Performing Self-Reliance: Repetition, Masculinity, and Historical Change in American Cinema

• Zhanming Hu

  Author

This essay examines how masculinity is represented and redefined across different historical moments in American cinema. Focusing on the recurring pattern of male self-reliance, it asks how films construct masculine identity through narrative structure, character behavior, and repeated acts of endurance, control, and independent action. Using qualitative textual analysis, the essay compares four films—The Searchers (1956), Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Fight Club (1999)—to trace changes from the relatively stable masculine authority of early cinema, to the feminist crisis-driven masculinity of the 1970s, and to the more self-conscious and diversification forms of contemporary film. The essay argues that masculinity in cinema is not a fixed identity, but a changing cultural idea shaped by different historical conditions, social concerns, and film traditions. Rather than treating film as the direct cause of social change, the essay shows that cinema functions as a cultural space in which masculinity is repeatedly presented, questioned, and reshaped. In this way, repeated patterns of male self-reliance show how outdated masculine ideals continue to exist even as their meanings change over time.

• JEBH000011.pdf