the Destroyer (1984), Missing in Action (1984), The Natural (1984),
Terminator (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Legend (1985), Pale Rider (1985), Back to
the Future (1985), Rocky IV (1985), Red Sonja (1985), Commando (1985), Missing in
Action 2: The Beginning (1985), Top Gun (1986), Superman IV (1987), Predator (1987),
Robocop (1987), Lethal Weapon (1987), Rambo III (1988), Die Hard (1988), Lock Up
(1989), Tango and Cash (1989), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Batman (1989), Sinbad of the
Seven Seas (1989).
If the booming interest of homosocial institutions (fitness clubs, college fraternities,
Boy Scouts, the NBA Revolution, Olympic Games, etc.) triggers the nation’s collective
unconscious that is mostly shaped in a bottom-up model, the collective conscious of
161
political communication, on the contrary, is always integrated into a top-down process in
which elites (here, government leaders and parties) can fabricate public preferences and
influence.
For one thing, Hollywood films have always been commercial products financed by
American capitalism and therefore influenced by corporate, legal, and governmental
pressures. We might have noticed particularly that Hollywood films in the Reagan era
seemed to be gaining importance as a mobilizer of public energies, actively promoting
the new conservative movements on several fronts, from the family to the military to
economic policy.
52

In exploring the film's function as a medium of political communication, Stephen
Prince perceived Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980 as presented by his
campaign managers, by the media, and by other analysts as a political revolution, a
decisive and profound political shift in the culture that would result in a major
realignment and revision of the role and administration of government. (Prince, 1992, 3)
Prince states that Reagan’s administration was, for better or worse, an activist one, cutting
social services, deregulating business, and promulgating the view that less government

52
For further discussion of the topic, see Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in
Contemporary American Film (New York: Praeger, 1992).
162
was better government.
At a time when the media consultant is a fixture of campaigns, a virtually invisible
running mate, political discourse often becomes a language of images. The embodiment
of these discursive trends throughout the 1980’s, of course, was Reagan, popularly known
as “the great communicator,” a president who used television, radio, and the press quite
successfully to consolidate both his presidency and his political agenda. With President
Reagan, in fact, it was sometimes difficult to tell where real life began and movie images
ended. Although never there himself, Reagan vividly described a black sailor at Pearl
Harbor, gallantly cradling a machine gun in his arms, who stood on the end of a pier
blazing away at Japanese airplanes that were coming down and strafing him. This way
Reagan explained why the military forces ended segregation during World War II.
53
Indeed, the Reagan era was, ideologically, a highly self-conscious time.
The dominant symbolic motifs of the Reagan period, then, portrayed a society under
threat. America and the family were besieged by resurgent forces of chaos and disorder:
communism, terrorism, gay and women’s rights, school bashing, abortion, and so on
(Prince, 1992, 32). In Reagan’s own language, “modern-day secularism [was] discarding

53
Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 165.
163
the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based.”
54
All were
threats to a nostalgic vision of an America of small government, small business, and local
communities organized around family and church. The Reagan’s “revolution” was an
attempt to turn back the clock to a mythical and more pristine America, to a time when
traditional authority was not challenged by oppositional racial, sexual, political, or
economic interests ʇ This vision of the past, of course, resounds the western’s nostalgia
for the small, pastoral community (The Clint Eastwood character in Pale Rider was even
called “Preacher”).
This perspective privileges me to offer two of the Reagan period’s heroes,
Heaven’ s Gate’s Kristofferson and Pale Rider’s Eastwood, as the models of moral
conservatives whose masculinity is created by society in order to override men’s natural
antisocial tendencies; it is the civilized role these men play when they are fathers,
protectors, and providers.
In the opening scene of Heaven’ s Gate, a marching band stamps and blares its way
through Harvard Yard at the 1870 Commencement. The massed young people vibrate
with a kind of Reaganite communal desire: Joseph Cotten as the Dean makes a speech
about the historical moment 炼 one graduating class after the Civil War 炼 and the

54
Ronald Reagan, Speaking My Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 171.
164
responsibility of the people taking part in that ceremony is to take custody of the social
forces that are about to erupt. The hero (Kris Kristofferson) departed from that idealistic,
euphoric Harvard graduation to the simmering frontier, and finally became a marshal
protecting the immigrants in Johnson County 炼 such an epic opening and egalitarian
masculinity incarnated by the Mythopoetic man parallels Reagan’s announcement that
1980 was “Morning again in America.”
In a similar vein, the small community of miners in Pale Rider evokes Reagan’s
vision of an America of small government in which Eastwood plays a mysterious dark
stranger and rides into a remote gold mining area claiming to be a preacher. The hero
proves a handy ally for the settlers and a savior of the community as he single-handedly
defeats the goons and evens his own long-standing score with a corrupt killer-sheriff; in
doing so, he seems to be practicing Reagan’s ‘rescue-and-invasion’ policy in Central
America. The deadpan-faced Preacher has a pattern of what looks like fatal bullet wounds
on his back; this image makes him a more persuasive Shane figure than Alan Ladd. His
relationship with widow Sarah Wheeler and her daughter Megan lacks any emotional
credibility, which underscores his moral conservatism.
The moral conservatives’ view of masculinity is familiar to anyone exposed to
American middle-class values, as in Kenneth Clatterbaugh’s perception of different
165
sociopolitical perspectives on masculinity (Clatterbaugh, 1997). The return of hegemonic
masculinity in the 1980’s portrays men in their civilized role as believed to be providers
for families, protectors of women and children, and fathers to their children. These
conservative men compete with each other and enjoy risks; they are socially and
politically more powerful and more influential than women. In this context, the Harvard
man in Heaven’s Gate and the Preacher in Pale Rider obviously correspond to the
conservative hegemonic representation of masculinity.
There is an intriguing episode, too, in Superman III (1983), in which Clark
Kent/Superman straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa and then pushes it back on the
slant when he 'awakens.' The film hoaxes us into believing that the American hero is
masculine and modest. He is able to maintain the international order without developing
savage traits nor forgetting that he is the agent of progress and Law.
1990’s
When the Reagan period was over in the late Eighties and the Cold War diminished
with the radical changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, so that anticommunism
no longer loomed as the rallying point it once did, George Bush’s New Right groups were
166
finding themselves bereft of an important, long-standing symbolic basis for organizing
and were searching for new bases.
Correspondingly, during the Bush presidency, symbolic politics remained a major
presence on the cultural landscape. Thus we find a great deal of attention being directed
toward issues of obscenity and censorship in the arts (reminiscent of Bush’s vice
president Dan Quayle’s conservative scorn for the late photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe in 1990 and the TV program “Murphy Brown” in the election year 1992).
Even Bush himself said to Museum News (just prior to the Republican national
convention in Houston): “I am deeply offended by some of the sacrilegious, blasphemous
depictions that sometimes are portrayed as art. I have taken the steps necessary to ensure
that the NEA spends taxpayer money more wisely and more efficiently.”
55
The
conservative wing of the Republican party has found that cultural issues are effective
ammunition in attacking its political opponents. The artists involved ʇ feminist and gay
performance artists, photographers, and black rap groups ʇ are precisely the kinds of
groups the New Right perceives as part of the adversarial culture.
56

55
Evan Roth, “Kulturkampf: How Bush and Clinton Score,” Museum News (September/October 1992): 46.
56
See C. Carr’s article, “War on Art: The Sexual Politics of Censorship,” Village Voice, June 5, 1990,
25-30.
167
As noted, too, the reflex emotions it arouses are extremely deep-seated in the culture
and, as the demonization of Saddam Hussein in the popular press attests, other evil
empires can be found. Expansive, nationalist, imperial ideologies will be likely, therefore,
to inflect popular narratives in the American cinema for a long time to come.
Bearing this in mind, the substitute gratifications of film need not be true to life.
Real-world decline of U.S. economic power can, paradoxically, elicit defiant ideological
celebrations of national glory, as demonstrated by the heroes of Dances with Wolves
(1990), Far and Away (1992), and The Last of the Mohicans (1992), who believe that the
“rescue-and-invasion” cycle has really played itself out in their charisma of pacifying the
West.
The star image of Tom Cruise (Far and Away), Daniel-Day Lewis (The Last of the
Mohicans), and Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
[1991]), coupled with their screen personae, reflects the affable portrayal of the
Mythopoetic Man, quintessentially, in a tendency of negotiated representation.
On the flip side, however, these new heroes seemingly divorce the conservative
legacy of the Mythopoetic Man ʇ it seems that their ‘statement of being’ assumes greater
‘savagery’: That Costner’s transformation is gradual and incremental from a `civilized’
bourgeois lieutenant into a tribal ‘barbarian’ was an early defection from the Rambo
168
portrayal. Whereas the Cruise character became a brutal-conscious pugilist (by extension,
being ‘wild’), Daniel-Day Lewis’s Mohican image was, at one step further,
‘born-to-be-wild’ in that he was raised by native Americans. Lewis, within this context, is
the living embodiment of proto-American identity, synthesizing the values of his two
cultures while remaining separated from nationalist allegiances. One way or another, he
is also closer to the “young guns” of the Clinton years.
There is a distinction in redefining the "trust me" image between the 1980’s and the
1990’s. In the late 80’s, the economy built upon conservative principles of the market,
cost-benefit efficiency, and competitive individualism was also losing its magic appeal to
a society suffering from unprecedented price inflation, intense job shortages, foreign
competition, interethnic tension and violence. Even if the Republicans succeeded in
defying against taxation, welfare, and other affirmative actions in order to enlist support
for a pro-capitalist economic program, by the mid-Eighties most Americans were
expressing distrust of the Republican economic agenda. Thus, in the steps of liberalism,
conservatism found itself in a dilemma during this time.
The "trust me" prototype needs to be remolded on both sides. On the one side, the
hyper-spectacular masculinity still prevails in the 1990’s in a large number of the
superhero series and sequels. The focal point, however, shifts gradually from the
169
externalized male physique to the inner emotional involvement of the hero in films like
Die Hard 2 (1990), Rocky V (1990), Robocop 2 (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1991), Batman Returns (1992), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), Robocop 3 (1993), Batman
Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998). Some musculature
films, with greater variations, attach more importance to the family adjustment and the
hero's tender endearment, albeit with a comic twist - they are Kindergarten Cop (1990),
Stop! Or My Mother Will Shoot (1992), Junior (1994), in conjunction with a late 80's film,
Twins (1988).
In Rocky V, the family value has an increasing significance to Rocky more than
anything concerning the square circle. Its themes of fatherhood, parental neglect, and
juvenile rebellion strike home as very relevant to the 1990’s.The hero (Sylvester Stallone)
must, and successfully did, resolve the deep-rooted resentment held by his son, Rocky Jr.
In striking contrast with the hard-boiled masculinity of Rocky, Rambo, and the
cartoonized Superman/Batman/Robocop or the deadpan face of Pale Rider, the new hero
(in the tendency of negotiated representation) is a more bland, sophisticated man,
accommodating the seedy post-feminist ideals of empathy, tolerance, and care that are
tended to the traditionally repressed. He is supposed to be bonded with values of natural
instinct and primitivism; he is, too, self-sustaining, able to repurpose the charismatic
170
scenario in mitigating controversial issues such as the interracial and gendered grudge,
wielding better control in the threatening environment. Films in this category include:
Dances with Wolves (1990), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Young Guns II (1991),
The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Far and Away (1992), Unforgiven (1992), Schindler's
List (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Apollo 13 (1995), Legends of the Fall (1995), Mission
Impossible (1996), Jerry Maguire (1996), Tarzan and the Lost City (1998), Soldier
(1998), Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Hi-Lo Country (1998). The Mummy (1999).
The reconciled shift is telling because it indicates that masculinity in hegemonic
representation in the early Eighties was not entirely in sync with what most Americans
believed now. The negotiated representation of masculinity arises with Mythopoetic
Men’s Movement, whose vision of society as primitive attempts to reduce social life to
primary-process thinking, that is, to the assertion of the power of natural instinct over
rational arrangements. This aspect of the Mythopoetic appeal matches the virtue
presented in Robert Bly's Iron John, whose title character understands in his gut what the
white, middle-class urban professionals in the 1990’s are missing from their lives as he
takes them on weekend camping trips into the woods.
57

57
For the full account of the values of weekend warriors, see Michael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman,
“Weekend Warriors: The New Men’s Movement,” in The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Response
171
In the late-1980’s, a spectrum of the family sitcoms ʇ Three Men and a Baby (1987),
its sequel Three Men and a Lady (1990), and Mr. Mom (1989), plus a corpus of television
sitcoms like My Two Dads, Full House, Paradise and Who's the Boss? ʇ all project the
hero as `feminine’ in varying degrees. Instead of being considered as feminist-inspired,
these family sitcoms candidly give a manifestation that the bachelor father can be the real
father and surrogate mother simultaneously; he is supplanting the female parent,
‘femininity’ being the means to justify the end ʇ to reinvent ‘masculinity’ that he is
castrated off in the chaos of the late Sixties and Seventies, largely initiated by feminism,
antimilitarism, antiracism, and gay activism. It is on the same ground that the late-1980’s
Vietnam scenario presents the new image of ‘masculinity’ ʇ by all means, in negotiated
representation, yet blended with ‘femininity.’ Chris Taylor in Platoon, for instance, says:
"I felt like a child born of two fathers," ʇ one father is the more ‘masculine’ Sergeant
Barnes and the other, the more ‘feminine’ Sergeant Elias. Caught in between their
influences, Chris sees Barnes and Elias "fighting for the possession of my soul." In Susan
Jeffords's analysis, the new ‘masculine’ hero in the late 1980’s Vietnam War films,
distinct from the early-Eighties Ramboesque muscular ‘masculinity,’ affirms himself as

to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (And the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer), ed. Michael S. Kimmel
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
172
incorporating, not accepting, the feminine (Jeffords, 1989, 138).
In reaching a consensus, the two 1994 westerns The Cowboy Way and City Slickers
II are both selling a profound nostalgia for old-fashioned masculine values on the surface
that have been feminized, industrialized and liberalized out of existence, but at the inner
core, the narrative is fraught with the rebellious scorn, at the price of the character’s
self-effacing masculinity. In the opening of City Slickers, Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal)
is celebrating his 40th birthday-another middle-class baby boomer, who is still working at
a radio station in New York City and living in the suburbs with his wife and their children.
But he also is an unshaven pipsqueak in a New York Mets cap (reminiscent of Clinton’s
pose on a Harley in a black leather jacket). He squawks loudly and windmills his arms to
take up extra space; oftentimes he is saddled with enough feel-good, touchy-feely
gestures. City Slickers II as well kicks up a colorful dust as its three New York neurotics
gallop over mesa and through canyons, with cell phones in hand, while dodging red-neck
bandits, a spectacular horse stampede and a blizzard of bats. The quest for gold is truly
motivated by his fear of aging and a need to prove his manhood. More to the point, his
city madness involves the therapeutic, self-esteem-building value of shared male
experience. Before the end of City Slickers II, everyone will hug, repeatedly. Despite all
the soft-and-fuzzy, the city slicker back to the west essentially accepts “family values,”
173
and let’s-love-one-another moralizing.
The comic heroes in City Slickers II and The Cowboy Way, like their counterparts in
the Sixties, Peter Fonda in Easy Rider (1969) and Jon V oight in Midnight Cowboy (1969),
seemingly exercise less control over property, thus infrequently affirm their manliness
through boastful demonstrations of strength, (mock) aggressiveness, and sexual potency.
In an opposite way, Lt. General Custer in Little Big Man (1969) and Buffalo Bill in
Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1977), or any Peckinpah’s or Leone’s heroes in the 70’s,
likely control property strictly; these men’s fierce public gender displays and denigration
of women...competitive physical contests, vociferous oratory, ceremonies related to
warfare, exclusive men’s houses and rituals, and sexual violence against women [and
other men].”
58
The Cowboy Way is a film that pits the traditions of the classic American cowboy
against the ways and wiles of the big city; it smacks of two 1969 mock westerns,
Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider (especially the West-meet-East theme). The film
contrives to set its heroes up against an unprincipled modern gangster, suggesting that
against such an antagonist, the temporizing methodology of modern law enforcement is

58
Scott Coltrane, “The Micropolitics of Gender in Nonindustrial Societies,” Gender & Society, 6 (1987):
87.
174
pointless. In one form, Woody Harrelson character dresses himself like the Marlboro man,
bumbling around the fashion world in his tight-fitting, bun-blasting jeans and boots
(evocative of young Elvis and Midnight Cowboy’s Joe Buck on his best day, specifically
in their sex appeal). But in another, he doesn’t have the guts to argue this reactionary
conceit literally ʇ as in the similarly themed Coogan’ s Bluff, back when Clint Eastwood
was a renegade star. The rodeo action he did when he lassoed Manhattan remained a pull
towards fulfilling his manhood.
The perspective in City Slickers II and The Cowboy Way chiefly concurs with the
liberal profeminist account of masculinity, but it, substantially, defines the principal harm
in this role as directed against men rather than women. In fact, its adherents believe that
the traditional social role of men has become lethal.
The 1980’s science fiction and horror films explore the theme of ‘being woman,’
with different safeguarding strategies, but in a wide continuum in which man either gives
birth to himself (Altered States [1980], The Terminator [1984]) or to himself as another
life form (The Fly [1986], The Thing [1982]) ʇ all distinctly remained in the tendency of
negotiated representation of masculinity.
! !
175
Chapter Four
Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and Celluloid Shamanism
Dances with Wolves, Forrest Gump
What is at issue is less remembering than rewriting the history.
ʇ Jacques Lacan
59
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism.
ʇ Walter Benjamin
60
To conflate Lacan’s and Benjamin’s notions into one entity means that rewriting the
history or constructing a selected memory of history is to mask barbarism. Lacan’s quote
is a perfect footnote to how Forrest Gump redeems the imperfect past in the Vietnam War,
while Benjamin’s quote attests to a new version of Manichaean documentation of
barbarism and civility in Dances with Wolves. Rudimentarily, what film could recurrently
mystify barbarism in its mode of rewriting popular history, if not a male-genre film? The

59
Jacques Lacan, Seminar I (New York: Norton, 1991), 20.
60
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1968), 256.
176
popular films in the 1990’s have traced clearly a shift in the style ʇ in the social
reconfiguration of a Mythopoetic Wild Man.
61
These shifts in style, as Michael Messner
suggests, might in some cases serve as visible signs of men’s continued position of power
and “privilege vis-a-vis women and less powerful men.”
62
Jenny in Forrest Gump and
the Sioux in Dances with Wolves are likewise reconstructed to mystify them. The new
hero is capable of using his supernatural energy (the shaman’s ‘medicine’ even nominally
embodied in the scenario of Dances with Wolves) to achieve an ethnic utopia, on the
assumption that individualism is more natural than something like rational state planning
ʇ which is conceptually too distant from nature.
Mapped against this historical grid, the sociologists viewed men's movements as a
logical development from feminism, just as women's consciousness was advanced by the
civil rights movement, which progressed in reverse order from democracy's liberating
visions. Many of men's movement leaders were also on the front lines during the anti-war
movement, the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental
movement, and even the women's movement. The social perspectives changed during the

61
The term is coined by Robert Bly in his book, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1990).
62
Michael A. Messner, “‘Changing Men’ and Feminist Politics in the United States,” Theory and Society 22
(1993): 733.
177
Eighties, resulting in the new-found awareness of issues such as teen life, women's roles
in society, and AIDS. Men's organized responses varied and can be categorized in a
complex range of men's movements. Some support feminism, some express a backlash
against feminism (viz. Men's Rights Movement), and others (such as Bly's retreat to an
idealized tribal mythology of male homosociality) appear to be attempts to avoid feminist
issues altogether (Michael Messner, 1995, 97). In the ball park, men's movements have
generated positive changes. A profound "crisis of masculinity" is specifically experienced
by white, middle-class men. Therefore men are willing to rethink and reconfigure the
traditional gender conditioning. It is vital that men began to take a constructive position
within this debate. Although still inviting a dialectic on gender issues to progress,
American men in the Nineties for the most part advanced through a dedication to
fathering, environmental protection, reducing violence, confronting racism and
homophobia, and supporting egalitarian partnerships with women (a signature for the
profeminist men, specifically). The new male dignity and self-assurance (conspicuously
mirrored in Forrest Gump and Dances with Wolves) is largely centered in his ability to
recuperate the lost manhood, and, no less, his willingness to recondition the conservative
male legacy.
178
The pursuit of racial syncretism and gendered tolerance in postmodern Hollywood
of the 1990’s fits in the U.S. national interests as the world's Super Cop (the Superman
series springs to mind), contingently upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989.
It also conjoins the American exploitation of global markets (by cultural invasion
63
and
economic monopoly) to pacify the world into the American West.
Yet why was the "American way" able to survive the eccentric anarchy of the 1960’s
and 1970’s and regain the affirming masculinity in the 1980’s and 1990’s? The answer, in
a closer examination, is the advent of American boomers' mild patriarchy in the 1990’s.
To contribute to this understanding, I will focus on two main areas of men's movements
in the boomer generation: the Nineties Hollywood responded to the Mythopoetic Men's
Movement (in the first wave) and the Profeminist Men's Engagement (in the second
wave). Both emerged from a historical process that roughly paralleled the life cycle of the
baby boomer generation.
The mostly heterosexual, middle-class white men that comprise the American
boomer generation have encountered the women's movement personally in the1960’s and
1970’s. They were searching for compatibility strategies to deal with changes in gender
displays in the 1990’s. The Mythopoetic Men's Movement, inspired and led by poet

63
Hollywood depicted as ‘cultural domination’ machine.
179
Robert Bly, began quietly in the 1980’s and seized the public imagination with the
publication of Bly's best-selling book, Iron John, in 1990. Through the use of old fairy
tales and poetry, Bly and other Mythopoetic leaders attempted to guide men on spiritual
journeys, aimed at rediscovering and reclaiming "the deep masculine" parts of themselves
that they believed had been lost (Messner, 1997, 16).
The spiritual perspective in these new heroes is founded upon the conviction that
masculinity derives from deep unconscious patterns. These patterns are best revealed
through a tradition of stories, myths, and rituals. When the feminist movement has
successfully tapped into the unconscious minds of women and found a way to unleash
their energy, men have yet to find a positive and vigorous way of doing the same.
Symbolically, the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement initiated by Bly fosters the
principal spiritual perspective of masculinity, restaged by John Dunbar (Kevin Costner)
in Dances with Wolves, Hawkeye/ Nathaniel Poe (Daniel-Day Lewis) in The Last of the
Mohicans, and Joseph Donnelly (Tom Cruise) in Far and Away. This tradition is more
humanistic and openly feminist-friendly; it teaches that men have been cut off from a
feminine understanding of themselves.
The new men of such characters can be invariably interpreted as forging a sensitive
egalitarian masculinity that allows them to feel more secure in their gender identity. As a
180
popular film echoes the American collective unconscious, it must semiotically encode its
historical position and knowledge into the narrative and dramatize it as allegory. The
Mythopoetic man John Dunbar maintains an omnipresent voiceover in Dances with
Wolves, favorably blessed with the power to delineate the ethnic Other (whether the
Sioux or the Pawnees) as traditional men, and himself as the changing New Man. The
Indians, in this sketch, exist “out there,” still stuck in “traditional, sexist, and `macho’”
styles of masculinity; they will never act like the phoenix, rising out of its ashes, and
transforming into a new spiritualized type of man.
In one way or another, film criticism entails a dimension of the study of politics and
ideology that might mislead us into equating cinema with history. In retrospect, I’m
thinking over my earlier strategy in historicizing Dances with Wolves (1990), a film made
in a year in which the Bush administration became engulfed in a major overseas conflict
with the Iraq nation.
In my previous interpretive grid, I took the cue of Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner’s historiography in Camera Politica
64
that discovers a means of linking a
discourse to its social ground as shifting from 1967 to the mid-Eighties, a period

64
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary
Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
181
characterized by a major swing in dominant social movements from Left to Right. Based
upon this format, I articulated the notion of a shifting heroic ethos in films from Little Big
Man (1970) to Apocalypse Now (1979) and to Platoon (1986), which seemingly
synchronized the social history at the time. I also noticed that the media helped package
the representation of the Persian Gulf War as a sophisticated narrative of redemption to
rewrite the Vietnam War as an imperfect war of the past that has in the present been
surmounted. As Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz have propounded, there was
another battle during the Persian Gulf War, one for dominance in shaping public opinion
ʇ a battle waged by both the government and the media with the expensive apparatus of
modern television rather than with guns.
65
Coupled to this vision of media and
government at stake for a new war on foreign soil, I contended that the ‘Arabs’ in the
Persian Gulf War were almost transfigured as the ‘Indians’ in the frontier West of Dances
with Wolves. A yearning for desert victory could be symbolically ritualized in the feat (of
Lt. Dunbar’s quest) of civilizing the ‘barbarian.’ The narrative voice-over in Dunbar’s
journal similarly evokes the ‘voice’ of Gen. Schwarzkopf in his sendoff to the troops:
Every one of you has a right to tell [the] story ...You’ve been places whose names
we can’t even pronounce [whether Iraq or Dakota]. But you’re going to take back

65
Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz, “Seeing Through History: The War for the Past,” in Seeing
Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War, eds. Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 20.
182
with you some great lessons...You’re going to take back the fact that the word
‘Arab’ [or `Sioux’] is not a bad word...that there are many cultures in this world,
and you’ve learned about them....
66
At the conclusion, I read the pseudo-syncretism in Dances with Wolves as answering
to the U.S. Congress motion in mid-March 1992 that George Armstrong Custer’s name be
struck off the list of Frontier Heroes in Hall of Fame, due to his 1868 Washita massacre
of the Indians, and so did the film harken back to the final vote cast by the White South
Africans in late March 1992 to endorse a negotiation of the end to apartheid.
Not necessarily debunking my former strategy or questioning its use-value, right
now I am more engaged than ever in reconsidering its potential of over-interpretation
when I related the ‘aims of representation’ to a historical frame of reference, broad
enough to encompass both textual and extra-textual dimensions. So the question is one of
control and opening raised: How, and in which respect, is it possible to historicize the
issue of representation? How can historical activity be viewed as constitutive of the uses
of “representation” without falling back on either idealist methodologies of closure and
homogeneity or the anti-representational dogma of the autonomy of the signifier? Even to
ask these questions is right at the outset to admit that I still need a good deal of

66
Mark Peters, “There He Is!” Newsweek, March 18, 1991, 21.
183
knowledge and thought about the actual modes and functions of representation, especially
rethinking the poststructuralist view of the ultimate hegemony of discourse uncritically
taken for granted for so long in the post-1970’s cinema and TV studies. Both the gaps and
links between what is representing and what is represented in these studies stimulate
some highly abstract scheme of the rise and decline of representation and are viewed
monistically, either in terms of rupture or in terms of closure.
I will not assume that such a changing identity may well resonate to the challenges
and dilemmas of masculinity as well as the specific needs in contemporary culture.
Instead, one possible explanation is that men’s publicly-stated opinions/images, as Nina
Eliasoph argues, are inauthentic presentations-of-self that can be viewed as attempts to
conform to an acceptable images of the New Man.
67
Absolutely, the cinematic
representations or misrepresentations of men often tell us more about how
people/audience construct public selves than they do about their genuinely held attitudes
about public issues, given that the box-office is an indicator that interacts with the pattern
of such a change.

67
Nina Eliasoph, “Political Culture and the Presentation of a Political Self: A Study of the Public Sphere in
the Spirit of Erving Goffman,” Theory & Society 19 (1990): 465-94; also see Messner, 726.
184
On second thought, my reflexive awareness seeks not to assault but to buttress the
epistemological security of such analyses as Ryan and Kellner’s historiography, or
Jeffords and Rabinovitz's media studies. Yet, there exists a worrying phenomenon in film
criticism in which the critical consensus constantly entices us to construe the word/world
as the resultant attempts of a president who used television, radio, and the press quite
successfully to consolidate his political agenda, or of the media dominance in shaping
public opinions. Such a set of significations held above are henceforth rooted in our
collective conscious (by way of explanation, Durkheim's collective representation), or
audience self-awareness rather than ingrained in the psychic contents of the collective
unconscious, which has never been in the stage of consciousness. To express differently,
although the government or the media (representative of collective conscious) may
schemingly conduct the remasculinization of America, each mostly reproduces part of
social history. Whereas a grudging fear of social feminization, the rapid development and
popularity of Boy Scouts and college fraternities, sports craze, fitness boom, AIDS
anxiety (each elucidated in Chapter 3), coupled with feminist movements, and the
ensuing men's movements
68
(to be examined in the following three chapters) all help

68
See Betty Friedan, "Their Turn: How Men Are Changing," in Men’ s Lives, comps. Michael S. Kimmel
and Michael A. Messner, second edition (New York: Macmillan, 1992).
185
make up history in the fullness. My critique of trends in film criticism is entirely
motivated by my hope for a more productive encounter between cultural studies and film
criticism.
Dances with Wolves
No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our
experiences so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.
Alfred Adler
What did Dances with Wolves and Forrest Gump have in common? They both
feature masculinity in negotiated representation and close on a Mythopoetic man as
protagonist. The word “mythopoetic” was first brought forward by Shepherd Bliss in the
mid-1980’s, so as to describe the development of men’s movements that seek to revision
masculinity. At the time it was being called “the Robert Bly men’s movement,” after its
most visible activist. According to Bliss’s belief, “mythopoetic” does not mean “myth and
poetry” or the contraction “myth ‘n poetry,” as some think. It comes from the word
“mythopoesis,” which refers to re-mythologizing. (Bliss, 293) It means re-making, so the
mythopoetic approach means revisioning masculinity for our time.
186
As concerns the western convention, Dances with Wolves combines some John Ford
elements of cavalry action with the masked ‘political correctness’ that echoes the
Mythopoetic Men’s attempts to construct their public selves in the post-feminist era.
The film begins with the hero on a crude, makeshift operating table. Lt. John J.
Dunbar (Kevin Costner), fighting for the Union Army, is wounded in battle, and wakes
up to be mutilated. Choosing to die rather than to have a leg amputated, Dunbar mounts a
horse and drags himself out of the field hospital.
Initially, I adopted Freud’s concept of castration anxiety to decode the scene. Within
the Oedipal scenario, loss of power means symbolic castration on any level. When he
regained consciousness, Dunbar's first utterance is: "Don't take off my foot." This
delirium projects his castration anxiety, under the guise of the foot as the usual phallic
surrogate.
Now I switch to Adler’s theory of masculine protest, first to reinforce the belief that
the main character is participating actively in his masculine construct, secondly, to
diminish the semiotic mismatch that seems plausible. I reimagine John Dunbar’s New
Manhood is a gradual and incremental process of construction (in his active mood),
mostly spawned by his fear of mutilation (masculine protest, so to speak) in the opening
sequence ʇ this way I redefine the sign as indexical rather than iconic, being
187
characteristic of Dunbar’s collective unconscious, instead of Freudian personal
unconscious that is excessively decoded by feminism in the visible gender display of a
phallic image. To historicize him is not necessarily to fix him in a static and uniform sign,
labeled “hegemonic masculinity.”
The impact of this paranoia, ironically, mobilizes Dunbar's valor in the next
sequence in which he, whispering "Forgive me, Father," rides between the rows of the
opposing armies, flinging his arms out in a crucifixion pose in slow motion. His action
serves to distract the Confederate infantry long enough for the Union soldiers to attack
and defeat the opposing army. Dunbar becomes a hero! The causality of the two segments
generates a logic that masculinity, as always in malestream cinema, is embedded in the
phobia of the devouring Other which poses a threat to the male subject's power (phallic or
not).
In the following scene, one line in Dunbar's journal says, "Trying to produce my
own death, I was elevated to the status of a living hero." In this earnest monotone, what
the audience hears is a narcissistic undertone in glorifying an act of stupendous
recklessness, evocative of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a film that captures a romantic
hero's egomania rather than his empathy with his "savage" brethren's destiny.
The heroic persona (again, in Jung’s terminology) is further exploited in the buffalo
188
hunt in which Dunbar awakens one night in his fort to the sound of thunder and the
violent shaking of the earth. He investigates, and finds a huge herd of buffalo galloping
near the post. He immediately rides to alert the Sioux camp to follow the buffalo trail. He
is hailed as a hero again (on the ethnic side this time). His heroic stature fits on both sides
now.
What is more crucial in establishing the hero's prowess is the protection of women
and children in the western myth ʇ the 'protector' image suggests traditional masculinity
and hegemonic representation of masculinity (in my taxonomy). In Dances with Wolves,
when "Kicking Bird" (the holy man of the tribe) and the village men hit the war trail,
Dunbar is honored to stay to protect the "women and children." Dunbar's first encounter
with "Stands with a Fist" offers another example: he ‘happened' to be in the course to
save the mourning woman from committing suicide and played the knight unpromptedly.
Parallel to this visceral image, the deranged and deluded commander of Fort Hays mocks
Dunbar in a previous sequence, calling him “Sir Knight” on a “knight’s errand,”
remindful of the traditional hero’s knighthood or manhood to Dunbar’s credit.
The camera movement, in its multiple angularity, also casts some adoring gazes at
the hero. The familiar image is constructed by a shot/reverse shot pattern. The preceding
scene is in a long shot of the landscape, then it cuts back to the (medium) close shot of
189
Dunbar in uniform on horseback. This method of joining long shots (of the landscape) to
closer shots (of the hero) via match cuts is recurrent in the first half of the film with
rhythmic frequency ʇ both in his suicidal ride in front of the enemy troops, and in his
journey to the lonely post, and when he plays with the pet wolf, “Two Sox.” The aim is to
legitimate Dunbar's charisma in a God-like association with Nature: the animals create a
situation in which Dunbar, on the one hand, sheds his original identity (with the wolf) and
wields, on the other hand, the energy (of the bison) which drives this level of existence.
In some episodes the camera captures Dunbar from below where he, spurring his mount
on a horse (evasive of amputation), clears a barrier, while the horse rises to clear the
stone wall over the head of a startled sergeant. Adopting the sergeant's view, the camera
sees the hero low-angle in silhouette against a setting sun, golden and shadowy,
emanating the mythical undertone.
Although portrayed as the tribal new man, Lt. Dunbar is in striking contrast with
Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffmann) in Little Big Man (1970), who is defined as feminine on
the grounds that he is adopted (by extension, ‘protected') from childhood by the
Cheyenne people, a life that "Stands with a Fist" experiences in her rescue by the Sioux.
As a counterpart to Dances with Wolves, Little Big Man was made at the height of
the Vietnam War. Its pro-Indian theme, like two other westerns of the early Seventies, A
190
Man Called Horse (1970) and Soldier Blue (1970), suggests a sympathetic view of the
ethnic minority and critiques harshly the militarism of America in the Sixties.
Skeptically, the macho ‘hero' in Little Big Man is assumed to be Lt. Col. George
Armstrong Custer (on the historical plane, at least), who came into view as a vainglorious
psychopath whose 1868 Washita massacre of the Indians was seen as reflecting the
cavalry's atrocity on a peaceful people.
The loathing of authority initiated by the late 60’s and 70’s Counterculture makes
Little Big Man fit into a disordered, hypercritical, and nihilistic West with people living in
constant fear and tension, and being antagonistic to the organic culture of the Cheyenne
or the peace-loving Sioux in Dances with Wolves.
Though in the same manner of self-seeking as scripted in Dances with Wolves,
Apocalypse Now (1979), a non-western in the late 70’s, takes the form of a mental
odyssey from the world of civilization to the world of the savage jungle. The film,
however, cynically subverts the supposed theme by pushing the central character deeper
and deeper into confusion and the unknown, thus reflecting the chaos of the Seventies’
ethos.
Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), the ostensible hero in Apocalypse Now, is on a quest
for origins and self-knowledge like Dunbar. The fact that he made a decision to give up
191
his chances to be a future chief of staff so as to join the jungle tribe is also reverberated in
Dunbar's choice of the remotest post and his desire to see the frontier ‘before it's gone.’
The mythic appeal in Kurtz's refusal to be a general, while choosing, instead, to be a
god, is likewise embellished in "Kicking Bird's" blandishment to Dunbar in the Sioux
warrior council: "He might be a god or he might be a special chief...I think he might have
medicine [a shaman's power]."
But Kurtz's Cambodian jungle, unlike Dunbar's Sioux’s garden, is all-enveloping,
pervaded by horror and terror in which animal man wears a mask to hide his true nature,
and his hiding is the greatest evil of the Heart of Darkness. Kurtz himself acts like the
father that a crazy world needs ʇ demanding, stern, animalistic and pagan. The nature
of the journey upriver now becomes clear: it's a voyage to our "primitive evil" instead of
"primitive goodness." Kurtz's last, weak and "feminine" words ʇ "the horror, the horror"
ʇ claims a bizarre will for destruction.
More to the point, Kurtz, for the most part, does not sustain his autonomous voice,
albeit ‘speaking' sporadically. Instead, he bears his existence in Willard's subjectivity, to
accomplish meaning for Willard's destination.
Willard (Martin Sheen), in the meanwhile, narrates Apocalypse Now for us and
makes comments and judgments as he goes along. During the voyage, Willard began to
192
identify himself as representing the ‘corporation,’ the U.S. Army, and ended up learning
to live by the values of the jungle tribe. In the light of this, Willard is closer to Dunbar's
prototype of the new Mythopoetic hero, who lets go of the hypocrisy of his predecessor
and adheres to the simplicity of Dunbar and this is to be seen as a ‘positive’
metamorphosis in both Willard and Dunbar.
The notion that Kurtz allows a ‘son’ to kill him may as well provide a ground for the
New Man’s configuration of Dunbar as the atavistic ‘hero-son’ of the 1990’s who
assumes a mission to destroy the initial ‘father’ of the 70’s, seeing that the latter’s
anarchic gesture goes beyond the Law of Order, and finally becomes a new patriarch
himself.
The distinction between Willard and Dunbar lies much more in the fact that Willard
seems not to have stepped out of Kurtz in full length. In one aspect, Willard assimilates
parts of Kurtz to himself. His voice-over, in some episodes, is fragmented by Kurtz's
‘interlocution’ (in a Bakhtinian term), resounding either in reading Kurtz's diary, Kurtz's
letter to his son, and, finally, in Kurtz's own voice on the soundtrack. It is at the heart of
Willard's search that an agony of taking sides between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘primitive’
disturbs him while Dunbar is patently able to read passages from his journal in a voice
almost exclusively from his own point of view. The denouement of Apocalypse Now
193
affirms Willard's awakening, nevertheless, and credits him with a success in taking poor
Lance (the surfer) away from the jungle ʇ the two surviving males signal a fragile, barren
rebirth of the family (a family without women). On the contrary, Dunbar's farewell to the
Sioux (neither Willard nor Dunbar lingers to stay) promises a fruitful future since he
leaves with his beloved woman, and rescues her from ‘savagery,’ signifying a
germination of heterosexual love coming from pure blood in malestream scenario.
Ethnic-Conscious Icons, Myth, Violence, and Manichaeism
Ethnic Icons
As the very name ‘western’ dictates, one of the ways in which we most readily
identify an example of the genre is through its setting, that is, its iconic conventions.
The visual spectacle in the western film, as it is essential to the gangster film, is primarily
achieved by its scope and grandeur, not necessarily by its shot lengths or editing.
If to literary minds the plot of a novel is corny and the dialogue banal, as Christine
Gledhill has noted in her study of genre, this is because literature has no language to cope
with cinema as a visual medium. Whereas auteurism developed the notion of mise en
scene to fill this gap; genre critics turned to iconography: mise en scene provided the
194
means of materializing the author's personal vision. The notion of iconography also gives
life to the conventions of generic production, investing them with historical and cultural
‘resonances’ which, put to work in new combinations and contexts, could produce new
articulations of meaning.
69

Edward Buscombe from another approach defines iconography in the western as
recurrent images including the physical attributes and dress of the actors, the settings, the
tools of the trade (horses, cars, guns, etc.). (Buscombe, 1985, 60) In a western film, the
audience knows immediately what to expect of a sheriff, the Indians, a cowboy, a
prostitute or other stock characters by their physical appearance and attributes, their dress
and deportment. It knows, too, by the disposition of the figures, which is dominant,
which is subordinate.
70
In Dances with Wolves, the audience is apparently feasted with the epic scope and
grandeur of the landscape: the ridges, horizons, and golden sunsets of the South Dakota
Plains; its spacious composition of horse-riding, gunfights, Indian attacks, chases, the
Sioux Ghost Dance and the buffalo hunt, in particular. The film also features the Plains
Indians' most striking trait in their colorful bonnet, tomahawk, and feather lance, which

69
Christine Gledhill, "Genre," in The Cinema Book: A Complete Guide to Understanding the Movies, ed.
Pam Cook (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 60.

70
Colin McArthur, Underground USA (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 23.
195
have become the (white man's) stereotyped image of the red man. As in the other
westerns, these iconic portrayals reinforce an ethnic impression with a popular image of
the Indian as an ignorant savage bent on obstructing progress and assailing white settlers.
The Bad Indians, the Pawnees in Dances with Wolves, wear scarier face-paint than the
Good Indians (the Sioux). The audience can thus applaud when a Pawnee is shot full of
holes. This knowledge of ethnic iconography provides the ground on which the populist
cinema attains its dynamic, the means by which significance is produced sometimes
without the artist. The raw harshness of the land, of intertribal warfare, of cavalry legend
in Dances with Wolves, as at work in the other westerns, tends to mythologize the
frontier's appeal, the wildness without which the Wild West is incomplete.
Yet, the audience response to these ethnic icons often generates the stereotyped
inaccuracies against the silent characters. The rupture operated by the contemporary
subversive reading of these ethnic icons enables the viewer to relocate the historical and
cultural traditions, to critique the westerns as a whole. But the iconography study fails to
fully specify the narrative distortion in a popular film ʇ the Pawnee's stock image in the
iconographic treatment of Dances with Wolves can offer only one dimension of the
discursive structure. To account for the film’s ideology we still need to go beyond the
iconographic matrix with recourse to narrative structure, coupled with its intertext and
196
other cinematic components.
Ethnic Myth
Citing Claude Levi-Strauss, we live in myth and seek refuge from it in history,
because history itself is a myth conceived to satisfy our need for stability and order.
71
History can explain the present in terms of the past, but it cannot provide an indication of
how to act in the present based on the past, since by definition the past is categorically
different from the present. Myths, however, can use the setting of the past to create and
resolve the conflicts of the present. In more concrete terms, some aspects of the American
West in the late nineteenth century have become quite significant in modern America, but
for reasons that are clearly different from the reasons for their actual significance in the
historical West.
Put differently, there is a distinction between social imaginary, a.k.a. myth (a mirror
of collective unconscious) and social reality (history) from which those representations
are derived and with which they interact. In Levi-Strauss’s vision, "through their myths,
people try to hide or to justify the discrepancies between their society and the ideal image

71
Frank P. Tomasulo, "The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and Antiwar Film," in
From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, eds. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 157.
197
of it which they harbour."
72
If we see, in a western film, a lone rider sitting easily in the saddle of his buckskin
horse, traveling across the plains toward the frontier, we readily expect that the scene is
telling a story. Certainly the West was wild, but even at its wildest, the actual events
could not possibly have included the many stories of glory, heroism, savagery, romance
and sacrifice, that the Western myth has produced. In other words, the historical reality of
the West offers a rich soil for the growth and development of the Western myth in a way
that ʇ if it did not really happen, it should have.
Assuredly, these myths are submerged in the contemporary production of ‘civilized’
cultures, as evident as they are in ‘primitive’ myths; the former often rely on the latter for
their general structure and specific "mythologemes" (in Levi-Strauss’s terms)
On another plane, these modern cultural myths may not fully reflect the historical
facts. Many film critics aimed at the factual errors and a number of unlikely absurdities in
Dances with Wolves, while dismissing another reality that the meaning of the myths
circulated by these prescriptive errors lurks in its "representative" function of the
narrative and fabricating stock images rather than documenting them.

72
Claude Levi-Strauss, "On Manipulated Sociological Models," quoted in The Structuralist Controversy:
The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 232.
198
Besides, the fictional attributes of myth serve to test the limits of our suspension of
disbelief. In Dances with Wolves, viewers are asked to believe that Dunbar emerges
unhurt before the enemy line, offering himself as a target at a slow gallop within 50 feet
of its picket line. We are also curious as to why Dunbar's supposedly maimed leg can stay
on after all.
Mysterious too is Dunbar’s discovery of the buffalo herd in a virtually surrealistic
scene: he fearlessly walks toward a thundering herd of buffalo charging at night in a blue,
dream-like mist. We must wonder why a highly skilled, hungry, and presumably alert
band of the Indians fail to find a thunderously noisy herd of buffalo and need an Eastern
neophyte to inform them.
True, as "Kicking Bird" declares, "I think he [Dunbar] might have medicine
[shaman's magic]," the audience accepts it much as they believe Dunbar's supernatural
power conjuring animals (such as Two Sox [the wolf] and Cisco [the horse]) ʇ That
Dunbar playfully chases and befriends "Two Sox" is watched by "Kicking Bird" and the
other approaching Sioux warriors, and thus earns him his Sioux name, “Dances with
Wolves.” Dunbar or “ Ņ Ţ ů Ť Ŧ Ŵ ġ Ÿ Ū ŵ ũ ġ Ř Ű ŭ ŷ Ŧ Ŵ ” also has the ‘medicine’ to tame the tribe's most
fierce warrior, “ Ř ind in His Hair,” who shouts his pledge of eternal friendship in their
sensational farewell close to the last scene in which Dunbar, amenable to the same power,
199
separates “ Ŕ tands with a Fist” from her adopted father and the Sioux family, riding away
with a white stranger to the world unknown.
All these myths favor "an interpretive grid, a matrix of relations, which filters and
organizes life experience and produces the blessed illusion that contradictions can be
overcome and difficulties resolved."
73
To rephrase, the ethnic myths around Dunbar
represent the cultural implications pervasive in the 1990’s, which satisfied the then
expectations of the audience. The box-office receipts vouch for the viewers’ demand of
the myth ʇ it explains why filmmakers/producers should feast audiences with these
models of social action necessary to their survival as institutions change.

Ethnic Violence
Violence is one of the most haunting aspects of the western film. Its appropriateness
to the western (as it is to the gangster film) proposes an accumulated repertoire in the
generic tradition which often projects a visual spectacle in favor of the dramatic tension.
Through violence, the western narrative is able to evidence a strong vein of masculinity.
The recurrent ritual of gunfights and Indian attacks in the genre highlights manhood (of

73
Claude Levi-Strauss, L'homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971), 590; "The Politics of Ambivalence," translated
by F. P. Tomasulo, 146.
200
the hero), savagery (of the Indians) as well as the physical agony and cruelty (of the
villain).
By the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s, violence had become more than an
obsession in Hollywood films. The opening sequence of The Wild Bunch displays a
scorpion placed in a nest of fire ants by a group of children who want to witness the
consequences. The children are fascinated in the same way, Peckinpah suggests, that his
audience will be fascinated. To prolong the screen violence, Peckinpah opens and closes
the film with massacres, with innumerable deaths relayed in slow motion.
In a deeper sense, Peckinpah's violent westerns of the Seventies, in conjunction with
the massacre of George Armstrong Custer in Little Big Man, are begging, in all sense
prescriptive, some social remedies to mitigate the lure of violence, by shaming the white
man into recognizing his oppression of the Other and the others (the Mexican women in
The Wild Bunch, the Cheyenne in Little Big Man and the Pawnees in Dances with
Wolves); thus redressing the chaotic disturbances of the Liberal Age. Such a formulation
would see filmic characters not as “real” people, but rather as discursive construct; the
ritual violence corresponds to a catharsis which outlines as a ‘refraction of a refraction’ in
201
Bakhtinian thought,
74
an attitude of revealing in art what may happen in reality at last.
For the villain, violence alludes to his villainy or moral corruption; for the Indians,
incarnating their savagery or lack of the graces of civilization. For the hero, however,
violence is a statement of his being (as in the classical western, Shane), essential to his
masculine identity: the lure of violence is always bound up with the puritanical notion to
‘protect women and children.’
In Dances with Wolves, we also witness ethnic violence excessively in some
segments: in one episode, the Pawnees kill the mule skinner Timmons in disquieting
detail; in the childhood flashback of "Stands with a Fist", we observe a hatchet murder of
a white farmer. The Union soldiers at the segment close to the end of the film are
unexpectedly sadistic toward "Dances with Wolves" and meet themselves a brutal end
when the Sioux warriors came to the rescue of the latter. In the same token, the audiences
are asked to watch soldiers laughingly shoot Dunbar's pet wolf to bits after it persists in
following them.
“Stands with a Fist” in one segment also shoots with a rifle ʇ and with courage and
accuracy. Even the youth get in the act; after being pistol-whipped, the leader of the trio

74
Robert Stam, “Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Ethnic/Racial Representation,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity
and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 252.
202
of the Sioux boys, “Smiles A Lot,” kills the sadistic sergeant by burying a hatchet into his
chest to the hilt. As awful as these and other violent acts are, they invoke a sense of
‘poetic justice’ in the mainstream audience who are coaxed to believe that the ‘Bad’ Guys
need to be either punished/destroyed or conquered/civilized.
Women exist in the western through two mechanisms: either as the cause of
violence/revenge, to be protected or avenged (as in The Searchers [1956] and Straw Dogs
[1970]), or as a middle ground between two masculine individuals or parties ʇ to abate
the violence (as in El Dorado [1966]). In Dances with Wolves, "Stands with a Fist"
obviously plays the role of the latter. Both "Kicking Bird" and Dunbar enlist the help of
"Stands with a Fist" as interpreter. It is her again that mentors and entices Dunbar deeper
into the Lakota culture, teaching him the language and thus opening up communication
between Dunbar and the hostile Indians. In the last scene, when Dunbar and "Stands with
a Fist" bid farewell to the tribe and ride off the canyon trail, “Stands with a Fist” assures
him, “You made a decision; my place is with you; I go where you go.” One can almost
see Dunbar take the lead while "Stands with a Fist" either follows him or keeps him
company in silence, forming a pair so much as Robinson Crusoe and His Girl Friday, or
Robin Hood and his Moorish sidekick Azeem, and more likely, a match comparable to
Don Quixotic and Sancho Panza.
203
Ethnic Manichaeism
Manichaeism, based on Levi-Strauss's concept of myth dichotomy,
75
incorporates a
Western ideology imposed on native cultures: Levi-Strauss's mythological data revealed
that "the complex rituals of many societies could be reduced to a system of rules or codes,
and that those rules and codes were themselves variants of a limited set of elemental
binary oppositions: nature/culture...animal/human being, and peace/war" ( Levi-Strauss,
1963, 145).
Peter Wollen uncovers, in John Ford's western films, an antinomy between the West
viewed as a Garden or as a Desert.
76
This Cartesian conception was charted in the
nineteenth-century economic geography by Henry Nash Smith in his book The Virgin
Land
77
(1950). Jim Kitses further sets out a whole series of oppositions which he finds
operating in the ideology of the western film. Kitses argues in Horizon West
78
that
fundamental is the clash between the Wildness and Civilization. From this derives a
series of structuring tensions: between the individual and the community, between nature

75
Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson
and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Basic Books, 1963).
76
Edward Buscombe, ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (New York: Da Capo Paperback, 1988), 19.
77
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950).
78
Jim Kitses, Horizons West (London: Secker and Warburg/BFI, 1969).
204
and culture, freedom and restriction, agrarianism and industrialism. All are physically
separated by the distance between the West and the East.
The ethnic binary oppositions in Dances with Wolves are evident in conflicts
between the cavalry and the Indians, the Sioux and the Pawnees, almost with good and
evil neatly divided by tribe (or as good as dividing by race).
Instead of helping us understand the historical Sioux, the film’s dialectic simply
makes the Sioux an idealized model in the white bourgeois imagination (to apotheosize
the Sioux as the ancient Greeks did their gods in their mythology). The notion that the
Native others are like us is able to smooth the way for the colonizing translation: the
“sympathetic” and “seductive” assumption that Native inhabitants of the New World
were like Europeans and “comfortable in (their) own modes of thought,” as Stephen
Greenblatt expounds, may not have caused “the horrors of the Conquest, but it made
those horrors easier for those at home to live with.”
79
Dances with Wolves poses the sophisticated wisdom of the Sioux on the subject of
peace and togetherness (echoing Bly’s idealized tribal mythology of male homosociality):
they never fight among themselves ʇ they negotiate ʇ framed mostly in council rather

79
Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990),
30.
205
than in battle. This rhetorical strategy is allegorical in what Judith Newton and Judith
Stacey called the “salvage text” in the genre of colonial ethnography: the pastoral, a
nostalgic, redemptive text that preserves a primitive culture on the brink of extinction for
the historical record of its Western conquerors.
80
The narrative structure of this “salvage
text” gives a picture of the native culture as a coherent, authentic, and lamentably
“eroding past,” while its complex, inauthentic, Western successors represent the future
(Newton and Stacey, 56).
Silent as they are, the ‘Bad’ Indians, the Pawnees, are profiled as dumb, much like
the Apaches in John Ford's Stagecoach. Their scary-looking, painted face with roach
haircut does justice to the Hollywood logic ʇ producing homogenized Native Americans,
devoid of individual characteristics or regional, gender-specific differences. The Pawnees
ʇ no identity, always male ʇ are viewed apart from wife or children or any family
relationships; they are isolated figures. This ambivalent view of the Indians, based on an
ahistorical and essentialist grid of good-and-evil opposition, is designed tofamiliarize the
viewer's understanding of myth: Killing “bad” Indians (or villains, outlaws) counts as a
good thing. The signification in the film's text seems to argue in Levi-Strauss’s words, "I

80
Judith Newton and Judith Stacey, “Learning Not to Curse, or, Feminist Predicaments in Cultural
Criticism by Men: Our Movie Date with James Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt,” Cultural Critique
(Winter 1992): 56.
206
do not aim to show how people think in myths, but how myths think in people without
their being aware of the fact."
81
It is significant as well among the white characters that we find the majority of the
enlisted men brutish and demoralized: an alcoholic insane major wetting his pants and
committing suicide; the Union troopers repeatedly brutalizing “Dances with
Wolves”/Dunbar, and threatening to hang him if he does not lead them to the "hostiles."
To redress this liberal anarchism, Dances with Wolves offers an alternative vision in
Dunbar's negotiated masculinity whose dissimulating syncretism transforms the tribal
character, “Dances with Wolves,” into a universal denizen.
Ethnic and Gendered Syncretism
The narrative of Dances with Wolves entails not only ethos (characters) but also
ethnos (peoples). The film allegorizes the ethnic syncretism in the most utopian and
paradigmatic fashion, a feat somewhat surprisingly coming from Hollywood that rarely
shows sensitivity to the ethnic polyphony prior to 1990.
It makes more sense to read the ethnic codes in Dances with Wolves within a
Bakhtinian perspective. Art, for Mikhail Bakhtin, constitutes a socially situated

81
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 12.
207
"utterance"; that is, a complex of signs addressed by socially constituted subjects to other
socially constituted subjects, deeply immersed in historical circumstance.
82
On this account, we would shift attention from the question of realism to one of the
voices and discourses in relation to a theme: What are the "accents" and "intonations,"
discernible in a film’s voice? Which of the ambient ethnic voices are "heard," and which
are elided or distorted? ( Robert Stam, 1991, 252-253)
To pursue this issue further, we will concentrate on the assumption that Dances with
Wolves might be untrue to historical "reality," but reveal the alternative truth of the mass
psyche (collective unconscious) in the American white bourgeoisie: a reality that exposes
the Manichean vision of good and bad, noble and savage, an ethos whose soft-core
racism is hidden behind the facade of a superficial ‘political correctness’ in performing
ethnic polyphony.
Although the truth is always reimagined by the viewers in a negotiated, or
oppositional reading, which is consistent with their social experiences, on the basis of
which they can accept, question, or even subvert the film's representation. In line with
Bakhtin’s dialectic, all discourse exists in dialogue “not only with prior discourses but

82
Robert Stam "Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Ethnic/Racial Representation," in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity
and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991),
252-253.
208
also with the recipient of the discourse, with an ‘interlocutor’ situated in time and space”
( Robert Stam, 1991, 254).
For that reason, the cultural values, pursuant with social shifts, may wellinvite a
dialogic/subversive reading of the essence prescribed in Dances with Wolves. The same
character can be perceived as both a tangible double of the soldier Dunbar (armed with
white supremacy), and a pacifist “Dances with Wolves” (advocating ethnic syncretism) at
the same time. As stated before, this negotiated position in masculine representation
involves contradictions both in the encoding and decoding process.
As a result, the negotiated masculinity in Dances with Wolves is ġ sophisticated when
Dunbar, together with his alter ego on the flip side, “Dances with Wolves,” leads a double
life like Clark Kent/Superman in the Superman cycle. The low-pitched profile of “Dances
with Wolves” attunes to an age in which interracial conflicts address their ultimate
tension. It bespeaks the tolerant attitude of the white majority toward the ethnic
Otherness.
Even the insightful use of subtitled Indian dialogue is not innovative and could be
traced to an earlier film, Windwalker (1980), which again was pioneered by such films as
The Devil's Doorway (1950), Broken Arrow (1950), and Rim of the Arrow (1956) in the
decade that witnessed the Beat Generation, although these films engaged in dialogue
209
dubbing into ethnic language only sporadically.
With all its crystal-clear revisionist portrait of the Plains Indians (the Sioux), Dances
with Wolves still makes it too easy to dismiss the other "utterances." All the native
reactions and motivations are finally relegated to a decisive voice-over narrated by a
white male character, which fact, instead of providing insights, further isolates the Lakota
Indians by denying them a voice: the male Pawnee warriors are worse objectified as
unidentified, to say nothing of the Pawnee women and children who are double-displaced
so much as they are constructed as absent from their own displacement. Even among the
Sioux, the film offers few prominent parts for women. Only “Kicking Bird's” wife is
given the name “Black Shawl” whose cameo appearance (with one-liners only) functions
as catalyzing the marriage between her step-daughter, “Stands with a Fist,” and “Dances
with Wolves.” In addition, the ‘spoken’ trio of the pre-pubescent Sioux are all ‘boys’ led
by “Smiles A Lot.”
But more important for this argument is the fact that in the Sioux camp the Lakota
language is dying out as long as the employment of English by the red men is becoming a
crescendo: When “Kicking Bird” exchanges parting gifts with "Dances with Wolves" in
the final scene, they, both in native attire, communicate in English ʇ we wonder when
“Kicking Bird” learns to speak fluent English. More expressively, Dunbar is given
210
permission ʇ through the return of his diary by a Native American boy ʇ to represent
Lakota culture and values, now transparently reinscribed in Dunbar’s English text and in
himself. Also, we are treated to a sight in which “Stands with a Fist” and “Dances with
Wolves” (two renamed whites in Lakota costume) strike a romance with English as a
communicative tool which is hereafter used whenever they stay alone.
The subtitled Indian language introduces cultural difference in exposing non-Native
American viewers to the experience of hearing Lakota spoken and of having to rely on
subtitles for obviously broken translation. At the same time, however, the film ultimately
collapses cultural difference into cultural sameness by suggesting that the two languages
translate into each other ʇ for instance, Tatanka/Buffalo, same difference. In this context,
the subtitled Native ‘voice’ is more visually than aurally activated in speech acts, and is
thus strategically ‘dramatized,' rather than ‘narrated,’ in the text while Dunbar's English
voice-over, by contrast, bears an overwhelming impact through which dominance is
swayed in each enunciation. The English-dominated texture clearly asserts that the
implied interlocution of the narrative ʇ in Bakhtin’s rhetoric, dialogism ʇ essentially
refers to the white bourgeois majority audience.
The ethnic utopia incorporated in Dances with Wolves emerges as a myth which
allegorizes a nonracist, communal America. The Sioux and the Pawnees simply provide
211
the `background' for the ideological work of the film which is in essence carried out
through a Mythopoetic bourgeois hero. More noticeable is the hero's homecoming from
the primitive utopia in a film that starred the same actor Kevin Costner in the same year.
Dunbar/Costner's journey to the West parallels Robin/Costner's going off to the Crusades
in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1990). Their mental odyssey still likens the pilgrimage
of the volunteer private Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) to the Vietnamese Jungle in Platoon
(1986). All the three films tell a story of an alienated man finding himself in the
wilderness and returning home more mature and wiser. The filmic text is really about the
transformation of the Mythopoetic hero while the savages (Indians, Sherwood Forest
outlaws, and the Vietcongs) present themselves in the hero's shadow and move to the
hero's destination accomplishing meaning (irrespective of staying in a positive light
ephemerally).
Masculine Dominance Reinforced
How is male dominance reinforced in many societies around the world? In Gerda
Lerner's view, patriarchy, masculinity, and the masculine point of view could be defined
as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and
children...It implies that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and
212
that women are deprived of access to such power.”
83
By emphasizing masculinity as a mechanism for the installation of patriarchal
structure, Susan Jeffords proposes one step further that “it is possible to see ways in
which, through the structural relations of gender, men of color or of the working class or
of other groups oppressed via defined categories of difference can be treated as women ʇ ‘feminized’ ʇ and made subject to domination” (Jeffords, 1989, xii).
Jeffords’s thought may be applied to the western codes in that some elements in the
western film like refinement, virtue, civilization, and christianity are all seen as feminine
by some genre critics, such as Robert Warshow (Warshow, 137). To conquer the West, on
this subject, means feminizing the savages. In Dances with Wolves, we observe how the
tribe's most fierce warrior, “Wind in His Hair,” is completely `tamed' by Dunbar no less
than Two Sox, the domesticated pet wolf. In the first half of the film, his commanding
presence is sexually charged with an aura of danger just beneath his angry bluster. His
character is dramatically revealed in a confrontation with Dunbar: he charges on
horseback directly toward Dunbar, stopping only feet from the soldier, shouts his
defiance and lack of fear of this strange white man, and disdainfully turns his back on a
cocked pistol to demonstrate his contempt for Dunbar ʇ the image was vividly conveyed

83
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 239.
213
in Edward D. Castillo’s review.
84

In the epilogue, however, “ Ř ind in His Hair,” perching on a ledge high up near the
canyon rim, shouted: "Dances with Wolves...I am Wind in His Hair...Can you not see that
I am your friend?...Can you not see that you will always be my friend?" This
worshiping undertone reminds us of Shane's finale when the boy Joey cried, "Come back,
Shane." In such an analogy, the text of Dances with Wolves deliberately infantilizes
“ Ř ind in His Hairs” so as to castrate his aggressive prowess.
In terms of stereotyping the marginal groups, another parallel of the Indians to
women is in the polarization of the two native tribes, the Sioux and the Pawnees. The
binary opposition of the native stock images may call to mind the dual treatment of
women in film noir through mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism ʇ either by looking
at them from above, disapprovingly, as a menace, or by looking at them from below, as
something awesome but still ‘savage.’
Whereas the ‘Good’ Indians are fetishized on a pedestal, the ‘Bad’ Indians are
confined almost entirely as dangerous and destructive. The Sioux are hailed on a moral
high ground as ‘flower-children’ in the primitive Garden; the Pawnees are humiliated as
the obstacle to the hero's quest, suggestive of the Green Berets in Willard's journey in

84
Edward D. Castillo, Review of Dances with Wolves, Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 14.
214
Apocalypse Now. Both avenues transform reality: the cannibal-like Pawnees, impressive
with their roach haircuts, spring from the spit of the fire-breathing dragon ladies in noir
films. In such cases, the Indians serve as the Other, either as the ideal ‘double’ of the hero
or as the all-devouring monster.
It follows that the displacement of the ‘real’ Indians and women would disturb the
patriarchal system and pose a challenge to the world view. Accordingly, it is necessary to
deprive the ‘voiceless’ Other of access to power center. The ideological operation of the
myth, by way of explanation, the absolute necessity of controlling the wicked (the bad
Indians and the spider women), is fulfilled by first demonstrating their aggressive power
and its frightening results, then destroying them.
In the hero’s transformation into “Dances with Wolves,” we witness the disarming
process operative gradually and incrementally ʇ first his beard, then his uniform, hat,
boots, finally his mustache. When he reappears in a baggy Lakota feather cloak, he loses
his gun ʇ a symbolic connotation as the impotence, that is further crystallized physically
in the sequence in which the Union soldiers suspect him of treason, torturing him
impassionedly; his vulnerability is clearly incongruous with his manly valor when he first
encounters "Wind in His Hair," cocking his gun at the latter.
215
The subtle status of ‘masculinity’ in this sense is a case of trying to eat one’s cake
and have it too. It promotes our attention to the distinction between ‘masculinity’ and the
‘masculine’ point of view. Granting that the hero in Dances with Wolves plausibly
assumed ‘femininity’ and ‘savagery’ in himself (in the Lakota costume, for instance) , he
never isolated himself from the ‘masculine’ point of view (i.e., losing his monolithic
voice in the narrative), irrespective of the fact that the aural discontinuity may
demonstrate a shaky position sometimes. This is because the ‘masculine’ point of view
represents a likely disembodied voice of ‘masculinity’ that marks who masters the right to
speak in the narrative though it may not consistently be spoken by any character. (The
male voice-over in flashback in film noir fosters the best example ʇ That Mildred Pierce’s
short-lived voice-over usurps the subjectivity of the narrative in Mildred Pierce once
jeopardized the Symbolic Order).
The enunciating power is also latent in the hero’s ethnographic writing. Alone on the
vanishing frontier, Dunbar keeps a journal in which he records the customs, costumes,
mores, and language of the Lakota Sioux as well as his own process of personal
redemption. The journal inscribes a prototypical instance of what James Clifford has
216
ciphered as an ethnographic “fable of rapport.”
85
In his critique of ethnographic realism,
the ethnographic encounter itself becomes, here, the subject of the book, a fable of
communication, rapport, and, finally, a kind of fictional, but potent, kinship. As Judith
Newton & Judith Stacey’s work suggests, Dunbar in this journal writing “constructs his
own authority as ethnographer-redeemer as well as the triumph of Western technology
and artifice over the “authentic,” traditional Lakota, who are thereby encoded as
incapable of representing themselves” (58).
With such an omniscient voiceover and journal writing, the masculine text in
Dances with Wolves is not only the record but also the sign of Dunbar’s ability to see
beyond his culture’s racist constructions of cultural difference: “Nothing I had heard
about these people was correct.” It is through this book-writing that Dunbar enters into a
brotherhood with the Sioux males and in the process disowns his own imperialist
patriarchy.
The deliberate feminization seeks to create a mode of shamanistic remasculinization
that surpasses legal, bureaucratic, gender, racial or other social connections. The
ideological work in Dances with Wolves displays, in essence, a Mythopoetic hero in the

85
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); also see Newton and Stacey, 58.
217
Nineties who combines potential leadership in Eastern society with the wild mythical
power in the West. He introduces racial tolerance to the postmodern America which is
evolving into a rather rigid system divided by class, gender, ethnicity and race. He is
heroic and modest too. He is able to do this without developing savage traits or forgetting
that he is the agent of progress and Order in the modern West.
Forrest Gump (1994)
[L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth
and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we
are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it.
Michel Foucault
86

It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the
present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first
place.
Fredric Jameson
87

86
Michel Foucault, Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76: Society Must Be Defended.
87
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), ix.
218
To quote Foucault and Jameson, I’m submitting a question: Is a popular film like
Forrest Gump “obliged to produce the truth” in an age that “has forgotten how to think
historically”? To elaborate Foucault’s insight of the art of government, a postmodern
blockbuster like Forrest Gump definitely finds its form of crystallization, organized
around the theme of reason of the symbolic order and largely limited to a type of
optimizing truth function. In its subdued recuperation of masculinity, Forrest Gump
seems to propose that inasmuch as our chief concern is the overall strength of the human
values, we attempt to keep the society from dispersing while not abandoning too many of
the weak, sick and hungry. This is the ‘truth’ of the American collective unconscious in
the Nineties, and the only truth not essentially to be fabricated.
In a different way, Jameson’s notion of postmodernism reveals that we are living in
time, but outside history. Forrest Gump knows only too well that the contents of
historical, and other narrative are just more images. The movie made the grounds for its
rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past, especially when Gump
appears to inhabit history, though we know that is not possible.
Although Forrest Gump was adapted from the 1986 novel into the 1994 movie, it
raises questions in which commentators as different as presidential candidate Patrick J.
Buchanan, who saw it as a testament to Republican values and virtues, and Michael J.
219
Lerner, who believes it speaks to the real need for a "politics of meaning," have both
found genuine cultural importance (Lavery, 1997). The issues are central not simply to an
understanding of the film's tremendous popularity but to any assessment of the current
state of American mass psyche.
Jennifer Hyland Wang, like most of the film scholars with emphasis on media
studies, reads the film as a resonant cultural and political image in the right-wing effort to
"redefine America." She discusses specific sites of critical, popular, and political
discourse about the film and its themes to document the cross-articulations within the
political climate of the 1990’s America, the movie, and the ideological agenda of the
Republican right. In her vision, political conservatives used the film to articulate a
traditional version of recent American history and to define their political ground in the
1994 congressional elections.
In my conceit, however, this argument dismisses probably a controversial issue: why
is a film, released in the Clinton years, able to articulate the opposing party’s conservative
nature and define their own political ground in the 1994 congressional elections? By the
time Forrest Gump swept most of the major 1994 Academy Awards, it had already
become the third highest-grossing film of all time, as well as a ubiquitous pop
220
phenomenon embracing best-selling books, and gnomic catch phrases.
88
Such a
marketing achievement couldn’t be made by solely the presumed Republican support.
Couldn’t it approximate the truth more likely in that the ticket-buyers of such a widely
marketed and praised film constitute a voting base equally divided into Democratic and
Republican parties? More probably, Forrest Gump, in a negotiated representation of
masculinity, is open to appropriation by both liberals and conservatives (as well as to
multiple political perspectives within and outside the American political system).
On top of this, this is not a ‘true and false’ question, but rather the limits of the
interpretive grid or overinterpretation. I have no doubt that a popular film responds to
topical political issues. But how far can we believe that the political figures influence us
how to think historically in addition to telling us what to think about? To what extent can
the use of the media by politicians and government officials convey ideas or share
information with the public? In my revisionist thinking, the politicians that try to shape
public opinions simply account for part of social history (on equal terms with Reagan,
Bush, or Clinton), but not in whole. Also, their influence is defined in the concept of
Durkheim’s collective representation, or Jung’s collective conscious (perceptibly at

88
It has even contributed words and phrases to the popular lexicon: a "gumpism" is a recognizable kind of
expression; "Life is like a box of chocolates" has taken on whole new levels of meaning.
221
variance with collective unconscious) ʇ it is because politicians always shape a top-down
model by exerting a fabricated influence on determining the agenda of topics for public
discussion, debate, and action. It is difficult for politicians to initiate, establish, or
maintain social agendas without the help and participation of the mass media industries.
The media force, in their turn, is used almost exclusively to keep the public "in line." But
don’t forget that the media can be used and abused by both the ruling and the opposing
party. Furthermore, the media force is also determined by the bottom-up processes, which
can act directly and indirectly on shaping or reflecting popular attitudes. The collective
unconscious is seen from the bottom up, in that the actions of many theatre-goers
formulate powerful forces that can themselves shape history.
We thus combine an explanation focusing on the varying preferences of the public
(the so called “bottom-up” approaches), coupled with a top-down model, to a lesser
degree, that elites (here, government leaders and parties) can shape public preferences.
While the voters/audience are likely to act on their self-interest, there is room for
politicians to influence how the voters/moviegoers see agreements affecting their social
interests. It is true that politicians can emphasize different consequences of policy to
different audiences to build, or erode, support for the agreement. Consequently, I argue
222
that both bottom-up and top-down forces shape mass preferences.
Rather than take into account top-down political factors, I will see more closely
that the collective unconscious is effective in the reproduction of the production, and that
the political influence is more probably reserved in a pivotal moment for a country in
turmoil or for those moments when the ideology has failed to reach full saturation (such
as during protests, governmental changes or inter-State conflicts). As a result, Forrest
Gump may as well be read to testify not so many Republican values and virtues as the
character traits of a Mythopoetic hero or a puritanical southern boomer.
Adaptation Aesthetic
To take up the previous argument, why and how is a popular film, adapted from the
novel specifically, supposed to shape mass psyche that possesses a common substratum
on the shady side of collective unconscious? In the history of the arts, “borrowing” is the
most frequent mode of adaptation. As Dudley Andrew posits, adaptation can “put into
play the intricate mechanism of its signifiers only in response to a general understanding
of the signified it aspires to have constructed” (97). Yet this matters specifically in regard
to its cultural reference. The success of adaptation rests much on the issue of its fertility,
not its fidelity. To study the mode of adaptation, we need to examine its existence as an
223
archetype in culture. Within this context, adaptation in the mode of grafting and
transplantation will always elevate film by demonstrating its participation in a cultural
venture whose value is outside film and outside texts altogether (either within the context
of Jung’s collective unconscious or Andrew’s adaptation theory).
It is quite plain that Winston Groom's novel is the product of the personal vision and
control of the writer, much like an art film that provides an artist’s more individual style
under the individual inspiration and vision of the author. Both the novel-writing and the
‘art house’ filmmaking that has only small ġ initial investment costs endorse a free, private
style of production, independent of the restrictions of established industry practices.
We can hence infer that the social issues rarely arise in the novel Forrest Gump as
much as in the film version and when they do, are treated without subtlety. A novel
mostly simplifies or simply ignores the influences of diverse hands in the making of a
popular film and also the influence of the public in shaping a mainstream blockbuster. So
does Winston Groom ignore the impact of technical developments upon the movie itself.
It was not possible, with Tom Hanks cast in the central role, to make Forrest Gump 6 feet,
6 inches tall and weighing 245 pounds. And the logic of making Gump a shrimp boat
captain rather than a very un-cinematic shrimp farmer is easy to accept.
224
Correspondingly, the main character Forrest Gump in the novel does not conform to
creating the public memory in the decade of a new generation, which is closely contrived
in the title character’s image of Bly’s top 10 best-selling book, Iron John, and is further
mystified in the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and other unconscious cultural
adjustments in the 1990’s. In Groom’s story, Gump repeatedly uses profanity, is mildly
racist, and is sexually active; indeed, he loses his virginity to a boarder at the Gump
house who seduces him. In the movie, Gump attaches more importance to the family
adjustment and the postmodern hero's tender endearment. He is morally upright and
squeaky clean; he has sex for the first time with Jenny only very late in the action of the
film, and it is this one experience which leads to the birth of Forrest, Jr.
89
A closer examination will bring to light that adaptation serves pivotally as it is the
ideological difference between the two versions in various media. In the novel, Gump
ignores his mother for years on end. While he is in Vietnam, the family house burns to the
ground, and his mother eventually ends up in the poorhouse, which causes Gump no great
distress. Such a Gump transcription is far from reflecting the affable portrayal of the
Mythopoetic Man in negotiated representation. It transpires that transgression and
infidelity are both imperative in the film version on condition that Gump is resolutely

89
See more details in David Lavery’s article, “‘No Box of Chocolates’: The Adaptation of Forrest Gump.”
225
faithful to his mother; he literally comes running when he learns she is ill; he is at her
bedside when she dies and grieves long and hard over her passing.
90

Boomer as a Mythopoetic Hero
Is Forrest Gump begging pardon for the baby boomers through the character of
Jenny? If so, to whom and for what is she making amends? According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, a baby boomer was born between 1946 and 1964.
91
In an article “Baby Boom:
The Population Baby Boom of 1946-1964 in the United States,” ġ Matt Rosenberg ġ described that young males returning to the United States, Canada, and Australia
following tours of duty overseas during World War II began families, which brought
about a significant number of new children into the world. This dramatic increase in the
number of births from 1946 to 1964 in America is called the Baby Boom (Rosenberg,
2009). Much of this cohort of eighteen years (1946-1964) grew up with Woodstock, the
Vietnam War, and John F. Kennedy as president.

90
Lavery tends to attribute most of the changes that were made in adapting Groom's novel to Zemeckis's
film (19-20) to "marketing decisions" (21).
91
Boomers Life, "Baby Boom population - U.S. Census Bureau - USA and by State," accessed July 1,
2008,
http://www.boomerslife.org/baby_boom_population_us_census_bureau_by_state.htm.
226
In screen time, Forrest Gump surveys three and a half decades of American history
and culture through the eyes of a male boomer and tells its story from this leveling point
of view. A generational fear of the liberal, urban baby boomers that's likely going to stay
unfinished leads to the search for culprits and the remasculinization of America.
Meanwhile, many of the Mythopoetic boomers thought it was their mission to save the
world. The world remained unsaved, though mightily improved in many aspects, but the
sense of failure nags ȹ a measure of the magnitude of youthful hopes. But fear can't
explain the entire phenomenon. Riding this current, Robert Bly, as no boomer himself, in
The Sibling Society, fulminates that "we navigate from a paternal society, now discredited,
to a society in which impulse is given its way. People don't bother to grow up, and we are
all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults....Adults regress toward adolescence; and
adolescents ȹ seeing that ȹ have no desire to become adults." Bly asks: "How did we
move from the optimistic, companionable, food-passing youngsters gathered on that field
at Woodstock to the self-doubting, dark-hearted, turned-in, death-praising, indifferent,
wised-up, deconstructionist audience that now attends a grunge music concert? That is
the question we need to answer." Bly comes to the conclusion in an ancestor-worship
gesture. "Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism," he writes,
"but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions, and literature handed down to us by
227
elders and ancestors."
In Forrest Gump the movie, the story unfolds with flashbacks, narrated in
slow-talking southern boomer’s accents by Gump (Tom Hanks) sitting on a bench. Gump
plays a sweet-natured, shabbily treated man. He is Ţ ġ child of the early boomer generation
from the South, born with a mental handicap, who finds strength in God, his country, a
childhood friend Jenny, and his mama. As Jenny is about to leave with her hippie
boyfriend, Gump grumbled, “You know what I think? I think you, should go back, to
Green-Bow, AL-A-BAM-A! deep south.”
Released in the Clinton years, Forrest Gump is noteworthy in that both the title
character and President Clinton are not the traditional southern boomers. When then
Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton stepped down as DLC (Democratic Leadership Council)
chairman to run for president in the 1992 presidential election, he presented himself as a
"New Democrat."
92
Although the label "New Democrat" was briefly used by a
progressive reformist group including Gary Hart and Eugene McCarthy in 1989,
93
the
term became more widely associated with the policies of the Democratic Leadership

92
Michael Kelly, "The 1992 Campaign: The Democrats; Clinton Uses Farm Speech to Begin New
Offensive," New York Times, September 28, 1992.
93
Steven L.Herman, "The ‘New Democrats’ are Liberals and Proud of It," Associated Press (December 4,
1989).
228
Council, whose members in 1990 renamed their bi-monthly magazine from The
Mainstream Democrat to The New Democrat.
94
These southern boomers advocated a
political "Third Way" as an antidote to the electoral successes of Reaganism.
95
As the
first American boomer president, the pro-southern former governor characterizes the
transformation from conservatism to liberalism and embodies a mixed value system as
well, which exactly matches the negotiated masculinity of a Mythopoetic hero.
The clearest parallel lies with that authentically American Southern view of man and
his world with a puritan ethic and a Christian ethic. Small towns have featured so
prominently in American culture that they have become a deeply rooted symbol in the
country’s collective unconscious.
For much of this century the term South conveys connotations of “prudish,” “racist,”
“repressed,” and “old fashioned.” What makes a southern small town is their sense of
social responsibility, the notion that man can create new means of bettering himself and
his environment. Like most powerful parents, the southerners provoked a powerful
reaction against social qualms.

94
Nicol C. Rae, Southern Democrats, Oxford University Press, 1994, 117.
95
John F Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, Random House, 2005.
229
Through believing in a great God, the puritanical southerners gained a vivid
awareness of the greatness of moral issues, of eternity, and of the human soul. When the
Puritans preached for ‘reformation,’ they had in mind a concern of order, disciplinary
code, and a state of revival, so as to be spiritually alert and ethically enterprising and
obedient.
In the Nineties, according to a 1998 Census Bureau report, the South had the
greatest number of voting-age residents (71 million), making up 35% of the country's
total electorate. The remainder of the total was distributed almost evenly among the
Midwest (23%), West (22%) and Northeast (19%).
In a Newsweek puff piece about Bob Dole and his generation's valuing of "self-
discipline over self-actualization," political columnist Joe Klein deplores "talking
about yourself excessively, celebrating yourself...what passes for ‘honesty’ among
baby boomers" (Newsweek, 2/12/1996) . Elsewhere, Klein writes that the Clinton’s
"low crimes and misdemeanors are mostly generation-specific...draft avoidance,
marital squiggles, chemical enhancement...moral relativism, the assorted seductions
and confusions of counterculture America....They bent the rules. They cut corners"
(Newsweek, 1/22/1996). ! !
230
In agreement with the southern boomer’s cultural context, the Mythopoetic men's
movement began with a few men attending lectures and weekend retreats. By 1990,
thousands of men ʇ most of them white, middle-aged, heterosexual, and of the
professional class ʇ had attended Mythopoetic events. Through the use of old fairy tales
and poetry, Bly and other Mythopoetic leaders, such as Michael Meade and James
Hillman, attempted to guide men on spiritual journeys aimed at rediscovering and
reclaiming "the deep masculine" parts of themselves that they believed had been lost.
Succinctly speaking, Bly argues that tribal societies had masculinity rituals, through
which adult men initiated boys into a deeply essential (natural) manhood. Furthermore,
urban industrial society, by severing the ritual ties between the generations of men and
replacing them with alienating, competitive, and bureaucratic bonds, obliterated
masculinity rituals, thus cutting men off from each other and ultimately from their own
deep masculine natures. In place of these healthy masculinity rituals, as Bly's words
suggest (1990), modern men revert either to destructive hypermasculinity or to a
"femininity" that softens and deadens their masculine, life-affirming potential (Messner
1997, 17).
In an article from April 1,1996 issue of The New Yorker, Michael Kelly, another
right-wing boomer’s political scribe, sneers that Clinton against Dole is "Elvis against
231
Bogart, the Vietnam War boomer against the Good War generation, the man of many
words against the man of few, the feeler of your pain against the tough guy who doesn't
even feel his own."
Like Clinton, Forrest Gump was another nontraditional southern boomer. He has
engaged in an almost religious pilgrimage for a grieving nation, for an America that still
hasn’t come to grips with the last thirty years of political assassinations, White House
corruption, a war that wasn’t won, sexual abuse scandals, and drive-by shootings. He is
not merely a survivor of the post-World War II era, he is largely the agent of redemption
for the society’s divisions. Specifically, he becomes a mediator who can reconcile
oppositions and heal the nation in the process; he can bridge the gap between the races,
between culture and counterculture, even between opposing philosophies.
In the 1990’s, the boomers become the 40-to-50-year-old middle managers and
higher earners in almost all managerial ranks. The U.S. businesses today are laying off
fewer people and creating almost as many jobs as they shed, says a new survey by the
American Management Association. Their earnings grew relative to other workers during
the past decade of generally stagnant wages. Many boomers have an economic cushion:
their working wives. Older boomers came of age during a still-buoyant job market and
bought homes before the steep jump in prices that shut out many of their younger
232
brethren during the 1980’s. “Since 1990, about three-quarters of the growth in the voting
age population has occurred in the 45- to 64-year-old age group,” said Jennifer Day, the
author of the 1998 Census Bureau report.
Increasingly, baby boomers will be shed from corporate payrolls. When these
worries are so close to the bone, it's the boomers' turn to warm to the sound of "family
values" and wish their children could assert their authority. As Bly taunts, the impulsive
now want to be impulse-controllers, and don't like the way that feels. In the 1960’s, the
boomer teenagers chalked up all the shouting across the dinner table to a generation gap.
Now with children of their own, it appeared to be coming back to haunt the boomer
parents; only this time, the shoe is on the other foot.
According to the 1990 census, of 746,900 lawyers, 24 percent were women, with
minorities registering seven percent. Women demanded ȹ and got ȹ policies on sexual
harassment, maternity leave and part-time lawyering. Boomers also provided a sizable
pool from which minorities could be recruited. And men started talking about personal
issues such as the need to spend more time with their families. All these boomers’
features in social history may increase understanding of the protagonist in Forrest Gump,
who ! always appears to defend American family values, engaged in more sophisticated
gendered displays and racial relations ʇ a critical stance I will foster, rather than simply
233
identify Gump with a Republican sympathizer.
The Myth Archetype
In redefining the "trust me" image in the 1990’s, Forrest Gump reshaped the western
myth and transformed it from how the west was won into how the Vietnam was redeemed.
It indicates that masculinity in hegemonic representation in the early Eighties does not
coincide with what most Americans believed now. The mediated collective memory plays
in reconstructing concepts of the American nationhood.
In the opening sequence of Forrest Gump, a feather wafts out of the sky to land at
Gump's feet. It appears in one long unbroken pan shot. Through the Eyes of Gump, the
feather has a shadow and a reflection everywhere. Gump picks up the feather and places
it inside his copy of the children's novel Curious George. The feather gets carried around
in the book throughout the real time of the film, only to be produced once again, right at
the film's end, in which Gump picks up the feather again that has wafted to his feet,
begins generously to tell his life story to a succession of strangers, and then goes off to
meet Jenny and his son. In so doing, Gump apparently believes that life really is "like a
box of chocolates"; you may really never know what you're going to get, but if you're a
simple-minded all-American "good guy" like Gump, at least you know that whatever you
234
get, it will be sweet (Lavery, 1997). The silent presence of the feather is a visual pun.
Linked to the box of chocolates and the children’s novel, the feather creates the myth of
Gump’s "everyman" characteristic of naivety that certainly argues strenuously for the
virtues of conformity and "good" behavior.
The film exposes the power of Gump’s mediated masculinity to reconstruct
preexisting discourses in particular ways to particular effects. Through the film’s
representation of gender and race and the filmic representation of the 1960’s, it
effectively revised popular memories of the era. The theme of ‘being stupid’ in Forrest
Gump resonates the theme of ‘being native’ in Danes with Wolves, and ‘born to be wild’
in Daniel-Day Lewis’s Mohican in The Last of the Mohicans.
As a magic and myth maker, Gump is born to an Alabama boardinghouse owner
who tries to correct her son’s posture by making him wear braces, but who never
criticizes his mind. When Gump is called "stupid," his mother tells him, "Stupid is as
stupid does." Also, when the braces finally fall from his legs, Gump astonishingly can run
like the wind. The scene brings to mind the opening sequence of Dances with Wolves, in
which the cavalry officer’s foot is about to be amputated, and we see him astride his
horse, arms raised in crucifixion, riding in a suicidal charge at the Confederate lines. It’s
no wonder that both the myth-making scenes in Forrest Gump and Dances with Wolves
235
are filmed in slow motion.
As Jung has stated, the archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a
motif - representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic
pattern. The archetype is simplified, inclusive of the persona, the shadow, the anima, the
animus, the great mother, the hero, and the self. The archetype can be used for a sense of
understanding as well as for a state of treatment (Jung, 1964). Thus, the archetype of
initiation in Forrest Gump is strongly activated to provide a meaningful transition with a
‘rite of passage’ from one stage of life to the next. Such stages may include being
parented, initiation, courtship, marriage, age, and even preparation for death.
The braces that Gump wears at the beginning of the film are concurrently designed
to straighten his back, to make him less "crooked than a politician."
Gump's successes begin, pointedly, when he breaks free of the cumbersome braces and
begins to run. The focal point shifts gradually from the externalized male physique to the
inner emotional involvement of the hero. In the scene where his braces break away,
Gump barges past an idyllic fishing scene beside a stream and then immediately through
the middle of an Alabama chain gang; the romantic image is undercut by a gruesome
reality.
236
The dramatic transition in the plot this way presents the new image of masculinity in
negotiated tendency ʇ the hero is blended with ‘femininity’ verbally. Jenny tells Gump
not to be brave; if he ever gets into trouble, he's supposed to "run, just run away." Jenny
is pictured several times in the film yelling, "Run, Forrest, run." And virtually all of
Gump's successes can be attributed directly to his following of that advice, in both literal
and figurative senses.
That's how Gump gets a college football scholarship, in a life story that eventually
becomes a running gag about his good luck. Gump’s running talent is further bonded with
values of natural instinct and primitivism that coexist in Tom Cruise character in Far and
Away, who became a brutal-conscious pugilist (by extension, being ‘wild’). The myth
goes on when Gump the football hero becomes the Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam,
and then the Ping-Pong champion, the shrimp boat captain, the millionaire stockholder,
an original investor in Apple Computers, and finally the man who runs back and forth
across the country for several years.
Ethnic Syncretism
The Mythopoetic hero in Forrest Gump is a more bland, sophisticated man,
237
accommodating the seedy postmodern ideals of empathy, tolerance, and care that are
tended to the traditionally repressed. He is able to recuperate the charisma in mitigating
controversial issues such as the interracial grudge in the real Vietnam War. As Peter
Chomo discusses in “Forrest Gump and Postmodernism,” Gump's role characterizes a
social mediator and an agent of redemption in divided times. In the novel, Gump's buddy,
Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue, is a white southerner, and they meet at the University of
Alabama, where he and Gump are members of the football team. Bubba, in the film
version, is an African-American man, however, with a distended lower lip. The film’s
identification of Bubba as an Afro-American reiterates Forrest’s ‘color blindness.’ After
graduation, Gump enlists in the United States Army, where he becomes friends with
Bubba, who meets Gump on the bus on the way to basic training for the Army, and then
they agree to go into the shrimping business together. In both novel and film, Bubba
makes possible Gump’s ventures in the shrimp business. In more sophisticated ways,
Louisiana's shrimp business in the film, Biyou Ia Batre, is remodeled into a largely
African-American enterprise, while Gump’s triumphant success (after a hurricane wipes
out his competition) is at the expense of the other Black shrimpers.
In the following segment, Gump’s mediated masculinity suitably appropriates the
meanings of ethnic remedy. When Gump talks about Bubba's ancestors, he happily
238
inverted the imagined spot in which Bubba's mom uses Bubba's share of Gump's
shrimping venture. Bubba's mother is later served lunch by a white lady, using the exact
same shot as the one of Bubba's mother's ancestors doing the same thing for their white
employers. This message is most clearly communicated when Gump shares the millions
he earned in the shrimping business with the impoverished family of his deceased best
friend.
In this single private gesture, these personal family histories are filmed to make
them explicitly fictional. It connotes an "integrated" view of American society where
African Americans are included. Yet the politically correct thinking is constrained by
concerns about the ethnic minorities who are willing to befriend the Mythopoetic hero.
The non-conformists, on the other hand, are treated very badly, whether black or white:
the Black Panthers are a bunch of gun-waving thugs; the white revolutionary Wesley, one
of the leading protestors and Jenny’s boyfriend at the time, is condemned as a male
misogynist disguised as a civil rights and equality proponent. More disputably, when
Jenny is physically abused by Wesley in the Washington March scene, the Panthers stand
by and watch the beating; only Gump, stepping in to save Jenny, punches Wesley and
knocks over a poster. In addition, the audience is allowed to hear much of the
unidentified Black Panther's threat of racial war, while most of the party members are
239
silent in other scenes, filmed as the angry stooges in the frame. The white celebrity
figures, in contrast, all participate in the soundtrack (through the face-to-face
interlocution with Gump). The film's emphasis on the threat of black violence seems to
suggest that the interracial tolerance be not secured, supposing the ethnic minorities
infuse "their liberal values" into the American cultural mainstream ʇ the need for
race-based political remedies, such as an affirmative action, is finally eliminated.
Notably too, it is a Vietnamese woman that Lieutenant Dan happily married in the
end, when he has acquired a new pair of prosthetic legs. To read between the lines, it
insinuates that even though the U.S. army failed to vanquish the murderous Vietcong,
they could marry one at least, to defuse the ethnic threat once and for all.
Redeeming the Imperfect Past
In Forrest Gump, Gump plays a white messiah to redeem America in the three
historical moments: the Counterculture, Vietnam War, and the Civil War. In the first case,
Gump in the movie is an eternal representative of the 1950’s. He sports a 50’s crew cut
and crisp gingham shirts throughout the decades traced in the film. Oblivious to fashion
and, by implication, to change, director Robert Zemeckis makes Gump represent "all of
240
the good American virtues" ʇ honesty, tolerance, decency, goodness, and loyalty.
96

The United States in the 1950’s experienced marked economic growth - with an
increase in manufacturing and home construction among a post-World War II economic
boom (Dunar, 2006). The Cold War and its associated conflicts helped create a politically
conservative climate in the country, as the quasi-confrontation intensified throughout the
entire decade. Fear of communism caused public Congressional hearings in both houses
in Congress while anti-communism was the prevailing sentiment in the United States
throughout the period. Conformity and conservatism defined the social mores of the time.
Accordingly, the 1950’s in the United States are generally considered both socially
conservative and highly materialistic in nature. The 1950’s are noted in United States
history as a time of compliance, conformity and also, to a lesser extent, of rebellion that
characterizes beat generation.
If the male boomer in Forrest Gump stands at sunny side of the boomer generation,
the female boomer Jenny reversely represents its doppelgänger, the hero’s dark
counterpart. Jenny's date of birth (which can be seen on her tombstone) is July 16,
1945—the date reveals that she is a quasi-boomer in the first wave of the baby boom

96
In his book Film Nation, Robert Burgoyne examines Forrest Gump and illustrates the role that mediated
memory plays in constructing concepts of nationhood.
241
(1946-1964). Again, as her tombstone shows, Jenny died March 22, 1982, a year that
approximately defines the end of the Counterculture.
Jenny is, as it were, a miniature representation of the several factors that distinguish
the Counterculture of the 1960’s from the authority-opposition movements of previous
eras. The postwar "baby boom " constituted an unprecedented number of young, affluent,
and potentially disaffected people as prospective participants in a rethinking of the
direction of American and other democratic societies. Widespread use of marijuana and
psychoactive drugs contributed to this reevaluation.
As the filmmakers revealed, "in pumping up Jenny's role [from the novel to the film],
screenwriter Eric Roth transferred all of Forrest's flaws [in the book]-and most of the
excesses Americans committed in the '60s and '70s to her.”
97
That Jenny contracts a
"mysterious" virus may well signify the social ills of the Sixties. The disease identifies
the Sixties ideology as the cause of "a host of contemporary social ills from AIDS to the
drug crisis to the decline of the university." The film’s narrative draws a parallel between
Jenny’s personal history and the male character’s deep fears about the possible
breakdown of American society in the face of an underlying drive toward anarchy and
disintegration. Jenny's life takes her from a Catholic Schoolgirl to being in one of the

97
Richard Corliss, “The World According to Gump,” Time, August 1, 1994, 54.
242
early issues of Playboy, from a flower child of the 60's to a hippie protestor of the 70's.
Between her and Gump they cover all the significant cultural emblems of that time period,
the yin and yang forces of the boomer generation, and all the while their lives intersect
with each other repeatedly.
To reflect the seedy side of the Fifties, the Sixties were a period when long-held
values and norms of behavior seemed to break down, particularly among the young.
Many college-age men and women became political activists and were the driving force
behind the civil rights and antiwar movements. Other young people simply “dropped out”
and separated themselves from mainstream culture through their appearance and lifestyle.
Attitudes toward sexuality appeared to loosen, and women, like Jenny, began to openly
protest the traditional roles of housewife and mother that society had assigned to them.
98
In this manner, Forrest Gump perceives the semblance of historical revisionism.
Though Jenny dies tragically, she leaves Gump with his son, and apparent hope for the
next generation. The nuclear family survives intact (indeed, appears to thrive) until Gump
accompanies his son to the school bus for the first time, at which point, the redemption of
the imperfect past completed, the feather is ready to be released again to bring the story,

98
“The Counterculture of the 1960s,” accessed,
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/more-subjects/history/us-history-ii/the-new-frontier-and-the-great-society/the-c
ounterculture-of-the-1960s.
243
and the film, to an end.
In the second case, Gump in the film states that he was named after a "General
Forrest," namely, a Confederate general and perhaps the American Civil War's most
highly regarded cavalry and partisan ranger (i. e., guerrilla leader). Unfortunately, after
the war, General Nathan Bedford Forrest (also played by Tom Hanks) became the first
Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization of Confederate veterans, many of
whose members began to use force to oppose the extension of voting rights to blacks, and
to resist Reconstruction-introduced measures for the ending of segregation.
99
In the film,
Gump's history is not told historically, but through the film clips that are obvious
references to such a notorious piece of historic event. Just like that, Gump himself is
situated in a personal history, in which he tends once again to redeem the imperfect past
of his namesake, or nominal ancestor.
In the third case, the Vietnam War in Forrest Gump embodies a postmodern
narrative space in which the hero shuttles back and forth through time and space. The
movie is ingenious in taking Gump on his tour of recent American history, and get in the
way of exploring the importance of electronic media in American culture. The technical

99
“Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877),” accessed,
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/chron/civilwarnotes/forrest.html.
244
tour de force places Gump, as it does, into historical situations with historical characters,
using archival footage and stand-ins seamlessly and convincingly. Despite his sub-normal
IQ, Gump manages between the 1950’s and the 1980’s to become involved in every
major event in American history. And he survives them all with only honesty and
niceness as his shields. Gump teaches Elvis Presley to dance, meets John F. Kennedy,
serves with honor in Vietnam, meets Lyndon Johnson, speaks at an anti-war rally at the
Washington Monument, hangs out with the Yippies, defeats the Chinese national team in
table tennis, meets Richard Nixon, discovers the break-in at the Watergate. Using
carefully selected TV clips and dubbed voices, the movie is able to create some hilarious
moments, as when President Johnson examines the wound in what Gump describes as
"my butt-ox." And the biggest laugh in the movie comes after Nixon inquires where
Gump is staying in Washington, and then recommends the Watergate. Gump stands next
to the schoolhouse door with George Wallace; he visits the White House three times; he's
on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon, and in a sequence, he addresses a
Vietnam-era peace rally on the Mall in Washington.
During the Vietnam War, Gump is seen running back into the combat zone to try to
find Bubba, only to be called upon by other soldiers to rescue them, which he did by
carrying them to the river. What he did was technically heroic although he didn't intend to
245
save 4 others and be awarded the Medal of Honor. Put another way, the Vietnam War is a
narrative like any other. As Gump can be inserted into a story, therefore he can be
inserted into history; other unreferred figures can just as easily be expunged. A further
appraisal of the treatment of the Vietnam War as a malleable history that Gump can play
with is discussed in his interaction with Lieutenant Dan as follows.
Traditional Patriarchy Crippled
It’s no coincidence that the fathers of the two main characters, Jenny and Gump,
were in one case sexually abusive and in the other, physically absent.
100
In the film, the
objective in such a narrating process is to invalidate the hegemonic masculinity as a
culturally normative ideal of the male behavior in the 1990’s. The negotiated gesture of
the Mythopoetic hero in Forrest Gump is able to supersede the traditional patriarch as a
new archetype of masculinity that American society strongly encourages men to embody.
Another male figure who allegedly incorporates the traditional patriarchy is
Lieutenant Dan. In the movie, Dan is Gump’s commanding officer and is saved (against
his will) by Gump heroically carrying him away from a Vietnamese fire fight. In the

100
Rather than having Gump's father go "on vacation" as he does in the movie, in the novel he gets
squashed flat by a load of bananas owned by the United Fruit Company.
246
novel, Dan is not Gump's commanding officer, nor does Gump save him in battle (he
meets him later in the hospital). On screen, Dan loses his legs in combat; in the book he
has not only lost his legs but is horribly scarred by burns received in combat. As the
film’s narrative goes, Gump was sent to Vietnam, and on June 7
th
, 1965, when his platoon
was ambushed; Gump saves many of the men in his platoon, including platoon leader, 2
nd
Lt. Dan Taylor. Gump himself is injured and receives the Medal of Honor. While
recovering from his injuries Gump meets Dan again. Now an amputee, he is furious at
Gump for leaving him a "cripple" and cheating him out of his destiny to die in battle like
his ancestors. Once again Gump encounters Dan, now an embittered drunk living on
welfare. Dan is scornful of Forrest's plans to enter the shrimping business and mockingly
promises to be Gump's first mate if he ever succeeds. One more time, such a
transformation in the film is significant in that without Gump’s help, Dan may become a
grotesque character and play a distant and ironic role in the remaining life. In the novel,
the last time the readers meet him, Dan has become a bitter communist. In the early
segment of the film, Dan serves first as Gump's mentor; then, after struggling with his
own despair and depression, he plunges into a life of drunkenness and debauchery; and
finally, he learns the will to live from the indomitable Gump. His service on Gump's
shrimp boat turns his life around and gets him "back on his feet," so to speak.
247
Since the quintessence of Dan’s hegemonic masculinity in Forrest Gump is not
capable of securing white male supremacy and dignity, the lieutenant wanted to die in
combat, so naturally. Yet he doesn't take living with amputated legs too well. It is Gump,
who, as an interloper in history, turns Dan into a double amputee but sanitizes the
imperfect past tapered in Dan’s amputated legs.
The Gendered Syncretism
Syncretism is an attempt to reconcile and meld disparate or contrary beliefs. This
mode of masculinity is able to express and contain elements of liberal feminist ideology
while remaining complicit with dominant gender ideology. As a strategy of
representation, it also operates by leveling some gender differences, effacing ideological
"critique," and framing ideas of "self," friendship, and loving in terms of middle-class,
therapeutic culture and ideology.
As Gump's life becomes a guided tour of American political history (whose celebrity
figures constitute the elite culture ʇ the nation’s collective conscious), Jenny goes on a
parallel tour of the Counterculture (the popular culture ʇ reminiscent of the nation’s
248
collective unconscious). She goes to California, of course, and drops out, tunes in, and
turns on. She's into psychedelics and flower power, antiwar rallies and love-ins, drugs
and needles. Eventually it becomes clear that between the two tours Gump and Jenny
have covered all of the landmarks of recent American cultural history.
Jenny goes from country girl to hippie to political activist to druggie and onward.
Jenny's dream of being a folk singer materializes only when she appears on stage in a
strip club wearing nothing but a guitar. The self-destructive paths of social change, sexual
freedom, and experimentation explored by Jenny and those surrounding Gump, lead only
to ruination.
Though Jenny dies tragically, she leaves Gump with his son, and apparent hope for
the next generation. The nuclear family survives intact (indeed, appears to thrive).
Gump’s single-parenting is a mediated demonstration of new patriarchy. After Jenny's
illness and death, Gump takes on the responsibility of raising his young son. In this
fashion, Gump portrays the triumph of the single father. In fact, one could argue, as did
the Village Voice, the film "defines the ultimate family value ... as single fatherhood."
In the movie Jenny rivals Gump for narrative attention only during the film's
presentation of the Sixties. Jenny visually moves from off the screen to center stage to the
margins of society, all in Gump’s voiceover and flashbacks. Jenny is mostly associated
249
with birds, from the moment she asks Gump to pray with her, “Dear God, make me a bird,
so I can fly far. Far, far away from here.” The image is recalled in a conversation after
Gump sees Jenny performing on stage and speaking the line, “Do you think I could fly
off this bridge?” Later, we see her contemplating suicide again, ready to jump off a
double bed, with Free Bird’s
101
solo wailing in the background. The bird symbolizes
Jenny’s liberal values that bolster Gump’s fantasies and memories of rescuing Jenny from
her sexual and moral degradation.
In a word, Forrest Gump emphasizes the discursive link between the threat of
sexually autonomous white females. Jenny moves on an ever-increasing path of
self-destruction.
To conclude, Forrest Gump characterizes an "integrated" view of American society
where ethnic and gendered relations have progressed, the film implies. Gump’s mediated
memory plays in constructing concepts of American nationhood in the new decade. It
spotlights Gump's generosity and sense of fair play in the Mythopoetic man’s negotiated
masculinity that supports a "politics of virtue" and permits the erasure of social difference.
Gump’s “stupidity” fittingly corresponds to Dunbar’s “femininity” in Dances with Wolves,

101
Although the rock 'n' roll group never topped charts (their biggest hit, "Sweet Home Alabama", topped
out at #8 on Billboard), Free Bird remains beloved by tons rock fans, especially in the South, where fans
embraced the band as a counter to the "protest bands" that popped up in the '60s.
250
a parable for mild masculinity. In superseding the multiple narratives of this era with a
singular narrative woven by Forrest Gump, Gump carries its audience to "the Promised
Land," to the Mythopoetic values and a southern boomer’s gender and racial roles. Gump
as a savior, endowed with blankness and innocence, allows him to embody a
trans-historical sense of morality. Gump expresses this thought in much more saccharine
fashion, announcing that his mother used to say life was like a box of chocolates because
"you never know what you're gonna get."
251
Chapter Five
Profeminist Men’s Engagement and Surrogate Motherhood
Big Daddy
Speech and images in sitcom, as well as all forms of its aesthetic production consist in
one way or another in the struggle with and for representation.
ʇ Fredric Jameson
102
Pro-feminist men are considered by some to be a stream of the modern men's
movement sympathetic towards feminism. Modernization was characterized by the
closing of the frontier, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of modern bureaucracies
(with the resultant decline of the significance of physical strength in most middle-class
occupations), and the fact that modern urban boys were increasingly separated from their
fathers and placed in the care of mothers (in homes) or female schoolteachers. The
resultant changes in work and family life brought on by modernization led to "fears of
social feminization," especially among middle-class men. Some men responded to these
fears with the creation of homosocial spheres of life such as the Boy Scouts of America,
organized sports, fraternal orders and lodges, and college fraternities.

102
Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. S. Nelson
and L. Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 348.
252
In short, masculinist responses to men's fears of social feminization resulted in
men's creation of homosocial institutions in which adult men, separated from women,
could engage in "masculine" activities, often centered around the development and
celebration of physical strength, competition, and violence. Some of them (Boy
Scouts, sports) were institutions in which fathers hoped to initiate their sons into
manhood through physical activities that were viewed as masculine returns to
"nature" that they hoped would counterbalance the "feminizing" effect of modern
urban social life (Messner, 1997).
In the early 1970’s, a radical feminist male discourse and practice was born in the
same welter of activity that bred men's liberation. In the spring of 1971, a collective of
four radical men in Berkeley, California, put out the first issue of Brother: A Male
Liberation Newspaper. By the fall of 1971, the third issue of Brother now had a different
subtitle: A Forum for Men Against Sexism. These radical Profeminist Engagements
focused a great deal on the "costs" of masculinity, as well as on the institutional
privileges afforded to all men under patriarchy (Messner 1997, 50).
For example, in 1971, one of the first expressions of this new men's consciousness
was published in a 60-page book called Unbecoming Men, a product of a Profeminist
253
men's consciousness-raising group. The men in the group critically examined their own
lives in light of the feminist dictum that "the personal is political." As a result, the book
was startlingly personal ʇ for instance, the men in the book discussed their own
masturbation habits and the pain of having been considered a "sissy" as an adolescent.
The lack of an analytical framework within which to discuss these personal feelings
tended to leave much of the early men's radical Profeminist discourse at the level of
guilty personal interrogation rather than critical social analysis (Men's
Consciousness-Raising Group, 1971).
In the late 1970’s, the consciousness-raising group shifted gradually to a social
agenda. As Andrew Tolson made perfectly clear in 1977, "for socialist men especially, it
is necessary to challenge a prevailing left-wing sectarianism which relegates questions of
personal and family life to peripheral status ʇ as 'women's issues'…It is vital that ‘men
against sexism’ begin to take a constructive position within this
debate ʇ supporting the attention to personal experience and the critique of socialist
dogmatism…The challenge to socialist men is to understand masculinity as a social
problem ʇ and thus to work together for a non-sexist socialist society (Tolson, 1977,
145-146; Messner, 1997).
254
The revolution of men's thinking advanced in the 1980’s and 1990’s, a slow
transformation of the reasons that men have supported feminism. The present-day
Profeminist men did not support feminism because of abstract conceptions of morality,
but for more concrete moral reasons. Women, they argued, actually expressed a higher
level of morality. Extending rights to women, therefore, would create a moralizing force
to temper male excess and help men resist the temptation to vice. Men who worked with
women in the temperance movement, the social purity movement and other social reform
efforts sought to extend women's role as the guardians of the home to include the national
home and hearth (Kimmel and Mosmiller, 1992, 16).
In a word, these men saw support for feminism as part of a larger project to
transform personal life in adherence to feminist and socialist principles. In this sense,
they supported feminism as men because of the gains that feminists sought to the crisis of
masculinity, a blueprint to liberate men from restrictive gender roles, and opened the
possibilities of sexual relations among equals. These differences among
Profeminist men's arguments emerged from a historical process that roughly paralleled
the life cycle of the younger (or the second wave) baby boomer generation ʇ in such
periods as boomers' adolescence (60’s and 70’s), adulthood (80’s), and parenthood (90’s)
255
ʇ and, no less than, the older Generation X-ers.
Not all the men in the boomer generation are attracted to the Mythopoetic
Movement, or respond enthusiastically to wild man and warrior imagery. ! In fact many
postfeminist men actively support women's demands for social, political, and economic
equality. The boomer generation was the first to include women and minority lawyers in
large numbers. In view of this, Hollywood corresponds to the social current with the rise
of courtroom films in a remarkable array - Presumed Innocent (1990), Reversal of
Fortune (1990), JFK (1991), Billy Bathgate (1991), A Few Good Men (1992), My Cousin
Vinny (1992), The Firm (1993), In the Name of the Father (1993), Body of Evidence
(1993), Guilty as Sin (1993), Serial Mom (1994), Murder in the First (1995), The
Crucible (1996), The Juror (1996), Primal Fear (1996), Sleepers (1996), Liar Liar
(1997), The Civil Action (1998).
Noticeably too, Hollywood depicts teen life as well in a more significant light in the
Nineties than had previous movies. The boomers' children in Home Alone (1990), My
Girl (1991), Home Alone 2 (1992), Beethoven (1992), Wayne's World (1992), This Boy's
Life (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), My Girl 2 (1994), Richie Rich (1994), Getting Even
with Dad (1994), Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1995), and Home Alone 3 (1997) all learn
something about self-reliance, to varying degrees, and appreciation for their family
256
through incredible experiences.
By contrast, when boomers themselves grew up in the 70's and early 80’s, their
image of stormy adolescence was relatively negative in the thrillers, disasters, and the
respective sequels: these films initiate a growing permissiveness in matters of on-screen
sex and nudity and a propensity for portraying sexually active teenagers, who first
committed a 'crime' of 'illegal' sex and nudity, and then either fell victim to the monster,
or were finally transformed into killers themselves in such films as Frankenstein on
Campus (1971), The Other (1972), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Carrie (1976),
Audrey Rose (1977), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Jaws 2 (1978), Halloween (1978),
Friday the 13th (1979).
In Halloween III (1982), for instance, we see adults plotting to kill millions of
American children; in Christine (1983) one teenager says, “Part of being a parent is
trying to kill your kids.” The phallic shark’s first attack in Jaws is commensurately on a
girl who has just seduced a boy into going skinny-dipping with her. Her transgressively
independent sexuality is suitably punished.
The sexual dimension in The Exorcist is graphically detailed in its rampage section
shock effects ʇ the indulgent close-ups of the head revolving on the girl’s shoulders; her
plunging a bloody crucifix into her vagina; the verbal obscenity on an unprecedented
257
scale; and the famous green bile that coils from her mouth (Andrew Tudor, 63).
What Friday the 13
th
takes from the horror codes is its invincible terrorization and
victimization of an isolated group of young people. In this, the first of a series, the killer
turns out to be woman seeking revenge because her son died in an earlier summer camp
swimming accident, while in the next two sequels, the psychotic is her inexplicably
resurrected son Jason himself. All three films build the tension on the frenzied killing of
isolated victims, and the female nudity and love making.
The bodies and souls of such teenagers are figured as possessed by demonic,
supernatural forces since they run amok and threaten both the family and the adult
authority that would keep them in the right place ʇ oppressed and at home.
As a part of their fatherhood with tender love, the Profeminist men in the Nineties
also started increasingly talking about personal issues such as the need to spend more
time with their families. In keeping with the decade's women's movement, the
Profeminist men supported women to lead lives outside the home resulting in a new sense
of independence. This concept of liberation and empowerment leaning on gender justice
was clearly reproduced in the Nineties' sitcoms and romantic melodramas - Pretty Woman
(1990), Bird On a Wire (1990), Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993),
258
Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Made in America (1993), I Love Trouble (1994), Reality Bites
(1994), Dead God (1996), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Honey, We Shrunk
Ourselves (1997), Patch Adams (1998), You've Got Mail (1998), Meet Prince Charming
(1999), Notting Hill (1999), Runaway Bride (1999). ! ! More significantly, whether it be comparatively conservative (Mythopoetic) or
liberal (Profeministic), the Hollywood myth is woven into a single kind of triumphant
appropriation of both camps by a far more sophisticated ideology than each embodies. As
Levi-Strauss observes, all myths provide "an interpretive grid, a matrix of relations which
filters and organizes life experience and produces the blessed illusion that contradictions
can be overcome and difficulties resolved" (Levi-Strauss, 1971, 590).
Although the Profeminist Men's Engagement started in the early 1970’s with a
radical feminist male discourse and practice, since the late Seventies, they have worked
quietly and vigilantly to support feminist women, to help reorient masculinity to a more
nurturing direction by embracing a feminist political vision (Michael Kimmel, 1995, 9).
As presaged by Madonna’s “hippie look” emblazoned on Vogue’s October (1992)
cover, and by Spike Lee’s simultaneous placement of Malcolm’s X on half the baseball
caps in America, that moment of the 60’s revival is finally upon President Bill Clinton,
the Baby Boomer voted most likely to succeed.
259
When Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner talked about his generation at the
magazine’s 25th-anniversary party, held within two weeks of the Clinton victory, he
gushed to a New York Times reporter, “It’s awesome to see somebody looks like me, and
who has been given this tremendous burden. I feel it all the more, because I could be in
those shoes.”
103
Not only had candidate Clinton graced the cover of Rolling Stone, he had posed on a
Harley in a black leather jacket, sung “Shout” with Whoopi Goldberg, gone on MTV and
said he should have inhaled, and, most dramatically, picked up his sax to play
“Heartbreak Hotel” for the audience of The Arsenio Hall Show.
104

As Jim Hoberman has posited, the Republicans orchestrated “a generational end-run,
associating Clinton with (as the JFK biography has it) Reckless Youth by creating a mock
Wonder Years for him complete with tremulous voice-over, some old duck-and-cover
footage, and the #1 pop song during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
105
Bush elected to play the sternly befuddled dad, accusing his rival of espousing
“Elvis economies,” and of making Elvis-like visitations on various issues. Before the
Democratic Convention, where Al Gore told the delegates that he had always dreamed of

103
Quoted in Jim Hoberman on Bill Clinton, “He Should Have Inhaled,” Artforum 31 (February 1993): 12.
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid.
260
being Elvis’ warm-up act, New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd had already
characterized the campaign as a struggle between “touchy-feelie” Democrats and “blood
and guts” Republicans. It was rock ‘n’ roll versus Sgt. Rock, King Elvis against Duke
Wayne.
106
In retrospect, the ghost of Malcolm X rose up to eclipse Jesse Jackson, and the new,
sexy Daniel Day Lewis in Michael Mann’s post-MTV Last of the Mohicans offered a
worthy comrade to the Democratic pair whom Newsweek positioned as “young guns.”
The morning after Clinton’s victory, the papers reported that the newly anointed president
spent election afternoon watching “a John Wayne movie” on TV .
I also suspect that the masculinity of the Afro-American hero (Mario Van Peebles) in
Posse (1993) is a deliberate imitation and adaptation of the “prevailing (white)
masculinity.” The underlying story of Posse features a group of mostly black infantrymen
who return from the Spanish-American War with a cache of gold. They travel to the West
where their leader searches for the men who lynched his father, and eventually the posse
goes into battle to establish justice. Told in this way, the film’s narrative reproduces the
dominant masculinity in the white cowboy genre, instead of eliciting the changing black
masculinities lived and reproduced in the same era.

106
Ibid.
261
Also categorized as part of Profeminist Men’s Engagement is Generation X,
commonly abbreviated to Gen X. It’s the generation born after the Western post-World
War II baby boom. Demographers, historians and commentators define the generation
with beginning birth dates from the early 1960’s to the early 1980’s. In 1965, the rate of
population growth was 1.21 percent, the lowest it had been since 1945 (Gorton Carruth,
1993).
The term was popularized by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales
for an Accelerated Culture. It was used in different times and places for various
subcultures or countercultures after the 1950’s (John Ulrich, 3). Gen X describes a
generational change from the later Baby Boomers who were born in the late 1950’s
(Joshua Glenn, 2008).
In American cinema, directors Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh,
Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater and Todd Solondz have been called Generation X
filmmakers. Smith is most known for his View Askewniverse films, the flagship film
being Clerks, which focused on a pair of bored, twenty-something convenience store
clerks in New Jersey circa 1994; Linklater's Slacker similarly explored young adult
characters who were more interested in philosophizing than settling with a long-term
career and family; Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse touched upon themes of school
262
bullying, school violence, teen drug use, peer pressure and broken or dysfunctional
families, mostly set in a junior high school environment in New Jersey during the early to
mid-1990’s (Dominique Russell, 2010).
Compared with previous generations, Generation X represents a more apparently
heterogeneous generation, openly acknowledging and embracing social diversity in terms
of such characteristics as race, class, religion, ethnicity, culture, language, gender identity,
and sexual orientation (Judy L. Isaksen, 2002).
On the negative aspects, Generation Xers are those grown up as children of divorce,
party animals. “If there is one classic image of the dubiously named Generation X, it is
the latchkey kid: the one walking home from school with a key around her neck, letting
herself into an empty house, eating a bowl of cereal, and plopping down in front of the
TV until Mom or Dad gets home. And then making herself dinner and tucking herself
into bed, with TV on softly in the background-company, confidant, parent,” writes
Michele Mitchell in A New Kind of Party Animal. The fallout from absent parents and the
immersion in and subsequent blase attitude toward mainstream media are two significant
threads in Mitchell’s "Gen X" exegesis. A former Capitol Hill press secretary and NPR
(formerly National Public Radio) reporter, Mitchell is convinced that the demographic
"18-35s" isn't the unparented-yet-spoiled, TV-glazed mass of morons that older folks love
263
to hate. On the contrary, she possesses a near-religious faith that Gen Xers are as
overachieving as she is, poised to shake up politics and society precisely because their
childhoods have made them immune to TV-manipulated images of a benign parental
government.
Big Daddy (1998)
Unlike melodrama, Big Daddy as comedy necessarily trades upon the surprising, the
improper, the unlikely, the unruly, and the transgressive in order to make us laugh; it
plays on deviations both from social-cultural norms, and from the rules that govern other
genres and aesthetic regimes. Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik explain that these generic
rules, in the case of comedy, demand both social and aesthetic indecorum. “It is hardly
surprising that comedy has so regularly involved the representation of what the ruling and
‘respectable’ elements in a society might regard as ‘deviant’ classes and their lives, since
the attitudes, speech, and behavior associated with such classes can be used to motivate
the representation of all kinds of impropriety” (4). It is hardly surprising, either, that the
position of the stereotype in all the comedies is so often highly ambiguous, depending
upon the extent to which it is used either as a norm to be transgressed or as the
264
ready-made embodiment of the unusual, the eccentric, and the deviant (4). Thus, Neale
and Krutnik conclude that while it can be seen why comedy has so often occupied an
exceptional position within specific aesthetic regimes and institutions, and why it has so
often been regarded as potentially ʇ or actually ʇ subversive, it can also be seen that that
potential is severely curtailed by the fact that ‘subversion’ and ‘transgression’ or
‘unruliness’ are institutionalized generic requirements (4).
Upon closer examination, Big Daddy is a mix of stand-up comedy and family sitcom.
Among the forms of comedy that have publicly flourished in the United States under the
conditions that have emerged since 1945, two general types have come to dominate:
stand-up comedy and situation comedy. Aesthetically at odds, these two subgenres of
mass humor form a Janus’s face of American culture. Stand-up, as David Marc has
explained, is a surviving bastion of individual expression. The stand-up comedian
confronts the audience with his or her personality and wins celebration ʇ the highest form
of acceptance ʇ or is scorned and rebuffed as a pitiable outsider (1989, 12). The sitcom,
by contrast, is the technology of the assembly-line brought to art. Whereas sitcoms
depend on familiarity, identification, and redemption of popular beliefs, stand-up comedy
often depends on the shocking violation of normative taboos (Sonny Koufax and the kid
Julian's urinating outdoors in Big Daddy, as a case in point).
265
More crucially and paradoxically, virtually all the hit sitcoms embrace the stand-up
comics: Sonny in Big Daddy is quasi-comedian, rich in physical traits or ability to
gratuitously display the stand-up comedian’s address to the audience.
107
In this respect,
Sonny Koufax/Adam Sandler on/off screen continues to expose a(n) (anti)heroic quality
to the text, eschewing the luxury of a clear-cut distinction between art and life. The other
main feature of the stand-up style ʇ the use of rapid one-off jokes (Sandler’s fast-talking
mannerism) shorn of any elaborate or elaborated context ʇ is also a feature of Gen. X’s
individuality. Jokes of this kind can be quickly inserted into the flow of a sitcom
discourse, or a session of questions and answers, without interrupting their progress or
disturbing their primary purpose to any great extent. Unlike the western hero, once
absorbed into the mainstream of civilization, losing his individuality, Sonny/Sandler
secures his effacing but assertive masculinity in Big Daddy, able to maintain his
individuality and escape from the encroachments of the melodramatic pathos by rejecting

107
A reminder to quite a few hit TV sitcoms in the Nineties: Roseanne Barr in Roseanne (the
Frito-chewing comedienne from HBO); Bob Saget, Full House’s widowed yuppie dad Danny Tanner, (who
also hosts America’s Funniest Home Video) and Dave Coulier (Joey, Tanner’s comedian buddy in Full
House), who co-hosts the spinoff series, America’s Funniest People with Arleen Sorkin. Even Tony Danza
(who plays “Tony” in both Taxi and Who’s the Boss?) and Ed O’Neill (Al Bundy) in Married...With
Children.But the most successful stand-up comedy TV series of all time is probably Seinfeld. The
eccentric personalities of the offbeat characters who make up Jerry Seinfeld's social circle contribute to the
fun.
266
a master narrative.
The use of unlinked ʇ or loosely linked ʇ jokes in Big Daddy, on the one hand, and
of Sandler’s ‘personal’ persona, on the other, are stylistic variation on the stand-up
routines. The I ʇ of the character Sonny Koufax is merged with the persona ʇ the I ʇ of
the actor Adam Sandler. And we may suggest that laughter in Big Daddy stems ultimately
from a pleasurable losing and regaining of a position for Sandler’s ego ʇ he evokes not
only delight but disgust and fear: this specifies adherence to socio-cultural norms during
the process of signification as long as his male unruliness carries a strongly ambivalent
charge.
As the counterpart of stand-up comedy, the narrative function in sitcom, citing
Jean-Francois Lyotard, “is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great
voyages, its great goal.”
108
Discourse is constituted by both words and images, and
unlike words, images (the star images in sitcom, in particular) have an iconic relationship
with their objects of reference. The new postmodern universe, with its celebration of the
surfaces, the vernacular, the self-as-commodity (Adam Sandler’s man-child persona in
Big Daddy unchanging from movie to movie, for example), threatens to reduce

108 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Introduction,” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge"
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), xxiv-xxv.
267
everything to the image, rather than in a theory of semiotic correspondence. With the
knowledge of generic convention, the sitcom makes the audience comfortable, but ʇ as
they say ʇ it also breeds contempt. Or in the case of Big Daddy, discontent ʇ in spite of
the film’s family-friendly scripts and the hero’s unerring stupidity but displaying
charming flashes of self-effacing naivety (still entitled to negotiated masculinity), plus
the unexpected mega-popularity of twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse as Julian.
The family sitcoms in the 1980’s in some degree can be traced to the screwball
comedies of the 1930’s in their relevance to the socio-economic clash. But it is a
distinctively 1980’s brand of domestic comedy which can be appropriately labeled
‘sole-parent’ comedy. The proliferation of these films, affiliated with a corpus of TV
sitcom programs, inarguably constitutes a cycle of which will in time post its own set of
rules and play on audience expectations.
Whereas screwball comedies of the 1930’s and 1940’s were made to reveal many of
the conventions of marriage under patriarchy, in seeking to hide these realities by
constructing a romantic mystification of marriage,
109
the sitcoms in the late Eighties and

109
During the 1930's and 1940's, Hollywood produced a genre of madcap comedies that emphasized
reuniting the central couple after divorce or separation. And the female protagonists were strong,
independent, and sophisticated. Stanley Cavell, for instance, in his book, Pursuits of Happiness: The
Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, examines seven of those classic movies for their cinematic techniques,
268
Nineties ʇ Three Men and a Baby (1987),
110
or Big Daddy ʇ as maintained by Tania
Modleski in a Camera Obscura essay, could be seen as the manifestation of the concern
about father’s rights while surrogate motherhood is the practice. Rather than being
considered feminist-inspired, Three Men and a Baby, as Modleski read it, is revisioned as
a practice of contemporary reconceptualization of the paternal role (69). At the end of the
original French film, the fact that the mother, exhausted form trying to care for the baby
alone, is shown asleep in her baby’s crib, indeed, points to the kind of infantilization of
woman, and comic inversion of mother/child roles (Modleski, 1988, 71). The effect of
films like Three Men and a Baby (or Big Daddy) is simply to give men more options than
they already have in patriarchy: they can be real fathers, “imaginary” fathers, and
surrogate mothers while women come to be configured as the incomplete moms. It is
possible, the sitcom shows, for men to take their increased participation in childrearing in
such a way as to make women more marginal than ever (80).
It would appear that now, since the 1980’s the family sitcoms depict the explicitness
with which the films rescue the father from his repressive, castrating function in the

and for such various themes as feminism, liberty and interdependence. Included are Bringing Up Baby
(1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and Adam's Rib (1949).
110
An American remake of the popular French film, Three Men and a Cradle.
269
Counterculture and admit his parenting desire for the child, thus usurping women’s
maternal function. It is essential to recognize that such an ‘illicit’ desire may be most
easily situated in the genre of comedy, which facilitates disavowal by allowing us to deny
the seriousness of its concerns.
In sole-parenting his textual children (or the adopted son), the hero in Big Daddy
possesses the defining position for the unmarked gender overlooked by feminism, the
masculine. The absent female becomes his reflection, perfectly mirroring his fantasy of
himself, as all traces of her resistance are ground away or space-out of the text/frame. As
Donna Haraway notices, visual inspection, always the privileged form of knowing for
western [feminist] scholars, shows only the reflection, copy, substitute, fetish, in an
endless chain of image-signifiers (1989, 234). In that perspective, Laura Mulvey contends
that the body of the (real) mother signifies the threat of powerlessness (castration), and so
the image of the mother can rouse anxiety (Mulvey, 1989). There is no end to the process
of deferring anxiety; it is endlessly reproductive of knowledge, self, and pleasure.
Here I quote a different opinion. Dina Ross, a Melbourne writer and journalist,
writes, “One of the saddest relics of feminism is the guilt that so many women feel at not
being perfect." Feminism's cruel fall-out has polarized mothers who do not work and
270
those who do. The stay-at-home versus work debate has become a minefield of prejudice
and antagonism, frequently and unfortunately fuelled by women themselves. Such
arguments not only fan the fire of guilt in both camps, they do nothing to ease the
dilemma.
111
From a socio-analytic concern, I suggest that it's a fact of life that a mother of Gen X
can never have it all. Whatever her choices as mother, there will be sacrifices. This is the
legacy the Mythopoetic boomers have never predicted, and one the Profeminist Gen
X-ers have not begun to come to terms with. It never means acknowledging that
Superwoman is a myth and, like all myths, it should be debunked.
In his research of the primate behavior, Harry F. Harlow found that his laboratory
cloth surrogate showed that fathers could replace mothers in the home. It is an
ambivalence built, by reversal, into the laboratory logic of replacement of the mythic
maternal function by its equally mythic paternal function (Haraway, 236). Instead of
stressing on visual castration anxiety (constructed in Freudian personal unconscious), I
prefer to take Harlow’s conclusion that “women threatened to replace men in the public

111
Dina Ross, “The Gen X Take on the Failings of Feminism,” accessed November 22, 2004,
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/The-gen-X-take-on-the-failings-of-feminism/2004/11/21/110097
2253493.html.
271
space of the economy....The socioeconomic demands of the present and the threatened
socioeconomic demands of the future have led the American woman to displace, or
threaten to displace, the American man in science and industry.” If this process continues,
the problem of child-rearing practices faces us with startling clarity. It is cheering, in
view of this trend, to realize that “the American male is physically endowed with all the
really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one
essential activity: the rearing of infants” (Harlow and Mears 1979, 125; Haraway, 1989,
236).
But by keeping the mother from the audience’s sight, both the scenarios of Big
Daddy and Three Men and a Baby effectively de-realize her as virtually nonexistent,
thereby suggesting that since the (biological) mother is the surrogate, the father must be
‘the real thing.’ It echoes the proliferation of the TV programs in the Nineties (Full House,
My Two Dads, Who’ s the Boss?, Mr. Belvedere), affiliated with a corpus of film sitcoms
(Baby Boom [1987]; Mr. Mom [1989]; Three Men and a Baby’s sequel, Three Men and a
Lady [1990]); Mr. Nanny [1992] and Kindergarten Cop [1990], which is twisted with a
theme of tough-man-made-new-man; and finally straightforward in Mrs. Doubtfire
[1993], a divorced man who disguises himself as a 60-year-old British nanny so he can
remain close to his three children).
272
One thing is clear. Although these changes by men are not all feminist-specific, the
growing concern with the “problem of masculinity” takes place within a social context
that has been partially transformed by feminism. As Michael Messner proposes, these
changes reveal that U.S. masculinity has received considerable attention in print
journalism, television, and film: The New Fathering, bolstered by the Profeminist Men’s
Engagement, and the increase in the prevalence of highly successful men weeping in
public.
112
Messner further maintains that these phenomena represent highly significant
(but exaggerated) shifts in the cultural and personal styles of hegemonic masculinity, but
these changes do not necessarily contribute to the undermining of conventional structures
of men’s power over women.
In “Between Father and Mother, II: The Anti-modern Modernism,”
113
T. J. Jackson
Lears related this “waning patriciate” as the “most sophisticated manifestation of the
antimodern impulse toward cultural regeneration among the upper bourgeoisie.” In its

112
Across the globe, politicians' tears appear to be more common now. President Obama isn't the only
world leader unashamed to be seen crying in public—or simply unable to avoid it. Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin crying after claiming victory in Russia's presidential election in March 2012. A tear runs
down the cheek of President George W. Bush during a posthumous presentation of the Congressional
Medal of Honor for Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham in January 2007. House Speaker John Boehner has a
reputation for getting welled up during speeches. President Obama becomes emotional in a speech to his
campaign workers in Chicago after his reelection win, to name a few.
113
From the book, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture.
273
cruder forms, that impulse “revitalized ruling class hegemony by reaffirming familiar
[and familial] values [in sitcom] or reinforcing newer tendencies toward a therapeutic
orientation of the self” (286).
Adam Sandler in Big Daddy plays Sonny Koufax, a 32-year-old law school graduate
of Generation X, whose personality, in many respects, features the dissimilarity between
the Mythopoetic boomers (John Dunbar and Forrest Gump) and a Profeministic slacker
of Generation X, chiefly in age group, generation gap, and the tendencies of masculine
representation. Unlike his friends who wear suits and act like lawyers, Sonny, as
possessed by Madonna’s “hippie look,” is dumped by his girlfriend Vanessa. That night,
before leaving for an extended business trip to China, his flatmate Kevin announces his
engagement to girlfriend Corinne. The next day a five-year-old boy, Julian, is dropped at
Sonny's apartment, claiming to be Kevin's son. Sonny spends a day with Julian and
decides to adopt him in order to impress Vanessa with his new found responsibility.
Believing Sonny to be Kevin, social services agree with the decision. Sonny calls at
Vanessa's apartment with Julian, where she reveals that she's having an affair.
Sonny then allows Julian to do whatever he likes in his Manhattan apartment. He
meets Corinne's sister Layla and invites her out on a date. After being told by Julian's
274
headmistress that Julian is falling behind in class, and has problems in hygienic ones -
"I've got the smelly kid in school!" This wakes Sonny up to amend his loose parenting
ways and inject some discipline. Sonny begins to keep Julian neat and tidy, and improve
his school work. Social services realize their mistake, take Julian into care and prosecute
Sonny. In court Layla acts as Sonny's defense lawyer but his negative character witnesses
hamper his case. At the last minute Kevin refuses to press charges against Sonny. Kevin
decides to take over the parenting of Julian. Some time later, Sonny is a lawyer married
to Layla with a child of their own.
The male femininity, or role reversal, in Big Daddy implicitly elicits other attentions
to ethnicity, class, and female subjectivity. Although the film centers around the family
ties, it certainly marks a continuum of slavishly contrived set pieces: its characters
represent almost every conceivable demographic group. It connotes a Profeminist
slacker’s syncretist bewitchment looming large in the Nineties’ America. Sonny reached
maturity, in regard to his comprehensive assimilation, in which he performs with as strict
an authorial control over his comic persona, and has everybody on his side in the final
courtroom scene in which Sonny in his counter-comical countenance declares about
parenting: ''I won't fail at that! I can't! I love this kid too much.'' The demographic group
275
in the courtroom scene embraces the Afro-American female judge; the homeless person;
the Hispanic delivery guy; an old drunk from Sonny's local bar; Julian the very child in
custody; a former Hooters girl Corinne, whose sister Layla, now Sonny’s new girlfriend,
acts as his defense lawyer; in conjunction with two gay buddy lawyers who Sonny knows
from law school—to sum up, all the non-mainstream and marginalized social groups in
the American culture are chosen in Big Daddy and tamed to support Sonny as their
representative voice. And most dramatically at the critical juncture, even the toughest
patriarch, Sonny’s own father, showed up in the line, helped shape the last part of a
jigsaw frame of a select community. Sonny convincingly joins forces to syncretize
Otherness, made up of the underprivileged ensemble who are united across the
boundaries of race, sex, sexuality, class, age (whether young or old), and more amazingly,
patriarchy—Sonny thus obtains a lopsided victory with social order purged and regained
in his hands.
That the court battle itself turns out to be risible in the amiable masquerade is hardly
a surprise. The real shock in Big Daddy comes in its final moments. After hinting at
Sonny's future as a househusband ("I'm in love with a young girl who makes plenty of
money!" he exults), the film suddenly shows its true conservative colors. The closing shot
reveals former power-dresser Layla in dowdy maternal prints holding onto her very own
276
baby, while husband Sonny breezes into the bar in a corporate suit, flush with victory,
and straight off the latest hot court case. The denouement gives a picture of how a
Profeminist syncretist of the Nineties in a carnivalesque deception is distinguishable from
his predecessor in the Eighties—Superman, Rocky, Rambo, Mad Max, and Conan the
Barbarian whose muscle is costume enough for his masculinity—or the much earlier
psychotic cop (Dirty Harry series) and the nose-cut detective (Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown) in the Seventies. Whether a Mythopoetic boomer or a Profeminist Gen X-er,
the two kinds of a Janus-faced syncretist hero, whose masculinity shifts from the
externalized male physique to the inner emotional involvement, always give prominence
to a more bland, sophisticated man, accommodating the seedy post-feminist ideals of
empathy, tolerance, and care tended to the traditionally repressed.
Equally central to the debate on male trouble in Big Daddy is Luce Irigary’s
introduction of economic impact on the role-playing in gender. As Irigary has put it, all
signs, called commodities in patriarchal societies, are exchanged between men, women
being themselves among these signs, participating in an essentially male system that
denies women their subjectivity and “heterosexuality is nothing but the assignment of
economic roles: there are producer subjects and agents of exchange (male) on the one
277
hand, productive earth and commodities (female) on the other” (192). Big Daddy initially
turns the table with Sonny’s new girlfriend Layla’s economic and social vantage as a
lawyer but she finally opts to give up the “economic role as producer subject” against
Irigary’s premonition, only to consummate Sonny’s negotiated masculinity as a domestic
and fearless housewife.
Surrogate Mother and Carnivalism in Male Femininity
In his influential study of medieval and Renaissance folk comedy, Rabelais and His
World, Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of the liberating of effects of European festive folk culture,
as seen most clearly in the many festive occasions that fell under the heading of carnival.
Bakhtin has aided us in more clearly realizing how “universal, democratic, and free” such
carnivalesque laughter was for “the people” in pre-industrial and pre-capitalistic cultures.
Carnival, Bakhtin reminds us, was a time of sanctioned freedom when through
masquerading, role reversal, games, eating, drinking, and making love, almost any
behavior was permitted (short of murder and so on). Such “ ŭ aughter degrades and
materializes” (20), and finally leads to “the world’s revival and renewal” (7), notes
Bakhtin.
278
In taking up this proposal, Robert Stam notices that Bakhtin gives the name
“carnival” to the decentralizing (centrifugal) forces that militate against official power
and ideology. But parallel to this opposition between carnival and officialdom “within” a
culture there is an opposition ġ “between” cultures ʇ namely, that which contrasts “closed,”
self-sufficient, “deaf” cultures, on the one hand, with “open,” permeable, and “hearing”
cultures, on the other (122).
Furthermore, the carnivalesque is not only a celebration but a critique, and often a
parody, of the other life: that of the Catholic church, the state, and daily existence.
Andrew Horton argues that this observation leads to Bakhtin’s emphasis on the ambiguity
of carnival as a double vision of existence (223). As simultaneously a celebration and a
critique, carnival (and parody) implies that “the death of the old is linked with
regeneration: all the images are connected with the contradictory oneness of the dying
and reborn world” (Bakhtin, 217). Therefore it is impossible to label such laughter as
progressive or conservative (Horton, 223). In brief, Bakhtin sees carnival as a safety
valve.
Much of the early American TV sitcoms of the 1950’s (such as I Love Lucy) was
created and performed by vaudevillians and stand-up comics ʇ that is, those raised in a
“popular,” nonliterary art form geared for as broad a public as was possible. The world of
279
physical comedy, which was liberated from the prison house of verbal language, made
this genre a universal signifying system aimed at and dedicated to laughter. But the
parody and critique in sitcom, as well as in stand-up comedy in particular, relate, of
course, to content: to what degree do we find a carnivalesque atmosphere or subject
matter that tends to debunk the institutionalized ideology? More notably, it encourages us
to look beyond subject matter to form and structure as well.
Big Daddy presents us with a maladjusted outsider, Sonny Koufax. As a law-school
prodigy living off a compensation claim, he is a slacker by choice and not necessity. In
spite of the fact that Sonny spends time in a tollbooth, and that's as close to work as he's
willing to come, this causes his girlfriend Vanessa to be unhappy with him, which she
expresses while flouncing around in a red bra. It may or may not be a myth of slackerdom
ʇ and there is one, which is what made it so threatening to the writers of Time and other
"upstanding" adults. Sitting on the couch, refusing to get a "real job," is inherently
anti-capitalist, and capitalism is a core element of American society ʇ and its ills. Truly,
Sonny denies the acts of the flailing anger, apathy, and cynicism that for many 18-35s is a
fact of daily life. At first glance, Sonny, far from being the gung-ho reformer and activist,
performs just like many pissed-off wage slaves who can't figure out where to direct their
media-saturated rage.
280
In a close and profound examination, however, striving and slacking are equally
valid responses to the Generation X. Sonny, the man-child in Big Daddy, proves his
worth by growing up; his mental odyssey smacks of the self-redemption of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV ʇ both main characters illustrate a slacker hero’s journey to self-discovery, a
process of maturation in which the carnivalesque fusion of boorishness and sentimentality,
together with the final ʇ but imperative ʇ reconciliation between father and son, is a
prerequisite to reaching kingship or Gen Xer’s manhood.
Unlike Three Men and a Baby, Big Daddy is a comedian sitcom. The show revolves
around Sonny’s stand-up act; a loose ensemble of supporting characters feeds his lines.
But where Three Men and a Baby stressed a loving environment, Big Daddy is more
likely to display both aggression and affection of the protagonist. He can solve complex
legal cases in seconds; he can be nutty and attractive with new girlfriend Layla; or he can
be authoritative and intimidating to total strangers ʇ in one segment, Sonny takes Julian
to Central Park for his favorite pastime, which is throwing tree branches in the paths of
speeding inline skaters. One middle-aged skater hits a branch, takes a nasty fall and ends
up in the lagoon.
When surrounded by people who either fear him or worship him, Sonny ultimately
comes across as an unappealing bully ʇ latent in his carnivalesque traits. In what surely
281
must be the film's comic nadir, Sonny even breaks into the flat of an elderly Upper East
Sider when the unfortunate man refuses to comply with Julian's trick-or-treat demands.
Rather than present an upscale suburban family as in Three Men and a Baby, Big Daddy
presents a downscale white one, in a home that’s as pointedly dreary as the apartment of
the Fifties’ sitcom The Honeymooners.
The "slacker" definition in Big Daddy goes further with the narrative in which
Sonny balks at work, marriage and baby-boomer values. Where Big Daddy departs most
from Three Men and a Baby lies in its meager concerns with proper behavior, language
and role models. At most times, Sonny is on the sloppy side, and reason is not one of his
strong points. It's not every film where an adult role model throws himself in front of a
moving car just to cheer the kid up. The film is filled to the limit with all the raunchy
words allowed by the PG-13 rating. ''Man, this Yoo-Hoo is good,'' Sonny says to Julian.
''Know what's even better? Smokin' dope.'' Neither is it a common practice that the hero
tutors a kid in cynicism, cruel practical jokes and antisocial behavior. As the ultimate
indulgent dad, he lets the kid rechristen himself ''Frankenstein,'' shoot lethal slingshot
pellets (result: many dead pigeons), and make a meal out of 30 packets of ketchup.
It is supposed to be “carnival,” in Bakhtinian language, that Sonny, bearing
transgression mostly in self-infantilization, has a pathological hostility against society;
282
when McDonald's won't serve them breakfast, he throws another customer's fries on the
floor, and when a restaurant won't let the kid use the restroom, he and the kid pee on the
restaurant's side door. And that's pretty much Sonny’s approach to fatherhood during its
first hour. The man-child Sonny and the kid Julian fight, interrupt and do almost always.
The Sonny character defiantly flaunts the rules of grammar ʇ by extension, the patriarchal
relations of the symbolic order, and isn’t ashamed of it, either. Sonny uses newspapers to
solve problems like spilt milk and bed wetting. In raising a sociopath, Sonny teaches
Julian to pee against walls, wear outrageous getups, and drop junk food to the ground
before vacuuming them back into his mouth.
Where Peter (Tom Selleck) of Three Men and a Baby is prone to whipping up a
gourmet salad in his apartment-sized, fully-equipped kitchen, Sonny in Big Daddy
reaches for boxes of macaroni and cheese ʇ viewers may be taken aback by the flagrant,
tireless promotion of junk food here. As Sonny is a constant participant of carnival, he
throws himself together with a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions
of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos.
What about the male ego in Big Daddy? Sonny is not a Mr. Mom in disguise of
super dad as Danny in Full House or Tony in Who’ s the Boss?. Instead, Sonny is a usually
unemployed. Sonny's girlfriend Vanessa tells him to get a real job, but he says he has one
283
as a tollbooth attendant, albeit on the lazy side: the film gives him nothing but days off.
Now a new way for re-authoring the representation of masculinity arises: in
syncretizing the other urban outsiders (the homeless man, the illegal immigrant fast food
deliverer, the old drunk granny, Julian the very child in custody, a former Hooters girl,
and the gay buddy lawyers, etc.), the slacker hero in Big Daddy, instead of using violence
as ‘statement of his being,’ burlesques the mother archetype, and feminizes himself as a
surrogate mom with a view to remodeling the patriarchal role.
If "masculinity" refers to the set of images, values, interests, and activities held
important to a successful achievement of male adulthood, the components of `masculinity’
may vary from time to time. It remains consistently as opposed to "femininity," but it can
be remodeled to wear a ‘feminine’ disguise so as to soften the potential resistance that the
repressed Other poses. Such a self-effacing demonstration of patriarchy, or new
‘masculinity,’ comes into force especially when the racial and gender conflicts and the
social order became increasingly challenged.
All in all, the Profeminist man is again based almost entirely on the lives of white,
middle, and upper-class, heterosexual men. What we witness in Big Daddy is a shift in
personal styles and lifestyles of the new privileged men that eliminate or at least mitigate
many of the aspects of hegemonic masculinity that men have found unhealthful or
284
emotionally constraining. At the same time, ŵ hese shifts in styles of masculinity “do little,
if anything, to address issues of power and inequality”
114
raised by the oppressed Other.
Its new image does not represent any sort of radical break from “traditional masculinity,”
but is so “congruent with shifts that are already taking place within current constructions
of hegemonic masculinity.” (Michael Messner, p. 729) Yet distinct from hegemonic
masculinity, the Profeminist man, engaged in negotiated representation, is less
self-destructive, and has re-valued and re-constructed men’s bonds with each other. He
has learned, among others, to obscure his colonizing tendencies.
To recap, the hero's ‘feminine traits’ in Big Daddy are interacting, reverberating, and
endorsing the same contemporary mythos enacted in other genres: the androgyny (in
symbolic connotation) in the Vietnam scenario, the (literal and abstract) genesis in
science fiction and horror films of the Seventies, and Mr. Mom (in disguise of super Dad)
in family sitcoms of the late Eighties onward. One of these goals is to present a new
brand of ‘masculinity,’ to redeem the bourgeois white male’s manhood through his
repressive, castrating fear.
With all things considered, we recognize that ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are
dynamic relational processes. ‘Masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are constantly reconstructing

114
Words borrowed form Michael Messner, 728.
285
themselves in a context of unequal, but shifting, power relations. Although “softer” and
more “sensitive” styles of `masculinity, as impersonated in Big Daddy,’ are developing
among some privileged groups of men in the 1990’s, this does not necessarily contribute
to the emancipation of women; in fact, quite the contrary may be true.” (Messner, 724,
725)
286
Chapter Six
Men’s Rights Movement, or New American Nazism
Falling Down
Where the feeling of inferiority is highly intensified to the degree that the child believes
that he will never be able to compensate for his weakness, the danger arises that in his
striving for overcompensation, will aim to overbalance the scales.
ʇ Alfred Adler
115
Here I cite Alder’s concept of overcompensation to make clear that the inferiority
feeling sometimes can lead to healthy compensation, but sometimes leads to strangulation
of social feelings. Instead of focusing on adjustment to society, they become continually
preoccupied with themselves and the impression they have on others.
The extreme manifestation of masculine protest generally occurs in the presence of
two conditions: an exaggerated inferiority feeling and an insufficiently developed feeling
of social community. Under these conditions, a person may experience or anticipate
failure before attempting a task that appears impossible and may become "discouraged."
It is obviously no coincidence that feelings of inferiority and injustice to men are very
common with the Men’s Rights Movement

in the 1990’s.

115
From "The Feeling of Inferiority and the Striving for Recognition" (1927), a journal article by Alfred
Adler, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.
287
The Men's Rights Movement is a reaction to some of the social changes brought
about by feminism and other civil rights movements in the past thirty years or so.
Proponents argue that men have become the target of discrimination as women and the
minorities that social welfare policies provide benefits to made advances in society.
Critics of the movement liken it to reverse racism and argue that men who subscribe to
the ideology are merely trying to hold on to privilege granted them by a long history of
patriarchy. Out in the real world, the Men’s Rights Movement is somewhat less popular
than Mythopoetic and Profeminist Men’s Movements in the American society of the
Nineties.
Initially, the Men's Rights Movement (MRM) is a subset of the larger men's
movement, focused on addressing perceived discrimination against men. It branched off
from the men's liberation movement in the early 1970's, antithetic to that movement in its
focus and rejection of pro-feminist principles.
116

116
While "men's rights" is often currently used as a cover for sexism, there are men's advocacy groups that
genuinely promote equal rights. The Good Men Foundation, for example, promotes activism on men's
issues, supports charitable foundations such as boys' and girls' clubs, and publishes an online magazine
dealing with men's issues that also acts as a forum for dialogue between feminists and men's rights
advocates. They focus on criticisms of traditional male gender norms, father's issues, factors affecting
at-risk boys in inner-cities, sex and health.
288
The Men’s Rights Movement upholds an ideology based on the premise that women
have more power than men in our society, mainly concentrating on things like alimony
and custody disputes, false rape accusations, laws biased towards women, and so on. The
highly disputed “pay gap” only exists because men work far more hours at high-stress
jobs they hate with longer commutes, less flexibility, more physical risk, etc., just to be
breadwinners and feed their families, only to die younger and get bashed for “earning
more."
117
Corporations have supported the drive for women to enter the workforce in
order to expand the labor supply and drive down wages.
118
In all likelihood, they're
unhappy about the "women and children first" protocol in maritime disasters, the Titanic
in 1912, for example, where 74% of the women survived but only 20% of the men did.
119
Biologically and mentally, men die roughly 5 years earlier than women, men commit
suicide at 4 times the rate of women. In addition, 93% of workplace deaths are male, and
while courts enforce financial obligations to women with children, men have no

117
NCFM (National Coalition for Men), “Pay Gap,” accessed April 15, 2011,
http://ncfm.org/2011/04/issues/the-pay-gap/
118 Welmer, “Department of Labor: Gender Wage Gap a Myth,” in The Spearhead Webmagazine,
accessed March 8, 2010,
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/03/08/department-of-labor-gender-wage-gap-a-myth/
119
“Titanic Disaster: Official Casualty Figures and Commentary,” accessed 1997,
http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm
289
reproductive rights.
120
They also argue that according to various statistics related to male
health, life expectancy, and suicide rates, men's medical issues are not given as much
attention as women's health problems.
121
Through their fist-raising protest, the Men’s
Rights Movement is often labeled as “New” American Nazism.
As the new American Nazists may complain, feminists usually fail to note that
males account for 70 percent of all assault victims, 80 percent of homicide victims, and
85 percent of the homeless. Males represent the fastest growing impoverished group in
America, with over ten million now living in poverty.
122
Ninety percent of persons with
AIDS, 93 percent of persons killed on the job, and 95 percent of prisoners are men.
123
In
prison these men, many of whom are nonviolent, are raped in numbers matching those of
free women. But there are no rape crisis centers or social programs ʇ with the exception
of a few, largely postfeminist men’s groups ʇ which deal with the posttraumatic
stress-induced disorders of men victimized by the American penal system. They question

120
John Hembling, “Understanding the Men’s Rights Movement,” accessed December 10, 2011,
http://www.avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-men/understanding-the-mens-rights-movement/
121
“Health, United States, 2005,” the 29th report on the health status of the Nation and is submitted by the
Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, accessed October 5, 2005,
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus05.pdf.
122
According to the report by U.S. Bureau of the Census, Money, Income, and Poverty Staus in the U.S.
(Washington D.C.: GPO, 1989).
123
According to the report by U.S. Department of Justice, Source Book of Criminal Justice Statistics
(Washington D.C.: GPO, 1990).
290
furiously: why are the Profeminist men not more concerned about issues which decimate
their own gender? (Aaron Kipnis, 286) It seems that merely affirmative action is a
privilege for the underprivileged.
It is conceivable that the Men’s Rights Movement leans right-wing in the political
ideologies they promote —the feminazis
124
from their perspective, for instance, are
attempting to steal men's hard-earned money through socialist policies. Following this
logic, feminism would be defused; civil rights for minorities would be under attack from
the conservatives. Recessionary inflation provoked a white middle class reaction against
state taxation for social services and against affirmative action programs that gave jobs to
minorities (Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, 1988, 217). ġ The films that corresponded to the Men’s Rights Movement began to appear with
greater regularity in the 1990’s although they made up a low proportion of the Hollywood
cinema: they witnessed reactionary candidate Pat Buchanan drop his Republican-party
deference to the rich. From the stump, he decried not only immigration by Latinos from
the south but also corruption among executives in boardrooms, who pocketed company
profits while they fired their longtime workers. People tend to search for villains during

124
Feminazi is a term popularized by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and in use since the early 1990s.
It is a portmanteau of the nouns feminist and Nazi.
291
economic hard times (Kitty Calavita, 2010).
None of these heroes in the white male fear subgenre are self-employed or members
of the owning class, and there is no such thing as secure and high-status work for them.
Everyone else has either lost a job, lost benefits, lost wages, or faces such losses. These
characters then connect their job troubles to their family lives, as they worry over paying
bills and spending time with loved ones.
Exemplary is Falling Down, released as part of a relatively small set of the films that
echoed Men’s Rights Movement, but were produced in increasing numbers in the
mid-to-late 1990’s. The other films as such include Set It Off (1996), Mad City (1997), In
the Company of Men (1997), The Negotiator (1998), Very Bad Things (1998), American
Beauty (1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Office Space (1999), and Fight Club
(2000). They seem part of a male disempowerment awareness campaign, each
highlighting the self-estrangement and repressed anger of men lost in the alienating ranks
of management culture and/or cubicle grids. They all tell the story of violence born of
class conflict in an economy unkind to its mainstream white male workers. They all give
voice to the unemployed angst and then blow most of their (anti)heroes away.
Furthermore, they all dramatize the agonizing conflicts in public between the
unemployed white male protestors, the families from which they have grown estranged,
292
and the police arrayed against them, with few unrelated subplots to distract the viewer.
Neal King notes a trend in which the stories begin with breadwinner stress, move to
territorial conflict as protagonists fight for public space, pause for speeches about
dispossession and desperation, and conclude with the visible injury or death of the white
male protestors by the end of the dead-end day (2004).
Falling Down (1993)
The American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the
absolute fake.
ʇ Umberto Eco
125

The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the
urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
ʇ Alfred Adler
126
In his book Simulations, Jean Baudrillard describes how our simulacra seem to have
assumed precedence over the real, how, for example, "the map" now "engenders the

125
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1986), 8.
126
Heinz & Rowena Ansbacher, eds. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic
Presentation in Selections from His Writings (New York: Basic Books, 1956), ch. 4, sec. 3.
293
territory" (2). However, that replacement, he argues, brings with it another consequence,
for "of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real,
is the impossibility of staging an illusion" (38).
Worse than Eco’s hyperreality, or Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the violence in Falling
Down is not the sort of imaginings or reveries from which the main character William
Foster (Michael Douglas) can simply be awakened; it is a type of ersatz reality. His soul
under pressure of the feeling of inferiority, of the torturing thought that the individual is
small and helpless, attempts with all its might to become master over this inferiority
complex. Well adapted to this goal, Foster’s movements, in Alderian train of thought, will
have to have a certain grandiose gesture about them. The striving for power and regaining
of dominance may become exaggerated (as showcased in the Korean grocery smash and
the shooting spree in the Latino ghetto) and intensified until it must be called
pathological in Falling Down.
It is worth noting that Falling Down was conceived of before the LA Riots (April,
1992), its filming spanned over the riots, and it was promoted and released three months
after the riots. There is ample evidence that its reception profited from this event.
127

127
For a discussion of the film's reception see Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles
and the Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1997), 107.
294
The narrative of Falling Down bursts into frenzied activity, usually when Foster
snaps and commences his violence, or when the police retaliate with assaults of their own.
Conflicts boil over, every time Foster claims public space and forces people to hear his
complaints. The most often repeated images include the hero’s monologues on his
frustrations, holding guns on frightened civilians, shouting at police. Foster complains of
having been laid off and of being unable to support his child. He lashes out at a society
that's betrayed working Americans: "You should be rewarded for that. Instead they give it
to the plastic surgeons. You know, they lied to me." In such a vein, Falling Down figures
white men as crazier, more prone to cracking under the pressure of losing their status as
patriarchs. Foster's actions are clearly dangerous; he actually kills the white supremacist
Nick (the military-surplus dealer) and eventually himself. For Foster there is no
negotiation in his tendency of oppositional masculinity, no contestation; his fantasy must
be everyone's reality ʇ or else. It has real effects because Foster has come to construct a
fantasy world to distort the world he inhabits, and even insist, in a most violent way, that
others accept his fantastic distortion. Only through this overcompensating process is his
final goal of “self-redeeming” achieved.
In the opening sequence of Falling Down, we see Foster sitting in a Pasadena traffic
jam, a signifier that all of the roads that might reunite people remain clogged. Foster is
295
tormented by a fly in a stifling heat, while radios drone and children scream in the
surrounding cars. As the credits appear, a similarly tracking camera takes us through
various details of his car, passengers in the cars around him, kids on the bus beside him, a
man arguing on a car phone, people who stare directly into the camera, and a window
crank that won't work as the car seems to fill with steam. His frustration further grows
when his air conditioning fails while he is stuck in traffic. He abandons his car and begins
walking across Los Angeles to attend his daughter’s birthday party. All the sights are
filmed in dusty yellows (signaling the misty future) and accompanied by the
disharmonious sounds of the buzzing fly, car horns and exaggerated road noises, distorted
voices, and the continuing drone of a helicopter overhead. Practically the unusual
distortion of sounds and images in this initial sequence suggests that the audience has
entered a subjective realm of the unemployed white male protestor (an archetype, in
Jung’s nomenclature, of the Men’s Rights Movement), a nightmarish fantasy sprung from
his discomforts of an unpleasant, everyday reality.
On a related note, the traffic jam is a metaphor of life’s detour, or the mental odyssey
of no return, as the start of the anti-hero’s sudden revolt against and retreat from the
bonds of the contemporary American society. One of the film’s taglines stated the film’s
premise: ‘The adventures of an ordinary man at war with the everyday world.’ Yet when
296
he climbs up and out of the entrapping freeway, "going home" is a dream out of reach for
such a displaced person.
For Foster, there is no sudden release from this contemporary, urban nightmare ʇ no
fantastic floating escape; he and his car are physically struck in an insistently real world.
The only fantasy here is the notion of escape, which Foster suddenly opts for, as he
announces that he is "going home." The rest of the film delineates Foster's efforts to find
a path of escape ʇ in this case, one that will lead him back to a home he no longer has. As
a matter of fact, each of Foster's encounters along the various detours around the roads
leads "home." All Foster's efforts underscore just how far removed from the new type of a
post-modern home that emerges as the legacy of the Counterculture Movement, and at
odds with reality he has become. Just as in the course of Foster's wanderings through the
inner city, he conveys a story about astronauts who go out into space and then find they
cannot get "back to Earth," a situation that pertinently describes Foster’s own situation.
He has no lifeline to draw him back to the old world, to yank him back from his chief
fantasy: that his world and his personal life can be made exactly as his mentality, mired in
the past, thinks they should be.
The "going home" also means going back to the “good old days.” The antihero in
Falling Down is instantly recognizable in his costume. Foster makes his first appearance
297
in a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie. Pens line his chest pocket, and he is wearing
1950’s style horn-rimmed glasses and a nondescript buzz cut, also redolent of the
1950’s-McCarthyism more, in which the hegemonic masculinity prevails. Like his
haircut, his glasses, and his job, the film suggests that Foster is out of place in this society.
He wants to get back to the time before feminism gained power.
In the same vein, Jude Davies, sees the film as offering a vision of America where
White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants are no longer at home:
Cinematic signifiers of Vietnam abound… As D-FENS walks past the pictures
of Vietnam on the outside of the store, the sound of helicopters is heard… [he] is
dressed in black combat uniform [which] makes him look more like a Viet Cong
soldiers…. When he finally arrives at Venice Beach… buildings are flimsy, the
atmosphere is hot. The place is swarming with colour and noise, with exotically
dressed, tanned people… D-FENS has arrived in Saigon. (Davies, 1995a, 221-2)
The Vietnam image is reminiscent of a deeply internalized distrust of women
reflected in Taxi Driver (1976), in which Robert De Niro plays a violent character who
was obviously scarred by the Vietnam War. In a word, Falling Down depicts the
privileged-turned-unprivileged people coming unhinged in hard times. The white
protagonist endures a day of family, job, and intergroup conflicts that culminates in a
suicidal fight with police. The miserable employee loses not only his job but also his grip
on "the world" that frustrates his attempts to sustain family and dignity. He responds with
298
an urban shooting spree during his journey across the urban geography. In essence, he's a
hard-working, tax-paying, politically concerned, white, middle-class American male, and
his patience has run out.
Just as his clothes and location are familiar to us, so is his morning commute. Even
though he is unemployed, Foster maintains the façade of work by commuting in traffic
jams each morning. As a morning routine, he ‘snaps’ and starts walking across the city
determined to see his estranged family on his daughter’s birthday. As a ‘tale of urban
reality’ (another tagline) he encounters everyday problems that are symptomatic of an
unbalanced society.
When Foster escapes the commute by simply getting out of his car and walking
away, the other angry drivers ask him where he's going, he shouts, "I'm going home!"
This is repeated several times throughout the film; all he wants is to go home (where he is,
however, unwelcome, given the restraining order). Here is a call for men, not just because
they hate the morning commute, but because they long to be reinstated as the heads of
their households.
On the whole, the public space in Falling Down, as Jay P. Telotte has observed,
becomes more furious, as assault replaces acceptance, and Foster seizes the weapons of
those he meets: a sawed-off baseball bat from the Korean grocer, a knife from a Chicano
299
thug, a cache of automatic weapons from the car of gang members, a shoulder-fired
missile launcher from a neo-Nazi, military-surplus dealer. Each new and more dangerous
weapon inspires a most unlikely response to the world (Telotte, 1996). The hostile
environment and the main character’s counteraction confirm the Men’s Rights Movement
angst.
It is not simply that the protagonist belongs to a specific class of ordinary men,
white, middle-class office workers in their late forties. It is that they sooner or later
deliver some sort of rallying cry that is meant to reflect all real white, middle-class males
in their middle-age crisis, assuming, of course, that such men are in similar situations.
Falling Down's credits refer to Foster as D-FENS. This is a reference to his
personalized license plate, a sign linked to the department from which he was recently
laid off. It spells out Foster’s victimized state in which he must defend himself from a
society that would take his job, family, and dignity away, and it caused a major dilemma
in which Foster is unable to reconcile his work to defend the national security with the
alien environment in front of him. Furthermore, Foster’s assertive action also attests to
the dynamic process that forms the striving for (over)compensation with which his soul
strives to neutralize the torturing feeling of inferiority. From the moment Foster gets out
of that car and abandons his commute, he's quite lost his place in the family
300
simultaneously.
A more approaching investigation of the film will reveal its vociferous tone that the
white patriarchy is in terminal decline, and this must be stopped; Caucasian men have
been marginalized by the growth of feminism and unrestricted non-white immigration;
America’s economic dominance has been badly affected by the Pacific Rim countries
(emblematic of the selfish and mean Korean grocer in the first sequence). All these codes
suggest the anxiety of the Men’s Rights Movement.
As a reactionary film, Falling Down documents the Men’s Rights Movement
disquiet and fury, promoting a backlash against people calling up feminists, blacks, gays,
Latinos and Asian immigrants, who all have a vested interest after the Civil Rights
Movements. Drawing upon Fredric Jameson's contention that "all mapping is undergirded
by ideology," we can first map the ideology undergirding the reterritorializations at work
in Falling Down; it blows open the defensive cartography to a geographic imaginary of
the Men’s Rights Movement.
Upon entering the inner city, Foster reasserts his hierarchical race-class position, and
his authority over “greedy Korean grocers,” “irrational and violent Chicano youth,”
“undeserving homeless poor,” etc. The inner city of LA is like a macabre world across
which “the angry white middle-class man” roams freely and shoots his way across,
301
reenacting a colonizing journey of power fantasies.
The inner city of LA in Falling Down is belligerent and insecure. A racial pattern
arises in the ways the displaced white jobholder copes with his troubles and approaches
lunacy. It is an incoordinate image like a square peg in a round hole that a white guy in a
white shirt and tie carries a briefcase in such an urban jungle. In Zilberg’s review, the
urban landscape “refashions the former fifties style engineer into an urban vigilante”
(193). In the middle of the narrative, Foster trades in his briefcase, now an empty sign,
for the props and clothing associated with the pathological traits of the metropolitan
wasteland: a duffel bag full of submachine guns and military garb. As it were, a would-be
Mythopoetic bourgeois hero now transforms into a Men’s Rights Movement protestor.
The protagonist's growing desperation and entrapment within his predicament has
provided a dominant theme. Foster lapses into violence as soon as he grows more
desperate, though the turns to crime vary by race.
Foster’s first encounter in the inner city took place at the Asian grocery store. The
Korean owner refuses to give him change for a telephone call. Foster then tries to buy a
can of pop, but the change from a dollar would not be enough for a phone call, either. His
frustration rages, until he begins ranting about the high prices set on the merchandise.
The Asian owner grabs a baseball bat and demands Foster leave. Foster grabs the owner's
302
sawed-off baseball bat and starts swinging, taking down piles of junk foods, and cans of
diet soda. The Korean convenience store hereby assumes the role of a symbolic frontier
for the reconstruction of the white masculine norm threatened with extinction. As such,
Falling Down merely shifts the ethnic marking of Hollywood's convention of the urban
jungle from Chinatown (1972) to Koreatown. The greedy Korean serves as little more
than a textured backdrop to the Caucasian protagonist's journey. His fallen state is the
underprivileged but necessary backdrop to the central tragedy, the privileged fall of the
middle class Anglo-American.
Foster keeps walking. During the eerie adventure of his day he will meet, and
confront, the Latino gang members who want to steal his briefcase, fast food workers
who tell him it's too late for breakfast, a neo-Nazi gun-shop owner, and other characters
who seem placed in his way to fuel his anger.
Outside the Koreatown, Foster is accosted by two Latino gang members who
threaten him with a knife and demand his briefcase. Foster attacks them with the bat and
takes their knife. The two gang members, now in a car with two friends, cruise the streets
and find Foster in a phone booth. They open fire, hitting several bystanders but missing
their target. The driver loses control and crashes. Foster picks up a gun, shoots the one
surviving gang member in the leg, and then leaves with their bag of weapons. Foster then
303
encounters a panhandler and gives him the briefcase, which contains a sandwich and an
apple.
In her essay on ġ the film’s spatial poetics, Elana Zilberg argues that the discourses
about the "inner city" of LA in Falling Down do not solely tell about others, but about
bourgeois white males themselves and their fear of falling from their privileged race-class
position, a metaphorical fall into this black hole, the abyss that the inner jungle is taken to
represent. Zilberg also posits that Foster's “transformation from commuter to pedestrian,
his disengagement with the highway and engagement with the urban landscape of Los
Angeles do mark a potentially powerful encounter with the changed cultural cartography
of Los Angeles” (190).
Zilberg’s interest is basically in the Latinization of LA as a particularly marked
aspect on the discourses on "thirdworlding" and "browning" of America in the cultural
politics in California, my concern, however, focuses attention on how men’s oppositional
representation has a tendency of demonizing Others, how it perfectly resonates with
Alder’s definition of overcompensation – their aggressive gender performances were
often felt to be negative traits of masculine protest, and finally how the oppositional
representation of masculinity is a double-bladed plow for the male character, struggling
304
to survive 炼 and in the end, ultimately losing. The Chicano territory, filled with lost and
desperate souls and littered with signifying scars of the inner city 炼 graffiti gang, for
instance, symbolically serves to witness Foster’s oppositional male representation and the
Men’s Rights Movement crisis.
During the next course of Foster’s wanderings, he visits a bridge under construction.
Cars are lined up in a traffic jam for miles. In fact, this is the same traffic jam he was in
from the beginning of the film. He encounters a road repair crew, who are not working,
and Foster accuses them of doing unnecessary repairs to justify their budget. He asks a
worker what's wrong with the bridge, and he says they're fixing it. Foster says he thinks it
doesn't really need fixing ʇ they're just trying to spend their inflated budget so they can
get more money next year. "I'll give you something to fix," he says, and reaches into his
stash of weapons and withdraws a bazooka. Foster briskly launches a missile underneath
the sewer and it explodes the road far away. Constructing, or in this case reconstructing,
does not simply locate the urban ecology ʇ an official and singular public sphere ʇ but
reasserts, as a subtext, the cultural and racial hegemony of the Anglo American male over
a disconcerting proliferation of multiple counter-publics. The low work productivity,
however, seems to foreshadow the impossible restoration of social order and justice.
305
Additionally, the image of the bridge will recur later in the nursery rhyme of the second
half in the scenario.
When Foster walks next into a Whammyburger at 11:33 am, he attempts to order
breakfast, but they have switched to the lunch menu. Foster is told by the manager, who
calls him buddy, that he can't have breakfast because this Whammyburger stops serving
breakfast at 11:30. "I don't want to be your buddy," Foster says evenly. "I just want
breakfast." "Well, hey," says the manager, "I'm really sorry." Replies Foster, "Well, hey, I
am too." To stress his need, Foster pulls a gun and starts shooting at a ceiling fixture.
After trying to reassure the frightened employees and customers, he orders lunch, but is
annoyed when the burger looks nothing like the one shown on the menu. He leaves, tries
to call his ex-wife Beth from a phone booth, then shoots the booth to pieces after being
hassled by someone who was waiting to use the phone. The machine gun Foster deploys
to order breakfast at the Whammy Burger also reminds us of the missile launcher insofar
as it expresses his anger at the road construction that blocks his path "home."
In an army surplus store, the store owner Nick is racist, homophobic, and a neo-Nazi.
He takes Foster to his back room, which is filled with WWII and Nazi costume and
equipment. Things are getting out of control when he realizes that the owner thinks
306
they're of the same ilk, and Foster ends up killing the owner and stuffing him in his own
store window. Foster walks away wearing army boots and a black jumpsuit, still carrying
his bag of weapons. What strikes a chord between Foster and Nick consists in the truth
that they have a similar identity crisis as out of place in this society. Both want to get
back to the time before the civil rights movements gained power. Like Foster, who
figures he can simply "return" to the way things used to be, Nick as well fantasizes about
the power once wielded in the Nazi concentration camps.
If Falling Down is billed as a story about a man at war with everyday life who is
about to get even, the film also offers the audience another alienated and falling character,
a retiring cop Prendergast, who the film evokes as an alter ego to complete the sunny-side
portrait of Foster. The mirror construction of the doubled character is as much a story
about a detective, who regains his agency and the courage to restore law and order. To
what extent Foster’s personality springs from the Men’s Rights Movement, to that extent
is Prendergast incarnate of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement. Prendergast has the
negotiating strategies to serve a variety of functions, including avoiding xenophobia,
sexist violence, living up to expected images of masculinity, and creating unique images
of personhood free of gender role expectations.
307
Like a middle-aged Mythopoetic boomer, Prendergast is able to cope with the world
that seems to be falling down around him. He can soothe his wife's imaginings about a
prowler over the telephone, sort out the Korean grocer's exaggerated account, persuade
the Chicano girl Angie to talk about her gang's guns and incite Foster's mother to talk
about her son as if he were one of her fragile glass figurines, and even draw Foster
himself into a conversation in order to save Foster's family from his homicidal plans.
When Prendergast is trapped in a traffic jam early in the film, he does not retreat into
fantasies of a private or public nature, like Foster. Rather, he gets out of his car and helps
move a blocking vehicle ʇ ʇ ʇ ʇ Foster's abandoned car ʇ ʇ ʇ ʇ to the side of the road; he helps make
the road passable and helps people to make connections.
At the end of the pier, Foster confronts his ex-wife, Beth, and daughter. His daughter
is happy to see him, but his ex-wife is frightened. Prendergast arrives and acknowledges
Foster's complaints about being ill-treated by society, but does not accept that as an
excuse for his rampage. Distracting Foster, Beth kicks the gun away as Prendergast draws
his revolver, insisting that Foster give himself up. Foster pulls a water gun, forcing
Prendergast to shoot him dead.
308
In this regard, Prendergast’s moves are simple, pragmatic, and human. More in topic,
Prendergast never quite separates the self from society; he never puts aside the world,
despite all of its painful memories, in favor of a subjective realm of fantasizing. He is
often pictured as a rosy counterpart of the antihero’s dead-end psyche. As further
expression of the white male guilt and self-centered angst, Prendergast’s appearance
identifies the criminals whom he and his colleagues hunt with bad white men.
Put another way, Foster is a doppelgänger of Prendergast, a tangible double that
typically represents evil. Foster can be perceived as a sinister form of Prendergast. As the
film's title suggests, both the characters are falling down, each inspired by a picture of
their lost daughters. Each of them is pulled by many of the same impulses: like Foster,
Prendergast is drawn “home.” His wife repeatedly calls, urging him to “come home now.”
They both appear repelled by the rapidly changing world ʇ either in retirement or
unemployment, and each has a hysterical wife or ex-wife. Although they do define their
lives by pursuing different dreams, they amount to sacrifices, by coincidence, to a system
built to defeat them. More to the point, both characters assume a fatherly role. We realize
that Foster has scripted his own death in order to provide for his daughter through his
insurance policy. Prendergast, too, comforts Foster's wife and daughter like a family man.
Through his aggression and destructiveness, Foster can finally provide for his daughter.
309
As a product of his work, Prendergast becomes “a man of action” (as Davies has tagged
in his review) and a surrogate father figure (1995b, 151).
As a hope against Foster’s fall, the detective, in another sense, represents the
possibility for order and justice. At his wife's urging, Prendergast is retiring early to live
in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where the London Bridge has been moved "stone by stone" and
reconstructed. Conspicuously, the title of the film, referring to Foster's mental collapse, is
taken from the nursery rhyme "London Bridge is Falling Down,” which figures as a
recurring motif throughout the film. It transpires that London Bridge, connoting the old
world and its order as recalled in the nursery rhyme, is "falling down." Yet Prendergast
seems intent, for his wife's sake, on repairing to an artificial old world in the middle of
the desert, to a bridge that, as Jay Telotte has observed, like the roads Foster traverses,
goes nowhere (1996).
Falling Down ends at the Santa Monica Pier, looking out onto the Pacific Ocean,
which is another geographical metaphor associated with the Asian community. When
Foster uses his daughter's plastic water pistol to goad the detective into shooting him,
Prendergast does so to shoot him in a duel, in which Foster is eradicated and falls into the
abyss of the sea. The twin relationship of a living person ʇ between Foster and
Prendergast ʇ also describes the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision,
310
in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection of the
dark-and-light sides of a personality. In accordance with the doubled characterization, the
film is basically about the complementarity of personalities. This psychic doppelgänger
serves to exteriorize the striking contrast between the two characters and between the
Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and the Men’s Rights Movement. Prendergast once
publicly told off his boss, who had previously criticized Prendergast's manhood. He will
not retire, but will keep working. All the Mythopoetic masculinities seem to stand
triumphant at the end of the film. In other words, Prendergast is blasting his falling self. It
is in fact the cop then who is ultimately reconstructed as the white masculine norm.
The other cops in Falling Down represent organized white-male violence, the
institution that brings the hammer down on those who decry their losses. Prendergast’s
fellow officers appear ominously oppressive and dangerous to protestors. And, as further
expression of white guilt and self-centered angst, the criminals whom these cops hunt are
bad white men. It does feature police violence against unhinged white males, and it does
pose women as more virtuous and somewhat less deserving of violence. White men
appear to feel more entitled and thus more violent when denied what they regard as their
birthrights.
311
As for the feminist issues, Sharon Willis suggests that the film is misogynist. Just as
the striking contrast between the two male characters is structured around their
relationships to home, so it is structured by their relations to women as the problem. In
Willis’s suggestion, Prendergast’s wife, Amanda, figures as the hideous subtext of his
reluctant retirement and his ruined reputation (18). In such a feminist reading, part of the
film’s aggression lies in its making her source of his degradation and emasculation. Her
fears have translated into what his colleagues read as his cowardice. So Prendergast’s
problems begin in the home, in the ruin of his wife, who “only had her beauty.”
The parallel problem, on Foster’s side, is not his ex-wife, Beth, as much as it is his
timid, paranoid, deranged mother, locked up in her house with her “glass menagerie.” In
the film’s equation, Willis asserts that Prendergast’s wife has made him a coward, while
Foster’s mother has made him a psycho (Willis, 18).
It will be interesting to juxtapose the feminist and the masculinist reading of the two
male roles in Falling Down. Willis, like most other feminist scholars, strives to attest that
the film fails to “prove” its point: all white men are not the same. What poses as a
critique of the white male complaint is in fact a feint. The disparity between Foster and
his presumed counterpart, Prendergast, is, in essence, slight and subtle. Whereas the
feminist manifestly highlights the false opposition between Foster and Prendergast, the
312
masculinist approach draws attention to their difference. As a husband, Foster, in my
view, embodies the Men’s Rights Movement angst and crisis, passing himself off as the
antinomy of Prendergast, who features the Mythopoetic Man’s subtle syncretism.
Foster’s neurosis, triggered by his negative compensation, reaches the pinnacle with the
tendency toward self-deprecation, inevitably nailed down as irrationally abusive, while
Prendergast, who enables to examine the dilemma-driven process of constructing a new
negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, becomes ‘rationally’ abusive, as
illuminant in the triumphant moment when he finally tells his wife off, shouting viciously
at her: “Amanda, shut up, shut up. I’ll get home when I’m finished and not one second
before…is that clear? And you have dinner ready and waiting for me.” Prendergast’s
insight, as a detective, is thus confirmed on the grounds that he can catch his suspect
insomuch as he knows how to handle difficult, damaged women. The manhood
Prendergast has reconciled even wins the applause of his Latina partner, Sandra Torres ʇ the ethnic and gendered Other, who secures their ideological high ground by giving him
an ovation for his aggression. This way Prendergast succeeds in syncretizing Otherness,
an attempt to reconcile and meld disparate or contrary beliefs. Prendergast’s position as
the film’s “good guy” takes shape around his success in securing dominance over his
crazed wife and in reclaiming his home through this patriarchal posture. In this causal
313
link, Prendergast’s negotiated representation partly shares the text's code with the
marginal groups ʇ his mode of masculinity is able to express and contain elements of
liberal feminist ideology while remaining complicit with dominant gender ideology. On a
broader scale, Prendergast still conducts a preferred reading of the mainstream narrative,
albeit sometimes modifying it in a way that reflects his own position, experiences and
interests.
On the flip side, Foster, whose oppositional representation of masculinity centers
upon a self-contained reflection of the male character’s hysteria and self-effacement, is
even prepared to murder his estranged wife and child after shooting helpless opponents in
cold blood. He is, from bad to worse, a stalker, a would-be family killer. Henceforth, he
exemplifies the principal harm as directed against men no less than women. Alluding to
Adler’s overcompensation, this way Foster employs his symptoms to shield himself from
potential or actual failure in his tasks. Depreciation is thus used to deflate the value of
others, thereby achieving a sense of relative superiority through aggressive gender roles
or subtle solicitude. Soon Foster will threaten his family and murder a man in defense of
his "rights." Foster’s negative traits of masculine protest define a bitter, sardonic
realization that negative forms of compensation develop, and lead to self-destruction on
both sides.
314
In summary, Falling Down highlights the self-estrangement and repressed anger of
men who are trapped in the alienating structure of the modern corporate system. But does
the representation of the "betrayed" white American male lead to a creative revisioning of
masculinity, or does it simply update a masculinity defined primarily in terms of
aggression and competition? While a film as such does offer passing insights into the
context and/or source of alienation, the insights here are typically subordinated to a plot
in which alienation simply serves as the starting line in a sensational race to ruin.
Possibly even more insidious than the films in the Eighties because they claim to depict
"real" men, victimized men, the film still insists that masculinity relies most heavily on
amorality and aggression for its definition (Latham Hunter, 2003).
Falling Down, given the mythic function that film can serve, addresses widely
shared anger and fear of the Men’s Rights Movement. The dead-end hero shakes his fists
at such a world, hoping that the film audience might be moved by his plights. Unlike the
Mythopoetic or Profeminist Men’s Movements, the Men’s Rights Movement is to
reassert in vain the cultural and racial hegemony of the unemployed white male in
oppositional representation. The hero’s suicidal gesture to retire from screen in the finale
vivifies their fear of falling from the privileged race-class position, an act of violence
pushed to its utmost bounds.
315
The Men’s Rights Movement advocates also maintain that feminism, instead of
helping men or providing a model for male liberation, has actually made things worse.
Although it has created new options for women, men have not been given the same range
of choices. Thus, a new sexism has come into existence, with men as the victim. In
addition, feminism has created guilt in men for their own socialization, which is not their
fault. It has not only contributed to false negative images of men but also exacerbated the
double binds that afflict them. The agenda of the Men’s Rights perspective is to bring
about an understanding of the new sexism and to create laws that protect men against
current injustices.
Being a negative model, Falling Down projects gendered and racial superiority,
triggered by an underlying sense of inferiority ʇ not being able to deal with today’s
dynamic reality. Forcing others to provide for him may yield a secret feeling of power
and superiority that compensates for his feelings of inferiority. Unprepared for the normal
challenges that might lead to failure, he pays the price for his painful depression, but uses
it to maintain his passive self-indulgence and protect himself from a real test of his
capacities.
What Foster and other Men’s Rights Movement protestors have in common is the
inferiority feelings shared by the laid-off, middle-aged bourgeoisie, while the feeling of
316
community is so underdeveloped that they retreat to protect their fragile yet inflated sense
of self. They wield what Adler called safeguarding devices to do this.
128
Falling Down
demonstrates a nation, demoralized by the Vietnam war, rattled by feminism, outsourced
by post-Fordism, and squeezed by a recession: America needed to shore up its traditional
power structures.
The narrative in Falling Down is built on solid family structures and patriarchal
guidance, resuscitating the primacy of the family and restoring the father to his position
at the head of that family. It seeks to return women to more traditional social roles, and it
attempts to reimpose male discipline and control on women's sexuality. Discourses about
feminism, immigration, racism, inner city violence, etc. are all subsumed within this
ideological frame of criminality.
Conflating the feminization of culture and the racialization of the 1990’s with threats
to white male supremacy, Falling Down iterates that since the cultural and political
upheaval of the Counterculture, white men, not women or people of color, have been
consistently victimized. Multiculturalism is clearly identified as the virus that has
attacked the white male body, and, by extension, the American social body.

128
They are similar to Freud's ego defense mechanisms.
317
Ultimately, the film reasserts the tragedy of white males through the demise of its
main character. As women and blacks acquire rights and voices in the political arena, the
film articulates, white males are simultaneously deprived of theirs.
318
Epilogue
I use the term masculinist to label my critical thinking, inspired by an idea from
Michael Kimmel in Changing Men (1987). According to Kimmel, men's organized
responses to the crisis of masculinity varied and could be categorized as "masculinist,"
"antifeminist," or "profeminist." In the light of this, my critical pathway varies from the
views of feminist, antifeminist, and profeminist.
Most prior men studies focus on men’s visual gender displays at a particular point in
time. The present work contributes to the understanding of the timing of masculine
transformations in a dynamic, relational, and extra-linguistic process. Based on a
theoretical characterization of Alfred Adler’s masculine protest, the author proposes and
calibrates four tendencies of masculine representation. In each representational mode, the
filmmaking fulfills the evolving needs, interests, values, and value systems tied to the
ones who encode the text and the ones who decode it.
This study tends to fill the gap between cultural studies (gender studies, among
others) and film criticism with recourse to social studies. As Adler emphasized the central
role of social functioning, Adler’s views of gender displays truly link psychoanalysis to
social studies. The application of Alderian thought to film criticism is conducive to
319
perceiving how the role of inferiority feelings creates a striving to overcome perceived
obstacles in men’s wavering masculinity. Adler’s work, being able to view the entire
individual without dividing the psyche into components, holds tremendous relevance to
improve our understanding of men’s social relations. In this model, we are capable of
observing how men have changed in recent popular histories and how they responded
socially to the changing relations of diverse social factors.
In Adler’s notion, optimal functioning is guided by cooperation and compassion
toward others (and the other sex). Many of the issues that were confronted by Adler
remain highly relevant today, and they provide useful guidance toward the gendered talk
at work. If women are to genuinely emancipate themselves, they need to have a better
understanding of the reciprocal nature of social interest, which is essential in all the
gender performances – i.e., any gender group that makes no social contacts with the
opposite sex soon finds itself isolated – according to the Adlerian psychology. The
solution of female marginality has to be linked with the solution of male inferiority
anxiety.
Why is it Adler, instead of Freud or Lacan, associated with the psychoanalytic
concern in my study? The question naturally arises in a manner consistent with the
320
reader’s awareness that Freud’s and Lacan’s ideas have become central to the various
receptions of things psychoanalytic in film criticism. The fact that this study doesn’t take
the Freudian approach is based upon a more general criticism of Freud's theory with its
emphasis on sexuality, and my conviction of Adler’s thinking that an individual’s
goodness is not dependent upon heredity or sexual libido, but on interactions with others
(Adler, 2004, 17). The reason I dismiss ġ Lacan's trajectory is due to my skepticism that
“Law of the Father,” in Lacan’s application of semiotics to psychoanalysis,
correspondingly constitutes culture and the possibility of social communication. The
masculinity in Lacan’s model is not an empirical fact. It is, rather, the occupant of a place
in symbolic and social relations. Oedipal repression creates a system of symbolic order in
which the possessor of the phallus (a symbol, to be clearly distinguished from any
empirical penis) is central.
To distract myself from the linguistic shackles ʇ being not absolutely achieved, I
confess, I decided to stick to Adler’s perception that a number of social factors (e.g., a
grudging fear of social feminization, the rapid development and popularity of Boy Scouts
and college fraternities, sports craze, fitness boom, AIDS anxiety, etc.) combine to
suggest a historical configuration with rather differently modulated significance for men
321
and masculinity. In Adler’s liberal mind, “heredity may be regarded as a supply of bricks
which, with all their different qualities, are used by each individual in his infancy to build
up his style of life” (Adler, 1935e, 6). “Heredity only endows him with certain abilities.
Environment only gives him certain impressions. These abilities and impressions, and the
manner in which he “experiences” them—that is to say, the interpretation he makes of
these experiences—are the bricks which he uses in his own “creative” way in building up
his attitude toward life. . . . it is his attitude toward life—which determines his
relationship to the outside world” (Adler, 1935a, 5).
Just as Jung’s collective unconscious is proposed to be part of the unconscious mind,
expressed in humanity and all life forms with nervous systems, so does Adler develop his
“Individual Psychology” as a comprehensive theory of human behavior that has broad
impact on the fields of education, social sciences, family life, psychology and
psychotherapy. As Henry Stein and Martha Edwards have noticed, the scientific paradigm
shift and intellectual climate of the 1990's might well be ripe for a re-discovery of Adler's
original and full contribution to an understanding of human beings and their relationship
to the world. They believed that Adler created an exquisitely integrated, holistic theory of
human nature and psychopathology, a set of principles and techniques of psychotherapy,
a world view, and a philosophy of living (Stein and Edwards, 1998). In other words,
322
neither Jung’s collective unconscious nor Adler’s masculine protest develops individually,
but is shared, motivated by all the social community, and finally converted to a natural
reality 炼 their theoretical concerns would not be fundamentally affected by
transplantation to other societies or other countries, either.
The thesis will also likely disconcert readers of standardized theoretical products
and disappoint them in search of a formulaic and simplified approach to textual
analyses. Rather, the enduring significance of Adler’s and Jung’s application resides in
keeping the idea of cinema studies as open and broad as possible. More specific to the
topic of interest, the present work seeks to understand how masculinity changed in the
Nineties’ America and how it differed from the masculine representation in the
Counterculture and Eighties – a diachronic relationship on one hand, but also why it
changed or what underlying (social) factors were really changing – a synchronic
relationship, on the other.
Unfortunately, Adler has rarely received the initial critical attention in cultural
studies, let alone in film criticism. More than half a century ago the thought of Alfred
Adler, in its first genuinely systematic form, was brought to the Anglo-American
academia in carefully chosen and brilliantly introduced selections from his writings by
323
Heinz & Rowena Ansbacher (1956). Prior to this time, Adler has been much
underestimated by those who are interested in psychoanalysis. The reason is owing to the
lack of organization in his writings,
129
his zealousness in popularizing his ideas, and his
unpopular emphasis on ego functions and other matters more recently in vogue.
My deep regret for Adler’s genius ignored aroused my profoundest interest to bring
him to the critical attention of the film world. Adler’s model is ideally suited for
promoting the prevention of biased gendered roles (e.g., hegemonic masculinity and
militant femininity). Adler’s work is designed to be the first to improve our
understanding of masculinity and femininity in the reciprocal gender norms.
Just as my Asian background has given me insights and perspectives that I wish to
provide balance to the American vision of men and masculinities, I have no intention to
debunk the role of Western-trained academics. Neither do I try to cheapen feminist
criticism as false consciousness (in Marx’s initial concept),
130
but rather remind the
limits and the potential overinterpretation. More significantly, the thesis proposes that
there exist new areas of exploring cultural codes after post-structuralism and feminism.

129
This is why few psychologists have read the original publications in which Adler described his views
on mental illness and psychotherapy.
130
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels began to transform the meaning of "ideology" more toward
the sense of "false consciousness," a way of misunderstanding the world and our place in it.
324
For many years feminist scholars in all the arts have questioned dominant
historiographical conventions. They have also argued that the conventional emphasis on
the role of heroic figures and the master narratives of the past have been significant
factors in obscuring the role of women in history. For feminist film scholars there are
pressing reasons to construct a speaking position and a narrative voice from which to
engage with the identity of women culturally constituted on the margins of the
mainstream history. This approach immediately yields the idea that men studies within
feminism has been more concerned to theorize femininity than masculinity. Their primary
interest remains in female subjectivity and female consciousness-raising, even though the
topic has changed to men and masculinity. Furthermore, the diversity of feminist opinion
has only added to the array of opposing views on men and masculinity. Undeniably, there
are some feminist scholars who take the alternative and reflexive approach such as Luce
Irigaray’s introduction of economic impact on the role-playing in gender, Julia Kristeva’s
interest in woman’s time, Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological reading of woman’s place
in the SF film, Susan Jeffords’s media-based study of the Persian Gulf War, to name a few.
They deserve credit for achieving more than a similar history gendered female.
The thesis initially began a project by sharing my sentiments to neutralize the
feminist approach that was tilting the balance too far the other way, and suppressing the
325
masculine. As for the scholarship of this study, it, first and foremost, attempts to articulate
the significance of masculine motivation (what drives men to behave the way they do),
which generally occurs in the presence of two conditions in Adler's views: an
exaggerated inferiority feeling and an insufficiently developed feeling of community.
Prior to this study, no one has attempted to build a bridge between cultural studies
and cinema studies in an outside-in approach. The outside-in approach will basically
examine the social findings by building the interdisciplinary rapport and modestly admit
that some of the films do not respond to social reality consequently; it is much above
creating a critical consensus or true-false imaginary in cinema studies.
This is a historical question, and in this study I am assuming that history is a
construct. All that remains of the masculine representation in cinema are social factors
and the testimony of their changing relations. A strenuous reader may ask: why not pay
more careful attention to historical context, except for a brief sketch of the boomer
generation from adolescence to parenthood and the three men’s movements in the 1990’s?
It may be proper to say that the thesis does not make a judgment depended on how the
films were exhibited in history, or ask to what extent film in general can be regarded as a
medium for history. Instead, the present research of masculine protest goes beyond the
simplification and intensification of the American history. Whether the (Hollywood) film
326
shows "the real thing," or the “reel” thing (the so-called myth), it always reenacts the
collective unconscious of the time - they are psychic innate dispositions to experience and
represent basic human behavior and situations. Consciousness (false or not) is much more
obviously part of social history, a dynamic force in its potential transformation and/or
distortion.
Within this context, the noir films may not throw light on authentic history, but they
capture the American men’s collective unconscious in the postwar years (the abiding fear
of strong women). In such a case, it would not seem entirely appropriate to speak of
whether such noir thought “reflects” or “fits” in the history with which it is inseparably
bound up. This is one of the Adler’s theoretical reflections on the issue of collective
unconscious as the psychic strata formed by repressed wishes (of men, in particular),
rather than inquire reflexively into the basic relation of film to reality.
Additionally, the thesis uses the ġ concept of genealogy that Foucault expanded into a
counter-history of the position of the subject which traces the development of people and
societies through history. As Foucault has discussed in his essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History," genealogy is not the search for (historical) origins, and is not the construction of
a linear development. Instead it seeks to show the plural and sometimes contradictory
past that reveals traces of the influence that power (which transforms into collective
327
unconscious in my study) has had on truth.
131
Foucault also describes genealogy as a
particular investigation into those elements which "we tend to feel without history"
(Foucault, 1980, 139). This would include things such as sexuality, and other elements of
everyday life. To pursue Foucault’s genealogical investigation, my critique of trends in
(feminist) film criticism is entirely motivated by my hope for a more productive
encounter between cultural studies and film criticism, rather than force the reader to make
true-false judgments of history. This is what can be characterized as recouping
masculinity in its positivity and productivity. Here, then, is a type of procedure, which is
unconcerned with legitimizing and consequently excluding the fundamental point of view
of the feminist approach, but runs through the cycle of positivity by proceeding from the
fact of acceptance to the system of acceptability analyzed through the mass psyche
(however it coexisted with history or not).
Likewise, my study is designed to consider the reverse direction of causality in the
outside-in approach whose conclusions are drawn on the basis of proofs (the present
social findings of contemporary perspectives on men’s movements), not simply by
assuming or thinking about a predetermined clause. My introduction of the three men’s

131
Foucault's ideas of genealogy were greatly influenced by the work that Nietzsche had done on the
development of morals through power.
328
movements in the Nineties in America counts for quite a lot in their functional/emotional
effect. I select only what is relevant to my central theme, while a comprehensive history
and description of the Nineties has never been of essential importance to a concern in
which ideas (ideology or false consciousness) cannot be “untrue” to their object if they
are actually part of it (history).
In this way, whether masculine protest embedded in the men’s movements may or
may not impact in sync with men’s motivation toward goal pursuit on screen, it won’t
invalidate my critique of recent trends in masculine representation, which always
progresses no less from mythical thoughts than from authentic history. The on- and
off-screen relationship between masculine protest and men’s motivation changes over the
course of goal pursuit as progress is made towards goal attainment. The present social
findings demonstrate that whereas high perceived degree of masculine protest increases,
the perceived goal progress among men’s movements is getting low ʇ the Men’s Rights
Movement calls to mind. The thesis is therefore intended to make contributions to the
literatures on perceived degrees of masculine protest toward men’s goal attainment and
its masculine representation on film.
By emphasizing masculine protest as a mechanism for male representation, the
viewer will easily perceive that the hero may adopt diverse strategies for the construct of
329
himself as chameleon in the 1990’s: he can be transfigured in the ‘savage’ disguise as the
western code dictates (Dances with Wolves), or playing a savior to redeem the imperfect
past in the Vietnam War myth (Forrest Gump), or ‘infantilized’ as the ‘adult-child’ in the
family sitcom scenario (Big Daddy), or simply pissed off as an angry protestor (Falling
Down). The “modest manliness” in the first three core films also suggests a different
mainstream resolution to middle-class men's anxieties in the post-feminist era. He might
take a low-key and ‘feminized’ gesture so as to soften the potential resistance that the
repressed Other poses in the changing social and cultural milieu, but he will always
secure the discursive enunciation, as the speaking subject to address the narrative (a
reminder of the omnipresent male voiceover in Dances with Wolves and Forrest Gump).
The films discussed in the thesis may not be exhaustive, but it shows that popular
films were tied so closely to the desires and anxieties of their audience that they could not
do otherwise than embody and refract the currents of social and political culture that
helped define the era to which they belonged. It would be more surprising had the
mainstream films not responded and embodied the anxieties and controversies of that era,
although they generally eschew contemporary social realities in the setting in favor of
330
beguiling imaginary worlds.
132
In my revisionist thinking, a popular film may respond to topical political issues, but
the politicians that try to shape public opinions account for simply part of social history,
not in whole. Their influence is defined in the concept of Durkheim’s collective
representation, or Jung’s collective conscious (perceptibly at variance with collective
unconscious) ʇ it is because politicians always shape a top-down model by exerting a
fabricated influence on determining the agenda of topics for public discussion, with the
help and participation of the mass media industries. But don’t forget that the media can
be used and abused by both the ruling and the opposing party, far from a lopsided cake. A
popular film is open to appropriation by both liberals and conservatives (as well as to
multiple political perspectives within and outside the American political system).
Furthermore, the media force is also determined by the bottom-up processes, which
can act directly and indirectly on shaping or reflecting popular attitudes. The collective
unconscious is seen from the bottom up, in that the actions of many theatre-goers
formulate powerful forces that can themselves shape history. We thus combine an
explanation focusing on the varying preferences of the public (the so called “bottom-up”

132
For further discussion of the topic, see Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in
Contemporary American Film (New York: Praeger, 1992).
331
approaches), coupled with a top-down model, to a lesser degree, that elites (here,
government leaders and parties) can shape public preferences. I consequently assert that
both the bottom-up forces (the mainstream media’s fear of social feminization, the
prevalent values of competition, success, and self-image, the developing sports craze,
fitness boom, AIDS anxiety, etc.) and the elite’s top-down forces (the politicians’ attempt
to keep the public "in line"), shape mass preferences ʇ as elaborated in the critique of
Forrest Gump.
As with many issues within the feminist movement, there exists a diversity of social
positions regarding masculine protest. In some specific circumstances, American films
were quick to respond to the Mythopoetic Movement and Profeminist Engagement. The
films of the 1990’s, collectively, reflect some of the most important political, social, and
economic issues of the time. In some cases, they recreated history while still others
articulated a partisan view, and some even challenged current social values and political
assumptions. Falling Down is an example as such. Falling Down acknowledges the
unemployed white male’s frustrations and suggest that the loss of breadwinner status can
unbalance workers (especially white ones), who may die trying to find decent jobs and
better lives through public confrontation. The ‘hero’ retains greater sympathy when he
332
sticks to calls for better jobs or fairer treatment rather than expressing anger or dispersing
wealth by force. In case the Men’s Rights Movement is not a mainstream movement,
neither is Falling Down a quintessential response from Hollywood.
From the 1990’s onward, the syncretist archetype in negotiated mode of masculinity
needs to be remolded again. The facts that women often contest men’s power, and that
some men oppress other men, have created possibilities for change. To celebrate the
arrival of the new millennium, the Mythopoetic and Profeminist brand of masculinity
continues to prevail in Hollywood. A growing concern with the “problem of media,”
however, takes place quietly within the social context that has replaced masculinity in
part as a problematic construct. The Civil Rights Movement has switched its teleology
now against the media abuse. The Truman Show (1998), preceded by Wag the Dog (1997),
spearheads the new trend, followed by Pleasantville (1998), EDtv (1999), No Such Thing
(2001), Run Ronnie Run! (2002), Surviving Eden (2004), and Stranger Than Fiction
(2006).
Take The Truman Show as an example. The film poses a commentary on
all-pervasive media manipulation in which Truman was adopted by the network and
raised in the zoo-like environment of a TV soundstage. Thus, the TV audience became
hooked when Truman was very young. Now, at age 30, he still doesn't know he's a
333
prisoner on an immense domed city-size soundstage, simulating Seahaven, a planned
community on the Gulf Coast near Tampa. In this real-time documentary, every moment
of Truman's existence is captured by concealed cameras and telecast to a giant global
audience. His friends and family are actors who smile pleasantly at Truman's familiar
catchphrase greeting, "In case I don't see you later, good afternoon, good evening, and
good night!" The media, on this account, controlled the "means of communication" and it
used that power to censor virtually all discussion of its own role in shaping events. The
media now offer the new outlet for masculine protest at the turn of the century.
Whether it aims at gender or media issues, the approach to masculine protest has
contributed to reconditioning previous men studies in the millennium, in an attempt to
revolutionize cultural views of masculinity through distinct changes in masculine values
that have been over-interpreted as singular, static, and linguistic-bound. Women’s and
men’s movements are maturing toward a movement of men and women for gender
reconciliation. Some of the adherents of the initial women’s and men’s movements, as
Shepherd Bliss has revealed, remain stuck in the early stages of blame, anger, shame, and
dualistic thinking (1995, 306). Others have matured to inclusive thinking, and dialectical
thinking, rather than polaristic thinking, either-or. As there are many feminisms, there are
many masculinities. In the post-feminist era, the majority of men appreciate the feminist
334
passion and concern for justice. But in our endeavor to understand men and masculinities,
we need to be allies, partners, even when we differ.
335
Bibliography
Abbott, Granklin, ed. Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology.
Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1993.
Adams, Rachel and David Savran, eds. The Masculinity Studies Reader. Maiden, MA and
Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Adler, Alfred. “The Fundamental Views of Individual Psychology.” International
Journal of Individual Psychology, 1 (1935): 5–8.
_____. “Prevention of Neurosis.” International Journal of Individual Psychology 1
(1935): 3–12.
_____. Adler Speaks: The Lectures of Alfred Adler. Edited by Karen Drescher & Mark
Stone. Lincoln, NE : iUniverse, Inc., c2004.
Millar, A. “Encouragement and the Essential Elements of Adlerian Practice.” In Adlerian
yearbook 2008, edited by P. Prina, K. John, & A. Millar, 11–30. London: Institute
for Individual Psychology, 2008.
_____. “Some Problems of Psychoanalysis.” Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society 3 (1911): 102–111.
_____. Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Psychical Composition. New York: Nervous
and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1917.
_____. “The Cause and Prevention of Neuroses.” Journal of Mental Science 73 (1927):
1–8.
_____. “Individual Psychology.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 22
(1927):116–122.
_____. “A Doctor Remakes Education.” The Survey 58 (1927): 490–495.
_____. Understanding Human Nature. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1927.
_____. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
& Co., 1927.
_____. “The Cause and Prevention of Neuroses.” Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology 23 (1928): 4–11.
_____. “On Teaching Courage.” The Survey 61(1928): 241–242.
_____. The Science of Living. New York: Garden City Publishing, 1929.
_____. “Something about Myself.” Childhood and Character 7 (1930): 6–8.
_____. “Individual Psychology.” In Psychologies of 1930, edited by C. Murchison, 395–
405. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1930.
_____. “The Meaning of Life.” Lancet 220 (1931): 225–228.
336
_____. What Life Should Mean to You. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931.
_____. “Individual Psychology and Experimental Psychology.” Character and
Personality 1 (1933): 265–267.
_____. “The Fundamental Views of Individual Psychology.” International Journal of
Individual Psychology 1 (1935): 5–8.
_____. “What Is Neurosis?” International Journal of Individual Psychology 1 (1935): 9–
17.
_____. (1935c). “The Structure of Neurosis.” International Journal of Individual
Psychology (1935): 3–12.
_____. “The Prevention of Delinquency.” International Journal of Individual Psychology
1 (1935): 3–13.
_____. “Prevention of Neurosis.” International Journal of Individual Psychology 1
(1935): 3–12.
_____. “On the Interpretation of Dreams.” International Journal of Individual
Psychology 2 (1936): 3–16.
_____. (1936b). “Trick and Neurosis.” International Journal of Individual Psychology 2
(1936): 3–10.
_____. “The Neurotic’s Picture of the World.” International Journal of Individual
Psychology 2 (1936): 3–13.
_____. “Compulsion Neurosis.” International Journal of Individual Psychology 2 (1936):
3–22.
_____. “A School Girl’s Exaggeration of Her Own Importance.” International Journal of
Individual Psychology 3 (1937): 3–12.
_____. “Mass Psychology.” International Journal of Individual Psychology 3 (1937):
111–120.
_____. “Significance of Early Recollections.” International Journal of Individual
Psychology 3 (1937): 283–287.
_____. “Physical Manifestations of Psychic Disturbances.” Individual Psychology
Bulletin 4 (1944): 3–8.
_____. “The Sexual Function.” Individual Psychology Bulletin 4 (1945): 99–102.
_____.”How the Child Selects His Symptoms.” Individual Psychology Bulletin 5 (1946):
67–78.
_____. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in
Selections from His Writings. Compiled and edited by Heinz & Rowena Ansbacher.
New York: Harper, 1947.
_____. “The Progress of Mankind.” Journal of Individual Psychology 13 (1957): 9–13.
337
_____. “Suicide.” Journal of Individual Psychology 14 (1958): 57–61.
_____. “The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology.” In Classics in Psychology,
edited by Thorne Shipley, 687–714. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
_____. Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964.
_____. Problems of Neurosis. New York: Harper & Row, 1964..
_____. Superiority and Social Interest. New York: Norton, 1964.
_____. “The Psychology of Power.” Journal of Individual Psychology 22 (1966): 66–
172.
_____. “Problem Children.” Individual Psychology 44 (1988): 406–416.
_____. “The Child’s Inner Life and a Sense of Community.” Individual Psychology 44
(1988): 417–423.
_____. “On the Essence and Origin of Character.” Individual Psychology 44 (1988): 424–
426.
_____. “Personality as a Self-Consistent Unity.” Individual Psychology 44 (1988): 431–
440.
_____. “On Doodlings: The Craving for Symmetry.” Individual Psychology 44 (1988):
441–443.
_____. “What Is Neurosis?” Individual Psychology 52 (1996): 318–333.
_____. “The Structure of Neurosis.” Individual Psychology 52 (1996): 351–362.
_____. Adler Speaks: The Lectures of Alfred Adler, edited by Mark Stone & Karen
Drescher. Lincoln, NE: IUniverse inc., 2004.
_____. “The Structure of Neurosis.” Lancet 220 (1931): 136–137.
Allyn, David. Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History. New
York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
Anders, Jentri. Beyond Counterculture. Washington State University Press, 1990.
Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Ansbacher, Heinz L. “The Significance of Alfred Adler for the Concept of Narcissism.”
The American Journal of Psychiatry 142, no. 2 (Feb. 1985): 203-207.
Ansbacher, Heinz & Rowena, eds. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A
Systematic Presentation in Selections from His WritingsNew York: Basic Books,
1956.
Ansen, David. "Revenge of a Supernerd." Newsweek, March 1, 1993.
Awiakta, Marilou. ''Red Alert! A Meditation on Dances with Wolves.'' Ms, March-April
1991, 70-71.
Baird, Robert. “Feature Films and the Indian: Going Indian Through Dances with
Wolves.” Film & History 23, nos. 1/4 (1993): 91.
338
Bakhtin, Mikhail, M. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
Balswick, Jack. The Inexpressive Male. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Selected and translated
from the French by Annette Lavers.
_____. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller and preface by Richard Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1974.
_____.“The Death of the Author.” Image - Music – Text, 142-148. Edited and translated
by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Basinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema, Volume II. Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Grey.
Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1971.
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of
Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from
Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1978.
Bernie, Zilbergeld. The New Male Sexuality. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.
Betcher, R. William. In a Time of Fallen Heroes: The Re-Creation of Masculinity. New
York: Macmillan, 1993.
Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack
Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1994.
Blake, Michael. Dances with Wolves. New York: Ballantine, 1988.
Bliss, Shepherd. “Mythopoetic Men’s Movements.” In The Politics of Manhood:
Profeminist Men Response to the Mythopoetic Men’ s Movement (And the
Mythopoetic Leaders Answer), edited by Michael S. Kimmel. Philadephia: Temple
University Press, 1995.
Blount, Marcellus, ed. Representing Black Men. New York/London: Routledge, 1994.
Bly, Robert. Iron John: A Book About Men. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990.
_____. The Sibling Society. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996.
Boeree, C. George. “Alfred Adler.” Accessed 1997.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/adler.html.
Boone, J. & Cadden, M., eds. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist
339
Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre & Wacquant, Loic J. D. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Brod, Harry & Michael Kaufman, eds. Theorizing Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, 1994.
Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1990.
Burgoyne, Robert. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 2010.
Buscombe, Edward, ed., The BFI Companion to the Western. New York: Da Capo
Paperback, 1988.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Byers, Thomas B. "History Re-Membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and
the Burial of the Counterculture." Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (Summer 1996):
419-44.
Cagin, Seth and Dray, Philip. Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs, Violence,
Rock 'n' Roll, and Politics. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Calavita, Kitty. “The New Politics of Immigration: ‘Balanced-Budget Conservatism’ and
the Symbolism of Proposition 187.” Social Problems. 43, no. 3 (Aug. 1996):
284-305.
_____. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. Quid Pro
Books online, 2010.
Cameron, Deborah. “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the
Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity.” In Language and Masculinity, edited by
Sally Johnson and Ulrike H. Meinhof. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Cameron, Ian & Robin Wood. Antonioni. Revised edition. New York/London: Praeger,
1971.
Carrigan, Tim, Bob Connell & John Lee. “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity.” In
The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, edited by Harry Brod. Boston:
Allen & Unwin, 1987.
Carruth, Gorton. What Happened When: A Chronology of Life and Events in America,
revised ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Castillo, Edward D. “Review of Dances with Wolves.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer
1991) : 14-23.
340
Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Christian, Harry. The Making of Anti-Sexist Men. New York/London: Routledge, 1994.
Clark, Danae. "The Question of Masculinity." In Gender: Literary and Cinematic
Representation, edited by Jeanne Ruppert. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1994.
Clatterbaugh, Kenneth. Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women, and
Politics in Modern Society. Boudler: Westview Press, 1990.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988; also see Newton and Stacey,
58.
Clover, Carol. “White Noise - Michael Douglas takes his revenge on a world that
oppresses him in the controversial Falling Down. Carol Clover explores why the
film matters.” Sight and Sound 3. 5 (1993): 6-9.
_____. “Falling Down: The Rise of the Average White Male.” In Women and Film: A
Sight and Sound Reader, edited by Pam Cook and Philip Dodd. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993.
Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: American Masculinity and the Movies during the Fifties.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cohan, Steven & Rae Hark, eds. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in
Hollywood Cinema. London/New York: Routledge, 1993.
Coltrane, Scott. “The Micropolitics of Gender in Nonindustrial Societies.” Gender and
Society 6, no. 1 (March 1992): 86-107.
Connell, R. W. “Psychoanalysis on Masculinity.” In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by
Harry Brod & Michael Kaufman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994.
_____. “Radical Psychoanalysis.” Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995.
_____. "The History of Masculinity." In The Masculinity Studies Reader, edited by
Rachel Adams and David Savran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
Cornwall, Andrea, ed. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies. New
York/London: Routledge, 1994.
Cook, Pam. "Masculinity in Crisis?" Screen 23, nos. 3-4 (1982): 39-46.
Cooper, Arnold M. "What Men Fear: The Facade of Castration Anxiety." In The
Psychology of Men, edited by Gerald I. Fogel, Frederick M. Lane, Robert S. Leibert.
New York: Basil Books, 1986.
Corliss, Richard. “The World According to Gump.” Time, August 1, 1994, 54.
341
Corneau, Guy. Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity. Boston:
Shambala, 1991.
Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1991.
Creed, Barbara. “Gynesis: Postmodernism and the Science Fiction Horror Film.” Alien
Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette
Kuhn. London: Verso, 1990.
_____. “Phallic Panic: Male Hysteria and Dead Ringers.” Screen 31 (1990): 125-146.
Dallek, Robert. Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Daniels, Ron. “American Society Is 'Falling Down': Vantage Point.” New Pittsburgh
Courier 25 (September 1993): 5.
Davies, Jude. “Gender, Ethnicity and Cultural Crisis in Falling Down and Groundhog
Day.” Screen 36, no.3: (Autumn 1995).
_____. "I’m the Bad Guy?' Falling Down and White Masculinity in 1990’s Hollywood."
Journal of Gender Studies, 4, no. 2 (July 1995): 145-152.
Davies, Jude & Smith, Carol R. Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary
American Film. Keele University Press, 1998.
Deloria, Ella. "Red Alert! A Meditation on 'Dances with Wolves.'" Ms 1.5 (March/April
1991): 70-71.
Deming, Robert. “The Return of the Unrepressed: Male Desire, Gender, and Genre.”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14, nos. 1/2 (1992): 125-48.
Doane, Mary Ann; Patricia Mellencamp; Linda Williams,, eds. Re-Vision: Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.
Doane, Mary Ann. “The `Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address,” In Re-Vision: Essays
in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, Linda
Williams. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Avon Books, 1977.
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Doty, William G. Myths of Masculinity. New York: Crossroad, 1993.
Dunar, Andrew J. America in the 50s. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006.
Durkheim, Emile. Emile Durkheim On Morality and Society. Edited by Rober N. Bellah.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1973.
_____. “The Cultural Logic of Collective Representations.” In Social Theory: The
Multicultural and Classic Readings, edited by C. Lemert. Wesleyan University:
342
Westview Press, 2004.
Easthope, Anthony. What a Man Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture.
New York/London: Routledge, 1990.
Eckstein, Daniel & David Sarnoff. “Four Adlerian Metaphors Applied to Couples
Counseling.” Journal of Individual Psychology, 63 (2007): 322–338.
Eco, Umberto. "The Myth of Superman." In The Role of the Reader, 107-124.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
_____. Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1986.
Edwards, Tim. Erotics & Politics: Gay Male Sexuality, Masculinity, and Feminism.
London/New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ehrlich, Susan. “Gender as Social Practice: Implications for Second Language
Acquisition.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19 (1997): 421-446.
Eliasoph, Nina. “Political Culture and the Presentation of a Political Self: A Study of the
Public Sphere in the Spirit of Erving Goffman.” Theory & Society 19 (1990): 465-94;
also see Messner, p. 726.
Farrell, Warren. “Is Male Power Really a Myth? A First Glance.” In The Myth of Male
Power, 27-41. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
______. “Are `Power,’ `Patriarchy,’ `Dominance,’ and `Sexism’ Actually Code Words for
Male Disposability?” In The Myth of Male Power, 67-101. See above.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963.
_____. "Their Turn: How Men Are Changing." In Men’ s Lives, second edition. Compiled
by Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
Friedman, Richard C. Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Arthur. “The Male Body and Literary Metaphors for Masculinity.”
In Brod and Kaufman, 239-258.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
______. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
______. “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
______. Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76: Society Must Be Defended. New
York: Picador, 1997.
______. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press. 1980.
343
Franklin, Clyde W., II. The Changing Definition of Masculinity. New York: Plenum Press,
1984.
______. Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76: Society Must Be Defended.
Friedan, Betty. “Their Turn: How Men Are Changing.” In Kimmel & Messner, 538-47.
_____. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, 1997.
_____. The Second Stage. London: M. Joseph Publisher, 1982
Friedman, Lester D., ed. Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the Ameican Cinema.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Gaines, Jane. “Women and Representation,” Jump Cut 29 (February 1984): 25-27.
Georgakas, Dan. “Review of Dances with Wolves.” Cineaste, 18, no. 2 (1991): 51.
_____. “They Have Not Spoken: American Indians in Film.” Film Quarterly 25 (Spring
1972).
Gertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." The Interpretation of
Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Gitlin, Todd. “Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television
Entertainment.” In Television: The Critical View? fifth edition, edited by Newcomb.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Gledhill, Christian. “Recent Development in Feminist Criticism,” Quarterly Review of
Film Studies 3 (Fall 1978): 482-83; also reprinted in Gerald Mast and Marshall
Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 817-45.
______.
"Genre." In The Cinema Book: A Complete Guide to Understanding the Movies,
edited by Pam Cook. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Glenn, Joshua. “The Original Generation X, 1954-63.” Boston Globe 10, January 10,
2008. Retrieved July 24, 2012.
Goode, William Josiah. The Family. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982.
Gormley, Paul. The New-Brutality Film-Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema. Intellect Ltd, 2005.
Green, Ian. "Malefunction: A Contribution to the Debate on Masculinity in the Cinema."
Screen 25, nos. 4-5 (1984): 36-48.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1990.
Greiner, Donald J. Women Enter the Wilderness: Male Bonding and the American Novel
of the 1980s. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. New York: Pocket Books. 1994.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism.” In Schor and
Weed, 82-97.
344
Gutterman, David S. “Postmodernism and the Interrogation of Masculinity.” In Brod and
Kaufman, 219-238.
Hall, Catherine. White, Male and Middle Class. New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
Hantover, Jeffrey. “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity.” Reprinted from
Journal of Social Issues, 34, no. 1 (1978).
Haraway, Donna, ed. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Harlow, Harry F. “Metaphors into Hardware: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love.”
In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science,
231-43. Edited by Donna Haraway. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Harmetz , Aljean. “Review of Falling Down.” New York Times, Feb21, 1993, A.28.
Hartigan Jr., John. “Name Calling: Objectifying 'Poor Whites' and 'White Trash' in
Detroit." In White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Matt Wray and
Annalee Newitz. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Harris, John F. The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. Random House, 2005.
Haug, Frigga. Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. London: Verso, 1987.
Hearn, Jeff. The Gender of Oppression: Men , Masculinity and the Critique of Marxism.
Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf, 1987.
______. Men in the Public Eye: The Construction and Deconstruction of Public Men and
Public Patriarchies. New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
Hearn, Jeff and David L. Collinson. “Theorizing Unities and Differences Between Men
and Between Masculinities.” In Brod and Kaufman, 97-118.
Hearn, Jeff and David Morgan, eds. Men, Masculinities & Social Theory. London: Unwin
Hyman, 1990.
Heath, Stephen. "Male Feminism." In Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine & Paul
Smith. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Hellmann, John. “Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American
Mythology in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.” In Inventing Vietnam: The
War in Films and Television, edited by Michael Anderegg.
Herman, Steven L. "The ‘New Democrats’ are Liberals and Proud of It." Associated
Press (December 4, 1989).
Higginbotham, Virginia. “Feminism and Bunuel: Points of Contact.” In Romance
Languages Annual, edited by Ben Lawton and Anthony Julian Tamburri. 1989.

! ġ
345
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, and Michael Messner. “Gender Displays and Men ˢ Power: The `New Man’ and the Mexican Immigrant Man.” In Brod and Kaufman,
200-218.
Horrocks, Roger. Masculinity in Crisis. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.
Horton, Andrew. “The Mouse Who Wanted to F---k a Cow: Cinematic Carnival Laughter
in Dusan Makavejev’s Films.” In Comedy/Cinema/Theory, edited by Andrew
Horton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Hunt, Dennis. “Review of Falling Down.” Los Angeles Times, 17 Sept., 1993, 24.
Hunter, Latham. “The Celluloid Cubicle: Regressive Constructions of Masculinity in
1990s Office Movies.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures, Journal of
American Culture 26. 1 (Mar 2003): 71-86.
Irigary, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Isaksen, Judy L. "Generation X." St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, 2002.
Jackson, Earl. Scandalous Subjects: Gay Male Representations in Literature and Film.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Forthcoming.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
edited by S. Nelson and L. Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 1988.
_____. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991.
Jardine, Alice, and Paul Smith, eds. Men in Feminism. New York/London: Routledge,
1987.
Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
______. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1994.
______. "The Big Switch: Hollywood Masculinity in the Nineties." In Film Theory Goes
to the Movies, edited by Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins. New
York: Routledge, 1993.
Jeffords, Susan and Lauren Rabinovitz, eds. Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf
War. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Jordan, Ben. “‘Conservation of Boyhood’: Boy Scouting's Modest Manliness and Natural
Resource Conservation, 1910–1930.” Environmental History 15, no. 4 (2010):
612-642.
Jung, Carl. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, CA: Princeton
346
University Press, 1981.
_____. Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffe. New
York: Vintage Books, 1962.
_____. Man and His Symbols. Del Publishing, a division of Random House Inc., 1964.
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Is the Gaze Male?” Women & Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New
York and London: Methuen, 1983.
Karlberg, Michael. “The Power of Discourse and the Discourse of Power.” International
Journal of Peace Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2005).
Kaufman, Michael. “Men, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power.”
In Brod and Kaufman, 142-163.
Keane, Marian E. “A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcook, and Vertigo.” In A
Hitchcock Reader, edited by Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. Ames:
Iowa State University Press, 1986.
Kehr, Dave. "Who Framed Forrest Gump?" Film Comment 31 (March/April 1995):45+.
Keller, Alexandra. “Historical Discourse and American Identity in Westerns Since the
Reagan Administration.” Film & History, 33, no. 1 (2003): 47-54.
Kelly, Michael. "The 1992 Campaign: The Democrats; Clinton Uses Farm Speech to
Begin New Offensive". New York Times, September 28, 1992.
Kennedy, Gordon, and Kody Ryan. “Hippie Roots & the Perennial Subculture.” Accessed
May 13, 2003.
http://www.hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=243.
Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Kimmel, Michael S., ed. The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Response to the
Mythopoetic Men’ s Movement (And the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer). Philadephia:
Temple University Press, 1995.
_____. Changing Men. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1987.
_____. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of
Gender Identity.” In Brod and Kaufman, 119-141.
Kimmel, Michael S. and Michael Kaufman. “Weekend Warriors: The New Men ˢ Movement.” In Brod and Kaufman, 259-288.
Kimmel, Michael S. and Michael A. Messner, comps. Men’ s Lives. Third Edition.
Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1995.
______, comps. Men’ s Lives. Second Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
King, Neal. “Dead-End Days: The Sacrifice of Displaced Workers on Film.” Journal of
Film and Video, 56, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 32-44.
347
Kipnis, Aaron. “The Postfeminist Men’s Movement.” In The Politics of Manhood:
Profeminist Men Response to the Mythopoetic Men’ s Movement (And the
Mythopoetic Leaders Answer), edited by Michael S. Kimmel. Philadephia: Temple
University Press, 1995.
Kirkham, Pat & Janet Thumim, eds. You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
Kitses, Jim. Horizons West. London: Secker and Warburg/BFI, 1969.
Klein, Alan M. Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory.
London: Verso, 1997.
Klumas, Amy L. and Thomas Marchant. “Images of Men in Popular Sitcoms.” The
Journal of Men Studies 2, no. 3 (February 1994): 269-86.
Krutnik, Frank, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. London and New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Kuhn, Annette, ed. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction
Cinema. London: Verso, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Meaning of the Phallus." In Feminine Sexuality, edited by J.
Mitchell and J. Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.
_____. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis į ġ New York: W. W. Norton,
1978.
Lasch, Christopher. "The Culture of Narcissism." In The Eighties: A Reader, edited by
Gilbert T. Sewall. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1997.
Lavery, David. “ ‘No Box of Chocolates’: The Adaptation of Forrest Gump.”
Literature/Film Quarterly. Salisbury: 25, no. 1 (1997): 18, 5.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
Lee, Martin A. Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion. New York: Grove
Press 1985.
Lehman, Peter, ed. Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. New York and London:
Routledge, 2001.
Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
_____. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. New
Edition. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2007.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
348
Levi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth.” In Structural Anthropology,
translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic
Books, 1963. Reprinted in Journal of American Foklore (1978).
_____. L'homme nu. Translated by F. P. Tomasulo, "The Politics of Ambivalence." Paris:
Plon, 1971.
_____. "On Manipulated Sociological Models." Quoted in The Structuralist Controversy:
The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, edited by R. Macksey and E.
Donato. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970.
_____. The Raw and the Cooked. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
_____. L'homme nu. Translated by F. P. Tomasulo, "The Politics of Ambivalence." Paris:
Plon, 1971.
_____. Totemism. New York: Penguin, 1969.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Introduction.” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
McArthur, Colin. Underground USA. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.
MacCabe, Colin. “Masochism and Male Subjectivity.” In Penley and Willis, 33-64.
McCann, Graham. Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1994.
McKenna, Andrew J. Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Machin, Richard & Norris, Christopher, eds. Post-structuralist Readings of English
Poetry. MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Maher, Kevin. “Reviews: Big Daddy.” Sight and Sound 9, no. 10 (Oct. 1999): 38, 40.
Malone, Michael. Heroes of Eros: Male Subjectivity in the Movies. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1979.
Marc, David. Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
______. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1989.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1974.
Mellen, Joan. Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1977.
Mellencamp, Patricia. "The Unfashionable Male Subject." In Gender: Literary and
Cinematic Representation, edited by Jeanne Ruppert, 17-24. Gainesville: University
349
Press of Florida, 1994.
Messner, Michael. “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities.”
In Men’ s Lives, second edition, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A.
Messner. New York: Macmillan, 1992.
______, eds. Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives.
Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Books, 1990.
______, eds. Men's Lives, co-authored by Michael Kimmel (1989, Macmillan first edition;
1992, Macmillan second edition; 1995, Prentice Hall College Div. third edition;
1997, Allyn & Bacon fourth edition; 2001 / 2004 / 2007 / 2009, Allyn & Bacon
eighth edition).
______. The Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements. New York: Sage Publications,
1997.
Messner, Michael; Margaret Carlisle Duncan; and Kerry Jensen. "Separating the Men
from the Girls: The Gendered Language of Televised Sports." Gender & Society 7,
no. 1 (March 1993): 121–137.
Messner, Michael A. and Sabo Donald F. Sex, Violence & Power in Sports: Rethinking
Masculinity. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1994.
Middleton, Peter. The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture.
New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
Miller, Patricia H. & Scholnick, Ellin Kofsky, eds. Toward a Feminist Developmental
Psychology. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Mills, Sara. “Discourse of Difference.” Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (May 1990).
Mitchell, Michele. A New Kind of Party Animal: How the Young Are Tearing Up the
American Political Landscape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Mosak, Harold, and Seymour Schneider. “Masculine Protest, Penis Envy, Women's
Liberation and Sexual Equality. Journal of Individual Psychology, 33 (1977):
193-201.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleaures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989.
_____. “Afterthought on `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King
Vidor’s Duel in the Sun.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989.
Murphy, Peter F., ed. Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities.
New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory.
New York: Routledge, 1988.
350
_____. "The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern
Theory." In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited
by Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
_____. “Three Men and a Baby M.” Camera Obscura, no. 7 (May 1988).
Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989.
Neale, Steve. "“Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema."
In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. London/New York:
Routledge, 1992.
_____. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema. New
York : Routledge, 1993.
Neale, Steve and Frank Krutnik. Popular Film and Television Comedy. London/New
York: Routledge, 1990.
Newton, Judith. Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique. Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Newton, Judith, & Judith Stacey. “Learning Not to Curse, or, Feminist Predicaments in
Cultural Criticism by Men: Our Movie Date with James Clifford and Stephen
Greenblatt.” Cultural Critique 23 (Winter, 1992-1993): 51-82.
N Ƿ th, Winfried. Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press,1990.
Nye, Andrea. Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man. New York/London:
Routledge, 1989.
O’Connor, John E. and Martin A. Jackson, eds. American History/American Film:
Interpreting the Hollywood Image. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979.
O’Pray, Michael. “Movies, Mania and Masculinity.” Screen 23, no. 5
(November-December 1982): 63-70.
Ostwalt, Conrad. “Dances with Wolves: An American Heart of Darkness.”
Literature/Film Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1996): 209-216.
Paganopoulos, Michelangelo. “Jesus Christ and Billy the Kid as Archetypes of the Self in
American Cinema.” A web-based essay from Journal of Religion and Popular
Culture (March 22, 2010).
Penley, Constance and Sharon Willis, eds. Male Trouble. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Pleck, Joseph H. The Myth of Masculinity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981.
Pope, David John. Male Friendship: The Correlation Between Homophobia, Male Sex
351
Role Identity and Intimacy in Male Friendship. Ph.D. diss., 1993.
Porter, David, ed. Between Men and Feminism. New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
Prats, Armando Jose. “The Image of the Other and the Other Dances with Wolves: The
Refigured Indian and the Textual Supplement.” Journal of Film and Video 50. no. 1
(Spring 1998): 3-19.
Prince, Stephen. Vision of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film.
New York: Praeger, 1992.
Rae, Nicol C. Southern Democrats. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Ransome, Paul. Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction. Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
(UK): Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1992.
Reagan, Ronald. Speaking My Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Renov, Michael. “Toward a Poetics of Documentary.” In Theorizing Documentary, edited
by Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1986.
Rosen, David. The Changing Fictions of Masculinity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993.
Rosenberg, Matt. “Baby Boom: The Population Baby Boom of 1946-1964 in the United
States.” Accessed March 27, 2009.
http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/babyboom.htm.
Ross, Michael W., ed. Homosexuality, Masculinity & Femininity. New York: Harrington
Park Press, 1985.
Ross, Steven J. “Cinema and Class Conflict: Labor, Capital, The State and American
Silent Film.” In Resisting Images: Radical Perspectives on Film and History, edited
by Robert Sklar and Charles Musser. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Rouse, Roger. "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," Diaspora,
Spring (1991): 1.
Russell, Dominique, ed. Rape In Art Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Ryan, Michael & Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Sabo, Donald F., & Michael A. Messner. Sex, Violence & Power in Sports: Rethinking
Masculinity. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1994.
Salamon, Lester M. and Michael S. Lund. “Governing in the Reagan Era: An Overview.”
In The Reagan Presidency and the Governing of America, edited by Lester M.
Salamon and Michael S. Lund. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1985.
San Juan, Efifanio, Jr. Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of
Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States. New Jersey: Humanities
352
Press, 1992.
Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the
Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992.
Schickel, Richard. "Losing It All in L.A." Time, March 1, 1993, 63.
Schor, Naomi & Elizabeth Weed, eds. The Essential Difference. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994.
Schulman, Sarah. My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush
Years. New York/London: Routledge, 1994.
Schuman, Howard. “Two Sources of Antiwar Sentiment in America.” In The United
States and the Vietnam War: Significant Scholarly Articles, edited by Walter L.
Hixson. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.
Scott, Ian. “Filming Los Angeles: History, Hollywood, and the City's Disastrous
Imagination.” Literature/Film Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2009): 201-211.
Scott, Steven D. “‘Like a Box of Chocolates’: Forrest Gump and Postmodernism.”
Literature/Film Quarterly, 29, no. 1 (January 2001).
_____. "When Authors Play: The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism." Diss.
University of Alberta, 1995.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Seidler, Victor J. Unreasonable Men: Theories of Masculinity. New York/London:
Routledge, 1993.
Seidman, Steven. Embattered Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary America.
New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
______. Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory. New York/London:
Routledge, 1994.
______. Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language, and Sexuality. New
York/London: Routledge, 1989.
______. Recreating Sexual Politics: Men, Feminism, and Politics. New York/London:
Routledge, 1991.
Sharman, Leslie Felperin. "Review of Forrest Gump." Sight and Sound (October 1994):
41-43.
Shohat, Ella. “Ethnicities-in-Relation: Toward a Multicultural Reading of American
Cinema.” In Friedman, 215-250.
Shull, Steven A. A Kinder, Gentler Racism?: The Reagan-Bush Civil Rights Legacy.
Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharp, 1993.
353
______. The Presidency and Public Policy Making. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg
Press, 1985.
______, ed. The Two Presidencies: A Quarter Century Assessment. Chicago: Nelson-Hall
Publishers, 1991.
Siegel, Carol. Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York/London: Routledge, 1992.
Simmons, Martin. “The Truth About Male Friendships.” In Kimmel & Messner, 399-402.
Sklar, Robert. “Oh! Althusser!: Historiography and the Rise of Cinema.” In Resisting
Images: Essays on Cinema and History, edited by Robert Sklar and Charles Musser.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Smith, Amanda, and Thomas Loe. “Mythic Descent in Dances with Wolves.”
Literature/Film Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1992): 199.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York:
Vintage, 1950.
Smith, Jean Edard. George Bush War. New York: H. Holt, 1993.
Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
______. “Misogyny.” In Clint Eastwood, 69-84.
______. “Gay Subject.” In Clint Eastwood, 143-50.
______. “The Meaning of Black.” In Clint Eastwood, 225-42.
Smith, Sam. Shadows of Hope: A Freethinker Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Solomon, Norman. False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era. Monroe, ME:
Common Courage Press, 1994.
Span, Paula. "Michael Blake's Dances With Fame." The Washington Post, 24 March 1991:
GlO.
Spector, Judith. "The Functions of Sexuality in the Science Fiction of Russ, Piercy, and
LeGuin." In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald
Palumbo. New York: Greenwood, 1986.
Spielberg, Warren E. “Why Men Must Be Heroic.” The Journal of Men Studies 2, no. 2
(November 1993): 173-188.
Staiger, Janet. “Individualism Versus Collectivism.” In The Media Reader, edited by
Manuel Alvarado and John O. Thompson. London: BFI, 1990.
Stam, Robert. “Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Ethnic/Racial Representation.” In Unspeakable
Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, edited by Lester D. Friedman. Urbana,
354
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Stam, Robert, and Toby Miller, eds. Film Theory: An Anthology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
Stein, Henry, and Martha Edwards "Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice." In
Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition: Philosophies of Life and Their
Impact on Practice, edited by Paul Marcus and Alan Rosenberg. New York, Barnes
and Noble, 1998.
Stoller, Robert. On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity. New York: Science
House, 1968; London: Karnac Books, 1994.
_____. Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon, 1975.
Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. New York/ London:
Routledge, 1995.
Stuart, Jack. “Patriarchy’ Reconsidered.” The Journal of Men Studies 2, no. 4 (May 1994):
309-24.
Stuckey, Mary E. “Mastering Televised Politics: Ronald Wilson Reagan and George
Walker Bush Herbert.” The President as Interpreter-in-Chief. Chatham, NJ:
Chatham House Publishers, 1991.
______. Playing the Game: The Presidential Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. New York:
Praeger, 1990.
Studlar, Gaylyn. The Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Studlar, Gaylyn & David Desser, eds. Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the
American Experience. Washington, DC: Smithonian Institution Press, 1993.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. New York
and London: Routledge, 1993.
______. “Masculinity, Politics and National Identity.” Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre
and the Action Cinema. New York/London: Routledge, 1993.
______. “Black Buddies and White Heroes: Racial Discourse in the Action Cinema.”
Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. New York/London:
Routledge, 1993.
Tatalovich, Raymond and Byron W. Daynes, eds. Social Regulatory Policy: Moral
Controversies in American Politics. Boulder: Westview Press, 1988.
Telotte, Jay P. “Definitely—Falling Down: 8 1/2, Falling Down, and the Death of
Fantasy.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 24, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 19.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Vol. 2, Male Bodies--Psychoanalyzing the White
Terror. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Tolson, Andrew. The Limits of Masculinity: Male Identity and the Liberated Woman.
355
Tavistock Publications, 1977.
Thomas, Sari, ed. Film/Culture: Explorations of Cinema in Its Social Context.
Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1982.
Thomas, Tony. Hollywood and the American Image. Westport, CT: Arlington House
Publishers, 1981.
Tomasulo, Frank P. "The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and
Antiwar Film." In From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film,
edited by Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1990.
Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of "Outsiders" and
"Enemies" in American Movies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Traube, Elizabeth G. Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s
Hollywood Movies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
______. “Transforming Heroes: Hollywood and the Demonization of Women.” Dreaming
Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1992.
______. “Hollywood and the Return of the Father.” Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender,
and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie.
Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Are American: Anglo-American Media in the World. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Ulrich, John. "Introduction: A (Sub)cultural Genealogy". In GenXegesis: Essays on
Alternative Youth (Sub)Culture, edited by Andrea L. Harris and Andrea L. Harris.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
Vaughn, Stephen. Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Vineberg, Steve. No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade. New York:
Schirmer Books, 1993.
Walczak, Yvette. He and She: Men in the Eighties. London/New York: Routledge, 1988.
Wang, Jennifer Hyland. “A Struggle of Contending Stories: Race, Gender, and Political
Memory in Forrest Gump.”Cinema Journal 39, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 92-115.
Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects
of Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
White, John Kenneth. The New Politics of Old Values. Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1988.
356
Wiarda, Howard J. American Foreign Policy toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s:
Issues and Controversies from Reagan and Bush. New York: New York University
Press, 1992.
Wiegman, Robin. "Negotiating AMERICA: Gender, Race, and the Ideology of the
Interracial Male Bond." Cultural Critique 13 (Fall 1989): 89-117.
______. “Missiles and Melodrama (Masculinity and the Television War).” In Seeing
Through the Media, 171-188, edited by Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” In Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism, edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams.
Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.
Willis, Sharon. ”Disputed Territories: Masculinity and Social Space.” In Penley and
Willis, 263-81.
_____. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1997.
Wills, Garry. Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
Wilson, Clint C., II, & Felix Gutierrez. Minorities and Media: Diversity and the End of
Mass Communications. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987.
Winokur, Mark. “Black Is White/White Is Black: `Passing’ as a Strategy of Racial
Compatibility in Contemporary Hollywood Comedy.” In Friedman, 190-211.
Wood, Robin. "Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era." Hollywood from Vietnam to
Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Young, Robert. ”The Same Difference.” Screen 28, no. 3 (Summer 1987).
Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. Seeing Films Politically. Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1991.
Zilberg, Elana. “Falling Down in El Norte: A Cultural Politics & Spatial Poetics of the
ReLatinization of Los Angeles.” Wide Angle 20, no. 3 (1998) 183-209.
Zinsser, Judith P. "Real History, Real Education, Real Merit-or Why is `Forrest Gump' so
Popular?" Journal of Social History Supplementary V olume 29 (1995): 91-97.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Virtual competencies and film

PDF

From "remote" possibilities to entertaining "difference": a regional study of the rise of the television industry in Los Angeles, 1930-1952

PDF

Mediating Hispanidad: screening the Hispanic-Atlantic imaginary

PDF

#Holocaust: rethinking the relationship between spaces of memory and places of commemoration in the digital age

PDF

A cinema under the palms: the unruly lives of colonial educational films in British Malaya

PDF

Contextualizing Asian masculinity in media post-race: a critical race theory inquiry on metadiscourses

PDF

Part-time labor, full-time dreams: extras, actors, and Hollywood's on-screen talent

PDF

The history of documentary in Africa -- The Colonial era

PDF

In a state of exception: political subjecthood in European film, 1990-2008

PDF

Color inside the lines: race and representation in the formula dance film

PDF

Japan in transnational Hollywood: industry and identity, 1985-1995

PDF

The Hollywood left: cinematic art and activism in the 1930s

PDF

Existential surplus: affect and labor in Asian diasporic video cultures

PDF

Viral selves: Cellphones, selfies and the self-fashioning subject in contemporary India

PDF

Shadows of stardom: Latina actresses in the 1930's Hollywood produced Spanish language films

PDF

Channeling Shirley MacLaine: stardom, travel, politics, and beyond

PDF

The virtual big sister: television and technology in girls' media

PDF

Embodied memory: the formation of archived audiovisual holocaust testimony in the United States

PDF

Virtual documentary: the virtual real and its rhetorical legitimations

PDF

Framing the fight: post-9/11 warfare and the logistics of representation

Asset Metadata

Creator Tang, Yungshun (author)

Core Title Screening masculine protest: reflections on Hollywood response to men’s movements in the 1990s

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 10/14/2013

Defense Date 06/19/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Alfred Adler,changing masculinity,collective unconscious,masculine protest,men's movements,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), Kinder, Marsha (committee member), Messner, Michael A. (committee member)

Creator Email yungshun@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-339696

Unique identifier UC11295972

Identifier etd-TangYungsh-2104.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-339696 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-TangYungsh-2104.pdf

Dmrecord 339696

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Tang, Yungshun

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA