White Patriarchy In Popular Culture

Popular culture has long been a powerful means of mediating American myth while perpetuating a sense of national identity based on ideology rooted in white Eurocentric patriarchy. Scholarly approaches to cultural artifacts, however, have become more critical with regard to hegemonic structures of power. Alongside the process of deconstructing white hegemony in academe, mass media emerged as an essential object of examination in determining notions of white patriarchy. Film, in particular, has become the prime mediator of popular culture on an audiovisual level. Large audiences are exposed to mainstream cinema on a daily basis as the movie industry has evolved to become increasingly influential over the past 100 years. In becoming one of the

The movie prides itself on alleged historical accuracy including the one-hour documentary feature Making ‘The New World’ (2006, Austin Lynch, dir.) which supports the presumptive authenticity of Malick’s worldbuilding. However, the attempt at providing a historically accurate representation of the events revolving the founding of Jamestown calls for thorough scrutiny of the director’s style. Particularly cinematography and mise-en-scène often reveal white patriarchal power structures through the representation of race, ethnicity, and gender. Notably, the depiction of Pocahontas is critical to understanding contemporaneous attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender in relationship with the misrepresentation of Native Americans in popular movies. There has been an abundance of movies containing problematic representations of Pocahontas throughout the years – the most infamous one probably being the 1995 Disney feature Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, dir.). It appears, however, that despite Malick’s attempt at portraying the events of the first permanent English settlement in Virginia, his imagination of Powhatan’s daughter is also informed by hegemonic power structures. I, thus, hold that by exploiting the female indigenous body of Pocahontas as the objectified Native American princess, Terrence Malick’s movie The New World perpetuates white patriarchic ideology through reiterating the establishment of Jamestown as a Eurocentric myth of