"Look Closer": Sam Mendes's Visions of White Men

Heholt, Ruth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6963-6427 (2014) "Look Closer": Sam Mendes's Visions of White Men. In: Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. ISBN 978-1-137-36363-3

Abstract / Summary

This chapter examines Sam Mendes’ films; American Beauty (1999), Revolutionary Road (2008) and Away We Go (2009). These films explicitly scrutinize white middle class men using a version of the colonial, white, male gaze. As this gaze is re-turned onto white men, instead of emphasising a collective and privileged identity, individuality is highlighted, showing white men to be confused and powerless. This chapter argues that the white gaze that disempowered the marginal for so long works in a very different way when applied to white men and Mendes’ injunction to ‘look closer’ in fact allows them to melt back into invisibility.

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