Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV: Representations of Masculinity and Femininity at the End of the World

233 Pages·2019·2.87 MB·English

by  Eve Bennett

Gender in Post-9/11 American
Apocalyptic TV
ii
Gender in Post-9/11 American
Apocalyptic TV
Representations of Masculinity
and Femininity at the End of the World
Eve Bennett
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Copyright © Eve Bennett, 2019
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Heroic Masculinity and Its Pitfalls 11
2 The Prince Hal Narrative 55
3 Patriarchal Conspiracies and Female Victims 101
4 Twenty-First-Century Female Weapons 139
Conclusion 181
References 191
Filmography 211
Teleography 214
Index 217
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the
research that eventually developed into this book. I also owe my sincere
gratitude to many excellent people for their help with it: Stacey Abbott and Vicky
Ball encouraged me to undertake the book in the first place, Ian Hunter and
Helen Wood advised on an earlier version and Johnny Walker recommended
the incomparable Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury, who has been incredibly patient
with a first-time author, as have Susan Krogulski and Erin Duffy.
The following people were fountains of knowledge in various areas: Suzy
Bird on Supernatural, Aimée Forsyth on Fringe, Erin Giannini on Dollhouse and
iZombie, Katy O’Neill on The Walking Dead, Neon Kelly on videogames and Pete
Falconer on Westerns. James MacDowell and Stacey Abbott gave helpful feedback
on Chapter 1, as did Rhonda Wilcox, Lorna Jowett and an anonymous reviewer
on Chapters 2 and 3. Bronwen Calvert is a superstar for reading the whole thing
through with great care and providing some excellent final suggestions. Darren
Meale was my source of free legal and IP advice, and Sue Bennett was on hand
throughout, improving my grammar and elegance of expression as always. Ian
Sawyer calmed me down whenever I panicked and let me talk through points I was
stuck on with him.
Andrea Glanz at AMC kindly gave me permission to use promotional images
from The Walking Dead, Jason Kauzlarich and Dan Radcliffe let me use their
brilliant artwork and there wouldn’t be a single screengrab inside the book
without the help of Chris Finnamore, IT advisor and lender of equipment
extraordinaire! Shout-out also to all those who helped me track down hard-
to-come-by books and articles, such as Johnny Walker, Bronwen Calvert, Kate
Cooper and Christoph Wagner.
Finally, huge thanks to Douglas Lowndes, Paul Chavard and all my friends
and colleagues for their support and cheerleading.
Introduction
Apocalyptic television and the post-9/11
gender backlash
A major explosion hits the middle of an American city. Afterwards, a survivor,
a white man in a suit (Jack Coleman), wakes up amid the rubble and wanders
around dazedly. As he does so, we hear snatches of radio or television broadcasts
commenting on the incident, most recommending violent retaliation against
the perpetrators: ‘We have got to go and attack the enemy’, ‘tyrant and terrorist
with strength not weakness’, ‘A serious threat to our way of life’, ‘We will hunt
down and punish those responsible’, ‘Kill them, kill them all’ (‘Brave New World’,
1.1). Later, a video appears in which the apparent leader of a group of ‘terrorists’,
as the media calls them, a non-Western man (Sendhil Ramamurthy), claims
responsibility for the attack, which he says was a suicide bombing carried out by
his ‘brothers and sisters’ (‘June 13th–Part Two’, 1.8).
The scenes I have just described are from Heroes Reborn, a 2015 miniseries
sequel to the NBC series Heroes (2006–2010). Although I began the research for
this book in 2011, and it focuses on programmes that debuted between 2002
and 2012 – including the original Heroes – Heroes Reborn shows that American
television has not yet entirely got over its preoccupation with the horrific events
of September the 11th, 2001. This preoccupation forms part of a wider interest
in catastrophic destruction or apocalypse that has been manifest since roughly
the turn of the millennium. While world destruction and the annihilation of
the human race have habitually existed as threats in the science fiction and
fantasy genres, on television as well as in other media, in the past they typically
remained as such: threats, posed by villains whose plans would be thwarted by
the heroes at the end of the episode or season. In the early twenty-first-century
wave of American apocalyptic programmes, however, the threat is far more
concrete. In many the apocalypse actually occurs, often in the first episode
2 Gender in Post-9/11 American Apocalyptic TV
(e.g. Battlestar Galactica (BSG; 2003–2009), Jericho (2006–2008), The Walking
Dead (TWD; 2010–)) or even before the show begins (Firefly (2002–2003),
Falling Skies (2011–2015)), though, of course, it does not entirely wipe out the
human race or there would be no show; some survivors remain to battle it out in
the harsh new world. In others the apocalypse remains a threat for most or all of
the show’s duration, but one that is graphically illustrated through devices such
as time travel and/or parallel universes (Heroes, Terminator: The Sarah Connor
Chronicles (T:TSCC; 2008–2009), Fringe (2008–2013)); flashforwards (Dollhouse
(2009–2010)); characters’ dreams or visions (Miracles (2003), Carnivàle (2003–
2005), The 4400 (2004–2007), Point Pleasant (2005–2006), Threshold (2005–
2006), The Event (2010–2011)); or smaller-scale disasters that seem to prefigure
a larger one (Lost (2004–2010), Surface (2005–2006), Invasion (2005–2006),
FlashForward (2009–2010)).
My interest in this ongoing cycle of American apocalyptic television was
the primary motivation for starting work on this project, but a second very
important inspiration was Susan Faludi’s book The Terror Dream: What 9/11
Revealed about America (2008). In it, Faludi provides a detailed picture of the way
that the American media’s representation of gender shifted after 9/11. Largely
concentrating on print journalism, with some reference to television news and
talk shows, she analyses the way that many media commentators’ portrayal of
gender roles abruptly became more essentialist and traditional. This, she argues,
was true of the depiction of the people connected to the tragedies in a concrete
way, for instance, the group of men who supposedly prevented the hijacked
United Airlines Flight 93 from reaching its target and also of the portrayal
of President George W. Bush and his male colleagues. All of these men were
repeatedly compared to ‘superheroes’ (Faludi 2008, p. 47) and ‘frontiersm[e]n ’
(ibid., p. 148) in both media and government rhetoric. Women affected by
the attacks, on the other hand, were portrayed ‘largely as vulnerable maidens’,
despite the fact ‘that the fatalities [on 9/11] were three-to-one male-to-female’
(ibid., p. 5), while lifestyle columnists circulated rumours (never substantiated
with any hard data) that American women in general had suddenly begun
prioritizing marriage and motherhood over their careers (ibid., pp. 116–145).
Faludi’s explanation for this phenomenon is that at times of crisis, nations tend
to ‘recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of [their] character as
a society and of the mythologies [they] live by’ (2008, p. 13). Hence, she reads
the regressive gender representations spread by the American media in the
wake of 9/11 as the ‘involuntar[y] revisiting’ (ibid.) of a set of myths created to
Introduction 3
quell a much earlier American cultural trauma: the capture of hundreds of New
England settlers by Native American tribes during the late seventeenth and most
of the eighteenth centuries. This resulted in a pervasive sense of shame that ‘was
largely a male burden … in which the captivity of women and children served
to spotlight male protective failures’ (ibid., p. 211). The ultimate consequence
of this trauma, Faludi argues, was that ‘[t]he specter of the white maiden taken
against her will by dark “savages” became [the nation’s] recurring trope … That
maiden’s rescue, fantasized or real, became [the] reigning redemption tale’
(ibid., p. 212), reappearing throughout history every time social or political
events created feelings of shame or insufficiency on the part of American men.
The 9/11 attacks, Faludi contends, were just such events, disconcertingly
similar on a basic level to the ‘foundational drama’ of the Indian wars
(‘murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christians’) (2008,
p. 208) and raising similar ‘apprehensions that America was lacking in
masculine fortitude’ (ibid., p. 8). Thus, in the aftermath, the media took upon
itself the task of ‘restor[ing] the image of an America invulnerable to attack …
[by] conjur[ing] a dreamscape populated by John Wayne protectors guarding
little captive Debbies [the niece Wayne’s character rescues in the film The
Searchers (John Ford, 1956)], a reverie in which women were needed to play the
helpless and dependent foil’ (ibid., p. 115). Those women who did not fit this
role, particularly feminists, were widely vilified by the right-wing press and even
blamed for having ‘“feminized” [America’s] men and, in so doing, left the nation
vulnerable to attack’ (ibid., p. 23).
Faludi states that ‘the cultural troika of media, entertainment, and advertising’
was responsible for ‘declar[ing] the post-9/11 age an era of neofifties nuclear
family “togetherness”, redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold
Warrior manhood’ (2008, pp. 3–4). Yet, despite this claim, The Terror Dream’s
focus is very much on the first element in the ‘troika’; as mentioned above, the
vast majority of Faludi’s case studies come from newspapers, magazines and TV
news programmes or talk shows. Her discussion of any kind of ‘entertainment’
is brief, her conclusions about it summarized in her comment that ‘[t]he post-
9/11 fixation on male protectors at work and mommies at home maintained
in pop culture’ (ibid., p. 139). About fiction TV, she merely remarks on some
broad trends in programming, such as the appearance of several series that
‘featured a return to nesting’ (ibid., p. 138) and of numerous ‘tough guy shows’
(2008, p. 139), including Lost, 24 (2001–2010), and various ‘all-male protection
fantasies with firemen or cops’ (ibid., p. 138).