1 When Men Were Men: Masculinity and Memory in Turn-Of-The

When Men Were Men: Masculinity and Memory in Turn-of-the-Millennium Cinema James A. McCormack ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6994-661X Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2017 School of Culture and Communication Screen and Cultural Studies The University of Melbourne 1 Abstract This thesis explores the imbrications of memory and masculinity in screen culture at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Key works in memory studies from this period argue that remembering and forgetting are complex practices informed by psychological discourses (for example, the debates over recovered memory), cultural and media industries (most notably, the news and popular entertainment industries), and commemorative practices (such as the rituals around Remembrance Day). These factors heavily influence how memory shapes both personal and social identity, and this thesis marshals these insights to explain how key film and television texts at the turn of the millennium remember the (imagined) past of masculinity. Many Hollywood productions of the era feature male protagonists beset by problems of memory and identity (including pathologies such as amnesia and post- traumatic stress disorder), and this thesis argues that in these works, nostalgic desires for lost masculinity have been supplanted by more traumatic modes of memory, ones which provide more critical and conflicted perspectives on both memory and masculinity. These more sophisticated representations demonstrate how the much vaunted contemporary crisis of masculinity is in fact a crisis of male reflexivity, as men struggle to come to terms with their loss of a transcendent or universal subjectivity and its replacement with a specific gendered identity that must compete for recognition within an increasingly pluralistic culture. 2 Declaration This is to certify that: (i) the thesis comprises only my original work to the PhD, (ii) due acknowledgment has been made in the text to all other material used, (iii) the thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. James A. McCormack 3 Acknowledgements There are many people I would like to thank for their help. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Barbara Creed, for her unsurpassed insight, guidance, and generosity with her time. Thanks for all the positivity, wisdom, and support! I would also like to thank my secondary supervisor, Chris Healy, and a number of other past and present scholars and peers at the University of Melbourne. Thanks to Ann Maxwell for encouragement to pursue postgraduate studies, and Brett Farmer for support in the early stages of the project. Thanks to those who offered advice and encouragement, including Peter Otto, Fran Martin, Audrey Yue, Jay Thompson, David McInnis, Hugh McNaughtan, and Jess Wilkinson. Thanks also to Annemarie Levin and all the other brilliant staff at the School of Culture and Communication. Thanks to Rob and Stu, for their friendship, and to Tymur, for insight and wisdom. Thanks to my late Aunt Peggy, who unfortunately never got to see this. A huge debt of gratitude is owed to my parents, whose support through my long candidature went above and beyond the call of duty. Infinite amounts of love and appreciation to both of you! Thanks to my daughters Reina and Eden, who were always at the centre of my thoughts, even when my thesis dragged me away. You were the best distractions I could ever want! And thanks most of all to my wife, Kris, who had to live with this thesis for far too long, and for that I am sorry. Thanks for your patience and understanding, and for being there for me. Thank you, and all my love to you! 4 Table of Contents Introduction 7 Chapter One 33 “What Manner of Man Is This?” Masculinity and “Unforgetting” in The Passion of The Christ Chapter Two 55 “Facts, Not Memories”: Tough Masculinity and Memory in Memento Chapter Three 69 “The Best Is Over”: Nostalgia, Melancholia and Reflexivity in The Sopranos Chapter Four 86 Flags of Our Fathers: World War II, Collective Memory, and the Disappearing Frontier of American Paternity Chapter Five 105 “Poison in the Wound”: Masculinity and (Recovered) Memories of Lolita at the Turn-of-the-Millennium Chapter Six 125 “The Past Is Not Through with Us”: Remembering and Forgetting in Magnolia Chapter Seven 146 “Remaining Men Together”: Trauma and Memory Between Men in Fight Club Chapter Eight 164 “The Only Thing Worse Than Losing Your Mind is Finding It Again”: Memory and Male Sexuality in Spider 5 Chapter Nine 181 Masculinity, Romantic Love and Social Memory: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Conclusion 196 “I Came in at the End”: Remembering and Surviving the Turn of the Millennium Bibliography 201 Filmography 225 6 Introduction Masculinity and Memory at Millennium’s End Throughout Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008), Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) faces a barrage of dire and baffling affronts to his manhood: his wife Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) leaves him for a woman; his daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) mocks him in her diary, claiming that Adele’s new lover is a better father than he ever was; his second wife Claire (Michelle Williams) tells him that he smells like he is menstruating; and, finally, Cotard’s position as director of the play that synecdochically stands in for his life is usurped by the ageing housecleaner/actress Ellen Bascomb/Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), whose final direction for Cotard is the command “Die”. Kaufman’s directorial debut develops the surreal tendencies of his earlier screenplays, representing an artist’s attempt to stage a theatrical production of his life; it is a play that grows in size and duration until it takes over Cotard’s actual life and the line between life and representation is hopelessly blurred. Figures from Cotard’s life become actors in his play, and the actors in his play intrude on his (ever-diminishing) life outside the play. Throughout the film, conventional rules of temporality and causality are discarded: a month seems to pass during a single breakfast; a woman lives for years in a house that is on fire; a child moves overseas and leaves behind a diary which somehow is continuously updated with new details of her life. Cotard’s attempts to restage the events of his life result not just in baffling or incomplete representations, but ultimately, a loss of authorial control, as the performers of his memories begin directing Cotard, rather than the other way round. Near the film’s end, Cotard comes to a realisation about his doomed solipsistic production, and how he can finally turn it around; as he explains, “I know how to do it now … none of these people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.” Cotard’s travails and eventual epiphany represent, in a surreal nutshell, the crisis of masculinity in contemporary American culture.1 Alienated from traditional family roles 1 Before proceeding, some comments on the terminology used in this thesis are warranted. Firstly, I have resisted the temptation to use scare quotes around the phrases masculinity in crisis or crisis of masculinity, despite my belief that both phrases are often used in tendentious, alarmist, or imprecise 7 and plagued by sexual anxiety, Cotard looks back at his life trying to see where it all went wrong and hoping that some meaning can be salvaged from the wreckage. The problem that Cotard encounters is not so much that his memory is unreliable, but that it is partial and incoherent; his recollections distorted by fantasy, guilt and desire, Cotard finds only the meagre redemption of a too-late realisation of the limited and incomplete nature of his perspective. Cotard’s belated recognition is what makes him such an emblematic figure for contemporary masculinity; for “like it or not, men today must deal, on some level with [their] gender as a problematic construct rather than as a natural, taken-for-granted reality” (Messner 1997, 2). This thesis explores the imbrications of memory and masculinity in recent screen culture. Analysing how this newfound gender reflexivity is represented in some seminal screen texts of the period, this project asks how the “old” or non-reflexive masculinity is remembered, the golden age “when men were men.” Exploring how contemporaneous crises of memory illuminate the turn-of-the-millennium crisis of masculinity, this thesis ponders the recent cinematic obsession with men’s nostalgia and trauma and analyses the ways that changes to our understanding of individual and cultural memory have impacted our understanding of the past, present, and future of masculinity. Consider, for example, an iconic popular study of masculinity in crisis from the end of the twentieth century. The feminist journalist Susan Faludi (1999) begins Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man with a rather saccharine vignette about a special night in the life of a boy from nearly forty years earlier. It is a nostalgic tale from the dawn of America’s Space Age, the story of “a boy in bed pretending to sleep, waiting for his father … [who] has promised to reveal to the son a miraculous inheritance: the transit of an artificial star” (1). The 1960 launch of America’s first communication satellite, The Echo—massive and luminous, yet incredibly fragile— ways (see the discussion on pages 10-14 below). My reservations about such term are, I hope, readily inferred without recourse to such punctuation or to descriptors such as “alleged” or “so-called”. In a similar vein, the terms men and masculinity are almost invariably used in this thesis as descriptions of white, heterosexual, cisgendered men and masculinity, respectively.

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