The Beautiful American: Sincere Fictions of the White Messiah in Hollywood Movies

Abstract

Surveys US cinema to argue that the white American self-concept depicted therein is, per Pierre Bourdieu (1977), a "sincere fiction" maintained by film's symbolic labor that conceals the brutality of US race relations & white hegemony behind a mask of naturalness & benevolence. Focus is on the propagandist image of the white messiah in various Hollywood films from Birth of a Nation (1915) to Three Kings (1999). J. Zendejas