After the crack-up: Angry white men in 20th century American culture

摘要

This project focuses on the angry white male in twentieth-century American culture and the problematic nature of hegemonic/patriarchal masculinity. It begins with the first "crisis" in masculinity following World War I, captured in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, when the shell-shocked soldier challenged the invincibility of American men physically and psychologically. The project then takes up the events following a second "crisis," the loss in Vietnam. In 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to establish America as the world's foremost superpower and became the 41st president. He dedicated his two terms to combating communism through intense military spending and de-regulation to jumpstart the national economy. During Reagan's term, Hollywood produced action movies featuring muscular stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, in movies like Commando, the Rocky, and Rambo series, to rewrite the loss in Vietnam and spread Reagan's ideology about the superiority of the white body. At the same time, novelist Bret Easton Ellis satirized rampant consumerism and yuppie culture in his works Less Than Zero and American Psycho. During the 1990-92 recession, the grunge band Nirvana, and their outspoken front man Kurt Cobain railed against jock masculinity with the release of their 1991 album Nevermind. A year after the Oklahoma City Bombing, Chuck Palahniuk released Fight Club, a novel about domestic terrorism that captured male disempowerment during the mid-1990s, amid a changing global economy. The white male has always been entitled in this country, yet these works capture the anger behind the American myth of white privilege.