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The turn of this century, much like the last, engendered a great deal of anxiety about white masculinity. Films such as The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999), Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), and Gladiator (Scott, 2000) responded by introducing a "new man"-a hero with a hard body that would liberate the world from its decadent shackles.1 Preferring to remain anonymous or disguise his true identity with another name, like Tyler Durden, Gladiator, or "The One," his anonymity makes it possible for him to achieve a legendary, even mythical, status, and act as the focal point for a nation of ordinary men desiring the freedom that submission brings. As such he recalls the heroes of Greco-Roman epics and adventure films of the past, especially the 1960s and 1980s. But even more so he is reminiscent of another centennial "new man"-the "blood and soil" man of fascist discourse and fantasy.2 The ideal man envisioned by fascist desire, while representing itself as a revolutionary new masculinity, was instead reactionary toward the potential of modernist multiplicity of discourse, and promoted the male mind as rigidly singular and non-dialectical, a fortress complete unto itself.
In this essay I will examine the representation of a radical "new" masculinity in the films Gladiator ana Fight Club within the framework of socio-political discourse on fascism, particularly Hider's Mein Kampfand Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fasdsm. These films present images of permeable suffering and injured male bodies while embedding those images widiin narratives that ultimately guarantee the impermeability of the psychic state of masculinity; they also tend to re-inscribe fascist discourse while self-consciously referencing it as undesirable. Fight Club, with its literal and metaphorical "two heads in one," presents a mixture of Caligari and Hider with its psychological blundering and méconnaissance of its origins.3 Gladiator, on the other hand, attempts to counter fascist political fantasies by means of a "natural" man who shuns power, while simultaneously setting up this hero to disenfranchise the masses he is theoretically representing. Both films exhibit a "new" masculinity that is resiliently reactionary, attempts at masculine dialogue, within the self or between men, are answered by a violence that conflates enslavement and liberation, and persuades only by silencing. Both films also imitate the fascist tactic of replacing political discussion...