War-image as affect, war-image as spectacle in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood: how are violent masculinities expressed?

Abstract

Through a theoretical engagement with the emergence of a new war film cycle in the 1990s, this paper asks: how are violent masculinities experienced and perceived? Specifically, I point to three distinct directorial approaches to the Hollywood war film – The thin red line, Saving Private Ryan, and Pearl Harbor – in order to analyze how films use war-images for affect or spectacle. This cinematic investigation aims to uncover the visual relations between masculine subjectivities and violence in the war film. Through a theoretical encounter with earlier work, this paper aims to increase the theoretical tools and concepts for understanding and thinking about the intersections of cinema, violence, war, and masculinities. By referencing the war films of Malick, Spielberg, and Bay, I argue that this category of genre film, in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood, can use affective force to open up possibilities for critiquing and re-thinking masculinities, rather than merely contributing to American myth and nationalism through the use of spectacle.

Keywords:

• masculinities
• the war film
• turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood
• affect
• spectacle
• violence
• Terrence Malick
• Steven Spielberg
• Michael Bay

Notes on contributor

Terrance H. McDonald is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His dissertation, entitled ‘Mediated Masculinities: The Expression and Alteration of Masculinity in Hollywood Genre Films, 1990–2010', under the supervision of Barry Keith Grant, incorporates his research interests in cinema studies, digital technologies, masculinities studies, and posthumanism. Terrance's work has appeared in Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, and he has recently presented papers at the following conferences: the Film Studies Association of Canada, the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, the American Men's Studies Association, and Žižek Studies.

Notes

1. This is an oversimplification of the war film for the sake of establishing the emergence of this new war film cycle in the late 1990s. For a thorough introduction to the war film that covers the nuances of each period, see Eberwein's (2010) The Hollywood war film.

2. For a text that thoroughly engages the ethics of Deleuze in relation to Spinoza, see Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith's (2011) Deleuze and ethics.