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6. Self-Help Hollywood Style: Masculinity, Masochism, and Identification with the Child Within
- State University of New York Press
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93 6 Self-Help Hollywood Style: Masculinity, Masochism, and Identification with the Child Within That American culture became increasingly therapeutized in the 1990s, especially through the infiltration of self-help discourse into many areas of life, seems almost incontestable. A sampling of journalistic commentary during the 1992 presidential campaign, for example , shows just how influential the ideology of self-help, with its call for therapy as solution and its collapsing of the political into the therapeutic, has become in politics and political commentary. In an editorial in Newsweek entitled “Prisoner of the People” (1992), Joe Klein argued that the passion and yearning of the electorate during the 1992 campaign and Clinton’s appeal could be explained by the public’s great desire to get “something therapeutic from its next leader,” something Clinton seemed to sense. Klein cites the man who was part of the audience in the second debate casting the public as “‘needy’ and ‘symbolic’ children of the next president” as evidence of this yearning for therapeutic answers to political problems (58). In The New Republic’s “Father Figures” (1992), Naomi Wolf suggested that the presidential election was a “referendum on patriarchy.” Clinton’s threat to fathers who failed to pay child support and Gore’s story of his political conversion in the face of his son’s near-death accident allied them, according to Wolf, with a “kind of therapeutic family democracy both at home and nationwide” (24). A New Republic piece by Richard Weissbourd which appeared in 1992 claimed that the great distrust of politicians evident in that election year could be explained by absent fathers: “Many people who as children lived through their parents’ divorces, or who were born to single mothers, are predisposed to distrust” (25). For Weissbourd it was Clinton’s biographical film, featured at the Democratic convention, that helped him win the election. It aligned him not with the abandoning father, but the abused child and suggested that, because of this experience, Clinton himself would be the kind of father/president who would not abdicate his responsibilities to his children/constituents . Court dramas in the 1990s like that of the Menendez brothers or Lorena Bobbitt also show the infusion of therapeutic models into new arenas: in these cases, what once may have been primarily understood as criminal behavior in need of punishment or rehabilitation, came to be widely seen as pathology in need of cure. While a number of critics have commented on the therapeutization of the political sphere, the best-seller list, and the courts, few have questioned its impact on film. In this chapter, we suggest that a number of films of the late 1980s gained popularity, in part, by their underlying appeal to the self-help discourse that had seeped into so many other aspects of American life. Focusing on a spate of films released in 1991, in particular Regarding Henry, but also The Doctor, Grand Canyon, Dances with Wolves, Prince of Tides, and The Fisher King, we suggest that these films are part of a larger group of movies that, since the late 1970s, has acted to displace feminism’s critiques of white masculinity, but in new form. We argue that this underlying self-help story acts to legitimize a new white masculinity , focusing on how the use of representations of an “other”— whether woman, non-Westerner, or minority male—as well as intertextual referencing assists this process. Since the 1970s, white men have been reeling from what many saw as near fatal blows, and the desire for a recuperated masculinity in the face of these assaults seems to have saturated Hollywood films. If Rambo-type movies used the Vietnam War to condemn the crippling effects of restricting white male aggression in the face of savage guerilla warfare, suggesting that the cause of America’s failure was not being male enough, other stories like Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July read America’s emasculation by the trauma of the war as an initiation right in the construction of a new moral heroism. Affirmative Action was felt as an unjust victimization of white men during this period, a view endorsed by the Reagan administration (see Kaminer, 1992), and movies like Lethal Weapon or Broadcast News recorded this sentiment with their dramatization of the white male’s struggle to prove himself in a workplace where he felt the racial and gender “balance” had shifted.1 But by the late 1980s, a new form of recuperated masculinity films seemed...