‘There’s nowhere to go to’: Emasculated White masculinity, made-horrific urban spaces and the remasculinization quest post-9/11

This article examines how urban walking shapes the production of masculinity in spaces defined by disaster in the science-fiction horror film Cloverfield . Initially, the film’s affluent young male New Yorkers traverse public and private urban spaces unimpeded, their privilege symbolized by their stewardship of a handheld camera. The film’s depiction of a giant monster’s subsequent attack on New York allegorizes the 9/11 terror attacks, displacing cultural anxieties about America’s proclaimed identity as a masculine nation state. The attack creates a monstrous new urban fabric in which White male dominion is overturned. As escape routes are cut off, the now inert and incapable male protagonist initiates a peripatetic romantic quest to rescue a former lover, seeking to recuperate unheroic masculinity through agency and movement. Imagining urban space as palimpsestic, his redemptive quest seeks to rewrite urban space previously associated with his failures as a lover and inadequacy as a hero.