UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Omega Men The Masculinist Discourse of Apocalyptic Manhood in Postwar American Cinema A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Ezekiel Crago June 2019 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Co-Chairperson Dr. Derek Burrill, Co-Chairperson Dr. Carole-Anne Tyler Copyright by Ezekiel Crago 2019 The Dissertation of Ezekiel Crago is approved: __________________________________________ __________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson __________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I wish to thank my committee chairs, Sherryl Vint and Derek Burrill, for their constant help and encouragement. Carole-Anne Tyler helped me greatly by discussing gender and queer theory with me. Josh Pearson read drafts of chapters and gave me invaluable advice. I was able to work out chapters by presenting them at the annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, and I am grateful to the members of the organization for being so welcoming. I owe Erika Anderson undying gratitude for meticulously aiding me in research and proofreading the entire project. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Omega Men The Masculinist Discourse of Apocalyptic Manhood in Postwar American Cinema by Ezekiel Crago Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2019 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Co-Chairperson Dr. Derek Burrill, Co-Chairperson This study investigates anxieties over the role of white masculinity in American society after World War Two articulated in speculative films of the post-apocalypse. It treats the nascent genre of films as attempts to recenter white masculinity in the national imagination while navigating the increased visibility of this subject position, one that maintains dominance in society through its invisibility as superordinate standard of manhood. Using an interdisciplinary approach that employs methods of cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, the dissertation argues that masculinity acts as a technology for being-in-the-world that can be used by subjects with bodies coded male or female. The films analyzed denaturalize masculinity by revealing the operations of this technology and the ways in which it defines the roles of men in a masculine masquerade. Post-apocalyptic films are instructive sites of articulations of apocalyptic masculinity through their narratives of fitness determining what kind of subjects will populate a precarious future. v Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1: “The End of the World as We Know It”……………………………….37 Chapter 2: “1970s: The End of the World as We Knew It”…………………..…...99 Chapter 3: “The End of the Road”………………………………………………….164 Chapter 4: “The Clothes that Make the Man”……………………………………..235 Chapter 5: “Apocalyptic Boyhood”…………………………………………………299 Coda…………………………………………………………………………………...353 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..378 Films…………………………………………………………………………………...390 vi Introduction “Real Men” and “Last Men” Society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked. (Deleuze and Guattari 112) In her documentation of masculine crisis in the 1990s, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999), Susan Faludi observes that “the United States came out of World War II with a sense of itself as a masculine nation, our ‘boys’ ready to assume the mantle of national authority and international leadership. The nation claimed an ascendancy over the world, men an ascendancy over the nation, and a male persona of a certain type ascendancy over men” (16). As Michael Billig succinctly argues in Banal Nationalism (1995), when a nation tries to unify under a shared identity, “one part – one aspect of the cultural and linguistic mosaic – will become the dominant, metonymic representation of the whole” (87). In this way, hegemonic masculinity becomes national authority. As Faludi asserts, US nationalism imagined the rise of the country’s power as empowerment of a certain kind of manhood.1 This ascendant hegemonic model of manhood posited a white man “controlling his environment,” and that “a man is expected to prove himself not by being part of society but by being untouched by it, soaring above it. He is to travel unfettered, beyond society’s clutches, alone—making or breaking whatever or whoever crosses his path. He is to be in the driver’s seat, king of the road” (Faludi 10). This ideal 1 Michael Kimmel argues that the crises of manhood expressed in the 20th century can be traced back to the formation of the nation itself (2). Americans have always attempted to define an ideal manhood because the nation is defined in manly terms, and definitions of manhood have always been in flux (Kimmel 5). He also observes that masculinity is always already in crisis, noting that it is driven less by the need to dominate and master than the “fear of others dominating” the masculine subject (Kimmel 6). This model of masculinity masters itself and proves its autonomous agency by not being mastered by others. 1 manhood was a continuation of wartime masculinity as well as a reaction to domesticity and wage-work. As Leo Braudy remarks in his examination of this kind of manhood, From Chivalry to Terrorism (2003), Men at war are on the front line of a more exacting and more one-sided definition of what it means to be a man than ever faces men at peace. By its emphasis on the physical prowess of men enhanced by their machines, by its distillation of national identity into the abrupt contrast between winning and losing, war enforces an extreme version of male behavior as the ideal model for all such behavior. (xvi) The ideal postwar man was not only imagined in such dominant martial ways, he was supposed to be master of his own destiny, and American democracy was supposed to supply him with the opportunities to rise along with the nation’s fortunes. In America, this concept of freedom and personal agency, an idealized autonomy, has been structured by racialization and the use of unfree people to both enable and define this freedom.2 Andrew Ross notes a kind of American exceptionalism not often considered, that, Unlike those countries where, historically and even now, nationalism is associated; a fear evoked originally by the prospect of extending tolerance, if not freedoms to seditious slaves, US nationalism emerged out of a fear of lower-class mobilization with populist revolt. In this respect, the structural history of US nationalism has been one of containment rather than one of self-determination” (Strange Weather 245). Following this nationalist logic, and considering the gendering of the nation mentioned above, we can also see hegemonic white heterosexual middle-class masculinity as a form 2 In Angry White Men, Kimmel observes that “one has to feel a sense of proprietorship, of entitlement, to call it ‘our’ country” (35). Ownership is key to the sense of national pride and the freedom it entails in the US. 2 of containment instead of liberation for men, determining the limits of their behavior, and one that allows them solidarity against other men who do not fit this ideal model. Definitions of race and nation cannot be disentangled, especially when imagining the figure of the “American man” referred to in Faludi’s title. Iowa Congressman Steve King recently tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” (Resnikoff). Such fear of miscegenation structured much political debate in the mid- nineteenth century. Even Abraham Lincoln was accused of being part African (O’Reilly 48). Benedict Anderson notes that racism denies the racialized subject a nationality or history by reducing everything to biology, but this is a biology registered in aesthetic terms (148). He writes, “Nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history” (149). But the two ideas of nation and race, operating on different scales, are entwined in notions of identity, both personal and national. Much is currently being written about the “resurgence” of the rhetoric of white supremacy in recent press, but nationalism has been bound to racism since the idea of nations first became what Anderson calls “imagined communities.”3 Those who “belong” to the same nation as us are imagined as the “same” as us, and in America, with its history of slavery, this belonging is related to skin color as well as language and culture. As noted 3 Aristotle, in his Politics, deals with the problem of citizenship in the city-states of the time, noting that heredity cannot be the only criteria of belonging, because logically this would exclude the founders of the state. He instead posits that sharing in governance of the state allows for a more inclusive and logical standard for citizenship (Book III section 2). 3 by Anderson and Michael Billig, this is the homogenizing role that language plays in defining national subjects, and literacy plays a key role. I am here conceiving of nationalism as a “common-sense” notion of identity described in great detail by Billig, who defines nationalism as a broad concept that defines “the ways established nation-states are routinely