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Abstract
Melancholy Men in American Film examines the repetition of a melancholic masculinity across American cinema acting as an anxious social metaphor attesting to a cultural concern with the damaged masculine. While iterated differently depending on genre, these characterizations embody struggles over historically contextualized notions of American masculinity. I argue that the re-iteration of melancholic masculinity is a re-enacting of masculinity as a drama of failed re-unification through which we glimpse elucidations for why wholeness is so elusive. My goal is not to establish the parameters of a new genre but rather to examine how character, genre, and context can be combined in works of corporeal imagination that come to embody cultural discourses, specifically one centered on struggling with the high wire balance between trying to explain and tacitly acknowledging the incompleteness of masculinity. This project challenges the view that masculinity in American films is a mere reinforcement of trajectories of power and thereby works to complicate American cultural notions of the stability of gender performance.
