ABSTRACT
As Harvey O’Brien writes, “In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in which 2,751 people were killed, it was presumed that the action film was finished forever. Few could imagine how these existing films could ever be shown again, let alone more films be made in that same mould.” 1 He points to a significant example of Hollywood’s initial response to these events, with specific regard to the newly problematic (or so it was assumed) status of the male star led action movie, when he highlights that “The withdrawal of Collateral Damage (2002), featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter seeking revenge on the Columbian terrorists who kill his family in an embassy bombing, was seen as a symbolic obituary.” 2 Thus, amidst fears that the formation of heroic masculinity depicted therein was no longer viable in the dramatically transformed geopolitical environment and cultural context into which Collateral Damage was to be released, the film was, in the first instance, shelved. Upon its eventual release several months later, the film did unremarkable but by no means terrible box office. However, with hindsight, it is clear that it contained a number of the key constitutive elements of what would subsequently become popular cinema’s dominant discourse of post-9/11 masculinity. The film’s configuration of action fatherhood, its paternally charged revenge narrative in which a father enacts righteous payback on the terrorists who killed his son, its valorization of a firefighter father as the ideal male, and the reenfranchisement of beleaguered masculinity through fatherhood, all presciently prefigured the model of recidivist masculinity that would rise to discursive prominence in twenty-first-century action cinema in the years that followed. Thus, commensurate with a post-9/11 cultural logic that enables the revivification of obsolescent masculine ideals, twenty-first-century action heroes retain the credentials of involved fatherhood germane to postfeminism’s masculine ideal. An augmented discourse of ideal masculinity emerges in the action genre after 9/11, which successfully offsets its reactionary ideological backpedaling through judicious recourse to the universality and affective negotiability of fatherhood. Postfeminist fatherhood thus remains a key facet of the post-9/11 masculine identity formation of what Sarah Godfrey and I elsewhere term “resurgent protective paternalism,” 3 which unites the differently configured masculinities discussed hereafter.
