Nation, Nostalgia and Masculinity: Clinton/Spielberg/Hanks

This dissertation focuses on masculinity in discourses of nostalgia and nation in popular films and texts of the late 20th century's millennial period—the "Bill Clinton years," from 1992-2001. As the 1990s progressed, masculinity crises and millennial anxieties intersected with an increasing fixation on nostalgic popular histories of World War II. The representative masculine figures proffered in Steven Spielberg films and Tom Hanks roles had critical relationships to cultural traumas surrounding race, reproduction and sexuality. Nostalgic narratives emerged as way to fortify the American nation-state and resolve its social problems. The WWII cultural trend, through the specter of tributes to a dying generation, used nostalgic texts and images to create imaginary American landscapes that centered as much on contemporary masculinity and the political and social perspective of the Boomer generation as it did on the prior one. The conceit of Clinton's masculinity is used as the figural link between the male bodies represented in such popular 1990s films as Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and The Green Mile. Additional chapters focus on Tom Hanks' star persona, the notion of boyhood, and the nexus between pop cultural imagery and representations of nostalgia