Masculinity Outside Victory Narratives (White Palms. Szabolcs Hajdu, 2006)

Abstract

This chapter interprets the award-winning Hungarian film White Palms (Szabolcs Hajdu 2006) in a wide social, cultural and historical context, from the point of view of such issues as sport, identity, nationality, masculinity, trauma and loss. The chapter explores the influence of local conceptions of history and nationhood on sports, and analyses the compensatory nature of sports in the discourses of nationality and masculinity in order to explain why and how the film diverges from international genre patterns and in order to reveal the full cultural significance of the film’s narrative and subtle bodily metaphors. Furthermore, it theorises the symbolic, representative potentials of the athlete’s body in terms of the king’s two bodies theory, and calls attention to the ways this body fails to undergo the kind of idealisation customary for the king’s body in medieval law or the athlete’s body in the victory narratives of mainstream cinema. Following Kaja Silverman’s conceptualisation of masculinity in crisis, the chapter connects this failure of idealization to an ideological crisis characteristic of Hungary before as well as after the fall of communism.