Wandering Into the Wasteland: White American Masculinities in the Apocalyptic Science Fiction Road Narrative
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Wandering into the Wasteland: White American Masculinities in the Apocalyptic Science Fiction Road Narrative Heather Wintle Submitted for the degree of PhD University of East Anglia School of Film, Television and Media Studies Date of submission: 9th October 2013 Word count: 99 939 words This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Wandering into the Wasteland: White American Masculinities in the Apocalyptic Science Fiction Road Narrative This thesis examines the portrayal of American white male subjects within the apocalyptic science fiction road narrative, focusing on two visual media in which this genre hybrid features prominently: film and comics. The study builds upon an embryonic body of scholarship addressing several structural, iconographic and thematic connections between the road genre and apocalyptic science fiction. In responding to the call for further research into the road genre’s spread across media, the study observes that apocalyptic road films and comics complicate the dominant critical narrative regarding the road movie’s increasing emphasis upon racially and sexually diverse travellers. Interrogating this discrepancy with an awareness of its ramifications for female, black and queer secondary characters’ representation, the thesis demonstrates how the apocalyptic science fiction road narrative has been persistently and primarily used as a forum for examining, indulging and critiquing various conceptualisations of American white masculinity and associated desires and anxieties. Each chapter conducts a textual analysis of a selection of case studies that foreground a particular ‘type’ of male traveller prevalent throughout apocalyptic road films and comics released between 1975 and 2013. These discussions utilise a mixed methodology combining reference to studies of apocalyptic fiction, the road genre and their integration, formalist work on comics that positions the medium in relation to film, and appropriate work on cultural representations of whiteness and masculinity. The first two chapters address several approaches to the correspondence between male power, communal involvement and the vehicle’s changing role throughout action-oriented post-apocalyptic narratives. Chapter 3 investigates the correlation between post-apocalyptic settings and thwarted narratives of adolescent maturation. Chapter 4 examines the recent concern with paternal agency and violence in traumatic journeys undertaken by fathers and children. Lastly, Chapter 5 explores the masculine crises arising from the road’s displacement by other, digitally enabled and/or fantastical forms of mobility. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 1. ‘A Machine? A Myth? Or a Man?’ 44 Armoured Masculinity in the Judge Dredd Road Serials 2. Crises of Social Adaptation in Waterworld and The Postman 69 3. Coming and Coming Hard: 106 Sexuality and Thwarted Maturation in Post-Apocalyptic Adolescent Journeys 4. Juvenile (In)sight and Spatial Renegotiations 149 in the Father-and-Child Journey 5. The End of the Road? 185 Elided Journeys, Virtual Highways and Dislocated Men Conclusion 218 Bibliography 241 Comics Bibliography 263 Filmography 266 Teleography 273 4 Acknowledgements This project was completed with the generous financial support provided by a Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number: AH/I503765/1). 5 Introduction The world crumbled. […] On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. […] And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max, the warrior Max. In the roar of an engine he lost everything – and became a shell of a man, a burnt-out desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again. From the opening narration of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981). In a 1994 article in Sight & Sound, Michael Atkinson posed the question, ‘[H]as the road movie found new wheels?’.1 The millennial boom in academic research surrounding road films and, secondarily, road stories in other media answers in the affirmative. Edited collections such as Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s The Road Movie Book (1997) and Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson’s Lost Highways (1999) and major monographs including David Laderman’s Driving Visions (2002) and Katie Mills’ The Road Story and the Rebel (2006) demonstrate an increased drive to trace the road film’s history and examine both its status as a distinctly American genre and its spread to other national cinemas. Matters of gender, sexuality and race are integral to many of these discussions. Whereas Timothy Corrigan defined the road film in 1991 as ‘a genre traditionally focused, almost exclusively, on [white heterosexual] men and the absence of women’,2 the recent growth in academic interest stems from, and foregrounds, the genre’s diversifying focus upon journeys undertaken by women, black travellers, gay and transgendered individuals and children from the 1990s onwards. This is a significant transformation, but one that is challenged by certain hybrid strands of the genre. Several studies confront the risk of adopting too purist an attitude towards the road story’s status as a genre by considering what Sargeant and Watson describe 1 Michael Atkinson, ‘Crossing the Frontiers’, Sight & Sound, 4.1 (1994), 14-17 (p. 14). 2 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 143. 6 as its inherent ‘intertextuality and ability to combine with other genres’.3 Building upon the common perception that the genre was consolidated in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), scholars have also noted its roots in the western, social conscience films like The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), and film noirs like Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945).4 In addition to these precursors, several academics have discussed the road story’s frequent combination with science fiction, and especially the subgenre of apocalyptic science fiction. The most widely examined example of the latter is the Australian Mad Max trilogy (George Miller, 1979; Miller, 1981; Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985), especially the post-apocalyptic feature Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which achieved worldwide commercial success.5 Immediately spawning numerous international low-budget imitators, Mad Max 2’s images of tough and taciturn leather-clad survivalist heroes and marauders prowling hostile deserts in eccentrically customised vehicles retain a powerful cultural influence. Tellingly, James Combs has coined the awkward portmanteau term ‘Mad Maxian’ to describe any post-apocalyptic film in which wandering survivors battle over desolate wastelands.6 However, few academics have recognised and addressed the true diversity and enduring vitality of visual media narratives combining apocalyptic science fiction and the road story, not only in film but also in comics (to an altogether more prominent degree than in television or video games). Even fewer have considered how these hybrid texts have complicated the prevailing critical narrative describing the road genre’s diversification by focusing insistently upon white male travellers. Whilst many of these characters wander into wastelands on perilous journeys that involve a simultaneous flight from, and confrontation of, the demons of their past or a search for stability, belonging, purpose and security, they are demonstrably not all ‘men like Max’. 3 Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson, ‘Looking for Maps: Notes on the Road Movie as Genre’, in Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of Road Movies, ed. by Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson (London: Creation Books, 1999), pp. 5-20 (p. 6). 4 David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), pp. 23-34. 5 Precise figures are unavailable for Mad Max 2’s international gross, but the film recouped its US$2 million budget several times over in North American takings alone, grossing over $24 million. See Anon., ‘Box Office History for Mad Max Movies’, The Numbers, [n.d.] <http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/MadMax.php> [accessed 4 February 2013]. 6 James Combs, ‘Pox-Eclipse Now: The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Popular Movies’, in Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, ed. by Christopher Sharrett (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1993), pp. 17-35 (p. 31). 7 Collectively classifying these texts as apocalyptic science fiction road narratives, this thesis examines the terms and nature of their enduring focus upon American white male subjects, desires and anxieties. The inquiry spans five chapters, each dealing with a prominent ‘type’ of travelling subject and associated concerns relating to gender, sexuality and race. From the mid-1970s through to the present, numerous apocalyptic science fiction films and comics have portrayed the voyages of hardened road warriors whose sense of self is uneasily bound to specific vehicles and associated paraphernalia (addressed across Chapters 1 and 2), adolescent boys anxious about sexuality and the nature