1 - Armchair Thrills and the New Adventurer
The representation of male activity enjoys countless permutations.
Fiction and nonfiction accounts of male activity and heroism
appear throughout the history of recorded narrative itself, from The
Epic of Gilgamesh to NFL post-game summaries, from The Iliad to Soldier
of Fortune, and from Beowulf to video games such as Halo or Doom.
Representations of male agency signify differently according to the writers’
or characters’ proximity to the situations depicted and the historical
circumstances in which those representations appear. Immediacy aids in
engagement, as do particular ideological affiliations. Nationalist sentiment,
religious or philosophical beliefs surrounding death and warfare,
and attitudes toward real, social violence all help dictate responses to
narratives of violent action. In whatever form, and however received,
narratives of dangerous male activity carry indelible popular appeal.
This chapter analyzes a constellation of popular nonfiction texts of the
late 1990s: Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin
Air, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. The first deals with a fatal
commercial-fishing voyage, the second with a fatal mountain-climbing
expedition, the third with a fatal U.S. military battle. I find Bowden’s book
the most compelling in its thriller-narrative form, and Krakauer’s most
absorbing in its appeals to readers. Junger’s book represents part of the
same phenomenon of massively popular nonfiction adventure texts, though
the book itself diverges from its cohorts because its most gripping events
lack eyewitnesses. Each of these texts merges popular-narrative form with
conspicuous realist appeals. This combination lends renewed credence to the
texts’ constructions of active masculinity, revitalizing venerable popularfiction
models with claims to authenticity. At the same time, the texts explicitly
recount catastrophic male ventures, favorably complicating narratives of
male heroism as they search for meaning amid fatality.
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The 2001 film adaptation of Black Hawk Down robustly manages the
terrain between realism and artifice. Visually, it adopts the long-familiar
shorthand for cinematic realism: location shooting, a handheld and highly
mobile camera, natural lighting, obstructed views, and limited establishing
shots. (Later non–reality-based thrillers such as Behind Enemy Lines
[2001] and The Bourne Supremacy [2004] use a similar visual vocabulary.)
Black Hawk Down also relies on mediated perceptions of the real. The
film’s cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, understands realism as an effect
achieved through aesthetic manipulation. Remarking on the film’s color
palette, Idziak observes, “The colors also lent authenticity to the visuals.
On the night scenes, for example, the decision to use green tones was made
because [. . .] ‘TV nights,’ like those presented on CNN, are almost always
greenish, so we automatically associate that color with authentic events.”1
The film’s visible distortions of color thus approximate the highly mediated
look of cable-news programming. A recognizable lens-filter effect
signals the real. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the familiar connotations of “TV
reality” resonate more strongly than unmediated historical reality, which
lacks a distinctive visual signature. In its reenactment of a 1993 military
operation, the film prefers the visual language of another medium as a
yardstick for realism. Similarly, Bowden’s book owes more to the structures
of popular fiction than to works of military history. Such mediated views
reshape popular definitions of heroic masculinity: constructions of male
agency once relegated to fantasy spaces find acceptance in nonfiction
realms.
The texts analyzed in this and later chapters emerge from a global
culture of postindustrial capitalism. This system does not require men to
perform spectacular feats of heroic activity on a regular basis, if ever.
Within this culture, accounts of survival amid extreme danger affirm the
possibility of unmediated experiences of physical punishment and triumph.
This affirmation may contribute more to armchair daydreams than
to active, physical pursuits, though. The deployment of popular fiction’s
generic conventions in 1990s works of popular nonfiction affirms these
armchair daydreams as a legitimate substitute for real experience. The
reconfiguration of venerable constructions of active masculinity also
impedes a complex view of historical reality. As in many other popular
discourses, individual men’s exploits overshadow geopolitics and history.
Many of the world’s cultures define masculinity principally through
agency and activity in the public world, through the physical trials of
sports and labor as well as through participation and financial risk-taking
in arenas such as business and government. When rising standards of living
permit large numbers of people to enjoy leisure time or freedom from
regular manual labor, imperatives arise to encourage activity away
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from population centers. Historically, such activities—including military
ventures, natural-resource exploitation, or simply exploration to satisfy
scientific or aesthetic curiosity—have been undertaken principally by
men. This activity, necessitating travel to unfamiliar, avowedly unpopulated
regions of the planet, can inspire a fanatical excitement, as occurred,
for example, in England in the late nineteenth century. Martin Green
argues that it was during this period, “the age of conscious imperialism,”
that “the cult of adventure was most developed.”2 In the literature of this
period, Green locates adventure as the “sponsor” of two stages of male
experience: on the one hand, boyhood and play; and on the other, manhood,
citizenship, and violence (31). The fundamental incompatibility of
these categories—particularly the disparities among citizenship, play, and
violence—suggests that adventure offers a highly unstable foundation for
male identity. Green acknowledges this instability, and notes as well the
global impact of European and American zeal for adventure: “Historically,
adventure has been a white idea as well as a male idea; it has been the
means by which the people of one particular culture have taken possession
of most of the globe” (226). In this chapter, I call attention to more localized
frameworks for adventure, works of popular U.S. nonfiction that construct
a conventional space for male fantasies of autonomous activity.
Published more than a century after the official closing of the American
frontier—a concept that Green notes is, like empire, closely associated with
adventure—these works champion anew the risks and rewards of male
activity outside the civilized world.
A case from England in the twilight of the age of empire will help illustrate
the preoccupations of adventure literature, preoccupations that
inform the texts I refer to in this chapter. Britain’s imperial expansion in
the late 1800s provided the content for countless books of male adventures
in faraway locales, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881)
and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) to Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim (1901). By the turn of the century, conventions of imperial-adventure
literature had become sufficiently ingrained that they could be penetratingly
critiqued, as in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), or cleverly
parodied, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). I invoke
Conan Doyle’s novel because it clearly articulates a number of the genre’s
key themes and appeals, specifically those surrounding gender construction
and male aspirational fantasies. These appeals also emerge in a range
of adventure texts that became bestsellers in the United States in the
late 1990s.
Like the U.S. texts that appear more than eighty years after it, The Lost
World represents remote adventure as a means to negotiate the social
pressures of twentieth-century Western civilization. The novel invokes
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anxieties about relationships with women, acknowledging potential
threats to patriarchal privilege from women. It also articulates fears of purposelessness
and softness in the capitalist world. Making an appeal particularly
to men of letters, Conan Doyle’s novel also reconciles the sedentary,
writing life with the desire for experience and adventure. The Lost World is
narrated by an initially timid journalist, Ned Malone, a man motivated to
join a presumably hopeless expedition to South America because of his
sweetheart’s desire for “a man who could do, who could act, who would
look Death in the face and have no fear of him—a man of great deeds and
strange experiences” (6). Made aware of his own directionlessness, his
virtual impotence, Ned implores his editor for a new assignment:
“What sort of a meesion (sic) had you in mind, Mr. Malone?”
“Well, sir, anything that had adventure and danger in it. I would really do
my very best. The more difficult it was the better it would suit me.”
“You seem very anxious to lose your life.”
“To justify my life, sir.” (9)
Ned thus implies that adventure, with its inherent dangers, guarantees
self-renewal and stabilizes an unmoored male identity. (As in most adventure
texts, women are virtually absent from the work, so the problem of
aimlessness, and the corresponding need for self-justification, becomes
entirely a male pathology.) One of Ned’s companions on the expedition,
the aristocratic hunter Lord Roxton, identifies the attendant comforts of
civilized society as a related source of Ned’s malaise: “ ‘a sportin’ risk,
young fellah, that’s the salt of existence. Then it’s worth livin’ again. We’re
all gettin’ a deal too soft and dull and comfy’ ” (53). Roxton, Ned’s idol,
staves off this softness not only through big-game hunting, but by keeping
exclusively male company. At the novel’s end, upon the completion of
many dangerous adventures and after the surprise dissolution of Ned’s
marriage prospects, he and Roxton set off for another adventure as a duo.
In the novel’s somewhat parodic logic, exemplary masculinity is forged in
the company of men, and its enemies are women and civilization (or
women as the embodiment of civilization). Wealth and high social standing
do not diminish this masculinity, but instead, for Lord Roxton, make
possible the pursuit of virile adventure.
Conan Doyle’s narrator combines intellectual exercise with physical
danger. His adventure-nonfiction descendants rely on similar appeals,
implicitly venerating their own acts of bearing witness to or transcribing
other men’s endangerment. In The Lost World, Ned relays his journal
entries from the field back to his London newspaper. As he and his fellow
adventurers become embroiled in a war between two remote tribes, he
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realizes a recurring dream.“Often in my dreams have I thought I might live
to be a war correspondent,” he muses just before introducing “my first
dispatch from the field of battle” (158). The transformation of a journalistic
assignment into a heroic enterprise animates many current writers of
adventure nonfiction. When such a transformation is not possible, writers
often substitute speculation about late men’s perceptions of danger to
construct a surrogate and posthumous heroism. (The Perfect Storm,
the extreme-weather account of a fishing-boat crew’s drowning deaths
investigated and written long after its fatal events occur, uses this second
strategy.)
The Men of Adventure Nonfiction
Many contemporary nonfiction accounts of heroic adventure represent
male activity in ways parallel to the popular fiction and film that are this
work’s larger focus. Both groups of texts offer physical activity as the chief
determinant of male identity, with men’s psychological efforts principally
mobilizing that physical activity. The textual forms differ principally in
their claims to realism. Popular nonfiction narratives construct the real
in ways indebted both to realist literature and to documentary media. Bill
Nichols notes two ways of understanding documentary cinema: as
“evidence from the world,” and as “discourse about the world.”3 Nonfiction
adventure texts shape historical events into coherent, linear narratives.
They legitimate their discourse with evidence, just as they transmit their
evidence as discourse. Their authors necessarily intervene into the historical
world, through interviews with people involved in the events the books
recount and, sometimes, through participation in the events themselves.
(Although the first-person account usually occupies a separate space of
testimonial literature, Into Thin Air features the author’s efforts simultaneous
with those of other mountain climbers.) Like American literary realism
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these texts rely on
observational detail to fortify their claims to objectivity and the production
of comprehensive knowledge. In addition, realist texts tend to define
the real according to an inverted class hierarchy. The working class, transparent
and unself-conscious in its behaviors, always proximal to physical
labor and suffering, rests atop this hierarchy. The middle and upper
classes, in comparison, softened by consumerism and schooled in artifice,
claim only contingent and mediated access to the real. Looking beyond
these problematic templates, critical discourse understands realism in
shifting political terms, as, in Amy Kaplan’s words, “progressive force
exposing social conditions” or “conservative force complicit with capitalist
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relations.”4 Nonfiction adventure texts encompass these conflicting
categories. Simply by foregrounding adventure itself—trials of the body
and mind in nature or in hostile human environments—the genre privileges
a physicality linked to the working class. Class boundaries are patrolled
as well. The Perfect Storm and Black Hawk Down, for example, recount
catastrophes that beset small groups of men in dangerous, working-class
occupations (commercial fishing and soldiering, respectively).Into Thin Air,
meanwhile, emphasizes the lethal bad judgment of prosperous travelers
who take on the physical challenge of an Everest climb with insufficient
training. In varying ways too, these texts expose the life-threatening
dangers faced by men of the working class, while also presenting realms
of adventure as locations for (unremunerative) male accomplishment.
Consistent rhetorical and evidentiary engagement with historical reality
contributes to the multiple claims of these texts.
By adopting the style and structure of popular fiction, works of print
nonfiction invoke historical reality differently than many previous journalistic
accounts. The new model arranges real events according to an
overriding narrative logic, with abbreviated chronologies and conventional
character typage. Authors such as Krakauer and Bowden move popular
nonfiction, a de facto realist mode, toward the category of adventure
literature once regarded as the antithesis of serious, realist genres. As Green
discusses at length in The Adventurous Male, English literature through the
early twentieth century sought to distance itself from the apparent sensationalism
and frivolity of adventure as a subject. The realist English novel,
argues Green, emphasized moral responsibility and the truth of adult relations,
constraints of emphasis that adventure-minded writers such as
Stevenson and Kipling could not abide.5 (In the United States, novelists
from James Fenimore Cooper to Jack London to Ernest Hemingway
unashamedly foregrounded adventure, contributing to their critical subordination
well into the second half of the twentieth century.) In terms of
realism, contemporary adventure nonfiction shows allegiance to a relatively
narrow set of facts: verifiable locations, acts of nature, and people’s visible
responses to life-threatening situations. Writers in the genre tend to offer
only tentative moral or political hypotheses. Books such as Into Thin Air
and The Perfect Storm, despite their often harrowing subject matter, partly
liberate readers from rigorous moral investigation, reclaiming nonfiction
for popular rather than elite readerships.
The 1990s rise of nonfiction-adventure literature also corresponds to a
resurgence of realist appeals in popular film in the broader U.S. culture.
Particularly in the wake of blockbusters such as Titanic (1997)—based on
a real event, let us not forget—Hollywood studios have clung to the rhetoric
of realism to promote each new spectacular event film, however laden
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with computer-generated effects.6 In the current privileging of realism,
textual producers and consumers bring renewed expectations of emotional,
psychological, or social resonance to popular texts. Realist appeals
are appeals for engagement, not promises of escape. Meanwhile, popular
texts repeatedly eschew visual signifiers of reality. Nonfiction adventure
texts define the real more often through historical or technical passages
than through imagery, which they use instead for creative effect. In popular
film, the reduced presence of human actors, real locations, and actual
sets makes realism a weak evaluative criterion. Nevertheless, fidelity to
or successful manipulation of the world we inhabit guides readers’ and
viewers’ reception of popular texts.
Realist texts have long served men’s interests rather than women’s.
Presently, because most work and leisure arenas for activity and violence in
the United States are open to women as well as men, these forums or pursuits
can no longer be defined as the exclusive provenance of men or as the
constituents of masculinity alone. Masculinity is a historically and culturally
shifting category, comprising a set of behaviors, attitudes, and forms of
bodily display deemed as desirable, acceptable, or at least expected in men.
It is also a category in service to a vanished but somehow recognizable
ideal.“Masculinity is a nostalgic formation,” argues Judith Kegan Gardiner,
“always missing, lost, or about to be lost, its ideal form located in a past
that advances with each generation in order to recede just beyond its
grasp.”7 Adventure-nonfiction texts tend to frame their subjects in terms of
men and masculinity, and relatedly, to link contemporary men’s exploits to
venerable historical accounts. The Perfect Storm, Into Thin Air, and Black
Hawk Down all recount events principally involving men, and they all
locate their subjects within historical pantheons of notable male enterprises.
The books thus participate in the privileging of male experience,
though they also raise questions about the practicality of that experience.
Nonfiction narratives of male adventure act as a key site for the circulation
of models of exceptional or heroic masculinity. Historical narratives
of explorers and adventurers—Columbus, Magellan, Lewis and Clark,
Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Edmund Hillary—delineate an overwhelming
male realm of experience, socially and geographically removed from
female lovers, spouses, children, and patrons. Such narratives depend on
activity at a spatial remove from domesticated social groups. In popular
narratives, folk belief, and countless cultural rituals worldwide, manhood’s
parameters are tested and extended in the wilderness. Crucibles staged
outside civilized society typically distinguish the men involved as more fit
to reintegrate into society. The men forged by such experiences are then
esteemed as models for the other members of that society. The strategic
exclusion of women leaves intact the belief that only men are physically
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capable of certain activities, and also preserves the experience of adventure
as a shared, homosocial endeavor. Women’s centrality or equality in adventure
nonfiction would both diminish readers’ perception of the risk and
endurance involved, and would compromise the solidity of the male
relationships depicted.
Adventure narratives themselves contribute to civilizing and gendering
processes. Books represent adventurers’ exploits in cohesive, compact form.
Moreover, the act of reading restages far-flung events in expressly civilized
spaces. However rugged the content of a popular history, more readers
encounter Scott’s Antarctic expedition from the comfort of the home than
from the frigid deck of an icebreaker. Despite such conditions, consumption
of adventure narratives itself plays a role in male identity formation,
with male readers gaining knowledge of active pursuits through the act of
reading. Such textual consumption can fulfill an aspirational function,
stirring readers’ desires to enact similar exploits (as is the case for Conan
Doyle’s Ned Malone). However, most people who read adventure narratives
do not become explorers, big-game hunters, or combat journalists. For
most readers, such texts are surrogates for real experience, supplying
models of both idealized and normative masculinity for readers.
In other forms, the actual, physical experience of adventure can provide
a surrogate for different experiences. Engaging in outdoor recreation
activities, the more rarified the better, can not only elevate participants’
self-worth but also rehabilitate flagging public images, particularly when
those activities are reconstructed as narratives. Men’s outdoor pursuits can
resuscitate a putatively authentic (but temporarily inactive) masculinity,
stripping away the accoutrements of a sedentary corporate and consumer
culture. Corporate executives periodically engage in adventure-based
retreats, often modeled on armed forces basic-training regimens, to hone
vaguely defined leadership skills. Individual physical achievement can
attest to a fitness of character transportable to other arenas. For example,
during Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, one television commercial
highlighted the vice president’s character through images of his 1999
ascent of Washington State’s Mount Rainier. The advertisement’s voiceover
included this assertion: “Strength of character, perseverance, grace
under pressure—these are qualities you look for in a mountaineer; they’re
even better in a president.”8 Here, success in solitary or small-group
endeavors removed from civic life signifies an ability to rise to challenges,
face adversity, and achieve goals, however disparate such acts might be
from the specific technical and physical feat of mountain climbing.
The visual image of success in Gore’s commercial stood in for any substantive
legislative accomplishments. Instead, the commercial asked voters
to transport Gore’s accomplishment from one arena of male endeavor to
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another: from the great outdoors to the far more exclusive sphere of the
U.S. presidency.
Into Thin Air’s Crucibles of Manhood
Outdoor activity’s efficacy as a public relations tool depends upon the
reception of images or narratives of such activity. The most successful
result is the production of a satisfying, vicarious experience for readers or
viewers. As with the Gore campaign commercial, numerous contemporary
nonfiction texts use events occurring in remote locations as signifiers of
bravery and determination. Simply by offering their exceptional images
and events to the public, these texts grant conditional but still vivid access
to situations far removed from everyday experiences. Thus, the texts fulfill
not only their explicit function—to mobilize support for a politician, or to
maintain reader interest—but also substitute for or supplement the physical
and psychological experience of remote adventure. Representatives of
the texts go where most men (and women) lack the resources to tread.
Fiction can just as easily deliver remote destinations and dangerous activity,
but what distinguishes nonfiction is its realist dimension. Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air retraces a set of spring 1996 climbing expeditions on
Mount Everest, including the author’s own, all undone by an ill-timed
blizzard. Peril ensues for all the mountaineers, and the storm leaves nine
people dead. Into Thin Air engages readers not merely because of its exotic
setting and descriptions of physical hardship, but also because of its explicit
claims to realism in a publishing market cluttered with multitudinous
fictional representations of action and adventure. In much of its narrative
structure, Into Thin Air is indistinguishable from a popular novel.
Krakauer’s book lacks the nefarious characters, cloak-and-dagger plots, or
gunplay of a Tom Clancy or Ken Follett novel. However, it shares with such
works a breathless narrative pace, international intrigue and conflict among
a relatively wide cast of characters, and a high body count, which is by turns
horrifying and mesmerizing. Genre fiction provides conventional settings
and events that recur from narrative to narrative, offering pleasure through
familiarity and repetition with slight variations. Adventure nonfiction,
in addition to satisfying generic expectations, delivers the vicarious experience
of lived suffering and exertion. Krakauer recognizes that signifiers of
authenticity and immediacy contribute to this experience. He literally
anchors readers in the text’s present, for example: each of the book’s chapters
begins by noting the location, date, and altitude of the events to follow.
The explicit location of events prevents Krakauer’s narrative from being
dismissed as simply another contribution to the enormous body of
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literature of risky male adventure. Krakauer reconstructs a principally
male experience, and he imprints his book’s besieged masculinities with a
stamp of authenticity. The ascription of realness to perils faced by men
makes abstract anxieties tangible. This sense of omnipresent peril creates
another paradox: if male fulfillment depends upon the risk of death,
then why does Krakauer emerge from his experiences so shaken, so unselfassured?
In some respects, such psychological scars are a component of a
complete, active masculinity. Into Thin Air is, after all, largely a memoir of
the author’s “return from the edge,” and his scars grant him the authority
to deliver his own account without impeachment. (This kind of scarring
also structures the well-received 2004 documentary Touching the Void,
which reenacts a grim two-man expedition in which one climber, in a desperate
act of self-preservation, leaves his partner for dead, though both
ultimately survive after stunningly difficult descents. Their improbable
travails, and the fallout of their literally imperiled male friendship, lend
their testimony immeasurable gravity.)
Masculinity in crisis is masculinity recognized. In part, this is the project
of Faludi’s Stiffed as well—to call attention to deep-seated pain or anxiety
among American men. Public discourse (and legislation) often stands
mute regarding women’s subordination in work relations, access to childcare
and abortion, susceptibility to domestic violence, and other demonstrable
inequities. Conversely, many public forums exist to redress any lack
of recognition of male achievement or pain. While I support Faludi’s position
regarding the difficulties faced by men since World War II, it seems
clear too that these difficulties have been long publicized. They appear in
film noir and the 1950s boardroom dramas that Steven Cohan scrutinizes
in Masked Men, in the Kinsey Report’s disclosures about sexual behavior
(which Cohan also studies), in the stroking of the male ego performed by
publications such as Playboy since the 1950s, and in many other texts, discourses,
and laws up to the present. White, heterosexual men are in little
danger of being forgotten or shortchanged. Still, claims of realism carry
much argumentative force and are repeatedly invoked to privilege already
dominant male perspectives. In another late 1990s example, nonfiction
works such as Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation histories of World War II
veterans appeared at a time when many of them were near the end of their
life expectancy, and when most readers were still further removed from the
experiences of the War. Dozens of polar histories recounting the exploits of
early 1900s military explorers such as Scott and Ernest Shackleton (the latter
of whom also became the centerpiece of a historical cottage industry
including major museum exhibitions, television documentaries, and feature
films) were also published in the late 1990s. These popular texts issue
compensatory appeals to rehabilitate already dominant masculinities.
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Like other nonfiction adventure narratives,Into Thin Air uses a range of
strategies to stake its claim to authenticity. Unlike many journalists and
historians, Krakauer participates in the ill-fated expedition he chronicles,
allowing him to incorporate his own struggle for survival into the larger
narrative of misfortune and loss of life. Because of this, the book alternates
between the modes of investigative journalism and memoir, exhibiting the
sort of deliberate subjectivity popularized in 1960s New Journalism.
In addition to detailing the author’s personal experiences, the work records
interviews with other people involved in or related to the event. In the text,
Krakauer presents the interview material somewhat casually, a conventional
presentation mode in mass-market nonfiction. He supplies direct
quotes even for conversations during which tape recording or note-taking
would have been impossible (e.g., during a blizzard while climbing Mount
Everest), and as with many popular histories, the book includes no footnotes.
Consequently, his work only intermittently meets the evidentiary
burden associated with historical research. To bolster its realist claims,
though, the book routinely departs from its chronological narrative to
present technical information and figures, principally involving weather
patterns. The deployment of an assortment of meteorological statistics
may be insufficient to ground the work in empirical reality, but this
appeal echoes the strategies of popular-fiction genres such as legal and
medical thrillers and war fiction. In each of these genres, digressions into
technical details—about jurisprudence, medical procedures, or military
tactics and weaponry, for example—identify the authors and their works
as dependable sources of information on particular subjects. Krakauer’s
book, in comparison, asserts its realism through an emphasis on location,
noting the specific positions and actions of real people at the onset of a
snowstorm. Krakauer’s spatial emphasis literally situates his subjects, most
still living at the time of the book’s publication. The technique balances the
author’s broader psychological speculations about people’s thoughts and
motives.
Journalism has historically been coded as male discourse. It relies on
empirical evidence and scientific objectivity, not overt empathy and emotion.
Still, a dimension of sensational appeal, linked to growth in women
readerships, has infused journalism since at least the late nineteenth
century in the United States and England.9 So-called yellow journalism is
distinguished by excited, adjective-laden prose, privileging writers’ subjectivity
over impersonal accuracy. Nonetheless, the profession of journalism
historically has been practiced disproportionately by men. While women
account for just over forty percent of journalists in all media (newspapers,
magazines, broadcasting, and other media) in the Americas, they represent
only about four percent of newspaper journalists in the United States.10
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Even the flaunted subjectivity of New Journalism came from a cadre of
almost exclusively male writers who plunged into predominantly male
worlds, including sports, politics, and the acid-test counterculture.11
Into Thin Air similarly depicts a gendered milieu. Men appear as
climbers, guides, equipment bearers, and pilots, while women play marginal
roles as base-camp nurses and other support staff. While the dozens
of climbers on the mountain include a handful of women, Krakauer interacts,
by coincidence or design, principally with other men. These men
enjoy a range of characterizations—from humble Sherpas to eccentric loners
to altruistic group members to risk-loving egomaniacs—denied to
women in the account. The woman climber to whom the book devotes
the most attention is Sandy Hill Pittman, who Krakauer characterizes as an
excessively wealthy, pampered prima donna, a “shameless” publicity seeker
(156), and a “grandstanding dilettante” (155).12 In addition, Krakauer
reports her decision to travel with an espresso maker and gourmet beans,
as well as her receipt of express-mailed copies of fashion and celebrity
magazines. It is scarcely coincidental that this massively popular
adventure-nonfiction book depicts its principal female presence as an
unwelcome interloper who possesses negative traits linked to both masculinity
(imperiousness and egotism) and femininity (vanity and attention
to domestic comfort and material luxury, particularly in an incongruously
rugged setting). A few of the book’s male characters receive similar treatment,
but the book’s large cast of men includes many more esteemed
figures. Krakauer’s unflattering depiction of Pittman demonstrates that
women do not belong in the mountaineering world, an implicit argument
borne out when Pittman later becomes incapacitated and must be carried
by other, male climbers.
Paradoxically, Pittman’s travails allow Krakauer to adhere to a primary
convention of adventure-nonfiction texts: conveying viscerally the events
and physical hardships that their subjects face. In addition to pure physical
description of human and environmental conditions—such as extremes
of temperature, fatigue, and illness—real-adventure narratives typically
invoke philosophical issues that arise from such undertakings. Weather
conditions and physical and mental pain set up commentaries on the
human condition or on individual psychology. As Krakauer recounts his
participation in the Everest expedition, he observes, “I quickly came to
understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And
in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it
struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something
like a state of grace” (174). Krakauer’s statement attests to a desire to regain
access to a more primal, unmediated physical state. This desire is in part a
fantasy of class slumming, as Krakauer implicitly laments the fact that not
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all citizens of developed societies can experience ceaseless toil and suffering.
Grace is apparently inaccessible to the comfortable. With his predominantly
male cast, and with himself as a further example, Krakauer also
locates the achievement of grace particularly in the male body. In invoking
grace, he also gestures toward a secular version of the desire for spiritual
transcendence (the sublime, really), otherwise attained through religious
practices or folk rituals. In a contemporary world that calls attention
to physical traits through health care, fitness subcultures, spectator
sports, and media representations but makes few demands for physical
endurance, Into Thin Air’s chronicle of physical punishments supplies a
bridge between sedentary readers and active, risky endeavors. Readers,
then, can use the book as a call to action: as an inspirational tome, it might
spark their own outdoor activities. However, as suggested earlier with
regard to adventure literature generally, the book alternately provides
readers with a surrogate trial that poses no risk of death or discomfort. In
either case, the book’s popularity suggests ways contemporary masculinity
is constituted through a combination of reality and fantasy.
Whatever use readers make of the text, the goals and perspectives of
Into Thin Air’s cast of characters build up an emphatically male subjectivity.
Krakauer’s thematic emphases and reportage consistently rearticulate
conventional tenets of male mythology: stoic endurance of physical and
mental adversity, the transformative power of pain caused by the elements,
struggles for leadership, and acts of individual heroism. In addition, as an
Australian doctor in Krakauer’s party comments, the controlled, collective
hardships of climbing replicate the disciplined, masculine environment of
the military. The doctor, Vietnam veteran John Taske, admits that after
leaving the military, he “lost his way” and “couldn’t really speak to civilians”
(176). Next he describes his reclamation of self-confidence: “All I
could see was this long, dark tunnel closing in, ending in infirmity, old age,
and death. Then I started to climb, and the sport provided most of what
had been missing for me in civvy street—the challenge, the camaraderie,
the sense of mission.” For Taske, the civilian world generates anxieties
because of its incompatibility with the masculinist mindset of his military
training, and the physically demanding, male-dominated pastime of
climbing effectively alleviates these anxieties. (Though he does not explicitly
mention his attitude toward women, his fear of a “long, dark tunnel” is
rather telling.) Taske’s brief account reads like one of the case studies in
Stiffed, a chronicle of male frustration and lack of fulfillment. Taske, who
indicates that he has previously defined his identity through a homosocial
world of shared ordeals, requires such trials to retain his connection to
notions of male power and purpose. Faludi’s case studies include men
engaged in assembly-line labor and working-class sports fandom, among
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others. For these men, the narrowing or elimination of traditional arenas
of gender-identity formation produces anxiety and frustration. Just as
Taske’s earlier military training furnishes a male identity within a group,
arduous adventure pursuits supply a concrete, individual goal. The achievement
of this goal contributes significantly to a public and private index of
male achievement.
As Into Thin Air demonstrates, even intangible achievements such as
the experience of danger can burnish masculinity. In Krakauer’s and other
works, danger proves a crucial component in the formation of exceptional
masculinity or the reaffirmation of a masculinity made lax by a comfortable,
middle-class lifestyle. Undertakings such as those Krakauer describes
carry the inherent, substantial risk of a torturous or spectacular death.
While most people’s lives end unceremoniously, adventure fatalities consistently
arouse public interest due to their apparent novelty and infrequency.
As Krakauer observes in his attempt to come to terms with the
multiple deaths he has witnessed:
I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit.
I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game—without it,
climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions.
[. . .] Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of
the inherent perils, but precisely because of them. (352)
Krakauer’s firsthand experience with tragedy, he implies, changes his
perspective, but he does not fully articulate a revised philosophy. Despite
the book’s accounts of fatal mishaps and gruesome deaths, Krakauer venerates
a model of identity in which exposure to risk leads to self-fulfillment.
The author’s own pain and guilt at having survived when hardier climbers
died presents a curious paradox with regard to masculinity: Krakauer’s
survival attests to his weakness, to his selfish instinct for self-preservation,
while he portrays many of those who died as heroes who perished in the
service of the group. By this logic, the strong do not survive. Even without
John Taske’s accompanying analogy between climbing and the military,
Krakauer’s definition of the experience parallels a wartime combat situation,
with casualties becoming heroes by default.
By chronicling a number of solitary, unspectacular deaths instead of a
range of brawny, eventful lives, Krakauer’s book departs from hoary
accounts of male heroism. Rather than engaging in a courtship of danger
that elevates those involved to some higher plane of endurance and selfknowledge,
the book’s principals either die or emerge from the experience
with substantial physical and psychological scars. Although Krakauer
indicts male hubris and folly, his book ultimately foregrounds the men’s
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scars as marks of distinction. We see then a further attraction for readers:
we not only register the experience of physical danger, but also gain apparent
insight into the process of coping with the aftermath of that experience.
In this respect, nonfiction adventure books function like self-help
books for men, with the addition of a gripping, high-risk narrative.
By reflecting on disastrous events some years after they have occurred, Into
Thin Air offers a case study that can be used for therapeutic applications.
In comparison, Krakauer’s previous book, Into the Wild (1996), about the
disappearance of a young outdoorsman, can only speculate about the
mindset of its vanished protagonist. The Perfect Storm similarly tries to
maintain interest in a narrative enigma: what were men thinking and
doing in the hours preceding their deaths? Because Krakauer and many
others do live through the Everest crisis, though, Into Thin Air can devote
much time to the exploration of posttraumatic psychology. In the logic of
Krakauer’s work, the trauma contributes to a fully realized male identity
rather than to its breakdown.
The transformative experience of remote adventure, and the narrative
conventions surrounding it, has become sufficiently popular to merit
cliché status. The theme of remote adventure as crucible of male identity
stretches from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to
contemporary action films such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).
In these and other male crucible narratives, the willingness and ability to
endure extreme physical hardships, often in solitude, grants men entry
into a privileged space of achievement. In works such as Into Thin Air and
Robinson Crusoe, male achievement is measured through sheer fortitude.
Unlike the wartime scenarios of Rambo or The Iliad, in which characters
defend home or country and contribute to some social good, Into Thin Air
narrates physical trials that serve no practical purpose. In a New York Times
Book Review parody, Margalit Fox calls attention to the frivolousness of
real-adventure literature’s subject matter and its characters’ deliberate flirtations
with disaster. Fox imagines a book cowritten by Krakauer and
Junger entitled The Perfect Mess, in which “the authors set sail for Everest
in a small flammable boat stocked with a ton of nitroglycerine and a single
M&M.”13 Fox’s parody indicates the degree to which narratives of outdoor
misfortune depend not only on their participants’ zeal for such endeavors
and their willful pursuit of danger, but also their incompetence, lack of
foresight, or sheer bad luck. In subject matter, Fox’s imagined bestseller is
nearly indistinguishable from some actual publications. Works such as
Martin Dugard’s Knockdown: The Harrowing True Account of a Yacht Race
Turned Deadly (1999) similarly offer stories of well-to-do men who blunder
into danger during costly recreational activities.14 Meanwhile, the protagonist
of Into the Wild sets off into the wilderness carrying little more
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than a large bag of rice. Still, for the most part, readers do not consume
such narratives to marvel at their subjects’ foolhardiness but to share the
exceptionality of the risk-taking recounted. As an index of masculine will
and striving, adventure narratives validate the desire to depart from the
comforts and routines of the developed, capitalist world.
Adventure nonfiction typically represents disparate and complex events
in an easily apprehended form. Krakauer’s book raises both global and
local questions, invoking international border disputes, national and commercial
interests in global tourism, the author’s own social relationships
and marital discord, and an abundance of complicated personal rivalries.
The book’s narrative priority, though, is to recount the disastrous climbing
expedition. This priority allows the author to withhold judgment about
many of the issues his work introduces. Krakauer’s occasional digressions
into vague, philosophical speculation about fate and the vicissitudes of
nature close off discussion of subjects that go beyond his work’s immediate
focus. In addition, Krakauer periodically interrupts the chronological
account of actions and relationships with his own meditations or with
esoteric renderings of Nepalese beliefs. These interruptions grant readers a
reprieve from the unrelenting discomfort and malaise of the central
events, and successfully delay the narrative’s resolution. Much of the event
narrative is authentically and unavoidably distressing to readers, as we
learn of the characters’ physical pain and their inabilities to control or
make sense of their situations. Amid this central series of events, the book
interjects local superstitions and religious lore about the supposed curse of
Mount Everest, as well as musings of previous writers about the mountain’s
beauty and the dangers it presents to climbers. The combination
of mountain-literature excerpts, Sherpa lore, and physical description
contributes to the theme of adventure as determinant of male identity.
References to earlier explorers and chroniclers link Krakauer’s book to the
substantial corpus of male exploration literature. Allusions to Nepalese
spirituality and folklore lend cultural-historical weight and purpose to the
climbers’ efforts. The varied associations partly protect the expeditions
from the charge of leisure-class frivolity. In addition, geographic descriptions
literally ground the narrative and its subjects, locating them in a
rugged landscape wholly separate from the comparatively homogenous
spaces of the urban, capitalist world. Overall, geographic and spiritual
elements bolster the implicit claim that adventurers can attain a transcendent
experience of selfhood and thus reclaim their position in a natural
order removed from capitalism, social class, and (with few exceptions) the
company of women.
Virtually all late-1990s accounts of extreme adventure attest to similarly
life-changing experiences regardless of geographic situation, historical
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period, or surrounding circumstances. Given this similarity, these
experiences may not be so unique or rarefied as correspondents maintain.
Such manufactured “peak experiences,” to use the terminology of early-
1990s motivational literature, attest to a continuum of experience in the
contemporary developed world: for financially stable Westerners, climbing
Everest offers parallel satisfactions to rafting on the Amazon, hiking across
Antarctica, or orienteering in the Gobi Desert. Ultimately, engagement in
each of these pursuits reaffirms one’s status less as an adventurer than as a
person of privilege. The mass-market popularity of narratives of individual
or small-group hardships implies that the subjects of capitalism seek
ways to induct themselves willfully into an imagined fraternity of armchair
adventure-seekers. Shared participation in the reading and transmission of
such mass-market narratives substitutes for the scarcer, authentic experience.
Just as fictional thrillers, mysteries, and romances promise pleasures
and dangers outside readers’ everyday experience, so do real-adventure
texts offer a bulwark against the perceived demasculinization or underphysicality
of postindustrial capitalist society. Even if readers are not
engaged in high-risk adventure, the texts offer assurance that at least someone
is, and stories of fatal mishaps can allow readers to rationalize their
own relative inactivity. Acceptance of one’s mortality typically justifies,
in a culturally acceptable way, the lack of engagement in potentially lifethreatening
pursuits.
The Perfect Storm’s Male Enigmas
Not all adventure narratives involve men who court danger; some men, at
least, are motivated by financial necessity. Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect
Storm traces the disappearance of a New England swordfishing boat
and its crew during a severe storm in the fall of 1991. Junger opens the
book with an admission of his basically impossible task as a journalist:
“Recreating the last days of six men who disappeared at sea presented
some obvious problems for me” (xi). No visible, written, or oral evidence
exists to flesh out the men’s final hours. Such is not a recipe for compelling
narrative, but Junger pushes ahead, privileging the account’s “unknowable
element” (xii). His rhetorical sleight-of-hand extends to his use of
evidence: “I wound up sticking strictly to the facts, but in as wide-ranging
a way as possible” (xi). While he professes to eschew conjecture, he asks
readers to accept other seafarers’ accounts in place of his central subjects’:
“I would interview people who had been through similar situations, and
survived. Their experiences, I felt, would provide a fairly good descriptions
of what the six men on the Andrea Gail had gone through, and said, and
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perhaps event felt” (xi, Junger’s italics). Most of his book avoids this
tentative and conditional voice, though. Instead, he rounds out a presenttense
narrative of the crew’s preparations for the voyage with a discussion of
New England’s maritime history, an overview of the economics and perils
of swordfishing, and much meteorological and oceanographic information.
The extensive scientific and historical sections transitively assure readers
of the overall objectivity of Junger’s book, even as it serves up cryptic
speculation as fact. (Based on interviews conducted years after the storm,
for example, Junger quotes a premonition of impending disaster from a
crewmember’s girlfriend as the men prepare to depart.)
The Perfect Storm is nothing if not a narrative of masculinity in crisis.
The first page of the narrative proper introduces crewmember Bobby
Shatford, asleep in a shabby motel. He has a black eye, administered by his
girlfriend, who sleeps next to him (5–6). Junger thus locates readers in
the realm of kitchen-sink realism, where men are physically besieged even
in bed. In this world, workplace dangers complement physical threats at
home. As Junger later asserts, “[m]ore people are killed on fishing boats,
per capita, than in any other job in the United States” (70). He also comments
on the economics of commercial fishing, noting a downturn in the
industry after the 1980s that results in more frequent, always risky trips for
wage-earning fishermen. Junger adds to these conditions the figure of the
driven-to-near-recklessness fishing captain Billy Tyne, who “has a particular
reputation for pushing things to the limit” (72). Thus all the pieces are
arranged for a male contest of gender, economics, and work hierarchy.
These various struggles merely serve as backdrop for a grander elemental
conflict, as the book’s subtitle, “A True Story of Men Against the Sea,”
reminds us.
By necessity, Junger sets up these numerous contests but cannot really
stage them. His male protagonists are principally enigmas, defined by those
they leave behind and by men and women with similar experiences. At a climactic
point, Junger incorporates testimony from another New England
fisherman who survived a similar experience in 1982, then segues into a
mostly third-person scientific account of the experience of death by drowning.
When the Andrea Gail disappears from narrative view, Junger shifts the
book’s attention to another boat, the Satori, whose crew is rescued, and to a
helicopter rescue crew’s own crash and subsequent rescue. For much of the
book, Junger thematically constructs his male protagonists as ghostly and
irrecoverable:
If the men on the Andrea Gail had simply died, and their bodies were lying
in state somewhere, their loved ones could make their goodbyes and get on
with their lives. But they didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth
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and, strictly speaking, it’s just a matter of faith that these men will never
return. Such faith takes work, it takes effort. The people of Gloucester must
willfully extract these men from their lives and banish them to another
world. (213, Junger’s italics)
Junger here calls on tropes of the uncanny: the men “didn’t die” but later
had to be “banished” by others. The absence of bodies contributes to this
view of men as enigmas. The book begins with the slightly wounded male
body of Bobby Shatford and finally emphasizes the absence of all the
crew’s bodies. Masculinity’s defining feature of the physical body disappears,
and Junger relates the struggle to account for this absence.
The Perfect Storm’s real achievement, perhaps, is its reversal of the terms
of masculinity itself. Steve Neale argues that “[m]asculinity as an ideal, at
least, is implicitly known. Femininity is, by contrast, a mystery.”15 Yet here
men are the mystery, and women are known. Women appear as characters
before and after the disastrous storm, and at the end of the book where
Junger acknowledges seven interview subjects, all women. In addition, the
two storm survivors whose accounts he cites in the most detail are women:
Judith Reeves and Karen Stimson. To counterbalance these women’s
voices, Junger repeatedly reasserts the subject of men and his own work as
a male journalist, watching storms himself and drinking beers at the
Gloucester inn where his subjects congregate. He begins his acknowledgments
with the statement that “[o]ne of the most difficult tasks in writing
this book was to get to know—to whatever extent this is possible—the
men who died at sea in the Halloween Gale” (226). Like Krakauer, he
asserts his own mental anguish as a badge of honor. Similarly, in the book’s
foreword, he locates himself at the scene of the event, a man on the border
between land and sea, where the urge to investigate strikes: “My own experience
in the storm was limited to standing on Gloucester’s Back Shore
watching thirty-foot swells advance on Cape Ann, but that was all it took”
(xii). Physically situating himself in the dead men’s environs—on the shore
just after their deaths, and in their favorite bar later—Junger makes a
rhetorical claim for his own worth as an investigative journalist. He leaves
present the enigma of the dead men’s experiences, but with a counterimage
of himself as an indefatigable, truth-seeking investigator.
Black Hawk Down’s Men at War
In their search for compelling stories of true-life male activity, writers and
publishers can scour the historical record of the early twentieth century,
turn to narratives such as Into Thin Air or The Perfect Storm that participate
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in an existing nonfiction genre (e.g., mountain or maritime literature), or
look to other present-day arenas where men’s actions take center stage.
Mark Bowden’s 1999 bestseller Black Hawk Down finds such an arena in
contemporary military activity. Bowden’s book chronicles U.S. military
action in Somalia in 1993, which culminated in a failed counterinsurgency
mission and the capture of a U.S. helicopter pilot by Somali soldiers.
Like Krakauer’s book, Black Hawk Down departs from straightforward
reportage or history, privileging instead a popular-fiction style of firstperson
action. As Bowden admits in the book’s epilogue,“I wanted to combine
the authority of a historical narrative with the emotion of the
memoir, and write a story that read like fiction but was true” (331–332).
Like Krakauer in Into Thin Air, Bowden aims to fuse the memoir’s claims
to authenticity and immediacy, the journalistic account’s accuracy, and the
popular novel’s fast paced and omniscient narration. Given its subject and
the assistance that U.S. military personnel provided to the author, readers
might expect the book to serve an explicit, nationalistic political ideology.
Bowden’s book, however, offers less in the way of military-policy analysis
than it does in vivid reconstruction of the sights, sounds, actions, and
emotions of the event. The book’s graphic presentation of small-arms
combat contributes to some extent to a military mythology of battlefield
excitement, but Bowden’s emphasis on the participants’ fear and confusion,
and the high toll of death and injury on both sides of the conflict,
disabuses readers of notions of mythic wartime valor.
In his choice of the memoir and the thriller as models for a comprehensive
account of a historical event, Bowden acknowledges the captivating
qualities of such popular forms. Moreover, the emphasis on first-person testimony
allows Bowden to probe contradictory cultures and value systems
without foregrounding his own prejudices. On one hand, Bowden frames
U.S. soldiers’ conventional, conservative statements about manhood and
military power in ways that make the statements seem deeply felt and
authentic rather than hollow clichés. For example, early in the book, Bowden
presents the views of a member of an elite U.S. combat team, Delta Force:
[T]he job demanded more. It demanded all you had, and more [. . .]
because the price of failure was often death. That’s why Howe and the rest of
these D-boys loved it. It separated them from other men. [. . .] Victory was
for those willing to fight and die. [. . .] If the good-hearted ideals of
humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it
happen. Delta made it happen. (33)
To a great extent, such statements appear initially as macho bluster, evidence
of the overconfidence and myopia of military indoctrination.
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When located against a backdrop of unsuccessful battles and U.S. casualties,
however, they acquire a different resonance, ironically indicting U.S. military
policy and the volatile model of masculinity that such policy supports.
In addition, because the bloodshed that Bowden records is so senseless—
neither side’s political agenda is advanced, and many of the Somali dead
are noncombatants—the Delta Force member’s “the job demanded more”
ethos seems perfectly apt, as reasonable and useful a claim as any other
offered on the conflict’s front lines. Elsewhere, Bowden presents competing
views about the conflict—for example, paraphrased quotes from
Somali combatants and civilians—also without direct attribution. He thus
presents readers with dueling subjectivities, competing perspectives that
he does not explicitly reconcile. Through its reticence, though, Bowden’s
book ultimately proves sympathetic to the military perspective. He critiques
the planning and execution of the U.S. operations in Somalia rather
than the ideology of military activity itself. Nevertheless, in reconstructing
events as a series of first-person narratives, he acknowledges that grasping
the overall situation in some depth requires consideration of multiple
viewpoints, not just the short-sighted “Delta made it happen” perspective.
Amid these competing viewpoints and Bowden’s narrative of the failed
mission, acts of individual heroism and bravery redeem the operation for
the U.S. military and government.
The Delta Force member’s aggressive worldview suggests the complex
ways in which nonfiction-adventure texts, and the events that inspire
them, negotiate constructions of masculinity. Far from being inoperable,
the uncomplicated Delta creed provides the modus operandi for real soldiers’
often deadly excursions into the battlefield. In the logic of the Delta
Force member, the likelihood of a sudden, violent death distinguishes an
exemplary manhood. According to this logic, only men who risk their lives
regularly can contribute actively to the maintenance of humankind’s
“good-hearted ideals.” Paradoxically, the explicit lack of concern with personal
longevity contributes to an exceptional male identity; the nearness of
death enriches men’s lives. Individualism supplies another foundation of
the Delta Force ideology—fulfillment comes from activity that “separated
them from other men.” Contrary to tenets of individualism, though, the
men’s exceptionality grants them group membership in Delta Force itself.
As in much military discourse, a stated desire for peace underwrites male
militancy. In addition, despite the men’s obvious position in the adult
world of the international armed forces, the “D-boys” appellation signals
the abnegation of adult responsibility. As in many other adult male groups,
associations with youth or boyishness signify the temporary removal from
the domestic order and liberation from conventional social strictures (and
social morality as well). In this respect, the grimly realist, violent world of
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Black Hawk Down overlaps with the Treasure Island milieu of globe-trotting
boy’s adventure.
Bowden’s narrative model, then, corresponds with the nonfiction
adventures already discussed as well as with the representations of male
activity that dominate 1980s and 1990s popular cinema. As in cinema,
print texts’ representations of the right-minded actions of individuals
supersede the potential contradictions of the texts’ larger ideological positions.
Into Thin Air locates readers alongside individual climbers, posing
few explicit questions about the utility of climbing itself. The Perfect Storm
accepts death in service to commerce, issuing no call for industrial reform.
Black Hawk Down similarly makes only implicit arguments about U.S. military
policy, focusing instead on the individual soldier’s courage under fire.
Krakauer’s and Bowden’s books in particular, while presenting contexts
for social behavior, prefer narrative momentum to careful analyses of
behaviors or institutions.
From Real to Reel Masculinity
Bestselling nonfiction accounts of male activity, such as Krakauer’s and
Bowden’s, borrow not only the solitary heroes or tightly knit groups germane
to action cinema but also their narrative techniques. They offer a
series of rising actions with climactic violence or triumph; hastily sketched
characters, often identified by a single, outstanding personality trait or
visual signifier; minimal historical context; and subordination of issues
and conflicts not immediately related to the story at hand. Because of the
apparent camera-readiness of books such as Into Thin Air and Black Hawk
Down, popular filmmakers in the late 1990s looked to nonfiction-adventure
texts as sources for mainstream films. The IMAX documentary Everest
(1998), despite its limited release at the small number of IMAX-equipped
theaters nationwide, grossed nearly $75 million in the United States.16 The
fictionalized film version of The Perfect Storm appeared in summer 2000,
directed by Wolfgang Petersen, a filmmaker known in the 1990s for semirealist
action dramas with middle-aged protagonists, including In the Line
of Fire (1993) and Air Force One (1997). (Notably, whereas Junger resists
the urge to build a fictional narrative for his disappeared protagonists, the
star-driven Hollywood film wholly forsakes this restriction.) Likewise,
Krakauer’s book appeared as a fictionalized television movie,Into Thin Air:
Death on Everest, in 1997. U.S. film studios, hoping to maintain or expand
viewership, continue to seek potentially lucrative alternatives to muscular
or effects-laden action films targeted at the reliable, but relatively narrow,
adolescent-male demographic. The popularity of real-world male trials
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among the adult, book-buying public makes such texts obvious candidates
for film adaptation. As films, both Black Hawk Down and The Perfect Storm
were substantial hits, suggesting that their realist credentials helped attract
viewers across categories of age and gender. Thus, the films successfully
recuperated well-worn themes and narratives surrounding male achievements,
both Black Hawk Down’s “war is hell” perspective and The Perfect
Storm’s venerable “man versus the elements” narrative.
When bolstered by claims of authenticity, highly conventionalized
visual representations of active masculinity can be promoted as gritty reality
rather than stylized fantasy. Bowden served as a consultant for the film
version of Black Hawk Down, which was moved forward from a planned
spring 2002 release to a December 2001 release to capitalize on post-9/11
nationalist sentiment. The film applied realist conventions of tight and
imbalanced framings and jittery hand-held cinematography, and featured
graphic scenes of battlefield carnage and triage. Nonetheless, it still bore
the simultaneously aggressive and mawkish stamp of producer Jerry
Bruckheimer, known for high-concept action blockbusters such as The
Rock (1996) and Armageddon (1998). In promoting the film, Bruckheimer
and director Ridley Scott touted the film’s supposed semidocumentary
aesthetic. In one New York Times interview, for example, Scott asserts of
the film, “It’s as near to the edge of a documentary as I could make it.”17
Interestingly, Scott offers documentary realism as a standard of artistic
achievement, despite the near-total absence of documentary films from
commercial theaters, studio distribution rosters, or Scott’s own resumé.
Overall, given the evidence of the film’s expressive color, frenetic editing
rhythms, and casting of numerous well-known or rising Hollywood
actors, “near to the edge” is a highly elastic term.
Early in this chapter, I quoted Black Hawk Down cinematographer
Slawomir Idziak regarding the perceived authenticity of CNN’s greenhued
“TV nights.” Idziak’s statement acknowledges that media texts figure
strongly in the signification of the real. Given this disconcerting power,
along with the rapid consolidation of media and publishing industries in
the late 1990s, these industry practices merit close scrutiny. Despite the
proliferation of specialized niches in the book- and magazine-publishing
industries, corporate control over the U.S.- and global-public sources of
information, entertainment, and enlightenment increasingly limits political
and cultural perspectives that are not explicitly mainstream. Compared
to print media, popular cinema supplies the public with an even more circumscribed
range of texts. The vast majority of U.S. theaters show only
fiction films from major U.S. studios, eschewing nonstudio productions,
foreign films, or documentaries. Studio films generally deal with fantasies of
personal transformation or virtuous suffering and conclude unambiguously
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and completely, thereby discouraging viewers’ critical reasoning. The more
such texts dominate the global media landscape, and the fewer the alternatives
to dominant narrative models, the more essential critical practice
becomes. Popular texts’ ongoing cannibalization of the category of documentary
realism can ground these texts in social reality, but it can also
rationalize irresponsible fabrications and distortions of world conditions.
The books discussed here, and their film offshoots, work on both sides of
that divide.
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