“The More You Look, the Less You Really Know”: The

Redemption of White Masculinity in Contemporary American and

French Cinema

Judith Franco

Cinema Journal, 47, Number 3, Spring 2008, pp. 29-47 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.0.0003

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/236895

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Franco.qxp 3/26/08 2:39 PM Page 29

“The More You Look, the Less You Really Know”:

The Redemption of White Masculinity in
Contemporary American and French Cinema
by Judith Franco

Abstract: Through a reading of contemporary American and French films that

privilege homosocial and father–son relations, this essay explores the ways in
which narrative structures and formal strategies are employed to articulate white
masculinity in crisis.

“The more you look, the less you really know” … or so goes the central argument
in attorney Freddy Riedenschneider’s (Tony Shalhoub) defense of murder sus-
pects in The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2002). This line also
applies to barber Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), the unwitting “homme fatal”
who is consistently represented as a source of fascination and contemplation for
the viewer. Whereas Freddy fails to get his client acquitted, a number of contem-
porary American and French films are more successful in creating reasonable
doubt and redeeming white masculinity.
In contemporary cinema, the exploration of masculinity is often associated
with fatherhood. European art films in particular focus on father–son relationships
and interrogate the changed role of the father in contemporary society. For ex-
ample, James Leggott’s survey of father–son relationships in recent British social
realist cinema identifies (troubled) father-centered and (angelic) boy-centered
narratives that are invested in the conservative project of restoring patriarchal
authority and reclaiming homosocial spaces.1 Building on Slavoj Žižek’s critique of
the reductive representation of overprotective and abusive father figures in con-
temporary cinema “who have in common that they both suspend the agency of the
symbolic Law/Prohibition,” Emma Wilson draws attention to a cycle of “missing
child films” in European and American art cinema that work to refocus attention
on male children (rather than women) as cinema’s endangered subjects.2 Wilson
argues that films such as La Classe de neige (Class Trip, Claude Miller, 1998) and
Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998) explore the disintegration of paternal authority
from the perspective of the son through a disturbing merger of fantasies of the

Judith Franco teaches film and television studies at the department of Arts, Media and
Technology at the Utrecht School of the Arts. She has published in Tijdschrift voor Gen-
derstudies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and
Television & New Media.
© 2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

Cinema Journal 47, No. 3, Spring 2008 29

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father as nurturer and as molester while also suggesting other ways of securing
masculine identity in the domain of femininity as an alternative field of both iden-
tification and desire.3 Whereas masculinity in contemporary European art cinema
is often negotiated through homosocial and same-sex parental affiliation, in “Too
Close for Comfort: American Beauty and the Incest Motif,” Kathleen Rowe Karlyn
identifies the father–daughter narrative in a striking number of recent American
films that use the incest motif to direct audience sympathy toward the rebellious
and romantic middle-aged male hero by portraying him as a victim of both the se-
ductive daughter figure and the absent or collusive wife/mother.4 In this essay I
will draw attention to a cluster of critically valorized contemporary American and
French films that push victimism to the limit by casting the middle-aged white
male in the morally superior position of the psychically and emotionally damaged
victim-hero whose invisible wounds not only justify his transgressive/criminal be-
havior but also absolve him of all responsibility and guilt.5 These predominantly
homosocial narratives exhibit melodramatic traits, most obviously by placing em-
phasis on the family as the site of wider social crisis but also in terms of the mise-
en-scène of the hyper-damaged male who becomes a pleasurable spectacle and a
smokescreen for the realignment of patriarchal power structures. After analyzing
the narrative structures and formal strategies that work toward the transformation
and redemption of the white male victim-hero in Monster’s Ball (Marc Foster,
2000), Panic (Henry Bromell, 2000), and K-Pax (Iain Softley, 2001), I will focus on
The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2002) and L’Emploi du temps
(Time Out, Laurent Cantet, 2002) to demonstrate how these critically acclaimed
art films represent male subjectivity as tragically and irremediably alienated by
foregrounding middle-class masculinity as a damaging social construction inflicted
on the innocent white male whose body becomes a site of performance that is
emptied out of meaning and thus identity. Finally, I will discuss L’Adversaire (The
Adversary, Nicole Garcia, 2002) as a counterpoint to L’Emploi du temps. Both films
were released in 2002 and were inspired by the case of Frenchman Jean-Claude
Romand, who lived a life of deception, posing as a doctor and a respectable family
man, and in 1993 murdered his wife, children, and parents before attempting sui-
cide.6 Whereas Laurent Cantet’s film omits the murders and adultery and invites
sympathy for the white-collar victim-hero who is represented as the norm of a mas-
culinity that can only attempt to be healthy, Nicole Garcia’s film stands out in terms
of its problematization of masculinity as a narcissistic construction. A comparative
analysis of these two films illustrates the ways in which the current cinematic con-
figurations of middle-aged white masculinity stretch beyond the boundaries of
specific national cinemas and resonate in both U.S. and French cinema.

Male Family Dramas. Both Sally Robinson and Susan Jeffords have argued inde-
pendently that articulations of white men as victimizers slide almost imperceptibly
into constructions of white men as victims. Robinson’s study of post-liberationist
mainstream American texts in Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis shows that

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the marking of dominant masculinity functions as a strategy through which white

men negotiate the widespread critique of their power and privilege. Robinson
identifies and deconstructs the rhetoric of crisis that allows white men to claim vic-
timization by appealing to representations of bodily/emotional trauma, and she ar-
gues that the figure of the wounded white male individual not only enables an
erasure of the institutional supports of white and male dominance but also works
to recenter white masculinity, often at the expense of evacuated others, namely
women and people of color.7 In her essay “The Big Switch: Hollywood Masculin-
ity in the Nineties,” Jeffords identifies a subgenre of male transformation narra-
tives that reveal a shift from the violent hard-bodied action hero of the 1980s to the
gentle family man/father. She goes on to argue that these narratives of male trans-
formation suggest that men have been betrayed by their own muscular bodies into
fulfilling a masculine heroic ideal that has alienated them from their own internal
needs and inherent goodness. Eventually, the integrity of the white male victims
who have suffered from the burdens of traditional masculinities is restored as they
devote themselves to improving their internal selves. These stories of personal suf-
fering, as Jeffords notes, fail to address the social and political causes and effects of
the privileges associated with dominant white masculinity. Moreover, the revised
men are not held accountable for their past actions: “The plots suggest that it is
the men themselves who have suffered the most from their behaviors, having their
lives taking away from them and placed in different bodies. Consequently, they’re
not called upon to repair the damage they’ve done—it’s not, after all, that severe.
They have only to become aware, of themselves and their needs to change.”8
In the late 1990s, the screen male appears even more damaged and trauma-
tized than ten years ago, as pointed out by the editors of The Trouble with Men:
Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema:
There has been a difference in the damaged man in comparison with earlier periods
of film. The damaged man is more often than not damaged from the start, either in
the way in which he is presented by our contributors, and/or from the start of the film
in which he appears … The damage is not just a climax, a moment of spectacular dis-
play, as might be the case, thinking back to Steve Neale’s 1983 article, for the shoot-
out of the western, the war film, or the action movie.9
The three-generational male family dramas I discuss here take great pains to
single out the father as a figure of oppression and locate the crisis of masculinity
in the traumatized middle generation, caught between the controlling patriarch
and the sensitive boy/young man, thus paving the way for the redemption of the
victim-hero who is imbued with a childlike innocence and vulnerability that legit-
imizes his transgressions. In Monster’s Ball, for example, the miraculous conver-
sion of the sexist and racist prison guard Hank Grotowski, whose identity is
modeled after the father, into the caring lover of a black woman whose husband
he has put to death, demands a tortuous narrative that exposes the film’s reac-
tionary racial and sexual politics. Monster’s Ball prepares the ground for the un-
likely affair between Hank and Leticia by trivializing and depreciating Leticia’s

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relationships with black men who are already marked as castrated. Leticia is de-
picted as an indifferent mother and as emotionally estranged from her imprisoned
black husband, Lawrence. Significantly, her last conversation with him is a petty
and ill-tempered row. Moreover, for Hank and Leticia to come together, the nar-
rative subjects the black woman to unspeakable loss. Leticia’s husband is executed,
she loses her son to a hit-and-run driver, and she is evicted from her home. As the
female/black other, Leticia functions merely as a catalyst as the white male protag-
onist discovers his new self. As Mia Mask puts it:
Monster’s Ball makes an insidious ideological maneuver by allowing its protagonist to
atone for his racism (and parental neglect) through the charitable assistance he gives
to his black girlfriend. While I read the text as grappling with gender, race, and class,
I also view it as ultimately redeeming Southern white masculinity through the sym-
bolic reparations Hank makes in Leticia’s name (e.g., the gas station). This superficial
redemption (which makes sexual partnership its reward) is what angered so many
African American viewers.10
Yet ultimately, the narrative is unable to resolve the contradiction between
the abusive patriarchal heir who is responsible for his son’s suicide and the reborn
man who distances himself from the father and embraces femininity. The final
scene questions the white male’s moral and spiritual enlightenment as Leticia
discovers that Hank was involved in her husband’s death, only for the black
woman’s distress and betrayal to be eclipsed by Hank’s paternalistic remark (“I
think we’re going to be alright”) in the romantic closing shot that shows the cou-
ple sitting on the porch, watching the stars while Hank feeds Leticia ice cream. As
the feminist scholar Tania Modleski has noted, “Heterosexual masculinity has
often been constructed in American society ‘at the edge of the territory of the
child’ while women have typically represented the repressive forces of civilized,
adult society—that which man rejects in order to live out his perpetual youth.”11
An important strategy in contemporary male family dramas is the representation
of the middle generation/son-father as boyish or childlike in order to emphasize
his (sexual) inoffensiveness and his victimization by the patriarchal father. In
Monster’s Ball, Hank’s innocence is signaled by his craving for chocolate ice cream,
which he insists on eating with a plastic spoon at any time of day or night. Also,
throughout the film, Billy Bob Thornton’s constrained body language, drawing
upon his performance of asexual underdogs in Slingblade (Billy Bob Thornton,
1996) and A Simple Plan (Sam Raimi, 1998), conveys passivity and repression.
What little sexual desire Hank is capable of must be kindled by Leticia’s sexual
advances.
While the objective narration and detached camera in Monster’s Ball compli-
cates identification with the male protagonist, especially in the first half of the film
(as we see Hank chase black men from his property, verbally abuse his black col-
leagues, and humiliate his sensitive “feminine” son), Panic draws us into a more
subjective account of the male protagonist’s crisis. Like Hank, Alex is portrayed as
a middle-aged man who has been conditioned throughout his life to follow in his

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father’s footsteps. Alex’s criminal past/persona only surfaces in flashbacks that

show him as a little boy and a young man, reluctantly being trained to kill for a liv-
ing by his father Michael. These subjective scenes convey a sense of trauma and
absolve Alex of responsibility for his actions, leaving the father to bear the burden
of abject masculinity. When Michael finds out that his weak son is “opening up” to
Dr. Park and jeopardizing the family business/honor, he orders Alex to kill his rival.
Unable to carry out the assignment, Alex finds himself betrayed once again, this
time by the “good father” who informs the police. In the shoot-out, Alex kills
Michael, and his redemption is sealed by death/martyrdom as he, in turn, is shot
by the police.
The final flashback that shows Alex and his sensitive young son talking about
infinity suggests that Alex lives on in Sammy. Significantly, Alex is depicted through-
out the film as a melancholic character with childlike features (“beautiful sad
eyes”) who is even more sexually disinterested than Hank in Monster’s Ball.12 Alex
becomes infatuated with Sarah, an incurable psychiatric patient, but the bisexual/
hypersexualized daughter figure merely functions as an enigma that the victim-
hero has to confront on the road to moral and spiritual regeneration. The only
human being with whom Alex really connects is Sammy, his son and alter ego. As
a matter of fact, the intimate father–son bond is depicted as the driving force be-
hind the victim-hero’s trajectory. It is after Alex discovers that Michael is secretly
enlisting Sammy in the family business—teaching the boy to shoot squirrels, a
repetition of Alex’s childhood trauma—that he decides to kill the father in order
to save his son.
In K-Pax, the redemption of the white male carries religious overtones. The
film opens with the apparition of Prot (Kevin Spacey), a mysterious Christ figure
who claims to come from another planet (K-Pax). Prot is arrested and treated in a
psychiatric hospital where he has a beneficial effect on his fellow patients and on
Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges), who transforms from an indifferent workaholic
into a caring family man. K-Pax is primarily concerned with the renegotiation of
relationships between fathers and sons, signaled from the outset by superimpos-
ing Mark’s and Prot’s face in reflecting surfaces, a bonding process that culminates
in the formation of father–son couples. The film not only closes on the reconcilia-
tion of Mark Powell with his estranged son from a previous marriage, but also con-
firms the doctor’s emotional commitment to his patient.
From the outset, Mark Powell appears obsessed with his charismatic patient,
inviting him for a day out with his family. When Prot has a panic attack, confirm-
ing Powell’s suspicion that a past traumatic event lies behind the K-Pax story, he is
subjected to hypnosis as a means of uncovering the truth. Regressive therapy leads
the analyst to identify Prot as Robert Porter, a man who disappeared after having
killed the murderer/rapist of his wife Sarah and six-year-old daughter Rebecca.
Even though K-Pax works hard to idealize the victim-hero through religious
metaphors and by dramatizing his pain/suffering as he is forced to relive his
trauma, three consecutive hypnosis scenes that feminize the character Prot’s

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Figure 1. William H. Macy as Alex, the quintessential white male victim-

hero with a childlike aura and vulnerability that legitimizes his transgres-
sions in Panic (Henry Bromell, Artisan, 2000).

partial and indirect confessions (he never speaks in the first person) suggest that
the true story/persona behind the wide-eyed alien is repressed because of its vio-
lent nature.13 Analysis reveals that Prot worked in an abattoir as “a knocker.” As the
patient explains defiantly, “a knocker is the guy who knocks cows on the head so
they won’t struggle while they slit their throats. Barbaric, isn’t it?” During hypno-
sis, Prot’s violence surfaces as he grabs Mark by the throat and we learn that he
killed the vagrant who murdered his family, in the same efficient and cold-blooded
way in which he killed cows (“his throat snapped”). Like the other male family dra-
mas I have discussed so far, K-Pax leaves the (dead) father to assume the burden
of abject masculinity/paternity and guilt by suggesting that Prot inherited his mur-
derous “skill” from his old man. Although the flashbacks, emanating from Mark’s
point of view, as well as the sheriff’s official version represent Robert Porter as a
traumatized victim who rightfully avenged his wife and daughter, one could also
read the husband/father as the perpetrator who wanted to get rid of his “shackles,”
as he calls it. That is, Sarah’s unwanted pregnancy at the age of seventeen and “a
life of misery” following in the footsteps of his father.
Significantly, water is a privileged motif in K-Pax, suggesting purity and re-
demption. After the massacre, we see Porter washing the blood from his hands
and disappearing into the river. The film’s climax shows Prot once again transcend-
ing his mortal body and sacrificing himself to save Bess (Melanee Murray), a
homeless black patient who is chosen to accompany him to K-Pax. All that is left

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on earth are Prot’s sunglasses and a catatonic body inhabited by a superior spirit
that Mark will try to revive.
In Monster’s Ball, Panic, and K-Pax, masculine identity is negotiated mainly
through narrative structure and by contrasting different types of masculinity,
coded as patrilineal. The ideological agenda of these male family dramas is geared
toward redeeming masculinity in the figure of the middle-generation male who is
in the center of crisis, torn between violent and benevolent versions of masculin-
ity. In Monster’s Ball and Panic, abject masculinity is externalized and displaced
onto the father, whereas K-Pax locates both the (repressed) monstrous and benev-
olent versions of masculinity within the male alien. Hence, K-Pax has to resort to
extreme idealization—religious metaphors and a resurrection narrative—in order
to redeem the male protagonist. What all these male family dramas have in com-
mon is that they absolve the son of responsibility and guilt, despite his complicity
in the crimes of the father, by constructing him as an attractively vulnerable and
rebellious victim-hero who has the courage to challenge the patriarchal order.

The Tragedy of Modern Man. The Man Who Wasn’t There and L’Emploi du
temps address the representation of white middle-class masculinity as a social
construction. In these art films, marked by a self-conscious narration and a predilec-
tion for psychological realism, masculinity is foregrounded as a fictional role pro-
jected onto and reluctantly performed by “vacant” male protagonists who slip from
passivity into criminality. In these art cinema versions of masculinity in crisis, the
male protagonist does not undergo a transformation or conversion. His crisis is
permanent and culminates in (self) destruction and martyrdom.
The impassive Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn’t There is the quintessential
castrated and domesticated male. He was proposed to by his domineering wife
Doris (Frances McDormand), who later cheats on him. He works in a barber
shop owned by his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco). Ed’s job—second
barber—exemplifies his servile, feminized condition. Significantly, everyone
keeps forgetting Ed’s name, and he describes himself as a ghost: “I didn’t see any-
one. No one saw me. I was the barber.” Whereas in classical film noir, as noir his-
torian Frank Krutnick writes, this type of hero “would experience the domestic
and professional routine as a source of profound dissatisfaction and he would at
least harbor the desire to escape from his trapped life of regularity and order,” Ed
shows no signs of rebellion, merely a sense of detachment expressed in his laconic
voice-over commentary.14
The barber’s feminized condition, exemplified by the motif of cleanliness, trig-
gers a revenge narrative that affects everyone around him. Ed secretly takes up the
offer of gay businessman Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito) to invest in the new tech-
nique of dry cleaning. In order to raise the money, he sends Doris’s boss Big Dave
(James Gandolfini) an anonymous blackmail note, threatening to expose his affair
with Doris unless he pays out $10,000. Terrified that his wife Ann (Katherine
Borowitz), who owns the family store, will find out, Dave delivers the money, which

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Figure 2. Kevin Spacey as Prot, the charismatic male alien bonding with
children, animals, and the mentally ill in K-Pax (Iain Softley, Universal,
2001).

Ed gives to Tolliver. When Ed is found out and confronted (“What kind of man
are you?”), he stabs Dave to death with a “dame’s weapon,” looks at his immacu-
late hands, and walks out as if nothing has happened. Even though Ed’s blackmail
note sets in motion a chain of tragic events—Doris is charged with Dave’s murder
and hangs herself, Frank mortgages the barber shop to hire an expensive lawyer—
the impassive barber is consistently marked out as a victim of circumstance. More-
over, Ed’s status as underdog provides emotional justification for the punishment
of his family and friends. Throughout the film, Ed is repeatedly humiliated, en-
couraging the spectator to sympathize with the victim-hero. Riedenschneider or-
ders Ed “to keep his trap shut because he is only the barber,” and Big Dave mocks
Ed’s fallen arches and his “smock.” Doris cheats on her husband, and an autopsy
reveals that she was pregnant with another man’s child. As such, Ed’s modesty and
his tragic awareness of being a simple man sets the white male victim apart, not
only from the treacherous Doris, but also from his ambitious and duplicitous male
counterparts who are figured negatively as caricatured stereotypes marked by
physical and emotional excess: Tolliver the hysterical pansy, Frank the pathetic
Italian, and Freddy the narcissistic Jew. Furthermore, the film suggests that these
“pseudo-men” are not what they seem. Tolliver wears a hairpiece, and “he-man”
Big Dave, who tells heroic war jokes, is exposed as a liar, a coward, and a crook.
We learn that he held a clerical post in the army and convinced Doris to cook
the books.

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Ed, on the other hand, emerges as the locus of authenticity and integrity be-
cause of his naïveté, exemplified by his devotion to Birdy (Scarlett Johannson), a
friend’s teenage daughter, “a good clean kid,” and a musical genius.15 Ed insists on
paying for her piano lessons, but Birdy is soon exposed as a mediocre piano player
and a sexually precocious girl who makes a pass at the reluctant barber in the car,
causing a crash. As the film critic Ruby Rich points out, the valorization of stupid-
ity in 1990s American popular culture, and neo-noir in particular, works to rein-
state masculinity: “These dumb lugs are all accorded a morality denied to the
women. At the same time, in a moment of crisis for masculinity in the movies,
these dumb guys are real men.”16
If the male characters in The Man Who Wasn’t There are systematically
ridiculed or exposed as duplicitous and treacherous at some point, the barber’s
single act of transgression is never even acknowledged. Ed’s truthful version of
the facts/confession of Big Dave’s murder is dismissed out of hand by Freddy
Riedenschneider as unrealistic and unconvincing (“you look too composed to be a
nutcase”), and ultimately, Ed is sentenced to death for a murder he did not com-
mit, consolidating his status as duped victim. It is in prison that the barber finally
discovers and embraces his vocation as “Modern Man,” as he finds himself re-
duced to a mere representation, a story in a men’s magazine that earns him five
cents per word. Death, the point of culmination in Ed’s trajectory, is figured as a
liberating experience (“seeing a hole gives you some peace”). The final scene of
Ed in the electric chair bathed in white light suggests Ed’s redemption and his
return to Doris, the Mother. The image of the barber’s leg being cleansed and
shaven in preparation for the execution echoes an early scene, which shows Ed
shaving Doris’s legs in the bath, and is accompanied by his last words: “I don’t
know where I’m going but maybe Doris will be there and I can tell her all those
things they don’t have words for here.” As the narrative unfolds, Ed’s initially la-
conic voice-over becomes more subjective, generating sympathy for the misunder-
stood and victimized male.17

The Bourgeois Rebel. The French director Laurent Cantet’s first feature,
Ressources Humaines (Human Resources, 1999), examines the dynamics of worker-
employer relations and its devastating effect on a father–son relationship and male
subjectivity. When Frank, an idealistic, high-flying business student, returns to his
hometown to take a position as a management trainee in the factory where his
father and sister work, he gets caught between the management’s rationalizing
scheme and the protests mounted by the union. Eventually, Frank’s questionnaire
about the thirty-five-hour week is used as an alibi to make lifelong workers, includ-
ing his father, redundant. Frank resigns and participates in a strike, but the re-
lationship with his father remains tense, painful, and unresolved. In Ressources
Humaines, the alienation between father and son is explicitly located in the work/
social status that pits them against each other. The working-class father identi-
fies with his job (and the machine he has been operating for thirty years) to the

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point of self-denial, refusing to participate in a strike that aims to protect his

rights. Frank, the only son, who has been given the opportunity to elevate him-
self socially, feels embarrassed by his father’s humiliation and betrayed by the
management.
In his second, more psychological feature L’Emploi du temps, Cantet shifts
his focus from the working-class family to a more affluent middle-class milieu. The
film takes its inspiration from a notorious real-life case from 1993, in which Jean-
Claude Roman sustained a fictional working life for eighteen years in the eyes
of his family and friends. Vincent (the stand-in for Roman, played by Aurélein
Recoing), a middle-aged family man, has lost his job as a consultant. Concealing
this fact from the people around him, he concocts an elaborate fiction about his
new post in Switzerland with a UN agency while spending weekdays sleeping
in his car. To finance his family’s affluent lifestyle, Vincent takes money from his
father on the premise that he is buying an apartment to be near his new job in
Geneva and he persuades his friends and relatives to hand over money to invest
in nonexistent, high-yielding Swiss bank accounts. Jean-Michel (Serge Livrocet), an
amiable crook who sees through Vincent’s lies, convinces him to repay the money
by drawing him into a scheme to smuggle fake luxury goods from Poland into
Switzerland. Eventually, Vincent’s wife Muriel (Karin Viard) discovers the truth.
After a painful confrontation with his wife and children, Vincent flees in his car.
Muriel begs him on the phone to come back. The last scene shows a terrified
Vincent forced into accepting a managerial post. Like Ed, the barber in The Man
Who Wasn’t There, Vincent is portrayed as an ordinary man without ambition who
feels trapped in a social role and wanders through life like a ghost. The male pro-
tagonist is frequently represented as an observer whose relation to the outside
world is mediated by windows/glass partitions that allow him visual access while
blocking participation. Or in the words of Cantet, Vincent becomes “a spectator to
his own life.”18 We learn that Vincent was fired because he preferred to cruise the
roadways rather than visit clients. He did not tell his wife he lost his job “because
it was easier not to.” The film introduces Vincent’s passivity as a natural, innocent
condition associated with his car, a comfortable womb-like space that shields him
from the outside world. The opening scene shows Vincent sleeping in his car in a
fetal position. He awakens to Muriel’s phone call and lies about his busy work
schedule. The scene points to the disruptive role of woman, as the representative
of social structuration. In his car, Vincent sings along to the radio and races a pass-
ing train with a boyish grin on his face. Throughout the film, constant motion pro-
vides the illusion of freedom. At the close of the film, it is once again Muriel’s voice
on the phone that keeps calling the male protagonist back to the real world and
the burdens that await him.
Vincent’s lies and deceit are initially unmotivated; he keeps his wife hanging
on the phone and delays his return with stories about fictitious meetings and un-
cooperative clients. The film revels in the white male’s rebellion and dramatizes his
downfall as he heads toward exposure. Vincent, the film’s narrative and emotional

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center, is construed as a victim of social pressure who gives his family and friends
what they want because he is afraid to disappoint them. More importantly, the film
insists on the complicity of Vincent’s wife and father in particular. Even though
his lies become more obvious and absurd, Vincent’s fantasy scenario is taken for
granted by his friends and relatives, and the film even suggests that the male pro-
tagonist’s sense of imagination compensates for the frustration of his bourgeois
entourage, who lack the courage to abandon their boring jobs and respectable
lifestyle. During an argument, Muriel, who is a part-time teacher, admits being
jealous of her husband’s adventurous life (“You see the role I’m stuck with. I never
imagined myself like this”). Later in the film, she helps him maintain the grand de-
ception. She encourages Vincent to ask his father to lend him money and does not
question his motives when he takes her to a log cabin in the middle of nowhere
rather than to his flat in Geneva.
But Muriel can be a rather selfish partner. When Vincent suffers a breakdown
and comes close to a confession, ventilating his despair and anxiety (“I’m afraid
I’ll disappoint. I can’t handle anything right now. I’m just going along … I only see
totally unknown faces. Like moments of absence … I can’t think anymore. My
mind is blank”), Muriel encourages her husband to pursue his imaginary career.
Vincent’s moral superiority is established primarily in relation to other male
characters. Whereas the fantasist has no scruples about defrauding his carefully se-
lected bourgeois victims, he distances himself from his criminal mentor/surrogate
father Jean-Michel, and an unexpected confrontation with Nono (Maxime Sassier),
a devoted family man who entrusts Vincent with his savings without demanding a
receipt, brings about a moral awakening. Nono, Vincent’s former school friend, rep-
resents an alternative type of masculinity and lifestyle associated with simplicity
and authenticity that contrasts sharply with the middle-class emphasis on status
and appearances. Nono spends his days making music and looking after his young
daughter while his wife goes off to work. At one point, Vincent is shown gazing
longingly from a distance at this idyllic family, and he quickly repays Nono’s invest-
ment with interest. It is within the father–son relationship that the male rebel is
granted a privileged status as sympathetic underdog. Vincent’s ever-present father,
the bourgeois patriarch, functions as a figure of oppression and social alienation—
or, as Will Higbee puts it in an essay for French Cultural Studies, “it is the pres-
sure of bourgeois expectation to maintain the trappings of professional success
and affluence—articulated most intensely not through his wife, but through the
father—that pushes Vincent to the breaking point.”19 Vincent, in return, repro-
duces the same relationship with his elder son: just as his father writes a check for
Vincent to pay for the deposit on the imaginary flat in Geneva, so Vincent in turn
gives a F500 note to his son Julien (Nicolas Kalsch). Through the course of the
film, the dreamy affectionate father figure is contrasted to Julien, who is portrayed
unsympathetically as a self-righteous, competitive, and materialistic boy. Signifi-
cantly, it is Julien who confronts Vincent in the final “outing” scene (“I won’t eat
with him. He’s a bastard. He makes me sick … You bullshit us, you laughed at us”),

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thus inviting the spectator to side with the humiliated father, who shows no sign of
remorse toward his family and continues to justify his transgressive behavior: “I
did that so you could live like nothing had happened … I could have just run off,
you know that … Are you going to watch me all night? You’re all completely sick.”
The closing scene dramatizes Vincent’s tragic destiny as he succumbs to social
pressure (once again represented by the father who set up the job interview) and
is condemned to live a lie, to be something that he is not: an ambitious business-
man. Vincent’s last words, “I’m not scared,” are contradicted by his petrified facial
expression. As the camera closes in on him and the melancholic background music
drowns out his final words, the male rebel is literally crushed and obliterated.

The Performing Body. Both visually and acoustically, the self-conscious art nar-
ration in The Man Who Wasn’t There and L’Emploi du temps foregrounds mas-
culinity as a social and cultural construction by dramatizing the internal-external
division of the male subject-in-crisis. Whereas Ed’s lack of narrative control and
inarticulateness challenge and problematize the traditional representation of mas-
culinity,20 this spectacle of castration is overridden by Ed’s laconic voice-over as the
most privileged source of information throughout the film, recounting the male
protagonist’s story in the past tense, and often anticipating the images. For in-
stance, the barber’s condescending introduction of his wife and brother-in-law
(“Maybe if you are twelve years old, Frank has got an interesting point of view”) is
underscored by caricatured images, allowing Ed to stand out as an enigmatic icon
of coolness. Indeed, The Man Who Wasn’t There establishes a sharp contrast be-
tween Ed’s silence, interiority, and depth, suggested by Billy Bob Thornton’s pen-
sive face in close-up or slow motion, often accompanied by classical music, and the
shallowness of the female/feminized characters who talk incessantly but hardly
communicate or listen. As such, Ed’s near-muteness emerges as the signifier of
nostalgic masculinity, authenticity, and virtue.
If male alienation in The Man Who Wasn’t There is figured in terms of the
protagonist’s inexpressivity, L’Emploi du temps draws attention to the alienating
effect of language. Vincent delivers a virtuoso verbal performance and ultimately
gets caught up in his own rhetoric in an attempt to construct a flattering represen-
tation of himself, tailored to the demands of his bourgeois milieu. While visiting a
Swiss bank, he picks up brochures and spends his days studying the information to
create a fictitious persona. Significantly, only outsider Jean-Michel, who does not
belong to Vincent’s bourgeois circle, sees through the verbal mimicry (“You didn’t
seem to believe what you were saying”). In both The Man Who Wasn’t There and
L’Emploi du temps, white middle-class masculinity is represented as emotionally
blocked by the male’s inarticulateness and inexpressivity.
Both films also draw attention to middle-class masculinity as masquerade in
terms of clothing and behavior. Everymen Ed and Vincent, appropriately embod-
ied by chameleon Billy Bob Thornton and the ordinary-looking French stage
actor Aurélien Recoing, are often represented as “trapped in a suit,” the masculine

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uniform par excellence that offers, as Anne Hollander describes such attire in Sex
and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress, “a complete envelope for the body”21
that, per Ruth P. Rubinstein in Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American
Culture, “denotes holding back personal feelings, or self-restraint, and focusing
energy on achieving organizational goals, or goal-directed behaviour.”22 Ed and
Vincent look the part, but their masculine masquerade covers up for a lack of
identity and dramatizes the characters’ alienation as they become transparent to
the outside world. Indeed, the invisibility upon which the normative power of
white masculinity rests, its closeness to a disembodied norm, has now become a
liability. We often see Vincent blending in with white-collar workers. But these
scenes serve to highlight his alienated condition as they are signaled by the visual
motif of glass partitions and architectural compositions, suggesting isolation and
entrapment.
The stylized black-and-white photography and observational camera in The
Man Who Wasn’t There turns the male image and masculine codes of behavior
into a fetishistic spectacle. Tableaux of the male protagonist’s immaculately dressed,
almost abstract body, and close-ups of Thornton’s inscrutable face, are offered di-
rectly to the spectator for contemplation and as a source of fascination in itself. In
the films discussed above, the male protagonists in crisis appear self-absorbed and
hermetic. Their status as introspective powerless outsiders, often combined with
a childlike sense of imagination, lends them a narcissistic quality not in terms of
independence, but rather as a symptom of cultural devastation which leaves them
self-recoiling inward. In The Man Who Wasn’t There and L’Emploi du temps, the
spectacle of male suffering and disempowerment is reserved exclusively for the
spectator’s eyes (and ears), inviting a privileged bond with the male underdog
through aesthetic and emotional pleasure, anchored in lingering close-ups of faces
as a locus/signifier of “humanness.”23

The Adversary. In contrast to her male counterparts, director Nicole Garcia re-
sists the mythification and fetishization of the white middle-class male in crisis.
In terms of factual information, her 2002 film L’Adversaire adheres closely to
Emmanuel Carrère’s book of the same title, yet the film adaptation eschews psy-
chological realism altogether. Carrère’s project was born out of fascination (and
partial identification) with Jean-Claude Romand, who is presented by the author
“not as a common criminal, nor a madman but a man pushed to the limit by over-
whelming forces.”24 Carrère’s approach is empathic as he enters into correspon-
dence with Romand, attends his trial, visits him in prison, and searches for
traumas to explain the tragedy and downfall of the mythical white male. If at first
Carrère parallels his life with Romand’s in order to provide a commentary on the
disaffection of bourgeois life, the author ultimately distances himself from his dou-
ble and exorcizes him as “pure evil.”
Garcia’s film, on the other hand, ruthlessly exposes the mechanisms and con-
sequences of pathological male narcissism. Significantly, the critical reception of

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Figure 3. Male alienation articulated through representations of space in

L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, Laurent Cantet, ThinkFilm, 2002), as we
see everyman Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) wandering aimlessly through the
corridors of the UN building.

L’Adversaire in France was marked by an unfavorable comparison to L’Emploi du

temps (released six months earlier) and to Emmanuel Carrère’s novel, praised by
critics for transcending a true crime story and offering a meditation on the condi-
tion of modern man “persecuted by his own performances and condemned to soli-
tude and dehumanization.”25 Furthermore, the detached, almost documentary
quality of L’Adversaire contrasts sharply with the compassionate perspective on
French masculinity that marks Garcia’s second feature and box-office success Le
Fils préféré (The Favorite Son, 1994), a male melodrama centering on a forty-year-
old man and his problematic relationships with his father and estranged brothers,
a film that delighted the audience and the press for addressing the topic of mas-
culinity from a point of view oriented by traditional female values of compassion,
generosity, and altruism.26
Despite the performance of Daniel Auteuil, one of France’s most prestigious
actors, as the stand-in for Romand, Jean-Marc Faure, L’Adversaire did not receive
any awards at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, and many French film critics invari-
ably described the film as “cold” and “lacking in depth,” thus revealing their in-
vestment in the white male as victim-hero.27 From the outset, Garcia establishes a
tight cause-effect logic between the male protagonist’s desire for control and the
destructive effect on his family and friends. The film opens with a statement by the
author that draws attention to the realistic motivation of the narrative: “For 15 years

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Figure 4. The duplicitous face of masculinity in crisis: Jean-Marc Faure

(Daniel Auteuil) as the emptied-out white bourgeois male figured as a
shadow or reflection in Nicole Garcia’s L’Adversaire (The Adversary, Bac
Films, 2002).

everyone believed Jean-Marc Faure. His wife, his parents, his friends … this film
is inspired by a true story.” Also, French viewers were by 2002 familiar with the
outcome of the Romand murder case, which allowed filmgoers to focus on the
narration that reconstructs and examines the process of male narcissism run amok.
For example, the opening scene shows Jean-Marc arriving home. We see the
stains on his jacket, a broken bowl, and two lifeless bodies under the covers as
Jean-Marc walks into the children’s bedroom. The film is anchored in this moment
of truth, the confrontation of Jean-Marc with himself and reality after a lifetime of
deceit, before he set his house on fire and tried to take his own life. Scenes of the
male protagonist at home watching his video confession are intercut with imper-
sonal flashbacks of the past six years and testimonies of the two witnesses: long-
time friend Luc (François Cluzet) and mistress Marianne (Emmanuelle Devos).
The detached narration and fragmented narrative, going back and forth in time,
work to expose a dynamic of escalating violence as Jean-Marc fails to sustain his
fictional persona in the eyes of his family, friends, and mistress. He thus chooses
to eliminate them rather than to be judged by them. In contrast to the rebellious,
childlike representation of the unemployed victim-hero in L’Emploi du temps,
L’Adversaire portrays its protagonist as a depressed man who turns into a vampiric
presence/absence (conveyed by Daniel Auteuil’s hermetic or masked face as well
as the numerous shots from behind) when his narcissistic construction is at risk.

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Figure 5. Christine Faure (Géraldine Pailhas) and son Vincent (Martin

Jobert)—innocent victims of the narcissistic father in L’Adversaire (The
Adversary, Nicole Garcia, Bac Films, 2002).

During a confrontation with his father-in-law, who wants to withdraw the money
he has entrusted to Jean-Marc, the male protagonist is represented as a restless
shadow on the wall who disorientates the old man, causing him to fall to his death.
On another occasion, Jean-Marc points himself out in a picture of graduate medi-
cal students, yet no one else is able to see or identify him.
If L’Emploi du temps suggests that society, and the bourgeois family in par-
ticular, are to blame for the alienation of the middle-class male, L’Adversaire
foregrounds the pathological behavior of the male protagonist as his carefully con-
structed persona disintegrates in the eyes of the other. From the outset, the om-
niscient narration sets up a dramatic contrast between Jean-Marc’s deception and
the victims’ trust. The film cuts between scenes of Jean-Marc’s mother (who
proudly indicates the conference locations on a map) and Christine (Geraldine
Pailhas), preparing Jean-Marc’s suitcase while he spends his time driving around
and watching television in hotel rooms. On the brink of being found out, we wit-
ness Jean-Marc buying tear gas, a gun, and a silencer, which he has wrapped up as
a Christmas present. When Christine discovers inconsistencies in his stories and
confronts him with her doubts and fears, Jean-Marc avoids her questions, puts her
to bed, and bludgeons her to death with a freshly bought rolling pin. The morning
after, he cleans the weapon, lures the children upstairs one by one, pretends to
take their temperature, and shoots them from behind. Driving to a nearby town,
Jean-Marc murders his parents in the house where he was raised.

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Throughout the film, Jean-Marc’s mistress is constructed as the only point of

resistance. Marianne, a sensual, independent woman dressed in bright red and
equipped with an inquisitive gaze and a critical mind, is the sole survivor. Further-
more, it is her story that closes the alternation of flashbacks and testimonies, invit-
ing us to share Marianne’s demystifying perspective on the male protagonist.
Despite Jean-Marc’s efforts to seduce his mistress with expensive gifts and lavish
dinners, she never takes him seriously as a “real man” and decides to end their
short-lived affair. In a last effort to impress Marianne, Jean-Marc invites her to a
fictitious dinner with a famous politician. Pretending to be lost in the middle of
the woods, he lures Marianne out of the car, blinds her with tear gas, and attempts
to strangle her. As she fights back and appropriates the gaze, Jean-Marc loosens
his grip and accuses her of having attacked him, thus revealing his paranoid pro-
jections. When Marianne refuses to return his phone calls, Jean-Marc swallows a
fistful of barbiturates and sets fire to the house. The final scene that shows him
being carried out of the house, accompanied by the rescue workers’ exclamation
“he is alive,” not only suggests that Jean-Marc’s half-hearted suicide attempt is yet
another carefully plotted strategy to save his narcissistic ego. It also underscores
the tragic ordeal of his victims.

Conclusion. The films I have discussed echo distinctive approaches to the crisis
in masculinity in their portrayal of white men as pathological, deviant victims of
circumstances beyond their control. Pathological masculinity is most commonly
distributed across different generations of sons and fathers and occasionally, in
The Man Who Wasn’t There, along the lines of sexual orientation and cultural
difference. Even though the middle-aged victim-hero in Monster’s Ball, Panic,
K-Pax, The Man Who Wasn’t There and L’Emploi du temps is a biological or sym-
bolic father, the films imbue their male protagonists with a child-like aura and
emphasize their emotional and economic dependency on (and oppression by) con-
trolling paternal/parental figures who bear the burden of responsibility for the
son’s transgressions, paving the way for his redemption in melodramatic narratives
that cast the damaged white male in the role of savior of children and women
and/or tragically defeated rebel without a cause. Such films demand that we iden-
tify with or feel empathy for the male underdog.
L’Adversaire, however, stands out in its focus on the demystification and dis-
integration of bourgeois masculinity/paternal authority, although Garcia is careful
to counterbalance the murderous father with a benevolent double, personified by
Jean-Marc’s longtime friend Luc, a “real” doctor and responsible family man. By
insisting on realistic motivation and privileging a detached perspective associated
with the sole female survivor, Garcia exposes the violent and destructive mecha-
nisms of male narcissism that are elided and suppressed in the critical and cine-
matic discourse of white male victimization.
What all these film share is the articulation of male alienation through repre-
sentations of space. The white male’s isolation finds expression in the visual motif

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of entrapment, associated with the domestic sphere and the workplace, whereas
natural landscapes and public spaces figure as a safe haven, a space of retreat that
mirrors the inner void of these bodies adrift, suspended in time and space.

Notes
1. James Leggott, “Like Father? Failing Parents and Angelic Children in Contemporary
British Social Realist Cinema,” in The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European
and Hollywood Cinema, ed. Phil Powrie, Ann Davies, and Bruce Babington (London
and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 163–73.
2. Žižek teases out the similarities between the obscene abusive father in Thomas
Vinterberg’s Festen (Celebration, Denmark, 1998) and the maternal protective father
in Roberto Benigni’s La Vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, Italy, 1997). See Slavoj Žižek,
“Fathers, Fathers Everywhere,” in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David
Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle, WA: The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Hu-
manities, 2000), 28 – 31.
3. Emma Wilson, “Lost Boys: Trauma, Masculinity and the Missing Child Film,” in
Powrie, Davies, and Babington, The Trouble with Men, 155 – 62. See also Emma
Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003).
4. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, “Too Close for Comfort: American Beauty and the Incest
Motif,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 69–93.
5. I borrow the term “victim-hero” from Sally Robinson. She notes that the post-sixties
era is marked by a new white and male investment in the “victim-function” testifying to
a desire on the part of those whose social and political dominance has positioned them
as victimizers, to cash in on the symbolic value of victimization. See Sally Robinson,
Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
6. Jean-Claude Romand’s case is the focus of French author Emmanuel Carrère’s semi-
journalistic account of Romand’s life and trial. See Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary:
A True Story of a Monstrous Deception (New York: Picador, 2001).
7. Robinson, Marked Men.
8. Susan Jeffords, “The Big Switch: Hollywood Masculinity in the Nineties,” in Film The-
ory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 196 – 208.
9. Phil Powrie, Bruce Babington, and Ann Davies, “Turning the Male Inside Out,” in
Powrie, Davies, and Babington, The Trouble with Men, 12.
10. Mia Mask, “Monster’s Ball,” Film Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 52.
11. Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’
Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 99.
12. Director Henry Bromell states: “What I wanted to do was to tell the story about a guy
who is now in his 40s but is basically 8 years old inside” In the same interview, Bromell
describes William Macy, who plays Alex, as “having a clown’s face which is one reason
I thought he’d be perfect for the role … you can see the helplessness of his character
in his eyes.” Michael Sragow, “Directors from B to Z,” http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/
col/srag/2001/01/18/bromell_zemeckis.
13. Ann Kaplan argues that the successful role of analysand is inherently a “feminized”
one. E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 106.
14. Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge,
1991), 148.
15. Birdy, played by a very young Scarlett Johansson, is the prototypical (motherless)
nymphet, the seductive daughter who combines girlishness with sexuality. Her

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duplicity and sexual forwardness elicits sympathy for Ed, the symbolic father who is
duped once again. Even though the (displaced) father-daughter incest theme is not
structural in Panic and The Man Who Wasn’t There, young sexualized and subordi-
nated female characters also perform the narrative function of enabling the white
middle-aged male to redeem himself as “the good father.” Kathleen Rowe Karlyn,
“Too Close for Comfort: American Beauty and the Incest Motif,” Cinema Journal 44,
no. 1 (Fall 2004): 69 – 93.
16. Ruby Rich, “Dumb Lugs and Femmes Fatales,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 11 (1995): 10.
17. As Philip Kemp remarks in a review of The Man Who Wasn’t There: “The unex-
pected factor is that Ed, latest in the brothers’ gallery of smalltime losers is treated
with compassion — not perhaps the first quality one would associate with a Coens
movie. This makes The Man, paradoxically, at once their warmest and their darkest film
so far.” Philip Kemp, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” Sight and Sound 11, no. 11
(2001): 51.
18. Cantet, cited in Ginette Vincendeau, “White Collar Blues,” Sight and Sound 12, no. 4
(2002): 32.
19. Will Higbee, “Elle est où, ta place? The Social-Realist Melodramas of Laurent Cantet:
‘Ressources humaines’ (2000) and ‘Emploi du temps’ (2001),” French Cultural Stud-
ies 15, no. 3 (2004): 242.
20. Adam Knee, “The Dialectic of Female Power and Male Hysteria in Play Misty For
Me,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven
Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 87–102.
21. Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Knopf,
1994), 8.
22. Ruth P. Rubinstein, Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture (Boul-
der, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 58.
23. Christine Gledhill and Pat Kirkham, two contributors to Kirkham and Thumim’s 1995
anthology, pointed out that the damage done to men on screen made those men more
accessible to female spectators. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, eds., Me Jane: Mas-
culinity, Movies and Women (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995).
24. Emmanuel Carrère, L’Adversaire (Paris: P.O.L. éditeur, 2000), 36.
25. Gaby Wood, “Empathy with the devil,” Guardian Unlimited, January 14, 2001, 1–4.
26. Béatrice Schaad, “Jean-Claude Roman: 18 ans de mensonges,” L’Hebdo, January 6,
2000, 3.
27. Geneviève Sellier identifies a dichotomy in French women’s films in the 1990s be-
tween the women filmmakers who are driven by a kind of radicalism and rebellion
against the patriarchal order, and those who aim toward consensus. Nicole Garcia be-
longs in the latter category, which could explain the lukewarm reception of L’Adver-
saire in France. See Geneviève Sellier, “French Women Making Films in the 1990s,”
in Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France
1981– 2001, ed. Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 213 – 24.

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