The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood

ABSTRACT

American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility of screen masculinity evades criticism and, further, how melancholic male dramas nurture a traumatic attachment to victimhood. Examining the film Foxcatcher (2014), I show how unmasked portraits of white male victimhood function as counterparts to the hard-bodied action hero. The filmmaker’s effort to parse the distinction between material and superficial wounds reifies the experience of noble suffering as a superlative expression of aggrieved white manhood. Foxcatcher’s fragmented portrayal of white masculinity illustrates the elasticity of victimhood even where “crisis” suggests that white masculinity is open to revision.

KEYWORDS:

• masculinity
• film
• victimhood
• whiteness
• melancholy

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jarrod Atchison, Lisa Corrigan, and Ryan Neville-Shepard, for the opportunity to present this work, and Kristen E. Hoerl, for being a willing interlocutor throughout the writing of this essay.

Notes

1 Foxcatcher, directed by Bennett Miller (New York: Sony Picture Classics, 2014). DVD. See also Michael Calia, “Oscar Nominations: Why Did ‘Foxcatcher’ Miss the Best Picture Cut?” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2015, https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/01/15/oscar-nominations-why-did-foxcatcher-miss-the-best-picture-cut/.

2 Ann Hornaday, “‘Foxcatcher’ Movie Review: Ensemble Cast Shines in Mesmerizing True Story,” The Washington Post, November 19, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/foxcatcher-movie-review-ensemble-cast-shines-in-mesmerizing-true-story/2014/11/19/fdd251ce-6f41-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html?utm_term=.ce53be2564ac.

3 Liz Braun, “‘Foxcatcher’ Review: Devastating Look at the American Dream Gone Wrong,” Toronto Sun, November 27, 2014, http://www.torontosun.com/2014/11/26/foxcatcher-review-devastating-look-at-the-american-dream-gone-wrong?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=recommend-button&utm_campaign=; Alex Godfrey, “Foxcatcher: The ‘Uneasy Relationship between Money and Creativity’,” The Guardian, January 9, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/09/foxcatcher-bennett-miller-steve-carell; Kenneth Turan, “‘Foxcatcher’ a Gripping Story of Seduction, Rejection, Murder,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-foxcatcher-20141114-column.html.

4 See Paul Elliott Johnson, “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery,” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 3 (2017): 229–50.

5 Claire Sisco King observes a consistent pattern of trauma, victimhood, and sacrifice enacted in different ways across decades of Hollywood films, ranging from disaster films of the 1970s such as Poseidon Adventure (1972) to contemporary male sacrifice films such as The Passion of the Christ (2004). See Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). See also Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013).

6 Susan Jeffords, Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

7 Elizabeth Abele and John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, Screening Images of American Masculinity in the Age of Postfeminism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993); Donna Peberdy, Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

8 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: International Psychoanalytical Press, 1922).

9 Other recent male melancholic films include Lost in Translation (2003), The Hurt Locker (2008), Manchester by the Sea (2016), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and Noctunral Animals (2016) among others.

10 For an example of men’s rights discourse, see Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power (New York: Berkley Trade, 2001).

11 Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: Nation Books, 2015).

12 Paul Elliott Johnson, “Walter White(ness) Lashes out: Breaking Bad and Male Victimage,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 1 (2017): 14–28.

13 Johnson, “Masculine Victimhood.”

14 See Hamilton Carroll, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Stephen Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004); Kate Lockwood Harris and Jenna N. Hanchey, “(De)stabilizing Sexual Violence Discourse: Masculinization of Victimhood, Organizational Blame, and Labile Imperialism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2014): 322–41.

15 James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994); Katie L. Gibson and Amy L. Heyse, “Depoliticizing Feminism: Frontier Mythology and Sarah Palin’s ‘The Rise of The Mama Grizzlies’,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 1 (2014): 97–117; and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).

16 Johnson, “Masculine Victimhood,” 231.

17 For more on abject hegemony, see Claire Sisco King, “It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 366–85.

18 Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Man-Pocalpyse: Doomsday Preppers and the Rituals of Apocalyptic Manhood,” Text and Performance Quarterly 36, no. 2–3 (2016): 95–114.

19 Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 6.

20 R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005); Robert Hanke, “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and Its Reiteration,” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 1 (1998): 74–93; and Nick Trujillo, “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Mound: Media Representations of Nolan Ryan and American Sports Culture,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8, no. 3 (1991): 290–308.

21 John Mowitt, “Trauma Envy,” Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 272–97; and Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

22 Bryan J. McCann, “Therapeutic and Material <VICTIM>Hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 382–401.

23 McCann, “Therapeutic and Material <VICTIM>Hood,” 386.

24 Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory (New York: Routledge, 2007).

25 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Volume XIV (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), 243–58.

26 Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification,” in Constructing Masculnities, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 21, 21–36.

27 Butler, “Melancholy,” 23.

28 See King, Washed in Blood.

29 King, “It Cuts Both Ways.”

30 King, Washed in Blood, 9.

31 See Michelle Rodino-Colocino, “The Great He-Cession: Why Feminists Should Rally For The End Of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy,” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 343–47.

32 See Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291–309.

33 Karen Lee Ashcraft and Lisa A. Flores, “‘Slaves with White Collars’: Persistent Performances of Masculinity in Crisis,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2003): 1–29; Christopher J. Gilbert, “Standing Up to Combat Trauma,” Text & Performance Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2014): 144–63; Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, “‘Good Vibration’ or Domination? Stylized Repetition in Mythopoetic Performance of Masculinity,” Text and Performance Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1994): 21–45; and J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

34 Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica; and Douglas M. Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush–Cheney Era (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

35 See Casey Ryan Kelly, Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 5.

36 Michael L. Butterworth, “Militarism and Memorializing at the Pro Football Hall of Fame,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (2012): 241–58; see also Justin Gus Foote, Michael L. Butterworth, and Jimmy Sanderson, “Adrian Peterson and the ‘Wussification of America’: Football and Myths of Masculinity,” Communication Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2017): 268–84.

37 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 3, 8.

38 See Lipsitz, Possessive Investment.

39 Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work, the Exceptions,” Standard Edition (pp. 309–333).

40 See John Bishop and Robert C. Lane, “Father Absence and the Attitude of Entitlement,” Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 30, no. 1 (2000): 105–17.

41 Freud, “Some Character-Types,” 322.

42 Joshua Gunn and Thomas Frentz, “Fighting for Father: Fight Club as Cinematic Psychosis,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 3 (2010): 288.

43 Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994).

44 For references to the “forgotten man,” see Aaron Blake, “Donald Trump’s Full Inauguration Speech Transcript, Annotated,” Washington Post, January 20, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/20/donald-trumps-full-inauguration-speech-transcript-annotated/.

45 Charles Morris III argues that passing performances are corroborated by an audience of “dupes” and “clairvoyants.” Particularly in the context of sexuality, the latter audience who sees through the contrived performance is often the subject of retribution. See Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 2 (2002): 228–44.

46 Claire Landsbaum, “Men’s-Rights Activists Are Finding A New Home With The Alt-Right,” Huffington Post, December 15, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mens-rights-activists-are-finding-a-new-home-with_us_585319f7e4b0630a25423132.

47 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).