3 In an essay I published on Clint Eastwood as director/star/persona, I argue that he is a quintessential contemporary melancholic hero. This ambivalence often appears to take the form of self-denigration, but in the course of the Freud essay, as Schiesari notes, the melancholic becomes something of a heroic figure insofar as he, while appearing to castigate himself, actually speaks unwelcome truths about humanity at large. To give an all too brief and necessarily oversimplified account of melancholia: in “Mourning and Melancholia,” a brief essay which has been hugely influential in contemporary theory, Sigmund Freud discusses the melancholic person as one who has internalized the lost object (a person or an ideal) and rather than mourning the object and letting it go incorporates it and treats it in an ambivalent fashion. Juliana Schiesari’s brilliant book, The Gendering of Melancholia, which has had a major impact on my thinking, argues that male losses have historically been culturally valued and assigned to the glorified category of melancholia while the grief experienced by women over their losses is devalued and labeled as mere “depression.” 2 The losses of white women and also, one must add, of people of color are moreover frequently appropriated by men to further aggrandize themselves as melancholy figures whose suffering on behalf of “Others” is culturally accredited. The suffering of men in film is seldom acknowledged as “sentimental” (or if it is, the term is heavily qualified), but rather passes for something more grandiose. Thus I believe it is time to address films that make men weep, or perhaps more accurately, make us weep for them. Even more to my point, however, is the fact that male popular culture also frequently indulges in sentimentalized suffering, even if it accompanies (nonpolitical) action.
To take what is perhaps the most prominent example of a work that criticizes films and novels aimed at a large female audience, Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint condemns much female popular culture because it elevates suffering over the “will to socially transformative action.” 1 Certainly, however, it is the case that “male” popular culture, while it may endorse action, hardly for the most part endorses political, or “socially transformative,” action. I have become weary of reading postfeminist denunciations of the “cult of sentimentality,” a phrase typically used to designate white middle-class women’s sphere. Historical Omission and Psychic Repression in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nightsįor some time now, I have been interested in pursuing the phenomenon I call “male weepies.” “Weepies” has long been the term used to denigrate women’s films, particularly the melodramas that have been aimed largely at a female audience and that deal with women’s losses and grief/grievances.