Screening masculine protest: reflections on Hollywood response to men’s movements in the 1990s

The aim of this study is to introduce a masculinist critique of male representation in a particular time frame, and illustrate how the author’s strategy differs from a feminist approach. The basic thrust of the textual analyses will be on two axes of orientation: the diachronic axis (men's movements in American social history) and the synchronic axis (Alfred Adler's view of "masculine protest"). The two axes converge in denaturalizing the Hollywood myth, its interaction, reverberation, and reorientation of the contemporary American social ethos, in tune with the masculine protest endured and reacted by men. To contribute to this understanding, the thesis first articulates Adler's framework of masculine protest, which will be further developed into four tendencies of masculine representation.