Fighting for Father:<i>Fight Club</i>as Cinematic Psychosis

Gunn, Joshua; Frentz, Thomas S.

doi:10.1080/10570311003767191

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…40 Furthermore, this sense of entitlement can also be accompanied by feelings of traumatic victimhood, in which the child "demand[s] reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love." 41 This reading of the film's Oedipal relations suggests that the cinematic crisis of masculinity is a response to what Joshua Gunn and Thomas Frentz call the "cultural decline of the father figure." 42 This suggests a closer alignment with men's rights discourse than at first glance. That is to say that film implies that white men's sense of victimhood is derived from the decline of the nuclear family, an inability to disidentify with the narcissistic mother and submit to the law of the father.…”

Section: Oedipal Troublementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kelly

2018

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

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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.

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Section: Oedipal Troublementioning

confidence: 99%