BEING A MAN ABOUT IT

In the Introduction I noted that the approach of the millennium prompted a series of films, including The Truman Show, Fight Club, The Matrix, Dark City and eXistenZ, which depicted a crisis of masculine control. David Bordwell has wryly described this crisis as ‘evidently one of the longest-running crises in history’ (Bordwell 2006: 104), but as Martin Fradley argues, while ‘a rhetorically compelling and suitably angst-filled narrative of white male decentring and decline has become one of the master narratives in post-1960s American culture’ this discourse had become ‘especially pronounced in the 1990s’ (Fradley 2004: 239). Reflecting cultural anxieties that extended beyond gender, such as media saturation and the growing ubiquity of digital technologies and commodity fetishism, the films also expressed an uncertainty about the possibility of a heroic male masculinity that flowed from debates and socio-cultural developments around gender identity that took place during the 1980s and 1990s, and which are worth reviewing here in order to provide some context for the consideration of 2000s male action heroes that follows.