ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how white masculinity has represented itself within the utopian masculine sphere of the Hollywood imaginary. In particular, I explore here the aesthetics, narratives and rhetorical strategies of the Hollywood action movie as it stands today, reading Gladiator as a high-profile, near-canonical and – I would argue – symptomatic Hollywood take on what has been dubbed the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’. Whilst focusing on this revivalist epic, I will also propose that the masochistic narratives and tortured mise-en-scène that typify the contemporary action film have their basis in wider cultural narratives characterised by a form of paranoia
narcissistic and performative masculine angst. By looking at the fantasy space of contemporary Hollywood – the popular bastion, as Robyn Wiegman points out, of US culture’s ‘historic reliance on the ideological supremacy of everything white, heterosexual, and male’2 – I will argue that broad but historically contingent fears, desires, fantasies and anxieties can be read, interpreted and critiqued.
