Boys in Trouble?

The notion that white heterosexual American masculinity is in a state of ‘crisis’ has been a popular and rhetorically potent discourse since the end of the Second World War. This debate became particularly vociferous in the 1990s and has persisted into the 21st Century. Moreover, intimations of ‘white male crisis’ have been repeatedly appropriated and reinforced within the narratives and seductive imagery of the Hollywood imaginary. Engaging with the rich body of conceptual work on the psycho-social functions of paranoia, Martin Fradley argues that white male responses to the social, cultural and economic shifts of the post-liberationist era in contemporary American cinema should be understood primarily as the product of a paranoid cultural imagination. Through close contextual analysis of films made by iconic figures such as Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas and Clint Eastwood as well as key films such as JFK (1991), Falling Down (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Lost Highway (1997), Fight Club (1999) and Gladiator (2000), Fradley argues that a reactive paranoia is perhaps the key structuring motif in American cinema’s depiction of normative masculinity in the 1990s and 2000s