Terrified men, monstrous masculinities: representing and recuperating American masculinities in contemporary Hollywood 'terror threat' films

This thesis explores how masculinities are represented and recuperated in Hollywood ‘terror threat’ narrative films from 2005-2010, films directly and indirectly addressing 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’. It aims to examine cinematic attempts to restore, redeem and ‘remasculinise’ threatened or ‘in crisis’ masculinities in post-9/11 Hollywood genre films, specifically in relation to experiences of and responses to terror. The thesis concentrates on four key films, World Trade Center (Stone, 2006), a post-9/11 disaster film with elements of melodrama and the ‘mine accident’ film, Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008), a SF-horror ‘discovered footage’ cum ‘monster movie’, I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007), a post-apocalyptic SF film (with horror elements, including in relation to zombies and vampires), and The Kingdom (Berg, 2008), an action-thriller also analysed as a ‘frontier western’. This cross-generic focus facilitates the analysis of contemporary cinematic difficulties recuperating and redeeming masculinities following the violent incursion of the ‘terror-Other’. The thesis finds the ‘terror threat’ films trouble scholarly assumptions on the tendency (or capacity) of Hollywood to redeem and recuperate conventional masculinities, specifically in relation to – or at the expense of – maligned females and ‘terror-Others’. In contrast to dominant critical perspectives, this study demonstrates the uncertainty, ambivalence and incoherence of ‘remasculinisation’ or masculine redemption. Ultimately, this study of ‘terror threat’ films highlights persistent anxieties, unstable identity constructions, uncertain performances of masculinity, ambivalent redemptions and recuperation, and even masculine monstrosity in the encounter with terror

Problematic mukbang watching and its relationship to disordered eating and internet addiction: a pilot study among emerging adult mukbang watchers

Internet technology has facilitated the use of a wide variety of different activities and applications in online contexts. One such activity is watching mukbang (i.e., watching videos of “eating broadcasts” where someone eats a large amount of food while interacting with viewers). In the present study, the relationship of problematic mukbang watching with disordered eating and internet addiction was examined. Participants were 140 emerging adults who watched mukbang at least once in the past 30 days (66% female; Mage = 21.66, SD = 1.88, range = 19–29 years). Structural equation modeling indicated that problematic mukbang watching was positively associated with both disordered eating and internet addiction. The present study is the first to explore the predictive role of problematic mukbang watching on adverse consequences, and suggests that mukbang watching may be problematic for a minority of emerging adults and that problematic mukbang watching warrants further examination of its impact on mental health and wellbeing

A support withdrawn: 'Spain's 9/11' and Australian newspaper framing

This study represents an attempt to redress the neglect of academic research into coverage of the Madrid train bombings through a content analysis of major Australian newspapers in the immediate aftermath (12-21 March 2004). It quantifies a sudden and significant shift in representation from a 'support for Spain' news frame following the bombings to a 'criticism of Spain' frame following the Spanish national election result only three days later. Australian newspapers made support for a terrorised Spain conditional on a politics of representation marked by the 'war on terror' as a master frame, and served to reflect the political interests and sponsored interpretation of government sources. The moral implications of this withdrawal of support for the Spanish cannot be under-estimated, for it suggests that Australian newspapers were prepared to contribute to an 'erosion' of compassion for recent victims of terrorism

Levinas and the face: Helping news consumers witness, recognise and recover trauma victims

As news consumers we often ignore the mediated suffering and trauma of (distant) others. But to do so, to not look, is to refuse recognition of their suffering and to accept their effacement. Witnessing is essential if we are to 'recover' victims as individuals

"It's not just a dream. There is a storm coming!": Financial crisis, masculine anxieties and vulnerable homes in American film

Despite the Gothic's much-discussed resurgence in mainstream American culture, the role the late 2000s financial crisis played in sustaining this renaissance has garnered insufficient critical attention. This article finds the Gothic tradition deployed in contemporary American narrative film to explore the impact of economic crisis and threat, and especially masculine anxieties about a perceived incapacity of men and fathers to protect vulnerable families and homes. Variously invoking the American and Southern Gothics, Take Shelter (2011) and Winter's Bone (2010) represent how the domestic-everyday was made unfamiliar, unsettling and threatening in the face of metaphorical and real (socio-)economic crisis and disorder. The films' explicit engagement with contemporary American economic malaise and instability thus illustrates the Gothic's continued capacity to lay bare historical and cultural moments of national crisis. Illuminating culturally persistent anxieties about the American male condition, Take Shelter and Winter's Bone materially evoke the Gothic tradition's ability to scrutinize otherwise unspeakable national anxieties about male capacity to protect home and family, including through a focus on economic-cultural "white Otherness." The article further asserts the significance of prominent female assumption of the protective role, yet finds that, rather than individuating the experience of financial crisis on failed men, both films deftly declare its systemic, whole-of-society basis. In so doing, the Gothic sensibility of pervasive anxiety and dread in Take Shelter and Winter's Bone disrupts dominant national discursive tendencies to revivify American institutions of traditional masculinity, family and home in the wakes of 9/11 and the recession

Monstrous men and bathroom mirrors: the bathroom as revelatory space in American cinema

Suggesting that bathrooms in film are primarily theorized as transgressive spaces of violence, vulnerability, disorder and disturbing acts, Glen Donnar's work adopts a different stance, focusing on encounters with the self and/as other in bathroom mirrors, whereby the bathroom arguably becomes a space of revelation albeit one which discloses inadequacy, difference and transformation. His chapter explores the many contradictory significances of domestic bathrooms and mirrors for younger men across key depictions from and of the 1980s in American film. The simultaneously physical and metaphorical, real and unreal characteristics of the mirror disturb bathroom and male protagonist alike, in large part because of its ambivalent capacity to both reveal and distort. Donnar considers the filmic bathroom finally a revelatory, heterotopic space that can neither conceal nor contain male inadequacy, shame or monstrosity confirmed through the mirrored encounter of the self

Final men, racialised fears and the control of monstrous cityscapes in post-apocalyptic Hollywood films

This chapter examines the horrific experiences of a 'final man' - the fabled last man on Earth - in a dystopic near-future science-fiction cityscape through a comparative analysis of three related post-apocalyptic films, ranging from the late 'classical' Hollywood period to a contemporary blockbuster. The films variously expose American (male) racial anxieties and preoccupations in keeping with each film's respective period. Each 'final man' initially enacts a masculinist desire to control urban space. However, the city is also a fearful space; and one irrevocably not his. This horrific loss of control is associated with historical racial fears of perceived urban destruction - and expressed through the arrival of 'monstrous' Others varyingly identified with terror, counter-culture and white patriarchy. Ultimately, an idealised post-racial future may mandate abandoning the 'monstrous' city for a non-urban future that precludes the 'final man'

Redundancy and ageing: Sylvester Stallone's enduring action star image

Sylvester Stallone's star image extends across fi ve decades, since his authorial breakthrough in Rocky ( 1976 ), with its emblematic features including his iconicity as an action star and association with hypermasculinity, hyperbolic (bodily) spectacle, and monosyllabic mumbling. Broadly speaking, Stallone's stardom grew from the mid 1970s until 1990 as a star, screenwriter, and director of fi ve Rocky fi lms and star of the Rambo series. In the fi rst half of the 1990s he relinquished writing and direction, appearing merely as an action star in a series of progressively less successful action blockbusters, including Judge Dredd ( 1995 ) and Assassins ( 1995 ). After Stallone attempted to shift his star image by playing against type in the late 1990s in fi lms such as Cop Land ( 1997 ), his 'lean period' stretched through the early 2000s as he struggled to interest audiences in characters that acknowledged their advancing age. However, Stallone's vaunted (and perhaps desperate) return to his early franchises from the mid 2000s and the surprising subsequent success of The Expendables series since 2010 have unexpectedly extended his stardom

"They Said It'd Be an Adventure": Masculinity, Nation, and Empire in Centennial Australian World War I Film and Television

Centennial commemorations of WWI in 2014-15 triggered a slew of Australian film and television mini-series depicting the nation's early experiences in the Gallipoli campaign. This article maps how these recent productions' deployment of adventure as an explicit narrative frame reveals complex continuities, transformations and subversions of adventure tropes and themes that have long structured Australian screen representations. Adventure-war remains a masculinist mode and Australian soldier masculinity idealized as forging the young nation. Yet recent productions also unsettle the customary "coming of age" chronology, indict the influence of adventure fiction, render adventure-war more inclusive and undermine traditional constructions of racial superiority

Persistently ambivalent: Chidlren, race, sexuality, and a post-apocalyptic Hollywood interracial future

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