When cowboys go mad: American masculinity in postwar film and genre fiction
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Citation
Abstract
This dissertation situates the serial killer as the culmination of a postwar exploration of American masculinity in postwar genre films and pulp fiction. It examines how these popular texts explore and critique American masculinity as a form of violent mental disorder. These texts present white manhood as a site of anxiety, paranoia, delusion, and compulsion expressed in violence against perceived threats to patriarchal white supremacy and the protagonist’s elevated status within that system. Focusing on the convergence of racial and gender identities within these genre texts, this study analyzes the postwar transformation of familiar nineteenth century icons, specifically the cowboy and the hardboiled detective, and how these figures are adapted across genre film and fiction. In particular, this study focuses on how those adaptations trouble the gendered and racialized depictions of American masculinity and culture they historically represent. As traditionally masculine figures begin to diagnose themselves–or invite the viewer’s diagnoses–the American “psychopath” emerges in the late twentieth century as its own genre of masculine performance. Initially depicted as a villain, the psychopath reveals the pathology behind images of American masculinity in the postwar period. Through close readings, cultural studies, gender studies, historicization, and psychoanalysis, this dissertation argues that postwar American masculinity culminates in the late twentieth century invention of the “reel” and real serial killer. In three sections exploring case studies of the postwar cowboy, the detective, and the serial killer, the dissertation traces the historical blending of genre fiction and film, beginning with the earliest formation of the Western, to argue that the serial killer distills postwar masculinity to its core elements: violence and infectious reproducibility. The American serial killer, like the cowboy and the hardboiled detective, becomes a repeatable model of wounded/wounding masculinity. Ultimately, this study argues that the act of categorization itself enables the production of a genre of masculine identification centered on repeatable, pathological violence, reflecting and reinforcing the persistent conservative cultural narratives of masculinity.
Description
2024
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International