Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema by Claire Sisco King (review)

Despite the advent of new forms of media and popular entertainment, cinema remains central to contemporary popular culture. Although box office attendance is not what it was in generations past, major motion pictures continue to influence our cultural imagination. This enduring legacy is, perhaps in part, attributable to the ways that newer forms of entertainment, from video games to YouTube videos, continue to utilize a highly cinematic grammar. The potency of this cinematic grammar—imagery, camera angles, narrative motifs, and the like—lies largely in the fact of its near-invisibility to most audiences. Thus, cinema, like most rhetorical appeals, is an art that does best when it hides itself, and in both cases the unraveling of these powerful, subtle, and often invisible rhetorical ploys requires a sensitive and careful analysis. Fortunately, for those interested in the cinematic framing of our national culture, Claire Sisco King’s Washed in Blood is a beautifully rendered and insightful analysis of a major strand within contemporary American films.

In Washed in Blood, Sisco King identifies a subgenre of films emerging during the post-Vietnam era, which focuses on the self-sacrificing male hero. These acts of self-sacrifice serve, in Sisco King’s analysis, as a means of addressing collective trauma and seeking a sense of national redemption. This subgenre returns in the early 1990s and again in the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, and in each era Sisco King unpacks the complex network of national trauma and cinematic framings through a series of detailed case studies. For the initial cycle of post-Vietnam era films (chapter 2), she examines Boris Sagal’s adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend in his film Omega Man (1971) and the 1972 disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure directed by Ronald Neame. For the films of the 1990s (chapter 3), Leonardo DiCaprio’s romantic hero Jack Dawson from James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and Bruce Willis’s adventurous oilman Harry Stamper from Michael Bay’s disaster epic Armageddon (1998) are the “wounded, traumatized working-class victim-heroes” who are “able to balance sentimentality and phallic masculinity” (80). Chapter 4, the final analytic chapter, explores the motif of male self-sacrifice in the post-September 11 remakes of Omega Man, in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007) and The Poseidon Adventure, and in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2006 Poseidon.

Across all these films, Sisco King uses a sophisticated understanding of trauma inflected in large part through the writings of Georges Bataille. Although for many scholars Bataille is perhaps more known for his influence on later poststructuralist writers like Foucault, Sisco King discerns from Bataille’s work a sophisticated conception of “sacrifice, trauma and self-dissolution” (21). The overarching thesis of the book is captured in her insistence that “sacrificial films posit trauma and self-loss as both enabling and ennobling, offering a paradoxical vision of the male victim-hero as at once wounded and masterful, suffering and salvific, pained and privileged” (20). Sisco King provides a myriad of arguments supporting this thesis. Her readings of the individual films are careful and provocative, and her ability to interweave philosophical, literary, and psychiatric discourses about trauma will be helpful for anyone interested in the topic. Those with an interest in popular American film will find these various trauma narratives fascinating and will, undoubtedly, be led to consider any number of other films that might be considered variations on these themes.

To be clear, although Sisco King’s work makes a clear and compelling contribution to film studies, it is also a work that casts a much wider shadow, impacting as it does broad and important concepts, including national identity, trauma, and masculinity. Thus, whereas discussions of Charlton Heston’s turn in Omega Man might not appear regularly in the pages of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, readers of this journal undoubtedly will find Sisco...