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 and Fight Club within the framework of socio-political discourse on fascism, particularly Hitler's Mein Kampf and Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fascism. These films present images of permeable suffering and injured male bodies while embedding those images within 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 Hitler with its psychological blundering and meconnaissance 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 and critique with the spectacle of a hysterical mass unity, aestheticizing violence as well as politics. (4)

Fascist movements have never really disappeared. They are characterized by what Roger Griffin calls a "palingenetic ultra-nationalism," which is to say the rebirth of a "true" national identity based on biological superiority, and located in a mythological past. (5) The nation is conceived of as vital, virile, aggressive, and militaristic, forcibly replacing a weak, passive, ineffectual, and decadent liberal government. Its structure requires a charismatic leader who epitomizes the "new man" and virility of the nation, and who controls the country as the head of state, church, military, and family (6) The hierarchical structure also includes a small elite who help maintain the non-representative populism; the people...