Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11

TROUBLING MASCULINITIES

TROUBLING

Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post–9/11

MASCULINITIES

GLEN DONNAR

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

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Copyright © 2020 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Donnar, Glen, author.

Title: Troubling masculinities : terror, gender, and monstrous others in American film post-9/11 / Glen Donnar.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020011869 (print) | LCCN 2020011870 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496828576 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496828583 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496828590 (epub) | ISBN 9781496828606 (epub) | ISBN 9781496828613 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496828620 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Masculinity in motion pictures. | Motion pictures and men. | Motion pictures, American—21st century. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M34 D66 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.M34 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/652110973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011869

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011870

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Carla, Gildon, and Feylan

CONTENTS

Introduction

Remasculinizing American Cinema Post-9/11

1.   Shielding Us from What We Are Not Yet Ready to See

The Uniformed Hero as Victim and in Masquerade

2.   I Don’t Know Why This Is Happening

Shamed Everymen and America’s Own Unknowable Monsters

3.   I Can Still Fix This

Restoring Protective Masculinity and/but Becoming a Monstrous Savior

4.   A Variation of Vengeance

The Inadequacy of Revenge in Remasculinizing the Nation Abroad

Conclusion

How Do You Love Your Family and Leave Them to Go to War?

Notes

Filmography

Works Cited

TROUBLING MASCULINITIES

INTRODUCTION

Remasculinizing American Cinema Post-9/11

It’s Just Like a Movie!: American Cinema, 9/11, and Spectacle

In the almost two decades since 9/11, it is easy to forget just how comprehensive the relation to cinema, genres, and film masculinities was in the attacks’ immediate aftermath.¹ Hollywood cinema, key film genres, and Hollywood masculinities were prominently mobilized in configuring and understanding the attacks—in which nineteen terrorists hijacked four domestic passenger planes, flying two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon and killing more than three thousand people—proposing the desired national response, and advancing and conducting the succeeding war on terror.² As it has often done in times of turmoil, America fell back on reassuring Hollywood narratives to displace the overwhelming impact of 9/11 and deal with its attendant traumas. The attacks also engendered heavily gendered ideas of national crisis and proposed national recovery. American national identity, notions of manhood, and expressions of hegemonic masculinity are often linked, especially in periods of perceived crisis. Each was widely considered to have been damaged by the attacks on, and consequent collapse of, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. The attacks were persistently figured in gendered terms, and the political, military, and cultural responses equally so, diagnosing perceived gender deficiencies, valorizing particular heroic and professional masculinities, and promoting the return of traditional masculinity and strong father figures.

Although 9/11 was widely described as unimaginable and unprecedented, the attacks were widely configured through insistent allusions to American cinematic history and Hollywood genre. The attacks were likened to Hollywood science fiction and disaster movies and, perhaps exacerbated by predating millennial concerns, clearly framed in apocalyptic tones. Eyewitnesses assimilated the attacks—commonly described as just like a movie!—through filmic experiences of catastrophe and spectacle. Scholars readily noted that it was as if Hollywood disaster movies had premediated the attacks—virtually fantasizing and imagining the wholesale destruction of key American symbols into being.³ And the revered director Robert Altman excoriated Hollywood’s irresponsible passion for the spectacle of disaster: The movies set the pattern, and the [perpetrators] have copied the movies (qtd. in Bell-Metereau 143).⁴

Hollywood has long offered extravagant spectacles of the fantastical destruction of America’s major cultural and economic urban centers, with New York and Los Angeles as its preeminent targets. Both cities share significant similarities in the cultural imagination of disaster and apocalypse. Their iconicity and distinctive geographies make them persistently vulnerable and attractive to natural disasters, invading giant monsters and aliens, and man-made catastrophes. According to the cultural historians Max Page and Mike Davis, this fascination reflects a long-held cultural ambivalence toward each city. They equally invoke long-standing cultural apocalyptic strains in American religious life and popular literary culture, articulating deeply held desires to witness their imagined destruction while simultaneously celebrating their greatness and power. The continuing American fascination with witnessing New York’s destruction, in particular, paradoxically reinforces its preeminence. The city stands in for (American) civilization itself, representative and exemplar. Any attack on it targets a specific idea(s) of America, and yet the city is in some sense also viewed as separate from alternate conceptions of America. Its iconic skyline inspires veneration, fear, and resentment in equal measure, symbolizing not only economic and political power but also arrogance and decadence. The city’s (cinematic) strengths are also its weaknesses. It is a historic immigration entry point, associated with openness, cosmopolitanism, and racial diversity; yet its skyscraper heights and island iconicity are ever vulnerable to a multitude of external threats, and its sprawling, urban indifference ever affords anonymity and concealment to subversive threats within.

Time and again, postapocalyptic Hollywood science-fictional cityscapes offer ideal spaces to indulge American ambivalence about its great cities and revel in the imagined cinematic destruction and punishment of New York and Los Angeles. Hollywood apocalypses routinely deploy the trope of the city as a space in which to exhibit (and warn of) the corruption of contemporary society, and exercise/exorcise the desire to judge, punish, and exact retribution. Popular apocalypse and disaster narratives about New York and Los Angeles also articulate and salve fears associated with immigrants, racial diversity, and external threats. Indeed, Davis observes that the abiding hysteria of all such fiction seems rooted in racial anxiety (281), whether foreign anxieties about alien invasion or domestic ones about increased black urbanization.⁵ These narratives articulate perceptions of cultural threat and announce prohibitions on supposedly undesirable contemporary social conditions and changes, exposing before annihilating monstrous and alien threats to restore and enshrine the cultural status quo (read: white institutions).

The desire (even need) to fall back on cinematic referents in the wake of 9/11 seemed to serve a specific purpose. In 1965, Susan Sontag famously wrote of the undeniable appeal of this imagination of disaster, the strange pleasure in watching cities and humanity destroyed in Cold War science fiction cinema. Such cinematic spectacles typically provide audiences a privileged position, maximum visual pleasure, and an all-encompassing perspective on disaster and apocalypse so that they can securely—unaffected and detached—delight in catastrophe largely emptied of identifiable death. Nick Muntean contends that the immediate employment of cinema referents after 9/11 sought to disarm the terrifyingly uncertain nature of the attacks by making them knowable through a mode of familiar, safely mediated spectacle that so often reaches a definite conclusion (51). Yet, as Christina Rickli observes, 9/11 offered a defective reference, especially unsettling given that not adhering to narrative conventions refused a sense of catharsis. The attacks did not conform to Hollywood cinematic narrative conventions such as good defeating evil: 9/11 was clearly not a movie. Hollywood’s penchant for spectacular destruction had long been criticized for proffering images absent of meaning.⁶ Ironically, however, such pleasure in disaster spectacle came to be criticized after 9/11 because these supposedly hollow cinematic fantasies of destruction had become saturated with meaning.

Later it became Hollywood’s prospective role in representing the events of 9/11 that would cause significant public consternation. Dominant critical consensus swiftly concluded that Hollywood would need to invert or transcend typical approaches to the imagination of disaster. John W. Jordan’s assessment of United 93’s (Greengrass 2006) early critical reception found that commentators and filmgoers were highly doubtful about Hollywood’s capacity to represent the attacks accurately or authentically. Yet equally—and ambivalently—many commentators also agreed that the cultural memory of 9/11 would be incomplete until Hollywood responded (Jordan 205). These anxieties only superficially seemed to entail that the understanding of 9/11 would be irrevocably violated by Hollywood’s commercial imperatives (or insensitivities) or that Hollywood would dishonor the victims of the attacks. Rather, the chief concern seemed to be that cinema’s singular capacity to make events spectacular via projection would enshrine, even enlarge, the day’s original fear. Such debates prompted scholars and social commentators alike to speculate that Hollywood spectacles of destruction would cease post-9/11 or at least be subdued. The initial response certainly seemed to witness a somewhat changed attitude to representing destruction and catastrophe, one that paradoxically withheld spectacle and evoked the fears engendered on 9/11. Yet, as Page notes, the prediction that Hollywood would refrain from visualizing New York’s destruction was swiftly disproved. Evidence at least of the city’s continued symbolic significance in the American imagination, many films would soon imagine it variously as the target of environmental, apocalyptic, alien, and monster attacks.⁷

♦ ♦ ♦

The rhetorical response to 9/11—which targeted the twin centers of American economic and military might—expressly conflated gender and national identity in portraying the attacks, connoting national crisis as masculine crisis. The attacks reanimated and codified long-standing ideological and cultural concerns about a supposed decline in traditional American masculinity—capable, competent and strong, and prepared for violence if necessary. The attacks not only diagnosed supposed masculine inadequacy but were blamed on others than the perpetrators. Julie Drew’s feminist rhetorical analysis of media discourse and presidential speeches in 9/11’s aftermath found that each explicitly gendered American national identity, characterizing the nation as emasculated and feminized. The breach of America’s defenses and subsequent emasculation figured in the collapse of the Twin Towers destabilized national-masculine identity and threatened prevailing American narratives of national invulnerability (see also Baudrillard; Žižek; Nayak). Blurring the national and the personal, according to Drew, the news media feminized victims—including in oft-replayed images of male panic and fear at the Pentagon—first to signal the nation’s violation and second to rhetorically define injury and trauma as both feminine and symptomatically weak. Conservative commentators lamented that the alleged loss of traditional masculinities had imperiled national security. This dominant post-9/11 discourse asserted not only that the attacks feminized the nation but that America was already feminized. The attacks had not so much damaged America as symbolized due punishment for the perceived devaluing and recession of normative (read: white) American masculinity.

This exposed national vulnerability demanded an emphatic response and mandated national retributive remasculinization (read: by individualist, transgressive male warriors). The attacks thus presented a supposed opportunity to recuperate traditional gender roles to redress America’s international position. Matthew Hannah’s identification of the "prominence of themes of violation and penetration" (551) in media commentary and policy pronouncements perhaps best signals this two-step classification, first of the attacks and then of the necessary (ideal) national response. Julie Drew argues that the pervasive desire to (re)masculinize, as well as enabling a shift to a more muscular, interventionist foreign policy, also constituted a response to the shame of such globally public emasculation.⁸ Not only were particular types of male performance or masculinity valorized in the wake of the attacks, but political and news media rhetoric repeatedly advanced the necessity of remasculinizing American identity, actively invoking genre and gender codes from westerns and action cinema to advocate (desired and actual) appropriate responses.

Hollywood Masculinities: (National) Crisis and (National) Recuperation

The aftermath of 9/11 swiftly initiated a process of defining the attacks as both unprecedented and revisiting previous moments of national testing. Political and news discourse produced and then reinforced a new political paradigm: 9/11 changed everything.⁹ The historian Richard Slotkin (Our Myths of Choice), writing in 9/11’s immediate aftermath, suggests that when America suffers an event that upsets its fundamental ideas, particularly of self, its people look to their myths for precedents, invoking past experience. The Bush administration and conservative commentators simultaneously invoked Pearl Harbor, World War II, and Hollywood genre and gender codes in characterizing the desired ideal national response.¹⁰ This discursive construction represented a tangled attempt to define a supposedly unprecedented present and also articulate a nostalgic future.

Scholarship on Hollywood representations of gender has long emphasized its prominent ideological role in the resolution of male crisis. Hollywood film is typically considered to recuperate threatened hegemonic masculinities through an arc of crisis, recuperation, and resolution. Such protagonist arcs are evident both in individual films and across particular genres, and particularly so in the conspicuous melodrama of male action genres, most often action films, war movies, and westerns. Mark Gallagher, who briefly discusses post-9/11 action films, also implicitly advocates this understanding, observing how issues surrounding masculinity are raised and resolved in Hollywood action films (5). Gallagher also observes the continued construction of violence as redemptive and regenerative. This tendency is especially palpable in periods of American national uncertainty or turmoil.¹¹ Historically, supposed crises in American masculinity (invariably though implicitly also presented as white) are equated with—even characterized as—crises of American national identity, including after Pearl Harbor, post–World War II, during the Cold War, and post-9/11. Yet the fundamental crisis of (white and institutional) masculinity in modern American society is most often pinpointed to the 1960s and 1970s and slated to the cumulative impacts of feminism, civil rights, and the Vietnam War.¹² Crises temporarily destabilize and decenter normative masculinity’s dominance, requiring its symbolic recuperation. Perceived changes in or threats to American identity/masculinity in turn generate a distinct cultural response in cinematic representations of masculinity. Fintan Walsh, examining a wide variety of performance case studies, propounds a recuperative understanding of masculinity, where national crises are followed by periods of remasculinization across the culture. According to Walsh, crisis as a period of disorder precedes restructuring and reestablishment, with the exposed vulnerability of emasculated and victimized masculinities provoking recuperative violence. In cinema, such remasculinization through redemptive violence can occur via a return to traditional masculinities or in recentering masculinity by focusing on the hero’s bodily suffering.

Even a cursory review of scholarship on masculinities in recent decades, in society and in cultural representations, makes it perhaps more pertinent to ask when (normative) masculinity is not in crisis. As Walsh observes, given that masculinity is never stable and always being renegotiated, crisis is in a sense a persistent condition of masculinity—as it is of gender more generally. The cultural uniformity of the resolution of crisis raises suspicions about whether claims of persistent masculine or male crisis are disingenuous, suspicions that also indubitably associate individual masculinities with the power of the state. For example, Wendy Brown suggests that state power and masculine performance similarly offer insincere repudiations of their power to conceal dominance and reinforce privilege, with power and privilege operat[ing] increasingly through disavowal of potency (194). However, there remains a tension between the insincere and what is perceived to be real. Sally Robinson observes that "the persistent representation of white male wounds and … masculinity under siege offers ample evidence of what is felt to be [its] real condition" in contemporary American culture (6, emphasis in original). Regardless of any association with tangible threats to power and dominance, hegemonic masculinity is both always in crisis and always (being) recuperated or recentered.

Even scholarship that critiques the recuperation of screen masculinities understands that this may not diminish hegemonic masculinity’s power. Robinson, arguing from the perspective of the American cultural upheavals of the 1960s, sees evidence of an ongoing process of remasculinization in the final decades of the twentieth century but also finds narratives that require a different interpretation. The pervasive rhetoric of crisis that she identifies accommodate[s] a range of narratives, variously characterized by competing interests and intentions. She identifies competing fictions of crisis, which aim either to heal a wounded white masculinity [and] remasculinize America or to dwell in the space of crisis and reimagine (dominant) masculinity (11). Regardless, male crisis need not signify male disempowerment, for there is much symbolic power to be reaped from occupying the social and discursive position of subject-in-crisis (9). This sentiment is reflected in recent scholarship on post-9/11 American cinema, with Casey Ryan Kelly asserting that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow hegemonic white masculinity’s persistent power (161). Kelly concludes that hegemonic white masculinity’s unintelligibility and incoherence, far from marking its decline or demise, strategically function to masculinize victimhood and evade indictment. Crisis certainly (re)centers dominant masculinity, yet Robinson, while not wanting to discount the persistent power of masculinity, concludes that its power is neither absolute nor secure. Yet the very persistence and saturation of claims of a loss of power require fulsome address.

Hollywood Genre Masculinities and 9/11: Crisis, Violent Suffering, and Remasculinization

This book builds on key scholarly examinations of particular periods in American cinema, which strongly inform key claims about post-9/11 representations of masculinity. Cinema’s capacity to visualize and display is integral to the dramatization of crises of masculinity, and cultural criticism recognizes the polysemous, at times contradictory, complexities of male representation in American cinema. For example, Gallagher identifies an increased deployment of melodrama—a mode typically associated with women’s films—in male-oriented action film. Earlier, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s influential anthology Screening the Male variously considered masculinity in terms of display, feminized males, masquerade, masochism, and becoming mother. The critical focus on muscular bodies and projects of violent remasculinization in 1980s action movies encourages a tendency to focus on the male body in writing on cinematic masculinity, both as an ideal marker of strength and capability and as a figure of vulnerability and humiliation. Steve Neale’s Screen essay on the display and spectacularization of male stars—a partial response to Laura Mulvey’s famed essay on the cinematic gaze—observes that male stars, particularly action stars, have long been objects of the cinematic gaze (Masculinity as Spectacle). The camera invites us to look at the male body—and the star body—as a marker of ideal masculinity, but in gazing at it, the audience also objectifies it; as spectacle, the male body is to be looked at by others, connoting its vulnerability.

American cinema routinely constructs victimized or masochistic masculinities as part of the recuperative arc typical of Hollywood screen masculinities.¹³ David Savran, whose work focuses on constructs of victimization as a means to control and regulate hegemony, observes that American cultural texts that emphasize masochistic masculinities characteristically conclude with an almost magical restitution of male power (37). That is, Hollywood films destabilize dominant or hegemonic masculinities to reinforce and recuperate them and reinstitute a perceived cultural ideal. Of course, the prevalence of sequels—beyond an industrial mandate—suggests that the anxieties such films supposedly redress remain unalleviated, requiring seemingly endless repetition. Yet even the incessant need to call attention to and then resolve crisis serves to strengthen and naturalize masculine power.

Arguments about the post-9/11 remasculinization of American society, politics, and popular culture dominated scholarly responses to the attacks. This scholarship implicitly assumed that a Republican presidency post-9/11 would encourage political and cultural responses mirroring Reagan-era America, rather than Cold War or Vietnam-era America. Although the initial construction focused on perceived national humiliation and effeminization, the presumed reinvigoration of muscular 1980s action film gender codes in redressing prior (national) wounding and suffering dominated political and news media discourses post-9/11. Spectacles of bodily suffering and (consequent) violent remasculinization accelerate (to the point of exhaustion) in the hypermasculine masochism of action star bodies in 1980s action cinema. This period generated numerous highly influential analyses of action film hypermasculinities, particularly Susan Jeffords’s Hard Bodies, Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies, and Cohan and Hark’s anthology. These analyses famously tie the spectacle of muscular, hard-bodied action stars like Sylvester Stallone to the remasculinization of Reagan-era American politics after Vietnam. However, while 1980s action heroes foreground the spectacle of the male body in action and pain (11), Gallagher asserts that they bear few of their [Vietnam-era] predecessors’ scars (18). While this perhaps too easily discounts psychological scars, visible bodily suffering is often temporary, serving to recenter masculinity and justify retributive ultraviolence.

By again equating American national crisis with masculine crisis, American culture after 9/11 discursively initiated the political and cultural recuperation of hegemonic American masculinities, either via recentering them through depictions of endured suffering or via revalidating traditional masculinities (invariably through violence). This response was not unprecedented, with Jeffords identifying how a militaristic foreign policy was twinned with domestic values centered on hypermasculinity, father figures and family life, and nostalgia during the Reagan era. This echoes Susan Faludi’s description of American political and news media efforts post-9/11 to restore broken national myths of (male) invincibility and (male) impregnability via a return to supposedly traditional American gender types. According to Faludi, the attacks prompted nostalgia for cinematic conquest and triumph from classical westerns. Although betraying a simplistic view of the genre, political and news media in the wake of 9/11 repeatedly and nostalgically cited Hollywood western and 1980s action film codes of the avenging, righteous hero needed to eradicate the shame and emasculation of the attacks. The discursive promotion of traditional (white, paternal, violent) masculinity was allegedly echoed in American cinema. Numerous scholars and commentators suggested this was realized via a (call for the) return to traditional gender codes, roles, and spaces, which mandated the consequent subordination of women and demonization of foreign Others.¹⁴ Faludi claims that when threatened, American popular culture’s consistently reactive promotion of hypermasculinity turns to Hollywood western myths and tales of heroic or manly men saving imperiled women. The recuperation of the father is a proclaimed trend in film and television post-9/11, across action films, serial television action-fantasy, and science fiction–alien invasion films. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra observe that both the state and popular culture likewise offer[ed] fantasies of patriarchal protection after 9/11 (qtd. in Godfrey and Hamad 160). Scholars also contend that post-9/11 film valorizes (invariably white) male sacrifice and suffering to recuperate damaged—and supposedly disavowed—traditional masculinities. In linking the hero’s and the nation’s suffering, American national identity is equally remasculinized through violence. The restoration or redemption of a father figure after familial or societal crisis is an acknowledged and persistent staple of American cinema, and post-9/11 Hollywood cinema supposedly redeployed images of strong fathers, helpless daughters, and absent mothers to facilitate (national) remasculinization.

Exemplifying American cinema’s historical capacity to remasculinize male protagonists in the advent of a crisis moment, representations of catastrophe, disaster, and apocalypse often become a vehicle to restore or reinvigorate masculine authority (and the status quo) through the mythic figure(s) of the avenging hero or the strong father. This opportunity to redress perceived social ills by reinvigorating dormant but desirable human qualities after the end is typically considered to support conservative ideologies. Mick Broderick finds that the return of the strong father not only promotes renewal through heteronormative articulations of the couple, the family, and the community but reinforces the symbolic order and conservative social regimes through the restoration of the archetypal Father and patriarchal law. Mathias Nilges further contends that when America—or, rather, dominant conceptions of it—feels threatened, popular cultural representations of the postapocalypse typically reinstate traditional masculinities, with moments of national instability … regressively equated to threats to masculinity (31). As Nilges argues, because of the post-9/11 loss of traditional notions of stability and protection associated with the logic of fathering, the cinematic return to paternalism and the restoration of the strong father becomes positively associated with the rejection of an unpleasant present (31). Nilges is one who counters the consensus opinion on the recuperation or remasculinization of primarily traditional or hegemonic masculinities post-9/11. He argues that the crisis of the loss of traditional forms of stability and protection is most obvious in the figure of the white male action hero, who is increasingly unable to avert threats to family, community, and nation (28). Nilges nonetheless contends the narrative of the absent, troubled, or impotent father is frequent post-9/11, with paternal deficiencies resolved in response to a larger crisis. Sean Redmond develops this line, arguing that the white hero in post-9/11 apocalyptic science fiction film embodies white masculinity on the cusp of its own expiration, suffering a terrifying identity crisis over [his] place within the social and economic order (Nowhere Left to Zone 299). Not unlike Nilges, Redmond ultimately finds that these films’ final solution may well be whiteness inspired (304), with the white salvific hero ultimately privileged, rather than superseded.

Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Kimmer, examining science fiction and apocalypse-disaster films, likewise note that a global crisis repeatedly initiates a transition from diminished, inept actual fathers to symbolic ideal fathers. The crisis must be solved by the father, often by means of violence, justified because enacted to protect the family. Extending Jeffords’s identification of the increasing tendency to define heroic masculinity through fathering into late-1990s cinema, Kord and Kimmer even suggest cultural representations of crises in masculinity invariably morph into crises in fatherhood in 1990s and 2000s cinema, with the father an ideal vehicle for national myths. Exploring the co-optation of femininity, they contend that subsuming mother within the father’s personality becomes a general trend in another alleged period of sensitive men and masculinities in American cinema.¹⁵ As much as dwelling in crisis or remasculinization through violence, such co-optation not only signals the availability of feminine qualities to male characters but preserves and extends (white) male hegemony. Hollywood apocalypses, as much as delivering spectacular judgment and punishment, thus often represent—in gendering concepts like order and control—a nostalgic restoration of an idealized, imagined past, particularly through (reinstated) gender roles and the return of the Father.

A significant offshoot of this paternal emphasis is articulated in Sarah Godfrey and Hannah Hamad’s analysis of protective masculinities, typically embodied in former policing or covert protective services, in post-9/11 action film. They outline this promotion of protective masculinities as a conflation of public/private sphere paternalism allied with post-9/11 ideals of masculinity (164). In connecting fatherhood and public-sphere work, Godfrey and Hamad argue films like Taken (Morel 2008) redeem failed domestic fatherhood via [the] triumphal resurgence of public protective paternalism (161). This hybrid masculinity, which has its roots in 1980s action films such as Die Hard (McTiernan 1988), deploys public-professional work to (re)validate previously derided or devalued performances of traditional masculinity and the redemptive violence of the strong father. Such protective professional-fathers symbolically connect national and familial security, mirroring the domestication of 9/11 evident in the collapsing of public and private boundaries through televisual mediation and subsequent political characterization. Godfrey and Hamad further note that the conservative-professional recuperation of paternalism is likewise tied to the imperiled daughter, depicting the resolution of threats to females through righteous, redemptive paternal violence. The cinematic redemption of fathers seemingly requires female helplessness (as daughters) or absence (as mothers). Cinematic representations of the transgressive hero-father’s use of protective skills outside his sanctioned professional role stand apart from how protective uniformed roles and performances were celebrated in 9/11’s aftermath. Politicians and popular media repeatedly valorized particular types of men and masculine performance in the wake of 9/11 and the succeeding war on terror, most notably firefighters, police officers, and soldiers.

Everywhere and Always: Domesticating Terror and