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20 Affliction When Paranoid Male Narratives Fail Marita Sturken A CULTURE REVEALS its underlying values in those aspects of its social fabric that are understood to be in crisis. In American culture, there has been in the past few decades a constant media focus on childhood in crisis, the family in crisis, memory in crisis, and, inevitably, masculinity in crisis. Indeed, during the twentieth century, masculinity has been seen as always moving from one crisis to another, never secure and safe, always under threat. This is paradoxical, given the power awarded to masculinity in American culture, and its central role in the construction of national identity. Yet the trope of crisis has remained a constant; from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, historical events have been understood as traumatic to the social role of masculinity . This reached an accelerated pace by the late twentieth century, with the rise of feminism and the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, which proved devastating to the jobs of workingclass men. In 1999 Susan Faludi published Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, in which she argues that the baby boomer generation was betrayed by the society of its fathers.1 Her work prompts the question, What is it about our overinvestment in masculinity that makes it always come up “short,” that asks it to be more than it possibly can be? The contemporary version of masculinity in crisis has emerged hand in hand with several other distinct social trends: identity politics and paranoid narratives. The public discussion of white men as victims of feminism, affirmative action, queer politics, and multiculturalism has fueled concerns of masculinity under siege. In addition, the 1990s 203 saw a fascination in popular culture with paranoid narratives, including such television shows as The X-Files, Dark Skies, and Millennium, the historical films of Oliver Stone, and more recent cyberfilms such as The Matrix (1999); the continuing credence in a government cover-up of the crash of an alien spaceship in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1946; the rise of conservative and right-wing conspiracy groups in the United States; and a preoccupation with narratives of millennial apocalypse and natural disaster. This new version of paranoia, which is distinct in many ways from the 1950s paranoia that centered on the external threat of communism, is inextricably tied to contemporary discourses about race and identity, and the emergence of the white male as a figure in crisis. I would like to explore in this essay the relationship of narratives of masculinity and paranoia through an analysis of the 1998 Paul Schrader film Affliction, starring Nick Nolte, which is faithfully based on the Russell Banks novel.2 The novel and film center on the character of Wade Whitehouse, a white forty-one-year-old divorced man living in Lawford , a small New Hampshire town, working as the local policeman, snowplow driver, well digger, and general handyman for a local businessman and selectman, Gordon LaRiviere. Wade is a fading American archetype, and he begins the film angry, troubled, and restless, as if he knows that all that shores him up as a man is about to unravel. He is the father of a daughter he rarely sees, the son of an abusive father, and unful filled and unhappy in his work and life. He drinks too much, and his erratic moods are tolerated by the people around him. He is, in essence, the symbol of masculinity in crisis, and one has to wonder if Banks meant to suggest through his naming that we should consider him to stand in for the American male of the late twentieth century. The film chronicles in a deliberate and painful fashion the stripping away of the masculine postures that hold Wade’s life together. He is a big man, played by Nolte as always on edge, his body often hunched over in anger, his clothes and boots always undone, as if carelessly thrown onto his hefty frame. There is also a charm in his character, the kind of charisma carried by men who appear to inhabit their bodies carelessly yet powerfully, a quality that is central as well to James Gandol fini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano in The Sopranos. As the film begins, we see Wade first attempting to cajole his way into his daughter Jill’s good graces, making excuses, as he always does, for being late, screwing up, letting someone down. When she calls her mother, Lillian (played...

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