The great raced and gendered outdoors: white male spatiality in Alexander Payne's Nebraska and David Lynch's The Straight Story

ABSTRACT

This study uses two U.S. films – Nebraska (2013) and The Straight Story (1999) – to examine the centrality and framing power of hegemonic white masculinity for common conceptions in the United States of the outdoors. While both white male filmmakers portray white men rendered vulnerable to outdoor extremes by advanced age, they also depict common white American male perspectives on geographical space, and on one's own supposedly appropriate role as a central actor in it, a phenomenon labelled ‘white male spatiality’. While Nebraska's central character remains ensnared in a damaging conception of land, himself and his relation to others, The Straight Story's protagonist demonstrates an approach to the outdoors that breaks free of self-serving appropriation, thereby promoting apprehension of others, land and the universe on something more like their own terms, as well as outdoor leisure practices that are more inclusive and reparative.

KEYWORDS:

• Outdoors
• white male spatiality
• leisure and race
• leisure and gender
• white masculinity
• elderly leisure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As is widely recognized in many realms of identity theory, a heightened and illusory sense of individualism is a common effect or manifestation of dominant group membership. This illusory sense of individualism arises because hegemonic, naturalized, and normalized social categorical membership discourages awareness of said membership, as opposed to membership in subordinated categories, whereby subordination and the problems it tends to cause conversely encourage awareness of group membership, often necessarily.

2 In terms of race, road movies with characters who are not white – such as Smoke Signals (1998), Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) or Green Book (2018) – are perhaps even less common, ‘the road’ and its pit stops and byways having been unwelcoming places for people of colour.

3 For a negative critique of gendered depictions in Lynch's Wild at Heart, see Willis (1991).

4 For a critique of another Payne film, The Descendants (2011), in light of subjective conceptions of geography held both by Payne and his characters, see Sánchez Palencia (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Summer Research and Creative Activity Award, funded by Eastern Illinois University's Council on Faculty Research.

Notes on contributors

Tim Engles

Tim Engles is a Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, where he specializes in critical whiteness studies and multicultural American cultural production. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited books, and he is the author of White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature.