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Undoing violent masculinity: Lynne Ramsay’s You were never really here (2018)

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posted on 2023-06-07, 07:05 authored by Sue Thornham
Reviewers described Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2018) as a “Taxi Driver for a new century.” Certainly, its narrative of an inarticulate killer who is also the would-be saviour of a lost and damaged “little white girl” recalls that of Scorsese’s 1976 film., and the two films share a fragmented, hallucinatory quality. Yet what such comparisons miss is both the devastating critique of this culturally powerful narrative to be found in Ramsay’s film, and the connections it makes between this paradigmatic story of a failed and violent but ultimately sympathetic white masculinity and another: that of the traumatising mother who is responsible for the violence of her psychotic son. In this article, I explore the nature of Ramsay’s critique, arguing that her film both refuses and interrogates both of these readings of gender. Ramsay’s protagonist, like Scorsese’s, is a traumatised war veteran, but his identification is not with a fantasised and recuperative ideal masculinity but with its feminised victims: girl and mother. His tragedy is not that he fails in his rescue attempt, or that he is in thrall to the “death mother”, but that he believes that the means of this rescue might be masculinity.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Feminist Media Studies

ISSN

1468-0777

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Department affiliated with

  • Media and Film Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-05-22

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2021-12-20

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2020-05-22

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