Date: 2009-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Film; History & Criticism; Men's Studies; Performing Arts; Social Science
Description: A struggle between narcissistic and masochistic modes of manhood defined Hollywood masculinity in the period between the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. David Greven's contention is that a profound shift in representation occurred during the early 1990s when Hollywood was transformed by an explosion of films that foregrounded non-normative gendered identity and sexualities. In the years that have followed, popular cinema has either emulated or evaded the representational strategies of this era, especially in terms of gender and sexuality. One major focus of this study is
Publisher: University of Texas Press

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

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Manhood in Hollywood
from Bush to Bush

DaviD greven

University of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 2009 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2009

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions

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♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of anSi/niSO Z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greven, David.

Manhood in Hol ywood from Bush to Bush / David Greven.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

iSbn 978-0-292-71987-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Masculinity in motion pictures. 2. Men in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures—

United States—History—20th century. 4. Motion pictures—United States—History—

21st century. I. Title.

pn1995.9.m46g74 2009

791.43'6521—dc22

2009006977

For my Father, not only one of my best friends but also one of the best film critics I know

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware 1

Chapter One

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 12

Chapter Two

An Ill-Fated Bacchanal: Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial 52

Chapter Three

Male Medusas and Female Heroes: Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 85

Chapter Four

The Hollywood Man Date: Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 125

Chapter Five

Destroying Something Beautiful: Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 160

Chapter Six

“Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality 176

Chapter Seven

The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ 204
viii Contents

Chapter Eight

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain 218

Epilogue

The Reign of Masochism 241

Notes 247

Bibliography 273

Index 285

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a genuine pleasure, in part because it has not only opened up new opportunities for talking about movies with friends and colleagues but has also led me repeatedly to recall the great movie experiences I’ve had throughout my life. As Pauline Kael once wrote, a love of movies is enough for a friendship, and I’ve been blessed with great friends who love movies as much as I do. I’ll never forget the time my best friend Viki and I trekked through the snow to see Kiss of the Spider Woman when we were in high school; when Robert and I saw that Louise Brooks double feature at Theater 80; when Ben and I watched Prince of Darkness (“Why weren’t we told? ” in the immortal cadences of Donald Pleasance); Lisa, Alex, and I curled up to watch Now, Voyager; when my cousin Orlando and I saw Vertigo for God knows which time again at the Museum of the Moving Image; watching The Ten Commandments with Jackie; seeing Swimfan with Rick, Mimic with Simon and Gabe, Prince Caspian with Corrine and Justine (“My mother was a black dwarf”); and so many other indelible experiences. Movies exceed the sum of the viewing experience; they’re a shared world of dreams, friendship, and love.

For enduring support throughout the years, I want to thank Michael T.

Gilmore, Wai Chee Dimock, and John Burt. I also thank Paul Morrison, whose “Sex and Culture” class got me hooked on Freud (sorry, Paul!). My colleagues and friends in the Connecticut College English department have given me friendship, mentoring, and constant intellectual community and challenge; I’m indebted to you all. Simon Hay deserves special mention for the provocative and stimulating conversations we’ve had as I wrote this book.

I also thank the outside readers of the manuscript and Jim Burr and the edi-torial team at the University of Texas Press. I thank the online film journal Scope for permission to reprint some of the review I wrote of the film Pitch
x Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Black, and I also thank the anonymous readers of Cinema Journal for their feedback on the article version of Chapter Four. And I warmly thank my students throughout the years, without whose passion and intelligence I would be greatly bereft.

My greatest debts are, as ever, to my beloved family, whose love, support, and humor enrich each moment of my life—my parents, Oswald and Florence Greven, my brothers, Mike and Ozzy, my dear aunts, uncles, and cousins, and my partner, Alex Beecroft, whose unfailingly generous nature and kindness and own love of movies make everything possible.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

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intrODuctiOn

When Hollywood Masculinity

Became Self-Aware

During a particularly suspenseful sequence in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (1993), Clint Eastwood, playing Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent haunted by his failure to prevent JFK’s assassination, races across rooftops in pursuit of John Malkovich’s wily, manipulative would-be presidential assassin, Mitch Leary. Part of the joke and the pathos here is that, at sixty-three years old, Eastwood is past these heroics, yet he valiantly pushes forward, sprinting over roof after roof, Horrigan’s young partner Al (Dylan McDermott) trailing behind. Malkovich leaps across one last great gulf; Eastwood follows suit, but he can’t quite make it, hanging desperately by his fingers on the edge. This is one of the most vertiginous sequences ever filmed; indeed, the shot of Eastwood hanging above a vast Nietzschean abyss recalls the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). When Hitchcock leaves James Stewart hanging over the edge, he creates a metaphysical statement about the predicament of humankind, suspended above the unknown.

What statement does Wolfgang Petersen seek to make here? As Horrigan clings to the edge, Leary appears above him, saying, “Take my hand or you’ll die.” Leary needs Horrigan alive, to serve as witness to his ingenuity and to partake in a lonely game only the two men can play. Eastwood, consistently rejecting Leary’s offers of kinship, takes his gun out and points it up at Leary, who finds the gesture amusing (as only Malkovich can convey). “If you shoot me, we’ll both die,” Leary says, while also taunting Horrigan about his resolve to save the current president. Eastwood resolutely keeps his gun on Malkovich—and then, to demonstrate his confidence that Eastwood won’t shoot him, Malkovich takes Eastwood’s gun into his mouth.

As if to give vent to the building pressure, Malkovich’s Leary shoots young Al, who, across the other rooftop, is trying to save Frank. From a low angle, we see Al’s face fall before us as he lands on the roof’s edge, a bullet wound

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure 0.1. Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire (1993): man over an abyss Figure 0.. Eastwood arms himself.

clearly shown in his forehead. But then Leary shoots Al again, and this time blood copiously pours out of his mouth. If the gun becomes a metaphorical phallus in Leary’s mouth, the blood pouring out of Al’s mouth metaphorically signals sexual release. The economy of violence safeguards the mainstream integrity of the film from the all-out homoeroticism that threatens to explode the screen, yet this homoeroticism suffuses the entire spectacle to the degree that it takes what had been an effective but formulaic thriller to another level of desperation and intrigue altogether. In the midst of a thriller about Washington and behind-the-scenes power, a fairly unmistakable depiction of male-male fellatio brings the movie to a startling halt.

What was in the water in Hol ywood in the early 90s? Eastwood had toyed with psychosexual themes in the 1984 Tightrope, but that film was an anomaly in the slew of reactionary films, largely in the action genre, that dominated the Reagan era. In the Line of Fire, far from being anomalous, joins with many

When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware
other films of its era to put a radically reimagined manhood on the screen.

When Clint Eastwood must involuntarily submit to oral gratification from John Malkovich, Hol ywood manhood has undergone a profound shift.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush considers the representation of masculinity in Hol ywood moviemaking from 1989 up to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The period has been presided over by three presidents: George Herbert Walker Bush, our forty-first president (1989–1993); our forty-second, William Jefferson Clinton (1993–2001); and George Walker Bush, our forty-third (2001–2008). Purportedly, the Bushes’ own monikers for each other refer to their presidential numbers; I will follow their lead and refer throughout this study to Bush père as “Bush 41” and to his son as “Bush 43.”

Although the respective cultural eras of which the presidents are figureheads each brim with numerous issues of urgent importance, this study narrowly fo-Figure 0.. John Malkovich’s killer embodies the threat of a new queer manhood.

Figure 0.4. Voracious queer desire: Malkovich eating Eastwood’s gun

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush cuses on the gender politics of Hol ywood movies during these years. My central argument is that a struggle between narcissistic and masochistic modes of manhood defines Hol ywood masculinity in the Bush-to-Bush period; this claim proceeds from the contention that a profound shift in gendered representation occurred during the Bush 41 years. In Marching in Place, Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame critiqued what they called the “status quo presidency” of the first Bush. I do not in any way dispute this assessment of his term in office; I do argue, however, that in terms of popular culture, the Bush 41 era was anything but status quo. An explosion of films that foregrounded non-normative gendered identity and sexualities transformed Hol ywood film’s representation of gender and sexuality. Indeed, we can with justifica-tion view the Bush 41 years as Hol ywood’s queer renaissance, a period the richness of which I can only adumbrate here. In the years that have followed, popular cinema has either emulated or evaded the representational strategies of this era of filmmaking, especially in terms of gender and sexuality.

The queer renaissance of early 90s film was a synergistic outpouring of popular and indie cinema. Mainstream films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), and Philadelphia (1993); crossover indie-mainstream successes such as My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Crying Game (1992); and a proliferation of gay-themed independent films (Isaac Julien’s 1989 Looking for Langston, Tom Kalin’s 1991 Swoon, Todd Haynes’s 1991 Poison, Gregg Araki’s 1992 The Living End, Rose Troche’s 1994 Go Fish, and several others) together made queer sexuality visible as never before. In addition to films that explicitly depicted non-normative gendered and sexual identities, several popular films from the same period beckoned readings as allegorizations of queer sexuality: Dead Ringers (1988), with its disturbingly incestuous homoeroticism between schizophrenic brothers (both brilliantly played by Jeremy Irons); Alien 3 (1992), with its central dilemma of the Alien

“virus” infecting the body of its heroine Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and its shaven-headed homosocial world of men, who look alternately like aiDS
victims and activists; and Prelude to a Kiss (1992), based on Craig Lucas’s play, with its story of switched identities between a quirky woman about to be married and an old man (in one of the key scenes, her tormented fiancé kisses the old man in order to kiss “her”).1 With its homoerotic themes and exchanges of fatal blood between men (Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as tortured quasi-vampire lovers), Neil Jordan’s 1994 film version of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire similarly allegorizes gay relationships and the threat of aiDS. Either through explicit or allegorical means, Bush 41 films made queer themes central, tinged with the pathos of aiDS before it became, thanks to protease inhibitors, a manageable chronic disease rather than an automatic

When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware death sentence. Quickly perceived as a distinctive movement, the slew of gay-themed indies were designated the “New Queer Cinema.” But this appellation applied fully as relevantly to popular filmmaking, and only by taking the popular films into account can we fully recognize the radicalism of the New Queer Cinema. As Paul Burston points out, queerness “has managed to pervade popular culture to such a degree that it hardly makes sense to draw distinctions between what is ‘mass culture’ and what is ‘queer subculture.’”2

It’s worth noting how commercially, as well as critically, successful these films were. If we take the Academy Awards as a barometer of the merging of critical and commercial success, we can note that Silence won Oscars for Best Picture and Director, as well as for Best Actress and Actor (Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, respectively); that The Crying Game, the sleeper hit of 1992, received several Oscar nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Jaye Davidson’s gender-bending performance (Neil Jordan won an Oscar for his original screenplay); and that Tom Hanks won Best Actor for Philadelphia.

It’s also worth noting that, at the time, many of these films were greeted with as much consternation as excitement. Indeed, many commentators then and throughout the years have denounced the films as homophobic, especially The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct but also The Crying Game and Philadelphia. Silence and Basic inspired activists to protest in the streets against Hol ywood homophobia; in New York City, a campaign to out Silence star Jodie Foster as “Absolutely Queer” garnered a great deal of attention. Some of these particular films were indeed awful, both on aesthetic and ideological grounds. Yet it is absurd to lump disturbing but also profoundly imaginative films like The Silence of the Lambs (a masterpiece) and The Crying Game (a flawed but brilliant film) with crude (if luridly fascinating) films like Basic Instinct. That Basic actually garnered a healthy number of lesbian fans at the time and that Philadelphia, a film that determinedly seeks to challenge homophobia, actually manages to list among the most homophobic of its era alerts us to the difficulty of distinguishing the positive from the negative portrayal. Indeed, as Judith Halberstam suggests in Female Masculinity, it may be worthwhile to reconsider the negative values we attach to the negative portrayal. As Linda S.

Kauffman puts it in a discussion of transgressive films such as those made by David Cronenberg and Brian De Palma, these directors “confront life in its most frightening forms: the intersection of the sex and death drives, the psyche’s violent vicissitudes, the cataclysms that make no sense.”3 As I will be arguing throughout this study, very often the most disturbing, least “positive”

films about sexuality most daringly address the complexities of sexual identity in our compellingly strange time.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush The impact of the openness of queer themes in the Bush 41 period has been considerable, altering the representation of gender and sexual identity. But the impact has also been unclear. Brokeback Mountain (2005) was a surprise critical and box-office success that explicitly put a gay love story on the screen.

The dearth of gay-themed films made in Brokeback’s wake, however, has led commentators to question what effect the film has had, if any, on Hol ywood, which is still stuck in its homophobic reluctance to represent homosexuality.

But while indeed troubling, the dearth of gay-themed films is only a seeming dearth. Since the Bush 41 era, homoeroticism, queerness, and the sexually non-normative have informed Hol ywood filmmaking. It’s not that queers are being explicitly represented; it’s that representation has turned queer. The openness of queer sexuality has transformed the shape of movie masculinity itself. For example, Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007), a highly altered film version of the great medieval epic, presents a digitized rendering of the titular character as a buff gym specimen. This isn’t a shaggy, rough-hewn medieval body but, instead, a delicately sculpted, gleaming example of postgay musculature: proportionate, nearly hairless save some delicate decorative chest hair tendrils, feminized. Beowulf’s face, appropriately grizzly, suggests the medieval period, but his body emblematizes the preoccupations of our own time. Turning the peek-a-boo, flowerpot-covering-the-phallus shenanigans of the Austin Powers films on their head, Beowulf has its hero strip down completely to battle the fearsome, pitiable monster Grendel. We watch as Beowulf nimbly leaps over and ducks beneath the pile of loathsome, bawling Grendel flesh, the spectacle being about what we don’t see, Beowulf’s presumably prodigious but invisible medieval manhood; the film explicates the paradoxical nature of the phallus as sign of both male power and of castration. And when in the final moments, the huge, gloriously golden-scaled dragon—which in the film version is actually Beowulf’s son by Grendel’s mother, a femme fatale played by Angelina Jolie, her hair a long, winding caudal appendage—dies and reverts back to enchanted human form, lying beside the dying Beowulf as foamy tides ebb and flow over their bodies, the effect is stunning: the aged, ruined Beowulf beside a golden, sleek version of his former exquisite self. This is truly the dream of American manhood as D. H. Lawrence described it, to

“go backwards, from old age to golden youth.”4 Bush-to-Bush films fuse the Lawrentian and the queer.

As stated earlier, this book focuses quite narrowly on Hol ywood films and what they tel us about masculinity. The sociopolitical life of the nation in the years after the Reagan era, the distinct versions of America we have experienced under the leaderships of Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 demands

When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware the kind of careful attention I simply do not have the space to provide in this book. And several films and directors significant for the themes of this book—

Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, the recent films of Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg—await treatments in a future study.5 What I offer here is engagement with certain films that I believe are among the key texts of the Bush-to-Bush era. I am committed to close reading of texts and believe the strength of my argument lies in such readings. My hope is that the treatment of films and directors and stars in these chapters wil be useful to those who undertake, in myriad directions, the study of this volatile, shifting period.

Chapter by Chapter

I will now offer brief summaries of the chapters and highlight the ways in which they address some of the major themes of the study taken up in this introduction.

chapter One—manhOOD in hOllywOOD
frOm buSh tO buSh

In this chapter, I provide the theoretical framework for this study as a whole.

Narcissism and masochism as theoretical concepts have been crucial to film theory in the past few decades; Hol ywood film puts these concepts into fascinating play. I track the uses of the concepts from their psychoanalytic origins to their deployments in film theory as well as psychoanalytically inflected queer theory, considering theorists such as Freud, Theodor Reik, Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Gaylyn Studlar, Leo Bersani, and Lee Edelman.

The main thrust of this chapter is that narcissism, though often cast in a pejorative light, may be useful as a mode of masculine cinematic performance that affords considerable erotic and identificatory license to the queer viewer.

In order to make this case, I explore the ways in which critics have valorized masochism as a resistant mode of masculine subjectivity; I challenge this valorization by suggesting that masochistic male sexuality often serves to bolster, rather than subvert, traditional masculinity.

chapter twO—an ill-fateD bacchanal:

Casualties of War anD the hOrrOr Of the hOmOSOcial In Brian De Palma’s great antiwar film Casualties of War (1989), his characteristic, career-wide experimentation with split-image effects—the split-

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush screen, the split-diopter—takes on an entirely new significance in terms of De Palma’s staging of the masochistic gaze. Daniel Lang wrote an account in 1969
of one of the most harrowing episodes of the Vietnam War: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by a group of American soldiers, one of whom refused to participate in and unsuccessfully opposed the group’s treatment of the woman. The first, and only, film version of this case, De Palma’s film emerges in the year that Bush 41 takes office and within a new wave of Vietnam films instigated by the surprising box-office success of Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986).

In this chapter, I consider the original account by Lang and De Palma’s cinematic rendering of it, which I view as the synthesization of several key themes in his oeuvre, especially the failed heroism of American manhood. I examine De Palma’s film as a representation of American homosociality, providing a historical contextualization of it that illuminates American misogyny and homophobia, the latter no less a key factor in the events as described in the Lang account and De Palma’s film. I provide a theoretical framework of the homosocial that allows us to consider De Palma’s film as a critique of the normative codes of American manhood and what Gayle Rubin, following Levi-Strauss, calls the “traffic in women.” The association of Eriksson, the man who opposed the kidnapping, rape, and murder of the woman, with homosexuality by the ringleader of the group, Meserve, is analyzed as a crucial component of the narrative. I explore the ways in which the film represents homoeroticism as both a galvanizing and threatening element in homosocialized manhood, which inculcates misogyny and homophobia. Further, this film represents a strong corrective to the particular forms of nationalism in the Reagan era, carried over into the Bush era. I also examine the film’s staging of a masculine battle between a “negative narcissism” and a “heroic masochism.”

chapter three—male meDuSaS anD female herOeS:

feStiShiSm anD ambivalence in the silenCe of the lambs This chapter reexamines the pervasive academic understanding of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film as a homophobic text. Considering the early reception of this film about a female fbi agent trainee on the hunt for Buffalo Bill, or Jame Gumb, a serial killer of women, I address the ways in which the film was simultaneously praised for its feminism and denounced for its homophobia, arguing that the representation of queer manhood and femininity should not be thus bifurcated but understood as shared elements of the film’s overarching critique of patriarchal manhood. From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective,

When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware I make the case that Gumb should be interpreted not as a gay man but as a fetishist, a distinct sexual identity with complexities of its own; I also link male fetishism to the figure of the phallic mother. This chapter deviates somewhat from the narcissism/masochism split of the study as a whole (though it remains implicitly important here), but treats fetishism, like masochism, as an alternative form of male strategy for the avoidance of homosexuality. I also tie in the film’s respective quest characters—Clarice Starling, the heroine, and Gumb—with the historical project of American self-made manhood, arguing that the film should be understood as an element within the project of American individualism.

chapter fOur—the hOllywOOD man Date: Split
maSculinity anD the DOuble-prOtagOniSt film

In Bush-to-Bush films, one genre exists in which the narcissism/masochism split is literalized through the complex negotiation for narrative dominance between two protagonists, usually male, both of whom lay legitimate claim to the narrative, a new genre I call the double-protagonist film. With the rise of the double-protagonist film—which, as I explain below, is related to but also distinct from the much more commonly understood “buddy film”—

Classic Hol ywood isolate manhood is transformed into dyadic manhood; dyadic manhood threatens to topple the reign of the heterosexual relationship presumably central to Hol ywood film; and male-male relations of all kinds must now contend with, account for, and orient themselves around a central, often contentious, always complex relationship between two male protagonists played by two male stars of commensurate stature, who therefore demand equal attention and narrative importance.

chapter five—DeStrOying SOmething beautiful:

narciSSiSm, male viOlence, anD the hOmOSOcial
in fight Club

David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) is one of the most culturally resonant and influential films of the 1990s, spawning the still-active titular clubs for young men. This chapter reads Fight Club as an example of fascist ideology in popular filmmaking, arguing that it is an attack on the perceived “softening” of American men in the Clinton era. I insert the film within the rise of male reformation/men’s movement projects such as Robert Bly’s Iron John and the Promise Keepers, arguing that, like these projects, Fincher’s film—which represents a revision of the gender politics of his previous films—works to

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush restore normative masculinity by purging it of the threats of femininity and queer sexuality. Fight Club exemplifies what I locate as a crucial agenda of the double-protagonist Bush-to-Bush film, to transform narcissistic manhood into a more normative masochistic version.

chapter Six—“am i blue?”: vin DieSel anD
multiracial male Sexuality

Whereas Michael Jackson has been largely impugned for, among other things, the attempt to “whiten” his image, Vin Diesel’s ability to pass as white—
despite the explicit problematization of his race in his 1999 film Multi-Facial and in interviews—has been a largely undiscussed aspect of his star image.

Another, also occluded, facet of his star persona is his sexual ambiguity. With his intersecting racial and sexual ambiguity, Diesel emerges as one of the most fascinating and problematic of current male stars. Looking at such films as Pitch Black (2000), Chronicles of Riddick (2004), and xXx (2002), I explore the ways in which racial and sexual ambiguities, as embodied by Diesel, get negotiated and the relationship of such issues to genre filmmaking. I also claim that, while his early films depict him as a brazen, queer narcissist, Diesel’s later films strive to transform him into the normative masochist, a project that has implications for the representation of both his racial and sexual identity.

chapter Seven—the Devil wearS abjectiOn:

the Passion of the Christ

Most of the popular and critical discussions of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film have centered on the issue of anti-Semitism. This chapter enlarges these debates by incorporating the film’s representation of queer sexuality into the discussion. This film pits a masochistic Christ against a narcissistic Satan. The androgynous figure of the Devil represents the height of a homophobic sensibility that undergirds Gibson’s oeuvre and relates to the historical, though underexplored, associations of homosexuality and Satan. I make the case that Gibson’s homophobic representation of the Devil is not unique to him but part of a longstanding tradition in Christianity. Yet, I also argue that it is precisely Gibson’s homophobia that impels his most ingenious cinematic achievements; I consider the relationship between aesthetics and hate as exemplified by Gibson’s filmmaking. I also reinsert the film into the tradition of the Hol ywood Biblical epic.

When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware 11
chapter eight—narciSSuS tranSfigureD:

brokebaCk mountain

This chapter places Ang Lee’s 2005 film within the tradition of the pastoral, arguing that, as a pastoral, the film is itself only one facet of a larger tradition of male representation. Lee revises the Western genre, which often featured a

“split hero,” two heroes who represent, in Laura Mulvey’s terms, an upholder and a personification of the law, through the terms of the new-style double-protagonist film. In doing so, he both critiques the Western genre and brings the insights of the classic Western to bear on postmodern representations of manhood. Arguing that Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) represents a queer version of the masochistic gaze subject, I further argue that Ennis Del Mar (the late Heath Ledger) simultaneously represents queer manhood and a straight male narcissistic subjectivity that must be redressed and reimagined. This film makes a moral case for the “transfiguration” of Narcissus.

chapter One

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Part One: Transformations in the Hollywood Masculine Lasse Hallström’s slight and enjoyable 2005 film Casanova, starring the late Heath Ledger as the titular legendary seducer and set in 1753 Venice, contains a scene that metonymically represents the shifts in the Bush-to-Bush representation of masculinity. In one typically antic, sitcom-like moment during a masked ball, Casanova sits at a banquet table attempting to wax eloquent before an assemblage of highborn dignitaries, including the free-thinking, feminist activist he loves and her mother. Unbeknownst to them, a rapacious young woman (Casanova’s fiancée) beneath the table proceeds to gratify Casanova orally. As Hallström stages the scene, the primary focus is on Ledger’s face, as he receives a pleasure that he must not acknowledge. Although the principle point of the scene would appear to be Casanova’s risqué comedic predicament, another aspect of it has equal weight: our experience of watching Casanova/Ledger experiencing sexual pleasure and resisting it.

With the focus on Casanova/Ledger, the film represents male sexuality as spectacle, made all the more spectacular by the male star-protagonist’s invol-untary submission to his own sexual experience. Moreover, our experience of the scene derives from an expectation on the moviemakers’ part that what we pay to watch is not Casanova’s ability to dominate the fairer sex through wit and the full arsenal of his seductive charms, but Casanova being dominated by an unseen virago.

The career of Vin Diesel provides another example of the overturning of the gendered expectations of star manhood in recent Hol ywood film. xXx (2002), at least in its first half, is the only Diesel film other than the 2000

Pitch Black to give Diesel’s droll deviousness its full range. It also fleetingly exhibits the subversive potentialities of Diesel’s ambiguous star image. In one

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1
scene, Diesel’s hero, Xander Cage, walks into a bedroom where he discovers a highly limber Czech woman cavorting near the bed upon which she will offer herself up to Xander. The way the scene is shot, Diesel’s body is as much up for our visual delectation as hers is. We see him in full-shot, invited to take him in fully, to consume his body as we watch him consume hers. With his usual monotone panache, Diesel/Xander muses, “The things I’m gonna have to do for my country.” Country matters here, to echo Shakespeare’s obscene pun in Hamlet, become a matter of national security, but Diesel’s unsettling display of male sexuality sends up the idea of a national manhood. Conventional male sexual domination of woman as spectacularized site of visual pleasure—the familiar Laura Mulvey paradigm—gives way to a spectacle in which the male spectator is himself as much an objectified spectacle as the spectacularized woman. If Diesel’s racial and sexual ambiguity facilitates this spectacularization of his body, it also endows us with unusual access to the body of a Hol ywood male action star. (We turn to Diesel’s career in Chapter Six.)

Mulvey’s famous paradigms of the masculine gaze that dominates women, whose spectacularized bodies connote to-be-looked-at-ness, no longer make any sense, or, at least, no longer make Mulvey’s specific, early 1970s sense. In Hol ywood film of the present, the male figure just as often and just as intently connotes to-be-looked-at-ness; a perpetual incitement to the eye, the male lead of contemporary film is just as watched as he is the watcher, a Narcissus whose own reflection watches him; men are now not only the subject of the gaze but also, as Steven Drukman argues, “the bearer of the look,” the role Mulvey had assigned to cinematic women.1 As I argued in the Introduction, we can look back to the early 1990s as the period in which Hol ywood masculinity became self-aware. In this study, we will track the impact this self-awareness has had on both films and their audiences.

Evidence of queer sensibility in Hol ywood films may lie not in explicit, mimetic (lifelike, realistic) representation of queerness but in allegorical, non-mimetic narratives that not only lend themselves to but also actively solicit queer interpretation and, more intensely, in depictions of sexual identity that thwart, refuse, and, in some cases, utterly denature traditional categories. It is precisely in the disorganization of normative conceptions of masculinity that points of resistance in Hol ywood film can be discovered. Part of what has facilitated this disorganization has been the perceived “crisis” in masculinity of the 1990s, what writers like Jon Lewis and Alexandra Juhasz call “the end of masculinity as we know it.”2 Juhasz calls films such as Fight Club and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (which features a running gag of a sodomitical

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure 1.1. Even in seduction scenes, Vin Diesel’s body is the one on display ( The Fast and the Furious , 2001).

relationship between Saddam Hussein and the Devil) “decidedly feminist in the sense that they are aggressively self-conscious (and self-confident) about the mobility of gender.” (Both films are from 1999, just on the verge of the shift from Clinton to Bush 43.) We reside “in a new kind of one-sex era where all are castrated,” Juhasz writes. “Let’s face it,” she advises us, “masculinity as we knew it and loved it is over. ”3 For Juhasz, the dissevering (in some cases quite literal) in our era of the phallus—the symbolic, abstracted form of male power that takes literal, biological form in the male sexual organ—from the male body, its up-for-grab-ness, its availability to anyone regardless of gender, approaches the utopian. In a similar argument in Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam encourages us to see masculinity as a quality independent of gender, as, in the cases she lays out, a quality that can occur in women completely independently of their male counterparts. Though unacknowledged as such, the decoupling of gendered characteristics from biological gender stems from Freud’s radical views of the subject. As Freud wrote in one of his most bracing essays, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Differences between the Sexes” (1925), “pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.”4 It is precisely the uncertainty of male

“content” in Bush-to-Bush Hol ywood film that makes it so unstable and intriguing.

meta-manhOOD

This book picks up where two important studies leave off. As my title suggests, my book is an homage to Robin Wood’s classic study, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Sharing Wood’s Freudian focus, I add perspectives from

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1
queer theory, masculinity studies, and American cultural studies. Though very different in approach from hers, my study also follows from Susan Jeffords’s Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Whereas Jeffords provides sweeping summaries, my approach, while cognizant of the overarching political issues of the shifting period that I study, zeroes in on the textual specificity of particular films for their value as aesthetic as well as political statements.

My study examines the fate of the figure Jeffords discovered at the threshold of the Bush 41 era, the “New Man” who represented a break with 1980s hard-body masculinism. This New Man was able to “transform himself from the hardened, muscle-bound, domineering man of the eighties into the con-siderate, loving, and self-sacrificing man of the nineties.”5 Using the titular character of James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) as an example, Jeffords argues that new directions for masculinity would move “not, as in the 1980s, outward into increasingly extravagant spectacles of violence and power (as Rambo and Ronald Reagan showed, these displays had become self-parody), but inward, into increasingly emotional displays of masculine sensitivities, traumas, and burdens.” The New Man of the 1990s, observes Jeffords, would shift “the ground away from the externalities through which

[masculine] logic had been defined in the 1980s to the ‘new’ internal qualities of the more ‘human’ man.” Jeffords adds, however, that this would not be “a simple negation but rather a rewriting, a repetition, a retelling of the story of masculinity”: “the reproduction of masculine authority (now freed from civil authority) through the affirmation of individualism.”6 Although Jeffords’s argument was oracular in many respects, on this key point it was not: Hol ywood’s depiction of individualism from the end of the Reagan era forward has turned out to be much less than affirming. The masculine individualism that Hol ywood has represented since the late 1980s has been a fissured one, as demonstrated by the roaming identities of Carter Nix in De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), the bifurcated male psyche of Fight Club (1999), the collective male ego of Zodiac (2007), all representations that defy any notion of a structural masculine coherence.

In the 1980s, hard-body stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris signaled a return to the narrative dominance wielded by the male star of Classic Hol ywood. That dominance had been overturned by the New Hol ywood films of the 1970s, which cast a lurid psychosexual light on the image of the male star. (This is not in any way to suggest that Classic Hol ywood masculinity is not riven with its own psychosexual instabilities, only that, as the first decade to break with the studio system, this period is notable for the sheer intensity with

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush which it subjected masculinity to critical scrutiny.) The 1980s worked to restore masculine power, casting masculinity in a hypermasculine mode that, however cartoonish it became, was maintained with a deadly seriousness that actively worked against self-knowledge.

With films from the Bush 41 era onward, however, a profound shift occurred. Masculinity became self-conscious as never before. Hol ywood films began to subject manhood to a different kind of light—the light of ironic knowledge. Although rarely discussed in these terms, the vaunted irony of the 1990s has deep implications for gendered identity. In this era, masculinity became aware of itself as both monolith and joke. Masculinity now performed its own iconic, chiseled status in the awareness that it did so as a performance: manhood became meta-manhood.7 In its post-Reagan New Man, Hol ywood produced a split masculinity, which performed traditional roles of gendered identity while also acknowledging its ironic, meta-textual status. This is not an easily endured self-consciousness: the alternate techniques of ironic distance and violence—joking or punching one’s way out of complicity—continued to allow masculinity to defend itself against self-knowledge. Yet, this knowledge also began to infiltrate the strongholds of masculine power.8

The meta-textuality of manhood opens up spaces for new kinds of queer viewing. Bush-to-Bush films—the period in which gays and lesbians became

“queer” and transgendered sexuality gained inclusion within the movement for gay rights—acknowledge the open secret of homosexuality in their representation of straight masculinity as self-aware and their increasingly explicit representation of homosexuality itself. As Justin Wyatt shows, “significant points of connection” between traditional modes of manhood and a new queer manhood can be seen in these films.9 Given the enduring prohibitions placed on the male body as a site of erotic interest, the queer gaze is necessarily subversive and threatening; yet, with the broad new commodification of the male form, this gaze is also now actively solicited by mass culture. New American men strut their cinematic stuff in a new age of ever-heightened awareness of male bodies as objects of multiple, competing desiring gazes.

I suggest that it is precisely in the narcissistic male image that a powerful potentiality for resistance lies, precisely within the self-aware beauty of the new Hol ywood male star that a potent queer radicalism awaits. Kathryn Bigelow’s languorous camera roving over the drenched and taut bodies of Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves in Point Break (1991); Neil Jordan’s staging of vampiric exchange as homoerotic narcissistic fantasy in Interview with a Vampire (1994); blonde Narcissus Jude Law’s ability to entrance desirers of any sex in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); Vin Diesel’s mysterious and intoxicating narcissistic beauty in Pitch Black (2000) and The Fast and the Furious

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1

Figure 1.. Narcissus beckons: Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) (2001); and the almost unbearable narcissistic ardor of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005) are some examples of a mesmerizing narcissistic spectacle in which the male body provides discordant, multi-gendered desiring gazes with ample unclassifiable, undisciplined, or at least discipline-resistant, substance for scopophilic, somatic, emotional pleasures.

These new developments enlarge, at their height make good upon, popular art’s potential to provide a broad, polyvalent array of pleasures, a polyvalency with tremendous potential to liberate queer spectatorship. As Judith Mayne writes in her incisive study Cinema and Spectatorship: Film theory has been so bound by the heterosexual symmetry that supposedly governs Hol ywood cinema that it has ignored the possibility, for instance, that one of the distinct pleasures of the cinema may well be a “safe zone” in which homosexual as well as heterosexual desires can be fantasized and acted out. . . . desire and pleasure in the cinema may well function to problematize the categories of heterosexual versus homosexual.10

Film genders have long since moved beyond the hetero vs. homo stage.

Our new queerly inflected mainstream movie practices actively open up these safe zones of polyvalent pleasures—at least, sometimes they do, and, more importantly, they can. Or, to put it another way, Hol ywood films don’t always play it “safe”—a new volatility inheres within the cinematic construction of gender that has powerful implications for queer spectatorship. Critics such as Mayne and Brett Farmer remind us of the extraordinary, and often over-

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush looked, power of cinematic fantasy, which allows the viewer to experience dominant culture in often oppositional, counter-intentional ways. Fantasy now works in tandem with a new queer openness.

narciSSiSm/maSOchiSm: the theSiS Of thiS bOOk

The split masculinity in Bush-to-Bush Hol ywood film reflects and responds to the highly charged conflicts in normative gendered roles that characterize this cultural era. Movies register the conflicts by dramatizing them in characters and narratives that render masculinity self-conscious, torn between an open acknowledgment of homoerotic tensions and a steadfast lockdown on all gendered roles. I propose that a means of accounting for this split in masculine identity is to consider it as the result of an ongoing conflict between narcissistic and masochistic modes of masculine performance, a conflict through which the New Male subjectivity emerges. To offer the thesis of this study, in representations of manhood in Hol ywood film from the late 1980s to the twenty-first century present, narcissism and masochism emerge—in contra-distinction, as I will show, to their discursive uses in theoretical treatments—
as a binaristic relation within a film’s thematic structures, sometimes even within its diegetic world.

Several key films of the Bush-to-Bush period may be described as a struggle between narcissistic and masochistic modes of male identity. This struggle can be waged within a protagonist’s relationship to narrative or through the treatment of a star and the manipulation of his star image. Or, it can be waged through the conflict between the protagonist-star and another, what I call the double-protagonist film that emerges within Bush-to-Bush cinema, related to but also distinct from the Western and the “buddy film,” genres that also combine male stars. (In Chapter Four, I elaborate on the double-protagonist film.)

The modern concepts of narcissism (a set of character traits that produce the particular sexual identity in which one takes one’s self as a sexual object) and masochism (a mode of achieving sexual gratification through the “lust for pain”) have their origins in psychoanalytic theory. These concepts have been crucial to film theory of the past few decades, especially in its psychoanalytic cast, dating from the “Grand Theory” of the 1970s, the tenets of which Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” embodies. They have also been important to psychoanalytically inflected queer theory, a theoretical approach that generally challenges essentialist views of gender and sexuality. One of the major contentions of this study is that, in criticism since Mulvey’s article in both the fields of film theory and queer

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1
theory, masochism has been positively cast in the role of a male sexuality that resists the structures of normative power, while narcissism has been cast as either a regressive sexuality or the bastion of white male privilege. Briefly put, the argument I make in the following pages is that, despite the commonly pejorative uses made of the term, narcissism is a potentially radical mode of male sexuality that can defy normative codes and categories of gender, whereas masochism, far from being radical, has emerged as the default mode of a traditional, normative masculinity.

For readers seeking a fuller, more specialized engagement with the theoretical literature, in Part Two of this chapter I offer a review and a critique of the treatments of narcissism and masochism in classical psychoanalysis, film theory, and queer theory.

why narciSSiSm?

The Ovidian version of the myth of Narcissus is a cautionary tale.11 The indescribably beautiful young male Narcissus is an equal opportunity rebuker of the innumerable sexual advances that come his way. Desired by both females and males and spurning them all pitilessly, Narcissus suffers the same fate to which he subjects all his admirers, to love a beautiful boy who cannot return this love. One of Narcissus’s admirers, Echo, can claim equal importance within this myth. A loquacious nymph, Echo distracts Hera from her husband Zeus’s philandering. The queen of the gods woefully punishes Echo: she can now only repeat what others have said, eventually becoming only a voice’s Echo. Falling in love with the reflection of himself he sees in a pool of water, Narcissus eventually realizes that the being he stares at and loves is his own reflection and experiences the pain his beauty has caused others. But knowledge in no way lessens the ardent desire that enflames and consumes him. Helplessly fixated, he stares at himself until he withers away, becoming the flower to which he provides a name. In a distinctively Ovidian detail, the dead Narcissus stares at his image reflected in the Styx, the river of death, even on his way to the underworld.

In his study Reflecting Narcissus, Steven Bruhm describes Narcissus as the figure who rejects. “As Narcissus rejects Echo and the boys who want him, he rejects not only the dictate to desire another (a socially prescribed and approved other), but also the drive to stabilize a range of binarisms upon which gender in Western culture is founded.” Bruhm lists some of the binarisms associated with the “problem of Narcissus”: solipsism vs. communality; surface vs. depth; regression vs. growth; madness vs. sanity; self-obsession vs.

democracy; and sterility vs. signification. “Because Narcissus is seen to prefer

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush the first term of the binarisms over the culturally privileged second, his rejections have made him utterly rejectable: the sad delusion he is made to perform stabilizes a culture that attaches itself to the ‘healthy’ and ‘productive,’ if only by rejecting Narcissus’s rejections.”12

Narcissism, as I argue below in my positive revaluation of Freudian theory, especially the mother-son relationship of the homosexual narcissist, has a powerful queer function that lies precisely in Narcissus’s intransigence, his refusal to desire normatively, and in the opportunity he provides to gaze upon male beauty, which he gives us the impression we want to do forever. Narcissus also presents the nexus of both heterosexual and homosexual desires, which fuse in the erotic interests he incites but refuses to satisfy. Narcissus stands in for both the queer male who enshrines his own beauty and the straight male who is the icon of desire upon whom a prohibition against looking is both placed and enforced. Narcissus, like no other figure, fuses desire and prohibition: it is always transgressive to look narcissistically.

Because narcissism has so pervasively been cast in negative terms, it may seem perverse to make the claim for it as resistant, even joyous.13 It may seem even more perverse to return to Freud, long associated with the pathologization of narcissism I am challenging, to begin this work of positively reclaiming narcissism, although in doing so, I am following a path already laid out for me by such psychoanalytic queer theorists as Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. As discussed below, these inspiring predecessors also make my task more difficult because they also actively figure in the valorization of masochism that this study challenges. As I have stated and will further demonstrate, masochism is indeed a quite useful category of a potentially radical, resistant masculinity. Yet, some deep problems inhere within the model, dating back to its historical late Victorian emergence. As Suzanne R. Stewart, in a study of late nineteenth-century masochism and manhood, writes, “The problem with so many postmodern theories of the subject is the elevation of the failure of subjectivity into a general condition of all subjectivity, a failure that is then celebrated as subversive.”14 What I will attempt to demonstrate is that masochism lends itself to appropriation by the very same structures of masculine power to which radical queer manhood claims to be resistant.

I’m stressing the utopian possibilities of narcissism at the moment, but it must be clearly stated that, although there is a radical potentiality at work in this cinematic figuring of narcissism, it does not manifest itself radically in every film, indeed in most films. The definitive example of the anti-narcissistic tendency in American film is Mary Harron’s 2000 version of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. As Patrick Bateman, the titular psycho, Christian Bale displays male cleavage with a downright queer aplomb, but his gleaming musculature, deluxe accommodations, and devotion to self-care

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1
all evince his murderous, maniacal hollowness, not anything like an ecstatic autoerotic bliss. If we look back at key Bush-to-Bush films, I would say that narcissism is not positively figured in any of them, with the possible exception of Interview with a Vampire, which figures narcissistic homoerotic desire as a heady flight up to the heavens (in the rapturously erotic, frightening, and beautiful scene in which Tom Cruise’s Lestat bites Brad Pitt’s Louis and they fly up into the air, narcissistic desire for possession of the reflected image transformed into vampiric exchange). Narcissism implicitly informs these male-male relations, but as relations they represent narcissistic desire as a dead-end. It is the charge of male desirability demonstrated as palpable to other males that endows many of these films with a queer energy and emotional power and erotic frisson, but rarely do the narcissistic desires achieve anything like a satisfying resolution. The male star’s refusal to be incorporated into the other’s desire remains as ornery as it is oppositional. Moreover, narcissism remains a refuge of male privilege even as it promises to liberate manhood from constricting confines. A good deal of the power of Brian De Palma’s film Casualties of War (1989), to which we turn in Chapter Two, for example, lies in its challenge to white heterosexual male narcissism, which it depicts as thoroughly negative.

To state my broad intentions early, I hope to make queer theory an accessible and il uminating popular mode of analysis for the study of mainstream film.

I also mean to make a case for the enduring explanatory power of Freudian theory. In the remainder of this chapter, I wil contextualize this study as a whole by comparing theoretical treatments of narcissism and masochism, laying the groundwork for and establishing my own critical position within these debates. In the fol owing sections, I wil briefly explore the psychoanalytic history of the concepts and then consider their uses in psychoanalytical y inflected film and queer theory. Given that I am addressing a wide variety of treatments of narcissism and masochism, and that I am attempting to reorient queer theory’s positions on these debates, of which it is a crucial component, the argument that fol ows is necessarily expansive and polemical.

Part Two: Narcissism/Masochism:

Theory and Cinematic Masculinity
re-enviSiOning freuD’S narciSSuS

Narcissism involves taking one’s self as a sexual object, a libidinal investment in the self. As such, it has been associated in psychoanalytic history with

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush homosexuality insofar as homosexuality has been conceived as a desire for sameness. To discuss narcissism in psychoanalysis, therefore, is impossible without bringing in the issue of same-sex desire. Some important critics have railed against these associations, primarily because they work to cast homosexuality as regressive, opposed to mature, adult sexuality that properly takes the opposite sex as an erotic object; other critics have sought to find meaning and value precisely within the Freudian paradigms, which have so often fueled the pejorative uses of both the terms narcissism and homosexuality. Following the latter critics, but mindful of the critiques of the former, I turn to Freud to make positive sense of the linkages between narcissism and same-sex desire.

Since Freud published his 1914 essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,”

homosexuality and narcissism have been inextricably linked, the Siamese twins of psychoanalytic theory. Yet, interestingly, Freud universalizes narcissism within his discussion of the two types of infant sexual object-choice, which he distinguishes as the “anaclitic” and the narcissistic. The first, the anaclitic, or “leaning-up-against,” type of object-choice focuses on “those persons who have to do with the feeding, care, and protection of the child

. . . in other words, the mother or her substitute.” The second, the narcissistic, can be found “especially in persons whose libidinal development has suffered some disturbance, as in perverts and homosexuals, that in the choice of their love-object they have taken as their model not their mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love object and their type of object-choice may be termed narcissistic. ” But the next line that concludes this paragraph anticipates Freud’s argument that narcissism bears a much greater significance than its prevalence among “perverts and homosexuals especially” would suggest: “This observation provides us with our strongest motive for regarding the hypothesis of narcissism as a necessary one.” Indeed, narcissism’s necessity reveals itself in its availability to all individuals as an object-choice. In one of his typically sneakily brilliant turns, Freud reveals narcissism, the special penchant of perverts and homosexuals, as a universal sexual disposition: a primary narcissism exists in everyone. 15 Freud also distinguishes “primary narcissism” from “secondary narcissism.” Primary narcissism is the “original libidinal cathexis of the self,” whereas secondary narcissism, as Jeremy Holmes puts it, is a regressive state in which the libido

“(here conceptualized as a kind of psychic fluid)” of narcissists is “withdrawn from the external world and reinvested in themselves and their own bodies.”

As Holmes describes it, “Freud believed that people suffering from paranoia and schizophrenia, and to some extent hypochondriacal illnesses, regressed, often in the face of loss, to” this secondary narcissistic state, described by Ronald Britton as “libidinal narcissism.”16

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush In an important reading, Michael Warner argues that the concept of narcissism has been “primitively” used in psychoanalytic theory to calumniate queer sexuality as regressive and self-fixated.17 The most useful point of his argument is his challenge to the prevailing view, in some circles, that the homosexual narcissist desires himself reflected in someone else, desires sameness. “Why is gender assumed to be our only access to alterity?” Warner heat-edly asks. “Can it actually be imagined that people in homosexual relations have no other way of distinguishing between self and not-self? That no other marker of difference, such as race, could intervene; or that the pragmatics of dialogue would not render alterity meaningful, even in the minimal imaginary intersubjectivity of cruising?”18 Warner then goes on to a blunt declaration of his position: “The central imperative of heterosexual ideology is that the homosexual be supposed to be out of dialogue on the subject of his being.

Imagining that the homosexual is narcissistically contained in an unbreakable fixation on himself serves two functions at once: it allows a self-confirming pathology by declaring homosexuals’ speech, their interrelations, to be an illusion; and more fundamentally it allows the constitution of heterosexuality as such. ”19 Warner wants us to understand that psychoanalysis, as an arm of power, facilitates the “utopian erotics of modern subjectivity” that work to obscure what institutionalized heterosexuality has in common with homosexuality, a dependence on “a self-reflexive erotics of the actual ego measured against its ideals,” a dependence made visible in homosexuality but decisively obscured in heterosexuality. “Heterosexuality deploys an understanding of gender as alterity in order to mobilize, but also to obscure” what are its own

“narcissistic sources,” hence the crucial function of a “discourse about homosexuality as a displacement” of these disavowed sources.20

I’m in full agreement with Warner that the view of homosexuality as desire for sameness and as a stunted inability to recognize and erotically respond to “difference” is a deeply primitive one. Yet, the central flaw of Warner’s powerful argument is that it hinges on a reductive and unimaginative reading of Freud, one of the most complex, inconsistent, and suggestive of thinkers.

What Freud says in one essay will be reimagined, if not altogether refuted, in another; part of the abiding problem with Freud is that the uses made of him, especially in American psychiatry, have often been pernicious in their flattening out of his strangeness and complexity. As Jonathan Freedman has written, American psychiatry and culture generally rejected precisely the

“determinedly despairing Freud of the late metapsychological writings: the Freud, that is, for whom the vicissitudes of the psyche and hence of culture itself are governed by the indomitability of the death-drive, the inevitability of repetition-compulsion, and the impossibility of cure.”21

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Freud returned to the subject of homosexuality several times, sometimes seeing it as a perversion, sometimes as the “most important of the perversions” (cold comfort, to be sure), but his attitude was not one of “complacent” hostility, as Warner describes it. Rather, Freud found homosexuality a richly suggestive and disturbing site of inquiry, and his treatment of it cannot be simply dismissed as phobic. What Warner leaves out of his view of Freud’s view of homosexual perversion is the centrality of perversity in Freud’s thinking, and both homosexuality and heterosexuality’s relationship to it, as Jonathan Dollimore has persuasively demonstrated.22

The most surprising omission in Warner’s attack on Freud’s theory of homosexual narcissism is the centrality of the mother-son relationship to Freud’s theory of homosexual development.23 This theory has proven extremely contentious and controversial, and I treat it in greater depth in Chapter Three’s discussion of The Silence of the Lambs. What I wish to suggest here, and take up again in subsequent chapters, is that, however perniciously exploited as a basis for homophobic practices in American psychiatry—which used Freud to diagnose homosexuality as a pathologization of the Oedipus complex, in the case of the male a pathological identification with the mother rather than the father—Freud’s theory of the mother-son relationship in terms of homosexuality should not necessarily be treated as itself pernicious; at the very least it should be reexamined. It may be recuperated as a powerful alternative to what, as Jacques Lacan theorized, is our ineluctable entry into the Symbolic order of the Father, the realm of law, language, and reason in which we become subjects. The homosexual male who identifies with the mother rather than the father—and therefore the Mother rather than the Father—thwarts Oedipus and his own proper socialization. As I will argue in Chapter Eight, the theme of gay male sexuality as mother-identified resistance to patriarchy is crucial to Brokeback Mountain.

As Tim Dean and Christopher Lane point out in their invaluable collection, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissism “have been used against lesbians and gay men.” But theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis, in her appropriation of the concept of perversion, and Leo Bersani, in his retooling of the concept of narcissism, demonstrate, in the words of Dean and Lane, the “profound usefulness” of these concepts “for thinking affirmatively about nonnormative sexualities.” Bersani’s concept of homo-narcissism—which he reframes as “inaccurate self-replication”—disrupts and denatures the concepts of self and other, a maneuver that threatens to push “psychoanalytic theory to its breaking point.”24 Tim Dean writes of Freud on the Narcissus theme in his 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci as being at his “most inventive.” This work was part of “a bizarre narrative of

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Freud’s own construction—as if Freud felt compelled to rival Ovid’s imaginative genius by creating a story of impossibly elaborate metamorphosis: the transformation of a boy into his mother.”25 “We might say,” writes Dean,

“that psychoanalysis reveals the otherness within sameness, and so explodes the myth that sameness only involves self-sameness.” To take just one example, the boy Leonardo, “by installing his mother in and as his own mind, has become other to himself.”26 This is the radical potential in Freud’s treatment that Warner overlooks.

freuD’S maSOchiSm

As John K. Noyes observes, in his erudite study of the history of masochism, the invention of the term “masochism” was itself an expression of a struggle for control. “The most celebrated moment in the history of masochism is the year 1890, when the Viennese doctor Richard von Krafft-Ebing named a pathology after the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In his best-selling novel, Venus in Furs [1870], Sacher-Masoch had told the story of Severin, a passionate and idealistic nobleman caught between the dictates of reason, domination, and control—everything society told him a man should be—and his own peculiar passion for submitting to the cruelty of dominant women. In his study Psychopathia Sexualis, [Krafft-Ebing] described masochism as ‘a peculiar perversion of the vita sexualis in which the individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused.’”27

Noyes points out that masochism was invented as male masochism and that

“a thematics of feminine masochism and women’s masochism emerged from the invention of male masochism.”28 In his 1919 essay, “A Child is Being Beaten,” Freud inverts this genealogy by beginning with female masochism and extrapolating male masochism from the feminine example.

In his 1924 essay, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” a decisive shift in Freud’s thinking on the subject occurs.29 Whereas he previously conjectured that masochism stemmed from an original sadism, in 1924 Freud takes the view of masochism as primary and erotogenic, the remnant of the human being’s original death-drive. What modified the death-drive, kept it from dominating, was the life-instinct, or libido, a crucial component of Freudian theory that tends to get de-emphasized, due to the cachet achieved by his theory of the death-drive presented in his later Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he argues that the chief drive of human beings, what we most ardently desire, is to move from life to inorganic lifelessness, stasis, death.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush When I turn to queer theory’s uses of masochism, I will take up again this significant shift in Freud’s thinking on masochism.

Is there a relationship between masochism and narcissism? At one stage in his thinking, Freud theorized masochism as a regressive return to narcissism.

As Noyes describes it, the Freud of his 1919 essay “A Child is Being Beaten”

understood masochism as a failure of sadism, sadism now turned upon the self, “a regression from the object to the ego.” What changed in Freud’s theory of masochism, as his 1924 essay on the subject evinces, was his incorporation of his new theory of the death-drive, developed in his 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which for Freud competes with the life-instinct, or libido, for dominance. “Sadism and masochism” for Freud, writes Noyes, “arise out of the respective success and failure of [the] outward diversion of the destructive instinct [flowing outward from the death-drive] onto objects in the external world. The failure of outward diversion takes the form of a libidinal binding of the portion of the destructive instinct that ‘does not share in this transportation outwards,’ [as Freud puts it in 1924]. When the organism fails to completely live out the ‘instinct for mastery, or the will to power, masochism arises.’ Masochism,” in other words, “is a result of sadism’s failures.”30

In his 1941 Masochism in Sex and Society, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, critiquing Karen Horney’s conflations of narcissism and masochism, describes the “characteristic of self-satisfaction” as crucial to narcissism: The beautiful youth of the Greek myth who fell in love with his own image reflected in the pool’s surface surely did not give a thought about the attention of others. He was absorbed by the sight of his own beauty and did not care for his environment. How different is the impression the masochist makes on us! His displaying and showing himself have all the characteristics of wooing, of making himself noticeable. His behavior is just the counterpart to narcissistic behavior. It would be more correct to state that evidently the narcissism of these masochistic persons had been deeply disturbed as they make such frantic efforts to attract the attention of others. Therefore masochism is never a sign of narcissism, but an expression of its being damaged and of an attempt to restore it.31

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit discuss Freud’s concept of masochistic narcissism as identification with a hated object.32

As I will be arguing in my analyses of individual films, Hol ywood plays out in its representation of masculinity the kind of split that Reik locates between the completely self-involved, self-sufficient narcissist and the prancing, look-at-me, attention-grabbing masochist. This split reaches its most literal

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush form in the double-protagonist film, in which a masochistic male character desperately attempts to control and allure a remote and beautiful narcissistic male.

narciSSiSm, maSOchiSm, anD film theOry

Narcissism has been crucial to film theory since the 1970s. Critics associated with what has been termed “Grand Theory”—a critical approach to film that fuses Althusserian-Marxism with Lacanian psychoanalysis—such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey have theorized about the narcissistic nature of film spectatorship. These “Apparatus Critics”—so called because of their interest in the cinematic apparatus itself—argue that film returns the spectator to an infantile, imaginary narcissistic state. Because my own argument flows directly from Mulvey’s work, with its revised uses of Freud, my focus will be on the significance of her arguments, which has been considerable.

In her seminal 1975 Screen essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”

Mulvey argues that the film spectator, gendered male, identifies with the onscreen male protagonist and joins him in a project of shared narcissistic omnipotence, the psychic state of masculinist hegemony.

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of his gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror.33

In terms now almost unbearably familiar, Mulvey argues that the dominant Hol ywood cinema is organized around the patriarchal white heterosexual male gaze, which spectacularizes and objectifies women’s sexuality. In a sexually imbalanced world, writes Mulvey, “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” The male protagonist/spectator’s scopophilic pleasure (a ravenous desire to look) arises from “using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight”; the woman is

“coded for strong visual and erotic impact” so that she may “connote to-be-looked-at-ness. ”34 Mulvey suggests that the male spectator-protagonist has two strategies for dealing with the castration anxieties provoked by the spectacularized woman: either voyeurism, “investigating the woman, demystifying

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush her mystery,” or fetishistic scopophilia, “[completely disavowing] castration by the substitution of a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous,” a psychic defense that centers on overvaluation of woman, “the cult of the female star.”35 Alfred Hitchcock, especially in Vertigo (1958), provides a synthesizing example, for Mulvey, of the first strategy; the ornately hyper-stylized films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich, the second.

(My disagreement with Mulvey can be best summarized by my completely antithetical reading of Vertigo: in my view, it is a film that resolutely critiques and challenges the masculinist gaze.)

Despite the severe limitations of Mulvey’s position, the feminist relevance of her argument makes her work enduringly valuable, and it is a testament to the powerful rhetoric of her 1975 essay that it continues to withstand ongoing critical challenges. But it should be noted that “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was a very early Mulvey article, and her own views have evolved over time, though this evolution has not resolved their controversial nature. Mulvey’s essay on the 1941 Citizen Kane for the bfi Film Classics series bespeaks considerable development in her views of the male gaze.

“[Orson] Welles’s own towering presence on the screen provides a magnetic draw for the spectator’s eye and leaves little space for sexualised voyeurism.”36

This interpretation of the figure of Kane defies Mulvey’s own definitive, 1975
interpretation of Hol ywood cinema and the patriarchal gaze that objectifies women, always presented as spectacular objects. In her recent arguments in such works as Fetishism and Curiosity (1996) and Death 24x a Second (2006), Mulvey has offered new positions; particularly valuable are her developments of the idea of the “curious” spectator (1996) and the “possessive spectator”

(2006).

Such a changed outlook suggests both the elasticity of Mulvey’s ongoing work and the new uses that can be made of it. Yet, one could also argue that Mulvey has never really changed her essential positions, only enlarged them in response to new work, often critical of her own. For example, in her Citizen Kane monograph, she allows us to think about Kane (Orson Welles) as a visual object himself only by arguing that the film, in its refusal of sexualized voyeurism, makes a decisive break with Classic Hol ywood traditions. Her 1975 claims then remain unchallenged because Citizen Kane is an anomalous film within the canon. In “Visual Pleasure,” Mulvey argues that woman, who “connotes to-be-looked-at-ness,” is the bearer, not the wielder, of the masculine look/gaze. In “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’” her 1981 follow-up to and partial revision of the 1975 essay, Mulvey concedes that a female gaze can be theorized. Yet more importantly, she argues that even if a female gaze does indeed exist, it is essentially and at most

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

“masochistic,” and, since it must copy or identify with a masculinist point of view, “transvestic.”

Many critics (including, ambiguously, Mulvey herself) have, from a variety of urgent needs, chal enged Mulvey’s inescapably absolutist early views.

Susan White charts the “almost hypnotically powerful effect on feminist film theorists” of Mulvey’s work. White also considers the ways in which recent critics, after many years of laboring over Mulvey’s paradigms, have argued that female desire, so elusive in “Visual Pleasure,” can erupt in the “gaps and fissures” of dominant texts, and that, moreover, the image of universalized white, middle- or upper-class woman Mulvey deploys itself needs to be painstakingly problematized.37 In their immense 1996 collection of essays, Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll present numerous views in vehement dispute with those of Grand Theory. In The Real Gaze (2007), Todd McGowan critiques Grand Theory for its insufficiently Lacanian rigor; his work seeks to provide a more accurate version of Lacanian views of such crucial concepts as the gaze. One of the most consistent ways that critics have re-butted Mulvey’s construction of cinematic viewing as narcissistic complicity has been to turn positively to an economy of masochism that may transcend this bad narcissism, and it is this particular intervention that we most attentively concern ourselves with here.

reScuing SpectatOrShip thrOugh maSOchiSm

Such critics as D. N. Rodowick, Steve Neale, Gaylyn Studlar, Kaja Silverman, Tania Modleski, Carol J. Clover, and Robert Corber have enlarged, in highly various ways, the paradigms of Mulvey’s 1975 essay to include an economy of masochism within the theorization of both the spectator-protagonist relationship and the representation of gender. Since Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure,”

narcissism and masochism have emerged as crucial concepts for considering film spectatorship and gendered representation within the ever-contentious debates the 1975 Mulveyan position continues to inspire. These film studies debates generally relegate narcissism to the filmic world of the protagonist and masochism to the spectator straining to enter that chimerical world.

In film theory treatments of narcissism and masochism, the latter concept has come to enjoy a far more secure position as a resistant sexual mode.

Though narcissism has been reimagined and reappropriated in some quarters for its positive value, it still negatively bears, on the one hand, the traces of its Mulvey-esque associations with traditional masculinism and, on the other hand, the pejorative patina of its association with homophobic denunciations of homosexuality. In contrast, masochism has been valorized as a male sub-

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush jectivity that defies traditional masculinism. Masochism as a critical preoccupation—and, more importantly, as a mode of male sexuality affirmed as resistant and disruptive—extends from the early 1990s to the present, as evinced by the remarkable correspondence between the treatments of masochism in Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (1993), a study of cinematic corporeality in the works of such filmmakers as Cronenberg, Romero, and Warhol, and Brett Farmer’s Spectacular Passions (2000), about the importance of fantasy to queer spectatorship. These are both excellent studies despite what is, in my view, their mutual wrongheadedness about the political radicalism of masochism.38

A great deal has been written in response to Mulvey’s 1975 formulations, but I limit my focus to those most pertinent to our study. In his essay “Masculinity as Spectacle,” Steve Neale points out that “there can be no simple and unproblematic identification on the part of the spectator, male or female, with Mulvey’s ‘ideal ego’ on the screen.”39 D. N. Rodowick problematizes Mulvey’s paradigms by adding masochism to the mix: the split Mulvey sets up between the star/ideal ego’s authoritarian omnipotence and spectatorial submission (which results in a shared omnipotence between image and spectator) can produce a masochistic element in relations between image and spectator. As Rodowick writes:

Mulvey discusses the male star as an object of the look but denies him the function of an erotic object. Because Mulvey conceives the look to be essentially active in its aims, identification with the male protagonist is only considered from a point of view which associates it with a sense of omnipotence, of assuming control of the narrative. She makes no differentiation between identification and object choice in which sexual aims may be directed towards the male figure, nor does she consider the signification of authority in the male figure from the point of view of the economy of masochism.40

Taking Rodowick’s points into consideration, Neale conjectures that “it is not surprising that ‘male’ genres and films constantly involve sado-masochistic themes, scenes, and phantasies, or that male heroes can at times be marked as the object of an erotic gaze.” The pleasures of looking upon the male image, Neale theorizes, drawing on Paul Willemen’s article “Anthony Mann: Looking at the Male,” are “founded on repressed homosexual voyeurism,” a voyeurism that produces considerable anxiety. The implication would appear to be, in Neale’s words, “that in a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look; that look must be motivated some other way, its erotic component repressed.”41 I

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1
return to this concept of repressed homosexual voyeurism in Chapters Two, Four, and Eight, retooling this concept as the “masochistic gaze.”

Robert Corber sheds welcome light on theorizations of film spectatorship in the wake of Mulvey.42 Critiquing the oedipalizing theories of Raymond Bellour, whose major argument in his writing on Hitchcock’s work is that these films work to prepare the male protagonist for heterosexual marriage, Corber writes that Bellour “claims that because Hitchcock’s films are constructed along an Oedipal trajectory, they insert the male spectator into a fixed, stable position. The hero’s sadistic pleasure in the woman’s fragmented body supposedly guarantees the coherence and totality of his own, thereby allowing him to return her look without fear of castration.” As Corber points out, such readings tend “to ignore the historical specificity of male subjectivity, its construction in relation to historically specific institutions, discourses, and practices.”

Because Bel our insists that voyeurism and fetishism are the dominant codes of a director like Hitchcock, “the only position of subjectivity they make available to the female spectator is a masochistic one.” Though feminist film critics have chal enged Bel our, “they follow Bel our’s example in proposing a monolithic view of male subjectivity. They assume the male spectator is not only heterosexual but unequivocal y so, and they limit the possibility of occupying multiple identificatory positions to the female spectator.

Consequently they tend to see the male spectator’s insertion into a fixed, stable subject position as inevitable.” In so doing, they ignore the “polymorphous sexualities circulating throughout filmic texts.” Alternative psychoanalytic readings al ow us to consider the male spectator’s “identification with the hero of the classical text as fluid and unstable.” Corber’s Freudian discussion of male identification with the hero of the classic Hollywood/

Hitchcockian text can be broadened to our discussion because mainstream film stil relies on a heterosexual presumption that some directors, in Hitchcockian fashion, and the fluid spectator may be able, on occasion, to challenge and subvert.43

For according to Freudian theory, the male spectator’s identification with the hero of the classical text involves the repression of a potentially destabilizing homosexual object cathexis. He unconsciously desires the hero of the classical text, or else he would not identify with him. Identification acts as a defense against a homosexual object cathexis. . . . [The spectator does not desire the hero, he is the hero, thus preserving his ostensible heterosexuality.] But this does not mean that he whol y relinquishes his homosexual object-choice.

Rather, it continues to exist in his unconscious, where it becomes a potential

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush obstacle to the formation of a fixed heterosexual identity. . . . in addressing the male spectator as a subject, cinematic discourse establishes a homosexual object relation between him and the hero that it must then repress.44

Corber sheds light on classical Hol ywood texts’ relationships to their viewers. But in the Bush-to-Bush years, the homosexual object relation between the male spectator and the male star—to say nothing of all manner of spectator-star relationships—has undergone a powerful transformation.

Bush-to-Bush cinematic manhood actively solicits the very same homosexual object cathexis with the spectator that it also—but now less securely—vilifies, repudiates, and disavows.

As Judith Halberstam, in her brilliant study of the Gothic, Skin Shows, writes of Mulvey’s “excessively neat formula for the increasingly messy business of erotic identification” (which includes Mulvey’s own recasting of her argument), “the most relevant reformulations of spectatorship take note of the multiple gendered positions afforded by the gaze and provide a more historically specific analysis of spectatorship.” Halberstam suggests that a “less psychoanalytically inflected theory of spectatorship is far less sure of the gender of the gaze. Indeed,” Halberstam continues, “recent discussions of gay and lesbian cinema assume that the gaze is queer or multidimensional.”45 What I want to add to Halberstam’s view is that such a productive problematization, an exciting enlargement, of Mulvey’s paradigms from a queer position need not proceed from a “less psychoanalytic” basis; indeed, psychoanalysis remains a valuable tool for the analysis of an oppressively heterosexist culture, for the reconsideration of matters of identity and desire and their vexed, intensely felt, cathected relationships to spectatorship.

fantaSieS Of maSOchiStic raDicaliSm:

StuDlar, clOver, Silverman

Post-Mulvey feminist psychoanalytic film theory and psychoanalytic queer theory have both stringently conducted a valorization of masochism as a resistant mode of male sexuality. In its ecstatic willingness to undergo physical and/or psychic torment, masochism is a radical defiance of conventional codes of masculine performance—or so goes the general understanding. In my view, this reading of masochism, despite its obvious strengths, is unsatisfying, even imprisoning. I will consider feminist film theory texts first, and then queer theory texts in the next section.

Gaylyn Studlar’s In the Realm of Pleasure valorously attempts to get outside of the masculinist spectator-protagonist-gendered-gaze deadlock of

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Mulveyan theory. We recall that Mulvey argues that the male spectator-protagonist has two strategies for dealing with the castration anxieties provoked by the spectacularized woman: voyeuristically investigating or fetishizing the woman. In her study, Studlar revisits the Mulveyan theory that fetishistic scopophilia—for Mulvey, embodied by the films Josef von Sternberg made with the star Marlene Dietrich—provides the second of the two avenues available to the male spectator-protagonist for the negotiation of the castration fears represented by the spectacularized female body (the first being voyeurism). Following Mulvey, Studlar focuses on the von Sternberg films and his use of Dietrich but draws significantly different conclusions.

Studlar positively employs Gilles Deleuze’s Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, a utopian study of masochism in the literature of Sacher-Masoch, as a means of establishing an economy of masochism as a radical alternative to Mulvey’s view of male sadistic visual reign over the spectacularized woman. Studlar argues that the pre-Oedipal relationship between the son and the mother provides a powerful alternative to the post-Oedipal, symbolic mode of male domination from which both Mulvey and Freud position male sexuality in relation to femininity. From a neo-Deleuzian position, Studlar champions masochism as a means of understanding the male relationship to femininity as a position of awe that recalls the infant male’s subservience to the looming, powerful pre-Oedipal mother.

The problem with Studlar’s view, however intelligent and compelling, is that, despite qualifications throughout, it replaces one orthodoxy about masculine viewing—Mulvey’s narcissistic, sadistic male voyeurism—with another, Deleuzian masochistic male submission to a dominant, dominatrix phallic mother. No doubt, submission to a great female star affords the viewer several confusing, heady pleasures. Yet, there is no awareness on Studlar’s part that the male masochism in Sacher-Masoch and Deleuze—as I elaborate upon in Chapter Three—depends upon an inherently misogynistic and thoroughly masculinist fantasy of domination of woman through the alternate means of establishing her as pitiless goddess rather than the usual one of derogating her as weak, fragile, and pitiful. Studlar draws thoroughly on Freudian paradigms but presents her work as critical of Freud, as a corrective to his lapses. One of the ways in which she critiques Freud is to fault him on the scientific accuracy, or lack thereof, of his theory of fetishism. She offers more plausible developmental models that are “truer” to male childhood psychosexual development, especially in terms of the male recognition of the mother’s lack of a penis, which Studlar and the apparently more scientifically sound interpreters of this phenomenon she cites view as much less significant than Freud argued it to be.

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Studlar may well be right in challenging the Freudian view of the significance of castration anxiety to male infants and children, but it is precisely within her means of challenging Freud that the chief weakness of her argument, a disturbing and normalizing literal-mindedness, makes itself most apparent. As Jonathan Dollimore argues in Sexual Dissidence, it is a mistake to read Freud for factual, pragmatic approaches to the problems of sexuality in our culture; Freud is most useful as an allegorist of the problems of sexuality, in which capacity he is revolutionary and challenging. Studlar’s argument uncritically accepts the Deleuzian fantasy of submission to an all-powerful goddess, but Freud, in his theory of fetishism and elsewhere, more challengingly asks us to consider the implications of male fantasies of women. He asks us to consider the utter fragility of the masculine ego, the manner in which it verges on collapse from its earliest moments of conscious awareness. In his theory of fetishism, he ironizes such fantasies of masochistic submission to powerful women as precisely the result of male overinvestment in their own phallic authority, a hysterical overcompensation for the recognition of the dangers posed to their own harrowingly vulnerable organs. Studlar ends up perpetuating Deleuze’s inability to get Freud’s joke or to glean his insights into masculinism, which must always be pried away from his unfortunate misogyny.

Though they would obviously provide another provocative means of either expanding or debunking Mulveyan paradigms, homosexual identificatory, voyeuristic, and fetishistic practices remain almost completely overlooked by Studlar, who mentions queer viewing only in the context of diva-Dietrich’s (admittedly considerable) power to enslave audiences of any gender or sexual orientation. Given the lack of a queer presence in her paradigms, it is disturbing to see positive readings of thinkers like Charles Socarides, one of the most virulently homophobic voices in American psychiatry, used both in support of Studlar’s thesis and, astonishingly, to critique Freud, who, in his complex approach to homosexuality, was light years ahead of Socarides and his ilk.46

Then again, I am grateful for any opportunity not to see homosexuality automatically fused with masochism; indeed, Studlar represents masochism as a thoroughly heterosexual male fantasy structure.

In effect, what Studlar’s neo-Deleuzian reading offers is a heterosexualized version of Freud’s theory of male homosexuality: now it is the heterosexual male who forms an intense bond with the mother to whom he submits. This submission does not subvert the normative heterosexual master-plot: it only provides an alternative route to its fulfillment, not through domination but through submission. Unwittingly, I am sure, Studlar perpetuates the sentimental masculinist misogyny of Deleuze’s view. At the start of Chapter

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Three, I demonstrate more specifically what I mean by this description of Deleuze’s work.

In her lively and provocative work, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Carol J.

Clover explores the peculiar tendency of the horror film, especially in its slasher subgenre, to culminate in a stand-off between a female survivor, whom Clover brilliantly designates the “Final Girl,” and the homicidal, monstrous fiend who has killed everyone else off. This Final Girl combines masculine and feminine qualities. Arguing against simplistic dismissals of the horror film as misogynistic, Clover does not view them as feminist statements, either. Rather, they provide opportunities to revisit the problems inherent in male spectatorship.

Writing in the early 1990s, Clover works hard to “unsilence” male masochism, seeing it as central to the equally silenced male-with-female-identification central to horror film viewing.

I take this double silence—silence about masochism and silence about identification with the female—as evidence that something crucial to the system of cultural representation is at stake. That something must be the operation whereby female figures are made to stand for, and act out, a psychosexual posture that knows no sex, but which for a variety of reasons that add up to male dominance, is routinely disassociated from the male. It is, in short, an operation which insures that men can eat their psychosexual cake and have it too: experience the pain/pleasure of (say) a rape fantasy by identifying with the victim, and then disavow their personal stake on grounds that the visible victim was, after all, a woman, and that they as spectators are “naturally” represented by the visible male figures; male saviors or male rapists, but manly men however you cut it.47

Clover’s work, influential in the study of horror film, has certainly effectively unsilenced masochism. Though Clover includes issues of same-sex desire in her analysis, and treats them sympathetically, her work nevertheless fixates upon the figure of the (youthful, white) heterosexual male viewer masochistically cathected to a repudiated yet nevertheless deeply meaningful femininity. Clover makes a convincing case for this male viewer’s masochistic-transvestic relationship to the Final Girl, but masochism becomes such an overdetermined aspect of this relationship that it comes to exclude any other way of thinking about male spectatorship. The masochistic horror movie male viewer’s essentially paralytic position—trapped between modes of identification with and revulsion for the suffering but finally triumphant female—
ultimately tells us less about horror movies, identification, and spectatorship than it does about Clover’s fantasy of this tormented male viewer’s psychic

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush torments, allegorized by Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s iconic monster Leatherface and his sexual confusions. In a curious way, Clover comes close to pathologizing the male horror movie viewer as a heterosexual male version of arrested development; she ends up reifying cultural stereotypes of the obese, socially inept horror movie viewer who should get out more, precisely the kind parodied in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Hot Fuzz (2007). (She also makes the heterosexual white male viewer the horror movie viewer.) Building on Clover but focusing on representations of manhood, Kaja Silverman treats, with several important qualifications, masochism as resistance in her influential study Male Subjectivity at the Margins. Deleuze’s Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (which I discuss in Chapter Three) looms over Silverman’s work, a debt she acknowledges. Noting her great sympathy for Deleuze’s study, Silverman writes that Deleuze argues that masochism

“works insistently to negate paternal power and privilege,” and is “entirely an affair between son and mother, or to be more precise, between the male masochist and a cold, maternal, and severe woman he designates the ‘oral mother.’

Through the dispassionate and highly ritualized transaction that takes place between these two figures, the former is stripped of all virility, and reborn as a

‘new, sexless man,’ and the latter is invested with the phallus. What is beaten in masochism is not so much the male subject as the father, or the father in the male subject.”48

As Bersani will do in his 2001 essay “Genital Chastity,”49 Silverman dis-sociates herself, to a certain extent, from the utopian view of masochism: Masochism in all of its guises is as much a product of the existing symbolic order as a reaction to it. Although in its masculine variants it shows a marked preference for the negative over the positive Oedipus complex, it nevertheless situates desire and identification within the parameters of the family. Moreover, by projecting a cruel or imperious authority before whom he abases himself, the feminine masochist [the perverse male who places himself within the feminine masochistic position, a pathology for men while being the “natural” female subject position] acts out in an exaggerated, anthropomorphic, and disruptive way the process whereby subjects are culturally “spoken.”50

Realigning herself with Deleuze, Silverman concludes, “Until our dominant fiction undergoes a radical metamorphosis, however, subjectivity will always carry the imprint of the family,” and the subject will always “be defined by lack and alterity.”51

As Suzanne R. Stewart argues in Sublime Surrender, the fin de siècle con-

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush struction of male masochism was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering. The masochistic male, lying shriveled and pitiable at the feet of the cold, hard, beautiful dominatrix woman—while an image with subversive and radical qualities, such as those John K. Noyes attributes to Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs—is the ultimate heterosexual male fantasy, one with long-standing historical precedent, of male subservience to pitiless female beauty. This subservience is the crucial compensatory component of the essentially misogynistic construction of femininity in the West. The image of the statuesque, unflinching, Medusan woman at whose feet lies a prostrate and subservient masochistic man ingeniously reorganizes masculine oppression of women, denied social power for most centuries, into a perverse image of male submission to the ruthless woman who wields all sexual power. This image is a joke whose echo can be heard in the exaggerated complaints of the straight men who grumble about the ways in which their wives “whip” them, even as their own marital, familial, and social authority remains whol y unquestioned. Masochism is, at heart, a sentimental inversion of enduring male privilege and authority, comedically reimagined as subservience to all-powerful, witchlike, goddessy Woman. Masochism is also parody of homosexual males’ presumed femininity or, more properly, effeminacy. For these reasons, I remain skeptical of utopian readings of masochism.52 Paul Verhoeven’s icy, grisly 1992
film Basic Instinct is the purest expression of conventional male masochism.

What’s to be valorized there (other than Sharon Stone’s marvellously confident and entertaining performance)?

Silverman—tel ingly, I think—uses a controversial filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as her example of “masochistic ecstasy” that productively “ruins” masculinity. It is interesting that radical masochism is figured in the form of a gay European filmmaker whose chief interest is in unrelieved squalor, despair, abjection; Silverman doesn’t choose to examine the work of a gay European director like Jean Cocteau, whose formal beauty transcends abjection. I take Silverman’s treatment of Fassbinder’s film In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden/ In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) as an example of the limitations of readings of radical masochism on even the part of a brilliant critic.

As Silverman writes, “Within the Lacanian account, the mirror stage is the one period in the subject’s life when, through a radical méconnaissance [a misconstruing or misrecognition], it merges so effortlessly with a beloved image as to believe itself ‘ideal.’ . . . In a Year of Thirteen Moons enacts a very different mirror stage. Early in the film, in an act of unmitigated aggression, Erwin’s lover, Christophe, drags him into the bedroom and forces him to look

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush in the reflecting glass on the wall, [telling him he’s afraid to look at his own face].” Silverman continues, “Significantly, what Erwin sees when he looks in the mirror is an image evacuated not only of ideality, but of love—his own, as well as that of his surrounding world. For what this scene makes clear is that Erwin represents a subject who has surrendered all of his libidinal reserves to another.”

Silverman reads this scene as a poignant representation of Freudian sadomasochism, “an identification by means of which a psyche can come to inhabit, and even experience the pain of, other bodies.”53 But what does the protagonist, a miserably unhappy, suicidal transgendered man, achieve or offer as a result of this masochistic misery? Fassbinder’s determined rejection of beauty and joy in this film, his conscious embrace of ugliness and squalor, makes it an exemplary instance of the queer fetishization of the death-drive, one that anticipates Lee Edelman’s invective that queers should embody their marginal, death-culture status in his most recent study, No Future. Moreover, Erwin’s masochism allegorizes Fassbinder’s own; the film is less a political deployment of masochism than a negative narcissistic indulgence in sentimental masochistic self-pity, one that exudes a monstrous hatred of its suffering, excruciatingly self-involved protagonist. To put it another way, In a Year of Thirteen Moons duplicitously hides its narcissism under the guise of sentimental masochism.

We can compare Fassbinder’s grueling mirror scene to the hypnotic images of male beauty and mirrors in Cocteau’s mesmerizingly beautiful Orphée ( Orpheus) (1950). When blond, beautiful Jean Marais embraces his own mirror image, it’s the passionate self-surrender of Narcissus, a disquisition on self, reflection, and beauty, an exact and indelible image of the poetics of longing and unattainable desire. Which is to say, Cocteau uses beauty both aesthetically and politically to make far more politically radical points about homoerotic desire and manhood than Fassbinder does. Anthony Minghella makes similarly inventive use of the mirror as a multivalent symbol for Jude Law’s Narcissus-like Dickie Greenleaf and Matt Damon’s chameleon-like titular desirer in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Silverman’s discussion of the infamous slaughterhouse scene compounds the problem. For Silverman, the scene in which Erwin visits the cow slaughterhouse is the “most striking dramatization” of what she calls Fassbinder’s “utopian,” “masochistic ecstasy,” “the rapturous and ultimately political use” of

“exquisite suffering.”

“As liturgical music plays on the sound track, Erwin and Zora (Ingrid Caven) move almost ceremonially through the large room in which the dying and dead animals disgorge their blood, are stripped of their skin, and are re-

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush duced to meat.” Silverman notes that the scene is miked in such a manner that Erwin’s voice appears “not to derive from his body”; this is “not the only way in which Erwin’s suffering is dramatized as situating him psychically ‘outside’

his body.” The slaughterhouse scene achieves its “emotional crescendo” as it

“achieves its maximum textual density”: “Erwin quotes Christophe quoting a speech assigned to Tasso by Goethe in his play, Torquato Tasso. ” The first couple of lines of the quote can suffice as a descriptor: “Thus do I see myself in the end, banished, rejected and banished like a beggar here, ha, ha, ha. I was crowned and adorned to be led to the altar as a sacrificial animal . . . .”

For Silverman, the “slaughterhouse scene suggests that masochism facilitates identification, and finds a particularly potent form of expression through it—
that it fosters and feeds upon an imaginary relay capable of almost infinite expression.”54

Silverman’s diction is interesting here: the verb “feed” is more suggestive of what Fassbinder does to his characters and his audience—and the cows—than Silverman would appear to intend. I don’t see an identification here, I see exploitation—Erwin’s, and, at a greater but more crucial remove, Fassbinder’s. Erwin not only projects his emotional suffering onto the animals being killed but also equates the two. This is the maneuver of equating emotional with physical pain that Elaine Scarry calls into skeptical question in her study The Body in Pain. Erwin transforms the spectacle of the cows’ suffering into the gaudy pageant of his own grandiloquent suffering. It’s not so much that he is in empathetic league with their collective trauma as he is an avid consumer of it, onanistically reveling in a spectacle more luridly squalid than his own psychic and experiential life. The sequence’s pièce de résistance is Erwin’s quotation from Goethe. He employs High Culture to transform a scene of abjection into exquisite art, the ultimate shamelessly exploitative maneuver, outmatched only by Fassbinder’s own exploitative shamelessness.

Erwin transforms their suffering into his own self-mesmerized Passion—
hence we see the cows suffer as he inhabits a securer, indeed even a lofty position removed from their own.

Masochism emerges, in Fassbinder and—despite my great admiration for her work, in Silverman—as a sham. It emerges as the sentimental politics of an aggrieved and ultimately hypocritical subjectivity; masochism covers up an unwillingness to acknowledge that one is enslaved by one’s own image. As the earnest young angel Abdiel rebukes Satan in Milton’s great poem Paradise Lost: “Thyself not free, but to thyself enthrall’d” (VI. 181): despite all of his masochistic posturing (“myself am Hell”), Milton’s Satan is enslaved by his own narcissism. Masochism is a failed narcissism, or, to put it another way, a hypocritical narcissism.

40 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush I do not mean to suggest that an aesthetics of ugliness can be devoid of moral power and value; indeed, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, loosely based on the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, creates one of the most excruciatingly, unbearably ugly atmospheres of any film, with enforced coprophagy and baroque torture on endless display. Yet, this film about Italian fascism is one of the greatest and most necessary films ever made. A precise, unflinching, determined film, Salò is filled with, in the words of Maurizio Viano, a “desperate beauty” about the sadistic desire to dominate and revel in one’s ability to dominate, which is at the heart of all fascist movements.55 It is not a film interested in the Bersani project of discovering masochism within sadism; rather, it exposes the inhuman logic of sadism. Masochism is as far removed from Pasolini’s film as Earth from Jupiter; the suffering on display testifies to the endless capacity of human beings to be brutalized by their fellow human beings, and the film renders the idea that such a situation could be sought out for personal sexual gratification unintelligible. One thinks also of profoundly disturbing sequences like the mother-meat dream in Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1952), ugly tableaux that in their formal and imaginative daring achieve a weird beauty all their own, or of scene in which a pig is fatally clobbered in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 Weekend, an onscreen real-life animal killing that makes a powerful political point about social alienation.

I want to suggest that reveling in the unruined spectacle of male beauty—
of narcissistic glory—may be more productive, more ecstatic, than a willful submission to ugliness and despair. Perhaps the appropriation of the spectacle of evolving forms of masculine beauty in recent Hol ywood films (to say nothing of Hol ywood history) for the queer desiring gaze, which denies neither the structures of power that mount, determine, and circulate these forms nor their impact on the desiring viewer, might provide a headier, more life-affirming alternative to the bleak and hypocritical injunction to embrace despair and death as the proper mode of queer living. Though Silverman’s position on masochism would appear unchanged, in her characteristically richly complex and illuminating recent work, she has explored the positive potentialities of narcissism. Parsing the Lacanian view of desire as essentially narcissistic, Silverman writes in The Threshold of the Visible World that the “only ego capable of filling the heart of subjectivity is the one which affords a ‘jubi-lant’ self-recognition, and this exemplary unity—which always assumes in the first instance a corporeal form—is impossible to sustain.” Inexorably, she writes, it “gives way to antithesis, corporeal decomposition.”56 Silverman aims in this study to demonstrate that Lacan believed in the “active gift of love,”

and the goal of her argument is to “move not toward the conclusion that there can be no relation between man and woman, but toward an elaboration of the

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terms under which precisely such a relation might be possible.”57 Yet, despite the admirable (though also firmly heterosexually oriented) efforts she undertakes to recuperate narcissism and, most importantly, love here, Silverman’s guiding efforts remain hampered by the fog of Lacan’s grim understanding of the fatalistic condition of the human subject who “engage[s] in the register of life” only from a place outside, who chooses meaning over life, “and hence speaks from the domain of death.”58 Silverman valiantly tries to resuscitate Lacan’s dead subject with the healing gift of love, but the essential pessimism of his view is inescapable. The chief problem with Lacan is the insistence on lack, lack as the void at the center of desire, and the death-fixated perspectives on desire that continue to inform queer theory versions of Lacanian thought.

fantaSieS Of maSOchiStic raDicaliSm: berSani

In Homos, Leo Bersani—a critic of the supplest intelligence—turns to the S/M (sadomasochistic) couple valorized by Foucault, who praised sadomasochism for desexualizing sex by eroticizing the entire body. In Bersani’s treatment, sadomasochism, while complicit with the social structures of “dominance and submission,” does perform the salutary function of exposing the desire to renounce power even as one wields and exercises it—in other words, the masochism inherent in sadism. It is “as if the excitement of a hyperbolic self-assertion, of an unthwarted mastery over the world, and, more precisely, brutalization of the other, were inseparable from an impulse of self-dissolution.” What is salutary about masochism for Bersani would appear to be that, in laying bare a desire for self-dissolution and therefore making the subject unfindable as an object of social discipline, masochism allegorizes the radical potentiality of the goal of psychoanalysis. Bersani, arguing that masochistic jouissance should be separated from the death-drive, calls this masochistic desire for self-dissolution “self-shattering jouissance,” which mirrors the psychoanalytic challenge to “imagine a nonsuicidal disappearance of the subject”—in other words, a total renunciation of the identitarian impulse to care for and celebrate the organic and continuous self. Bersani here, as in his earlier essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” especially seeks to blast away the hypocrisy of queer/liberal pieties about the utopian possibilities of loving, nurturing queer sex, arguing that queer sexual fantasies no less intimately coalesce with the basest aspects of autocratic cultural productions than straight fantasies do.59

Foucault strove to expose “sexuality” as a culturally imposed and maintained fantasy that emerged as a form of social control most prominently in the Victorian era. Foucault adamantly challenged Freud’s characterization of

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush the Victorian era as a repressive period, arguing that it was the opposite, a period of endless incitement of discursive practices that forced sexuality to speak its own “truth.”60 If the brutality of Foucault’s work, despite its importance (to say nothing of its extraordinary influence), on sexuality lies in his utter disregard of the emotional experiences and implications of sexual acts, Bersani’s Freudian critique of Foucault exhibits a similar lack of interest in the emotional life of its subjects. Here I find myself in the odd position of employing Bersani’s heady newer work on narcissism as a means of critiqu-ing his work on masochism since the late 1980s (the first aiDS era, in which Bersani’s treatment stung most effectively). Self-shattering jouissance, the major concept to be extracted and widely circulated from Bersani’s treatment of masochism, is highly fascinating and useful. But surely there must be other forms of political resistance—and ecstatic pleasure—than the desire to do away with one’s own existence.

Something Bersani—to say nothing of Foucault—pays insufficient attention to is the underlying self-loathing that may account for some forms of masochistic desire. Certainly, gay self-loathing—commingled feelings of shame and disgust projected onto the gay subject and internalized within his or her psychic life—does not explain gay masochism, nor should masochism be reduced to the expression of internalized homophobia. Yet, is it not possible—though largely undertheorized—that the desire for death in some S/M
and other gay circles is attributable to long-standing feelings of inferiority and worthlessness that have an origin in the deeply homophobic socialization wrought upon all subjects of our culture? One could say that some forms of sadism have the same origin, that behind sadistic desires to inflict pain and watch suffering lie deeper desires to gain control over one’s own suffering.

I know that here I’m in danger of conflating “psychology” and “psychoanalysis” in the same way that, in Tim Dean’s critique, Douglas Crimp does in his work on melancholia and gay psychology in the aiDS era.61 If my raising of some of these possibilities smacks of piousness (a quality I dread), I want to raise another question in response: Why has it become so unfashionable to speak of our emotional lives and vulnerability and non-masochistic suffering as queer people in a homophobic culture, one that, despite the considerable and even shocking advances in the past couple of decades, still bears ample evidence of murderous agendas and intentions toward queer people? (As brilliant as a great deal of psychoanalytically inflected queer theory is—especially Lee Edelman’s earlier work and Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality—it perpetually runs the risk of rushing past the emotional experiences of queer people, especially in its Lacanian guise, with its attendant penchant for, if not fetishization of, strange and strange-making signs, glyphs, codes, and various other

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significatory geometries.) In Precarious Life, her critique of Bush policies in the wake of September 11, Judith Butler challenges us to imagine a life lived in the knowledge of our vulnerability, of the “precariousness” of life. Queer vulnerability, physical and psychic pain and trauma, need to be considered outside the space of masochism as well as within it. It is precisely for these reasons that, although I concur in certain respects with the valorizing view of masochism, I remain generally skeptical of it as a political act and as a privileged marker of sexual expression. Masochism is altogether too available as a way of figuring queer suffering as volitional and pleasurable tout court. Unpacking Freud’s 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” and thereby making way for the extraordinary range of queer theory projects of the present that grapple with melancholia and its intertwined relationships with sexuality, gender, class, and race, Judith Butler writes of the “melancholia of gender identification,” drawing out the implicit Freudian point that “it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo; the taboo against homosexuality in effect creates the heterosexual ‘dispositions’

by which the Oedipal conflict becomes possible.”62 Queer theory must continue to consider the ways in which our psychic lives are constituted by our socially abnegated status, conveyed in such resonant figures as melancholia, as well as the ways in which our transgressive desire transcends our abnegation, achieves a heady and liberating rapture—a goal that fuels this book project.

In her book, The Power of Feelings, Nancy Chodorow links some versions of Foucauldian, Lacanian, and feminist theory in their united elimination of the “realm of personal emotional meaning,” its subordination to and determination by “language and power.” Chodorow suggests “that gender cannot be seen as entirely culturally, linguistically, or politically constructed. Whether racial-ethnic, international feminist, linguistic, performative, micropolitical, or based on the analysis of discourse, gender theories that do not consider individual personal emotional and fantasy-related meaning cannot capture fully the meanings that gender has for the subject. They miss an important component of experienced gender meaning and gender subjectivity.”63 To apply Chodorow’s views to my argument here, Bersani accounts for fantasy-related meaning but makes no mention of emotional meanings of sexuality and gendered identity. Moreover, what he creates is an ultimately reductive and bindingly essentialized image of the ecstatic bottom embracing his self-ruination, a bizarre image of sexual sublimity that I can only view as a romanticization of submissive gay male sexuality and one at odds with Bersani’s salutary exposure elsewhere of the non-politically radical nature of many forms of desire.

Displaced by the image of the ecstatically self-dissolving masochist seek-

44 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush ing shattering jouissance is a bare queer body who suffers unmasochistically.

Masochists derive pleasure from suffering; masochists seek out suffering in order to derive pleasure. But there are suffering people who suffer not in order to achieve sexual gratification but because they have no choice, are made to suffer by someone or something more powerful than they—or more cunning at inflicting pain than they are at eluding it. Given our era of sanctioned torture, it is difficult not to read these panegyrics to ecstatic submission to pain as plushly self-serving fantasy (and, frankly, as obvious sexual ennui). Queer theory, especially in its Foucauldian cast, is haunted by the suffering and abject person it refuses to recognize, keeps offstage, suffering not volitionally but as a result of the social abjection he experiences because of his subaltern sexuality.64

Foucauldian queer theory has replaced “sexuality” with the celebration of infinite sexual acts, transmuting sexuality, a lived somatic and emotional experience, into sex, corporeal contact abstracted out of any emotional experience. Bersani, from a different angle, perhaps unwittingly joins in with the Foucauldian approach he otherwise resonantly critiques in his elevation of the transcendently self-annihilating bottom—a fantasy of self-extinction that corresponds, sadly, to cultural fantasies of doing away with gay people altogether. Matthew Shepard, murdered because of his sexuality, is only the most harrowingly vivid example of a non-masochistic suffering body—a suffering subject who did not volitionally choose to suffer. Queer theory comes dangerously close at times to positing that all sufferers are masochistic sufferers seeking out deeper and deeper levels of self-extinction.

If the Bersani concept of masochistic self-shattering fits in with the essentially pitiless Foucauldian fetishization of “bodies and pleasure”—a fetishization that has had, among other unfortunate consequences, a tendency to reduce queer lives to the body in pursuit of its pleasures, despite Bersani’s call for a politically useful masochism that is separated from the death-drive—

Homos also effortlessly coalesces with Edelman’s No Future in its co-optation of the rhetorical power of death. (Indeed, Bersani approvingly blurbs Edelman’s book on the back cover.) The ways in which Bersani not only joins Edelman in No Future but also enables and anticipates him in Homos are exemplified in his positive reading of what he finds most salutary in Jean Genet, his “ingenious solution to the problem of revolutionary beginnings condemned to repeat old orders”: in Genet, “dying is conceived, and experienced, as jouissance.” In Genet, Bersani writes, “homosexuality is enlisted as the prototype of relations that break with humanity, that elevate infecundity, waste, and sameness to requirements for the production of pleasure.” Bersani admits that this is a “noxious” view of homosexuality. But he goes on to say

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that one reason to tolerate Genet’s “rejection of relationality”—and implicitly, since Bersani works to recuperate and celebrate exactly Genet’s noxiousness, we should not only tolerate but embrace it—is that “without such a rejection, social revolt is doomed to repeat the oppressive conditions that provoked the revolt.” The political achievement of a work like Genet’s Funeral Rites is that it presents characters who are “positioned for a reinvention of the social without any indication about how such a reinvention might proceed historically or what face it might have.”65 As Bersani limns Genet, homosexuality emerges at its most politically efficacious when it refuses the political and the social and embraces its essential wastefulness.

What Bersani gave him, Edelman has taken to its logical extreme, the equation of homosexuality with a culture of excrement, waste, despair, and death. Edelman’s No Future takes the following position on the proper queer experience of the social: “in a social order intent on misrecognizing its investment in morbidity, fetishization, and repetition,” it is incumbent upon queers to
inhabit the place of meaninglessness associated with the sinthome [in Lacanian terms, the idiosyncratic organization of jouissance that gives an individual a means of living]; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture—the culture of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary lures—as always already a “culture of death” intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life. The death drive as which the queer figures, then, refuses the calcification of form that is reproductive futurism.66

Assigning death in the Lacanian death-drive the uncanny, undead “immortality” of a horror film zombie, Edelman both describes this immortality as a “persistent negation that offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any promise of a future,” and stridently recommends that queers take up the burdensome business of embodying this immortality.

“[W]hy not acknowledge,” Edelman cajoles us, “our kinship at last with the Scrooge [of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol] who, unregenerate, refuses the social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the Child, for the sake of whom, as the token of accession to Imaginary wholeness, everything in the world, by force if needed, must give way?”67

Edelman’s Homographesis was a brilliant study that transmuted Lacanian theory into broadly applicable queer theory paradigms. No Future contains some exciting insights and contours of argument. Who could dispute Edel-

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush man’s central claim that our heteronormative and imperialistic culture ro-tates around the enshrined image of the child who symbolizes reproductive futurity, a reproductivity no less compulsory than a committed faith in the future? (Edelman would have strengthened this point by historicizing this enshrinement of the child as one of our cultural inheritances from the Victorian era.) Yet, Edelman has also written an awfully odd manifesto, a series of conniption-fit rants that screams out its own masochism. Edelman bequeaths to future generations of queers a book that emblematizes a culture of death.

Ultimately, Edelman’s complex yet simplistic argument comes down to the vociferous contention that if straight culture is going to treat us like we’re excrement, why not embrace our excremental natures and throw ourselves, excrementally, into the faces of the dominant culture? Inescapably, Edelman’s argument hinges on an acceptance of the most pernicious cultural stereotypes of queer people and indulges in a shockingly simplistic reading of the relationship between straight and queer culture.

Bersani himself has revised his thinking on masochism, now calling (masochistically?) his “celebration of ‘self-defeat’” “rather facile, even irresponsible.”

He now writes, “Masochism is not a viable alternative to mastery, either prac-tically or theoretically. The defeat of the self belongs to the same relational system, the same relational imagination, as the self’s exercise of power; it is merely the transgressive version of that exercise. Masochism consents to, indeed embraces, that theft of being that mastery would remedy by obliterating otherness through a fantasmatic invasion of difference.” Perhaps, Bersani ponders, the crucial move to make—one that redresses the crucial mistake—
is to stop theorizing “desire as lack.”68

At heart, writes Bersani, all desire has a narcissistic basis.

We love . . . inaccurate versions of ourselves . . . we relate to difference by recognizing and longing for sameness. All love is, in a sense, homoerotic.

Even in the love between a man and a woman, each partner rejoices in finding himself, or herself, in the other. This is not the envy of narcissistic enclo-sure that Freud thought he detected in male heterosexual desire; it is rather an expression of the security humans can feel when they embrace difference as the supplemental benefit of a universal replication and solidarity of being.

Each subject reoccurs differently everywhere.69

Recognizing our narcissistic disposition can lead to a utopian erotics of seeking sameness in the form of difference that radically reimagines difference itself as a different form of sameness, and as an alterity not determined by such narrow concepts as gender.

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Taking this powerful theorist’s new formulations as a goad and a dare, I argue that, in narcissistic desire, desire can be reimagined as fullness and plenitude rather than lack.

aeStheticS: primary narciSSiSm anD the life-Drive As Stanley Aronowitz has argued, far from being the enemy of radical politics, narcissism is indeed essential to it. Aronowitz argues that the sense of autonomy gained from self-affirmation is precisely what allows the subject to revolutionize his or her political situation.70 What I seek to restore is this sense of narcissism’s erotic and political potential. Norman O. Brown understood the importance of narcissism not only to the Freudian death-drive but also to the equally important but far more de-emphasized life-drive. As Brown wrote in his dazzling rereading of Freud, Life Against Death, “Narcissistic love is fundamentally a desire for pleasurable activity of one’s own body. . . .

the primal experience of union of the self with a world of love and pleasure sets the pattern for all human love. . . . Thus the human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.”71

Remarking that he has returned to what he describes as Brown’s “clumsy, jargon-ridden, congested, alienating” Life Against Death, Robin Wood wrote in his 1998 Sexual Politics and Narrative Film of finding it newly resonant.

Wood restates Brown’s thesis as follows:

the human race . . . has been a battleground for a continuously developing and shifting struggle between the forces for Life (creativity, freedom, spon-taneous impulse, joy, love unconstrained by rules or limits) and Death (repression, denial, punishment, prohibition, authoritarianism, mechanization, possessiveness, greed, money values); that this struggle is fought out on every level—the global level of international politics, the local level of the individual national culture, the personal level of the individual psyche, the level of consciousness and the level (above all, perhaps) of the unconscious; that, in our age, with its invention and proliferation of the means of universal destruction (the ultimate strategies of the “Death-”drive), that conflict is swiftly reaching its crisis, the point of decision where the human race [must decide] whether it is to transform itself or perish, perhaps taking everything else with it.72

Wood finds the full horror of its implications to lie in the loss of not only the human race but “the incalculable, unpredictable vastness of human potential.”73

Wood’s return to Brown, and by extension to Freud, and the question of

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Life versus Death forces was eerily prescient of the post-September 11 “Iraqi Freedom” calamities we face. It is difficult not to feel that we live in the clutches of death, caught within the ever-spinning gears of the death-drive.

When besieged on a daily basis by the reports of the unceasing and unceasingly staggering decimation of human life of all cultures, it is difficult to see anything like the presence of a life-drive. As Wood writes: The Death forces are easier to identify than the Life because they have crys-tallized into organizations and institutions: religion, at the point where it hardens into dogma; nationalism, at the point where it becomes imperialism; government, at the point where it becomes authoritarian or privileges one group above others—in short, everything that sets nation against nation, class against class, person against person, promoting hostility and competition instead of cooperation.74

For several reasons, Wood’s words are deeply meaningful to me, for not the least reason that his writing, especially in Hitchcock’s Films, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, has been so influential on my thinking. I don’t agree with him on every point, finding some of his Marxist readings of films dogmatic, but he remains, to me, the finest of all film critics. (I am indebted as well to Pauline Kael, an equally great critic, but she serves as a more difficult critical icon, given the wildly fluctuating political value of her work.)

In his most recent work, Wood has returned to his old critical mentor, F. R. Leavis, and to his view that aesthetic value lies in a work’s ability to demonstrate that it is “intelligent about life.”75 There are numerous problems with the Leavisite approach of evaluative criticism, the chief one being its perpetuation of elitist classifications separating “High” art from its lowbrow forms. Still, I want to make a case for evaluative criticism here as a deployment of the Life force. I posit that aesthetic evaluation is another mode of libidinal engagement with life.

Throughout this book, I demonstrate that the chief implication of my thesis—that narcissism is a Life force, masochism a Death force—for the study of the films presented in this book is that I principally evaluate them as works of art, politically valuable or pernicious precisely because of their aesthetic qualities, either admirable or questionable and even, in some cases, immoral.

Most current academic writing, especially about film, treats texts as slices of a cultural pie—which the critic then submits to a process whereby cooked ingredients revert to their original raw state. The raw ingredients will then be

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examined as representative elements of all of the ideological, social, political, and cultural issues at stake in the society from which the textual portion has been sliced. This is highly evaluative criticism, but hypocritically so, substituting political “morality” for aesthetic value as the basis for evaluation.

In this study, I want to propose that a qualified, informed return to evaluative criticism—my own version of which I call “queer Freudian aesthetics”—
can be a salutary effort not only to make sense of dominant culture but also to critique its failings while recognizing that the dominant culture—to take Hol ywood as a metonymic example—is not always already simply and dis-missably a Death force but always a struggle between Death and Life forces.

The creativity and imagination of artists of all kinds who work on film (for example) can, on occasion, subvert and circumvent the Death forces of repressiveness and ideological conformity, something that has been true since the earliest days of Hol ywood history. I don’t mean to strike a naïve or politically insensitive point; Hol ywood has a bloody history of pernicious ideological crimes. But I also have tremendous faith in the power of the courageous Hol ywood artist to make great art within a popular medium that can be oppositional, resistant art even as it is aesthetically audacious, compelling, inspired, and inspiring. In Classic Hol ywood, the films of Hitchcock, Wyler, Wilder (at times), Lang, Welles, Ophuls, Sirk continue to astonish, move, and revivify me (as these names evince, Hol ywood has always been suffused with the skills of international talents); directors who emerged after the collapse of the studio system—especially Brian De Palma, in my opinion the greatest of the directors associated with the New Hol ywood of the 1970s, and Larry Cohen (lucky enough to have a great study of his work in Tony Williams’s book)—have produced extraordinary, defiant works; more recently, filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Isaac Julien, Todd Haynes, Guillermo Del Toro, Julie Taymor, and a few others have awed me with the singularity and complexity of their visions. Heady and heightened, all of these filmmakers’

films inspire one to “leap above the wall of self and see through another’s eyes,” in X. J. Kennedy’s words; in Emily Dickinson’s, they blow the top of your head off.

Though these views remain underexplored, Freud just as passionately believed in and affirmed the libido, or Life force, as he did the death-drive.

In his 1924 essay on masochism, he assigns the libido the role of subjugator of the death-instinct, right down to the cellular level: “In the multicellular living organism the libido meets the death or destruction instinct which holds sway there, and which tries to disintegrate this cellular being and bring each elemental primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability. . . . To the libido falls the task of making this destructive instinct harmless,” albeit,

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush disturbingly, by projecting it outward, outside the body, “towards the objects of the outer world. It is then called the instinct of destruction, of mastery, of the will to power.” (Freud echoes Nietzsche’s famous phrase and theory.) The libido’s efforts to turn the destructive forces outward rather than allowing them to continue devouring host bodies from within has disquieting effects, as do the implications of those effects. Nevertheless, the libido, or Life force, from the very start of our selves wages a war against Death forces, a war unceasingly waged.76 Moreover, the libido, as Freud argues in “On Narcissism,”

accounts for primary narcissism, not a perversion, but our universal human desire to live: “the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.”77

Masochism, on the other hand, corresponds to the death-drive and is indistinguishable from “primal sadism.” “True erotogenic masochism” remains, sentinel-like, as an anguished witness to that harrowing standoff between Life and Death forces, the “phase of development in which the amalgama-tion, so important for life afterwards, of death-instinct and Eros took place.”

Masochism represents a regressive failure of the libido’s campaign to push Death-forces out of the body: masochism is the “introjection” of sadistic and destructive forces, which in fact can simply be called primary masochism, the desire for the living person to destroy herself. In later life, libidinal failure against Death-forces, our capitulation to the death-drive, constitutes secondary masochism.78

Any theory, therefore, that extols masochism extols the death-drive; any theory that extols the death-drive insists upon our submitting to the mastery of masochism, to the victory of death. Conversely, any theory—such as the one I labor to achieve here—that extols the Life-force of creativity, imagination, and its freedoms extols the libidinal potentialities of primary narcissism, or the Life force. In sum, what, emboldened by Silverman’s recent work on the importance of love not only to the psychic but the political, I urge us to do here and throughout this study, despite all of the hazards, mishaps, and wounding disappointments inherent in the process, is to join with the narcissistic Life force of celebrating beauty in myriad forms, the beauty of actors, the beauty of filmmakers, the beauty of writers, the beauty of artists: in sum, the beauty of Love.

I have been challenging the enshrinement of masochism in psychoanalytic and queer theory discourse, because, in part, I see masochism as the linchpin of increasingly more frequent efforts to equate queer theory and the death-drive. I have been writing in support of narcissism as a symbol of what can be a positive and instructive return to beauty—and joy—for queer theory.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush 1

Yet, it is necessary to acknowledge the potential radicalism of masochism, despite the ideological uses to which it is often put. Masochism endures as an important figure in several discourses, particularly in feminism. As I have noted, it is entirely possible for masochism to represent political resistance and for narcissism to represent pernicious heterosexual male privilege and presumption. The contention I make, however, is that masochism can only be resistant—in most cases—when it is figured as straight male masochism because homosexual and feminine masochism tend not to challenge but to accommodate prevailing stereotypes about gays and women. I am well aware that such a reading rests on an unwieldy tension—how can masochism be both only resistant when associated with hetero-manhood and the domain of hetero-male privilege? This is not a tension I can resolve, only one I can explore.

As I will propose in fuller depth throughout this book, the narcissism/
masochism split has powerful—on occasion even disruptive—implications for the representation of such oft-discussed film problems as the gendered gaze of both diegetic character and film spectator, sexual identity, and racialization. In the spirit of Laura Mulvey’s recent work, I practice a form of curious spectatorship. For Mulvey, the curious spectator is the creation of a directorial vision that does not delimit and construct the viewer’s experience of a film but allows the viewer to make her own sense of what she sees. While I understand Mulvey’s point, I also think it can be highly pleasurable to submit to the vision of a “strong” director (submission does have its appeal on occasion). In any event, drawing on Mulvey, I urge curious viewing—especially as Hol ywood films get curiouser and curiouser. By curious viewing, I mean a disposition to film that leaves one open to what’s happening on the screen, which involves a certain amount of vulnerability, a letting down of one’s intellectual guard, a willingness to be enveloped by narrative, and the possibility of access to a range of confusing and heady pleasures.

chapter twO

An Ill-Fated Bacchanal

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial In the late 1970s, difficult and disturbing films about the Vietnam War such as Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) struck a cord with audiences and critics. These films challenged viewers to confront the horrors of an ap-pallingly ill-conceived war. (Indeed, it was widely reported at the time that many people walked out of Cimino’s film, finding several scenes too intense.) In the Reagan era of the early 1980s, the genre mutated into cartoonish fare such as the jingoistic Rambo films (which, given Rambo’s 2008 comeback, remain relevant), starring Sylvester Stallone as an ex-vet who rescues the apparently multitudinous number of American pOwS in scary Asian locales.1

The late 1980s, however, returned us to serious treatments of Vietnam. A slew of new Vietnam films appeared in the wake of the astonishing success of Oliver Stone’s Platoon in 1986, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Director: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987); Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989); Stone’s 1989 Born on the Fourth of July, about Ron Kovic, a Vietnam vet, paralyzed in the war, who transforms from a gung-ho patriot into an antiwar activist; and several others.

De Palma’s Casualties emerged in the same year that Bush 41 took office and asked us to create a “kinder, gentler America.” In his inaugural address, Bush proclaimed that his was “a moment rich with promise,” pledging to use American strength as “a force for good.” Casualties interrogates the mythos of benign American force. Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July also considers the question of force, but its methods and conclusions are distinct from those of De Palma’s film. Stone’s film eulogizes the paralyzed Ron Kovic’s loss of masculine potency, a loss conveyed in the cry Kovic (Tom Cruise) utters in the most famous scene, “Penis, penis, penis!” simultaneously lamenting the loss of his sexual powers and mocking his frigidly uptight, conservative mother.

Whereas Stone’s film nostalgically yearns for a time of American innocence

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial Figure .1. A wounded apparition: Oanh (Thuy Thu Le) in Casualties of War (1989) and, implicitly, full access to masculine power, even as it works to critique these things, De Palma’s film offers an unflinching critique of American force as figured by the phallus/penis—it critiques the symbolic (phallic) power of American force by exposing this power’s investment in the literal biological organ (penis) that figures it. Casualties casts the penis not as nostalgic icon but as weapon of destruction and death; which is to say, it demonstrates that American culture weaponizes the penis as an emblem of a compulsory national masculinity. In so doing, the film raises a provocative question: Is war hel , or is it simply the most vivid version of the essential hellishness of our culture?

Casualties and the real-life case on which it is based blur the lines that separate war from life. To say that this story remains relevant is a harrowing understatement given the endless proliferation of horrors that, in our post-9/11, Iraq War present, spill over us like blood from an unstanchable wound.

Lyrical where Stone’s Platoon (1986) was grandiose, ruthlessly sharp in its analysis where Apocalypse Now (1979) was pretentiously portentous, a director’s hubris in berserk overdrive, Casualties of War remains the greatest Vietnam War film ever made, in part because it deepens its treatment of this particular war into an allegory of American national identity.2 The film presents war as the symptom of male psychosis—but exposes this psychosis as the inevitable result of male socialization. Given the institutionalized misogyny, homophobia, and patriarchal homosocialization of our culture, male sanity hangs on by a thread, and Casualties of War depicts its inevitable unraveling.

This is neither an anti-manhood film nor a film hostile to the difficulties faced by soldiers in wartime.3 Rather, it is a film that lays bear the social and psychic structures that undergird American manhood, forcing us to recognize our culture in its most revealing guise.

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush American Culture and the Homosocial

Before turning to De Palma’s film, it will be helpful to ground our analysis in an understanding of the film’s chief site of inquiry, the homosocial, or the collectivized gendered group. Since the Victorian era, our culture has oper-ated under the rule of strictly maintained gendered spheres, distinct “male”

and “female” worlds, males commonly assumed to occupy the public realm of action, commerce, and industry, and females the private one of domesticity, family, and the emotional life.4 The separate-spheres model illuminates the era in which the Vietnam War was fought; though images of women in combat proliferate in the Iraq War, the merging of gendered spheres in terms of combat was unthinkable in the Vietnam War era.5

The homosocial is a key element in patriarchy, the system of male rule that remains the dominant ideology of our culture. Freud theorized that civilization began as the result of a battle between a primal father and a fraternal horde.

In Totem and Taboo, an anthropological study of the mythic origins of modern society (far more insightfully compelling as myth than anthropology), Freud argues that the fraternal order competes against the Father, whom they kill and then cannibalistically ingest, both to gain access to Woman/The Mother and to free themselves from the patriarch’s rule. Filled with “contradictory feelings,” the “tumultuous mob of brothers”

hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt. . . .6

While the realm of fraternity (relations between young men) would seem opposed to patriarchy (the realm of the Fathers), patriarchy itself, the system of male rule, makes no such distinction: fraternal and paternal worlds are interlocking halves of the same, homosocialized patriarchal system. Patriarchy is organized around the establishment and maintenance of ties between men that are as compulsory in our culture as heterosexual relations. As Carole Pateman writes, “Civil individuals form a fraternity because they are bound together by a bond as men. They share a common interest in upholding the original contract which legitimizes masculine right and allows them to gain material and psychological benefit from women’s subjection.”7 The fraternal American brotherhood of the nineteenth century hinged on the exclusion of

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial women, racial minorities, and immigrants. Casualties makes it vividly clear that compulsory American fraternity continues to hinge on such exclusions.8

Famously, Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American Novel that American men chafed against “the gentle tyranny of home and woman”

and wanted to escape marriage and reenter fraternity, specifically in the arms of their “dusky brothers.” White men secretly longed for “the pure marriage of males, sexless and holy, a kind of counter-matrimony, in which the white refugee from society and the dark-skinned primitive are joined till death do them part.”9 Although these desires for interracial fraternal escape may have amounted to a powerful strain in American literature, it is also true that many literary texts conceived men who wanted neither marriage nor male friendship—who in fact steadfastly wished to remain emotionally, sexually, and psychically inviolate. (Important examples of this figure include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe and, pace Fiedler, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a solitary figure in works like The Pathfinder [1840] despite his common association with the interracial homosocial of his Mohican friends Chingachgook and Uncas.)

Casualties bears an interesting relationship to these Classic American themes. It demonstrates a battle between one intransigent, non-joiner man and the larger masculine group that seeks to engulf him within its own murderous logic. Preserving his own sexual inviolability is not the chief agenda of the protagonist of the film, as it is for several key figures in Classic American literature (the thesis of my study of nineteenth-century American literature, Men Beyond Desire). His refusal, however, to enter into the homosocial order and its sadistic disposition toward the feminine—his refusal to perform his sexuality by joining in the homosocial ritual of gang rape and his association with the victimized female—is analogous to the inviolate nineteenth-century male’s refusal to enact compulsory sexual roles and to form homosocial ties.

The straightforward directness of the particular issues at stake in the real-life incident remains astounding, especially considering that we have had Daniel Lang’s account since the late 1960s, yet we continue to react with astonishment at the various atrocities—such as, more recently, Abu Ghraib—
with which we are confronted. (De Palma’s 2007 film Redacted treats a similar atrocity involving rape and murder during the Iraq War.) This is a story that unflinchingly, thoroughly reveals the logic of American manhood and, therefore, the patriarchal logic of American culture. Men in patriarchy are homosocialized, forced to cleave to group male identity. This homosocial manhood organizes itself around the traffic in women and the abnegation of nonnormative men; white manhood remains the privileged model. Predicated on misogyny, homophobia, and a fetishized racial purity, homosocialized hetero-

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush sexual white manhood depends upon certain baroquely public rituals, such as war, to affirm and anoint its status as the privileged social division. Certainly, this is to put the matter in intensely stark terms and to override all of the complexities at work in the national construction of gender. But it is difficult to come away from the story Casualties tells with any other impressions.

Casualties stages a struggle that informs the readings in this book: it pits two styles of American masculinity, a narcissistic and a masochistic, against each other. As one of the first instances of what I call the double-protagonist film of the Bush-to-Bush era, which incorporates tropes and themes from the noir, Western, and buddy-film genres while also exploding those genres and developing a new manner of representing both manhood and male-male relations, De Palma’s film established many of the major stylistic modes and thematic issues that will concern us in this study as a whole. In the Introduction and in Chapter One, I suggested that a narcissistic, rather than a masochistic, mode of manhood might be preferable, for multivalent reasons, for queer engagement with culture, including film texts. Casualties, however, is a film that depicts the most pernicious form of negative narcissism, in which white male heterosexual narcissistic omnipotence has harrowing, deadly implications, and masochism—more specifically, what Freud describes as moral masochism, a suffering fueled, in part, by guilt—emerges as a politically conscientious challenge to it. Negation provides an alternate vision of the ways in which narcissism could be read positively, i.e., when it does not produce the results it does here. We can be more specific and view the form of negative narcissism treated by the film as, in the terms of Wilhelm Reich, phallic narcissism, a particularly volatile and destructive form of male sexuality.

In part, masochism emerges as politically useful in this film because it is embodied by a heterosexual white male character whose adoption of an inherently feminized masochistic position endangers him—in multiple ways—
and puts him in league with the suffering woman as it excludes him from the privileges of white male homosocial American identity. This film will also help us more clearly to illustrate the dynamics of what I refer to as the masochistic gaze, which I elaborate upon in the last section of this chapter.

Another complex effort on the part of the film is to cast a light on sadism without condoning or embracing it. To illuminate sadism can come perilously close to accommodating it, through an evocation of the masochistic longing that inheres within sadism, an evocation that hinges on a sentimentalization of sadism strongly refused by texts such as De Palma’s film. That De Palma shows us the psychic sources of sadism without sentimentality is one of this film’s profoundest achievements.

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial A Wounded Apparition

The film is based on Daniel Lang’s deeply powerful essay “Casualties of War,”

published in the October 18, 1969, issue of the New Yorker; playwright David Rabe, who specializes in the Vietnam War, wrote the screenplay.10 As Pauline Kael described in “A Wounded Apparition,” her masterly essay on the film: Lang gave a calm, emotionally devastating account of a squad of five American soldiers who were sent on a five-day reconnaissance mission; they kidnapped a Vietnamese village girl, raped her, and then covered up their crime by killing her. The account dealt with the kind of gangbang rape that the Vietnam War had in common with virtually all wars, except that the rapists here, unable in general to distinguish Vietcong sympathizers from other Vietnamese, didn’t care that the girl wasn’t Vietcong. This indifference to whether a candidate for rape is friend or foe may not really be that much of an exception; it may be frequent in wartime. What’s unusual here may simply be that a witness forced the case into the open and it resulted in four court-martial convictions. . . . Lang’s factual narrative is based on conversations with Eriksson, the witness who testified against the other men, and on the court-martial records. (The names were changed to protect everyone’s privacy.) Rabe’s script follows it closely, except that Rabe dramatizes the story by creating several incidents to explain what led to the rape and what followed.1

The dramatic changes in the film bear some closer inspection. For now, we will consider the events as Lang, with a heartbreaking economy, described them.

Former Private First Class Sven Eriksson, honorably discharged 1968, came from a small farming community in northwestern Minnesota. The incidents took place in 1966 in “a remote hamlet in Central Highlands, a few miles west of the South China Sea” (12). He first saw Phan Ti Mao (called Oanh in the film), the girl abducted by the other members of his patrol group on November 18, 1966. Although his memories of Mao’s appearance were hazy, he remembered that “she was wearing dusty earrings made of bluish glass”; she also had one prominent gold tooth and eyes that were dark brown and

“particularly expressive.” She wore the customary garb of rural women, black pajamas that hung loosely. She was “slender and slight”; in less than twenty-four hours, she was dead, murdered by the other four members of the group (13). One of the soldiers stabbed her three times; she was also shot, part of her head blown away in the process.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Eriksson had “scarcely landed” in Vietnam when he was made aware of its culture of random violence. Beatings, “random, routine kicks and cuffings”

administered by the gis toward the Vietnamese were common. “Needless to say,” Eriksson reported, the Vietcong committed the same kinds of crimes

“indiscriminately.”

You “could see changes coming over guys on our side—decent fellows, who wouldn’t dream of calling an Oriental a ‘gook’ or a ‘slopehead’ back home,” Eriksson said. “According to Eriksson, the leader of the patrol, [Sergeant Tony] Meserve, who was assertive and confident, was both the patrol’s youngest soldier and its most experienced one, being a volunteer of three years’ standing who had fought in Vietnam for a year and had been decorated several times; he was due to go back to the United States in a month.” Other members of the group included blond Philadelphian Ralph Clark, “twenty-two, a stringbean in physique,” his “quick movements and seemingly abrupt decisions” reflected, “in exaggerated form,” Meserve’s own thinking. Two of the other members of the group “were cousins named Diaz—Rafael, known as Rafe . . . tall, swarthy, round-faced,” his disposition “naturally sunny and amiable.” Manuel was fairer-skinned, stockier, and jumpier. Manuel worshipped authority “devoutly,” but Rafe “was capable of questioning” it, though he

“generally wound up” going along with whomever emerged as the leader—

“just to keep from making trouble” (23). (In the film, there is one Diaz character, Antonio Diaz, played by John Leguizamo.)

Meserve emerges as a pitiless, determined figure in Lang’s essay, a terrifying blank. He bluntly informs the patrol group, after briefing them, that they were going to have a good time on this mission, because he was going to see to it that they found themselves a girl and took her along “for the morale of the squad.” For five days, the Sergeant said, they would avail themselves of her body, finally disposing of it, to keep the girl from ever accusing them of abduction and rape—both listed as capital crimes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Was Meserve a psychopath before the war, or did the war make him that way? Both Lang and Eriksson appear to believe the latter. One of Eriksson’s friends who started at the same time as Meserve had known him to be “a con-siderate, agreeable man.” In the month before his abduction of Mao, though, Meserve appeared to be undergoing changes, inflicting violence on the Vietcong “because he felt like it”; Meserve himself appeared to be “a war casualty”

(27). Nevertheless, Lang’s Meserve emerges as a case study in cold-blooded indifference to human suffering, as blank and terrifying as the implacable serial killer of current media obsessions.

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial After Mao has been kidnapped, wrenched away from her mother and sister in the early morning hours, her mother runs after the group, her cheeks wet, her manner imploring, as Lang writes. Her mother had run to give Mao her scarf; Clark, as if to override the awkwardness of the moment, stuffs Mao’s mouth with it. “The hamlet was barely out of sight when Manuel, perhaps competing with Clark, untied Mao’s hands, then slipped his pack from his shoulders and loaded it onto the girl’s” (31). The group finds an abandoned hootch and sets up camp there. Mao even begins to help them unload their packs. “She had no idea the kind of place she was helping to prepare,” Eriksson said (34). The men then enjoy “a hearty snack,” which they do not share with Mao. Refreshed, Meserve, with a “knowing smile,” announces that it is time to have some fun. Clark, like Meserve, visibly tingles in anticipation, Rafe and Manuel “less so.” Eriksson reports that he probably looked—
knowing that there was no way that he could take part in what was about to occur—as glum as he felt. Meserve, Eriksson suspected, probably understood this,
for before anything else happened the Sergeant confronted him, demanding to know whether he would enter the hootch when his turn came. Eriksson shook his head. Incensed, the Sergeant uttered the first in a series of threats.

Unless Eriksson went along with the others, Meserve warned, he would run the risk of being reported “a friendly casualty.” Clark seconded this vociferously, and both Diazes concentrated puzzled stares on the difficult member of the group. . . . Rebuffed a second time, Meserve lashed out with an attack on Eriksson’s manliness, deriding him as “queer” and “chicken.” . . . Rafe

. . . testified that he could not have withstood the epithets that he heard Meserve heap on Eriksson; it was his fear of such derision . . . that caused him to enter the hootch that he had helped make tidy. Manuel gave similar testimony. “I was afraid of being ridiculed, sir,” he told the prosecutor.

As Manuel explains it, this fear of being ridiculed is no idle fear. With everyone mocking the person who refuses to join in with the group, “when you go out on patrol, you ain’t going to be as good as you want to be, because these guys ain’t helping you to do anything. It is going to be yourself. There is going to be four people on that patrol and an individual” (36). Eriksson becomes that individual within the homosocial group, literally, going off to sit alone on the “grassy turf” as the four other men proceed to take turns raping Mao.

With searing simplicity, Lang tells us of this “ill-fated bacchanal” (36), the rape and Mao’s suffering, expressed in a “high, piercing moan of pain and despair.” When Meserve, the first one to rape Mao, emerges from the

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush hootch, he wears a look of “swaggering irresistibility,” then gestures to Rafe that he’s next; Rafe, in order to spare himself “ridicule,” complies. Though Clark is just as eagerly excited for the raping as Meserve, it is interesting that Meserve tells the more ambivalent Rafe to go in second. Clark, for his part, watches Rafe’s performance through a hole; his manner is “momentarily sub-dued” when his turn comes up, as third. But after Clark has had his turn with Mao, he regains his jauntiness, proclaiming, “I held a knife to her throat.” The knife had been given to him by a friend who’d been wounded. Manuel has his turn. The men, now accompanied by Eriksson, all reenter the hootch. “Mao had retreated to a corner of the hut, frightened, watchful, her eyes glistening with tears, her presence made known chiefly by a cough that had grown more pronounced since morning” (38). As the men eat—again, without feeding Mao—they compare notes about their shared acts, comparing Mao to other women they’ve known and ruminating on “how long it had been since they had had a woman.” As if suddenly bored with the discussion, Meserve reminds them of their mission and sets them off to continue reconnoitering.

When, later, the patrol spots three Vietnamese they assume to be Vietcong, Eriksson is left to guard the hootch. He feeds Mao crackers, beef stew, and water, which she eats between whimpers. She is wary of him, trying to figure out what his “game could be.” Eriksson ponders what to do to help this “weak, coughing girl” with whom he cannot, because of the language barrier, speak. Eriksson has been described as implausibly good, but Lang reports that he contemplated killing off the other members of the group before dismissing the idea. After a while, Mao stops whimpering and decides that Eriksson will not harm her and can be trusted. He even sees a little look of trust in her eyes. “There shouldn’t have been,” Eriksson reflected, “because I had decided, outside, that there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do for her.

It was the hardest decision that I’ve ever had to make, and it couldn’t have been the best possible one, or Mao wouldn’t be gone today” (43).

In the morning, events happening rapidly, the decision to kill Mao is made. The methods of murder remained to be settled upon, but Meserve is clear that he wants Eriksson to do the killing; should he refuse, he will be reported “K. I. A.”: “Killed in Action.” When the Diazes both refuse to kill her, Eriksson feels some excitement. Clark avidly volunteers, but Meserve insists they must collaborate. “Clark could knife the girl from the front,” while Meserve could bayonet her from behind.

Eventually, Clark is the one to stab Mao. In Rafe’s court-martial testimony, he reported that Clark took her to the bushes and stabbed her with his hunting knife. Clark reemerges, and Meserve asks him if he’s gotten the job done. Just as Clark is answering yes to Meserve’s question, Lang writes:

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial 1

Mao, like a wounded apparition, was seen crawling rapidly downhill and then disappearing into the thick foliage. As Rafe recounted it, “Meserve saw her and said, ‘There she goes.’ Clark said, ‘Why, that bitch, I stabbed her more than twice. Meserve told us all to shoot her before she could get away.

We were all told to look for the girl.” All five men shot, but Eriksson aimed his weapon [away from the direction of Mao]. (50) Finally finding Mao in some bushes, Clark blazes away at the girl in the bushes with his M-16. “You want her gold tooth?” Clark asks. Mao’s head, Rafe reported, had been partially blown away (50). The group then engages some Vietcong. Lang writes that Meserve “fought well that day” (51).

The rest of Lang’s account focuses on Eriksson’s arduous attempts to get justice for Mao by bringing the men to trial, which, after considerable struggle, he is able to do. Interestingly, the tactic of the defense lawyers is to deride, in Meserve-like fashion, Eriksson for his lack of manliness and his inability to conform to the group. The men are court-martialed and imprisoned, but most of their jail terms vary widely—Meserve certainly doesn’t get the harshest sentence—and are eventually considerably reduced.

From the time Lang’s essay appeared, De Palma wanted to make a film version of the case. His Godardian, avant-garde draft-dodger comedy Greetings (1968) culminates in an astonishing Vietnam jungle-set sequence that prefigures his work in Casualties. Greetings stars Robert De Niro as a blue movie filmmaker named Jon who, despite his ingenious efforts, has been drafted. In the sequence, the callow, glib protagonist speaks to a tv reporter, appearing quite tickled to be interviewed during his battle performance. He and the reporter notice a Vietnamese woman, who anticipates the victimized Oanh. After questions of whether or not she is Vietcong, Jon announces that he will have to shoot her, anyway—even though she (poignantly) waves a white flag. But when he goes up to her, the tv reporter and his crew behind him, Jon asks her to pose for the cameras, to disrobe: “take off your shoes—as if you were alone in your room.” She complies and is filmed. De Palma (who edited this film as well) intercuts this scene with shots from the previous porno montage Jon had made with a blonde woman he tricked into posing for him. The Vietnam War has become yet another satirical blue movie, the lurid subject of puerile male fantasy. In this moment, De Palma equates the Vietcong woman’s sexual exploitation with the militaristic exploitation of war and carnage, which the film has depicted as the culmination of institutionalized male cruelty. And by intercutting this scene with shots of the duped blonde woman, De Palma condenses the tendency toward war and the tendency toward the exploitation of women into the same male proclivities. By

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush framing the war in terms of misogyny and male domination, De Palma reframes the entire question of war in gendered terms, a view Casualties fulfills with great poignancy.

Manhood over an Abyss

Through pure cinema,12 De Palma bril iantly sets up Eriksson’s predicament in the film as symbolic of the male condition. In the opening scene, set during the time of Nixon’s resignation (as a newspaper evinces), we see a racial y and cultural y diverse group of passengers onboard a train. Immediately, we are disoriented—how does this gray image of mechanized modernity relate to the green hel of Vietnam? A pretty, bespectacled Asian woman gets on the train and sits down. Once we orient ourselves, we notice Michael J. Fox (Eriksson) sitting in the distance, a smal component in the frame. The camera tracks into the image of passengers, focusing on Eriksson, in strangely current dress that makes him look much more like a 1989 than a 1970s-era man. Sluggish and sleepy looking, Eriksson looks like he’s dreaming the sequence. He notices the Asian woman, who has just sat down. He stares at her, for she obviously reminds him of someone. She notices him staring, stares back at him briefly, looking visibly discomfited and choosing not to continue to return the male gaze she has recognized as such. What De Palma suggests in this discombobulating opening sequence is that the nation remains half-asleep, stuck in an oneiric world between Vietnam and the present.

In the sequence that follows, we see the men fight the Vietcong in the nighttime jungle, the heart of darkness of the Vietnam War film. De Palma and his superb cinematographer, Stephen Burum, defamiliarize the images of the soldiers with whom we ostensibly identify. Standing together in the dark, the soldiers’ faces glow with a bluish-purple light—they could be alien visitors, which, in the geopolitical context of the film, they are. In a mortar attack, new soldier Eriksson, often referred to as “Cherry,” falls up to his waist into a tunnel. De Palma uses Eriksson’s predicament as an opportunity to stage a sequence that encapsulates and illuminates the themes of the film. As James Moran writes in an excellent study, De Palma pointedly defies expectations here. Rather “than remain above ground or cut to the tunnel’s interior in an effort to preserve the verisimilitude of the jungle environment,”

Moran observes, “the camera audaciously pans vertically in front of Eriksson and below ground level to reveal the tunnel and the jungle as a set (as far as the camera, if not the eye, can see). . . . [T]he sequence gradually swells in

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial operatic abandon, rhythmically punctuated by Eriksson’s cries for help timed perfectly with exploding shells and camera edits.”13

As Meserve races to save Eriksson, his heroism, though authentic, is also presented somewhat parodistically through references such as his line “Here comes Audie,” which signals that Meserve sees himself as the star of an Audie Murphy Western, or as Murphy himself, the ultimate war hero, and through the hyperbolic momentum of his approach; when he hands back a blown-off arm to a prostrate soldier, he could almost be Indiana Jones in a denatured Spielberg film. (Spielberg will play with just this trope of a soldier’s blown-off arm in the early section of his 1998 Saving Private Ryan. ) If Meserve is a heightened version of the action star here, in contrast, Moran notes, “the vc creeps ant-like in the dirt, knife lodged in his gritted teeth like Magua in Tourneur’s Last of the Mohicans. The lurid music, subjective tracking camera from the vc’s point of view, and Eriksson’s dangling feet reminiscent of Jaws create for the spectator a stereotypical image of the enemy as the alien, stealthy Asian. By coding these initial impressions of the Vietnamese as monstrous and the Americans as heroic, only later to subvert that polarity, the film will eventually disturb the viewer’s conventional recognition of virtue and malevolence, of right and wrong.”14

Eriksson’s terrified whimpering makes him sound like an infant; he’s in the humiliating position of being a grown man caught in a breech birth. Meserve becomes the Oedipalizing father, saving Eriksson from the feminine subject position into which he has fallen, as the yonic imagery of the tunnel suggests.

(Eriksson will later tell the men that his father died, reinforcing Meserve as father substitute.) But this scene also cinematically renders the “negative Oedipus-complex” Freud described as the son’s passivity to the Father whom he erotically desires and to whom he wishes to surrender. In his erotic, masochistic phantasy of being beaten by his father, discussed by Freud in his 1919 essay “A Child is Being Beaten,” the boy keeps his body in a passive position but substitutes the beating mother for the beating, desired father.

Ingeniously, by opting for this strategy of passivity to the mother, the boy maintains “a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice”; for the boy has shrewdly been able to evade, in Freud’s words, “his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious phantasy.”15 As a cinematic version of this dynamic, Casualties presents a version of the negative Oedipus-complex in which the boy, in a passive position, does not substitute mother for father, which will have repercussions for the representation of both men’s sexualities.

After Meserve rescues Eriksson, the vc pops up out of the hole, and Meserve shoots him. De Palma depicts this shooting in an exceedingly styl-

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush ized manner, using, as Moran notes, an extreme Dutch angle to convey the sense that Meserve is berserk, the rabid dog of war.

De Palma’s Hitchcockian View

A brief digression: most De Palma supporters have never known what to do with De Palma’s agon (or contest) with Hitchcock, choosing either to celebrate De Palma as a master of referentiality who makes gleeful allusive use of Hitchcock and others (the early Kael approach) or to ignore the Hitchcockian themes altogether.16 Kael in particular angered other critics by suggesting that De Palma was an infinitely superior artist to Hitchcock, whose work De Palma ransacked with prankster glee, an initial view that, as her review of Casualties achingly affirms, transformed over time.

Addressing these issues sufficiently extends beyond the boundaries of the present argument, but the major point I wish to make here is that it is precisely in De Palma’s intertextual engagement with Hitchcock, the manner in which he grapples with the power of Hitchcock’s images, that De Palma’s special genius lies. As Robin Wood writes, “De Palma’s identification with the female position is in general much more unambiguous than Hitchcock’s, and, correspondingly, the male position much more unambiguously undermined.”17 Approaching Hitchcockian cinema as the grammar of filmmaking, De Palma is Caliban to Hitchcock’s Prospero, having learned to curse from the Master. De Palma’s cinema is both the curse of the Master—an inheritance of Hitchcock’s problems (misogyny, the view that an allegiance to formal concerns evinces a lack of emotional investment and interest in behavioral specificity)—and a cursing of the Master, taking Hitchcock’s concerns, tropes, and techniques to unprecedented, innovative places. More than a shared mastery of technique links Hitchcock and De Palma as great artists.

Both of these directors unflinchingly explore the hazardous experience of lives lived within what Lacan called the Symbolic order—the masculine realm of law and language that represents a violent break from the Imaginary world of the mother.

Though apparently far removed from the Hitchcockian tone of his thrillers, the jungle sequence is one of De Palma’s most brilliantly and innovatively Hitchcockian scenes. Eriksson’s trapped position within the hole recalls, as it synthesizes, two especially famous Hitchcock scenes: Roger O. Thornhill’s (Cary Grant) appeal to Leonard (Martin Landau) for help as he struggles to maintain a claw-hold on a Mount Rushmore crag in the 1959 North by Northwest, and, in the 1958 Vertigo, Scottie’s (James Stewart) position as he

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial precariously hangs from a rooftop, having inadvertently caused the death of the policeman who attempted to save him. Leonard stomps on Thornhill’s fingers, grinding them into the rock; Scottie remains hanging there, his expression one of terror, a Nietzschean image of the metaphysical condition of man, suspended over a vast abyss. Eriksson, the imperiled man, suggests the imperiled woman of Hitchcock/De Palma films and prefigures Oanh. Unlike Leonard, Meserve rescues Eriksson; unlike Scottie, Eriksson is shown being saved. But his position is no less metaphorically suggestive of the essentially paralytic nature of male subjectivity in the masculinist Symbolic order than Scottie’s. Suspended and helpless, Eriksson hovers between death and life: the vc who represents an otherness that can only be conceptualized as alien, monstrous, and menacing, and Meserve, the embodiment of the homosocial, who inextricably fuses intimacy and love with mayhem and death.

After Meserve rescues Eriksson, they both return fire, and Meserve yips out a “Yeah!” that sounds remarkably postcoital. The vc pops his own head out of the hole, and Meserve maniacally shoots at him. Interestingly, the eye-line match shots from Meserve’s position alternate between prostrate Eriksson and the vc, rendering them indistinguishable as targets for Meserve’s gunfire. “What a mad fucking minute, eh, Cherry?” Meserve screams out gleefully at Eriksson. In the next sequence, after Brownie (Erik King) has been shot and Meserve puts his hand on Brownie’s gushing neck to stanch the bleeding (Brownie dies soon afterward, and with him the Fiedlerian fantasy of the interracial homosocial), the low-angle medium close-up point of view shot we get of Meserve from Brownie’s position makes it impossible to tell if Meserve is aiding or strangling him.

De Palma finds numerous means of visually representing Meserve’s duality, which is crucial to the messages of the film. The homosocial intimacy enabled by war comes at the cost of terrible violence and suffering. The closeness between the men does not mitigate the violence and suffering but, rather, heightens it. Meserve symbolizes both male-male love and the gathering psychotic energies of war itself; he is both father-protector and Cronos devouring his young, at once an image of youth being consumed by the national father and the terrible face of national power consuming its youth. Through Sean Penn’s extraordinary, terrifying, moving performance, matched by Michael J. Fox’s exquisite display of moral torment, we see that Meserve is a welter of warring impulses, a harrowingly unwieldy mixture of desires to love and destroy.

Penn’s performance recalls Robert Mitchum’s indelible fusion of the horrifying and the humorous in Charles Laughton’s classic The Night of the Hunter (1955), albeit with a current of vulnerability that only intensifies the fury the character exhibits. A more human figure in the film than in Lang’s account,

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. The murderous intimacy of the homosocial in which Meserve much more straightforwardly embodies Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil, Penn’s Meserve is a mess of pain, rage, and an odd melancholia, a melancholia that appears to provide a mental refuge for the inhuman acts in which he indulges and forces the other men to indulge in as wel . After raping Oanh, Meserve emerges not triumphant but muted.

“Better than nothing,” he says. Penn’s flamboyant theatricality in the role may seem overblown at times, but it is key to the film’s portrait of Meserve as a manhood in the process of decohesion. The theatrical swagger comes to seem like a desperate attempt to overmaster not only the ravening forces of war but also the discordant pressures of American male identity. His pitiable-ness mitigates neither his terrifying nature nor the magnitude of his crime.

A berserk collage of masculine styles with no essential core of identity, he signals, in his attempts to achieve cohesion through the destruction of Oanh, the tormented and terrifying barrenness of American manhood. This collage manhood anticipates the major characteristics of Bush-to-Bush Hol ywood masculinity.

Manhood in Split-Screen

After Brownie is airlifted out, we have a daytime scene in the barracks among Eriksson, Clark (Don Harvey), Hatcher (John C. Reilly), and Rowan (Jack Gwaltney), Eriksson’s confidante, who later reassures him that Meserve couldn’t possibly, especially given the short time he has left to serve, be serious about the plan. The camera then pans to the right, and we see, on the other side of a hanging drape, Meserve in close-up, meticulously shaving what appears to be an already pristine face. The drape between Meserve and

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial the group of men lends the shot the appearance of a trademark De Palma split-screen image, with Meserve in front and the men in the background. As we observe Meserve’s ritual, his razor-holding hand gets subtly shakier, as if he were being pricked by small charges of anxiety. That Meserve’s isolation in the frame is counterbalanced against the homosocial intimacy of the group is crucial to the film’s representation of manhood. It is not only Eriksson who will be depicted as isolate. (Oddly, Clark persists in asking the men to accom-pany him to the showers, as if he couldn’t shower alone, reinforcing the theme of aloneness within the homosocial.)

Though mythologized by Brownie and especially by Hatcher—who likens Meserve, during the kidnapping, to Genghis Khan—as “Sarge” who keeps them all safe, Meserve remains essentially isolated, perhaps even bereft, the sign of the homosocial but only ostensibly a member of it. American homosociality, in other words, is essentially fascist in nature and design: it is slavish collective worship, along class and racial lines, of the authoritarian and autocratic. Though nothing could possibly exculpate Meserve for what he does to Oanh, the film suggests that the death of Brownie was his breaking point. The kidnapping of Oanh becomes the attempt both to forget Brownie and to form a genuine, palpable bond with the other men, albeit a male-bonding based on the willful, shared destruction of a human being. I return to this scene below and discuss it as a narcissistic contrast to Eriksson’s masochistic gaze, which I will contextualize within the terms of De Palma’s career.

The nighttime scene in which the patrol abducts Oanh is one of the most wrenching in the film. It signals the embrace of evil and the concomitant indifference to suffering. If there is a more poignant moment in the cinema than Oanh’s mother running after her doomed daughter to give her a scarf, I Figure .. One of De Palma’s characteristic split images connotes the distance between the would-be leader Meserve (Sean Penn, right) and the homosocial group.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush have not seen it. Stuffing the scarf into her mouth, Clark crosses the line from human to monster, never to step over it again. For the rest of the film, he will be untouchably, ineradicably evil.

What follows the abduction scene is a succession of three extraordinary vistas in extreme long shot, the most painterly images in the film. The first, of a red and gold dawn exploding above, is apocalyptic, the sign that this party of gang rapists, a man of conscience, and a doomed young woman have entered hel . But what are we to make of the next two, paradisiacal views, lush landscapes in which mountains loom in the mist? This question is answered by the extraordinary shot of the patrol, Oanh at the end, walking across a sandy brush. By this time, Oanh has been forced to carry Clark’s rucksack, which he had dumped on Hatcher, who now transfers his burden onto Oanh. As Oanh moves deeper ahead, a snake slithers past in her wake. The apocalyptic-paradisiacal views have prepared us for this Biblical image. Yet as such, it is a curious moment. Oanh is neither associated with the snake, as with the Old Testament version of Eve, nor does she triumph over it by crushing it beneath her heel, as with the Virgin Mary. Rather, Oanh walks past it and beyond it.

The Catholic De Palma does not provide an image continuous with Judeo-Christian tradition, only one evocative of it; he decontextualizes Oanh from the Biblical view of women.18 (Perhaps this image has been prepared for by the shot of the black nun leaving the train in the opening scene.) He returns these men and this doomed woman to a nature before Biblical morality, a world in which man has no nonsecular comfort, a place without the assurances of myth. With unflinching clarity, De Palma suggests through this image of a snake slithering of its own accord a world in which human beings cause their own suffering and mete out their own justice. By extension, he challenges the prevailing cultural fantasy of the United States as a God-approved nation, revealing that the human significance of our actions is far more devastating than any cosmic sense of their importance.

At the hootch, the murderously heated discussion between Meserve and Eriksson summarizes the chief argument put forth by the film, that the established socially, culturally, and nationally maintained state of American manhood is psychotic. When Eriksson refuses to participate in the rape, charging away, Meserve flies into a rage. “Motherfucker! You walking away for me? You’re taking your turn in there!” he screams. Strangely enough, nothing like pleasure seems to motivate Meserve; rather, it’s the satisfaction of ex-erting dominance over a woman who stands in for both the enemy and her sex, a dominance that becomes a male communal rite, impels him, makes it so crucial to him that Eriksson join in. Of course, pragmatic needs press: if Eriksson participates, he cannot very well make their actions public. But

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial Meserve’s consistent insistence on participation goes well beyond the pragmatic. Sensitive and frightened Diaz confesses to Eriksson that “I ain’t raping nobody, man.” Noticing Eriksson staring pointedly at Diaz when he demands that Eriksson participate, Meserve screams, “Why are you looking at Diaz?”

which leads to Diaz’s capitulation to Meserve’s furious rule and acquiescence to the gang rape. But after Meserve rapes Oanh, he insists that the visibly reluctant Diaz be second. The homosocial is not some authentic and essential aspect of male identity—as Lionel Tiger argued in his sociological study Men in Groups and Camille Paglia has echoed in her work—but instead a desperately incoherent, fraught cultural fantasy, the establishment and maintenance of which requires great effort and comes at great cost. Male bonding in this film is “defined less by the group’s internal similarities and (they seem to have nothing in common but their tour of duty) and more by external disparities—
sexual and racial difference—that draw them together in concerted opposition to the ‘Other.’”19

Meserve demands that Eriksson explain why he refuses to participate, and, finding no satisfaction in Eriksson’s answer—“This isn’t right”—proceeds to question whether or not Eriksson can function sexually (“Haven’t you got a pair?”) or if he is “a homosexual.” Meserve spins Eriksson’s desperate gaze at Diaz into proof of the latter. Penn does a remarkable job of demonstrating the strenuousness of Meserve’s efforts, the desperation. An underlying homoerotic energy intensifies the taut, tense scenes between Penn and Fox, allowing us to register the homosexual panic that infuses the entire situation of the gang rape, the relations among deeply emotionally and sexually deprived men and an unspeakably violated woman. Rabe’s script makes this homoeroticism explicit. Meserve, very much seeming as if he’s about to make good on his threat, taunts Eriksson by saying that maybe after he’s done with Oanh, “I’ll hump you. ” One of the remarkable revelations of Casualties is that the homosocial’s necessary homophobia is itself profoundly homoeroticized: as Meserve taunts Eriksson over being a “homosexual,” Meserve puts his gun into his own mouth, simulating fellatio. Numerous such moments abound—Clark orders Hatcher to “hump my ruck”; scared Diaz tells Eriksson upon arrival at the hootch, “That was some hump, huh?” In one of the most stunning shots in the film, when Diaz complies in the rape of Oanh, we see his delicately beautiful body in undress from behind; from this posterior perspective, he looks as fragile and defenseless as Oanh. De Palma visually implies that, in being made to rape Oanh, the vulnerable and conscientious Diaz, another racially different character, is also being raped, by Meserve and the homosocial order he represents. Like Herman Melville’s novels, Casualties exposes the long-standing threat of sodomitical rape in the American military

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush in all of its forms, further intensifying the valences between Eriksson’s subject position and Oanh’s.20

Interestingly, it is precisely at the moment at which Meserve threatens to rape him that Eriksson backs forcefully away and brandishes his gun at the men. Though in a masochistic-feminine position, Eriksson, no more than any of the others, allows the taint of homosexual identity to tarnish his image.

Homosexual identity is so threatening to collectivized male identity that even the abnegated male in the group shares no less urgently in homophobic loathing.

Indeed, standing there with his big but ineffectual gun, Eriksson looks like he’s straining to regain his phallic masculinity. Interestingly, Meserve’s response parodies the allegiance to masculine codes Eriksson surprisingly evinces. “They say that this is a weapon,” Meserve begins, referring to his gun. “But this ain’t a weapon. It’s a tool. Now this”—and here he grabs his own penis—“this is a weapon.” Meserve proceeds to say that while the gun is for “fun,” his penis is for “fighting.” At this, he begins to rape Oanh, brutally beating her as wel .

Meserve emerges as an embodiment of what Wilhelm Reich described as the “phallic-narcissistic” character, for whom “relationships with women are disturbed by the typical derogatory attitude toward the female sex.” A “strong phallic aggression” informs this character type, for whom, on an unconscious level, the penis “serves less as an instrument of love than as an instrument of aggression, wreaking revenge upon the woman.”21 As Robin Wood argues, De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) is about a man who hates his own masculinity so much that he wants to become a woman.22 The failed transsexual Dr. Elliot (Michael Caine), who anticipates Jame Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs, bears a surprising similarity to Meserve. Meserve sees his penis as an instrument of menace, pain, and death, the phallus as the face of the death-drive. It is harrowingly ironic indeed that one of the most despicable male characters in a Vietnam War film provides the most stringently succinct and devastating account of the murderous nature of American manhood. Throughout the film, male sexuality is represented as violent, terrible, deadly—the long phallic knife Clark brandishes, the guns. Meserve makes explicit the construction of the phallus in patriarchy as the ultimate instrument of death. Though a director so often accused of misogyny, De Palma is an unflinching critic of masculine force.

In an extraordinary series of lap dissolves, we see the rape from a distance.

Covered in rain, in these nighttime images the men once again glow with an uncannily bluish, denaturing light. Indeed, the three men huddled together—

Meserve, Clark, and Hatcher—could be the three witches in Macbeth. Re-

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial 1
inforcing the theme of isolation, Diaz is separate in a panel of realistic color, a Catholic saint in flesh-tones floating above the men, albeit, given that they face in the opposite direction, an unworshipped one. When Meserve walks toward us, we realize that these images have been from Eriksson’s point of view. Again exhibiting his duality, Meserve rather gently tells Eriksson that he will be relieved from his post at some point. In one of the most painfully beautiful images in De Palma, we see, in extreme close-up, Eriksson’s face in the rain, bluish streaks of light falling on his blankly traumatized-looking face.

“I bet you like the army, Eriksson,” Meserve says, rather black-humorously.

“This ain’t the army. This ain’t the army, Sarge,” responds Eriksson. Meserve then prodigiously mangles the Book of Psalms (“Though I walk through the Valley of Evil, I shall fear no death, because I’ve got the biggest gun!”) and—
in a flourish that is a spectacular reminder of Meserve’s weirdness—he lasciviously sticks out his tongue to taste the rain. This gesture reinforces Meserve as a homoerotic threat to Eriksson, who could be his next erotic object/target.

But it even more resonantly suggests that isolate Meserve’s eroticism is essentially onanistic and narcissistic, an erotic world of one that bars any intimacy (the embodiment of negative narcissism).

Eriksson’s position of failed heroism, his inability to save Oanh, emblematizes the recurring theme of masculine failure in De Palma. Michael cannot save Elizabeth in Obsession (1976); Jack cannot save Sally in Blow Out (1981); Jake can’t save Gloria Revelle in Body Double (1984); the men can’t save Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia (2006). There are several variations on this theme: men unable to save each other— The Fury (1978), The Untouchables (1987), The Black Dahlia—and women unable to save women, in Carrie (1976), or men, in Mission to Mars (2000). But for the most part, the man’s failure to save the woman is a recurring De Palma theme, one of the major crossovers from Hitchcock’s work, as Vertigo most powerfully evinces. Eriksson’s compassion for Oanh, his refusal to participate in the gang rape, and his courageous willingness to face off against Meserve and the homosocial does not exculpate him—especially in his own mind—from his failure to act. To quote the odious prosecutor in Vertigo, “he did nothing. ”

One could theorize that this haunted masculinity derives from the fear of performance failure, an inability to achieve a coherent gendered performance that remains itself unquestioned. But in no De Palma film does the performance of active masculinity come without cost. The failure of the man to save the woman emerges as a critique—an indictment—of the murderous pressures on men to conform to a masculine ideal that pivots upon the subjugation of women. The paralytic position of heroically minded De Palma men is that they can protest the destruction of women yet do nothing to prevent it.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Moreover, the men are most often complicitous in the very plots they protest yet cannot thwart, having played active roles in their genesis. For example, Emil Breton loves psychotic Danielle in Sisters (1973), but is implicated in the panoptically sinister medical-psychiatric institutions that hasten her fall into madness; Obsession’s Michael fails to deliver the ransom money to free his wife and daughter; Dr. Elliott’s compassion for Kate Miller in Dressed to Kill is belied by the homicidal rage against her felt by his alter ego Bobbi; Jack’s investigation of the crime further ensnares Sally in the assassination plot in Blow Out; and Jake immorally ogles the woman he believed to be Gloria Revelle in Body Double. Casualties synthesizes this intensely personal theme. As Terrence Rafferty writes of the film, “De Palma [here] seems to have arrived, finally, at the terrifying source of his sensibility. . . . The suspense here is heartfelt and unendurable. It’s tragic suspense.”23

Eriksson is morally implicated in the plot to abduct, rape, and kill Oanh, involved in every facet of this plot, however peripheral he attempts to make his involvement. Eriksson remains an essentially ambiguous figure in the film, an equal site of audience empathy and frustration. As such, his character demands us to interrogate how we view essential male identity. If we feel that he should have taken “action,” killed the other men on the patrol to rescue Oanh, are we not on some level buying into the myth of masculine identity, of masculine performance, as action? The film forces us to recognize that the homosocial vanquishes the normative men who protest it no less efficiently than it does its more apparent enemies, queer men, women, and racial others.

Eriksson exists to record and reflect the terrible evidence of Oanh’s suffering, conveyed so indelibly through Thuy Thu Le’s profoundly moving performance, suggestive as much of Oanh’s spirit as of her suffering. In the whole middle section of the film, in which the rape and the murder occur, his chief words are “Oh, God,” and “No.” Eriksson exists to bear witness, the only possible agency in a world of suffering, violence, and death. As Freud said in “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” masochism bears witness to the powerful impulses to destroy life that are coterminous with those to preserve it in living organisms from the start of their existences. Eriksson embodies masochism’s witnessing role.

I Failed to Stop Them

Oanh’s death scene is the central sequence in the film and the greatest sequence in De Palma’s cinema, a spellbinding and emotionally devastating cri-

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial tique of misogyny, racism, war, and national power. Alternating between long shots and intimate close-ups, De Palma conceives the sequence both as the harrowing last moments of Oanh’s life and as an antiwar allegory. As an allegorical set piece, the sequence synthesizes the three major themes of the film: the destruction of women in patriarchy, the anguish of male performance failure, and the inevitable futility of war. In a stunning series of compositions, De Palma gives us views of the men fighting the Vietcong whom they’ve intercepted, the American army’s ambiguous contribution to this battle, Oanh’s destruction, and the despair of Eriksson, unable to save her.

De Palma uses his customary split-diopter technique to show us Oanh being stabbed by Clark in the distance as we see a shot of Eriksson’s face in close-up.24 Never before has his split-diopter effect carried so much awful resonance—the violation of this woman is only part of the frame, part of a larger struggle, one aspect of the mêlée, and something that occurs while Eriksson is not looking; his gaze signals his powerlessness here.

Eriksson has been, throughout the film, a deconstruction of Mulvey’s theory of the masculine gaze that dominates what it objectifies. Eriksson’s gaze has multifaceted objects and agendas, and it is most definitively not about the solidification of or access to male power. Precisely outside of his gaze, the terrible event he has been attempting to prevent takes place; De Palma constructs Eriksson’s point of view as an example of the masochistic gaze.

We see, in the distance, an American ship chugging toward the scene of battle, ostensibly a sign of the triumphant restoration of order. But the hazy distance of the ship suggests its ineffectualism. Moreover, we see bloodied Oanh, “a wounded apparition,” struggle from the brush to the bridge, crawling in fact toward the scene of densest fighting. Drenched in blood, she could be Carrie at the prom, another symbol of female suffering at the hands of the unfeeling collective. Fascinatingly, when she catches Meserve’s eye, Meserve cannot help but stare at her, transfixed. Shaking off the power of the image, he screams, “She’s getting away! Shoot her!” Eriksson, emitting another of his plaintive, baleful cries of protest, shrieks “No!” and tries to intervene, racing toward the men and Oanh, only to be gun-butted in the stomach by Meserve, in a variation of Meserve’s threat to “hump” him. Whereas Meserve saved Eriksson earlier, he now prevents him from saving Oanh, the masculine compact culminating in the destruction of woman. In a remarkable effect, Clark (who has screamed at the bloody apparition of Oanh, “Bitch! I stuck her twice!” confirming that his long knife has been indistinguishable from his phallic apparatus), Hatcher, and Diaz all rise up from their supine positions on the bridge at the same time, assuming mythic positions in a frieze

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush of collective masculinist violence. To the oppositional but conjoined cries of Meserve and Eriksson, the men shoot Oanh from both sides, an unspeakably grisly substitution of gang gunfire for gang rape. Oanh falls to her death, in a moment that, with Ennio Morricone’s music at its most heightened, is supremely and devastatingly operatic. Immediately afterward, an American plane appears, blasting everything in sight, including the American ship, blown to smithereens along with the Vietcong soldiers.

De Palma then cuts to the image of Oanh’s bloody, crushed, disjointed body lying on the ground, panning left to show us the images of men of all nations floating in the water, dead, bobbing next to the remnants of destroyed vessels of war. In one sequence, De Palma fuses the themes of the destruction of a woman and the futility of war, suggesting harrowing linkages.

Oanh’s Male Double

The intensity of the film greatly diminishes after this sequence, almost as if to say that the limits of art have been reached and exhausted. Yet there are three moments of profound power that take the film’s allegorical meanings to still deeper levels.

At one point, Eriksson attempts to discuss matters with his confidant, Rowan, as they walk with other soldiers through a village. As he does so, a tall, gangly, terribly vulnerable young man keeps interrupting them, vexing Eriksson, now in a position to call this annoying young man “Cherry.” Eriksson’s irritation and even callousness hints at some level of darkness in him, some way in which even noble, empathetic Eriksson shares a bit, however small, of Meserve’s cruelty. Eriksson does, in his upbraiding of the young man, soften his scolding to words of advice, yet the suggestion hangs in the air. A minute after the young man walks away he is blown up by a booby trap. When Eriksson looks at his body, cut in half—an anticipation of the image of the bisected body of the murdered Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia—he once again says “Oh, God,” linking Oanh’s death to that of this young man. Oanh, a figure who combines femininity and the racial other, and this vulnerable, non-normative young man, the man of in action, do not fit into the logic of the homosocial and are destroyed. This annihilated young man is Oanh’s symbolic counterpart. He also provides the figure of the non-volitionally suffering male body that is missing, as I argued in the Introduction, in the discourse of masochism. (One of the few lapses in Kael’s review is her mention of this scene only to remark on it as “the poorest piece of staging” in the film, overlooking one of its most pointed episodes.25)

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial Masculine Intimacy as Poison

As De Palma will also convey in the 1998 Snake Eyes, relations between men in patriarchy are essentially murderous, given that male-male relations pivot on a homoerotic intimacy that must be actively disavowed in favor of a shared embrace of violence and domination. This sense is powerfully conveyed to us in the brief but indelible and terrifying moment in which Meserve whispers something we cannot hear into Eriksson’s ear as Meserve leaves the court-room after being sentenced. Though we cannot hear what he tells Eriksson, the snarled words of Captain Hill (Dale Dye, a real-life military man), who cautioned Eriksson against reporting what happened to Oanh, flood and crash against the sound track: “I think they’d be looking for a little payback”—and then Eriksson snaps awake on the train, the entire narrative having been his recurring nightmare.

This Shakespearean touch, Meserve pouring poison into Eriksson’s ear, amplifies the homoerotic energy between them, as it underscores the theme of the murderous masculine compact, the terrible intimacy and the shared guilt between men in homosocialized patriarchy, who share in the subjugation and destruction of those outside of it. Meserve, who rescued Eriksson and now most likely tells him that he will find and kill him, represents both this homosocial male intimacy and the murderous energies that sustain and disavow it.

Mirror Men

In the scene at the bar—after Clark, most likely acting as proxy for the group, tries to kill Eriksson, who violently retaliates, confronting the group and bashing Clark in the face—Eriksson looks at himself in the mirror as he gets himself drunk. De Palma endows Eriksson “with connotations previously reserved for Meserve.” Eriksson, staring at his reflection, tries “to reconstitute his shattered self-image,” which links him to Meserve, whom we saw also looking at himself in the mirror (albeit, I would add, wielding a razor).26 This scene is interesting for several reasons. It is one of the most heartbreaking in the film: “Four men raped and killed a woman, and I failed to stop them,”

Eriksson simply and devastatingly tells the Lutheran priest (Sam Robards), who speaks to him out of concern for Eriksson’s drinking. The scene also amplifies the homoeroticism that inheres in the tensions between Eriksson and Meserve through its suggestion of a kind of fascination with the latter on the part of the former. Here, the masochist tries to reclaim his inner narcissist,

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Eriksson pointedly (though unconsciously) modeling himself after Meserve’s narcissistic self-regard in the mirror (tellingly, after the scene in which Eriksson erupted into his own display of violent force).

The Hol ywood films made after Casualties will invert the schema presented here, just as this scene reverses the moral vision steadily maintained in the film that it is Eriksson, not Meserve, who should be emulated. As I demonstrate throughout this study, the maneuver that will become common in Hol ywood film is to transform the male narcissist into the male masochist, male masochism emerging as a valorized mode of manhood, narcissistic manhood as unsatisfactory and even pernicious.

Casualties does not present Meserve as always already necessarily monstrous, though he is certainly shown to be an odd, unstable presence. But though it endeavors to illuminate his sadism—and, probably due to Vietnam veteran David Rabe’s screenplay, does more to exculpate him than Lang did in his essay (nevertheless, Vietnam War veterans actively campaigned against the film for showing soldiers in an apparently inauthentically negative light)—it never romanticizes it. The film demonstrates that Meserve’s subjectivity, his sadism, emerges from his failed narcissism, the negative narcissism that fails to generate a beauty that makes the world come alive and appear hopeful but, instead, forces the world to conform to the failed narcissist’s grotesquely distorted view and fantasy of narcissistic omnipotence.

Before Brownie’s death, despite disturbing rumblings that announce his future evil, the possibility is suggested that Meserve embodies and evinces a kind of charisma and masculine energy that comes from a generous-hearted and genial narcissism, a contagious display of libidinal energy. This magnetism draws in and unites a group, which relies on an essentially homoerotic unifying energy, as Freud speculates in the conclusion to his essay “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Paranoia, Jealousy, and Homosexuality.”27 Meserve could be another version of Melville’s Handsome Sailor, surrounded by sailors of all kinds and cultures drawn in by his intoxicating and necessary social magnetism. But Meserve transmutes generous, confident narcissism into a particularly fatal negative form.

After Eriksson wakes up, the Oanh-like Vietnamese woman leaves the train.28

He gets up after her, noticing that she has forgotten her scarf, that poignant link between her and the murdered girl. Running after her, he intercepts her.

She turns to face him, not terribly interested in him but polite just the same, and thanks him for the scarf. “Do I remind you of someone?” she asks. These could be Judy’s words to haggard Scottie in Vertigo. “You had a bad dream.

I think it’s over, now,” she tells Eriksson before walking away. Contrary to

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial some critical views of the film, this woman is not exculpating Eriksson, nor is she symbolically exculpating us for the war.29 Rather, she is giving Eriksson the divine gifts of empathy and recognition, precisely those gifts so resolutely denied to Oanh.30

The Masochistic Gaze

Appropriate to a study of the director who most consistently and probingly engages with Hitchcock’s style—in fact makes an agon with this style his own chief cinematic project—Tania Modleski’s feminist treatment of masochism and female vision in her discussion of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Notorious (1946) illuminates our understanding of the ways in which De Palma constructs the masochistic male gaze.

Notorious stars Ingrid Bergman as the titular woman known for her sexual promiscuity, Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a Nazi convicted in America as a traitor. Cary Grant plays Devlin, a cia operative who enlists an initially unwilling Alicia to infiltrate a secret Nazi enclave in Brazil. The drama of this film lies in the various sadomasochistic games the tortured lovers play with and on each other. Hitchcock engineers considerable audience sympathy for Alicia, who, having been spurned by Devlin and nearly poisoned to death by the villain and his mother, comes close to death by the end. When we first see Devlin, the only part of him visible is the back of his head. Noting that Hitchcock uses this shot to illustrate the operative’s ambiguousness of character, Modleski offers the view that, though we are meant to identify with Devlin as spectators, surely we are to perceive this identification, so presented, “critically, ” since “spectatorship is here shown to be a somewhat shady activity—and more than a little menacing.” Modleski offers us the possibility that the film engineers masochistic responses in both male and female spectators.

Modleski takes this point even further by suggesting that not only the male spectator but also the male protagonist may experience this spectatorial masochism. The idea that witnessing a woman’s suffering “may be painful to the male subject has not been sufficiently considered.” (Carol Clover’s discussion of the transvestic and masochistic identification on the part of the male spectator with the Final Girl of horror movies would shortly take Modleski up on her challenge.) “And yet,” Modleski writes, “in Notorious Devlin’s position as passive spectator is clearly one which causes him a great deal of anguish—an anguish which he nevertheless seems determined to intensify on a number of occasions. It is almost as if he sends Alicia into the arms of

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Sebastian [her husband, the Nazi whom she initially spied on] for the purpose of watching her, as if he stages her suffering so that he can increase his own distress. At the end of the film, Devlin makes explicit the idea that ‘mastery is simultaneous with self-punishment’ when he apologizes for his cruelty to her and explains, ‘I couldn’t see straight. I was a fat-headed guy filled with pain.’”

Modleski is quick to point out, however, that though Devlin may share in Alicia’s masochism, “we must not suppose that there is an equality in suffering

[between these characters] . . . if Devlin says that he couldn’t see straight because he was in such pain, it is Alicia’s vision that the film consistently shows to be distorted, partly as a result of her self-destructive masochistic activities (her drinking) and partly as a result of other’s people’s destructive treatment of her. If Devlin is filled with pain, she is filled with pain and poison.”31

Modleski’s work, in part, explicitly joins the critique of Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” from critics like Kaja Silverman and Gaylyn Studlar (both of whose work we considered at greater length in the Introduction), all of whom in distinct ways question Mulvey’s “exclusive emphasis on the male spectator’s sadism, man’s need to gain mastery over the woman in the course of the narrative,” as Modleski puts it. The economy of masochism in Modleski’s work truly enlarges Mulvey’s paradigms. But though Modleski shares in the belief in masochism’s importance, she is even more concerned with what the repression of male masochism, rooted in the boy’s pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother, says about adult male views of women. “What are the source and consequences for women of this repression?” Furthermore,

“what are the sources and consequences of the ‘dread of woman,’ of ‘ambivalence’ towards the mother, of the equation of women with death,” figured as crucial components of Studlar’s “masochistic aesthetic”?32

Modleski’s questions retain their urgency, and by taking them in a different direction here, I mean to redress what I feel is a lack in her view—queer sexuality—and not to perpetuate the obfuscation of women’s predicament in patriarchy Modleski has been fighting against in her work for several years. I intend only to add the perspective that queer sexuality shares the same predicament, or at least mirrors it. One could say that her indifference to queer issues hampers her view of Hitchcock—which distresses me, especially since I consider her one of Hitchcock’s finest critics—but I am not going to delve into that set of difficulties here, focusing instead on the impact her findings have on queer sexuality, especially in terms of masochism. For it is not only with women and the feminine that masochism has been linked—it is also, as the earlier treatments of Bersani, Silverman, and Edelman demonstrate, with queer sexuality that masochism has been closely aligned. Moreover, I would

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial say that the linkages among masochism, femininity, and death that Modleski inarguably locates in masochism discourse is even more pronouncedly present in queer theory.

To return to De Palma’s film, it is most notable in constructing a masochistic gaze that participates in neither a feminine nor a queer typing of masochism. Moreover, it does not construct a male masochistic gaze that erases women’s suffering; indeed, the masochistic male gaze as presented functions specifically to show us this female suffering, to show us what Eriksson cannot see, the first stage of Oanh’s murder as Clark stabs her.

It is important to refine our definition of the gaze at this point. For Lacan, Freud’s famous French psychoanalytic re-interpreter, “the look” and “the gaze” are not the same thing. (Since Lacan reformulated Freud’s theory of scopophilia—desiring looking, a form of looking that gives sexual power and pleasure—into the theoretical field of the gaze, the gaze itself has received so broad and complex a treatment in psychoanalytic theory and in film theory, psychoanalytically inflected and otherwise, that it would be absurd to attempt any kind of summarization of its history here.) As Kaja Silverman unpacks Lacan’s theory of the gaze, “Although the gaze might be said to be ‘the presence of others as such,’ it is by no means coterminous with any individual viewer, or group of viewers. It issues ‘from all sides,’ whereas the eye ‘[sees]

only from one point.’” Silverman, drawing on Lacan, differentiates the eye or the “look” from the gaze, making the analogy that the eye and the gaze are, in psychoanalytic theory, as distinct as penis and phallus.33 Tim Dean also stresses the importance of distinguishing “vision” from the “gaze.”34

As Henry Krips explains it, the gaze is Lacan’s name for “the structural distortions of the visual field, those that are not only seen but are also the source of a look turned back upon the viewer.”35 Krips’s discussion of David Cronenberg’s manipulations of the cinematic gaze in his 1996 film Crash can help us to understand the way De Palma constructs the masochistic gaze, which in turn helps us to understand this concept as it will appear in several other Bush-to-Bush films.

Cronenberg’s camera’s look, writes Krips, “takes on an inhuman quality; the formal, geometrically precise, and oddly angled shots follow a pattern no human viewer could replicate.” Krips theorizes:

By opening a gap between what is visible to the human eye and the camera’s visual field, and especially by leading viewers to see in an “unnatural” way what they could not see for themselves, this use of the camera draws attention to the film’s nature as film. The inhuman quality of its look refuses viewers the familiar viewing position of identifying with the camera, that is, of

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush watching what it sees as if they themselves were watching. Viewers are thus made aware of the interpassive nature of the filmic experience, the fact that they are seeing vicariously what has been seen on their behalf. The film thus plunges the viewer into the formal structure of the gaze.36

De Palma uses the split-diopter effect to show us Eriksson looking, Eriksson looking in the wrong place and in the wrong direction, and Oanh’s stabbing, which occurs outside of Eriksson’s view. Earlier, we see, in a moment that prepares us for and deepens the scene of Oanh’s stabbing, through another split-diopter effect Eriksson looking in the opposite direction as Vietcong escape in the field in which Brownie was just shot. All of these examples of faulty vision can be described as masochistic male looking, indicative, as they are, of the fragility, vulnerability, and powerlessness of the male eye. This masochistic looking serves as an allegory of the gaze. In Lacanian terms, the gaze is the entire visual field in which the looking subject is only one component, as is what he or she looks at, and that connotes not mastery over but the impossibility of vision. What De Palma represents is not just masochistic male looking—which in this case does not suggest the seeking of gratification and pleasure through suffering and watching suffering but instead the impairment, thwarting, or blinding of masculine vision—but the effects of the looking on the woman, who suffers through unspeakable violence not only unrecognized but unassisted. De Palma’s masochistic male looking allegorizes the gaze by revealing the void at the heart of vision. As Eyal Peretz writes, De Palma is the “greatest contemporary investigator, at least in American cinema, of the nature and the logic of the cinematic image,” which Peretz, following Lacan, describes as a “blankness at the heart of the senses.”37 What De Palma critiques is any idea that male looking automatically connotes power. He exposes the totalizing and inadequate nature of any broad theory of the male gaze. In De Palma, the gaze itself is masochistic, suffused with suffering, revealing the subjugation of the spectator to vision and the image; moreover, De Palma exposes the impact looking relations have on gendered bodies. All of these elements together form De Palma’s construction of the masochistic gaze, of which what we see is a cross-section, a kind of compressed frozen frame from a much larger visual field that exposes what, in seeing, we profoundly fail to see.

De Palma’s tone is markedly distinct from that of Cronenberg, even if the effect created—of creating an impasse between what we can see and what we do see, of dissolving any sense of mastery over the visual field—is similar.

De Palma wants, in the manner of silent film, to rouse the viewer to feeling through images (and operatic music). Cronenberg wants to show us the dead-

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial 1

Figure .4. The masochistic gaze: what Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) cannot see Figure .. The masochistic gaze: Eriksson fails to see Oanh being stabbed by Clark.

ening effect of even sexual perversity on the human body (as well as the psyche); De Palma wants us to perceive the ways in which we deaden the body and the psyche. By amplifying and heightening our visual responses, he refuses to allow his viewers anything like a complacent response to his images, insisting instead upon our continuous engagement with and responsiveness to them.

Eriksson’s masochistic look recalls the other men in De Palma’s films who can watch but do nothing, only powerlessly witness destructive forces abolishing Life. For example, Peter (Kirk Douglas) watches both his lover Hester (Carrie Snodgress) and his son (Andrew Stevens) die, Hester hit by a car and Andrew falling to his death, in The Fury; Jack sees and, even more devastatingly, hears Sally scream her last cry for help in Blow Out; and Jake witnesses Gloria Revelle about to be murdered in Body Double, an act that he fails to prevent. It also provides a commentary on male gazing as harrowing as it is unflinching.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Meserve’s own performance of the narcissistic male look has been an equally pointed and complex meditation on the male cinematic gaze. In the scene in which he shaves, Meserve verges on a commitment to evil that he has not quite yet made, while being poised to make it. Cut off from the other men in the frame, he occupies a position of harrowing isolation, one he will invert by making the group conform to the blinding singularity of his will.

Holding the straight razor in his hand as he shaves, he literalizes negative narcissism, enacting a male fantasy of narcissistic omnipotence that is as potentially self-annihilating as it is outwardly destructive. He acutely embodies Reich’s phallic-narcissistic character model, forever seeking “unconsciously to prove to women how potent” he is while at the same time offering only a

“sexual act [that] constitutes a piercing or destroying” of the woman.38 Like Dr. Elliot in Dressed to Kill—who looks at himself in the mirror with fright and a blank failure of recognition, failing to link himself to Bobbi’s voice on the answering machine, “I borrowed your razor, ” and failing to recognize that anguished and murderous Bobbi is himself and that he possesses the murderous silver instrument that Bobbi claimed as her own—Meserve both possesses the phallic razor and lacks the ability to recognize his own capacity for evil.

Casualties inaugurates the narcissistic/masochistic split in male identity in Bush-to-Bush cinema but remains unsurpassed in its use of this split as metonymic of American culture and as political critique of American manhood.

Casualties of War has in no way lost its heartbreaking and terrifying relevance.

What makes it such an innovative work is that it places gender and its attendant anxieties at the very center of warfare, and at the very center of any attempt to make sense of why and how we make war with such unceasing fervor. The film no less acutely speaks to our current war than it does to Vietnam. If women soldiers are seen to preside over male prisoners of war in the photos of Abu Ghraib (the abuses of which came to public attention in 2004), a reversal of the gendered dynamics of Casualties, sexual violation remains the traumatic logic of warfare (as has been widely reported, rape and other sexual violations of male prisoners were intrinsic aspects of the torture they underwent). In this regard, the combination of female and male soldiers in the Iraq War looks less like gendered equality and more like the remodeled face of a retooled patriarchy. Patriarchy, as a homosocialized and masculinist base of power, inherently gendered male, continues to be the foundational power around which our culture is organized. If women are now included among the ranks of soldiers in war, this inclusion does nothing to redress a gendered imbalance; rather, the women are assimilated into the homosocial, masculinized into the other side of the gendered split, made compatible with

Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial Figure .. Eriksson in the rain: no catharsis patriarchal demands. Patriarchy, compulsory homosocialization, and war-making continue, unabated.

Coda: Redacted

In 2007, De Palma returned to the same themes of Casualties of War. The 1989
film is about the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman during the Vietnam War; Redacted is about the rape and murder of an Iraqi woman—and the murder of her family—during the American war in Iraq. Like Casualties, Redacted is a cry of rage at atrocities committed by the United States government in the name of freedom, a chimerical term the films expose as absurdly inauthentic and meaningless. With a kind of sickeningly grim inevitability, De Palma’s intervention in American war-making comes full circle: what De Palma railed against at the start of the Bush 41 presidency comes to pass again in that of Bush 43. In comparing Casualties to Redacted, one registers the profound shifts that have occurred in the visual media through which stories get told. Whereas Casualties made characteristically De Palmian use of wide angles; long, languorous tracking shots; surgically skillful editing; rapturous color; and a grandiloquently emotive score, Redacted feels home-made, raw. When at its sleekest cinematically, in the sections of it meant to be footage from a French documentary about American soldiers in Iraq, the sleekness serves an entirely satirical purpose. Made up of handheld video footage (from a character’s video journal), security camera tapes, YouTube videos, Iraqi newscasts, jihadist Web sites, and assorted video blogs, the film assembles the varieties of makeshift filmmaking techniques available for the creation of instant film, the worldwide democratization of the moving image.

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush The character who makes the video journal, the soldier Salazar (“Sally”), intends to use the film he makes to get into film school. That this character ends up retributively beheaded reveals a great deal about De Palma’s view of the function, responsibilities, and ultimate fate of the artist. Redacted demands that we leave behind any sense that art can bring us joy. At most, it can only bring us closer to the truth.

chapter three

Male Medusas and Female Heroes

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs For Freud, the universal male trauma occurs in infancy when the male child recognizes that the mother does not possess a penis, a terrifying realization the shock of which inheres in the enforced recognition that a being so immense and immensely powerful can be “lacking” the organ in which the little boy has invested so much of his psychic energies.1 Later in life, the male may endow parts of women’s bodies (noses, feet) or that which adorns their bodies (fur, shoes) with a tremendous power. The male investment in these spatialized aspects of women can be described as “fetishism,” or the attempt to restore the maternal phallus—that phantom organ that never existed yet wields such indelible fascination that it assumes the form of a necessary actuality—to the woman always already bereft of one.

Obviously, so many complexities exist in this theory—so many implications for male sexuality, to say nothing of those for the women doubly marked by “lack” and the strenuous effort to deny it—that any discussion of the phenomenon of fetishism is necessarily skewed, inadequate. But for the purposes of our discussion throughout this study, fetishism takes on a new dimension when it is seen, as Gilles Deleuze theorized it, as a subset of masochism. As I have been arguing in this study, although masochism can have a radical, resistant dimension, as it does in De Palma’s Casualties of War, it ultimately emerges in Bush-to-Bush films as the normative mode of male sexuality, one that most appositely reflects the tormented but ultimately resolved, streamlined, and properly updated model of American manhood.

Before commencing our discussion of The Silence of the Lambs, the film whose figuration of fetishism occupies our discussion in this chapter, it will be helpful to draw upon Deleuze’s discussion of fetishism within his larger consideration of masochism.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .1. Portrait of the artist as a young fetishist: The Silence of the Lambs (1991) The Mother in Ice: Fetishism in Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze’s Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty examines the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, especially his most famous novel Venus in Furs, the template for masochistic male sexuality. In Masochism, Deleuze challenges the prevailing psychoanalytic understanding of masochism as the inversion of sadism—that, if sadism is the lust to inflict pain, masochism is simply the lust to experience inflicted pain. The most brilliant achievement of Deleuze’s study is that he defamiliarizes each process to the extent that they do indeed come to seem mutually exclusive. Among the several crucial differences in both modes of achieving sexual gratification that Deleuze enumerates, one of the most important is that, whereas sadism

“operates with the negative and pure negation,” masochism operates through

“disavowal and suspension.” Disavowal constitutes the core of the strategy of fetishism, which seeks to disavow knowledge of the mother’s missing phallus.

The mother, so crucial to fetishism, crucially informs, indeed occupies the center of, masochism, hence the chief difference between it and sadism is that whereas sadism negates the mother and inflates the father, masochism abolishes the father and makes the mother central.2

Fetishism, as defined by the process of disavowal and suspension of belief belongs essentially to masochism. . . . [T]here can be no masochism without fetishism in the primary sense. [Masochists like Masoch do] not believe in negating or destroying the world nor in idealizing it: what he does is to

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs disavow and thus to suspend it, in order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy. [The masochist] questions the validity of existing reality in order to create a pure ideal reality, an operation which is perfectly in line with the judicial spirit of masochism. It is not surprising that this process should lead straight into fetishism. The main objects of fetishism in Masoch’s life and work are furs, shoes, the whip, the strange helmets that he liked to adorn women with, or the various disguises such as we find in Venus.

. . . [A split occurs] in fetishism and the corresponding double “suspension”: on the one hand the subject is aware of reality but suspends this awareness; on the other the subject clings to his ideal. There is a desire for scientific observation, and subsequently a state of mystical contemplation. The masochistic process of disavowal is so extensive that it affects sexual pleasure itself; pleasure is postponed for as long as possible and is thus disavowed. The masochist is therefore able to deny the reality of pleasure at the very point of experiencing it, in order to identify with the “new sexless man.”3

Freud’s study of masochistic beating phantasies in children (mainly in girls), the 1919 essay “A Child is Being Beaten,” especially its image of a boy being beaten by his mother, informs Deleuze’s work.4 In Freud’s view, the presence of the mother is key to a brilliant strategy on the boy’s part for preserving both his passive, masochistic position and denying or staving off the fulfillment of his essentially homosexual phantasy of passive submission to the beating Father. Somehow the boy manages to preserve ever-elusive, always-desirable heterosexual legitimacy and his masochistic phantasy. Freud’s beating mother is the screen for the beating father, always beating in the wings.

But for Deleuze, precisely the reverse is true: the father is actually irrelevant to the phantasy; it is the mother who is all-important, necessary, supreme.

She beats the father within the child, and being beaten by her is the major significance of the entire phantasy.

Given the elision of the role of the mother in much classic psychoanalytic thought, Deleuze’s elevation of the mother to the central position has exciting possibilities—perhaps through Deleuze a psychoanalytic approach that restores the crucial importance of mothers and the maternal to psychosexual development and to the social order itself can be found? No such luck, alas. For, despite the highly suggestive theory for the mother’s supremacy that Deleuze offers, a theory that can have important uses in other contexts,5

Deleuze’s version of the centrality of the mother to masochism evinces precisely what is so potentially pernicious about masochism as a valorized mode of male sexuality, especially for queer men and for the women burdened by their suspect mythologization in the multivalent fantasies of masochism.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush For Deleuze through Masoch, and presumably throughout human history, three women exist: the Aphrodite-like hetaera, or prostitute; the sadistic woman; and the “intermediate feminine type between the hetaera and the sadist.” If we think of the hetaera as the “primitive, uterine mother, mother of the cloaca and the swamps,” and the sadistic woman as the “Oedipal mother, the image of the beloved, who becomes linked with the sadistic father as victim or accomplice,” we can conceive of this third, intermediate woman between the two as “the oral mother, mother of the steppe, who nurtures and brings death.” She is the “ideal of coldness, solicitude, and death.”6 This oral mother is Nature herself, revealed as “the trinity of the masochistic dream”:

“cold-maternal-severe, icy-sentimental-cruel. These qualities point to the difference between the woman torturer and her counterparts, the hetaera and the sadist: their sensuousness is replaced by her supersensuous sentimentality, their warmth and their fire by her icy coldness, their confusion by her rigorous order.”7

The mother of masochism combines absolutism, unflinching dedication to her ideal of severity, with sublime, unreachable coldness. Being disciplined by her is ecstatically pleasurable for the masochistic male, whom she suckles with a teat as icy as the tip of a mountain. Apparently, Deleuze sees the replacement of the beating father with this Olympian cold, severe, timeless version of femininity as a radical innovation. But at least in Freud, the father in the wings suggests that the male child remains hopelessly, unsatisfyingly fixated on a father the desire for whom represents a homosexual longing that cannot be acknowledged, much less acted upon.8 There is therefore something subversive going on in the Freudian view. But where is the subversion in Masoch or in Deleuze here? The masochistic mother is simply the feminine eternal—

Nature—gussied up with the unflinching authority of the Burkean sublime.

The centrality of manhood in Western culture can continue unchecked, un-critiqued, so long as woman is employed as the embodiment of inescapable, idealized Nature.

Masoch and Deleuze project the cultural fantasy that modern womanhood can be corrected, that ideal womanhood can be restored, that bright, shining female divinity can be regained. Everything in Masoch, writes Deleuze, “is suggestive of coldness: marble body, women of stone, Venus of ice. . . . The woman in the dream, at the beginning of Venus, expresses in her speech a romantic nostalgia for the lost world of the Greeks.” The Greek world having been lost to the Ice Age, man became coarse, wanting a “new dignity”; women developed the techniques of sentimentality and severity, a sentimentality that

“became the object of man’s thought,” and a severity that became “the punishment for his coarseness.” “In the coldhearted alliance between man and

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs woman, it is this cruelty and sentimentality in woman that compel man to thought and properly constitute the masochistic ideal.”9

Masochism, then, along with its complementary mode of fetishism, can be read as an ingenious strategy for employing gendered archetypes of the classical past to ensure the proper functioning of man in the present, with one theme running unchecked throughout the ages, the view of woman as proper helpmeet to man. There is nothing in Deleuze whatsoever to question man’s essential supremacy, no voice of the lives of women, no voice of those who desire members of their own sex, no voice of someone who does not wish to submit to the constructed icon of a misogynistic ideal that has endured unabated for centuries in Western thought—therein lies the true, the only, timelessness in male masochistic phantasy. As I argue in the Introduction, masochism can be understood as hypocritical narcissism, a whol y self-involved, other-denying sexuality that nevertheless identifies itself as the dissolution of the self and the submission to the other.

Given that masochism is, at heart, a heterosexual male phantasy about domination by a supernally supreme icon of femininity devoid of human character and endowed with mythological might, masochism presents particularly unwieldy and unstable theoretical possibilities as a site of a resistant manhood, despite the numerous readings of it as such. Because Freud allows at least for the possibility that something resistant can take place in masochism—that homosexual phantasy may lurk within it, on the one hand, and that heterosexual manhood is as mysterious and problematic a sexual outcome as homosexuality, on the other—Freud remains not only a more fertile but also a more promising site of resistance than Deleuze.

The most suggestive point, for our purposes, that Deleuze makes is that fetishism should be regarded as a subset of masochism, a point that will inform my discussion of the depiction of male sexuality in The Silence of the Lambs. As I will demonstrate later in this chapter, the unprovided theorization of fetishism has been the crucial absence in criticism of the film, a critical oversight I aim to redress. I return to the issues of masochism, fetishism, and narcissism in Freud and in the film below.

Hollywood and Homophobia

Though a box-office hit and an enthusiastical y reviewed film, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs almost immediately became a site of tremendous controversy and even an inspiration for political activism over what was perceived to be its representation of male homosexuality. In the

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush character of the fledgling serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), the movie creates a vile, ugly caricature of the homosexual man, a catalogue of every homophobic trope imaginable, and, no matter how accomplished the movie, the treatment of this character makes the film morally offensive. At least this was, and remains, the conventional appraisal. At the time, certain gay rights groups publicly protested the film, demanding that Hol ywood stop misrepre-senting queer people as monstrous psychopaths. When the New York Society of Film Critics handed out awards to Silence for best film, director, actor, and actress, gay activists showed up and protested; the following year, activists protested at the Academy Awards show, which Silence swept, generating suspense over whether or not they would disrupt the award show itself. Posters of the film’s star, Jodie Foster, impugned her for her involvement in the film by “outing” her as “absolutely queer.”

Intensifying the activism was the coterminous emergence of Paul Verhoeven’s film, Basic Instinct (1992). That film presents its glamorous female serial killer Catherine Trammel (Sharon Stone), uncrossing her legs in a killer white suit, as ravenously bisexual, cavorting with her girlfriend in the Sodom of a dance club as Nick Curran (Michael Douglas), the agonized, violent, shady detective investigating her, looks on in desperate rage. Certainly, Basic Instinct, though a huge popular hit, garnered no kudos for its representation of women. What made the controversy over Silence’s purported homophobia all the more onerous an issue to negotiate was the film’s positively viewed feminism, with its heroine praised for being a great new female character.

It was almost as if there were two films called The Silence of the Lambs, one a virulently homophobic one, the other one progressively and profoundly feminist.10

It was an extraordinary year for the strong woman investigator of brutal crimes. The first installments of the British series Prime Suspect, starring the great Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, a female police detective investigating a series of serial murders of prostitutes while being confronted by sexist hostility from her male colleagues, premiered in 1991 to justifiably high praise.

In the following year emerged David Fincher’s Alien 3, in my view one of the most powerful feminist films ever made. The end of the Bush 41 era produced an extraordinary outpouring of feminist consciousness in popular film and television. Yet, the issue of gay male representation, for many, remained less than salutary.

In this chapter, I propose that Silence’s representation of Jame Gumb is more complicated and more difficult than the term “homophobic” allows for.

In and through Jame Gumb, the movie grapples with the overpowering phantasm of American masculinity and male sexuality—a masculine ideal inextri-

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 1
cably linked with national identity. The question of homosexuality here, then, emerges as only one aspect—albeit a very significant one—of the discourse of masculinity in the film. Jame Gumb not only represents the queer body but also and more crucially the incomprehensible incoherence of American masculine identity itself. In this regard, if homophobic tendencies are, indeed, present in the film, they are overshadowed by the power of its critique of American masculinity. I would go even further and suggest that the film is, on balance, anti-homophobic in the acuity of its challenge to any notion of a normative, stable sexuality.

Quest Heroes and Self-Made Monsters

Since Benjamin Franklin, a cult of self-making—initially a male project, but certainly now a broadly gendered one—has informed the ways in which Americans make sense of themselves and impelled our narratives of aspiration.11 Emersonian and Thoreauvian self-reliance remain forceful touchstones for American identity. The powerful tension between collectivization and revered models of individuality exists no less resonantly in our own era than it did in the early days of the republic. Silence ponders as it parodies cults of American self-making and individualism. I argue that Jame Gumb should be primarily read as a parody of the American cult of self-made manhood. More affirmingly, Gumb’s double, the fbi trainee heroine Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), recasts the classic American model of the self-made man in feminist terms, even as she enlarges, critiques, and represents a reimagining of the Western quest hero—an idea deepened by a consideration of her as a lesbian heroine. Clarice’s new female quest hero collapses several classical heroes: Oedipus, the investigator of a miasmic crime he wishes to purge; Perseus, who must battle the Medusa to rescue the girl; and Aeneas, who must make his way through the underworld. Like these three heroes, Clarice will stop along the way to receive challenges and guidance from a disquieting guide—
in Clarice’s case, Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Clarice wants desperately to become a successful fbi agent so that she can escape the dead-end orphan’s life forced upon her after her parents’ respective deaths, among other reasons, some involving the titular lambs. Psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal serial killer played by Anthony Hopkins, wants desperately to become free, released from his windowless, medieval underground prison cel , free to see live trees (a sight he says he craves) and satisfy his anthropophagic hungers. Jame Gumb—a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who flays women—wants desperately to become the realized version of his

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush perfervid fantasy of created womanhood. Hence, the movie’s moving chief signifier, the chrysalis of a moth, a cocoon from which may spring a dazzling, resplendent, free butterfly: the liberated fulfillment of and release from the agony of becoming. This film grapples with the peculiar process of an American becoming. As Clarice runs in the opening credits sequence, we see a shot of a tree with words on plaques pinned to it, forming a legend that reads: hurt—agOny—pain—lOve it, and, barely visible beneath the imperative statement, priDe. These words are deeply resonant. Clarice’s expression belies this grittily triumphant fbi rhetoric—agony is something to be taken seriously and that transcends jingoistic vainglory. This plaque’s words also fuse the film’s themes of masochism (hurt, agony, and love for it) and narcissism (pride).

Homosexuality or Fetishism?

Like theorist Diana Fuss in her essay on the film, I use Freudian theory to interpret the Gumb character.12 Whereas Fuss argues that the film illustrates the homophobic tendencies already present in Freud, I use Freud to tease out the radicalism of the film’s treatment of gender, which itself extends Freud’s own radical visions of gender. From my queer-Freudian perspective, I argue that Gumb should be read as a fetishist. Though such a reading does not resolve the debates over whether or not the film is homophobic in intent or effect, it certainly enlarges the discussion. The fetishist shares with the homosexual (as well as the onanist, or masturbator, and the prostitute, to name three of the chief Victorian sexual monsters) the socially threatening and therefore demonized penchant for non-marital, non-procreative sexual desires. Emily Apter, discussing Foucault’s classification of fetishism as “the model perversion,” describes the early model of the fetishist in psychoanalytic theory as a foppish young man, shy and feminized, whose taste for collecting betrayed an overly developed epicurianism and an attraction to the sampling of “bizarreries” (fetishists, ever since Jean-Martin Charcot and Valentin Magnan’s groundbreaking article on “genital inversion” [1882] were suspected of being latent homosexuals). The typical fetishist was susceptible of manic passions, from bric-a-bracomania to erotomania.

Though far less sinister than the sadist or masochist whose sexual appetites and proclivities, luridly cataloged in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), could be satisfied only through violence, the fetishist shared with the sadomasochist a socially reprehensible propensity to “linger” (Freud’s term)

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs in the realm of foreplay. Digressing on the path to coital consummation, foiling civilization’s righteous aim to propagate the species, he was guilty of an exemplary dalliance in gratuitous sex.13

If the homosexual threatens society by his choice of a sexual object with whom he or she cannot biologically reproduce, the fetishist—neither necessarily homosexual nor heterosexual, but most often viewed as the latter—
threatens by obsessively brooding, “lingering,” over the objects of his desire.

The idea of “bric-a-bracomania” extends, in the film, to the representation of Gumb’s gendered identity, which, far from cohering into any one sexual identity, can only be described as a sexual collage.

The representation of Gumb needs to be contextualized as part of the film’s overarching depiction of American manhood and masculinity as corrupt, exhausted, and pernicious. As Judith Halberstam writes, “The Silence of the Lambs is a horror film that, for once, is not designed to scare women; it scares men instead with the image of a fragmented and fragile masculinity, a male body disowning the penis.” It is precisely as a determined critique of masculinism that the film conveys an underappreciated anti-homophobic message along with what is, for many, a homophobic one. As Halberstam continues, “It seems to me that The Silence of the Lambs emphasizes that we are at a peculiar time in history, a time when it is becoming impossible to tell the difference between prejudice and its representations . . . homophobia and representations of homophobia.”14 As this study as a whole argues, Hol ywood in the early 1990s exhibited an uncanny prescience about the difficulties of this “peculiar” moment in history, striving afterward to deny the knowledge of which it had availed itself. Like Casualties of War, The Silence of the Lambs figures male sexuality as a site of horror. Moreover, it brilliantly establishes, as it prefigures, the model for a new Hol ywood male subjectivity of the kind we have come to know from Bush-to-Bush: a collage masculinity, composed of myriad images, attitudes, dispositions, attributes, predilections, and possible libidinal investments.

Certainly, an overlap between misogyny and homosexuality exists in the popular understanding of gay men, and it can certainly be argued that Silence plays into such stereotypes. Yet, to categorize the film’s construction of Gumb as homophobic is inadequate because to do so is to ignore the complexities of this construction, particularly as it relates to issues of national manhood.

Gumb is in several ways a proleptic reflection of a particular crisis in American manhood in the 1990s. With the rise of queer visibility and female agency, heterosexual manhood had to adapt while maintaining its core identity. The

“90s man” had to incorporate and wield new attitudes, new behaviors, new

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush dimensions—a tolerant awareness of homosexuality, on the one hand, and a respect for women’s enlarged social power, on the other—while still maintaining an authentically unchallengeable heterosexual male identity. Moreover, the 90s man ingeniously colonized the most alluring and useful aspects of queerness and femininity. Heterosexual men developed a beauty culture, became “metrosexuals,” got facials, manicures, pedicures, spa treatments, indulged in the freedoms of the new “gay vague” look and identity.

What Gumb represents is a terrified and terrifying prognostication of imminent trends in the national construction of American manhood—a manhood attempting to incorporate normativity, femininity, queerness, and perversity simultaneously. No positive images of male identity—save for the feminized and lost male authority of Clarice’s father—exist in this film, and, given this critical distance toward masculinity on the film’s part, Gumb emerges as a figure of great pathos.

Manhood’s Face

Early on in Silence, Jodie Foster’s young fbi trainee Clarice Starling is sent on “an interesting errand” by Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), Chief of the fbi Behavioral Science section at Quantico. She must grill Dr. Hannibal Lecter for information on Buffalo Bill. Our identities and Clarice’s fused, her first meeting with Lecter becomes our first meeting with him, and the movie skillfully enables us to accept him, the way Clarice accepts him, into our minds—in other words, to defy the patriarchal fbi honcho Crawford’s advice: “You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” We are then introduced to Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), the administrator for the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the maximum-security serial killer prison housing Lecter. The odious, hammy Chilton serves as a negative foil to Lecter. “He’s a monster,” Chilton informs Clarice as he laboriously flirts with her, all the while seeming like the true monstrosity.

Demme’s most crucial film grammar here is the close-up; he uses the face as mutable canvas.15 Zooming in on Clarice’s face in Crawford’s office as she stares at the grisly photos and news clippings of the young women murdered by Buffalo Bill/Jame Gumb, Demme makes her a sign of suffering and empathy, as does Foster’s extraordinarily subtle yet palpable communication of Clarice’s interiority.

If Clarice’s face is a mobile means of conveying emotion, Crawford’s face in close-up is the cold, blank, almost featureless face of institutionalized masculine power (much like the shots of Jason Robards’s face and those of the

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs Figure .. The empathetic gaze: Clarice’s (Jodie Foster) face other old, white patriarchal men on the verge of destroying a gay man’s life in Demme’s next film, the 1993 Philadelphia). When, in close-up, he tells Clarice,

“You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head,” the effect of his words and that face convey the sense that an invasion from his psychic presence would be equally frightening. Similarly, the close-up of Dr. Chilton—who represents another version of institutionalized male power, the psychiatrist-overseer in the madhouse (shades of Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound)—links him with Crawford in that he speaks to Clarice from the same vantage point, seated while, across the desk, Clarice stands before him. Heald is fascinatingly directed as the smarmy, careerist Chilton. His face is almost immobile, but his mouth twists and contorts as he all but explicitly comes on to Clarice.

The film links his autonomous mouth to Lecter’s rapacious cannibal appetites. Chilton is also on a quest of becoming: his desire for fame seems to be his chief erotic project and aim. If Crawford and Chilton both represent masculinist power in the film, Crawford as the embodiment of law enforcement, Chilton as psychiatry—both arms of power with historically conflictual, at best, relationships to women and racial and sexual minorities—their respective representations of this masculinism are interestingly non-erotic.

What Silence exposes is the desexualizing effects of power on masculinity itself. Crawford is a prime example of this; Chilton less so, mainly because he reads as flamboyantly homosexual all the while he hits on Clarice. Chilton performs his role as slimy sexist seducer as if the performance of this role were itself a source—the only source—of his sexual satisfaction.

In her book, also titled The Silence of the Lambs, Yvonne Tasker has demon-

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. Masculinity as death: Crawford’s (Scott Glenn) face Figure .4. Masculinity as death: Chilton’s (Anthony Heald) face strated that Demme’s film can be understood in terms of the Classic Hol ywood woman’s film melodrama. As Robert Lang writes in the context of melodrama, “Masculinity as a concept . . . could be characterized in terms of the father’s absolute sexual, political, and social control.” He quotes Krzysztof Wodiczko, for whom the “ultimate social definition of the form of the father’s body” is an
imperturbable, unshaken, inflexible, sober-minded, sexless and lifeless, silent, cold, odorous with death, ghastly pale (all blood transfused to the state’s

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs disposal), tired but powerful and self-disciplined, disciplining structure. The body of an unmoving father, barricading vast social territory, creates heavy traffic, the traffic which the body will then regulate himself. The lifelessness will want to regulate life; his sexlessness wants to castrate.16

The dry, taut, lifeless, yet broodingly intense Crawford behaves in a sexist manner that evinces the Law’s relationship to femininity (exemplified by the scene where he disarms local police officers by referring to Clarice’s womanhood as a problem they all share). In his occupation of the position of the Law of the Father, he provides the sign of masculine power always already figured as sexual threat, yet he himself never conveys a sense of sexual design or desire. His sexual blankness and unreadability figure institutionalized patriarchal male power as cold, empty, dead. Like Lecter, he occupies an office that looks like a cell with illustrations on the wall. But whereas Lecter displays sketches of the Duomo, Crawford displays photos of the ravaged bodies of murdered women. Clarice’s scenes with Crawford and Chilton prepare us for her first one with Lecter—prepare us by making us long for some genuine emotional connection neither of these scenes provide.

In marked contrast to Crawford is Clarice’s dead father (Jeffrie Lane), whom we see in flashback after she has visited Lecter for the first time and been humiliated by an assault from Lecter’s fellow psychopath inmate Multiple Miggs, who flings his semen at her, a gesture that exemplifies the film’s view of male sexuality as repellant. Weeping quietly as she leaves the asylum, Clarice recalls walking up, as a little girl (the young Clarice is played memorably by Masha Skorobogatov), to her father, home from work. He embraces her, picks her up, puts her down, and then the camera, as if disoriented by the love and the tenderness and the loss in these memories, gives us a view of small town denizens (one on a tractor) all but waving at us (an almost Lynchian effect) and then tilts dizzyingly upward, veering off into the sky.

The spookily tender quality of these flashbacks brings us inside Clarice’s consciousness. Her father is warm, feeling, almost feminized. If he represents the Law, he is not its cold, dead, pitiless face but an embraceable, human, compassionate figure—a harbinger of what Clarice could become.

The Daughter’s Seduction

Chilton leads Clarice down, down into the bowels of the prison, the film’s frame tightening around her, around us, our breaths constricting, lurid red lights flashing, and panoptical surveillance cameras recording Clarice’s every

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. Lecter (Anthony Hopkins): the face of queer knowledge move, hidden mikes capturing every syllable. When Clarice, plunged into the chthonic recesses of Lecter’s lair, must make the agonizingly lengthy walk to his cel , she must also walk past a collection of lesser-light serial killers, who grotesquely gape and leer at her; Multiple Miggs spits at her through his cage: “I can smell your cunt.” But Lecter stands statuesquely becalmed and poised, a gentlemanly smile on his face. “Good morning,” he says, in his cultivated, elegant tones—distinctly not those of an American. Lecter, this sight of him anyway, is a relief. Like Clarice, we gratefully move toward him.

This first scene between Clarice and Lecter establishes the precise film grammar Demme will use for all of their (four) scenes together, primarily a tight shot/reverse-shot format and a consistent use of close-ups. The indescribably brilliant, all-knowing Lecter—a superb parody of Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis—involves Clarice in a dangerous yet irresistible game, one in which her mind is the quarry. Quid pro quo, they will exchange information—he that which will lead her to Buffalo Bill, she that of her own life, particularly details about the period in which her father died and she was sent to live on her uncle’s sheep-and-horse ranch.

The bond between Lecter and Clarice romanticizes the bond between analyst and analysand—it’s a romanticized version of Freud and Dora’s psychoanalytic union. But it’s also a deeply satirical version of that (in)famous relationship, for Lecter is, indeed, a monster, someone who killed and ate his patients (and, now legendarily, with fava beans and a nice Chianti, an unfortunate census-taker). Before Clarice visits Lecter for the last time, a befuddled security guard asks, “Is he some kind of vampire?” (“They don’t have

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs a name for what he is,” Clarice responds.) Parodying a line from the musical Oklahoma!, Lecter tells her, “People will say we’re in love.” The entire movie operates in this double-edged fashion. Lecter seems the embodiment of the movie’s penchant for antithesis. He speaks like an eloquent and refined Oxford don; he asks Clarice if she has ever imagined Crawford “fucking her.”

He possesses acute insight into the shadowy minds of madmen; he is himself a madman. He sketches the Duomo from memory. He slices off one man’s face and affixes it to his own (Freud’s theory of transference made disgustingly literal). He is the Sphinx to Clarice’s Oedipus, the Archimago to her Brito-mart, the Beast to her Beauty.

But most appositely, he is the Satan to her Eve—Milton’s Satan. When he annihilates two security guards and masterminds his way out of a Rube Goldberg-machine prison-fortress, he does so with passion and grandeur, ruling his hell with savage gusto as he leaves Clarice to heaven. Like Milton’s Satan, he is the ultimate resistance to autocratic power—a power the film will locate precisely as homophobic, misogynistic American masculinism itself.

And like Milton’s Satan, Lecter gives Clarice the tools—his psychoanalytic methods a version of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge Satan offers Eve17—
to perceive her own life in its proper context, to understand what motivates her propulsive ambition. But like metaphors in an Emily Dickinson poem, Lecter undergoes constant rhetorical change. He is as much a product, as we shall see, of this masculinism as he is a critic of it. The key point here is that Lecter provides precisely an alternative to both Crawford and Chilton in their respective symbolic roles for Clarice while remaining never anything less than threatening.

Cannibal Love

Some viewers see in the Clarice-Lecter relationship a heterosexual romance, the implication being that the film is actually a heterosexist text that demonizes its gay characters, such as Gumb, while valorizing the Clarice-Lecter romance. Because I read Silence as a queer allegory, my own reading of the film runs fully counter to this view. One theme that complicates a Clarice-Lecter heterosexual romance is the film’s strong suggestion that Clarice’s chief affec-tional—and potentially sexual—bond is with a woman, her friend Ardelia.18

A more consistently suggested complication is Lecter’s own queerness.

As a cannibal in the modern world, Lecter invades modernity with practices linked to the primitive, the sub- or proto-human. That he is a hypercultivated white male linked to institutionalized white male power—psychiatry—makes

100 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush him especially threatening, a bewildering blend of traditional white male power and, in terms of the popular imagination, regressive, primal human savagery. His cannibalistic appetites historically link him to the discourse of cannibalism in the United States, and specifically to the early American understanding of queer desire as an element of cannibalism.19 Homosexual panic historically infuses the New World discourse of cannibalism.20 Lecter is a postmodern return of an earlier scene of cannibalistic horror that conflated both whiteness and a primitive, atavistic anthropophagic hunger: the Donner Party.21 In its depiction of Lecter, Silence “draws indirectly on the traditional association of homosexuality with cannibalism, both conventionally feared as involving a loss of differences.” As, plot-wise, a peripheral figure who ends up dominating the narrative, Lecter also emerges as precisely what European explorers feared, “the marginal cannibal outsider” who “colonizes and takes over the center.”22

Lecter as Sibyl

It may be possible, indeed quite plausible, to read Lecter’s leering comments to Clarice—about Crawford “fucking” her, for example—as heterosexual come-ons. But several motifs complicate this reading of Lecter’s sexuality. Lecter is associated throughout with conventional markers of queerness. Taste, cultivation, heightened aesthetic propensities: all these qualities mark Lecter as stereotypically gay (at least for an older generation; queer life of the present does not as readily conform to these signifiers). His campy wit also queers him. “Oh, and Senator,” Lecter sadistically says to distraught Senator Martin,

“one more thing: Love your suit!” One of his most explicitly heterosexual lines is delivered in the manner of a droll gay wit and references show tunes: when he first sees Clarice in their last meeting, he remarks, in that reference to the musical Oklahoma!, “People will say we’re in love. ” The manner in which Hopkins delivers the line renders the idea of heterosexual intimacy between the psychotic psychiatrist and the young fbi trainee utterly ludicrous. The diabolical dandy, Lecter is a polyvalent sign of sexuality, sexually threatening to men and women.23 Lecter’s sexuality is truly omnivorous, though one could also say, perhaps, that at center it’s quite unidirectional, if we see his cannibalistic appetite as the true locus of his desires.

If Lecter is not Clarice’s would-be lover, then who is he? Their bond is an intensely rich and felt one, even if it is not heteroerotic—or mutually heteroerotic, at any rate—and should be understood as that between the hero and the oracle. Specifically, Lecter is the Cumaean sibyl to Clarice’s Aeneas.

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 101

Just as the sibyl leads Aeneas through the underworld, Lecter leads Clarice through the chthonic recesses of not only Gumb’s but her own psyche.

It is not insignificant that Lecter takes on this feminized role. He and Clarice both assume gender-bending roles, he as sibyl, she as hero. (The Cumaean sibyl herself is a figure of gender ambiguity, as Michelangelo’s representation of her in the Sistine Chapel continues to attest: her massive arms seem likelier to pulverize than to embrace the would-be hero.) Lecter is a perverse nurturer, drawing out and feeding upon Clarice’s memories—a form of psychic cannibalism. In this regard, he is not so much the “Hannibal Lecter, my father,” as described in postmodernist author Kathy Acker’s edited volume of the same name, as he is the Terrible Mother of Jung or the dark, chthonic, devouring archaic mother of Barbara Creed’s formulation, “the monstrous-feminine” who threatens to re-incorporate the child.24 Everything about Lecter suggests this archaic mother, from his subterranean position in the bowels of the prison to his monstrous all-consuming appetite to his access to essential “deep knowledge.” Lecter embodies a particular cultural view of the old wise woman—the sibyl, the crone, the witch—as devouring monster, as if the knowledge she imparts has to be paid back in flesh. Lecter extends the pop culture associations with the woman seer and cannibalistic appetites.25

But unlike the Cumaean sibyl, who wants nothing other than to die, Lecter kills to live.

Though Lecter is indeed the most spectacularly dramatic figure in the movie, Clarice and Jame Gumb are at the film’s emotional core. Lecter’s flamboyance distracts us from the compassion the film extends to the rival yet synchronized quests of both fledgling fbi agent and fledgling serial killer.

The compassion it extends to Jame Gumb is disquieting, for it signifies a poignant investment not just in him but also in his brutal quest. I now turn to the figure of Gumb, offering a series of readings that countervails against the conventional understanding of the film’s depiction of him as homophobic.

Mouthing Off: Film Cuts and Psychic Splitting

The discussion of cannibalism naturally opens up one of the chief areas of symbolic emphasis and theoretical difficulty in the film: orality. As Freud theorizes in Three Essays, orality is the first of the three stages of childhood psychosexual development (the anal and the phallic follow). Freud called this first stage oral-cannibalistic. (Orality and anality are pregenital, whereas the phallic phase is genital. ) Perhaps no film has more embodied, in the academic treatment, the fatal elision between orality and homophobia than The Silence

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush of the Lambs. For Diana Fuss, the film’s major ideological infractions vis-à-vis Gumb are its representations of orality and the use of extreme close-up.

repreSentatiOnS Of Orality

Fuss writes that Silence “is a film obsessed with orality—with mouths, lips, teeth, tongues, and, of course, ‘gumbs.’”26 Discussing the characters of Lecter and Gumb, Fuss argues that the film makes the Freudian elision between homosexuality and the regressive sexual phase of orality.

In the psychoanalytic model of sexual perversion that I have been discussing, male homosexuality is represented as fixated at the earliest stage of the libidinal organization—the oral-cannibalistic stage—in which the recalci-trant subject refuses to give up its first object (the maternal breast and all its phallic substitutes). Instead, the male homosexual ingests the (m)other, “puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love” [as Freud put it]. Oral-cannibalistic incorporation of the mother not only permits a homosexual object-choice but unleashes sadistic impulses.27

Fuss claims that the chief aim and effect of the film’s representation of Gumb is to elide a regressive and monstrous orality with a homosexuality here rendered as pernicious. Yet, orality undergoes a program of continuous resignification throughout the film. If orality signifies homophobia in Silence, that is only one of orality’s signs.

In one of the film’s most haunting moments, Clarice removes a death’s head moth chrysalis—Gumb’s serial killer calling card—lodged in the throat of Fredericka Bimmel, Gumb’s first victim but the last one to be found, whose corpse Clarice assists in examining. The most significant and literalized figure of incorporation in the film, the moth in Fredericka’s throat suggests that the woman has been made to incorporate the queer male, rather than the reverse in Freud’s theory of homosexuality cited by Fuss. After Clarice removes the chrysalis, a breath is expelled from the corpse. It’s Fredericka’s final testament, her last breath, her muffled yet inextinguishable presence. The film returns her voice, if only for a second, to her after her death has silenced her. In the classical Roman author Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the water nymph Cyane witnesses and protests the abduction/rape of Proserpine by Hades, yet is powerless to stop it. In grief, she dissolves into a pool of water, losing her agency and her voice.28 Clarice is Fredericka’s aural as well as visual witness,

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 10
and not just her witness but also her avenger. She does not dissolve but instead rises up, reclaims her active femininity.

Throughout, the film links orality to its feminist sensibility. The film’s emotional core lies in the relationship that develops between Clarice and “Hannibal the Cannibal” Lecter. The psychiatrist as cannibalistic serial killer, Lecter lends himself especially well to considerations of Freudian theories of orality and polymorphous perversity. When the pompous Dr. Chilton tries to scare Clarice into submission before she meets Lecter for the first time, he demonstrates Lecter’s barbarism by showing her a picture of one of his victims, a nurse. “His pulse never rose above normal, even when he ate her tongue,”

Chilton says. We never see the picture, only Clarice’s silent and quietly stricken face. The unseen picture produces silence, a kind of aural portrait of inexpressible horror. Lecter is associated, through his oral fixations, with the grotesque devouring of a professional woman’s voice, or “tongue.” He wishes to control when women speak and what they say, hence his relationship with Clarice, whose own feedback he both inspires and determines. His inability to let a powerful woman speak on her own terms comes through strongly in his interview with Senator Martin (Diane Baker), Catherine Martin’s mother.

Lecter eats her tongue, as it were, by forcing her to speak about apparent irrelevancies (breast-feeding Catherine), humiliating her, and attempting to co-opt the power she obviously wields, over him not least of all. When Gumb puts the death’s head moth to his lips, his serial killer fetish and calling card, clearly orality takes on a different resonance than when we are shown other instances of it. Especially when we include the issue of Lecter’s cannibalism, the uses of orality in the film refuse a clear and consistent metaphorical agenda and organization.

extreme clOSe-upS

The other principle point in Fuss’s critique of the film regards Demme’s use of extreme close-ups for Gumb. Fuss makes the case that Silence “labors to call up the classic psychoanalytic association of homosexuality with the morbidity, orality, and boundary confusion that define primary identification.”

She argues:

To do this to Jame Gumb, the camera must be at its cruelest—and its most cutting; Gumb is optically dismembered as savagely as he is known to have mutilated his victims. Only one kind of body can sustain such thorough inspection or close scrutiny from the camera: the corpse . . . [It] is impossible

104 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush not to acknowledge in the end a certain insidious equation established in The Silence of The Lambs between homosexuality and pathology, between perversion and death.29

The Silence of the Lambs is a film obsessed with corporeality: with the very substance of the body, with flesh, skin, and the visual intelligibility they, however obscurely or imperfectly, signify. In this film, identity is the surface, one that can be removed and reassembled at will. Only Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) rivals Silence’s determined interrogation of the flimsiness and fraudulence of external identity. Jame Gumb is, as Clarice says, constructing a woman suit out of the bodies of women. Throughout the film, this drive to construct a new identity is made as aggressively, overpoweringly tactile as the markers that define it. Self-fashioning in The Silence of the Lambs means corporeal re-
fashioning. The classic American mythology that we can invent ourselves, or perpetually re-invent ourselves, running from Benjamin Franklin to Madonna, informs Jame Gumb’s obscene and desperate attempt to construct a new identity for himself from the outside in.

Jame Gumb’s obsessive quest and the components of his tortured psyche are interwoven into the texture of the film, certainly into its mise-en-scène.

In the tellingly named Your Self Storage Garage—to which Clarice has been directed by Lecter and of which the kindly old owner remarks, “Privacy is very important to my customers”—the incoherencies of the Gumb-text manifest themselves. In the black interior of the garage, Clarice’s surgically slicing flashlight illuminates pieces of Gumb—the frames of film that represent fragments of Gumb’s psyche. We see through a succession of cuts a bird of prey (a quote from Psycho, with its looming stuffed birds—owl, raven—in Norman Bates’s office), which stands in for Gumb (and for Lecter); a typewriter and some books; a decapitated mannequin, anticipating the grisly severed head of Benjamin Raspail, which Clarice is about to discover; a piano; a hearse with an American flag covering it. Clarice discovers Raspail’s head—with telltale signs of his transvestitism apparent—and we await the further discovery that a moth in its chrysalis has been lodged in his mouth. The uncannily appropriate elements of this mise-en-scène create a sense of the floating perme-ability of Gumb’s identity. That American flag draped over the hearse signifies the shallow covering of national identity and the potentialities of death and dread beneath it—potentialities horrifically realized by Gumb.30 It conveys the empty and deeply American futility of Gumb’s quest. The piano and the hearse will reappear as signs in the sequence in which Clarice remembers her father’s funeral. The film weaves Clarice’s interior life into the texture of the film; here, Gumb’s and her interiorities are interwoven.

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That Clarice discovers the decapitated head of Raspail, a gay man who was Jame Gumb’s lover and also a transvestite, and therefore Gumb’s double (though not a copy, for Gumb is neither gay nor a transvestite), has been read by some as an example of the film’s homophobia. Yet, it is also possible to read the Raspail head as a different kind of sign. Gumb represents a threat to gay men as well as to women; like the murdered women, this gay man has also been a victim, a point obscured, if not ignored altogether, in most treatments of the film. Raspail represents Gumb’s murderously rejected, discarded homosexual identity. Given the complexity of the sexual identity Gumb attempts to create afterward, homosexuality emerges as run-of-the-mill, vanilla sexuality.

Gumb does not exhibit any clear sexual desire or identity. In this regard, he is the postmodern equivalent of the inviolate male of nineteenth-century American literature, a male who rejects both heterosexual and homosocial/
homoerotic desire.31 (Clarice, Gumb’s double, can also be read as an inviolate woman, though I think the film also suggestively codes her as lesbian.) In her bracing (if ultimately frustrating) study of gender and horror and slasher films, Carol J. Clover finds that “in the long and rich tradition in which he [ Silence’s villain, Jame Gumb] is a member, the issue would appear to be not homosexuality and heterosexuality but the failure to achieve a functional sexuality of any kind.”32 It is precisely Gumb’s lack of a definitive sexual identity that, I argue, makes him such a problematic figure in critical treatments of the film.

An enormous complexity exists in the gendered mise-en-scène of the Jame Gumb character. Demme breathes new and poignant life into Lacan’s by now familiar theory of the mirror stage, in which the child, who heretofore saw itself as a collection of disparate, singular parts, now, seeing itself reflected in the mirror, mistakes its own reflection for wholeness, a complete body image and identity. When Demme’s camera gives us Gumb’s parts, it leads to piercing images of illusory falseness as beautiful as they are unsettling.

Demme’s mutilated imagery appositely provides a visual representation of Gumb’s mutilated psyche.

Demme’s use of extreme close-ups here to represent Gumb’s body is similar to Alan Parker’s use of such shots in the “Rainbow High” number in Evita (1997). This film version of the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical about Argentina’s most famous First Lady, stars Madonna in the titular role. (This underrated film is, like Silence, propelled by the yearning ambitions and desires of its heroine.) In this sequence, Evita demands to be constructed as an icon to be beloved by the masses. Like Gumb, she understands identity as something constructed from the outside in. She sings out her demands for attention to individual parts of her bodily surface, spatializ-ing herself no less than the Metaphysical Poets did the body of a woman:

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Eyes, hair, mouth, figure

Dress, voice, style, movement

Hands, magic, rings, glamour

Face, diamonds, excitement, image.

Like Evita, Gumb makes an identity out of shards: his identity is, in T. S.

Eliot’s words in his famous poem “The Waste Land,” “a heap of broken images.” The tattoo beneath his right nipple—is it a horn? a murderously sharp penis intersecting a vagina? The droplets of blood seem to suggest an image of sexual violence and despair, perhaps the horror of his own phallus and the longing to be rid of it, a fantasy of the sexual reassignment surgery he was denied. The ambiguous image renders his identity itself a somatic shard.

When he dances and thwarts his own male genitalia, a dance culminating in a perverse diva flourish, the terrible reality of Gumb’s quest becomes piercingly clear. He stands, tremblingly, in a self-imposed freeze-frame—he wants to hold before the camera his momentarily achieved visual identity for as long as possible. It is as if being able to create this visual image, even for a moment, confers the authority of achieved identity. I find this shot intensely moving. I do not see a demonic homosexual man here. I do not see the invasive cruelty of Demme’s camera, as Fuss does. I do not see what Foucault calls “the frozen countenance of the perversions.”33 I see instead the nakedly empathetic representation of an obsessed individual desperately yearning for a mysterious and murderously elusive identity. I see an imperfect butterfly.

“You don’t know what pain is!” Gumb screams at Catherine in one of his more floridly masochistic moments. In the mirror with his penis hidden, Gumb momentarily captures a sense of narcissistic wholeness and complete-ness by realizing his fantasy within the image. I can think of no more profound cinematic version of the Lacanian view of narcissism as a pathological fixation on the image, yet Demme also gives him his moment, allows Gumb the full urgency and pathos of his own obsessions, exploding the pathologizing impulse.34 Jame Gumb inverts the Lacanian mirror stage: it is only through the fragments of his identity that Gumb can maintain his self-image.

Collage Manhood

The Jame Gumb character represents the untenable, incomprehensibly disparate, and unrealizable nature of American manhood itself and is therefore best understood as a collage of discordant masculine identities and sexualities.35 Beyond this, Gumb is a somatic discourse of the cinema and its privi-

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 10

Figure .. Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith): the face of suffering and resistance leged masculinist, white gaze. Demme associates Gumb throughout with the camera. When Gumb stalks Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), he spies on her with an up-to-the-minute sophisticated video apparatus, like the titular figure of Michael Powel ’s Peeping Tom (1960). The onanistic filmmaker, he watches himself watching himself constructing his own identity. He transmutes James Stewart’s long phallic telephoto lens in Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window into a bug-like night-vision camera-helmet. And he sees everything through a green haze, the color of the supernatural (think of the medieval epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; remember also that the original tints of James Whale’s mordant 1933 film version of Frankenstein were green, “the color of fear”36). Clarice’s toggle coat and other outfits are also a verdant green, which reinforces the links between them as it extends the film’s Hitchcockian visual and thematic structures. Just as Judy, newly re-remade as Madeleine, emerges from a supernatural green haze in Vertigo, Clarice and Gumb’s personae float in an ominous green haze. Red symbolizes anguish, trauma, pain, and woman’s sexuality in Hitchcock’s 1964 Marnie; the color green in Silence symbolizes the essentially mysterious, fearful nature of identity.

In his lair, in the chthonic bowels of Mrs. Lippman’s home, Gumb surrounds himself with clips of his own serial killer fame, which links him to Crawford, who also keeps pictures of Gumb’s heinous handiwork in his office.

Gumb charts his own status as a public persona as Buffalo Bill, giving himself his own fifteen minutes of fame, documenting his own fierce struggle to become. He provides his own makeshift self-portrait of the artist as a youngish serial killer. When he brings a droning moth to his lips, kisses it, and says,

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

“So beautiful, so powerful,” it’s a deliberately clunky, forced moment (though eerily so): he is strenuously willing himself into the achieved identity, the

“power and the freedom,” to lift from a key theme repeated in Vertigo, he so prizes in the moth.

Gumb, as memorably played, in an unsung great performance, by Ted Levine, is a disorienting blend of macho virility—he struts his streamlined, masculinely taut form like a man aware of his own sexual power and prowess—
and gaudily conventional female beauty—his nipple ring, his bejeweled hands (his rings are molting moths of gold). He could be a harlot in a Cecil B. De-Mille biblical epic. He also recalls and revises Robert Mitchum’s sinister and murderous preacher Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s masterly 1955 The Night of the Hunter (a linkage with Sean Penn’s performance in Casualties of War and between the films in their construction of collage masculinity).

Harry, who kills his gentle young wife (Shelley Winters), has the word lOve tattooed on one hand and hate on the other. One of Gumb’s hands has lOve tattooed on it, which as a trope intertextually links both films and provides another enigmatic aspect of Gumb’s collage persona. In a way, Gumb is the movies, spliced together and disparate images cohering—or trying to cohere—into a whole vision. If Gumb is a figure of the splice, he represents the splice as disconnection: not the splicing together of identities Melville envisioned in Moby Dick, but the violent destruction of the coherent image in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Gumb explodes Freud’s theory of inversion, which posits that the invert psychically “feels” like a natural woman.37 A post-identity Narcissus, Gumb autoerotically comes on to himself, staring at his woman-suited mirror image, saying with harrowing vehemence, “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me so hard.” If Gumb wants a man to fuck him, it is not clear that as the submissive partner he identifies with women or experiences himself as a woman.

If anything, Gumb sounds his most hypermasculinist notes in the vehement tones of his uttered fantasy/demand to be fucked. Rather, what drives him is a furious narcissism—“I’d fuck me, I’d fuck me so hard”—a desire to be one and complete, the subject and object, in a position of mastery and submission at once.

It is precisely in this manner that Gumb represents a grotesque new version of the classic self-made American man. In Silence’s updating of the figure, the self-made man is a Frankenstein’s monster of sexuality, the fusion of masculinity and femininity that eradicates the need for any outside social contact, any object relations of any kind.38 But it is also this desperate and thwarted desire for an idiosyncratic (and resolutely murderous) ideal of narcissistic wholeness that makes his quest as poignant as it is hideous.

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 10

Figure .. The splintered face: Jame Gumb’s (Ted Levine) collage manhood Gumb, as I noted earlier, is a critique of masculinist America. One item in the Gumb mise-en-scène that adds to while largely comprising his identity is especially notable. As Clarice pursues Gumb as he pursues her, we see shots of a mannequin with the unfinished toil of Gumb’s project—the woman suit—slipping off of it, and next to the woman suit-in-the-making, a poster of Nazi or neo-fascist propaganda. This small poster has a swastika in the upper left-hand corner and the legend Open yOur eyeS beneath the face of a man whose eyes are covered by the smaller legend buSineSS aS uSual.

The fascist imagery would be telling enough on its own, but its proximity to the unfinished woman-suit is profoundly revealing. Gumb’s unspeakable misogyny and fascism intersect; American manhood is all about the consolidation of a power that decimates what it subjugates. The messages on the poster, which cry out to Gumb, add to his confused and distorted psyche.

Impelled to do precisely what he refuses to do, open his eyes to the suffering he causes, Gumb treats his kidnapped victims and their lives as business as usual. The fascist ideology only corroborates and intensifies Gumb’s annihilating rage.

Moreover, Gumb is configured as a composite of several serial killers—Ted Bundy, who wore fake arm casts with which he clobbered women, as Gumb does; Ed Gein, who inspired Norman Bates, who murdered his mother and other women and transformed their flesh into household objects, such as lampshades; and their grisly ilk. He also anticipates Jeffrey Dahmer, who would come to infamy after Silence was released, a serial killer who murdered immigrant young men and kept parts of their bodies as trophies.39

110 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. No closure: Clarice is left hanging at film’s end.

Linked to fascist ideology and a combined version of the hideous attributes of several different killers, Gumb is also a despairing portrait of the class subaltern in American life. If Clarice represents American ambition and self-make-over, and Lecter a Europeanized if debased high culture, Gumb represents the obscure, blurry working-class identities of Middle America. Fusing the personae of serial killers, the ideology of fascism and of national manhood, and an abjectified class identity, Gumb is an index of intersections between sexuality and national, social, and racial markers of gendered identity.

When Clarice, hearing the gun’s trigger being pulled by Gumb, shoots him, sunlight bursts through the bullet-riddled windows, and we then get an image of insect death. The beautiful/ugly quality recalls that of the shot of the bird in the window in eyeless Dan Fawcett’s house in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). The dying insect is Gumb, his video camera headset protruding from his eyes like the eyes of a fly, his wing-arms not outstretched but clamped tightly together. At the sunlit window we see a combat helmet, implying the Vietnam War, and a felled, flaccid American flag (seemingly that of a child’s) resting on it. And once again, we see a mural of a butterfly swirling vertiginously, inexorably, the mocking and sad image of an unattainable state of grace.

Here, in this brilliantly conceived montage—which recalls, compresses, makes lyrical the imagery of Norman’s sad, lonely, childhood room under Lila Crane’s gaze in Hitchcock’s Psycho—the film says that there are terrible limits to self-invention, to this deeply American notion that you can

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 111
constantly reinvent Your Self.40 As Judith Halberstam writes, “Buffalo Bill’s extreme violence against women lies not in his gender confusion or his sexual orientation but in his humanist presumption that his sex and his gender and his orientation must all match up to a mythic norm of white male heterosexual masculinity.”41 The helmet, the flag, and the mural of the moth signify the exhausted categories of nationhood and the self, but also the irresistible demands that they, as ideals, place on the individual. Even Clarice—with whom, thanks largely to Foster’s revealing, delicate performance, we identify so intensely—finds only a deeper emptiness by the film’s end. Lecter, having escaped, calls her to ask if “the lambs have stopped screaming.” He hangs up as she iterates, “Dr. Lecter . . . Dr. Lecter . . . Dr. Lecter . . . Dr. Lecter.” Like Gumb’s, Clarice’s quest can never end.

Male Medusa

If, as several critics over the years have noted, Clarice is a female version of the archetypal male hero on a quest and Lecter is her mentor, and, as I argue, her gender-bent oracle/sibyl, this reading has implications for the other characters as wel . Perhaps the mythological character whom Clarice most closely resembles is Perseus, the young man who is sent by evil King Polydectes to capture the head of the Medusa, the Gorgon with swarming snakes for hair whose look turns men into stone. If Clarice is Perseus, the role of King Polydectes would have to be filled by Jack Crawford, Chief of the fbi Behavioral Science section, who gives Clarice her assignment to interview Lecter in order to find out what he knows about Gumb. Indeed, it is fascinating how closely Crawford’s dictates to Clarice in their first scene match Polydectes’s words to Perseus in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of the myth:

“Wel , then,” continued the king, still with a cunning smile on his lips,

“I have a little adventure to propose to you; and as you are a brave and enterprising youth, you will doubtless look upon it as a great piece of good luck to have so rare an opportunity of distinguishing yourself. . . . The bridal gift which I have set my heart on presenting to the beautiful Hippodamia is the head of the Gorgon Medusa, with the snaky locks; and I depend on you, my dear Perseus, to bring it to me.”42

If Crawford is the evil king who sets the female hero on a doomed quest (a reading that allows us to complicate Clarice as embodiment of the Law of

11 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush the Father, against which she is then opposed, even as she manifests it), then Jame Gumb can be read as the Medusa (alternatively as the Minotaur, the mythic man-beast monster in his labyrinth).

Reading Jame Gumb as the Medusa—the Male Medusa—has important queer implications. Demme’s visual associations of Gumb and the color green deepen in significance if we think of Gumb as a new, postmodern Green Man, a Male Medusa. As Marjorie Garber writes in an essay on the gender indeterminacy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Male Medusa, “the foliate head or leaf mask which gained enormous popularity in England and throughout western Europe during the Romanesque and medieval periods . . . with leaves sprouting from [its face] . . . [is] often sinister and frightening. . . . [This]

Green Man . . . embodies a warning against the dark side of man’s nature, the devil within.” It is interesting that this sinister figure represents the union between brutal masculinist power and generative female nature.43

The sequence in which Gumb, having shut off all the lights in his basement-labyrinth, stalks the now blinded Clarice in the dark using his night-vision goggles, contributes a powerful new theme to the Perseus-Medusa myth: Medusa’s own desire. He sees Clarice through the green glow of his night-vision lenses: he has created a green-lit field that is like the outward projec-tion of his own thematic qualities. With his goggle-eyes that turn women into lifeless objects, just as Medusa’s vision did to men; his curly, shaggy Medusan hair that surrounds his face; and those deadly, deadened eyes, Gumb is Medusa as grotesque postmodern collage: the transgendered body, the surveillance of the Internet-era eye, movies themselves. When Gumb reaches out his hand to Clarice’s long hair, he almost but never quite touches it. Gumb is Medusa longing for the normative beauty of femininity, which he is denied.

The idea that a man could envy a woman her femininity—even if this man is marked as queer—is an explosive idea for culture, in which masculinity is the privileged standard. Provisionally, we might say that Gumb is a figure of what Bruno Bettelheim has described as “womb envy,” male desire for the mysterious qualities of womanhood and femininity.44 As such, he is a powerful corrective to Freud’s theory of penis envy, in which he argued that girls and women envied the male penis without in any way exploring the ways in which males envy women. We can read the now rather infamous scene (“It puts the lotion in the basket or it gets the hose again”), in which Gumb mercilessly mocks Catherine Martin as she pleads for her mother, as a tormented and tormenting representation of this womb envy. Gumb parodies Catherine by pulling at his T-shirt, forming mock breasts. His action here, grotesque and

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 11
inhuman, is an attempt to conquer the momentary empathy he experienced while hearing her implore him to release her.

Gumb’s inability to relate to Catherine in human terms reflects his larger relationship to women and to femininity. Gumb fetishizes the outward markers of femininity, not an essential feminine identity. He is not so much a figure of womb envy as he is a fetishist. What Gumb fetishizes is flesh, not just the contours and textures of women’s bodies but also the flesh itself.

He sees women as mere forms, outlines, costumes. He desires to inhabit a woman’s body but to do so must evacuate this body of an identity, which he then fills with himself. The “queeniness” of Gumb distracts us from the genuine issue his character represents, which is a horrifyingly deep misogyny deepened by envy.

Spectral Mothers

Reading Lecter as Barbara Creed’s abject, devouring, archaic mother, to return to our earlier discussion, allows us to uncover the anguished hidden discourse of the maternal in Silence. The chief site of loss and trauma in the film is the mother, an occluded and dominant figure. Silence is, like many Brian De Palma films, a rigorous engagement with Hitchcock’s Psycho, the ur-film about an absent/all-powerful mother.

Clarice has flashbacks only of her father, only mentioning her long-dead mother once to Lecter. When Clarice visits the home of Fredericka Bimmel, an early Gumb victim, she meets Fredericka’s father, not mother. The only living mother that we see is Senator Martin, whose associations with the law and the state link her to institutionalized masculine power. We never see her reunited with Catherine, though she does make an earnest televised plea to her daughter’s captor for compassion and mercy. Although almost completely visually unrepresented, the figure of the mother pervasively haunts Silence. If the film ostensibly erases the mother, she nevertheless exists as an emptiness, a structuring absence.

In Harris’s novel, after Clarice’s police officer father is murdered, her mother washes the blood off her dead husband’s hat, telling her daughter that everything will be okay, an image of courage that Clarice accesses. The film actually goes out of its way, in Ted Tally’s script, to make Clarice mother-less. Lecter knowingly asks her what the worst memory of her childhood was, and she answers, “The death of my father.” In the film, Clarice’s mother died when she was a baby; as she tells Lecter, when her father died when she was

114 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush ten years old, “He was everything I had.” But the largely undiscussed death of her mother that precedes that of her father haunts the later death. Indeed, the flashback of her father bears the burden of representing not only the father but the forgotten, obscured mother as wel .

The most telling and disturbing visual representation of the dead, occluded mother in the film is the shot of the poorly preserved old Mrs. Lippman in the bathtub, an almost subliminal suggestion of Psycho, the corpse of the mother’s body in that film’s first site of murder, the bathtub. Mrs. Lippman was an elderly tailor for whom Fredericka Bimmel and her friend, Stacey Hubka (whom Clarice interviews, in a poignantly quiet scene), work, doing alter-ations. Gumb kills Mrs. Lippman, appropriating not only her home but also her seamstress’s art. Gumb appropriates what is conventionally considered woman’s art, sewing, dressmaking—think Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—just as he appropriates women’s bodies for his own monstrous art-making. The corpse of Mrs. Lippman represents the dead mother who haunts the largely masculine, homosocial world of Silence, which echoes another film in a deep intertextual relationship with Psycho, Tobe Hooper’s 1974

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the shriveled corpse of the grand-mother presides over the berserk, baroque, cannibalistic white trash male family.

If Lecter represents the archaic, devouring mother brooding over his fledgling Clarice, as capable of devouring her as he is of providing her succor, the corpse of Mrs. Lippman stands in for the chief missing mother figure here, Gumb’s own. “Whatever else he may be,” writes Carol Clover, Jame Gumb, or, Bill, “is the clear brother of Norman Bates, Leatherface [from Texas Chainsaw Massacre], Jason [Voorhees, from the Friday the 13th films, especially the second, 1981 film in the series, in which the Final Girl45 of Clover’s description, psychology major Ginny, confronts Jason by pretending to be his dead mother, who was also a serial killer], Mark (of Peeping Tom), and the rest: a male who is a physical adult but a spiritual child, locked in the embrace of his mother.”46

As Lecter suggests to Clarice, Gumb was not born a monster, but made one, through years of childhood abuse. The novel depicts him as mother-obsessed but never depicts a flashback scene between son and mother. Though never discussed with any greater specificity than this, this childhood abuse is strongly suggested as having been dealt to Gumb by his mother—by the inference of Silence’s position within the psycho-killer-with-mother-issues genre rather than any direct evidence.47

The dead mother provides the key to understanding Gumb’s mysterious and maddening motivations throughout the film. The only way to read Gumb

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 11
convincingly is as a fetishist, which relates to the theme of his relationship to his mother and women. Freud’s theories of fetishism illuminate the film’s construction of Gumb’s character.

Gumb as Fetishist

In a footnote added in 1910 to his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud conjectures that homosexual identity emerges from an identification with the mother: “future inverts, in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother) . . . after leaving this behind,” Freud argues, “they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say,” Freud continues, “they proceed from a narcissistic basis, and look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them. ”48

The mother-son horror movie genre—emblematized by Hitchcock’s 1960

Psycho and its ilk—may be said to be the chief cinematic engagement with the Freudian theory of male homosexuality as a pathological cleaving to maternal attachment, or, in Lacanian terms, the male’s refusal to leave the Imaginary stage—the pre-Oedipal realm of the Mother—and enter the Symbolic—the realm of the Father, associated with rationalism, law, and, most importantly, language.

Spectral mothers and damaged, demonic sons link films such as Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence (De Palma’s great 1976 horror film Carrie is a female version of Psycho’s basic themes). Silence should be understood as a film that critiques this film genre even as it fulfils and extends it.

Silence indexes the concerns of the horror film genre generally, but, more specifically, what it grapples with is the mother-son horror movie theme, exemplified in several Hitchcock films, most notably Psycho. Raymond Bellour’s words on that Hitchcock film may be even more relevant for Silence: Norman’s psychosis, his inordinate object-desire that rushes headlong into murder, is entirely structured by a fetishistic aim carried to the point of madness. Psychoanalytically, Norman is a collage. . . . He seeks to construct a chain in which the excessiveness of the psychotic-perverse desire of the male subject can be structured—from the man to the camera, his true measure—. . . his presence [is] a distance, fascinated, in vertiginous mastery.

This chain may be written: phallus-bird-fetish-mother-eye-knife-camera. A terrifying play on words . . . Mommy mummy: the mother’s body, fetishized

11 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush to death, so to speak, becomes the body that murders, in keeping with the desire awakened in the eye of the subject possessed by it. Through the incredible incorporation of the metaphor-turned reality, Norman’s fascinated look carries within it the phallus immemorially attributed to the mother. But he can acknowledge it in himself only on the condition that he ceaselessly encounter it in his mirror image, namely in the body/look of woman . . .

otherwise, it is his own body that will desert him. . . . [T]he literally impossible desire for possession and fusion is [what is at stake].49

In Silence, the mother’s body becomes not the body that murders but the body one murders for. The fetishized flesh of the mother would appear to be what Gumb craves. Yet, it is actually more complicated than that. Gumb attempts to turn himself, within the new mother’s body manufactured from the flesh of other women, into his own fetish. If Norman fetishized Mother, Gumb ultimately fetishizes himself.

Freud’s theory of fetishism is another provocative analysis of the relationship between mother and son, one that has been consistently reinterpreted and reassessed, particularly by feminist critics. In Freud’s 1927 essay “Fetishism,” he explains why “some men” develop fetishes. The fetishist—who privileges a foot, a shoe, a nose, even the shine on a nose as the site of his sexual desire rather than the woman herself—has, through his fetish and his act of fetishizing, discovered an ingenious strategy for defending against and coping with a profound childhood psychic trauma that all men must grapple with all of their lives: the discovery that their mother, who seemed the embodiment of fullness, presence, oneness, totality, does not have a phallus.

The fetishist devises a peculiar, specific strategy for coping with the trauma of this discovery, but in enduring the trauma, he joins the ranks of all men, who may be divided into three sexual categories: the fetishist, the homosexual, and the normal heterosexual male. Why some men become fetishists, others homosexuals, and most heterosexuals cannot be easily explained, if at all, but all men must cope with the trauma, and these three sexual categories represent the strategies men have for doing so.

If Freud misogynistically dispenses female subjectivity to the mysterious regions of the “dark continent,” while nevertheless offering often speciously authoritative yet always muddled accounts of female sexuality, he nevertheless offers a profound and profoundly consistent view of male subjectivity and sexuality as tormented almost from its inception. Male identity in Freud emerges as a desperate series of ever-mounted psychic defenses, strategies for overcoming, forgetting, and shielding against trauma, all of which fail and in

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failing need to be, despite their inherent futility, perpetually renewed, taken up again as if for the first time.

The boy cannot accept the mother’s lack of a penis.

No, that cannot be true, for if a woman can be castrated then his own penis is in danger; and against that there rebels part of his narcissism which Nature has providentially attached to this particular organ. In later life, grown men may experience a similar panic, perhaps when the cry goes up that throne and altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will also follow them (215).50

What if Nature had not “providentially” endowed man with so gloriously powerful an allegiance to his own sexual organ? The suggestion is that, without this narcissistic reverence for his own phallus, male identity would be utterly untenable, rather than nearly so. With subtle and sweeping daring, Freud explains away here the whole masculine history of war, bloodshed, imperialism, murderous power—responses to the illogical fears over “throne and altar”—as the result of the mythic little boy’s silent scream at the thought that his phallus, like his mother’s phantasmatically endowed one, might be taken away.

But what happens to the mother’s phallus, the absence of which provokes such intense terror? That phantom-phallus never really goes away.

In the world of psychical reality the woman stil has a penis in spite of al , but this penis is no longer the same as it once was. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its successor, so to speak, and now absorbs all the interest which formerly belonged to the penis. But this interest undergoes another very strong reinforcement, because the horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute. Aver-sion from the real female genitals, which is never lacking in any fetishist, also remains as an indelible stigma of the repression that has taken place. One can now see what the fetish achieves and how it is enabled to persist. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it; it also saves the fetishist from being a homosexual by endowing women with the attribute which makes them acceptable as sexual objects (216).

Leaving such questions as whether or not women or homosexuals get to have fetishes aside for a moment, the salient point here is the function of the fetishist as an ingenious representative of what may be universalizingly said

11 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush to be what all males fear: castration, woman’s power, and women’s bodies.

“Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals” (216).

Before his well-known 1927 essay on fetishism, Freud proposed a theory of the fetish in his 1910 monograph, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Freud’s psychobiography especially concerns itself with the interrelationship between Leonardo’s sublimated homosexuality and his creativity, which, as Freud argues, flourished so gloriously precisely because it gave vent to his sublimated homosexual desires. A highly controversial aspect of the work remains Freud’s discussion of a very early childhood memory the adult da Vinci wrote down in his notebook. “There is, so far as I know,” writes Freud in the third chapter, “only one place in his scientific notebooks where Leonardo inserts a piece of information about his childhood.” Freud refers to a passage about one of the artist’s earliest memories: “It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall . . . that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.”51

In Leonardo, Freud, in his typical universalizing manner, draws on various cultural traditions in his theorization of this passage, such as “the vulture-headed Egyptian goddess Mut,” in whom, he writes, “we find the same combination of maternal and masculine characteristics as in Leonardo’s phantasy of the vulture” (47). Freud notes that such “hermaphroditic divinities” can be interpreted as mythological “expressions of the idea that only a combination of male and female elements can give a worthy representation of divine perfection.” Yet, why aren’t we more freaked out, he wonders, about the ease with which we culturally endow “a figure which is intended to embody the essence of the mother with the mark of male potency which is the opposite of everything maternal”? (48).

Freud accounts for the shocking normalcy of this phallic mother in our myths by positing our experience of it at a crucial moment in our childhoods.

(By “our,” of course, Freud means that mythological transhistorical subject, the male infant/child.)

Before the child comes under the dominance of the castration-complex—
at a time when he still holds women at full value—he begins to display an intense desire to look, as an erotic instinctual activity. He wants to see other people’s genitals, at first in all probability to compare them with his own.

The erotic attraction that comes from his mother soon culminates in a longing for her genital organ, which he takes to be a penis. With the discovery, which is not made till later, that women do not have a penis, this longing

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 11
often turns into its opposite and gives place to a feeling of disgust which in the years of puberty can become the cause of psychical impotence, misogyny and permanent homosexuality. But the fixation on the object that was once strongly desired, the woman’s penis, leaves indelible traces on the mental life of the child, who has pursued that portion of his infantile sexual researches with particular thoroughness. Fetishistic reverence for a woman’s foot and shoe appears to take the foot merely as a substitutive symbol for the woman’s penis which was once revered and later missed; without knowing it, “coupeurs de nattes, ” play the part of people who carry out an act of castration on the female genital organ. (50)

Freud’s translator James Strachey explains the term coupeurs de nattes as “perverts who enjoy cutting off females’ hair.” In Lecter-like fashion, Freud comes close to diagnosing Gumb as a coupeur de nattes, the only—and harrowing—
difference being that Gumb, a coupeur de peau, cuts off women’s skin, not hair.

Mothers are denied their sexual agency entirely in this passage even as they are endowed with a mysterious and maddening totalized sexual supremacy as the figure who combines both masculine and maternal power, if only in the pre-Oedipal/Imaginary realm. In making use of this passage, I do not ask my reader to accept Freud’s misogynistic uses and designations of women. I do, however, wish to make the case that Freud fascinates precisely for the way in which his work both foregrounds and theorizes misogyny, just as it both relegates homosexuality to the pathological and claims it as a fundamental element in human sexuality. Freud himself sees his work here as a theorization of the root causes of misogyny, even if he is unable to see that strain in his own work. The most radical aspect of Freud’s discussion here is his depiction of masculinity as a tragic fall from a time in which it still held women at full value. Misogyny, if we can put it this way for the atheist Freud, is a kind of post-lapsarian sorrow.

In her excellent study on the phallic mother and fetishism, Marcia Ian writes, “as feminist critics both inside and outside psychoanalysis have pointed out virtually from the very beginning, on the subject of female sexuality Freud was disingenuously obtuse, admitting he knew little about this ‘dark continent’ but always turning from such disclaimers to make precise authoritarian claims about its location, its nature, and its history.” As Ian continues: Freud has little of use to say about women; but then psychoanalysis is not about women. At best, as Luce Irigaray puts it, the institution of psychoanalysis “maintains itself paradoxically in sexual indifference, inasmuch as,

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush for that analysis, the female sex is always understood on the basis of a masculine model.” Neither is the image of the phallic mother about women; it does not refer to women or to mothers. It does not refer at all, except to the possible collapse of sign and referent—a collapse represented as and replaced by the fetishization of their phantom connection to the mother.52

What the phallic mother represents, ultimately, is the “end of contradiction and the end of ambivalence” since she is not two, but one, the mother who

“inseminates and lactates.” The phallic mother is “neither hermaphrodite nor androgyne, human nor monster, because she is emphatically Mother.”53 As such, the phallic mother emerges as the ideal creation for Gumb to inhabit, since by transforming himself into it he need not be either male or female, phallic or yonic, but, instead, one being who cancels out the hellish anxieties caused by inhabiting either gendered identity.

The historical problem of self-made manhood in American life is that the myth of total self-sufficiency threatens to impair or even destroy one’s social connections and abilities to have intimate sexual relations. What is the logic of total self-sufficiency but the reaching of a level of autonomy that eradicates the need for anyone else? As this new-style phallic mother, Gumb is the ultimate American self-made man, finally solving the problems of the social and sexual identity and sexuality itself—he embodies in one being a total oneness, a total self-sufficiency. He can now be both the phallic aggressor (“I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me so hard.”) and the supple, desirable female body encased in the woman-suit.

My reading of Gumb as fetishist concerns itself less with that mythological site of trauma, the missing maternal phallus, than it does with the potentially loopier aspects of Freud’s reading, namely the hermaphroditic goddess.

One of the potentialities of this vulture-mother is that she refuses the conventional soft, feminine, nurturing aspects of the maternal: clawed and cannibalistic, she threatens to devour her child. She is terrifying. This is a theme that Freud takes up in his 1922 essay, “Medusa’s Head.” Athena wears the aegis of Medusa: as a goddess who is “unapproachable and repels any sexual desire,” Athena rightly displays the image of the Medusa, who represents “the terrifying genitals of the Mother.”54

Phallic Mother

If, as I have argued above, Gumb should be read as a Male Medusa, he displays the same terrible face of a monstrous maternal masculinity. He trans-

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 11
forms himself into the vulture-mother. If Gumb represents a male identity terrorized in childhood by a tyrannical and tormenting mother—the central premise of the mother-son horror film, and thereby the implicit logic of the film’s conceptualization of Gumb—then, as a man, he has transmuted his abuse into the deepest abusiveness, turned the violence dealt him by (we infer) his mother into the worst imaginable violence toward women. His desire for a woman-suit is the desire to inhabit the body of the figure who terrorized him, his mother, whose formidable capacity for cruelty and violence he internalized and made his own.55 Gumb incorporated the monstrous mother whose imago he then proceeds to externalize. His desire for the woman-suit is the desire to live inside, control, and become the mother, the terrifying phallic mother whose masculinist strength is indistinguishable from her maternal function.56

If Gumb desires the maternal phallus, it is that phantom organ as sign of masculinity’s wrath, as symbol of violence and hate, as betrayal of mother’s love masquerading as phallic strength. Gumb’s fetish for woman’s skin is an ardent, monstrous desire to turn women into the phallus, to become the maternal phallus from the outside in, to inhabit the mother’s—his mother’s—
terrifying wrath. When he mocks Catherine, pulling out his own mock-breasts, we see the fatal blur between the victimized boy and the terrifying mother, now become the terrifying adult male who victimizes a woman whose own bodily dimensions signify conventional images of the maternal woman.

If in Psycho Mrs. Bates taunts and rebukes Norman—who impersonates her—
then in Silence the psychotic male taunts the woman who stands in for all women, i.e., the mother. When Gumb dances, clad in women’s clothing and women’s skin, and hides his own penis, he rejects the literal, biological male sexual organ in favor of transmuting himself, however fleetingly, into a phantasmatic image of the symbolic maternal phallus, which he both inhabits and embodies. Gumb’s moth icon corresponds to Leonardo’s vulture-mother: it beats its tail against the child Leonardo’s mouth; Gumb brings the moth to his lips (“so beautiful, so powerful”). Silence is a portrait of Leonardo as a demonic artist.

Freud’s theories of homosexual development do, indeed, intersect with certain aspects of Silence’s systems of signification, namely the conflation of orality and homosexuality. But, given the sheer complexity of the film’s construction of Gumb, the Freudian notion of fetishism most appositely provides an interpretive model. We should recall Freud’s remark in his 1927 essay that

“probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals.” As Freud confessed, “We cannot explain why it is that some of them become homosexual in consequence

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush of this experience, others ward it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority overcome it” (216). The essential ambiguity of male sexual development as Freud describes it here—the mysterious byways of queerness, fetishism, and heterosexuality—matches the unclassifiability of the film’s Gumb. Calling him a fetishist seems more appropriate than calling him a homosexual; but this interpretation, too, is ultimately inadequate. Gumb embodies the continuum of male sexuality.

Fetishism as Symptom

Some readers may wonder if I’ve excused the film’s homophobia by claiming Gumb as a victim of female wrath. Gumb may be pitiable, but he’s no victim: he’s a monster who tortures and kills. If films that preceded Silence— Psycho, Texas Chainsaw, The Dead Zone, 57 and Friday the 13th, films disparate in skill but united in cultural impact—all posited the source of the serial killer as some anguished and destructive problem within the mother-son relationship, Silence was the first film of its ilk to conjoin this theme and the female project of self-fashioning and self-making, of a woman’s narrative that competes with and overpowers the serial killer’s own. If those previous films left the serial killer problem at mother’s (bedroom) door, Silence made sophisticated, oblique use of this theme and also counterbalanced it with the story of a woman’s experience of patriarchy. Many of these previous films staged confrontations between the monstrous male and the resourceful woman. This woman—the Final Girl, as Carol Clover describes her, the last woman to survive the bloodbath—faces off against the monstrous killer: Lila Crane’s exploration of the Bates house and confrontation with Norman at the end, Texas’s Final Girl’s escape from Leatherface, Laurie’s face-off with the Shape at the climax of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), as well as Ginny’s with Jason Voorhees in the second Friday the 13th film in which she impersonates his mother. But no film before Silence more resolutely explores the woman’s experience in the serial-killer-with-mother-issues genre than Silence. By linking both the Final Girl and the serial killer to the overarching problems of patriarchy—if Gumb was indeed terrorized by his mother, she was only the dark face of patriarchy, the vessel of its wrath— Silence recontextualized its genre and reorganized its potential as oppositional statement against patriarchal power.

If Gumb is a victim of female wrath, is he Deleuze’s ideal masochist, awaiting submission to the oral mother so oneirically present in the Freudian/

Leonardo phantasy of the vulture-mother beating its wings against the boy’s

Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs 1
mouth? “You don’t know what pain is!” Gumb howls at Catherine Martin when she (duplicitously) threatens to kill his dog, Precious. Gumb certainly, grandiloquently conveys enormous, masochistic pain along with his sadistic wrath and narcissistic phantasies. But if Gumb represents the masochistic phantasy as Deleuze describes it, predicated on disavowal, suspense, an oddly scientific observation of his prey, in his effort to become a “new sexless man”

he registers the harrowing cost of masochistic maternal phantasies, not only on manhood but also on women and non-normative men. The film’s Jame Gumb renders Deleuze’s ecstatic heterosexual male masochist and the iconic, oral mother who dominates him unintelligible as ideals. Rather, this film brings those dubious ideals into the infinitely more terrifying and palpable realm of the experiential world, with all of its implications, mess, and mayhem. This film exposes masochistic, fetishistic male phantasies as an indication, a symptom, of the Symbolic order’s pernicious effects on the individual; it does not offer the much more comforting view of those phantasies as resistance against those effects.

Love/Hate

What Gumb craves, ultimately, is the end of ambivalence and conflict, the resolution of his tortured state of being contradictory in his psyche and person. Neither male, despite his masculinism, nor female, despite his attempts to achieve a self-made femaleness, Gumb is not so much “both/and” as he is

“neither/nor.” Becoming the phallic mother allows him to transcend neither/
nor and both/and, eradicating any question of difference, embodying a new oneness that fulfills the mythic want of self-made manhood for total self-sufficiency. Gumb tries to achieve oneness without otherness, selfhood without ambivalence, the ambivalence imposed upon the self by social and sexual relations. Now the self-made man needs only self.

The tattoo of lOve on Gumb’s hand suggests its harrowingly proportionate opposite, hate. It attests to the anguished struggle between both modes represented, in every way, by the film in its depiction of its characters and what they mean to us. This love-hate ambivalence tonally and thematically suffuses the film. The climactic confrontation between Clarice and Gumb is one of the most piercing representations of love/hate ambivalence in the cinema, as Clarice—who much more than Gumb represents the Freudian artist who sublimates her desires, whose art is the relentless acquisition of knowledge, whose profound ambitiousness Lecter astutely notes, the artist unable to love or hate, always occupying the fatal gulf between both modes—

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush kills the lamb she can never save.58 Clarice tried to save the lamb; now, she kills it. Ultimately, she represents the impasse between love and hate, the ambivalent space between these profound emotional and moral positions and psychic states. In the end, The Silence of the Lambs can only be understood in the context of this ambivalence.

And, in the end, in the context of Lecter’s perversity. It is with him that we end the film and with him whom we are ultimately made to identify.

Lecter, the force of perversity, the unclassifiable, the socially uncontainable, the unrepentantly appetitive monster, the unloosed id, freely fol ows the lure of his own desires, obliterating all other concerns the film, or we, might have.59 Clarice, abandoned, now queasily embodies the superego function she has both accepted and challenged throughout the film, as Lecter resolves the struggle he represents between the normative and the perverse. The Silence of the Lambs is one of the few Hol ywood films to culminate in the apotheosis of the perverse. Ultimately, it casts off the successfully Oedipalized heroine, leaving her to the cold ambiguities of the Symbolic, preferring to follow Lecter into the infinite reaches of unsocialized perversity. The film concludes, then, with a refusal to grant Gumb’s wish for the end of ambivalence. It leaves us in the position of having to confront the contradictory nature of our responses, of what Clarice has accomplished, of our desire to see Chilton get his just desserts by becoming Lecter’s dinner. It is precisely Silence’s allegiance to ambivalence that makes it such a powerful and, given its sociopolitical cli-mate, daring film.

chapter fOur

The Hollywood Man Date

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film Though actively discussed concepts in psychoanalytic, queer, and film theory circles, narcissism and masochism remain largely segregated in these critical discussions, largely used as competing ways of thinking about the spectator-protagonist relationship. To recapitulate the thesis of this book, in representations of manhood in Hol ywood film from the late 1980s to the present, narcissism and masochism emerge as a binaristic relation within the diegetic world of the film, as several key films may be described as a struggle between a narcissistic and a masochistic mode of male identity. Very often, this agon, or contest, is represented either thematically or through relationships between men that conventionally fit into the hero-villain split. But a new genre has emerged in Bush-to-Bush films, a kind of film that may be said to literalize or allegorize this narcissism/masochism split. In this new genre, which I call the double-protagonist film, the central conflict is a complex negotiation for power between two protagonists, each played by a film star, both of whom lay legitimate claim to narrative dominance. Bush-to-Bush Hol ywood films suggest that manhood’s center cannot hold, that manhood is split, that the warring elements of manhood spill out beyond the individual subjectivity of the star-protagonist, and that the burden of male representation must be carried by two stars rather than one.

The most obvious precursor to the double-protagonist film genre is the buddy-film genre. Though related to the buddy film, the double-protagonist differs from it in several key respects that I will take care to examine in this chapter. The other antecedents of the double-protagonist film are the western, the noir, the Hitchcockian psychosexual thriller, and its imitators of the 70s and the 80s. The overlaps, as well as the differences, between the new double-protagonist film and these other, influencing genres will be considered in this chapter, which will conclude with close readings of Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) and Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus (2002).

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure 4.1. The double-protagonist shot: Willem Dafoe and Greg Kinnear in Auto Focus (2002)

The double-protagonist film bears an interesting relationship to Hol ywood history. A dyadic pairing of male stars does not occur in most Classic Hol ywood films, which are star-driven. Some film genres, however, specifically depended upon the double-star film, such as the “Road” movies of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and, most notably, westerns, which often placed two powerhouse stars, such as John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, in the same film. Though not, in male-male terms, “double-star” films, film noirs often made the theme of the double central. Certainly, many Classic Hol ywood films pair a major male star with a major female one—for example, It Happened One Night (1934), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Double Indemnity (1944), Notorious (1946), and An Affair to Remember (1957)—a tradition that endures to the present day. (Because my focus is on male-male relationships, I will leave the extraordinarily intricate construction of heterosexuality in Hol ywood to other discussions.) And there were sometimes elephantine all-star productions ( The Ten Commandments, How the West Was Won) that swirled numerous different stars into their mix.

But for the most part, what we envision when we consider the men of Classic Hol ywood is the lone, solitary star making his way through a complex and challenging special world. (The same is true for the female protagonist of the woman’s film, the genre in which a female star dominates.) We think of the star in isolation, the star fighting his or her way through the complications of plot to a resolution that relieves him or her of his or her narratively imposed anxieties. We think of Humphrey Bogart’s caustically cynical Sam Spade;

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1

John Garfield’s lustrously sweat-drenched boxer; Gregory Peck’s impeccably unruffled gray flannel suit; Gary Cooper’s embattled sheriff; James Stewart’s increasingly manic, agitated, suffering Everyman; and John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), famously detached from family and future in the film’s memorable closing shot of Ethan walking away from the reunited family and heterosexual coupledom. Very often, there is a heavy in these films, but the villain is never thought of as the other protagonist, only as the ancillary plot-necessitated figure who makes trouble for the protagonist.1 “A man don’t go his own way, he’s nothin’,” says Montgomery Clift’s Robert E. Lee Prewitt in the 1953 From Here to Eternity, a statement that resonates even for this film studded with major stars (Clift, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra).

The double-protagonist film has profound implications for both the cinematic construction of American masculinity generally and for the historical development of representations of queer sexuality specifical y. The double-protagonist film signals several important shifts: in the construction of the essentially isolate male protagonist, the chief embodiment of which is Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in Ford’s 1956 film; in the construction of the heterosexual couple, the focal point and the achieved goal of traditional film narrative; and in the construction of male-male relations. With the rise of the double-protagonist film, Classic Hol ywood isolate manhood is transformed into dyadic manhood; dyadic manhood threatens to topple the reign of the heterosexual relationship presumably central to Hol ywood film; and male-male relations of all kinds must now account for, contend with, and orient themselves around a central, often contentious, always complex relationship between two male protagonists played by two male stars of commensurate stature, who therefore demand equal attention and narrative importance.

To give a better sense of what I mean by this new genre of the double-protagonist Hol ywood film, I list below a representative array of titles.

Casualties of War (1989)

The Hard Way (1991)

Point Break (1991)

Cape Fear (1991)

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

The Fisher King (1991)

A Few Good Men (1992)

Philadelphia (1993)

In the Line of Fire (1993)

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Bad Boys (1995)

Seven (1995)

Heat (1995)

Face/Off (1997)

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Snake Eyes (1998)

Fight Club (1999)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Arlington Road (1999)

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Enemy at the Gates (2001)

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Auto Focus (2002)

Troy (2004)

Collateral (2004)

Miami Vice (2006)

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

The Departed (2006)

The Black Dahlia (2006)

The Prestige (2007)

We Own the Night (2007)

American Gangster (2007)

Cassandra’s Dream (2007)

Of these films, only The Hard Way and Miami Vice correspond to the buddy-film genre of which the Lethal Weapon series has been the emblematic model in several film criticism treatments. L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia self-consciously recall classic noir by placing themselves back in the noir time and space of Classic Hol ywood Los Angeles, and films such as Seven and The Departed modernize the noir genre. While several of these films can be seen as, in Robert Ray’s phrase, “concealed westerns,” none explicitly evoke or characterize themselves as westerns.2 Though it contains the shards of earlier genres and ways of thinking about male-male cinematic relations, the double-protagonist film innovates these genres and the nature of these relations.3

The above list represents the new kind of manhood film in which two stars share and compete over narrative power. Probably the simplest reason to explain the rise of the double-protagonist film is economic: an increasingly desperate Hol ywood employing two major actors to sell one film. Yet, without dispensing with the economic factor, the psychosexual significance

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1
of the double-protagonist film bears scrutiny. Each male star doubles the other, in their battle over narrative dominance, sexual objects, and audience sympathy. Several of these films pit the protagonists against each other, but several of them demonstrate the merging of the two central males into one; always the males are complementary halves of a dyad that suggests not two individuals but two warring halves of one consciousness, a psychic doubling that recalls Ingmar Bergman’s haunting, disturbing woman-centered Persona (1966), albeit in masculine terms. (Perhaps the most obvious male-male version of Bergman’s film is David Fincher’s Fight Club. ) In order to understand how the double-protagonist film differs from its cinematic antecedents, we should contextualize it by contrasting it to other films that make male-male relations central: noir, westerns, the psychosexual thriller, and buddy films.

Dark Passage: Doubles in Noir

Noir films present us with masculine heroes in whom divided natures war. The masculine split of the noir is primarily psychic, internal, and embodied not by double male protagonists but by female characters who represent competing points of identifications or narrative possibilities for the tortuously split noir hero. As Frank Krutnik notes:

Although in [noir] films like Out of the Past the woman may represent a disturbance of the hero’s attempt to achieve a position of mastery and knowledge, and a concomitant disruption of the linear, investigative narrative, the cause of this disturbance and disruption lies . . . in the “nature” of masculinity itself. Masculine identity and sexuality are never stable and unified but rather are in flux between conflicting positions of desire; masculinity is hegemonic rather than homogeneous.4

Noirs, then, do not simply reiterate notions of coherent masculinity but, instead, “negotiate conflicting and contradictory positionings of male desire, identity, and sexuality, and [work] to consolidate masculinity as unified.”5

In a well-known essay, “Notes on Film Noir,” Paul Schrader suggests that noir reflected the postwar disillusionment experienced by those returning home after the Second World War. “The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessman and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film.”6 One of the sources of the pain and conflict in noir manhood is

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush buried/repressed wartime trauma and the situational development of feelings of intense male-male intimacy, homosocial bonds that had to be suppressed in the postwar social order. Many film noirs, Steven Cohan points out, “recount a veteran’s successful transition from male bonding to heterosexual romance.”7 But not without considerable difficulty: as Cohan demonstrates in a discussion of Humphrey Bogart’s noir vehicle Dead Reckoning (1947), the film “openly foregrounds the organization of Bogart’s tough masculinity out of two coordinates which his films with [Lauren] Bacall tame through their heterosexual narratives. [Bogart’s] Rip Murdoch is overtly misogynistic . . .

and covertly homosexual.”8

Though the theme of doubling is crucial to this genre, as Raymond Durgnat points out (though he gives largely female examples9), film noir’s filmic world chiefly evokes the hero’s essential isolation and alienation. “To a large degree, every noir hero,” writes Robert G. Porfirio, “is an alienated man. . . . The noir hero is most often ‘a stranger in a hostile world.’”10 Noir films emphasize the impossibility of authentic male-male bonds, the inherent impasse between men and women in patriarchy, and the barren aloneness and heightened vulnerability of the postwar urban American male.

Split Heroes: Doubles in the Western

If noirs emphasize the loneliness of their isolate protagonists, the western is the genre most likely to feature a double-protagonist relationship. In her essay

“Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” a sequel to her most famous article, Laura Mulvey discusses the “common splitting of the Western hero into two,” a deviation from the patterns described in a text Mulvey draws on here, V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folk-tale. “A folk-tale story,” writes Mulvey, “revolves around conflict between hero and villain.” But in the split-hero Western, the “issue at stake is no longer how the villain will be defeated, but how the villain’s defeat will be inscribed in history, whether the upholder of the law as a symbolic system will be seen to be victorious or the personification of the law in a more primitive manifestation, closer to the good or the right.” Mulvey uses John Ford’s famous, elegiac western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), with its deployment of John Wayne’s rancher Tom Doniphon as an exemplar of the romantic, fading spirit of the Wild West and James Stewart’s idealistic lawyer Ransom Stoddard, who brings book-learning and civic values to frontier anarchy, as a key example. “This narrative structure,” writes Mulvey, “is based on opposition between two irreconcilables. The two paths cannot cross.”

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 11

For Mulvey, manhood in the western—which I view as a template for the double-protagonist Bush-to-Bush film—is represented, then, by two di-verging styles of masculinity, the narcissistic and anachronistic social outsider (Tom Doniphon, the personification of the law) and the figure (Ransom Stoddard, the upholder of the law) who attempts to civilize him and represents the social order, chiefly symbolized by marriage. The “rejection of marriage,” Mulvey writes, “personifies a nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence.” This rejection reverses the resolution of the Proppian folk-tale, which culminates in marriage, and the proper resolution of the Freudian Oedipus complex, which integrates the subject into the symbolic.

The split hero in the western, then, represents “a tension between two points of attraction, the symbolic (social integration and marriage) and nostalgic narcissism,” which Mulvey associates with a “phase of play and fantasy difficult to integrate into the Oedipal trajectory.” Marriage, then, emerges as

“repression of narcissistic sexuality.”1

Using the Bush-to-Bush double-protagonist films as an example, I argue that a different way of thinking about split masculinity from Mulvey’s can be useful. Although the alternate star does often represent civilization—the social order, marriage, responsibility, all those things Leslie Fiedler argued, in Love and Death in the American Novel, that American men always attempt to escape, through homoerotic interracial fraternity—that is not his consistent function. Rather, his function is to react to and register the overpowering and seductive appeal of the main star. If the alternate protagonist’s tie to the law—Keanu Reeves in Point Break, Paul Walker in The Fast and the Furious, even Brad Pitt’s guilty vampire Louis, who wants brazen Lestat (Tom Cruise) to exsanguinate rodents rather than humans in Interview with the Vampire—
leads him to attempt to impose the law on the lawless lead, that attempt to capture the lead only allegorizes the desiring male’s efforts to ensnare his beloved. The attempt to capture the main protagonist outside the law principally functions as a metaphor for the lover’s erotic designs on the beloved, who most often mightily resists the lover’s advances. As Carson McCullers wrote so memorably in The Ballad of the Sad Café, “the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.”

The Hitchcockian Psychosexual Thriller:

Strangers on a Train

Although the male star—Cary Grant, James Stewart—dominates several Alfred Hitchcock films and is usually paired up with an equally magnetic

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush female star—Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kel y—a small but notable group of double-protagonist films exists within the larger genre of the Hitchcockian psychosexual thriller. Of the films that specifically fall into the paradigms of the double-protagonist narrative— Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Frenzy (1972)— Strangers provides the most exquisite realization of the genre’s possibilities. Hitchcock’s film version of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, despite having homophobic elements, pushes the concepts of self and other to their breaking point. Guy Haines (Farley Granger), a handsome tennis player on his way to marrying a senator’s daughter, falls prey to the bizarre machinations of homicidal, homosexually coded Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), a wealthy dandy who courts Guy with fantasies of shared murders: “You do my murder, I do yours: criss-cross!” They meet in the titular train on which Guy travels to a meeting with his wife, tarty, taunting Miriam, whom he wishes to divorce. Later, Bruno kills Miriam, expecting Guy to kill Bruno’s father, whom he abhors even as he worships his dotty, deranged mother, in a one-to-one cinematic translation of the Freudian theory of homosexuality (as discussed in Chapter Three). If Hitchcock’s representation of Bruno is textbook Americanized Freud, and therefore phobically charged, his rendering of both heterosexual and homosexual types of manhood is nevertheless disruptive.12 He refuses to depict Guy, ostensibly the normative, wholesome American, as such, presenting his own desires, however banked, as murderous and murderously unstable. When Miriam refuses to grant him a divorce, he comes close to strangling her, saying later to Ann, the senator’s daughter he hopes to marry, “I wish I could wring her neck!” just as Bruno will. (A train roars past as Guy expresses his violent wishes, aurally and visually linking him to Bruno.)

Moreover, Hitchcock cast the feminized, almost tremulously beautiful young Farley Granger, who played high-strung pianist Philip in Hitchcock’s all-but-explicit homosexual thrill-kill murder mystery Rope, based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, in the role of Guy, further complicating a normative image of male heterosexuality. And if Bruno is the fiendishly foppish dandy in many respects, he also denatures his own typing. At the fairground at which he stalks Ann, he appears at times to be gazing lasciviously at her as he returns her own transgressive, lascivious gaze. And he exudes strongman strength as he engages in masculine contest for her pleasure, hitting the high score on the sound-the-bell that even the two All-American boys escorting Miriam are unable to do. (Indeed, these young men, both playfully and laughingly hanging out with Miriam without any apparent rivalry over her, may be the real homosexual couple in this film, she their girl-pal

“beard.”) Although Guy punches Bruno in the face after he tells him, “But

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1

Guy, I like you” (a declaration made after Bruno has collapsed in the after-math of nearly strangling a rich older society lady), he then almost tenderly straightens Bruno’s tie, a gesture that will be reproduced in David Fincher’s Fight Club, another exemplary double-protagonist film. In the end, Hitchcock refuses any clear distinction between normative and pathological male sexuality. In this film, narcissistic homoeroticism emerges as a radical political statement, disrupting cultural understandings of normativity and pathology.

Guy and Bruno emerge as a fatal blur of murderous male energies, each the other’s tortured, mutually accusing mirror image.

Masculinity’s Tightrope: The Star and the

Psychosexual Thriller of the 0s and 0s

In terms of Hol ywood male-male relationships, I would argue that a significant shift occurred in the Reaganite mid-1980s, still a period in which the major star-driven film dominated. This was the era of the Stal one/

Rambo films, the beginnings of the single-star action movie reigns of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

But it was also an era in which the star image seemingly underwent a new transformation. Another genre that presages the double-protagonist one is the psychosexual thriller of the 70s and especially the 80s, which follows the form of the genre Hitchcock established. Richard Tuggle’s Tightrope (1984) is exemplary in this regard, especially in the ways it indicates shifts in the representation of the male star from the 70s, New Hol ywood era to the 80s. Tightrope stars Clint Eastwood as a New Orleans detective, Wes Block, who hunts a serial killer preying on prostitutes. Tightrope does not feature a double-protagonist relationship, but its plot paves the way for it by focusing on the star and his double. Wes frequents the same brothels and enlists the sexual services of the same women as the serial killer, whose identity doubles and deepens the depravities and perversities of Wes’s persona. Like the serial killer, Wes likes to tie women up or handcuff them. Divorced, Wes raises two daughters and struggles to maintain the veneer of a normal family life as he indulges in his sadomasochistic sexual tastes and chases his like-minded but murderous doppelgänger. At the time of the film’s release, it garnered considerable attention for its, and Eastwood’s, willingness to show the dark side of the male protagonist, to suggest that only a thin line—the titular tight-rope—separates the “good” hero from his malevolent double. In Tightrope, the double is a shadowy, masked figure; we hear his creepily self-satisfied voice, but never see his face except at the nighttime train tracks climax in which Wes

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush pulls off his mask. In Bush-to-Bush films, the protagonist-double relationship transforms into a double-protagonist one in which the double emerges not as a peripheral but as a coequal character who shares the narrative.

I said that Tightrope “seemingly” represents a transformation in the star because the New Hol ywood of the 1970s brims with films in which the psychosexual perversities of its stars occupy center stage—Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To (1976), and William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) spring immediately to mind. The latter two films brilliantly construct the doppelgänger theme around their male stars.

As Amy Taubin writes, with characteristic acuity, of Taxi Driver: Travis Bickle is Ethan Edwards split open. In The Searchers, [John] Ford finally shows the fissures in the masculine ideal he monumentalized. . . .

Ethan, the lone wolf, becomes Travis, the psychopath, trying to work out on his own what it is to be a man. Isolation intensifies his pathology. Quoting Thomas Wolfe, [Paul Schrader, the screenwriter] dubs him “God’s lonely man.” . . . The hallucination that Travis enacts [at the climax, in which he fulfils his fantasy of “rescuing” the child prostitute, Iris, played by Jodie Foster, from Sport, played by Harvey Keitel, her pimp]—and which results in real death—is the hallucination of masculinity. It’s the search for that image of ideal masculine wholeness that subtends the entire history of the movies.13

We can understand the double-protagonist film as the most obvious and the most insistent effort to restore split American manhood to a state of wholeness—the phantom, phantasmatic ideal as captivating as it is illusory, as desirable as it is elusive. If the 1980s mark a retrenchment of America manhood that corrects the apparently debilitated, perverse images of cinematic manhood in the 1970s, an attempt to return to an older model of stoic and stalwart masculinity that drew upon a new fixation with the masculine form itself (hence the hard-body phenomenon), Tightrope returns Hol ywood masculinity to its 1970s instabilities. Tightrope is an unusual film in that it subjects its particular kind of star to the same sexually motivated scrutiny as the New Hol ywood films of the 1970s did the newer crop of stars, like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino (now today’s old guard, of course). Clint Eastwood stands in for the unflinching codes of Classic Hol ywood manhood and provides a link to the old Hol ywood past even as he embodies a new style violent masculinity. To see him subjected to such a thoroughgoing social critique innovated the representation of manhood in Hol ywood film. I don’t mean to suggest that Tightrope is an especially good film; seeing it again, one is struck principally by the unusual, cold, almost Kubrickian tone the director strikes—the

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1
film equivalent of rigor mortis. Most disturbingly, the film appears to impugn its protagonist for his sexual perversities yet has little interest in or empathy for its systematically murdered women.14

If we take Robert De Niro’s indelible Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s masterpiece Taxi Driver as the decadent late stage in the lonely, isolate Hol ywood male protagonist, and see Clint Eastwood’s Wes Block as the beginning of a new-style Hol ywood protagonist—with resonant echoes of past ones, like Humphrey Bogart’s highly dubious playwright Dixon Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), who exhibits his penchant for barbaric violence in the cinema’s first depiction of road rage—the character/star whose psychosexual perversities emerge as an explicit feature of his onscreen presence, the star whose image is fundamentally challenged, split, its coherence contested, then the double-protagonist of the Bush-to-Bush cinema represents a key stage in the evolution of the American movie male.

The Buddy Film

For one very simple reason, the double-protagonist Bush-to-Bush films cannot be called buddy films: the men in them are not, for the most part, buddies. The so-called buddy film has been the most widely discussed example of cinematic male-male relations, so it will be helpful to address the buddy film in our analysis.

In his characteristically incisive essay “From Buddies to Lovers,” Robin Wood discusses the buddy films of the 1970s and their concomitant problems with both misogyny—in that the films were often hostile reactions to feminism—and homophobia—in that the possibility that homosocial bonds might include homosexuality had to be rigorously and violently denied. To a certain extent, Wood attempts to recuperate these films, but without losing sight of their ideological difficulties and limitations. He locates the central problem in them not as the “presence of the male relationship but as the absence of home.” By “home,” Wood refers not only to a physical location but also to the home as both a “state of mind and an ideological construct, above all as ideological security. Ultimately, home is America. . . . [The 70s buddy]

films are the direct product of the crisis in ideological confidence generated by Vietnam and subsequently by Watergate.”

Given that they suggest but can never allow the consummation of male-male relationships, “the films are guilty of the duplicitous teasing of which they have often been accused, continually suggesting a homosexual relationship while emphatically disowning it.” Citing such films as Easy Rider

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Mean Streets (1973), Scarecrow (1973), California Split (1974), and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) as examples, Wood theorizes that the popularity of the buddy-film genre “testifies, no doubt, to the contemporary ‘heterosexual’ male audience’s need to denigrate and marginalize women, but also, positively, to its unconscious but immensely powerful need to validate love between men.” The “strategies of disownment” are necessary to appease the panic of the heterosexual male spectator and ensure his satisfaction.15

Robert Kolker writes that the oft-repeated convention in 1980s action films
is to provide the hero with a “buddy.” The “buddy” is an extension of the cultural cliché of “male bonding,” a situation in which men can fantasize about being released from the repressions imposed by the company of women. In film, the “buddy” allows adventure, joking, safe community, marginalization of women, and an apparent absence of sexuality. The “buddy” complex views sexuality as an obstacle to manly acts. But this denial of sexuality carries a covert admission of the possibilities of homosexuality, which, of course, is inadmissible.16

To play it safe, one of the buddies has an accommodating wife or girlfriend largely rendered invisible. “Men engage in rigorous activity together; the sexual tensions between them are never stated.”17

The buddy film of the 1980s looks remarkably, then, like its 1970s incarnation, the crucial distinction being that it is now retooled to fit a culture of what Susan Jeffords has described as the hard-body hypermasculinization of the Reagan era. For Jeffords, the principle difference in 70s manhood and its 80s version lies in each decade’s representation of manhood in the context of the social order. To take Eastwood’s iconic psycho-cop Dirty Harry (Calla-han) as an example, the institutions that enable the activities of the criminals Harry kills off retain their power, resulting in a nihilism “that cannot reassure the audience that any of [Harry’s] actions have mattered or have changed the social order in any way.” Jeffords continues, “In contrast, the heroes of hard-body [Reaganite] films suggest a different kind of social order, one in which the men who are thrust forward into heroism are not heroic in defiance of their society but in defiance of their governments and institutional bureaucracies.”18

If the social contexts of the buddy films, along with the cinematic construction of manhood, change, the inherent problems of misogyny and homo-

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sexuality do not and are now heightened by a more pronounced racialized discourse of interracial male friendship that is not so much an innovation as it is a romantic return to the codes of the early American republic. Kolker’s description of the action film-buddy film’s interracial male friendship could be a rewritten version of Leslie Fiedler’s discussion of the same relationship in nineteenth-century American literary classics such as The Last of the Mohicans (which would be spectacularly revisited in Michael Mann’s 1992 film version).

Leslie Fiedler famously depicts the relationship between isolate wilderness hero Natty Bumppo and his Mohican comrade Chingachgook as “the pure marriage of males, sexless and holy, a kind of counter-matrimony, in which the white refugee from society and the dark-skinned primitive are joined till death do them part.”19

The buddy film inherits and mobilizes the tensions inherent in a homosocialized and homosocializing society that depends on bonds between members of the same sex but also rigorously polices against any erotic dimension to those bonds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains the matter this way in Between Men: “In any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial ( including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power: a relationship founded on an inherent and potentially active structural congruence.”20 As Cynthia J.

Fuchs observes, the buddy films of the 1980s use the “transgressiveness of black-white difference” to displace “homosexual anxiety,” thereby sustaining

“the secrecy of masculine intimacy and vulnerability.” The anxieties on display in the Lethal Weapon films fuse sex and violence, but most “emphatically displaces homosexuality by that violence.” Indeed, this violence comes to seem the deepest form of male intimacy.21

In the 1990s and beyond, the much more publicly acknowledged reality of homosexuality—figured in the rise of the queer movement—radically transforms the paradigms of repressed homosexuality of the earlier buddy films of the 70s and 80s. This is not to suggest in any way that the double-protagonist film of the Bush-to-Bush era represents, in toto, anything like a progressive movement in the cinema—but it is to suggest that the opportunity for resistant pleasure inheres and sometimes manifests itself within the genre. What’s key about its development is that it simultaneously literalizes the metaphorical split within the tortured psyche of the divided, lonely noir protagonist and reimagines the male-male relationships of the western and the later buddy-film genres as it represents not so much a response to feminism and queer sexuality as it does the next stage in cinematic manhood after those challenges were raised.

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Narcissus and Echo: The Movie

If, as I am suggesting, Hol ywood manhood from Bush 41 constructs a split image of manhood and that this split is literalized in the creation of the alternate protagonist, there nevertheless remains one star who is the dominant one, and another star who threatens his dominance. As such, the alternate star—Michael J. Fox in Casualties, Brad Pitt in Interview, Guy Pearce in L.A., Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback, Aaron Eckhart in Dahlia—is in an essentially secondary position, one that chafes against the major star’s dominance. The alternate protagonist falls somewhere between double and co-star, between transvestic female lead and complementary buddy-film buddy. Given that, in film theory discourse generally, the subjectivity of the cinematic male protagonist has been described as narcissistic, this secondary male lead can be seen as being in an essentially masochistic relation to the narcissistic male—a male-male version, in other words, of the famous and infinitely suggestive Ovidian myth of Narcissus and Echo. The words used to describe his double by the titular protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s great 1839 story of the doppelgänger “William Wilson” tellingly synthesize these relational dynamics: “His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions . . . and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own. ” We can call the alternate masochistic male lead the echoistic male.

It will help our analysis to recall some of the elements of the Ovidian myth of Narcissus and Echo, consider its continuing usefulness to film theory, and use it to theorize the echoistic role of the alternate male star. Ovid’s version of the Narcissus myth helps us to understand women’s place in patriarchy.

Desired by both females and males, the beautiful Narcissus is cursed by being forced to suffer the same fate to which he subjects all of his admirers, to love a beautiful boy who cannot return this love. Obsessed with Narcissus, Echo is constantly “following him,” as Robert Graves limns the myth, “through the pathless forest, longing to address him, but unable to speak first,” forever iterating her plea “Lie with me!” In terms of the themes of this study, Narcissus’s rough shaking off of poor Echo and adamant dismissal of her advances—“I will die before you ever lie with me!”—are eerily relevant.22

Echo becomes Echo because of female rage against male power. A loquacious, charming nymph, Echo distracted Juno while her spouse Zeus was off philandering with another nymph. Upon discovering Echo’s duplicity, Juno punishes her by denying her the ability to speak—now, Echo can only repeat what someone has said to her. One of the most poignant figures from Classical myth, Echo can be used, in feminist terms, as a figure to represent

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1
women’s problematic role within patriarchy. If the position of Woman in the West, as Hélène Cixous argues, is one of decapitation—the denial of mind and voice—the myth of Echo encapsulates this position.23

If Narcissus, the beautiful man who falls in love with his own reflection, stands in for the conventional male protagonist, Echo, the nymph denied her own voice, able only to echo the words spoken by others, has provided the template for the cinematic version of Woman, who can ostensibly only support, reflect, echo narcissistic male leads. But what happens if a male character occupies the echoistic position?

As an essentially feminine, not exactly passive but also not quite active position, the alternate male protagonist’s echoistic role places him in a position of submission to the narcissistic lead, whose dominance the alternate lead resists but also, in opposing, enshrines as he enables it. It is precisely by his relatively inferior, uncomfortable, resistant disposition that he allows the main protagonist to recognize, establish, and maintain his dominance. In terms of psychoanalytic and queer film theory treatments, the only theorized subject position into which the alternate lead can fall is that of masochism.

The double-protagonist film of recent Hol ywood history is therefore most accurately understood as an agon between narcissistic and masochistic modes of masculine subjectivity for narrative dominance. To my knowledge, no one has yet theorized about a conflictual relationship between the narcissistic and the masochistic cinematic males. Such a theorization allows us to view the relationship that exists between the concepts of narcissism and masochism, which are, as I have stated, concepts that occupy, respectively, a mutually central yet usually segregated position within several overlapping debates in psychoanalysis, queer theory, and film theory.

The innovation of the double-protagonist film is that it places a male in the conventionally feminine echoistic position. The echoistic male bears many of the same characteristics of the female usually put in this passive/subjugated position. But he also represents something else, a greater access to the narcissistic potentialities of the main lead, one that can potentially help him to transcend the maiming confines of the female echoistic position, or at least complicate her prescribed fate. In part, this can occur because of the conventional privileges afforded the masculine over the feminine position; therefore, the masculinization of Echo enacts a kind of misogynistic erasure of the cinematic feminine. But in another respect the implicitly feminized position of the echoistic male also opens up a homoerotic tension between the two male leads that potentially, and positively, challenges traditional modes of masculine subjectivity.

140 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 film Point Break is both a retro-western and a prominent example of the new-style double-protagonist film. Like Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bigelow’s film negotiates a conflict between, in Mulvey’s words, “an opposition between two irreconcilables,” two paths that cannot cross, but, unlike Ford’s film, it collapses villain into protagonist.

Rather than the contrasting of an antiquated against a more modern form of heroism, a negotiation both incited and enabled by the activities of a villain, that Mulvey found in Ford’s western, Point Break makes its central conflict an opposition between one character who represents the institutionalization of the law but who also chafes against his role as the law’s embodiment (Keanu Reeves’s undercover fbi agent Johnny Utah) and another who represents both lawlessness and a roguish outsider law that he invents and imposes (Patrick Swayze’s bank robber and Zen master surfer Bodhi).24 In sum, the film gives us two competing forms of heroism that each bear traces of villainy.

Yvonne Tasker writes of Point Break that it “brings together action, comedy and an exploration of the sexualized relationship between the two protagonists: all aspects familiar from the buddy movie format.” I would argue that Point Break goes much further in its exploration of the sexual nature of the male-male relationship than the usual buddy film, a point that Tasker’s own analysis supports: “Point Break is also very much concerned with different images of masculinity, diverse masculine identities. . . . [It] delights in the bodies of its male protagonists. Bigelow has described the film as a ‘wet western’. . . . Themes and images [of westerns of the past] . . . are intertwined with the need for contemporary films to present their heroes either nearly naked, or in the need for clinging costumes that display the body.” This commodification of the male body registers, Tasker argues, 1990s “shifts in masculine identities and how they are defined.”25

The more recent film The Fast and the Furious (2001), made ten years after Point Break, demonstrates the coherence and consistency of the double-protagonist film’s themes across the years of the Bush-to-Bush era. The film basically reproduces the plot of Bigelow’s film, replacing surfing with street racing. Paul Walker’s undercover detective/street racer Brian O’Conner occupies the dominant position in terms of narrative focus to Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto, the Hades of his street-racing underworld. But in terms of male representation, Walker’s conflicted Brian, torn between his allegiance to the superegoic world of the law that he serves and the thrilling secret world of street racing that Diesel’s Dominic embodies, is clearly in the echoistic position to Dominic, around whose magnetic charisma the film is organized.

Diesel, here as in several films, occupies the narcissistic subject position, the one that all of the other characters desire, while conflicted Brian masochisti-

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 141
cally struggles over his desire to uphold the law and identify with the charismatic Dominic, an identification with strong erotic undertones.

In one shot of Rob Cohen’s film, we see both men’s faces in huge two-shot close-up as they sit side by side in one car, black sunglasses concealing their eyes and whatever desiring secrets may exist within them. In the climax, Cohen—borrowing from Ridley Scott’s languorous use of montage technique to suggest the homoerotic merging of Susan Sarandon’s and Geena Davis’s distinct identities in Thelma and Louise—opts for a lyrical use of montage to depict the men as they race against each other, in a vehicular version of a duel in the sun. The poetically, sensually blurring faces of these distinctly beautiful men confuse the parameters of identity and desire, narcissism and masochism, merging into an ode to a general atmosphere of narcissistic abandon.

The echoistic male position contains within it a potential challenge to conventional masculinity precisely through its destabilizing insertion of an often all but explicitly manifested level of homoerotic desire. But I would argue that the potential radicalism of the echoistic, i.e., masochistic, position lies not in its inherent masochism but in its movement away from masochism toward a shared access to the main protagonist’s narcissism. No doubt, some of my readers will hear in this argument a conservative approach to gendered representation, though that is antithetical to my intentions. Narcissism has been reimagined and reappropriated in some quarters, but still bears the traces of its Mulveyan associations with traditional masculinism (cf. Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”). But in several distinct treatments of recent years, as I demonstrated in the Introduction, masochism has been valorized as a male subjectivity that defies traditional masculinism. What I wish to suggest here is that, despite the valorization of masochism, it is a mode that often makes a highly unsatisfying contribution to the resistance of masculinist oppression.

Further, I wish to reconsider narcissism as a potentially defiant, resistant, and even joyously heady mode of masculine performance that surpasses masochism as a positive queer mode of cultural engagement. The double-protagonist film allows us a key opportunity to test out this hypothesis.

The Masochistic Gaze

We can profitably return now to the theme of the masochistic male gaze explored in the discussion of Casualties of War in Chapter Two. In that chapter, I argued that De Palma staged masculine failure through the impairment of Eriksson’s (Michael J. Fox) gaze. What I wish to suggest now is that the double-protagonist film seizes upon problematic viewing as indicative of

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush changes in male-male representation and as, possibly, sign of a newly expressible male-male desire that cannot be reduced to homosexual desire but may or may not include it within its scopic scheme.

I have been challenging the enshrinement of masochism in psychoanalytic and queer theory discourse because, in part, I see masochism as the linchpin of increasingly more frequent efforts to equate queer sexuality and the death drive. I have been writing in support of narcissism as a symbol of what can be a positive and instructive return to beauty—and joy—for queer theory. Yet, it is necessary to show the flip side of my terms. Masochism endures as an important figure in several discourses, particularly in feminism. It is entirely possible for masochism to represent political resistance and for narcissism to represent pernicious heterosexual male privilege and presumption. The contention I make, however, is that masochism can only be really resistant—in most cases—when it is figured as straight male masochism because homosexual and feminine masochism tend not to challenge but to accommodate prevailing stereotypes about gays and women.

One of the most interesting consequences of the double-protagonist split in Bush-to-Bush film is that it positions one apparently normative male character, the echoistic male, as a diegetic spectator of male beauty, the main protagonist, who, as the audience surrogate, is also a symbolic spectator. In his pining for the main protagonist and in the manner in which he chafes against male dominion, often figured as the main protagonist’s heady display of narcissistic omnipotence and concomitant efforts to maintain this reign, the alternate protagonist is a version of what Paul Willemen and Steve Neale have theorized as the repressed homosexual voyeur.26

Voyeurism, as Freud brilliantly theorized it, is sadism in the form of the look, a desire to dominate others through the eyes.27 But repressed homosexual voyeurism—as a category of looking relations that someone, live or fictional, may occupy, or be made to occupy, regardless of their sexual orientation—implies a desire that is not so much “active” as it is concealed, yet is also not exactly “passive,” as it seeks out an object rather than waiting to be rendered one. It is not sadistic looking but rather anguished, embattled, maimed, obscured, thwarted, deflected, barred, or prohibited looking. Given the narrow range of options between active/passive, sadistic/masochistic looking, the alternate star’s gaze, understood within the context of repressed homosexual voyeurism, can only be described as masochistic.

The masochistic gaze has powerful implications for this study because it describes a new way of thinking both about straight masculinity and about how straight masculinity thinks about itself. As I have been suggesting, the scopophilic category of repressed homosexual voyeur is occupied principally

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 14

Figure 4.. Masochistic Ripley (Matt Damon) contemplating Dickie in the bathtub in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Figure 4.. Exhibitionistic Narcissus: Dickie (Jude Law) rises from the tub after Ripley has asked if he can get in.

by straight fictional characters in the mainstream films under discussion here, who are straight in that they are not figured explicitly as queer. This is the case in Casualties of War, in that De Palma’s construction of Eriksson’s gaze as masochistic functions as a meta-commentary on the essential powerlessness of his position and the challenges posed to resistant manhood generally.

There are, though, queer characters who wield the masochistic gaze in several

144 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure 4.4. The masochistic gaze (Ripley not being able to look at naked Dickie) . . .

Figure 4.. . . . impairs and thwarts queer male vision.

important films, such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brokeback Mountain, and one can argue that a film like Auto Focus demonstrates a collapse between straight and queer characters figured as a collapse of the gaze. Regardless of the apparent sexuality of the male characters in the films, the occupation of the subject of the masochistic gaze is an inherently queer position.

As an inherently queer position, the masochistic gaze when occupied by a normative male star/protagonist revises straight masculinity, makes masochistic straight masculinity a kind of disavowal of kinship with heterosexuality

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 14
while also the double of homosexual masculinity. The straight male subject of the masochistic gaze, therefore, liminally stands between normative heterosexual manhood and abjected queer manhood, representing alternately a fusion of both modes and an inability fully to embody either, while ostensibly maintaining a tie to straight manhood that comes increasingly to seem like an odd parody—and sometimes also a stringent critique—of that normative gendered, raced, and classed subject position.

In the course of her unpacking of Lacan’s theory of the gaze, Kaja Silverman, as we discussed in Chapter Two, differentiates the eye or the “look” from the gaze, making the analogy that the eye and the gaze are, in psychoanalytic theory, as distinct as penis and phallus. Drawing from Lacan, Silverman elaborates that, far from lending an air of mastery to the subject, voyeurism renders the looking subject “subordinated to the gaze,” disturbed and overwhelmed, and overcome by shame. In Lacanian gaze theory, “the possibility of separating vision from the image” is called “radically into question,” and along with it the presumed “position of detached mastery” of the voyeuristic subject. This clarification of Lacanian gaze theory has bold implications for feminist film theory, whose proper interrogation of the male look has not “always been pushed far enough. We have at times assumed that dominant cinema’s scopic regime could be overturned by ‘giving’ women the gaze, rather than by exposing the impossibility of anyone ever owning that visual agency, or of him or herself escaping specularity.”28 This view of the voyeuristic subject not as victim but as vulnerable and fragile insofar as he can never achieve the sense of mastery that fantasmatically impels his very voyeuristic project informs my reading of both Point Break and Auto Focus.

As Lacan himself writes:

What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain. There he will phantasize any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete. What he is looking for is not, as one says, the phallus—but precisely its absence, hence the pre-eminence of certain forms as the objects of his search.29

What these films stage is the confrontation between the masculine voyeur and that “hairy athlete,” the homoerotic male fantasy that obtrudes between presence and absence, who is the shadow on the wall, closer to Rank’s figure of the shadowy double than to Lacan’s discovered “absence.” In the double-protagonist film, the question raised is not whether or not the male looker phantasizes about a graceful girl when in reality only a hairy athlete lurks be-

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush hind the curtain, but, rather, if what that male looker actually wants to find behind that curtain is not the girl but the hairy athlete, or both.

If we consider films such as Point Break and Auto Focus in greater detail, we can narrativize several different developments at once: the double-protagonist film, the increasingly explicit nature of homoerotic desire, and the increasingly fraught nature of looking relations between men.

Masculinity at Sea: Point Break

As directed by Kathryn Bigelow, a director of striking talents whose films are as intoxicatingly, poetically visual as they are erratic and unsatisfying (in this regard, she bears remarkable resemblance to another great woman director of the present, Julie Taymor), Point Break self-consciously represents male beauty from a desiring perspective. The film represents its surfers as manifestations of a mythological manhood: riding their boards on white-crested waves, they assume attitudes of self-reverential repose, meditating on their own timeless beauty. Like figures in a frieze, they convey the uncanny impression of motion and frozen movement combined. In its hypnotic deployment of masculine doubles, Point Break provides the cinematic equivalent of Leo Bersani’s theory of homosexual desire as the longing for “inaccurate self-replication.”

Point Break retools in masculine terms the classic fair lady/dark lady split in Western art in its haze of Hellenic hairstyles: blond men are doubled and re-doubled, Bodhi, his brother, and the other surfers blending into a blond male blur; Johnny Utah’s surfer girlfriend Tyler (Lori Petty), as tough and masculinized as her name, doubles his dark hair, eyes, and clothes. Indeed, they chiastically complement each other in gender terms, he lending her a yearning femininity, she him an unflinching masculine resolve.30 It is no unintentional touch that in the single most threatening and most phallicized shot of a gun in the film, the gun is in her hand.

When Utah first glimpses Bodhi, surfing on a sunlit sea, the entire movie slows down, awed by his awe, which Bigelow sustains for an almost unseemly duration. Utah can’t take his eyes off of Bodhi, riveted by his visual spectacle. Tightrope may have presaged the double-protagonist film, but such a masculine contemplation of male beauty as Point Break gives us is unimaginable in Tuggle’s film, which is also about the lawman’s pursuit of his double whose secret world he must infiltrate (made easier by the shared uses of that world by protagonist and villain). As pretentious as he is blond and bearded, Bodhi nevertheless enraptures those around him, especially Utah, with his

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psychobabble-Zen philosophies, which are increasingly exposed as murderously self-serving and duplicitous, a cover for amorality. As the magnetic center around which the other characters revolve, blond Bodhi is a surfer Billy Budd, cynosure of the homosocial, crossed with the armchair philosopher Captain Vere. Strangely, that puts Utah in the Claggart role, the villain who can appreciate Billy’s beauty and could have loved him but for “fate and ban.”

Indeed, given the way in which Bigelow even homosexualizes heterosexuality—in her visual representation of Tyler, the only woman with a prominent role, and Tyler’s physical likeness to and corporeal indistinguishability in lovemaking from Utah—we can characterize the film’s representation of desire in the terms with which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes Melville’s novel, as another work in which “every impulse of every person . . . that could at all be called desire could be called homosexual desire, being directed by men exclusively toward men.”31

A male’s exposed posterior—one of Bodhi’s crew moons a bank’s surveillance camera—emerges as a multivalent visual symbol in the film. As Yvonne Tasker writes:

That a surfer’s ass is the only real clue Utah ever manages to come up with is indicative . . . of the maverick way in which the film addresses its concerns of physicality and the spectacle of masculinity. Rather than being centered on any traditional detection or investigation, the film is visually given over to the spectacle of the male body engaged in physical feats such as surfing and skydiving. In this drama of doubles, in which Utah and Bodhi recognize themselves in each other, a sexualized competition between the two men takes them, literally, to new heights.32

In one scene, Utah and his older partner freeze-frame this offending, revealing posterior, discussing the case as the frozen male anus looms above them, a glyph of male sexuality’s haunting power over the homosocial, but also a classified, de-eroticized object, a sign of the sublimation of all sexual energies in such fields as the fbi (a point discussed in relation to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs in Chapter Three).

Bigelow provides the most rapturous onscreen depiction of the ways in which the homosocial and the homoerotic can blur. On the plane before they skydive, Bodhi hands Utah his parachute kit. Having chased Bodhi after a bank robbery and thereby revealed his “secret” identity, Utah is understand-ably suspicious of Bodhi’s having packed his parachute. The other members of the group switch around all of the parachute kits, both reassuring and tormenting Utah, who snaps, “Are we going to jerk off or jump?” Bodhi high-

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush fives him, saying, “That’s my man!” If the threat of the circle-jerk finds verbal expression here, Bigelow takes this threat even further by visually representing collective male sexual abandon. In the air, the men’s bodies ecstatically whoosh and careen, and Utah momentarily loses all sense of prohibition and retribution, giving in completely to the exhilarating liberation of airborne homosocial bonding. At Bodhi’s behest, the flying men all form a circle in the whipping air, clasping each other’s arms in the process and remaining in their joined, circular position for many moments. These shots more closely resemble footage from gay Tantric sex videos than anything in previous Hol ywood films (Bigelow poeticizes, takes to lyrical new heights, the jingoistic homoeroticism of the 1986 Top Gun).

What Bigelow seizes upon throughout is the opportunity to heighten and highlight the varieties of masculinity in a manner that enshrines narcissism as visual pleasure, inciting in the viewer the desire to join in with the multivalent pageant of male beauty. Keanu Reeves’s softened, feminized beauty, supple musculature, and languorously erotic voice tone contrast with the blond, bearded height and limber, dancer’s agility of Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, who combines these qualities with almost frightening physical might. Swayze manages to make dreamy blondness physically intimidating, but more resonantly to convey the sense of Bodhi’s essential, murderous ruthlessness beneath the Zen master charm.

Bigelow frames Utah’s masochism through his vision, which she depicts as masochistic. In one scene in which Utah, on a stakeout in front of a bank, buys heroes from a vendor for his partner (burly, likable Gary Busey), her camera pans right, beyond Utah’s view, beyond Utah facing in the opposite direction, to show us, in long shot, Bodhi and his crew getting out of their car and infiltrating the bank. Utah’s masochistic gaze—impaired, faulty, un-masterful—will be parodied later in the moment in which he and Bodhi stare at each other, at the conclusion of an exhilarating handheld camera chase sequence. Having chased Bodhi, who wears one of those U.S. president masks his gang don when bank-robbing, Utah now has Bodhi in his sights, can shoot and “get” his man. The way Bigelow shoots the scene and uses parallel editing makes Utah’s desire to possess Bodhi by looking at him palpable.

Bodhi’s gaze triumphantly refuses Utah’s possessive one, even as Bodhi’s eyes, the only visible aspects of him beneath his Reagan mask, hypnotically compel Utah to submit to him. Knowing that Utah won’t shoot, Bodhi, with a seductive smile in his eyes, races off. After Bodhi escapes, Utah shoots madly into the air, a desperate paean to his own unfulfillable desire for Bodhi as well as a statement of the onanistic quality of his echoistic position.

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It is chiefly with and through Utah that we, Echo-like, perceive Bodhi’s beauty, when he surfs, holds court on the beach, draws his California crew around him. The film’s narrative stages a transition in his character from Echo to Nemesis, the correcting goddess who redressed Narcissus’s cruel indifference to those who desire him. Possessing the punitive force of the law, Utah punishes Bodhi for having failed to make good on his narcissistic promise, for having incited a desire in Utah that can never be satisfied. His climactic confrontation with Bodhi at the threshold of the “Fifty Year Storm” on an Australian beach restages Ovidian themes. Utah’s echoistic desire for Bodhi impels him to this spot, where he finds Bodhi staring at the storm. Utah’s Nemesis role leads him to hand Bodhi over—not to the law but to his own desire for self-immolation within those world-engulfing waves; in other words, the masochistic male incites the narcissistic male’s own death-drive masochism. It’s not so much that Utah allows Bodhi to choose his own destiny as he allows Bodhi to choose which form of death he prefers. “You know I’d die locked up in some cage,” Bodhi tells him, with which Utah tacitly concurs by allowing Bodhi to “escape” into the sea. But as Utah makes quite clear to the Australian cops, irate that he has let Bodhi go, he is well aware that Bodhi surges toward his own death on the waves. I don’t read, as Sean Redmond does, Utah’s discarding of his badge as the rejection of the social order; rather, I read it as a statement of satisfaction at Bodhi’s death, at the successful elimination of the maddening goad to endless desire figured in Bodhi, which the law both facilitated and enforced. Bodhi dead, the law—
which both led Utah to Bodhi and has lost its original purpose—has done its work and to retain it would be superfluous.33 With Bodhi’s death, Utah can now go forth to desire no more, freed both from desire (Bodhi) and the prohibitions that impel and enflame it (the law).

Bodhi’s narcissism, however entrancing, is, like that of Meserve in Casualties of War, finally a negative narcissism, killing and corrupting. But Utah’s masochism is no less troublesome, a desire to kill off the beautiful for its own sake. At the end, Utah stands blissfully alone, free of Bodhi, Tyler, and the homosocial, having killed off all goads to desire. The masochistic male echoistic position is the desire to kill off desire, to become Nemesis.

In this manner, repressed homosexual voyeurism takes the form of a desire to erase the object of desiring interest, to remove it from consciousness and vision. Utah’s male masochist creates death wherever he goes. Although Bodhi and his band certainly break the law with their bank robbing, it is only when Utah enters their roguish revels that bloodshed and murder ensues. Bodhi betrays Tyler’s friendship, submitting her to the murderous machinations of

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush an amoral member of the group, to get back at Utah. Masochistic male desire kills off narcissistic beauty, maddened by its taunting entrancements and, most of all, its self-sufficiency.

Tormenting Compulsions: Auto Focus

Not a great film but an impressive, unjustly overlooked one, Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus extends the themes of fraught male-male looking relations in Point Break to a new degree of freighted anxiety; as such, it registers shifts in the developments of both the double-protagonist film and the construction of America masculinity. As a film by the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, it also provides a poignant and worrisome critique of 70s cinema.

Writing of the scene in which Travis Bickle watches, alone, the screen in a Times Square porno theater, Amy Taubin remarks: In the porn theater, Travis cocks his finger like a gun at the screen. We don’t see the image he sees, but we hear the sounds of faked sexual passion. Again, the connection is made between gun violence and orgasm. But Travis doesn’t come in his seat in the porn theater. Nor does he come when he’s sitting in front of his cab, where the windows frame a porn movie as epic as the city itself. I think it’s safe to say that Travis never comes to orgasm, that, for him, the only possible release is death; the film will deprive him even of that and by so doing, deprive us of the security of closure.34

The male protagonists of Auto Focus apparently come to (offscreen) orgasm frequently, obsessively, yet the same essentially barren and plangent quality of fervent effort never coming to fruition, or of gathering tensions never finding release, characterizes Schrader’s film. Like Scorsese in Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma, in whose films from the early Hi, Mom! to The Black Dahlia runs a consistent and consistently despairing theme of pornography as the failure of eros, the failure of connection, and the failure of normative masculinity, Schrader presents pornography in Auto Focus as the site of the absence of eros, the triumph of the death-drive, and the end of narcissism. Desire and sexuality are fully tethered to masochism, fetishism, and the death-drive here, libidinal energies devoted to the cessation of life.

The most valuable aspect of Jacques Lacan’s work lies in his decoupling of desire from biological or physical needs. As the Lacanian theorist Tim Dean describes:

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 11

Distinguishing desire from biological or physical needs, Lacan conceived desire as the excess resulting from the articulation of need in symbolic form.

Thus where bodies may be said to have needs such as biological sustenance and physical protection, subjects have desires—principally, overcoming the loss constitutive of subjectivity as such—hence the requirement to “find the subject as lost object.” It is because desire remains distinct from need that sexuality is cultural rather than biological.35

If desire is the differential between need and demand, desire always exists outside of the corporeal wants and wishes that have a pressing agenda all their own—desire becomes its own project, indeed yanking at the sometimes wayward, resistant body to which it is tethered in the effort to fulfill its unfulfillable, limitless agenda. Desire, as Freud made sure we understood, has no object, “no real aim.”36 Desire floats and fluctuates above, below, beyond us, always goading us, never revealing, satisfying, or fulfilling us. Auto Focus gives us an opportunity to see desire’s harrowing machinations up close, for what they are, as it demonstrates bodies in service to the unceasing campaign of desire’s desire never to desist.

Most films about addiction focus on substance abuse; Auto Focus is one of the only films ever to depict sexual addiction. The film is based on the real life unsolved murder mystery of Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear), a radio and television star. At the start of the film, Crane is cast in the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, the most improbable tv comedy hit of the 1960s, being about a German pOw camp. Auto Focus focuses on the relationship Crane develops with John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), an electronics technician and a swinger, who seduces Bob into his underground world of group sex and video technology. Carpenter, or “Carpie,” as Crane calls him, purveys the latest 1960s technology, the video recorder, which would not make its mass-market appearance until the late 1970s. Orgies, recorded, often surreptitiously, on video, follow, rampantly.

The two men develop an even closer bond and make even more videotaped orgy productions when Crane, post- Hogan, goes on the road with a sex farce, Beginner’s Luck (the execrable show features lines such as “What does your wife look like?” “I can’t remember!”).

Many discussions of the “tourist gaze” exist. For our discussion, I find Katherine Frank’s examination of it in G-Strings and Sympathy, a theoretical deconstruction of her own experiences as a stripper, particularly interesting (though far too brief).37 Drawing on the work of sociologist John Urry, Frank discusses the “collective gaze”—in which multiple tourists lend glamour to their surroundings—and the “romantic gaze,” which emphasizes solitude and

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush privacy. Auto Focus explores Crane’s attempts to fuse both the collective and the romantic gaze, to make the realm of endless sexual opportunity a private, special realm of personal fantasy, themes that link the film to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance, whose narrator, Miles Coverdale, can be described as an onanistic voyeur in a would-be utopian realm of new erotic possibilities. Crane’s narcissism becomes a kind of masochistic submission to itself, as his desire not only for unceasing sex but also for the unceasing mechanical reproduction of him having sex becomes a thing to which he must forever submit.

Crane explicitly puts Carpenter into the subordinate, echoistic position.

“What you’ve done for me?” Crane incredulously counterattacks Carpenter when he confronts Crane for having made a video that casts Carpenter in what he sees as an unflattering light. Crane coldly explains that it is with him the Hogan-obsessed girls they pick up want to have sex, and that Carpenter benefits from Crane’s fame and largesse, not the other way around.

Though Carpenter shares in Crane’s sexual obsession, he is not so much Crane’s double or his reflective surface as he is his failed, rejected, pining lover. Carpenter, in a way analogous to Crane’s confusion of the gaze, confuses homosocial intimacy with homoerotic desire or wants something more utopian, a way for orgiastic sex to be like the potential Blithedale of Coverdale’s description in Hawthorne’s novel, a new Golden Age that promotes polyamorous amativeness and authorizes “any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent.”38

What label, Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin ask in their study Queer Images, “should we put on group sex? If the group comprises only one sex, then one might still describe this arrangement as homosexual. But what about a group-sex scene comprising men and women together? Are the participants still heterosexual, or are they now something else?” Such questions explicitly arise in Auto Focus, which allows us to speak of the Bush-to-Bush double-protagonist film—in this regard quite distinct from the buddy film—as one in which queer themes speak their own name. “An amusing scene occurs in”

Auto Focus, as Benshoff and Griffin describe it: Reviewing a videotape of a recent orgy in which he participated, Crane is shocked to discover his heterosexual buddy’s hand on his butt. Does this make Crane gay? His buddy? What about the two women in the scene—
should they now be considered lesbians? The term heterosexual orgy is something of an oxymoron, as it is part of the design of such an arrangement for

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sexual desire and pleasure to flow from person to person without regard to gender. Group sex is queer sex.39

For several reasons, works like Auto Focus and Hawthorne’s novel before it, complicate these matters. Its historical moment places it in a liminal moment for sexuality between traditionalism and post-60s sexual openness. But both The Blithedale Romance and Auto Focus refuse the presumably ecstatic pleasures afforded by group sex, locating a plangency rather than an exhilaration within the occasion for rampant sexual activity. The film chiefly does this by reminding you that the women are exploited against their will by being surreptitiously filmed. Their free-flowing sexual expressiveness undergoes a morbid and dehumanizing reification once transmuted into video images for the men’s endlessly prolonged visual pleasure.40 Carpenter’s anguish over Crane’s desire for him, or lack thereof, also communicates the hollowness of group sex; Carpenter always locates Crane at the center of the whirling carnival of sex and cinema. What complicates Benshoff’s and Griffin’s view of that scene in which Carpenter’s hand is on Crane’s ass is that the film refuses to label Carpenter as “heterosexual”; indeed, the film comes awfully close to making him increasingly explicitly homosexual. Amateur photographer/filmmaker Crane shoots the jokey video montage that leads to his fight with Carpenter, who is offended by the video, which includes footage that shows him in a way we have not seen before, mincing it up for the camera. These images of a louchely effeminated Carpenter are joined by a shot of a drag queen, looking sullen and swollen (not someone we’ve seen before), as a looped voice-over from a famous 70s commercial scolds, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. ” In another scene, we see Carpenter affectedly bring Crane and himself drinks to a poolside table. In one extraordinary depiction of queer male fetishism, Carpenter watches Crane perform as Carpenter wears Crane’s Hogan helmet.

Carpenter stands in for the closeted homosexual whose sexuality is an open secret, but he also anticipates the 70s homosexual who publicly reveals his sexuality.

Moreover, the discussion of Carpenter’s hand on Crane’s ass reveals that the offending hand rested not just topically on that prohibited zone but digitally invaded it. The argument they have, in which Crane calls Carpenter a

“fagola,” leads to the temporary erosion of their bond and signifies the rupture of homosocial desire by homoerotic desire. Later, in one of the most melancholy scenes in the film, Carpenter visits Crane, who after a terrible fight with his second wife (Maria Bello, somewhat miscast in this film but always interesting to watch), is sitting in his basement watching one of the men’s video-

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure 4.. Intimacy without connection: video surveillance and the blinding gaze in Auto Focus
taped sexual adventures. Between the marital fight and Carpenter’s visit, the videotape scene is introduced; in it, the sweetly giggly young blond woman asks Crane to turn off the tape, which he only pretends to do, saying, “Happy now?” as he takes her into his arms. As Carpenter and Crane talk on adjacent sofas, the videotape of the same woman still plays, but now the man having sex with her, while remarkably similar to Crane, is revealed to be Carpenter—
one male body substituting for another. Commiserating darkly about women (“Can’t live with them, can’t live without them . . . can’t live with them, can’t kill ‘em!”), the men watch the video, occasionally making eye contact with each other. Crane tells Carpenter, the lone wolf, that he has the right idea.

“Live separately,” Carpenter agrees. As they watch the sex video, Crane says,

“Oh damn, this is getting me hot,” and begins masturbating; Carpenter immediately follows suit, the men speaking to each other matter-of-factly all the while.

It’s difficult exactly to know what Schrader is after here—is he saying that the men desire each other and come close to fulfil ing this desire by this shared masturbation? That the men’s masturbation is so unself-conscious and by this point so rotely mechanized that it loses any erotic intention or threat? But the way Schrader visual y concludes the scene speaks volumes.

The camera moves behind the backs of the masturbating men on the sofas, both captured in the shot, blankly mesmerized by their own created sexual scene, and Schrader holds the image frozen for a moment. “This was my Norman Rockwel shot,” Schrader says on the DvD commentary for the film,

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1
and, as such, it stands as a bas-relief of sexual despair, a statement about the profound disconnections at the heart of normative manhood. If male friendship and homosocial bonding over the sexual exploitation of women are highly traditional themes, here the traditions are bankrupted by the effort to heighten and extend them.

The theme of sexual despair comes through in several other scenes as wel .

After having had his utopian desire for queer sex rebuffed, Carpenter finds himself in the odd position of being asked to inspect Crane’s now professionally enlarged and enhanced penis. Standing before Carpenter, who is seated, Crane exhibits his organ for Carpenter’s scrutiny. This display emerges within the context of their fantasies—which are prompted by Carpenter’s announce-ment that he’s just pirated a major new film, Deep Throat (1972)—of making pornographic films with major film stars, such as Stella Stevens (“We could charge ten bucks,” Carpenter muses). Carpenter balks at the idea of looking at Crane’s penis, finally relenting (“It looks thicker”). Given that Carpenter had indicated through word and action a desire for closer sexual intimacy with Crane, it seems likely that Carpenter feigns, at least to a certain extent, his disinterest at glimpsing Crane’s penis. Phallic organs, penises, eyes, are all weaponized, technologically enhanced, tethered to machines that meta-phorize the mechanization of sex. Crane puts Carpenter into the masochistic position of being forced to gape in awe at his bravura display of male sexual potency. But Carpenter, for his part, consistently refuses the masochistic position into which he always collapses, wanting co-partner status with Bob, who insists always on his narcissistic superiority.

In two of the saddest scenes in this sad film, Crane tells Carpenter of his decision to return to his career and leave the swinging life—and Carpenter—
behind. Carpenter pleads with him but then angrily abuses Crane for having so depended on him without demonstrating any gratitude for it. Later, Carpenter calls Crane, and in this brilliantly filmed scene Carpenter’s desperation rises to a fever pitch. Throughout, the actors are superb at conveying the longing and menace in the men’s relationship, and here Schrader fully exploits the haggard, skeletal quality of Dafoe’s screen presence to suggest a living hell of rejection and emptiness, a death’s head in the place of desire. Fascinatingly, as Carpenter talks to Crane about their mutually unsuccessful and separate attempts to get laid, Carpenter grabs at his crotch, desperately, violently, as if he both wants to masturbate as he speaks to Bob—which would make masturbation a kind of desperate, ritualistic homage to an obviously failed male-male relationship—and to castrate himself for his own messy, undeniable longings.

After this scene, Schrader depicts Crane’s murder, almost incontrovertibly by Carpenter (though years later brought to trial, never convicted). We see

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Crane sleeping as a looming arm holding a camera tripod bashes the tripod repeatedly against his head. This scene, notably cold and affectless—Crane doesn’t move a muscle as his head is pulverized—reads like the punitive destruction of Narcissus, a just punishment for his indifference to the desire he has instigated and refuses to satisfy.

An onanistic voyeur who wants to be a tourist of endless erotic possibilities, Crane plays drums in strip clubs with telling names like Salomé’s. Salomé has been a sign throughout of impending castration, of manhood falsely assuming mastery of the spectacle of lascivious female sexual display and instead having its head handed to it on a platter. But in this film it is a man who cuts off the head of another man, a man put in the feminine position—to follow Hélène Cixous—of decapitation. The position of Woman in the West, Cixous argues, is one of decapitation—the denial of mind and voice.41 Carpenter’s murder of Crane forces Crane into the ultimate masochistic, passive position, depicted here as wordless, almost inanimate submission to his own death, the most forcible reversal of their roles imaginable. The masochist murderously exchanges his roles with the narcissist, whose narcissism he co-opts through staggering violence: Echo becomes Nemesis.

Pornographic Despair

Auto Focus demonstrates that the homosocial underwent a profound transformation in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the “swinging sixties” period in which sexuality was newly deployed as a multivalent sign of liberation. The film registers the shifts in American homosociality posed by the emergence of not only a newly visible, newly articulated and articulable post-Stonewall homosexuality but also of a new openness about sexuality generally, the most dramatic and vivid embodiment of which was pornography, which emerged as a massive mass-market phenomenon in the 1970s, as the film’s reference to Deep Throat reminds the viewer. In Auto Focus, pornography signals a new utopianization of sex that stands markedly in contrast with the repressive atmosphere of constraint and conformity represented in the film by Disney (Crane makes a 1973 Disney movie called Superdad, and cameos in another, the 1976 Gus). But, like Schrader’s earlier work, his script for Taxi Driver and his direction of Hardcore (1979),42 Auto Focus makes pornography no less dis-mally repressive than Disney. The world of desire in this film is pornographic and dehumanized, and dehumanized precisely because it is pornographic.

Herein lies both the radicalism and reactionary sensibility of Auto Focus, and why it is, for all of its strengths, not a great film. The film refuses the

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conventional association of masculine dominance, through the sadistic voyeuristic gaze, with pornography. Indeed, pornography, with all of its trappings of technological impersonality, violation, and exploitation, emerges as shared isolation; as we have noted, the film stages pornography as the masochistic gaze. The film collapses voyeuristic looking into exhibitionistic showing, opting for the arguable reading of exhibitionism as masochistic.43 Pornography’s incitement of the gaze only intensifies the tormenting compulsion, in Freud’s words, to look that inheres in the sadistic desire to look. Pornography leaves the men bereft, decimated by desire.

But there’s also no sense conveyed by the film that the men’s desire for sexual liberation could be in any way liberating. When Crane’s weary, concerned agent (Ron Liebman) urges him to break free of the swinging underworld, telling him “Sex is not the answer,” and Crane responds, with full ghastly smarm, “No, it’s the question, and my answer is ‘Yes!’” the film frames Crane as hopelessly self-deluded, his inability to register the precariousness of his insistent desires a foreboding of his fall. The film has zero interest in considering the possibility that Crane—depicted as the embodiment of American male shallowness, glibness, sexual exploitativeness, and lack of self-knowledge—might be heroic in his desire to break free of the myriad constraints placed on sexual expressiveness. (For many critics, especially from a Foucauldian and an anti-Freudian perspective, the contention that society is built on repression and that sexual expressiveness provides an alternative to this repressiveness is a naïvely wrongheaded one, but we should raise the question of why this would be such a naïve point to make, given that society is indeed repressive and sexual expressiveness is indeed constrained.) Pornography may not be “the answer,” but in its crude form here it nevertheless signals a need for innovations in the sexual organization of culture, innovations we as a culture still resist and refuse.

The reactionary agenda of the film, then, oddly depends on the quasi-homosexual masochist’s rejection of straight male narcissism for its full fulfillment. Carpenter’s murder of Crane emerges as a just retribution, an attack on Crane for the pitilessness of his narcissism and his self-delusion. We recall that, in the Ovidian Narcissus myth, the seer Tiresias tells Liriope, Narcissus’s mother, that he will have a long life unless he knows himself. Narcissus cannot know himself, and if he does come to know himself, he will die. Carpenter’s murder of Crane, then, becomes our murder of Crane—this is why it is key that we never see Carpenter in the scene in which Crane is murdered; his arm becomes our arm, raining down upon narcissistic Crane’s head the full fury of masochistic rage against unyielding Narcissus. The murder is a means of communicating, in the most expressive way, the truth of Narcissus

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush to Narcissus, to end his self-delusion. But this confuses the issue. Crane’s problem is not lack of self-knowledge but the all-too threatening awareness of the rapaciousness of his own desires. That these desires are only the more vivid, more insistent reflection of customary American male desires—only an intensification of the sexual design and patterns of American manhood—
makes the retributive abuse to which Crane is subjected a deeply problematic issue. That this retribution comes from the quasi-homosexual voyeur, now recast as avenging angel, deepens the problem. Carpenter carries on the tradition in Bush-to-Bush films of masochistically suffering from narcissistic self-sufficiency and avenging us for our masochistic suffering.

Rejecting Narcissus

As our subsequent chapters will show, Bush-to-Bush films reject Narcissus in favor of embracing masochistic manhood. Take another look at that list of double-protagonist film titles and consider, briefly, the fate of narcissistic manhood in some of these films. In Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), Denzel Washington’s fulminating, masochistic lawyer lives while Tom Hanks’s narcissistic white homosexual dies; in Interview with the Vampire (1994), doleful masochistic vampire Louis helps to destroy narcissistic blond vampire Lestat (who does triumphantly return, but only at the very end); and in Collateral (2004), the masochistic taxi driver played by Jamie Foxx reneges on every obvious chance of escape from the narcissistic sociopathic hit man played by Tom Cruise, in order for the taxi driver to destroy the hit man himself. The film ends with Cruise’s homicidal silver-haired Narcissus destroyed and a new, uncertain, but hopeful heterosexuality prevailing, as the taxi driver and the woman lawyer (Jada Pinkett Smith) he saved from the hit man walk out into the first light of dawn. (This Michael Mann film, though as richly visually textured as all his others, is tediously schematic in the extreme.) As I will argue in subsequent chapters, Fight Club enacts the same destruction of the narcissist and valorization of masochism, and Vin Diesel films as a whole can be seen as a transformation of a narcissistic male star into a properly masochistic one.

Bush-to-Bush films display a new sexual openness the chief sign of which is a new eroticization of the male body, one not without its deep complications (especially for race; as Philadelphia and Collateral suggest, the double-protagonist film only intensifies the racial politics of the buddy film). But although this new openness exists, a reactionary quality inheres in the films’

determination to redress narcissism, to check the overly brazen display of male

Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film 1
confidence, beauty, and desire. These qualities draw in the spectator as much as the echoistic alternate protagonist and supporting characters, but the films appear to insist on portraying all narcissism as negative, a crushing insistence on obeisance to a monstrous male ego run amok, rather than an exploration of the liberating and potentially radical possibilities of male narcissism. Point Break appears to approach its narcissistic males as occasions for liberating and transformative spectatorship, but, glorious though the filmmaking is, it too concludes with the destruction of Narcissus. Brokeback Mountain is the closest to a celebration of male narcissism, but it too provides its chief narcissist with a stern reckoning, albeit one that is poignant in the extreme.

What we have then, in Bush-to-Bush films, and specifically in the double-protagonist film, is an opportunity to compare one powerful style of masculine performance to another. Recently, some critics, considering the rise of obese and slovenly and diffident heroes who, triumphing over the once-dominant suave, pumped-up male, now get the proverbial girl, have described this split as a contest between the old-style alpha male and the new-style beta male, the hard-body against the soft, the Adonis against the schlub. I believe that the psychoanalytic paradigms of narcissism and masochism most resonantly and poignantly illuminate this split. Narcissism and masochism emerge as competing modes of masculinity locked in bitter contest. Given that the victor of this cinematic agon is most often the masochist, we must consider whether or not American masculinity can really be truthfully described as self-centered.

The privileged form of masculinity to emerge from Bush-to-Bush films is that of the male masochist provided at the climax of Auto Focus, wracked with pain and filled with rage, annihilating dreaming Narcissus.

chapter five

Destroying Something Beautiful

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club A film that struck a resonant chord with audiences, especially young men, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) is one of the defining films of the Clinton era, a grimy-grandiose pageant of several contemporary obsessions, consumerism, terrorism, and shifting codes of masculinity chief among them. The film is often noted for its nihilistic view of American culture, yet it has a sincere and heartfelt agenda. It seeks to repair the damaged psyches of young American men of the present by enacting a return to primitive and purgative codes of male violence. If a film like Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) is a cry of anguish over the homicidal hypermasculinism of patriarchy, Fight Club masks its homicidal hypermasculinism with a surface of anguished tears. An embrace of the most stringent codes of patriarchy, despite its seeming veneer of intransigent defiance, Fight Club reveals a great deal about the fraught negotiations of American manhood in the 1990s: beneath the apparent transformations and revisions lay the unchanged core of American manhood, of which D. H. Lawrence’s description remains exact: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” And this is the crucial next line: “It has never yet melted.”1

Lawrence was describing the representation of manhood in nineteenth-century American literature. What’s shocking about watching Bush-to-Bush films like Fight Club and Snake Eyes is their reprisal of the basic issues that dominate the works of Classic American literature and its sociopolitical milieu. If the presidency (1829–1837) of Andrew Jackson, rightly described as the symbol of his age, signals the beginning of our modern understanding of American manhood as a decisive break from European values—associated with a decadent and effeminizing civility and high culture—and an embrace of hypermasculinism and rejection of feminine weakness, the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43—administrations that, in distinct ways, can all

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 11

Figure .1. Strangers on a plane: Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1999) be seen as attempts to grapple with the Reaganite refounding of America—
signal a renewed struggle over this entrenched American masculinism.2 Films like Fight Club alert us to the extraordinarily intricate, complex nature of this struggle—and the particular and peculiar re-entrenchment of American manhood that the Bush-to-Bush era has produced.

Waking up the Sleeping Giant

Fight Club takes particular aim at the apparent artificiality of 90s manhood.

Its protagonist, “The Narrator” (Edward Norton), named “Jack” but never called this in the film, is an insomniac office worker and soap salesman. Norton’s Narrator leads a life of what Thoreau famously called “quiet desperation.” This film, based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, saves its salesman from Willy Loman’s fate by replacing the living death of his dull, office-drone life with the revivifying energies of masculine contest. Fight Club sets out to viril-ize effeminated Clintonian manhood and as such continued to be a zeitgeist phenomenon for young men well into the era of Bush the Second.3 A slum-bering messiah on the verge of leading a ragtag band of hapless and homicidal apostles, the sleepless Narrator will be awakened and restored.

Like the bespectacled, seemingly sexless male lead in a screwball comedy, The Narrator silently screams for rescue from dreariness. Like the screwball, this film will make its chief dramatic project the reawakening of this blank, frigid male soul. And as in the screwball, an agent of chaos, a trickster figure, will appear to save the hero from fatal boredom by driving him crazy.

In screwball, this salvific satirizer of strait-laced society would be a woman like arch, antic Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) in Howard Hawks’s 1938

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Bringing Up Baby; in Fight Club, antic, madcap rescue arrives in the form of Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. Chiseled, trashy, given to wearing neo-70s pimp ensembles, with buzz-cut hair and big dark sunglasses and wrapping his murderous musculature in disorienting hipster mood clothes, Tyler is Shakespeare’s “ill angel” or Conrad’s secret sharer to Norton’s nonentity Narrator.

Tyler and The Narrator also provide the most exact literalization of the narcissism/masochism split in Bush-to-Bush cinema, Tyler as swaggering, hypnotic narcissist to The Narrator’s hollow-eyed, yelping masochist.

Fight Club plays like Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story of the doppelgänger

“William Wilson” in reverse: whereas in Poe’s story the double, who looks like the narrator and shares his name, turns out to be the good side of the narrator, his conscience, ever chastising him for his evil acts, in Fight Club the double is revealed to be the destructive, Dionysian side of the protagonist, ever emboldening him to acts of mayhem. Indeed, Tyler’s ultimate project is the formation of “Project Mayhem,” a kind of boys-gone-wild grassroots terrorist organization. Yet, Fincher’s film endorses the destructive double’s determined agenda. Tyler performs a salutary rescue mission on the dull Narrator’s life.

Boring into his balked brain (literalized in the opening credits sequence, in which we see bolts of fear race up the neural circuits of The Narrator’s cere-bellum), Tyler reawakens The Narrator by helping him to reclaim his normative manhood. It’s as if fiendishly lively and murderous Brom Bones in Washington Irving’s classic story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were assigned to give lonely, persnickety pedagogue Ichabod Crane a masculine makeover (a sort of Homophobic Eye for the Queer Guy), with one fatal difference: Irving wouldn’t align himself with the force of masculine violence, but Fight Club enshrines it. Given that Fincher directed two of the most striking critiques of patriarchal manhood in Bush-to-Bush cinema— Alien 3 (1992) and The Game (1997)— Fight Club signals the concession to masculinism that characterizes his later work, which holds true for the impressive but ultimately deeply troubling Zodiac (2007). One of the chief cultural projects of the 1990s was reclaiming white straight manhood from the principle seductive allurements that threaten to undermine it: sexual women and queer desire. Fight Club is the ultimate expression of this cultural project. Both of its time and timelessly traditional, Fight Club reveals a great deal about the manhood of our age: remapped, it’s the same old ground.

Perhaps a different Irving story more appositely anticipates Fincher’s film.

Fight Club is like a version of “Rip Van Winkle” in which the narrator goes to sleep an old man and wakes up a young one. (The film preserves the protagonist’s animosity toward women; when Irving’s Rip awakens an old man, his one compensation is that his termagant wife no longer exists to harass him.)

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 1

As such, it speaks to deeply American longings for personal restoration and cultural renewal, longings it will realize with murderous urgency.

Ironing Out John

One of the major best sellers of the Bush-to-Bush era, Robert Bly’s Iron John, sets out to treat the wounded psyches of the “soft men” that our culture, in Bly’s view, has been producing in the wake of feminism.4 In this reverie-like account of Native American ritual, Bly longingly mourns the absence of such nourishing rites of male-bonding in American life: “Among the Hopis and other native Americans of the Southwest, the old men take the boy away at the age of twelve and bring him down into the all-male area of the kiva. He stays down there for six weeks, and does not see his mother again for a year and a half.”5 As Calvin Thomas writes, “Some versions of ‘men’s studies,’

especially those influenced by the mythopoetic school of Robert Bly, are spectacularly uninformed by and hostile to feminism . . . [while others seem like a] defensive reaction against feminism. They seem motivated by the desire to ameliorate the condition of men, while ignoring or minimizing the oppression to women.”6 Thomas’s critique easily deflates Bly’s masculinist rhetoric, so transparent an attack on the pre-Symbolic maternal.7

For all of its considerable hipster creditability, Fight Club has a lot more in common with earnest male reclamation projects like Iron John than it does with the rebellious underground, underworld cultures it feverishly references.

Fight Club sees the enemy, and it is “us,” i.e., the preponderantly young male audience it hails. It is an earnest attack on, or counterattack against, what our culture—with the rise of female sexual autonomy and queer visibility—has done to us: made men soft, vulnerable, weak, soulless.

Revisiting Jacksonian America

The Narrator needs to be rescued from the soul-deadening life he leads as a faceless corporate worker. But the film’s focus for attack is not really the corporate world or what Thoreau in Walden called “the curse of trade”; Fight Club is not an anti-capitalism movie. Rather, this film targets male weakness as a site of scorn. It is precisely The Narrator’s submission to the effeminizing quality of corporate life that the film critiques. It marvels in horror as he shops from the Ikea catalogue, filling his apartment with modular furniture.

Behind the seeming attack on mass culture and depersonalization—“Our jobs

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush are turning us into drones!” the seeming cry uttered by the film—lies a deeper disgust at effeminated weakness that goes back to the Jacksonian era of the antebellum United States, in which the codes of American gendered identity were first firmly set. Jackson, in Michael Kimmel’s words, demonstrated a

“gendered rage at weakness, feminizing luxury, and sensuous pleasure.” Jackson’s administration, which appealed to “small planters, farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” the “bone and sinew of the country,” was “saturated with the rhetoric of the violent, short-tempered, impulsively democratic artisanate.”8

Fight Club’s weak, blank, insomniac Narrator wears his suffering in the huge dark bags under his eyes and expresses his weakness for effeminizing luxury through soulless, conformist consumerism. But the film doesn’t set out to critique the conformist and corporate culture that governs much of American life so much as it uses this corporate background as a current backdrop for the very old project of making American males tough, resilient, natural men who do not fall prey to the decadent temptations of culture. Yet, as I will demonstrate, The Narrator’s masochism, while ostensibly the site of the film’s corrective concerns, never emerges as a mode of resistance; neither does Tyler’s narcissism, though it provides a necessary jolt, remain unchecked and untransformed. The transformation of narcissism into masochism in Bush-to-Bush films no less, in fact quite prominently, dominates this film’s list of agendas.

Astonishingly, Fight Club’s message resembles that of the endless series of self-help and self-control books aimed at young men in the antebellum era. In the Jacksonian age, numerous works of health and sexual reform and the temperance movement advocated that men control what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the animal department of our natures,” their base, animalistic carnal impulses, to regulate their bodies in preparation for their roles as husband, father, and productive capitalistic employee. One of the chief targets of attack in this reformist literature was masturbation, or onanism, and its ill effects on the body. The conduct books railed against the “solitary vice,” warning that it left young men ineradicably debilitated. Only proper, marital sexuality was safe for male bodies, and even procreative marital sex had to be performed sparingly and with great caution.9 As one of the leading antebellum reformers, Sylvester Graham (inventor of the cracker), wrote of the onanist: the wretched transgressor . . . becomes . . . an idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant, glossy eye, and livid, shrivelled countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and foetid [ sic] breath, and feeble, broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head . . . denote a premature old age! a blighted body—and a ruined soul!10

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 1

The insomniac and depleted Narrator’s appearance ful y conforms to Graham’s description. Not only does Graham’s vivid rhetoric serve as a marvellously apt description of the morgue aesthetic of Fincher’s film, it also eerily anticipates some of the film’s own directives to its interpellated audience of damaged young men. The director replaced the fbi copyright warning on the DvD edition of the film with his own, Project Mayhem version: “Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive.”1

Frighteningly phobic and excessive as Graham’s rhetoric sounds to us today, it may be less frightening than Fincher’s here and in his film. If Graham worried that onanistic practices would lead young men even to having “unnatural congress with each other!” Fincher associates the crushing conformity of modern culture with a propensity to both onanism and homoeroticism that the film will complexly exploit and eradicate. Just like Graham, Fincher advises young men to keep their hands off their own bodies, but, unlike Graham, he also advises them to use those hands as battering rams against each other.

Castrating Women and the Homosocial

Like the endangered men in nineteenth-century literature, with its horror at femmes fatales, fatal women who, like Salomé, the castrator of victimized men, steal away men’s souls, The Narrator of Fight Club is in danger of losing his head.12

The person who threatens to castrate The Narrator is the femme fatale, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter). Fight Club is a neo-fascist film about the appeal and the power of the homosocial. The castrating woman is a key figure in such a scenario. The image of the castrating woman—who is both whore and homosocial totem, both qualities evinced by her association with several men at once—thoroughly corresponds to historical fascism, as Klaus Theweleit, in his study of fantasies of men instrumental to the rise of the Nazi party, has amply demonstrated. A new-style Whore of Babylon riding atop homosocialized manhood, this castrating woman destroys the male group that undergirds her power.13 As Mary Ann Doane describes her, the classic femme fatale is associated with “fatality and morbid sexuality”; she “provokes catastrophes.”14 Marla is remarkably reminiscent of the classic femme fatale, with one crucial difference: as we will see, she is no less a subject of the film’s project of reformation than The Narrator.

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Like Tyler, Marla is a trash-chic hipster. She infiltrates the same self-help seminars that The Narrator attends to enjoy the warmth, support, and love he doesn’t receive from his “real” life. Going to meetings for men with testicular cancer, sufferers of tuberculosis, and sundry other harrowing plights, The Narrator experiences an unprecedented connectivity that sullen, slat-ternly Marla, another “faker” (she even attends the all-male testicular cancer group), threatens to sever. “I can’t experience this if there’s another faker in the room!” The Narrator pleads. “I need this!” he tells her, pleading with her to stop attending “his” meetings, the only places that he can cry, feel. (After considerable negotiation, they divvy up the sob story spoils.) Interestingly, it is only after the disastrous appearance of dangerous Marla that Tyler Durden, the protagonist’s alter ego who for most of the film appears to be a distinct, separate character, appears. If, like the nineteenth-century femme fatale, Marla threatens to castrate The Narrator, Tyler appears to save him from the fatal wounding of female sex. But Tyler—evidence of The Narrator’s conflicted psyche, so conflicted it results in the splitting of his personality—also symbolically enacts the castration and decapitation threatened by Marla by manifesting the evidence that The Narrator has already been cut, split into two. Tyler, with his total self-confidence and homicidal daredevilry, emerges to protect the already deeply effeminated Narrator—and narrative—from further corruption, even as he represents evidence that castration and corruption have already taken place.

Tyler emerges as a kind of Mephistophelian Robert Bly, a hipster-disguised traditionalist men’s help guru in the era of the Promise Keepers, the Christian men’s ministry that restores men to their “God-given” roles as husband and father, tricking up narrative tensions in his trippy fashions. For all of his cool menace, imperturbable charm, and murderous sexiness, Tyler is a nanny, Mary Poppins masquerading as Natty Bumppo, Aunt Pol y masquerading as Tom Sawyer, to the repressed, zonked, unloved child of corporate culture. Tyler performs a late Oedipal intervention, steering The Narrator away from the influence of Woman and toward proper identification with the Father, in the form of homosocialized patriarchy. Fight Club ostensibly makes a sharp distinction between patriarchy and fraternity. Yet, though the homosocial Fight Club brotherhood may appear to be the enemy of the Father, it is simply his order in corporate form.15 This is the key way in which Fight Club demonstrates that American culture in the Bush-to-Bush era bears remarkable similarity to its antebellum version: it is still rigorously homosocialized, the sexes, through the maintenance of separate gendered spheres in which people mainly interact with members of their own sex, made alien and mysterious to each other even as same-sex intimacy is institutionalized.

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 1

Indeed, Fight Club is a remarkably Victorian movie. It shares with Victorian America several ideological and social preoccupations: rigidly maintained separate gendered spheres; the social institutionalization of same-sex bonds and the concomitant romanticization and (attempted) de-sexualization of those bonds; the construction of autonomous womanhood as threatening and prone to a monstrous, devouring sexual voraciousness; an abhorrence of male weakness; and an ultimate recourse to rituals of violence intended to purge the very same forces that undergird the rituals: a deep, enveloping, maddening homoeroticism and tendency toward effeminating sensuality.16

Fight Club may be said to express a fantasy of return to nineteenth-century American manhood, a return dependent upon a deeply ill-informed misreading of those historical codes, a fantasy frontier in which men were properly homosocialized, rigorously en- rather than e- masculated, and women’s apparently rampant lust for sex and power were sorely, severely checked. Fight Club restores the homosocial as the defining social structure to ensure normative manhood and subjugated womanhood, re-entrenching patriarchal, homosocialized male power as an affirmed social model and re-inculcating misogyny.

One late nineteenth-century work helps us to understand several themes and symbols in Fight Club. As many critics have noted, Herman Melville’s homosocial fictions express and problematize a homoerotically charged longing for brotherhood. This longing may be said to come to receive a stern critique in his last work, the short novel Billy Budd, Sailor (1891), which figures a beautiful, highly desirable young man as the symbol of the homoeroticism that undergirds the homosocial. As such a symbol, Billy exposes and thwarts the logic of homosociality, which makes clear that it seeks always to destroy the homoeroticism that inspires and binds it together in the first place.17 The sailors who enshrine beautiful and apparently innocent Billy as the latest incarnation of the “Handsome Sailor” can do nothing to save him from being hanged at the behest of Captain Vere, who also apparently loves Billy, at the climax of the novel. The suggested homoerotic longing for Billy on the part of the homosocial group of sailors finds vent in the duplicitous stratagems of Claggart, the villain of the tale who represents “Natural Depravity or depravity according to Nature,” and whose twisted desire for Billy emerges as a false accusation of mutiny. Billy, a stutterer who cannot articulate his feelings, strikes Claggart dead; depraved Claggart dies with a smile on his lips. When Billy is executed, he dies for the homoerotic sins of his homosocial community, a kind of phoenix of male-male desire, to be reborn in the form of the next Handsome Sailor.

Fight Club reimagines Billy Budd as a cautionary tale against homoeroti-

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. The threat of something beautiful: a new Billy Budd in Fight Club (1999) cism and for the homosocial. It agitates against male beauty, campaigns for the nearly defeated but still potent and reclaimable power of male bonding.

One figure in the film, blond and delicate Angel Face (Jared Leto), makes Fight Club’s link to Billy Budd palpably obvious. With his dreamlike blondness, Angel Face closely resembles the Billy Budd of popular representations, especially Terence Stamp’s Billy in Peter Ustinov’s (dreadful) 1962 film version.18 When The Narrator/Jack pounds Angel Face’s beautiful visage to a bloody pulp, violating all the rules of even fight club conduct, he enacts a destruction of the homoeroticism that has lent a necessary, galvanizing, mobilizing charge to this homosocial underworld. His line, “I wanted to destroy something beautiful,” explicates both the homoeroticism and the homophobic violence that undergird the film. By ridding itself of homoerotic energies, the film undertakes an apparently salvific project for the larger culture, expunging homosexual desire from the American homosocial. As with Billy Budd, the homoeroticism that stimulates the formation of male homosocial bonds must be eradicated to preserve those bonds.

To effect its heave-ho of homosexual progress, Fight Club ingeniously employs narcissistic homoeroticism—the figurings of which I explore in the next section—which places this film within the linked representations of narcissism and homosexuality.

Narcissism, Homosexuality, and the Doppelgänger

Like Poe’s story “William Wilson,” Fight Club plays with homoerotic themes eventual y revealed to be narcissistic themes, Tyler being The Narrator’s

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 1
double. Fight Club restages the doppelgänger plot of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, transplanting the men from train to plane for their first meeting. Like Strangers, Fight Club adds an insistent homoeroticism to its theme of narcissistic doubling: Tyler bathes as The Narrator looks on, the exact tableau in Anthony Minghella’s much more pronouncedly homoerotic 1999 adaptation of another Patricia Highsmith classic The Talented Mr. Ripley. As Guy did for Bruno in Hitchcock’s film, The Narrator straightens Tyler’s tie during his gig as a waiter and stands guard as society-defying Tyler urinates into the soup.

The film sports with the homoerotic implications of its narcissistic doubling, but ultimately this homoeroticism serves to reinforce the idea that, while instrumental to The Narrator’s psychic and physical awakening, Tyler is a transitional force: he exists to wake up The Narrator but then must relinquish his power back to The Narrator, who reincorporates Tyler, his embodied id, into his psychic make-up. Thereby strengthened and revivified—even if this restoration has left its mark, in the form of his gunshot wound to the head—The Narrator can enjoy the fulfillment of heterosexual desire and the spectacular display of restored masculine potency as he and his newly and now authentically claimed normative love-object, Marla—now heterosexual prize rather than classic femme fatale—watch the dynamite-rigged credit card buildings of Project Mayhem’s plot explode and crumble. All of the homoerotic energies of the film have all built up to the restoration of the once soft, now whole Narrator’s heterosexual desire and male power.

Although some may feel that Fight Club differs from no other Hol ywood film in its embrace of fascist hypermasculinism, there are other popular films that foreground similar themes and come up with different results that defy normative conventions. In addition to Snake Eyes, Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) addresses the same themes of male anomie and the “secret sharer” or doppelgänger of the protagonist but does so with an empathy and an austerity that make it distinct from Fight Club’s contemptuous cruelty and bombastic stylistic aggressiveness. Whereas everything about Fight Club’s aesthetic recalls the morgue reconceived as sex club—Helena Bonham Carter’s glossily pale skin resembles the varnished artificial hues of a corpse; the lurid, fluores-cent look of the film stock, with its palette of sewage greens and excremental browns, emphasizes all of the actors’ sallowness— Gattaca’s considered, pristine look conveys the social despair behind its futuristic society’s emphasis on hygienic conformity. The hero, Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), lives a drab life as his society’s subaltern, relegated to pariah status because of his

“genetic inferiority” in a world in which genes are now the sacred standard.

Homoerotic themes of doubleness and social defiance inform his relationship with Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law), a genetically privileged, paralyzed young man bitterly wasting away his life. But where Fight Club offers its own

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush fascist ideology instead of a genuine social critique, Gattaca mournfully and poetically explores the strictures and hollowness of the social order.

In David Cronenberg’s 1988 Dead Ringers, the director also stages a conflict between narcissistic doppelgängers—the twin brother gynecologists Eliot and Beverly Mantle played so brilliantly by Jeremy Irons—and Woman in the figure of the actress Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold) who disrupts the men’s enclosed life, but uses this conflict to explore psychosexual states in daring, haunting ways. In one dream sequence, Claire makes love to both brothers at once, and, noticing the thick fleshy cord that links the brothers’ bodies, proceeds ravenously to bite through it. Such disturbing, haunting images use the theme of the double provocatively to denature normative sexuality, whereas Fight Club’s doubling serves a reactionary, normative purpose. Moreover, the film’s uses of homoeroticism are purely ornamental, not emotionally charged and resonant as they are in Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. If one could say that Minghella oversimplifies the representation of Tom’s desire in Highsmith’s novel, which places more emphasis on his class aspirations than on his sexual longings for Dickie, and that Matt Damon is as miscast as Tom as Jude Law is superbly well cast as Dickie, the director nevertheless made a brilliant and plangent film about homoerotic desire. There is nothing in Fight Club to match the haunting suggestiveness of Tom singing “My Funny Valentine” to Dickie in an Italian night club in Minghella’s film.

Violence and Tears

“Coming in the wake of 1999’s schoolyard shootings in Columbine,” writes James Swallow, “Fight Club was accused, along with films like The Matrix, of promoting violence.”19 Although it seemed that Fight Club was predictably attacked for being a film that foregrounded violence, the film’s representation of violence is disturbing not for its existence—violence is, after all, a part of human life, and film has as much a right to represent it as any other human experience—but for its allegorical function as an expression of a particularly and peculiarly postfeminist American male rage. Violence in this film functions allegorically as the unrepresentable exchange of sexual intimacy between men, the theme constantly and coyly suggested by the film but which the film disavows through its emphasis on the choreographing of violence rather than sexuality between men. A substitute for sexual relations, the violence becomes a way of both representing male intimacy and purging it of the threat of sexual content and aim. Further, the violence in this film manifests the current results of the male-makeover that has been complexly undertaken since the feminist movement of the 1970s. It graphically depicts an understanding of

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 11
the New Male emotionalism not as a newly gained expressivity informed by a greater sensitivity but as the legitimated expression of unadulterated rage.

Fight Club emerges within the context of the rise of men’s liberation movements such as Bly’s and the Promise Keepers. As Sally Robinson has observed, “The men’s liberationists take from contemporary feminism a valida-tion of emotional release, a sanction for airing pain and grievances, and most importantly, a permission to express rage.”20 The Clinton era constructed male emotional blockage as an extremely dangerous condition; feelings had to be released. Emotions are figured as “psychophysical essence” in men’s liberationist literature, “material, even liquid, substances that flow or not.” It is important to note that “the emotions most often identified as dangerously blocked are anger and resentment, rather than, say, love and fear.”21 Robinson continues:

Because of the psychologized, therapeutic solution favored by men’s liberationists, this new construction of masculinity [as expressive of pain] ultimately works to reinforce, rather than contest, male dominance. The cure for what ails these men is not, as we might have hoped, the abolition of patriarchy, but rather the uninhibited release of emotional energies and “natural”

impulses.22

Fight Club replaces freely flowing tears—a faker’s unfaked emissions of feeling—with violence. “I want you to hit me as hard as you can,” Tyler indelibly tells The Narrator. Tears, their flow, the release of crying, appeared to be what the blocked-off Narrator initially needed. At the testicular cancer meeting, in which men cry in each other’s arms over all that they’ve lost—their families, their potency (“We’re still men”)—The Narrator is paired up with vast Robert “Bob” Paulson (Meat Loaf), a behemoth former bodybuilder now laden with two enormous saddlebag male breasts, a by-product of his cancer treatment. Bob weeps as he holds The Narrator, a kind of gigantic male Juno who enfolds The Narrator into his considerable bosom. “Now you cry,” Bob instructs, and The Narrator, initially to his surprise and then to his ongoing relief, finds that he can cry, feel, in the warm embrace of this monstrous male mother.23 There is a highly ambiguous, carefully prepared shot of the pattern of The Narrator’s tears on Bob’s wide, buxom chest. Is The Narrator a new-style Man of Sorrows, a Clintonian Christ, leaving the imprint of his countenance on this gender-bent male Veronica’s shroud? Or are tears the New Male spend, since their glistening pattern on Bob’s chest resembles ejaculate as well? The term “spermatic economy” has been used to describe the sexual nature of the program of self-control that organized the construction of nineteenth-century manhoods. If, like ejaculate, tears must be conserved

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. Hugging the male mother (Meat Loaf ) to preserve male power and maintain the façade of emotional detachment crucial to it, the excessive outpouring of tears in Fight Club threatens to deplete the reserves of masculinist authority.24 Given the spermatic economy of the Bush-to-Bush films—the extraordinary explosion of semen imagery in films as diverse as The Silence of the Lambs, There’s Something about Mary (1998), and teen comedies like American Pie (1999)—the film transmutes male sexual fluid into the fluid of emotional release, providing a lachrymose economy that fits into the pattern of male fluidic exchange in this era’s films.25

One way to think about the film’s lachrymose economy is that it figures emotional release as the positive result of properly channeled homoerotic, gender-bending energies. It also suggests that, however demonized women may be, femininity remains a valuable, even necessary outlet. Bob’s male femininity represents both gender fluidity and the colonization of femininity by a masculinist logic that co-opts it for its own purposes. Woman is rejected, ostracized, so the homosocial must simulate her positive social function as the dispenser and bearer of tenderness, nurture, and warmth. Far from attempts of genuine gendered transgression on the film’s part, the Narrator-Bob scenes, played for laughs, may be said to express masculine wishes for emotionalism that displace women’s role and make a mockery of the thought of homoerotic desire.

Duel

If, as I have been suggesting throughout this chapter, Fight Club recalls the codes of Victorian America, the underground fight culture it thematizes is its closest link to nineteenth-century American culture. The sport of prize-

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 1
fighting is our modern-day version of the duel. Since the nineteenth century, prizefighting has been a form “of public ritual and violent entertainment” that

“offers insight into the troubling impulses” that lurk behind the American attachment to sports, as John Dudley argues. “Boxing matches provided audiences with the opportunity to view dangerous, often lethal displays of violence, and the sexual potency embodied by the prizefighter came to represent

. . . masculinized nationalism.”26 Nineteenth-century boxing was “defended as a counter to the ‘mere womanishness’ of modern, overcivilized society. But boxing was more than mere manhood. . . . If the workaday world undermined working-class manhood—requiring obedience to rules and docility towards managers—then boxing celebrated [men’s] traditional virtues: toughness, prowess, ferocity. If men could not make things with the skill of their hands, they could at least destroy things, or others, with them.”27

As we noted earlier, Fincher’s film replaces idle onanistic hands with murderous fighting hands. Fight Club can be understood as a cultural wish for the rebirth of manhood through the blood and pain of pugilistic rites. Doing away with women, pulverizing the mounting homoerotic energies, these violent rites can restore and renew and remake manhood by recapturing its very brute essence.

Fight Club recalls not just the underground boxing culture of the late nineteenth century but also the much earlier culture of the duel, which was dying out by the time of the Jacksonian presidency. (In an infamous incident before his presidency, Jackson killed a lawyer, Charles Dickinson, for insulting his wife. Part of the drama of the incident was Jackson’s avowed hatred for Dickinson’s effeminate dandyishness.28) As Andrew Burstein writes of the changing codes of the duel in Jackson’s time, in “episodes wherein one actually set out to kill another in a duel, it was understood that the ritual had devolved into something frowned upon—something less civilized—something frontierlike.”29 As the bloody Narrator explains to his mildly shocked fellow fighters after pounding away at soft, gentle Angel Face’s face, “I wanted to destroy something beautiful.” The pulverization of Angel Face represents a return to the frontier-like primitivism of the pre-nineteenth-century duel.

Fight Club’s clearest linkage to nineteenth-century American masculinism is its recapitulation of several important themes in bachelor culture, one of the most important social phenomena of nineteenth-century American life, the century in which scores of young men left the rural environment and flocked to cities in which they could pursue the classic American male project of “self-making.” Boxing and bachelor subcultures intersected. Resurrecting the language of “skilled artisans,” “working-class bachelor subcultures,” notes Michael Kimmel, “controlled their own labor like individual proprietors.

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Here was a ‘manly’ art, an act of violence which required craftsmanlike skill and deftness.” Boxing served as a “cult of ‘elemental virility.’”30

The utopian Fight Club underworld that The Narrator/Jack and Tyler create, in its broad class (though not race) spectrum, recalls nineteenth-century bachelor subculture. Urban bachelor subcommunities—fed by the constant influx of unmarried young men, bolstered by enlarged economic opportunities—“provided crucibles in which both bachelor subculture and general male culture fused and flourished.”31 Men of all classes often lived together in boarding houses and residences, ate together in dining halls and clubs. The big Victorian mansion in which all the fight clubbers live recalls the bachelor boarding house, done up to replace Victorian stylistic excessiveness with excessive postmodern squalor. Just as boxing and other forms of ritualized fighting allowed men softened by the docility-inducing demands of the workforce to regain their elemental virility, the fights in Fincher’s film allow socially pulverized young bachelors to regain their forfeited manhood by pulverizing each other.

Fight Club moves inexorably toward a deeply nineteenth-century resolution of its tensions. As nineteenth-century fraternities grew and grew, across class if not racial divides, marriages, even if delayed, were hardly endangered by them. As Howard Chudacoff notes, “Contemporary accounts indicate that virtual y al single club members eventually married, usual y within a few years of joining; clubs were home for very few confirmed bachelors.

Perhaps these associations provided the kinds of alternative attractions and diversions that helped postpone marriage for a short time, but there is no real evidence that distraction turned into absolute avoidance.”32 If there was a general fear that reckless bachelors, these “rogue elephants,” would never marry, it was a deeply unfounded fear, as bachelorhood, far from jeopardizing marriage, may have even bolstered it.

Despite the intensely homoerotic atmosphere of Fight Club, highlighted by the narcissistic-homoerotic-onanistic intensity of the Narrator-Tyler relationship and the menace of the castrating and calumniated woman Marla, the film demonstrates that its pugilistic, lawless, murderously violent fraternal subculture has had a purpose all along: preparing its protagonist for normative sexuality and freeing him from the effeminating taint of corporate culture. Fight Club is an exemplary instance of the perversion/normalization Oedipal project of Bush-to-Bush Hol ywood film (to be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter): masochism has not been resistance but rather the preliminary stage of Oedipalized self-actualization for The Narrator, and narcissism the perversity that must be rejected and abandoned to ensure normative sexuality. In the last shot of the film, The Narrator and Marla, both

Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club 1
freed of decadent and sensual Tyler, hold hands as the icons of the corporate workaday world, credit card company buildings, apocalyptically explode, the successful climax of Project Mayhem. Although the destruction of the signs of corporate capitalism could be read as a potentially radical anti-capitalist statement, there is little radicalism here. Grand violence does not amount to political critique but a refusal to engage with the problems of being a social agent in the capitalist machine. The film substitutes flashy mayhem for serious political and social critique.

Freed from his psychic splitting, his homoerotic leanings, and the ties to the workaday world that have effeminated and thwarted him, The Narrator can now embark on a normative heterosexual future with the redeemed and no longer castrating woman Marla, who now stands, hand in hand, by her remade man. Fight Club is an extraordinarily neat articulation of the enduring Jacksonian codes of American manhood and heteronormativity. If Fincher’s earlier films seem to resist precisely these codes, Fight Club embraces, enlarges, and enshrines them. In regressing from his own radicalism, Fincher certainly succeeded in destroying something beautiful.

chapter Six

“Am I Blue?”

Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality

Multiracial, drol y sexy, so jaded that his irony seems like an effort at social engagement, a void with attitude, a hunk with no definitive sexual orientation, an object of multivalent desire, all of his virtues negative virtues—his charisma coming from a lack of charismatic talent, his beauty from the coun-terintuitively mobile effect of his sleepy wit on his placidly plug-ugly face, his sexiness from his indifference to sexuality—as blank as his shined-up Riddick eyes, Vin Diesel is the embodiment of postmodern manhood: postrace, postgay, posteverything. His slightly sluggish, drugged voice suggests Brando on Novocain, but with an undercurrent of sexual menace.

Diesel’s popular mythology makes him a postmodern Horatio Alger, pul -
ing himself up by the bootstraps and capitalizing on the very aspects of his identity that create special problems in our culture, specifical y his ambiguous racial status.1 Vin Diesel paved the way for and continues to provide an intriguing popular culture counterpoint to the Obama phenomenon of multiracial American identity. As Mary C. Beltrán argues, stars of recent big-budget films, such as Diesel, The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), and Keanu Reeves, reflect the new Hol ywood “racelessness.” Beltrán writes, “Industry executives increasingly appear to view these and other multiracial actors as box-office draws who both reflect the ethnic diversity of viewers and embody what these young viewers want in a film hero.” She theorizes that these films reflect the change in public perceptions of nonwhite identity: “As cultural critics such as Marilyn Halter and Leon Wynter assert, a ‘postmodern ethnic revival’ has taken hold in the United States with respect to individuals of both European and non-European heritage expressing a greater interest in their ethnic origins than Americans in previous decades. This renaissance in ethnic exploration and related consumer practices,” Beltrán continues, “has been prompted by several factors, including increasing ethnic diversity and cultural pride since

“Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality 1
the peak of the civil rights and counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s.”2 For Beltrán, these developments signal a paradigm shift: In marked contrast to the racial attitudes that motivated the tragic mulatto discourses in the early part of the twentieth century, as described by film historian Donald Bogle and others, nonwhite ancestry now has cachet. According to Wynter, “Blackness (or nonwhiteness) now suffers less and less of a discount in the marketplace, while whiteness commands less and less of a premium.” Nonwhite ancestry also has, I argue here, a particular cachet when combined with whiteness.3

Diesel’s films reveal that, despite this newfound cachet, multiraciality continues to generate considerable anxiety. Moreover, Diesel presents another problem: his ethnic/racial ambiguity is inextricably linked to an equally per-plexing sexual ambiguity. What’s most interesting about Diesel’s Hol ywood career is the way in which racial and sexual ambiguity compete for representation. Initially, his racial ambiguity was figured largely in sexual terms; in his later films, his sexual ambiguity is overinscribed with an attempted racial dis ambiguation.

The later films, especially A Man Apart (2003), make Diesel a project of proper racialization—in other words, make him more readably African-American—though always with ambiguous, nebulous results. The sequel to xXx (2002), xXx: State of the Union (2005), casts the racially unambiguous African-American actor Ice Cube in Diesel’s role as the new Triple X, over-writing Diesel’s racial ambiguity with racial certainty, a maneuver that makes explicit the implicit agenda of most recent Diesel films. Along with this attempted racial makeover, a gendered transmogrification also occurs, as Diesel trades in his sly sexuality for a more properly masculinist brutality. Attesting to the instability of Diesel’s star image, a recent film like The Pacifier (2005) substitutes this brutality for bathetic babyishness. In Diesel’s breakout film Pitch Black (2000), the predominant disorientation effect comes from his ambiguous sexuality in a film that, rare for an action sci-fi flick, does not engineer a heterosexuality for its star but, instead, a survivalist partnership with the heroine that largely eschews the erotic. But the sequel performs the reverse maneuver, using his sexual ambiguity to signal his racial ambiguity and transmuting Diesel’s queer qualities into a much more stably heterosexual profile. The two Riddick films, Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick, metonymically represent the narrative of identity told through Diesel’s career, a movement from a racial and sexual ambiguity to an attempted racial and sexual certainty.

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Mulatto Manhood

Diesel’s career allows us to consider several key issues overlapping in Clinton-Bush 43 cinema. His highly charged sexual and racial ambiguity make him an interesting spectacle of ironic manhood, in which questions of both sexuality and race are deferred in a gendered performance that heightens its self-awareness as such. Though news articles with titles like “Vin Diesel Slams Gay Rumors” are ubiquitous—as they are with another both racially and sexually ambiguous star, Wentworth Miller of the television show, Prison Break—

Diesel’s teasingly gay-coded star sexuality seems as self-aware as it is self-mesmerized. His post-ironic swagger is a cartoon of masculine performance that fuses black and gay male sexuality in a linked satirical program, sending up both in order to send up the larger form of white—and black—hetero-manhood. Diesel’s initial version of manhood was brazenly and bracingly narcissistic. The development of his career, however, reinscribes the masochism of the Bush-to-Bush male star, allowing us to witness the transmogrification of the narcissistic male ironist into the earnest and morose masochist.

Like many other versions of recent manhood discussed in this book, Diesel’s masculinity corresponds to long-standing themes in the construction of American manhood. His stardom connotes the important nineteenth-century figure of the self-made man; it also corresponds to an especially difficult phenomenon for the antebellum slave era, the mulatto, the person who fuses black and white, a figure of ongoing obsession and dread. It will be helpful to our discussion to historicize mulatto identity in the United States.

As Stephen Talty writes of antebellum Americans, Most whites looked on blacks with disgust or pity, but, mostly, indifference.

It was not that they secretly knew that blacks were human and chose to ignore it. Their blindness was so deep-seated as to be almost a function of brain chemistry; they simply could not look on blacks and see creatures like themselves. For whites, then, black men and women were as much a part of the southern landscape as magnolia trees or livestock. But lighter-skinned captives stood out; they could disrupt slave auctions and unnerve an entire town. . . . There was “something so revolting to the feelings of sight” of white captives, a local newspaper observed, that it prevented their purchase. Light-skinned mulattoes were prized auction items, so long as their African blood was clear. Experienced traders knew, however, that a slave whose coloring was too close to that of the buyers was often impossible to sel . Few Americans wanted to own a slave paler than themselves. Who would want to live with that shock to the optic nerve?4

“Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality 1

The unnerving quality of the white black person endures to this day, as Michael Jackson’s career so vividly demonstrates. The enigma of Diesel challenges us with the equally volatile cultural questions of race and sex: do you see him as white first, or as black? Or do you see him as neither white nor black, but, that dreadful, queer phrase, something else?

James Snead writes that “defamatory racial caricatures, infinitely repeat-able in filmic form, allow those white viewers who believe in them to place themselves in a position of stable and unchanging superiority to blacks. The cinematic stereotype functions by feeding back susceptible white viewers the way they see (and wish to be seen by) a given minority culture.” A brief list of these stereotypes in American films would include: “the stooge/jester, the buck/brute, the tragic mulatto, the body-servant/mammy/housemaid, and the loyal sidekick/retainer.” Snead names three tactics whereby black stereotypes are “forged and perpetuated in all periods of Hol ywood film.” One tactic is mythification, which relates to the larger-than-life, grand-scale inherent nature of movie images that we “look up to.” Another, marking, refers to the attempt to remove the inherent ambiguity of the black-white division by marking black bodies as black to “eliminate any ambiguity”; for example, black actors in Classic Hol ywood like Fredi Washington had to darken their skin to register unmistakably as black. And, finally, omission, meaning what we don’t see becomes as real as what we do: the absence of positive black characters, reinforced by the repetition of this absence, becomes a reality.5

The sorrow and scandal in pop icon Michael Jackson’s recent career link him much more closely to the figure of the tragic mulatto and the melancholia of “passing,” as exemplified so poignantly in Nella Larsen’s great novel Passing. 6 Diesel’s bravura response to racial oppression, the parodistic deferral of questions of race and gender and sexuality, would appear to place him at a remove from tragic racial stereotypes. If, as Snead writes, “the history of black film stereotypes is the history of the denial of history in favor of an artificially constructed general truth about the unchanging black ‘character,’”

we can read Diesel as part of an intervention against this pernicious structure of artifice, in that his very artificiality disrupts and defies any steadfast images of unchanging racial identity.7 Racism in the cinema, Snead writes, “might be described as the tendency to recycle certain ethnic codes, already familiar to a series of privileged viewers, in order to reinforce their familiarity, despite the changes that may have gone on in the real world.”8 Diesel’s resistant screen identity attests to the genuine, salutary possibility of change in identity politics.

Nevertheless, if Diesel disrupts mythification, it is less clear that he disturbs the tendencies toward marking and omission of Snead’s formulation.

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Diesel’s disavowal of race, mirrored by his disavowal of any connection to the sexual ambiguity that inheres to his projected image, constitutes a refusal or even inability to discuss, register, or represent racial identity in anything like coherent terms. His delicious swagger has an ineluctably melancholy under-tow. If his autoerotically charged sexuality conveys the liberating potentialities of queer narcissism, his queer defiance can also be read as a defense against being linked with either racial or sexual oppression; he can exploit the cultural benefits of blackness and gayness without having to account for, do battle with, or intervene in racism or homophobia. Diesel’s persona uncomfortably corresponds to the ongoing postfeminist fantasy of straight white male identity that can successfully co-opt the cachet of racial and sexual alterities without inheriting their baggage of oppression.

Strangely Fascinating Even to Me

In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, first published anonymously in 1912, a bildungsroman about the rise of a young man whose light skin allows him to pass for white, the themes of racial passing, homoeroticism, and narcissism dizzyingly come together. After being outed as black by an insensitive schoolteacher and taunted by his schoolmates in the process, the stunned narrator comes home and stares at himself in a looking glass, trying to cope with the harshly gained new knowledge of his racial identity. Self-mesmerized, he remarks that he finds his whiteness “strangely fascinating even to me.”9 Diesel’s self-fixated sexuality inherits the same tensions of the passing narrator in Johnson’s work, even as it disavows the racial identity that leads to traumatic self-reflection. Queer narcissistic desire—a recognition of one’s own beauty that is “strangely fascinating even to me”—
emerges as a compensatory experience, a reveling in narcissistic desire that overrides racism. In this looking glass episode, narcissistic desire emerges autonomously from within a scene of greater panic about racial identity. The narcissism does not alleviate the pain the narrator feels or the vexations of his newfound racial identity; he ends the chapter by noting that the teacher did him harm that was “years in healing.” But the narcissism buffers the blow of racism, gives the narrator a chance to reclaim himself as an object of erotic wonder that cannot be exhausted by the epithet “nigger,” to be something else and something more.

Diesel’s narcissism functions in similar ways, as a site for a rearticulated subjectivity that substitutes self-fixation for racial and sexual identity. The subversive side to his narcissistic sexuality lies precisely in the refusal to

“Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality 11
answer or claim identity and the ways in which this very insistence on refusing the questions carries an erotic charge; to a certain extent, I want to champion the liberating potentialities of Diesel’s peculiar performance of post-identity manhood. What’s bracing about Diesel is the fun he projects in being post-identity: his seeming indifference to acting (his acting is always a parody of acting, of the concept of giving a performance) and to the demands of celebrity (refusing to answer questions about his personal life, keeping his offscreen persona an apposite blank) add to the image of strangely sexy ennui he embodies. But his narcissism also transparently functions as a refuge from the kinds of vexing and volatile questions about identity he incites. Whether or not Diesel claims a black (or a queer) identity, he nevertheless constitutes a particular version of black queer manhood, even if it is one that is the negative space marked off by his disavowals. Little wonder that his breakout role in Pitch Black makes such an issue of his seeing and ability to be seen.

Diesel represents a thrilling/traumatic site where straight white hetero-and hypermasculine identity intersects with subaltern racial and sexual identity. He comes to stand for both whiteness and blackness but also race-tolerance and racism, homophilia and homophobia, self and other, whatever those latter terms signify and to whom. Diesel also represents the schismatic tensions between multiracial and black identities, while conveying the ongoing sense that all racial difference (at least in the United States) is organized around black racial identity. As Yvette M. Alex-Assenoh writes: black politics remains a central staging area for multiracial politics and debates more generally. . . . In the face of a growing movement among individuals of mixed-race parentage to acknowledge all aspects of their heritage, some Americans argue that it is only right that they be allowed to identify themselves in a way that genuinely reflects who they are. . . . Others see the multiracial movement, especially where African-Americans are concerned, as simply an opportunity for individuals to self-identify as anything other than black.10

In this Obama era, the multiracial movement takes on an especially urgent momentum that Diesel’s problematic stardom can illuminate. Diesel’s performance of racial ambiguity can be seen as a strategy for escaping associations with blackness or a radical new multiracial stance that, in Alex-Assenoh’s language, “adds another dynamic component to the meaning of race in America,”

changing the “very nature of research on American racial and ethnic groups, and the extent to which behavior”—or, I would add, anything at all—“can be linked to racial characteristics.”1

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush But most often left out of these debates is precisely what Diesel provocatively adds, the charge of ambiguous sexuality. Watching his films, you think that if sarcastic gay porn stars like Ryan Idol or Jeff Stryker popped in at any moment, little would change. (That one thinks of white gay porn stars first attests to the disquieting dearth of prominent black, Asian, or Hispanic gay, or, indeed, straight, porn stars.12) Diesel emerges as a sign of a simultaneously disavowed and daringly suggestive gay black/multiracial male sexuality that demands an understanding from such circles. As such a sign, he also prob-lematically contributes to the difficulties of black queer identity.

Before his death in 1994, Marlon Riggs wrote about the difficulties of being gay in both the straight white mainstream world and the larger black community. The “terrain black gay men navigate in the quest for self and social identity is, to say the least, hostile.” Riggs eloquently revealed that what “disturbs—no, enrages—me is not so much the obstacles set before me by whites, which history conditions me to expect, but the traps and pitfalls planted by my so-called brothers, who because of the same history should know better.” Like nested dolls, the demons of bigotry lie embedded within each other. As Riggs suggested:

What lies at the heart, I believe, of black America’s pervasive cultural homophobia is the desperate need for a convenient Other within the community, yet not truly of the community, an Other onto which blame for the chronic identity crises afflicting the black male psyche can be readily displaced, an in-dispensable Other that functions as the lowest common denominator of the abject, the base line of transgression beyond which a black man is no longer a man, no longer black, an essential Other against which black men and boys maturing, struggling with self-doubt, anxiety, feelings of political, economic, social, and inadequacy—even impotence—can always measure themselves and by comparison seem strong, adept, empowered, superior.13

These tensions can most clearly be seen in the ways in which the “down-low”

controversy in the African-American community continues to play out in dominant culture, simultaneously disavowing a spectrum of sexualities in the black community and ramping up the pathological associations with homosexuality and bisexuality.

Of course, complicating the feelings of intracommunal abjection Riggs so movingly described is the overarching indifference to queers of color within the larger white male gay community.14 One gets the impression here that Riggs was fully aware of these overarching constrictions and impediments, but that this awareness only made him more despairingly angry at his own

“Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality 1
community for failing to recognize him, for failing to understand the ways in which creating the abjectified Other in him replicates the history of racism under which blacks have suffered.

Diesel shares in the historical difficulty of black male representation, difficulties only intensified by his polyvalent ambiguities. As many theorists have argued, the institution of slavery performed a twofold disfigurement of black male sexuality, by grotesquely, fetishistically emphasizing the sexual endow-ments and performance of black men while at the same time denying them the agency and authority of conventional manhood. Blacks fit into the terrain of white (male) desire, argues Kobena Mercer, “by being confined to a narrow repertoire of ‘types’—the supersexual stud and the sexual ‘savage’ on the one hand, or the delicate, fragile and exotic ‘oriental’ on the other.”15 Diesel’s star manhood ingeniously, bracingly, and disturbingly fuses these types, oscillat-ing between them. His most recent version of his star identity represents a fixated concession to the hypermasculinist stud, yet even in his most resolutely heteromasculinist form, Diesel’s multivalent sexuality unsettles.

Part of the problem inherent in Diesel’s star manhood is its simultaneous incorporation and disruption of the already asymmetrical analogy between gay and black identities, even more complicated by the gay black identity that combines and challenges both. Drawing on Lacanian queer theorist Lee Edelman’s work, Maurice O. Wallace argues that although queer whites can, to a certain degree, pass in white straight culture as such, they can do so in ways “unavailable to racial subjects.” According to Edelman, Wallace writes,

“homophobia and racial discrimination differ in that, unlike the racial Other, the subjecthood of the white queer is not optically determined.” Rather, Wallace continues, “homophobes read backwards onto white bodies, marking them—I can think of no better way to put it—a posteriori. . . . Negrophobes, on the other hand, read black bodies prescriptively according to stereotypical forms as narratives that anticipate and fix the conditions of black possibility well in advance of the look.”16

Diesel allows us to consider the varieties of passing—race, sexual, also class—and to consider passing as what Bryant Keith Alexander calls a “cultural performance.” One highly significant interpretation of cultural performance is that it “privileges one social marker above others.” Passing can be seen, according to Alexander, “as both a means of maintaining cultural membership, by assuming the necessary and performative strategies that signal membership, as well as the conscious and unconscious choice to engage other performances that situate racial identity. In this way intercultural dynamics are maintained primarily through recognizable performative practices. . . . The accusation of passing is thus an assessment of cultural performance whether

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush as subversion or the presentation of the real.” Maintaining this cultural performance depends upon achieving and sustaining “realness”—that elusive quality so intensely prized by the drag queens of Jennie Livingston’s superb 1990 documentary Paris is Burning—the authenticity of whatever role/identity/status you’re playing. As Alexander puts it, “These cultural performances are indeed ‘designs for living.’ In the case of passing, the design for living is the performative move that assumes the identity and the specified benefits of being the other within a particular context. For example, gay men who

‘pass’ as straight attempt to avoid the social and cultural strictures against homosexuality; or light-skinned Blacks passing for White assume the social and cultural privileges of being White,” while avoiding the traditional stigmas associated with Blackness.17

The theme of “not overacting” pertinently relates to Diesel, whose own acting style is best described as a deferral of having to act at all. I don’t mean to suggest that Diesel can’t act, only that his minimalist acting is so stylized that it undercuts the traditional associations of acting. Cate Blanchett remarks, “Acting takes its toll on people. There’s a kind of madness in it that’s thrilling and wonderful but also can be incredibly destructive.”18 One could never imagine Diesel having anything like such a passionate investment in or emotionally devastating experience of acting. If passing is successfully maintained by not overacting, Diesel would certainly appear to be the most successful passer of all time. His cool control and his particular mode of affectless acting link him to the black showbiz diva, such as Lena Horne, who, to defy the collective gaze of the white audience who sexually objectified her, “threw up a wall around herself with her cold affect and death-ray stares. She was present, but not available.”19

Passing in Diesel’s case can also be seen as a profound defense against the threat of insult, insult that takes several forms, relating to both his race and sexuality. As Didier Eribon writes, “The power of insult and stigmatization is so great that it brings an individual to the point of doing almost anything to avoid being included in the group being designated and constituted by insult.”

To claim one’s own identity despite this stigmatization requires an awareness that one acts as “part of a collective enterprise—one of self-reconstruction—
in which people as a group recover their status as autonomous and free individuals.”20 In several of his later films, Diesel is positioned within a collective that addresses his possible black racial identity though never his sexual ambivalence. And he is always shown to be as much outside the collective as a part of it. Diesel films make the implicit case that a refusal to acknowledge one’s own allegiance to a group identity results in isolation rather than autonomy, “freedom.”

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In this chapter, I track the development of Diesel’s star manhood in his films from Pitch Black to The Pacifier, demonstrating that Diesel’s career narrativizes the particular movement in Bush-to-Bush cinema from narcissistic to masochistic manhood, with issues of race and sexuality made all the more apparent and pressing by their disavowal.

Pitch Black: Vision and African American Manhood Eyes are the locus of the cinema’s self-reflexive interest in its own visual obsessions, serving as the problematic vessels of Surrealist political attack ( Un Chien Andalou’s [1929] infamous eye-slitting), the cautionary metaphors of Hitchcock’s attack on voyeurism ( Rear Window’s [1954] blinding red flashes, Jimmy Stewart’s telescopic camera), the metonym for woman’s victimization in a patriarchal culture ( Peeping Tom’s [1960] terrifying ocular close-ups, the telltale Eyes Without a Face [1959] of George Franju’s masterpiece). And if eyes represent not just the windows of the soul but also the most fetishistically prized features of cinematic bodies, then the hard reflective surfaces of Vin Diesel’s eyes in the 2000 sci-fi/action film Pitch Black, directed by David N.

Twohy, demand critical scrutiny, as does the enjoyable and less accomplished sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), which both reinforces and reenvisions the themes of Pitch Black.

“Shined up” so that they appear silver, like luminous but scratchy coins, Riddick’s eyes cannot be read or decoded; they tell us nothing of his interior life. They do not allow him to see the world as others see it—he hates and shuns the light—but they also do not allow him to be seen, serving instead as barriers against penetration. They allow him to see what others do not: his infrared-like night vision enables him to see psychedelic vistas within the darkness the other characters stumble in. Through his night vision eyes, Riddick can see some of the terrifying predatory monsters of the film: a sickly, gray-bone white, these monsters thrive in the darkness, unseen by their victims, the hapless humans who’ve crash-landed on their desolate planet. Riddick alone stares at their triangular heads, their salivating angled mouths rowed with glittering teeth. His singular views of them catch these monsters unawares: unsuspectingly, they are observed in repose, absently contemplating the human meal they’ve caught. These shots of them—we see what only Riddick can see, the monster in the dark—make the monsters seem curiously sympathetic, almost mournful in their unceasing, unappeasable appetites. As a result, the simultaneous opacity and magical sightedness of Riddick’s eyes in Pitch Black are crucial to the film’s exploration of sight, vision, appearances,

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush and, of all things, empathy. That Diesel is one of the rare heroes of color in a mainstream blockbuster sci-fi/horror movie makes the film’s obsession with sight even more interesting. Pitch Black complexly allows for a potential subversion of the gaze, creating, to use the terminology of Frantz Fanon and Maurice O. Wallace, a “visual carnival” in Diesel’s Riddick.21

A transport ship, carrying about forty passengers, crash-lands on an initially blazing hot, daylit planet. Despite the sunstroke-brightness and heat of the planet, the unlucky band soon discovers that an eclipse is rushing toward them. With the eclipse, they will be at the mercy of the seemingly barren planet’s indigenous populations, the hordes of scissor-like alien birds of prey that swoop at and slice apart their victims, and those Alien-like creatures seen by Riddick alone.

The near-futuristic passengers are an expectedly motley crew, some hoping to settle on “New Mecca.” Diesel’s antihero, Riddick, is a convicted murderer being led to captivity by a bounty hunter, Johns (Cole Hauser), who passes as a lawman. The ship’s disaster-appointed captain, Carolyn (Radha Mitchell), carries the burden of having nearly ejected all of the passengers to save herself (“I’m not going to die for them!”) when the transport ship crashes.

For a time, it seems that Riddick will be the monstrous threat the survivors must elude. Yet, it is quickly revealed that he is, for the most part, their staunchest ally. Initially, Riddick disappears and, once one of the Aliens dispatches a survivor, appears to prey on the humans. Once discovered, he is kept strapped and bound, like Hannibal Lecter, and there are a few moments during which he theatrically terrifies Carolyn. But the movie never sustains its interest in Riddick (hidden behind ominous sunglasses, in a tight tank top that reveals his apparently deadly, rich musculature) as homicidal monster.

His capacities as a ruthless killer lend him an air of heroic invincibility in light, so to speak, of the growing threat from the real, nocturnal monsters.

Johns emerges as the genuine soulless villain; Riddick—except for one moment at the end, when he unflinchingly tells Carolyn he refuses to go back for the two survivors left, which he does, anyway—comes to seem morally uncompromised and even selfless. The movie wants it both ways: it wants us to fear Riddick and to love him, as if he were the wild love child of Machiavelli and Beatrix Potter. A more complex film would have forced us to question why it is that the killer and not the lawman emerges as the hero, a feat accomplished by John Carpenter’s great prison-set movie, Assault on Precinct 13 (1973), which presents us with a radical duo whose racial typing and interrelationship Pitch Black reverses: the black lawman and the white criminal who bond together to thwart a monstrous threat. When Johns makes a threatening move against Carolyn, Riddick calmly taps a long blade against

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his crotch, an image both subversive and banal; we too readily accept that Riddick commands our allegiance. (As played by Australian actress Radha Mitchel , Carolyn provides an interesting visual contrast to Riddick, a soft small blond in fearless opposition to his dark, supple machismo.) Simplistic though it is, Pitch Black remains one of the most resonant sci-fi/action films of the past decade. In one magnificent moment in its superbly tense climactic sequence, Carolyn, having raced back to save Riddick and armed only with luminescent glowworms to deter the advance of the voracious monsters, holds the wounded Riddick in her arms. As they stare at each other, the sensuality of their conjoined bodies, flecked with spots of glowworm light, is overwhelming. Suddenly, a terrible, visceral stabbing sound is heard. It seems as if Riddick, who gazes meaningfully at Carolyn, has been grabbed by an Alien. But it is Carolyn, not Riddick, who is snatched away to her doom by their predators. With its rain-drenched noirishness and flecks of uncanny glowworm light, this sequence is haunting.

Pitch Black deploys the spectacle of Diesel’s multivalent ambiguity in ways that heighten and complicate the problem of visualizing black men. Both this film and its sequel thematize Diesel’s difference through plot and visual scheme. Pitch Black is particularly noteworthy for a science-fiction film of its era for its considered, shifting color schemes—scorching yellows for the barren planetscape in daytime, a high-tech blue hue that also represents daytime, an ominous dark crepuscular yellow, and finally, an eclipsular, engulfing darkness. The blue daylight is particularly striking. I would argue that it is the color palette of Diesel’s ambiguity, as this color scheme is employed for the section of the film in which Riddick not only eludes Johns, Carolyn, and the passengers but also taunts and teases them in antic pursued-pursuing-the-pursuers games. We see Riddick out of the corners of our eyes and of the frame, lounging like a lizard in crevices or lingering in long shot like a fop in a Merchant-Ivory film over his drink under a canopy. As much voyeur as voyeuristic object, he stealthily observes a conversation between Carolyn and Johns behind a slatted wall, teasingly inserting his long blade between the slats. He proceeds to cut off a piece of Carolyn’s short blond hair, then smells it. This action would appear to suggest heterosexual fixation on his part, but then the film overturns such a suggestion by having Riddick blow away the hair as if it were a daffodil, a distinctly non-heteromasculinist touch.

In one shot, Twohy strikingly depicts the homoerotic tension between Riddick and Johns in palpably visual terms.22 We see Riddick walking toward us and then Johns emerging into the frame from the left, the actors then positioned in a close medium two-shot in which their faces come so near each other they almost touch. The way Diesel uses his body language in the

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush scene, Riddick’s interest in Johns appears olfactorily motivated, as it did with Carolyn. Diesel de-hierarchizes the senses, making smell as sensually charged as sight. A pansexual and panracial threat, Diesel defies gender, sexual, and racial norms here with proportionate wit and menace. “You found something worse than me,” Riddick says of the pale ravening monsters. The suggestion made is that only something beyond the human can outmatch Diesel’s fearsome ambiguity. Pitch Black unleashes Diesel as an erotic monster of racial and sexual anxieties, both their cause and site. The subsequent films strive and strain to contain Diesel’s multivalent threat.

Diesel Alight: The Chronicles of Riddick

Twohy’s sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), disappointed audiences, ending up a box-office failure that presaged the decline of Diesel’s popularity.

Although not nearly as inventive or satisfying as Pitch Black, the sequel brims with interesting ideas and effects. Most significantly, it thematizes Diesel’s ambiguity in a manner that starkly contrasts with the first film. Whereas darkness provoked terror in the first film, in Chronicles, light looms as a terrifying threat.

In the same interview in which she discusses acting, Cate Blanchett remarks, “Ambiguity is not absence.” Ambiguity becomes analogous to fetishism in Diesel’s case. In an essay on the transvestic African-American basket-ball player Dennis Rodman, a sexually ambiguous celebrity whose image bears some interesting iconic resemblances to Diesel, Lindon Barrett writes,

“Rodman, in his cross-dressing, his unruly cultural exhibitions, exposes a discordant system of interlocking fetishes.” Barrett draws here on the work of the sociologist Sut Jhall, who “defines fetishism as ‘seeing the meaning of things as an inherent part of their physical existence when in fact that meaning is created by the integration into the system of meaning.’” Barrett argues that

“the inscrutable cipher” Rodman allows us to see that “self-identification is produced and extracted within the flows of daunting social forces: race, gender, capital, morality, or any combination of these with other factors.”23 As we explored in greater detail in Chapter Three, the fetishist seeks to replace the phantasmatic phallus of the mother—the discovery of the absence of which is the fundamental trauma of childhood in the Freudian psychoanalytic view—
with the fetishistic object (for example, noses, shines on noses, shoes, fur).

Analogously, the viewer invested in the pleasure of Diesel’s ambiguity seeks to stave off knowledge of the essential hollowness of Diesel’s star image by fetishizing the ambiguity that marks even as it camouflages this hollowness.

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Ambiguity provides the allure and pleasing, reassuring phantasy of a wholeness, a “real” identity, that may or may not be there, the resplendent, almost tactile surface of a body that may be nothing more than a mask for a nonexis-tent essence. Pace Blanchett, ambiguity compensates for absence. I return to this point below.

Recal ing Snead’s tri-partite schema of racism in Hol ywood films—
mythification, marking, and omission—and thinking of Diesel’s ambiguity, we should consider its relationship to omission. Diesel omits blackness from his star image; his ambiguity could be said to constitute omission by its refusal to represent, reveal, claim, or embody racial identity. If his sexuality complicates his racial presence, his films’ heterosexualizing retooling of it works to distance him from black identity, even as the films increasingly strive to associate him with it, implicitly signaling his blackness without going so far as explicitly to depict him as such. In none of the Diesel films I’ve seen is he given a black woman as a sexual partner, be she a girlfriend or a wife. The closest to a black woman of importance in a Diesel film is J. J. in xXx, played by insouciant, blond-dyed black actress Eve, but J. J.

is clearly Diesel’s character Xander Cage’s promoter and agent, not sexual partner. J. J. also slaps down the multiracial/Hispanic woman who comes on to Xander at a party—a vague hint of apparent black animosity to interracial dating (again, the way this exchange plays out, the animosity seems more impersonal y political than amorously motivated). Hispanic actress Michel e Rodriguez plays Diesel’s girlfriend in The Fast and the Furious, but their love scenes are remarkably devoid of erotic frisson, which owes something to the sexual ambiguity of lesbian idol Rodriquez’s own marvel ously brusque screen presence. In al of the other Diesel films, his love interest is always a white woman. Sexuality, normatively established in the films, functions as a marker of Diesel’s whiteness, even as the later films work to suggest the star’s black identity. Chronicles problematizes the fetishization of whiteness in Diesel films by figuring whiteness as malevolent threat. As such, it critiques the entire cinematic apparatus itself, if one agrees with Richard Dyer’s view of it in his book, White: “The photographic media and, a fortiori, movie lighting assume, privilege and construct whiteness. The apparatus was developed with white people in mind and habitual use and instruction remain in the same vein, so much so that photographing non-white people is typical y construed as a problem.”24

The sequel’s premise, a mash of the Oedipus, Moses, and Jesus myths, centers on Riddick’s race. The race of isolate, murderous Riddick, an unknowable, raceless killer in the first film, emerges as key to the plot, which casts Riddick as unlikely messiah. This film’s villains, the evil, fascistic Necro-

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush mongers, colonize, in Borg-like fashion, entire worlds, whose populations they attempt to convert to their strange death-cult religion, the members of which float in liminal states between life and death. The Necromongers live in fear of the one race that can challenge them: the Furians, a male member of which, a prophecy holds, will rise up against the Necromongers, slaying its leader (echoes of Oedipus). Riddick learns that he is the last male member of the Furians, having survived the Necromonger murder of the innocents (male Furian children, echoes of the Moses and Jesus stories). By not only determining Riddick’s race but also making it crucial to the plot, the film suggests that what the first film left undisclosed (his race) is a crucial fact that it must expose. By discovering his own proper racial identity, Riddick discovers his destiny as messiah.

Allegorically, in marking Riddick as Furian, the film marks Diesel as black and thus serves as a metonym for the general run of post- Pitch Black Diesel films. The figuring of whiteness in Chronicles complements the black identity it allegorically confers upon Riddick. If, as Dyer argues, whiteness has historically been linked with light, and therefore with all of the positive qualities—divinity, rationalism, order, civilization itself—it connotes, the film’s uncanny depiction of light denatures and defamiliarizes these common associations. Light emerges as monstrous, annihilating, and, in Freudian terms, the unheimlich, the familiar ( heimlich) returned as the unfamiliar, now bearing the token of repression, textually signified by the prefix “un. ”25 A reification of itself, light in this film is the uncanny, “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”26 On the prison planet Crematoria, when Riddick heroically helps a ragtag group escape the Necromongers, they run away from the encroaching and scorching light that threatens to engulf the planet. The looming, overarching strands of killing light resemble spi-ders’ webs, tentacles, ensnaring monstrous arms. When light hits the body, flesh crackles, bubbles, burns. Covered in light, Riddick’s body smokes, as if he were a freshly baked god. The planet’s lava pools and incinerating liquids reinforce the impression that all light touches turns to smoldering, hissing tableaux of death. When one louche character, a Necromonger who was once also Furian (Linus Roache), walks out into the light, his body incinerates, one flaming limb at a time. Whiteness/light consumes and eradicates, apocalyptically destroys.

Beyond this, the character of the Elemental prophetess played by Judi Dench parodies white “transparency” by being literally such. Pointedly, the black Lady Macbeth figure played by Thandie Newton mocks and disparages Dench’s Elemental for being so evanescent, so unmarked. In an almost onanistic/narcissistic display of her own qualities, Dench’s Elemental glides on cue,

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demonstrating her quicksilver, elusive, ungraspable nature. Whiteness cannot be marked, rendered solid, or grasped; Diesel’s outed race, however, becomes increasingly harder, more graspable, finally finding its resolutely reified form in the final image of Riddick, the Furian who defeats the Necromongers, as a bronze god.

If the Necromongers parody whiteness by being the colonizers who enslave and threaten to obliterate the Other, Riddick’s unwilling but inevitable transformation into racialized messiah connotes his ineluctable acquiescence to proper racial identity and signification. The image of Riddick as brooding, melancholy bronze god at the end is a frieze of compulsory racial categorization in our identitarian era, the badboy of racial and sexual ambiguity’s transmogrification into the icon of normative racial and sexual identity.

Strategies of Containment: Perversion/Normalization If popular culture can be said, in all of its vast and myriad forms, to have a unified design, it lies in its engineering of the fate of polymorphous pleasure, which most often follows Freudian theory. What drives the pulsating waves and experiences of polymorphous pleasure underground—turns them into the sedimentation of the repressed—is the Oedipus complex, through which we pass from a state of polymorphous perversity into a properly socialized, normative one. This is a highly ambiguous process, one that Freud saw as a triumph for the human race but a defeat for the individual.

Popular culture texts may be said to return repeatedly to this scene of psychic trauma, to the conflict between perversity and socialization that can only be resolved through the Oedipus complex, the resolution of which denies us access to the full range of our desires. Popular culture texts perpetually plunge us into states of polymorphous pleasure that the mechanisms of the plot and their ideological agendas corral, curtail, control, condemn, and contain.27 Such texts most often set loose subversive, perverse energies and properly Oedipalize, contain them, by the end. But just as certainly, not every popular culture text contains its subversive energies, even if most do. And not every popular culture text contains/Oedipalizes these perverse energies in the same way; what fascinates are the varieties of the practices and strategies for containment. Diesel’s films are exemplary in their exposure of the difficulties involved in the subversion-containment, or what I will hereafter call perversion/normalization, model.

In films such as The Fast and the Furious (2001), Knockaround Guys (2001), xXx (2002), and especially A Man Apart (2003) and The Pacifier (2005), Hol y-

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush wood attempts to curtail Diesel’s monstrous ambiguity. The strategy is most successful in A Man Apart; for its first half, at least, xXx allows Diesel the full range of his ironic sexual and racial identity; and Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious finds vent for Dieselian sexuality.

The Fast and the Furious casts Diesel as Dominic Toretto, an underground god of la street-racing culture. A kind of father figure to a collection of street-tough, vulnerable misfits, Dominic himself is the ultimate lost son, his father having been burned to death in his vehicle during a (legitimate) car race. Dominic and his band’s car-jousting extends to criminal pursuits, hijacking cars and then selling them off. Handsome, blond young Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), an undercover cop, infiltrates Dominic’s haven, gaining his trust and friendship even as he must spy on and plot against him.

Given its premise, the film is virtually a remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, substituting hot rods for cool waves. Most of the film plods, but when the camera’s eye falls on its two chief visual spectacles, the swiftly moving, nitrous-oxide-enhanced vehicles and the Diesel-Walker dyad, Cohen’s style becomes lyrical and sensuous, like Bigelow’s film in its hypnotic entirety.

In Knockaround Guys (2001), a surprisingly appealing film that plays like Goodfellas meets Totem and Taboo, a fairly hapless group of young would-be mobsters—their fathers are long-time mobsters, the titular knockaround guys from the old days—attempts to complete a mission (delivering half a million dollars) on their own, with disastrous results, ending up facing off against a duplicitous sheriff (the eminently weird Tom Noonan) in a remote Midwest-ern town. Diesel plays Taylor Reese, childhood friend of the protagonist, Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper), whose father (Dennis Hopper) and uncle (John Malkovich, wildly and entertainingly miscast) are infamous mobsters.

Diesel’s race is never explicitly described here, but, evincing the mutability his hybridity allows, he is associated with Hispanic culture, being the strongman who monitors bodega video game cash. Despite this implicit association, the Diesel of this film is rendered as colorless as possible, reduced to his bare essentials of brawn and brutality. In this film, he represents the masculine heft the other young men lack. At one point, Matty and Chris (dark-eyed and -haired Andrew Davoli) discuss the worst imaginable job, and Chris offers being the guy who “mops up spooge at Show World” as his choice. The implication is that manhood is spent. This film, obsessed with male potency, offers a vision of its era’s young manhood as cut off from the capitalist marketplace and from its own sexual power. For a film about young male criminals, Knockaround Guys is remarkably devoid of the scenes of heterosexual conquest typical in the genre. Diesel’s display of masculine prowess is associated with male-male violence but not with sexual bravado. As such, his sculptural manhood here is

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almost poignantly bare and stationary, the sign of a faded, unattainable masculine ideal. In their final confrontation, Matty tells his father, whose mob world he finally rejects, that he never looked at Matty “as a man.” This film suggests a white male manhood cut off from both the fraternal order (most of Matty’s friends get killed, with only Diesel’s Taylor surviving) and the Father, whose recognition remains as elusive as it is sought after.

xXx, at least the first half, is the only Diesel film other than Pitch Black to give his droll deviousness its full range. It also fleetingly exhibits the subversive potentialities of Diesel’s ambiguous star image. In the scene considered in Chapter One, Diesel’s hero, Xander Cage, finds himself in a bedroom with a Czech woman who offers herself up to Xander. The way the scene is shot, Diesel’s body is as much up for our visual delectation as hers. We see him in full-shot, invited to take him in, to consume his body as we watch him consume hers. If Diesel’s racial ambiguity and sexual ambiguity facilitate this spectacularization of his body, they also endow us with unusual access to the body of a Hol ywood male action star.

Diesel’s Xander Cage is an extreme sports athlete, a Robin Hood who sends up the rich, recruited by the government on a special mission: go to Prague and hunt down some rogue, psychotic Russian bent on destroying the world. As this multiracial Robin Hood, Diesel leads a band of exclusively white merry men, who resemble the videohog guys on Jackass, although the women who come on to Diesel before his recruitment are black or multiracial in appearance. Recruiting Xander is Agent Augustus Gibbons, played by Samuel L. Jackson. One of the fascinations afforded the spectator of xXx is watching Diesel and Jackson, two antithetical styles of black cinematic masculinity, square off. Whereas Jackson’s movie masculinity must always be asserted volubly and vehemently, taciturn Diesel, whose looks at times suggest Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, fuses French New Wave cool and porn star gravitas. It behooves us to consider in greater depth the film’s negotiation of these stars’ respective embodiments of raced masculinity.

Race as Scar

Gibbons has a long scar on his face, leading drol Xander to dub him

“Frankenstein.” The typical mistake, calling the monster by the name of his creator, actually fits here, since Gibbons is Frankenstein to Xander’s monster of ambiguity. Gibbons’s scar is an interesting touch, an overinscription of his more visible African-Americanness that strangely suggests that the fusion of blackness and male power is a monstrosity of its own. Or that visible,

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush marked blackness is a wound, one that rebukes Diesel’s flippant avoidance of the issue, its history and ongoing struggles. Gibbons represents blackness and national power as equally scarred, wounded, in opposition to Xander’s insouciant polyvalencies. “As my people would say,” Diesel retorts to Gibbons, never specifying exactly who his people might be, “kiss my ass, Scarface. ”

This reference to Brian De Palma’s great but also highly ambivalent Cuban gangster epic serves several functions at once. Perhaps most saliently, it links the representative of national power Gibbons with the subaltern, hip-hop black culture that appropriated De Palma’s 1983 film. “Scarface, ” writes the African-American film critic Armond White, “is one of the best examples in film history of moviegoers making culture for themselves.”28 The ways in which De Palma’s film became a touchstone for generations of young black and Latino communities, especially considering the expansive condemnation of the film by dominant culture upon its release, are endlessly fascinating. But for our purposes here, I read the Scarface reference as a nod to the imagined black community that Gibbons, though associated with national power, represents, and that Xander, though ostensibly a mixed-race rebel, like the star who plays him, does not.

Scarred Gibbons is the “Scar” figure of westerns exemplified by that character in John Ford’s ever-troubling masterpiece The Searchers (1956), the racial other who maddens and haunts the conflicted, lonely white hero, a figure whose antecedent is James Fenimore Cooper’s villain Magua in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In xXx’s configuration of this scenario, however, one figure of racial otherness haunts another, the black man who represents national power maddening and haunting the multiracial, sexually ambiguous man.

Mocking the symbol of the nation Gibbons cherishes, Diesel says, “You think maybe I should be like you. Get all shot up for the old Stars and Stripes. I bet that flag is a real comfort every time you look in the mirror.” Gibbons, as Jackson plays him, unflinchingly responds, “A small price I paid for putting foot to ass for my country,” oddly vivid metaphorical language. Buried within this terse dialogue are struggles over race, identity, and assimilation in American culture. Diesel is the free-market identity-sampler with a tie to a distant African-American past; Jackson’s Gibbons is the aspirationist, assimilationist black man who chose to honor Uncle Sam in the hopes He might someday honor him. Each figure represents the torturous imbalance in modern raced identity, the paralytic struggle between separatist and assimilationist models, with their respective perversities—Diesel’s ambiguity, Gibbons’s tie to U.S.

military power—rendering the entire debate incoherent.

Gibbons’s facial scar counterbalances Xander’s bodily markings: covered with tattoos that race up and down his bulging arms, Xander also has the

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triple X insignia tattooed into the back of his neck, which becomes a recurring identificatory symbol for his character. Unlike the narrator Tommo in Melville’s Marquesan travel fantasia Typee, a white sailor who mortally dreads being tattooed by the titular Marquesan people, Diesel’s marked body here suggests a white manhood made legible, comfortable with the display of signs, markable—but only up to a point. Though an illustrated man here, Diesel remains as remarkably raceless in this film as he is in all other films, despite their increasingly adamant efforts to render him clearly marked.

But Augustus Gibbons represents something more: High Culture, the Western tradition itself, as his weighty name that fuses Classical Rome with classical scholarship (another Gibbons wrote Rome’s most famous historical survey) suggests. At one point, he makes Xander meet him in a vast, sumptuous opera house in Prague as an opera is performed for Gibbons and Xander, the only audience members, small blips in a red sea of empty seats.

“You already broke me,” Xander tells Gibbons, “you don’t have to be cruel and unusual.”

Indeed, High Culture haunts this film. Yorgi (Marton Csokas), the Russian villain, wants to create “Anarchy 99,” a movement to topple high culture through the destruction of the great cities, and, implicitly, civilization, in the effort to create the world anew. Yet, this anarchic anti-aesthetic movement relies on the force of a superweapon named “Ahab.” xXx is a kind of meditation on traditions lost that appears to suggest that ties to traditional culture are maintained by those outside of it, like Gibbons, who embodies the melancholia of the failed integrationist ideal and white cultural inertia and exhaustion—hence the empty, desolate opera house with Gibbons the only apparently engaged spectator and postmodern Xander’s automatic hostility to the entire high culture scenario.

Far more entertaining than the tedious thriller plot that has Xander infiltrate Yorgi’s stronghold, the first half of the film showcases the tête-à-tête between Gibbons and Xander. This involves placing Xander in all manner of fantasy scenarios in which he must prove his mettle by outwitting murderous assassins. In one scenario, Xander must both decode and strategize his way out of a murderous scene in a diner, the most familiar tableau of normative life. These scenes further allegorize Gibbons’s and Xander’s relationship: Gibbons places Xander in familiar settings yet expects him to see through their artificiality and detect their hidden levels of menace. In some inchoate way, the film seems to be inserting Gibbons as a kind of guru to Xander, helping him to see through the deceptions and be alert to the dangers of normative, i.e., white, culture. But ultimately, there is no genuine connection between the two, no solidarity. Mixed-race id to Gibbons’s race-based superego, the

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush film suggests that no racial ego exists, no tangible, attainable, livable racialized subjectivity.

The Diesel-less sequel to xXx most interestingly allows us to compare the cinematic representation of Dieselian masculinity to that of an African-American actor. Cast in the role of Triple X, Ice Cube stars in xXx: State of the Union (2005), directed by Lee Tamahori, who also made Once Were War-riors (1994) and the excellent Alec Baldwin-Anthony Hopkins man-against-nature thriller The Edge (1997). xXx: State of the Union is not in league with The Edge, to say the least, though it’s chock-full of fascinations.

The sequel seems to be a grandiloquent amplification of Gibbons’s/

Jackson’s rebuke to Xander/Diesel. Diesel’s character isn’t just unavailable for action in this film, he’s been killed off (off-camera). “We need a new Triple X,” Gibbons says, someone who’s an even more powerfully threatening badass than Diesel. Of all the actors to replace and surpass Diesel in such a capacity, the diminutive Ice Cube seems like a highly odd choice. A skillful dramatic actor, as his breakthrough performance in John Singleton’s superb Boyz n the Hood (1991) evinces, Ice Cube is a joyless action-movie hero, glowering, monotonous. Diesel may speak in monotone, but he’s never monotonous, always giving you a sense of wry unheard commentary. Cube’s star manhood is stolid, impassive, strenuous, without any of the lightness of spirit that Diesel brought to the franchise. Although Cube’s heterosexual credentials are impeccable, queer-ish Diesel’s much more convincing at the bust-em-up and derring-do. In contrast, when Cube kiboshes baddies and leaps off buildings onto hovering helicopters, you feel little thrill, just blank astonishment at the filmmakers’ demands on our credulity.

In some shots in the first xXx, Gibbons’s scar greenishly glowed, a prominent sign of the racial uncanny. But in the sequel, the scar barely figures at all, in some shots being completely undetectable. Cube’s Darius Stone is a Navy Seal who was wrongly imprisoned when he fought an order from his commanding officer to kill innocent people in Kosovo. Gibbons, who was in the same company with him, recruits Stone, in his ninth year in prison, to join his renegade team. When Stone angrily tells Gibbons,” I like what you’ve done with your face,” one blinks, because there’s been no indication whatsoever in the scene that Gibbons has a scar. Whereas in the first film, the scar had creases, lines, indentations, bumps, crevices, odd pulsations, in the sequel it appears softened, barely visible. With a more properly African-American actor in the lead, the significatory function of Gibbons’s scar diminishes.

Cube’s intensity has no charge, except in one register: a ravenous appetite substitutes for the sexual voraciousness typically associated with the action hero. Regressing to the oral stage of psychosexual development, Stone defers

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sex so that he can chomp avidly and violently on burgers, shakes, and fries, a parody of the conventional African-American diet without much of a sting, only a queasy sensation. Food becomes a multivalent symbol here—at one point, Stone nukes a bunch of microwave dinners, presumably to gorge on them, during a scary encounter with the police after he’s been framed. But he uses the microwaved foodstuffs as a decoy for the heat-seeking missiles (or whatever they are) aimed at him.

If avid eating substitutes for action sex, it is interesting to consider the way the representation of Cube’s sexuality differs from Diesel’s. In the sequel’s version of the scene in which the hero gets propositioned by a sexy woman, the Senator’s daughter, Charlie (Sunny Mabrey), a duplicitous, evil leggy blonde who works for the villain, Deckert (Willem Dafoe), Stone registers the sexual come-on but leaves it unexplored. “The things I can’t do for my country,”

Stone says, with a rare hint of drollery. Fascinatingly, in the sequel we see the deferral of the casual, uninhibited sexuality Diesel’s Xander revels in. To a certain extent, I think the film’s racial politics play into the scene. Charlie, blonde and blank, is an especially forgettable femme fatale. She seems hardly worth the profound vehemence Gibbons—uncharacteristically—directs at her. “Kill the bitch!” he shrieks at Stone at one point. At a climactic moment, he shoots her himself. In close-up, Gibbons says, “I told you I’d kill the bitch.”

This excessive moment sticks out of the text; it seems designed to speak to its presumed audience. Truth be told, Cube’s sexuality never really gets displayed here. There’s a lot of threatened intimacy between Stone and car dealer Lola Jackson (the gorgeous, mysterious Nona Gaye), but it remains threatened, never consummated. Yet, the film insists that if its black action hero were to have sex, it would be with a black woman, not a hateful white “bitch.”

In the first xXx, the villains were rogue Russians; in this film, they’re enigmatically driven Washington insiders who feel the president is too compassionate and liberal (!) and who want to return America to its conservative superpower glory. The film seems embarrassed by its premise, deeply conflicted over having the star of a new African-American action hero franchise protect the president, who, for the most part, is indeed depicted as an up-standing model of old-fashioned American liberalism and tolerance, indistinguishable from such a figure in a Classic Hol ywood movie. As if in compensation, the film—in a highly outlandish and mystifying move—turns to the hip-hop drug and carjacking community to help Stone and Gibbons rescue the president from Deckert’s perverse plot. Stone entices one gangsta badboy into joining his national security renegade posse with the incoherent appeal to his sense of free-market democracy, warning that if the likes of Deckert have their way, the gangsta will no longer have a choice of cars to jack.

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush The craziness of all of this attests to the incoherence of the entire premise, the profound befuddlement on the part of the filmmakers about making a crossover film, apparently a more bewildering enterprise than ever. Although the film does conclude with an image of the rescued president as a hollow charlatan who celebrates a white hero who played a less important role in his rescue than Stone, for the most part, the film’s depiction of him puts an innocent face on national power, as if he were a fantasy Bush 43 who really did put the compassion into compassionate conservatism. Disorientingly, the film enacts a fantasy of a return to the 1960s civil rights/JFK era in which beliefs in a government that could be instrumental in ending racial oppression and in a noble, decent presidency were still potent.

The crazy hip-hop-versus-evil-military splinter group battle could have been a brilliantly off-kilter spectacle if made by a director like John Carpenter, with his genius for cross-genre ragtag absurdity (for example, the spectacularly apocalyptic, anarchic sequence in his 1995 remake of Village of the Damned in which the alien, glowing-eye children force various military and law enforcement groups to wage war upon each other), but it remains an incoherent mess here. As I have suggested, however, the mess and incoherence are highly illuminating, powerful evidence of the apparently still deeply incommensurate natures of the black and white Americas.

Diesel and the African-American Homosocial

A Man Apart fully dispenses with the ambiguous Diesel devilry, casting him in a derivative revenge plot that transforms his teasing sexuality into cold, chiseled, brute masculine force. This film effects the transformation of Diesel’s bracing narcissistic persona into a brooding masochistic one. After his wife is murdered by minions of “Diablo,” the Mexican drug cartel lord, Diesel’s Sean Vetter goes on a determined rampage to wreak revenge. The now-bearded Diesel displays none of the taunting wit that made him such a deliciously un-conventional male icon. The chief interest of the film lies in its simultaneous immersion of Diesel in a black homosocial community while keeping him distinct from it, racially inviolate, and its staging of a confrontation between Diesel’s now fully masochistic manhood and the flamboyantly narcissistic one of Timothy Olyphant’s Hol ywood Jack.

Though this intriguing premise goes largely unexplored, the film examines the scenario of a new drug-enforcement team comprised entirely of men with inner-city backgrounds. In contrast to Boiler Room (2000), The Fast and the Furious (2001), Knockaround Guys, and xXx, Diesel’s friends in this film are

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African-American men with pronouncedly working-class backgrounds. The appealing Larenz Tate plays his best friend and partner, Demetrius Hicks.

But though associated with the black inner-city homosocial, Diesel, especially before the murder of his wife, signs as white, with his suburban name Sean Vetters, sexy white wife, and beachfront house. No more than Knockaround Guys, which associated Diesel with the Italian-American homosocial but never elucidated his particular relationship to it beyond the bonds of friendship, can A Man Apart assign Diesel an explicit racial identity, though it seems to avow most clearly his status as black male. Diesel remains a man apart in all of these films, never fitting into the categories of heterosexual or African-American but nevertheless being deployed as a signifier of both categories.

Flashy, louche Hol ywood Jack, who owns a hair salon and kills people unhesitatingly for Diablo, reads as queer, as if Diesel displaced all of his sexual polyvalency onto Olyphant. Hol ywood Jack represents the new-style queer psycho who substitutes killing people for having sex with other men and whose effeminacy, flamboyance, and amorality may or may not sign gay sexuality but, in leaving the question of sexuality an open one, constitutes non-normative sexuality anyway. Hol ywood Jack assumes the outrageous and amoral narcissist role in this film, but Diesel pummels him repeatedly, as if to punish so flagrant a display of a refuted narcissism. It’s almost as if Diesel pulverizes his own maddening, inescapable former narcissistic image, trying to shatter it. In one scene, Hol ywood Jack, covered in blood and bruises, digs his own grave, whimpering and moaning as Sean and Demetrius loom above him. This decisively deadly check to narcissistic exuberance allegorizes Diesel’s own career as it enlists the black, straight homosocial to dispense with queer, narcissistic white manhood.

Rectifying Diesel

Worst of all the Diesel-containment films is The Pacifier (2005), which plays out like Lee Edelman’s worst nightmare, the reduction of queer intransigence to an embrace of family values, most vividly embodied in the Child.29 This time, Diesel plays disgraced Navy Seal Shane Wolf who must protect the Plummer kids (while their mother is away with the film’s villain) from enemies of their recently killed father, a government scientist whose top-secret experiment remains in the their house. Like Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop (1990), this film is Diesel’s comedic “breakthrough” movie, a parody of his stoic star image, his “Diesel Laughs!” picture. The problem is that it’s

00 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush no fun at all, lacking any low comedy vitality, replete with tedious gags and laborious shtick.

Of chief interest to us is the film as containment strategy. It rehabilitates Diesel’s dangerously unstable star image, correcting its ambiguity while simultaneously making expository use of it: in a covert nod to Diesel’s gay icon status, his character agrees to direct the sexually ambiguous teenage Plummer boy, his hair now a short Hitler Youth blond, as Rolf in a production of The Sound of Music. This film updates George Stevens’s classic Manichean western Shane (1953), about a weary, mysterious gunslinger who protects a settler family from evil, greedy cattlemen. That movie ends with Shane’s (Alan Ladd) departure, prompting the little boy’s (Brandon de Wilde) hauntingly plaintive plea “Come back! Come back, Shane!” The Pacifier is a retooling of Shane in which Shane (Wolf) never leaves. At the film’s start, Shane views family with hostility; by the ends, he feels the tug of familial desire and now wants a family of his own. The film effects the re-immersion of the rebel-outcast inviolate hero into the normative, nurturing confines of the family. Having rehabilitated the racial and sexual monster, his monstrousness transmutes into awakened feelings of love and nurture.

This film could have been a cheerfully perverse, bracing, subversive movie.

It could have shown us Diesel wanting to share in the Plummer children’s anarchy, returning to a state of polymorphous perversity that disrupted the static, servile rationalism of the Symbolic order. Instead, the film is more interested in having Diesel provide the superego discipline to the unleashed id of the misbehaving children: everyone in the Plummer family adopts his Navy Seal seriousness. He turns them into more efficient models of the family properly functioning within the capitalist order (for example, his militaristic discipline transforms a little girl’s Girl Scout troop into a bunch of ass-kicking hombres; in a more subversive movie, he would have gotten involved in their Girl Scout games and squabbles).

If the Plummer family becomes a more efficient, functional model of the capitalist family, Diesel is the narrative agent for this transformation, but the key theme in the film is the transformation/rehabilitation of Diesel’s star image. Diesel’s own potentially polymorphous perversity undergoes a program of socialization; he emerges from this film’s Oedipalizing scenario normalized, socialized, heterosexualized, and resolutely contained. The film’s Oedipal narrative structure is schematically obvious: Shane kills his symbolic father, his murderous, duplicitous, double-crossing Navy mentor, Capt. Bill Fawcett (Chris Potter, who played conservative, straight-acting gay chiro-practor David on Queer as Folk), and, having realized that Mrs. Plummer is not a suitable love-object, transfers his loving desire for her (having as-

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sumed her role) to the nurturing, ex-military, tough-but-fair Principal Claire Fletcher ( Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham), developing properly heterosexual desire along the way and keeping it stringently out of the family, which allows him to start his own.

Most interestingly, in order to represent Diesel’s Oedipalization, the film must show us the process of his psychosexual development. Freud’s theory of this process can help us to contextualize the Oedipal scenario of The Pacifier.

Freud established three phases of infantile psychosexual development: the oral, the anal, and the phallic. Orality is the first of the three stages of childhood psychosexual development (the anal and the phallic follow) as Freud theorized it. Orality and anality are “pregenital,” whereas the phallic phase

“deserves to be described as genital.” If Freud should be read allegorically, these pregenital phases serve as allegories for the course and varieties of adult human sexuality. As such, these allegories have continually lent themselves to vulgar Freudianisms and conventional wisdom, but they retain their strange power. (See Chapter Three for a more sustained discussion of orality.) The oral phase “might be called cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization,” Freud wrote in his famous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In it,

“sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food; nor are opposite currents within the activity differentiated. The object of both activities is the same: the sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object—
the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part.” Like orality, the second pre-genital phase, “the sadistic-anal organization,” is not subordinate to the “reproductive function.” Interestingly, the anal phase is neither masculine nor feminine in nature but only “active or passive.” “The activity is put into operation by the instinct for mastery through the agency of the somatic musculature; the organ which, more than any other, represents the passive sexual aim is the erotogenic mucus membrane of the anus. Both of these currents have objects which, however, are not identical.”30 Most fascinating of all, the first edition of Three Essays contains no mention of what Freud will establish in a footnote added in 1924 as the third phase, “the phallic.”31

The film takes considerable pains to associate Diesel with the anal phase and anality. An incessant joke in the film is Shane’s horror at changing the excrement-filled diapers of the Plummer infant—whom Shane dubs “Red Baby,” a component in his militaristic renaming of the Plummer family members. But nothing prepares you for the full manifestation of this excremental imagery and anal theme. In one sequence, the Plummer children trick Shane into diving into a sewer to retrieve a tracking device. Diving into these dark, dank pools, Shane emerges from them covered in excrement, flies buzzing

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .1. Mixing sex and race: Vin Diesel in The Pacifier (2005) around him; when he returns to the Plummer home, he stands before the children and Principal Fletcher, displaying himself as excremental spectacle.

Humiliated and shamed, Shane nevertheless resists the human impulse to jump into the shower, seeking ablutions for his purification. Rather, he revels in the resplendent spectacle of his own abjection, self-disgust, and humiliation. The film achieves alone what all of the post- Pitch Black Diesel films together sought to do: to transform Diesel from narcissistic to masochistic movie star.

This crapulent movie allows us to consider the cultural work of mainstream film as compromise formations of our social order. In psychoanalysis, a compromise formation is the “ideational, affective, and behavioral resultants of attempts at solution of conflict among and between the psychic agencies and the outside world.” Compromise formations occur when our wishes and fantasies “encounter ego restrictions or superego prohibition.” Our psychic agencies (id, ego, superego) combine with the forces of external reality, producing fantasies that can then be “tolerated in consciousness.” These fantasies combine both wishes and fears, “dangers, defensive activities, and punishment.”32

Diesel’s return to the anal stage here can be read as a cultural compromise formation, a cinematically expressed cultural fantasy brimming with desires and fears. A desire to see Diesel abjectified, humiliated, covered in shame, covered in excrement; fears of Diesel’s racial ambiguity, sexual ambiguity, and their fusion; hatred of Diesel for his arrogance, his unsettling beauty, his envi-able musculature, the audacity with which he contests the cultural incitement

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to categorization, all combine in the compromise formation effected by this film.

In the most negative terms imaginable, The Pacifier associates Diesel with blackness, but only by thematizing blackness as excremental, in contrast to the gleaming white suburban purity of the family to which he, butch-mammy fashion, ministers. Few groups, theorizes Joel Kovel, “have ‘suffered the appellation of filthiness’ so much as blacks.” In aversive white racism, “there is a sense of disgust at the dirtiness of black bodies and black people.” “African Americans, in other words, have served as the container for white shame—
that is, projected fears and anxieties that the self is defective and dirty.”33

With Diesel in the picture, these pernicious associations with filthiness fuse homophobic as well as racist mythologies, given the anal-phobic derogations of gay male sexuality’s presumed indistinguishability from sodomitical sexual practice.

If we understand the traits associated with the anal stage as seeming opposites that “both express and defend against anal eroticism,” we can see the anal stage thematics of the film more clearly. “Orderliness, obstinacy, frugality, and parsimony are common features of the anal character, ” but so are “heightened ambivalence, untidiness, defiance, rage, and sadomasochistic tendencies,” as well as a potential “obsessive-compulsive neurosis that suggests anal fixation.”34 Behind the drill-sergeant fastidiousness of Shane’s orderly militarism possibly lies a murderous, berserk rage. Metonymically, the orderliness and the rage stand in for the demeanor and hidden qualities of the star, whose coolness may hide boiling rage or, even worse, nothing at all. The ultimate problem with Diesel’s ambiguity, what gives it its truly unsettling quality, is that it alerts us to the flimsy nature of identity, to the sham of surface. What if you remove the mask and there’s no face behind it? What if you find out Diesel’s race or sexual orientation and discover that neither exists? Behind the insouciance of Diesel’s star image lie the deepest terrors of our culture.

chapter Seven

The Devil Wears Abjection

The Passion of the Christ

The figure of Jesus represents an infinite number of things to vast numbers of people, but for the purposes of this study, our focus will be on Jesus, as depicted in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, as the supreme example of the male masochist.

In his 1941 study Masochism in Sex and Society, Theodor Reik writes: A psychoanalytic investigation of martyrdom would be able to prove the importance of having witnesses not only of one’s suffering but of one’s per-severance as wel . [In the classic accounts, the martyr’s own] humiliation and disgrace were displayed. . . . A man who licked other people’s spit from the ground, who kissed festering wounds, and picked up vermin which had fallen down in order to put it back on his own body, undoubtedly gave an example of his own humbleness and his consciousness of sin. But he not only gave an example; he wanted to be an example. . . . Whoever humiliates himself so deeply wants to be exalted.1

For Reik, “Christ’s very life and death become the glorification of suffering and its conquest.” But this is not merely suffering for its own sake, but heightened masochistic suffering, which holds within it the promise of pleasure, which comes after “self-conquest,” a surrender. Christ, for Reik, represents the ultimate successful masochistic fantasy: “He bore his punishment in order to ascend to Heaven, he paid the highest price so as to become God himself.

He gained eternal life by death, he entered the glory of God by disgrace. He conquered through being defeated. He was victim and victor.”2

If Jesus can be viewed as the ultimate masochist, he is also, in Gibson’s film, the masochist longing for narcissistic wholeness.

Most of the pre-release hype over Mel Gibson’s film centered on its pur-

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Figure .1. The suffering of Christ: The Passion of the Christ (2004) ported anti-Semitism. Indeed, The Passion is fairly anti-Semitic, but no more so than most film versions of Jesus’s life. Sadly, an institutionalized version of anti-Semitism lies at the heart of the New Testament, the avoidance of which denatures the narrative. Still, some films buck the trend: Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), which features a blue-eyed, American-looking Christ in its matinee-idol star Jeffrey Hunter, begins with a depiction of murderous Roman oppression of the Jews. The violence of The Passion also prompted concern; even Stephen King worried about the impact of seeing a “skinless nightmare Christ” on the children dutifully dragged by their parents to see the film. The film certainly reaches new levels of cinematic skin-slicing, bone-splitting violence, but in this capacity it has a powerful precedent in Latin American/Caribbean Catholicism, which brims with lushly violent tableaux of Christ’s suffering.

Much of the backlash against the film’s violence reeked of middlebrow disdain rather than an understanding of the varieties of Christian experience.

The Protestant austerity of most representations of the Passion transmute Jesus’s suffering into the higher realms of devotion to God and transcendence of the body; the suffering becomes decorative, and Jesus’s submission to the Father’s will, splendidly stalwart, emerges as the chief narrative focus and theological message. Yet, as medieval versions of the Passion Play attest, the blood-drenched, ravaged body of Jesus, and the cataclysmic panorama of suffering in the Passion, are no less crucial to the story than its purifying, transcendent message. There is as much a case to be made for the power of imaginative engagement with Jesus’s somatic and emotional suffering as there is for meditative contemplation of its intellectualized representation.

In a prime example of the kind of myopic middlebrow criticism of movies that serious people appear to take seriously, David Denby, the paragon of

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush critical complacency, writes in such a pompously and condescendingly classist way about the film that he emboldens one, despite reservations, to defend it.

Unlike The Passion, “the central tradition of Italian Renaissance painting left Christ relatively unscathed; the artists emphasized not the physical suffering of the man but the sacrificial nature of his death and the astonishing mystery of his transformation into godhood—the Resurrection and the triumph over carnality.” Denby continues:

By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. . . . The depictions in “The Passion,” one of the cruelest movies in the history of the cinema, are akin to the bloody Pop representation of Jesus found in, say, a roadside shrine in Mexico, where the addition of an Aztec sacrificial flourish makes the passion a little more passionate. Such are the traps of literal-mindedness.3

With stunning cultural snobbery, Denby reduces an entire culture’s vibrant version of Christianity to Pop “literal-mindedness” that is apparently beneath contempt.

None of the hoopla hovering around the film gave any indication of its most problematic and disturbing reactionary agenda: a committed mounting of a homophobic sensibility, embodied in the depiction of the Devil, whol y added to the cinematic Jesus myth by the perfervid obsessions of the director.

But herein lies the central difficulty of the film: along with its stylized violence (though never its anti-Semitism), Gibson’s homophobic aesthetic gives the film its chief aesthetic power, indeed most resonantly displays his skills as a filmmaker of an idiosyncratically poetic horror form and adds to the maddening complexities of this beautiful/ugly, hateful/heartrending, offensive/
irresistible film.

In his catalogue of elitist complaints, Denby chides Gibson and his screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, for selecting and enhancing “incidents from the four Gospels and collating them into a single, surpassingly violent narrative.”

Denby makes no mention, however, of Gibson’s most surprising contribution to the Passion narrative: the presence of the Devil in the Garden of Gethsemane episode in which Jesus begs God to spare him if at all possible from his fate. As I will demonstrate, the most striking aspect of Gibson’s Devil is his sexual ambiguity, which Gibson depicts as part of his eerie and terrifying screen presence. Part of the drama of the film lies in the confrontation it stages between the Devil’s sexual ambiguity and that of Jesus. The Passion

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galvanizes the narcissism/masochism theme, various configurations of which inform and impel the film.

The Devil in the Shape of an Androgyne

The primary homophobic imagery in the film involves the representation of Satan. Gibson imagines the devil in a manner not unique to him but also not conventional as an androgynous youth whose temptations of Jesus carry with them the dread, disturbing whiff of sexual perversity. Played by a young Italian actress, Rosalinda Celentano, the Satan of this film most closely resembles the androgynes of Ingmar Bergman films such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), which casts a woman in the role of a mysterious young man. Strangely and hauntingly beautiful, Celentano’s Satan serves as effeminate or androgynous counterpoint to the already inherently feminine and feminized form of Jesus.

To add to the sexual perversity of his imagined Satan, Gibson shows us this Satan as a perverse male mother with a grotesquely wizened, hairy infant, a hideous parody of the Madonna and Child, gliding into the crowd that gawks as savage Roman guards unrelentingly and mercilessly brutalize Jesus in the scourging episode. Importantly, divine, sinless virgin mother Mary exchanges looks with this queer Satan, who not only parodies but also co-opts her role.

Satan usurps Mary’s pivotal function, adding and embodying the terrifying power of the phallic, Medusan mother to it while parodistically representing this phallic mother in mockingly androgynous drag.

The perverse Satan combines so many different levels of gendered and sexual depravity, through so many symbolic modes of sign, play, and parody, that s/he ends up emerging as one of the bravura inventions of Gibson’s film, a briefly seen tantalizing spectacle one longs to see again.

The disturbingly beautiful androgynous Satan of this film sharply contrasts against other cinematic representations of the figure. For example, Gibson strenuously inserts the figure of the tempting Satan into the Garden of Gethsemane scene in which Jesus begs God to spare him, if possible, from his terrible fate. In the New Testament the scene of Satan tempting Jesus occurs much earlier, when Jesus fasts, essentially at the start of his messianic career, for forty days and forty nights in the desert.4

If we compare Gibson’s version of Satan to that in George Stevens’s 1965

The Greatest Story Ever Told (long patronized as a hokey all-star extravaganza, it is the supremely beautiful example of the austere style of cinematic Jesus representation, as evinced by its spellbinding version of the raising of Lazarus

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Figure .. The Devil as beautiful androgyne
from the dead—“Lazarus, come forth!”), we can well understand the daring innovation of Gibson’s intentions. In Stevens’s film, Satan (Donald Pleasance) properly tempts Jesus in the desert. As Pleasance embodies him, Satan is bedraggled, unkempt, an ugly, whiskered middle-aged man with a rabid glint in his eye, as pitiable as he is predatory.

In contrast, Satan in The Passion is cool, unflinching, a mixture of both sexes, and youthful. This Satan’s skin gleams an alabaster white, and his temptations carry a whiff of impossible sexual appeal and enticement; his cold menace has an erotic charge. When a snake slips out from beneath the folds of his garment and seeks out Jesus, it is the iconic symbol of Satan’s androgynous sexual threat, a fusion of masculine and feminine sexual archetypes.

We’re meant to marvel at this strangely angelic Satan’s troubling, haunting, nightmarish beauty, part of the horror of his presence, a blue-white glow in the darkness. Gibson’s Satan is the enduring archetype of the “beautiful boy as destroyer.”5 The snake, in Bruce Chilton’s view, “crawls lasciviously over the Savior’s body, adumbrating the torture that is to come. But once he is on his feet again, Jesus crushes the snake’s head and marches out to meet his tormentors. . . . That literally serpentine scene in Gethsemane is, of course, not in the Gospels, and its basis is light-years from history. Satan and his snake are imported from medieval imagination,” and “marinated in gothic fantasy.” In Genesis 3:15, Eve is “told that her seed will bruise the head of the serpent who seduced her into eating the forbidden fruit and that the serpent will snap at her seed’s heel.” In this manner, Jesus emerges as “Eve’s son, undoing Adam’s fall.”6 Richard L. Rubenstein reads this scene of “an arguably hermaphroditic Satan” as an aspect of the film’s demonization of Jews: “Because of our inability to accept the lordship of Christ, my people have been traditionally cast in the role of the most despicable of villains in the primary

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narrative of Western civilization.”7 But this queer Satan is more than, or not simply, a despicable villain and seems to be operating on a different phobic plane than Gibson’s Jewish villains. As I will develop further, the relations among Jesus, “The Mother,” and this androgynous Satan are crucial to this film’s psychosexual politics.

With his sinister sensuality and corrupt beauty, this androgynous Satan provides the narcissistic contrast to Jesus’s grandiloquent masochism. More than any other film in this study, this film reifies narcissism as the queer and masochism as the normative mode of male sexuality. Satan’s parodistic attempts to mirror Jesus—crouching as he crouches in the Garden, appearing as the ghastly Madonna holding the ghastlier doppelgänger of the Christ child—play, with a grotesquely cruel panache, with narcissistic tropes of imitation, reflection, mimicry, and unattainable desire. Narcissism in this film emerges as the ultimate parodistic reflection of normative manhood, a sustained critique that plays like an awful, merciless joke.

Masochism emerges as a joke on itself—if masochism is the condition of normative manhood, the mournful submission to a state of grief over the condition of the self, the level of masochism reached in the representation of Jesus goes so far beyond even the considerable havoc and anguish of the Passion story as to be itself parodistic. There are so many egregious moments of Jesus’s suffering, so many moments in which the injuries done to him reflect Gibson’s baroquely misanthropic imagination rather than any correspondence to the Passion Play, that masochism becomes a parody of manhood and male desire. In a strange moment, Jesus says, “I am ready,” with an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile on his face, before the scourging begins. The impression is that Jesus welcomes his suffering. But the scourging scene that follows lets loose the full, leering depravity of these guards so obscenely proficient at inflicting harm, and Jesus undergoes not just scourging but varieties of skin-flaying torture, even to the extent that he is turned over so that a new series of scourgings can be conducted on the front of his body. The bitter joke seems to be on a willingly masochistic manhood. (Other similarly excessive scenes include Jesus, in chains after his abduction at Gethsemane, falling over a cliff and hanging suspended; an especially virulent Roman guard pulling Jesus’s right arm so that his hand can be aligned with a pre-existing nail hole, breaking his arm in the process; Jesus, nailed on the cross, flipped over in the process of erecting the cross, his indescribably ravaged body hitting the gravel y earth.) The excessiveness of the suffering here serves both to parody masochistic manhood and to give it its full, spectacular due, an opportunity for its most passionate and comprehensive expression.

But if the suffering Jesus represents masochistic manhood, Gibson also fig-

10 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush ures Jesus’s narcissism as the restoration of his youth, beauty, and unviolated and coherent body. Throughout the film, Gibson cuts from scenes of Jesus’s suffering and his increasingly damaged and transformed body to flashback scenes in which Jesus appears undamaged, glowingly handsome, complete. In one of these flashbacks, Jesus innovatively builds a table, to his mother’s polite bewilderment. In one of his great touches, Gibson adds a level of erotic affection to Jesus’s teasing, physically demonstrative interaction with Mary. This makes the scene in which Mary runs to him and gives him comfort (“I am here”) when he stumbles carrying the cross all the more resonant. Masochistic manhood longs for narcissistic restoration, for the reassuring spectacle of the masculine subject’s beauty.

Satan’s access to narcissistic beauty is shown to be temporary and given a punitive redress. When Jesus dies, we see Satan, from a cosmic overhead shot, in some infinitely vast outer-space cavern, shrieking. As he howls, his shawl flies off his head; uncannily, the visual effect created as howling winds whip off his shawl is that of a wig flying off his head. Parodistically, Gibson suggests that Satan’s predicament here looks like a drag performer’s worst nightmare: having her wig blown off in mid-song and shrieking in embarrassed despair.

As such, this shot complements that of the extravagantly effeminate, gold-filleted minion of the even more louchely, decadently effeminate Herod wildly shrieking at us in close-up. (Only a gold-splattered delicate African male, a eunuch who is either a slave or a reveler, looks down in shame or in empathy as Jesus is mocked. Even as the Jew and the homosexual inspire Gibson’s ire, the African draws out his sympathy. Simon of Cyrene, the bystander con-scripted by the Roman guards into helping Jesus carry the cross, is played by an actor of color. Initially resistant to helping Jesus, he develops an intensely empathetic relation to the faltering, bloody, mutilated man he helps, even to the point of defying the guards and risking his own skin.) In the final shot of the film, of the resurrected Christ, Jesus’s narcissistic restoration has been fully achieved. Once again beautiful and complete, the risen Jesus glides out of the tomb, in a movement that reverses Satan’s glide through the scourging square. But, in an ambiguous masterstroke, Gibson ends with a close-up of the remaining nail wound hole in Jesus’s right hand, from which blinding white light, rather than blood, shoots. This replacement of viscera with divine, blinding light—the most hygienic transformation of ugliness and pain into triumphant abstraction, of horrifying pain with the absolutism of perfection—effects the most sublime narcissistic restoration in any of the films of this study.

The Christian myth of Jesus’s death and resurrection is analogous to the Lacanian mirror stage, but only up to a point. In Christianity, Jesus’s har-

The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ 11
rowingly ruined body transforms into a rapturously restored, whole form; in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, we transform from the corps morcelé—the anguished, fragmented body in bits and pieces—into a coherent and bounded self-image. Yet, this self-image is itself only an illusion that we mistake for a real achievement of wholeness that is itself no less illusory than our mirror image.8 If the risen Jesus of Christianity transcends ruin to become the God of Wholeness, in Gibson’s film, the restored God bears the mark of ruin, the stigmata of masochistic suffering, the residue of human defect that is also, in secular terms, a literalization of the narcissistic scar/wound of American manhood.

Gibson’s Homophilic Homophobia

In many ways, Mel Gibson’s cinematic oeuvre—from his early starring role in the all-but-explicit male-male Australian antiwar love story Gallipoli (1981) to the first film he directed, The Man Without a Face (1993), a homoerotic mentor-pupil film in which Gibson plays the mentor—has been central to the wave of homoerotically charged films into which The Passion fits.

In a manner that mirrors similar phenomena in the 1970s and early 1980s, studios in the “Gay 90s,” argues Michael DeAngelis, “became cognizant of the profit potential in the targeting of gay audiences, [packaging] the eroticized male body for both gay and mainstream consumption as an object of identification and desire.” Stars like Keanu Reeves, Johnny Depp, and Leonardo DiCaprio represent the “new androgyny.”9

Gibson’s Lethal Weapon films index the first wave of post-70s mainstream films that demonstrate an unusual awareness of their availability as a text to audiences with disparate sexual interests. The Lethal Weapon films “often hedge dangerously close to conflating homosocial and homosexual bonding in the depiction of [their] ‘male couple.’”10 In the series, Gibson’s detective Martin Riggs is the Three Stooges meets the death-drive, a sadomasochistic oddball who seems desirous of his own death, always the bane of his black partner, Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), a humorless sobersides. As has been remarked upon by many, many commentators over the years, Gibson has a penchant for playing characters who undergo all manner of physical abuse, most prominently in his bombastic 1995 epic Braveheart, in which Gibson also stars as William Wallace, a commoner who leads the Scots in attempt to overthrow English rule in the thirteenth century. Wallace and his band seem to revel in their suffering, always at the hands of other men. Gibson’s homoeroticized onscreen masochism, however, has been counterbalanced by

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush repeated homophobic comments made to the press, a homophobic disgust matched only by his now equally prominently articulated anti-Semitism, which would appear to confirm the charges of anti-Semitism leveled at The Passion. 1

What fascinates about Gibson’s homophobia is that it contains within it a love of queer male beauty and a hatred of the same masculinist oppression that undergirds homophobia. To revisit Braveheart for a moment—a numbskull epic if there ever was one—it exhibits exactly Gibson’s homophilic homophobia. In a frightening turn that lends the film some power, Patrick McGoohan plays the brutal, pitiless English King Edward I (nick-named “Longshanks”), who despises his son Edward, Prince of Wales, for his effeminacy. As Peter Hanly plays the prince—perfectly, it would appear, to Gibson’s design—he is indeed hatefully effeminate, ugly, and nasty. In this manner, Gibson’s homophobic sensibility would appear to be oddly in sympathy with the film’s detestable villain, Longshanks, directing a hateful gaze at the prince along with the king. Yet, the object of the prince’s desires and Longshanks’s disgust is Philip, a dark-haired, sensually delicate young man who, as played by Stephen Billington, is a figure of great beauty. When Longshanks kills Philip by hurling him over a balcony, we in the audience feel appalled at the king’s barbarity, which the scene serves to emblematize. It is precisely this murderous king’s hatred of Philip’s delicate beauty that makes him seem undeniably monstrous. In the prince and Philip, homophobia and homophilia split, the one getting all the qualities the other does not possess, with brutal masculinism emerging as the enemy of both. Gibson’s own William Wallace, then, presumably unimpeachably masculine a hero, joins in sympathy with annihilated queer Philip.

When William is tortured to death and, far from demonstrating agony, seems to enjoy his own annihilation, the character and Gibson’s masochism fuse; the entire spectacle suggests a desire to reveal masochistic phantasies to a broad audience. No director has more nakedly put his masochistic phantasies for grandiose punishment on the screen. Gibson embodies what Theodor Reik theorized as the demonstrative form of masochism, fitting into Reik’s description, within his discussion of demonstrative masochism, of the young man who flagellates himself before a mirror: In one case a patient, who thus attained orgasm, first had to see in the mirror the bloody weals he had produced on his buttocks by beating. Such solitude is materially, but not psychologically, real. The masochist imagines a spectator whom he sometimes plays himself. The phantasied witness partakes in observing and enjoying the exposure and the beating. This second

The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ 1
person cannot be eliminated in the phantasy because he is the carrier of the pleasure-bringing action. In solitary masochistic practices the second person is as essential as in self-pity when unconsciously another person (father, mother) is phantasied as present and sympathizing with us in our trouble.12

Movies are our national mirror, the site of the ultimate and infinite méconnaissance, where we perpetually misconstrue or misrecognize, in Lacanian terms, the movie mirror image of us with a coherent, whole, bounded, authentic self-image, the desire for authenticity the chief phantasy. Moviemaking is a perpetual reentry into the mirror-stage, but one that seeks not only to control the process but also to reimagine it on one’s own terms, to make a mirror that reflects the artist’s image. This is never more potently felt than in the films of obsessive directors like Gibson who repeatedly put their perversities on the screen for all to see. We become that phantasy spectator so crucial to the materially solitary but psychologically crowded masochistic beating phantasy.

Gibson may be said in The Passion to transform his own masochistic beating phantasies into a self-hagiographic epic about the prototype of the masochist, except that the film ultimately appears to view its masochism as a necessary passage to a true and authentic narcissism, a beautiful ego-ideal that nevertheless bears a mark of the former masochism (the risen Christ with the nail wound in his right hand). In this manner, the film subverts its own normative agenda of the pathologization of narcissism (effeminate/androgynous Satan) and the enshrinement of heroic masochism (Jesus), along with the normative trajectory of Bush-to-Bush films into which The Passion so seemingly comfortably fits. This film seems to want, then, both to indulge in grandiloquent masochistic squalor and to reclaim a transcendent narcissism.

The linchpin figure is Satan, whose own narcissism functions as sign of decadence and despair, as negative narcissism to Jesus’s beautiful, true, authentic narcissism.

If the film’s true narcissist is Jesus, his relationship with Mary demands a consideration from a Freudian standpoint.

Rather snarkily, Bruce Chilton describes the flashback in which we see the adult Jesus and Mary together thusly: “Jesus’s mother is with him in Nazareth in a truly peculiar flashback, in which Jesus, pottering in his shop like a suburban householder in Los Angeles, completes a handsome but unusually high table in a Swedish contemporary style. He predicts he will make chairs tall enough to make it serviceable, prophesying the use of kitchen tables around which his followers will presumably one day sit and discuss this film with admiration.”13 Gibson does much more in this scene than anticipate Ikea. This

14 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush scene is crucial to developing a sense of the profound love between mother and son, their intimacy, an intimacy that verges on the erotic, as evinced by the moment in which Jesus warmly kisses her after teasing her for her bewilderment at the chairs. The eroticized mother-son bond here suggests a revised version of the potentially pathological Freudian account of the centrality of the mother-son bond to homosexual narcissism. Moving toward a higher, a divine, narcissism, Jesus may also be the homosexual narcissist with an erotic fixation on the Mother. The “Father” is never present in this film that presents a primarily secular version of Jesus that largely eschews his miracles and divine birthright.14 If the homosexual narcissist “fails” properly to Oedipalize, to identify with the father and enter his symbolic world and to reject the mother and the imaginary realm she embodies, in this film, Jesus is shown to be resolutely tied to the mother, the world of feelings, pain, the unknowable, of tears, blood—in other words, the abjection associated with the world of the mother, to combine Freudian, Lacanian, and Kristevan approaches to the Oedipal process.15

Kristevan film theorist Barbara Creed, writing of the horror genre, which makes her work quite appropriate for the study of Gibson’s film, describes abjection within the mother-child relationship:

In the child’s attempts to break away, the mother becomes an “abject”; thus, in this context, where the child attempts to become a separate subject, abjection becomes “a precondition of narcissism. ” Once again we can see abjection at work in the horror text where the child struggles to break away from the mother, representative of the archaic maternal figure [for Creed, the Alien films are exemplary in this regard], in a context in which the father is invari-ably absent ( Psycho, Carrie, The Birds). In these films the maternal figure is constructed as the monstrous-feminine. By refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking its proper place in relation to the symbolic [as Lacan described, the world of the Father’s Law of language and reason]. [The child is] partly consumed by a desire to remain locked in a blissful relationship to the mother and partly terrified by separation. . . . Kristeva argues that a whole area of religion has assumed the function of tackling this danger.16

As Creed quotes Kristeva, “this is precisely where we encounter the rituals of defilement,” which all converge on the conflation of the maternal and the abject. “The function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.”17

Gibson, with his predilection for images that give you the heebie-jeebies

The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ 1

(the snarling demons and the devil-children who haunt Judas; Satan and his monstrous child; the terrifying black crow that pecks out the eye of the unrepentant thief, crucified along with Jesus and the thief who does repent), has made in The Passion of the Christ one of the most startling horror films ever made. In this regard, Creed’s work illuminates Gibson’s horror movie deployment of the mother-child bond and Kristevan abjection, as much for the ways in which he retools these concepts for new purposes.

In The Passion, Jesus’s “major love interest,” in the view of Susannah Heschel, is “his mother, hardly a normative heterosexual passion.”18 Jane Schaberg agrees: “The role written for his mother and the casting of a stronger actor (Maia Morgenstern) in that role tell us that his strong erotic bond is with his mother, not Mary Magdalene. His mother is the one who kisses his crucified feet, bloodying her mouth.”19 But the film manages to circumvent its implicit typing of Jesus as homosexual-narcissist by splitting off the positive qualities of this identity into Jesus-mother (good) and Satan-child (bad).20 Satan doubles both Jesus and Mary. He is, on the one hand, an otherworldly being, and, on the other, a grotesque anti-Madonna, carrying his hideous demon-infant in his arms. He parodies divinity by appearing in angelic form while embodying demonic character. He parodies Jesus’s already unstable, feminized masculinity by being such a brazenly genderbending figure, a brazen-ness that parodies the concept of gender itself. When he exchanges a look with Mary, his gaze is telling, taunting: he declares war against her sacred femininity, challenging her with his flagrant gendered deviance. All of these qualities take his function as sign of the perverse to the nth power.

Heschel views the homoeroticism in the film as an aspect of its anti-Semitism, part of its effort to depict Jesus as “the anti-race.”21 She speaks directly to the film’s queer sexual politics:

Gibson’s Jews are its repugnant sexual deviants. Herod, king of the Jews, is a vulgar transvestite engaged in a lewd, drunken, bacchanalian orgy with a group of transvestite cohorts. The Jewish priests are a homosocial clan of physically unattractive men; they are stout and bloodthirsty, with yellowed teeth and gruesome sneers. Barabbas is horrific, a one-eyed monster who sticks out his tongue at the Roman soldiers and wiggles it in a lewd suggestion. The only “normal” heterosexual couple in the film is Pilate and Claudia.

. . . The film’s Jesus emerges from its cauldron of sexual deviants [to suggest]

. . . an undefined or perhaps innate asexuality.22

My disagreement with Heschel’s striking reading of the film stems from her view of Jesus as asexual. I view Jesus not as asexual but as yet another

1 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. The power of the mother-son bond
version of an obsessively enduring masculine type in American life, the inviolate male, who refuses to satisfy either the heterosexual or the homosexual desires he incites (my book Men Beyond Desire studies this figure) and whose own sexuality remains a maddening blank. It’s not that the inviolate male is asexual but that he refuses to perform a sexuality at all. Moreover, although her view that homoeroticism in the film functions as a means of establishing that Judaism is a realm of the grotesque all-male homosocial and therefore not a mother-religion to Christianity is compelling and persuasive, I find unsatisfying her lack of exploration of one of her most striking points, that the film suggests that Christianity is born not from mother-Judaism but rather from “a homoeroticism that is inflected by race and leaves Jesus’ sexuality ambiguous.”23 (I would point out that, while I agree that the film’s portrayal of Mary and Mary Magdalene is “deracinated,” the strikingly Semitic beauty of the film’s Veronica, shown as a loving mother whose tender cleaning of Jesus’s face is maternal in nature, complicates her view. Indeed, I can think of no more intensely moving or explicitly Jewish representation of Veronica in the cinema.)

For I think that this is Heschel’s boldest and most compelling claim, that Christianity is a religion founded on homoerotic desires that stem from its essentially ambivalent attitude toward genital—i.e., normative, heterosexual—sexuality. It is a religion founded upon homoeroticism rather than homosexuality, upon a general attitude of same-sex attraction predominantly male (but, as Heschel points out, can be seen here in the female-female bond between Mary and Mary Magdalene).

We are living in a moment in which the homoerotic bonds inherent within Christianity are undergoing a radical revision through an explicit expurgation.

The success of The Da Vinci Code, which posits that Jesus not only married

The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ 1

Mary Magdalene and had children with her but also that for centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been covering up this secret, explosive knowledge, attests to a current attempt to divest Christianity of its homoerotic underpinnings. The thesis of The Da Vinci Code is that the androgynous figure of John leaning against Jesus’s chest in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper is actually Jesus’s lover, Mary Magdalene. It is quite odd indeed to see Leonardo da Vinci—for Freud, the supreme example of the homosexual artist—employed as an indication of a barred, restricted heterosexuality the knowledge of which has been hidden for centuries, but such are the vagaries of our culture.

As Tom Horner writes in a discussion of biblical homosexualities, although the story of the woman often presumed to be Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’s feet and drying them with her hair shows that Jesus enjoyed touching and being touched, “He was of course even more intimate with men.” Horner writes:

In one account of the Last Supper we read “Now there was leaning on Jesus’

bosom by one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23; see also John 11:3, 5, 36; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20). The Gospel does not present it as anything unusual that a disciple is leaning on Jesus’ chest, nor is there any indication that the other disciples thought it unusual. Granted that it was considered quite normal for close friends to recline thus at ancient Semitic banquets . . .

it does strike us that Jesus displayed a considerable degree of warmth as a person in that he assumed such a posture with a friend.”24

Horner rightly cautions us against seeing more in this striking display of male-male warmth than is there. “There is simply not enough to go on to draw” the conclusion that Jesus was homosexual. “What is conclusive is that it is impossible to conceive of Jesus as displaying hostility toward anyone because of his or her sexual preferences—especially the kind of hostility that some of his followers have displayed toward others throughout history on account of their homosexuality.”25

In a highly, even agonizingly, difficult way, The Passion uses its grotesque homophobia—though not its grotesque anti-Semitism—to restore the gorgeous homoeroticism of Christianity. Vile and ugly though its homophobic images are, they allow the affirmed homoeroticism—the mother-son Jesus-Mary bond, the Jesus-John bond—to stand out even more beautifully in juxtaposition. Hence does this pernicious/affecting film affirm a new queer narcissism, albeit one always already marked by the narcissistic wound.

chapter eight

Narcissus Transfigured

Brokeback Mountain

The extraordinary rise of the double-protagonist film in Hol ywood from the first Bush presidency in 1989 to 2009 has demanded a new understanding of self and other in mainstream film, a project undertaken by this study as a whole. In Classic Hol ywood, the protagonist—white, male, heterosexual—
largely understood his struggle as one between Woman, on the one hand, and the racial/sexual Other, on the other hand. But in Bush-to-Bush films, this relation has changed. Suddenly, normative manhood’s primary struggle is against another version of itself—an inherently narcissistic relation. Self can no longer be understood as total, realized, complete; two proportionately matched male selfhoods must compete for dominance.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), based on E. Annie Proulx’s 1997
short story in the New Yorker and expanded by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, diagnoses this split between two protagonists as a historical crisis in American male subjectivity, a split within normative manhood. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyl enhaal), two young sheepherders who unexpectedly fal in love on the titular mountain in Signal, Wyoming, in the summer of 1963, represent at once newly fashioned versions of that most iconic of American male images, the cowboy, and this image newly fashioned as queer. “I ain’t queer,” Ennis says to Jack at one point. “Me neither,” Jack responds. Ennis and Jack go on to marry, have children, and maintain (clandestinely) their romantic and sexual relationship. By giving us two male protagonists who both maintain the appearance of normative manhood and develop and sustain (with difficulty) a loving relationship, the film manages to be a simultaneous portrait of straight and queer male identity in America. As such, it is a deeply important film that synthesizes the concerns of our study, which has claimed that the trajectory of male representation in Bush-to-Bush cinema has been to denature and

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain 1

Figure .1. The male embrace: Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005)

blur the oppositions between straight and gay manhoods. The depiction of Ennis in particular corresponds to the theme of col age manhood explored in this book.

Beyond this, Brokeback Mountain is one of the great American films of recent years, exquisitely considered and realized, with some of the finest acting in any Hol ywood film, providing resonant evidence of the power of melodrama, a genre this film revivifies. This film also dazzlingly reworks and reimagines the narcissistic/masochistic schema of Bush-to-Bush cinema, confirming its importance but also problematizing it.

The manner in which Brokeback stages its battle between narcissistic and masochistic manhood denatures the relational logic between them. If normative manhood is most often in Hol ywood film understood as narcissistic, and queer manhood as masochistic—though as I have been arguing it is more cogent to see the project of several films as the transformation of a narcissistic manhood into a masochistic manhood—then this film determinedly unsettles the question and makes hazy the only ostensibly secure boundaries between each.

Gender is Difference

B. Ruby Rich writes that “ever since the dawn of feminist film criticism and theory in the 1970s, film scholars have analyzed the homoerotic subtexts in

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush the homosocial world of the classic western.” Noting the exceptionality of Lee’s film, she observes:

But Brokeback Mountain goes much further, for it turns the text and subtext inside out and reads the history of the west back through an uncompromis-ingly queer lens. Not only does the film queer its cowboys, but it virtually queers the Wyoming landscape as a space of homosexual desire and fulfillment, a playground of sexuality freed from judgment, an Eden poised to restore prelapsarian innocence to a sexuality long sullied by social shame.1

The considerable air of premonitory erotic suspense Lee creates in his homo-Eden is palpable. When Ennis comes upon a huge bear that startles his horse into throwing him to the ground and sets mules racing away, it feels like Nature giving vent to gathering libidinal tensions. Ennis says of the coyote he has shot, “Big sonofabitch . . . balls on him the size of apples.” The mountain realm of Brokeback is a pastoral idyll of male-male bonds that returns those bonds to nature; women are not present in the film until we meet Ennis’s wife, Alma (Michelle Williams).2

I would argue that Lee’s project here is to demonstrate that gendered sameness is also gendered difference, an answer to Michael Warner’s challenge to psychoanalytic pathologizations. The film challenges the psychoanalytic view of homosexual desire as narcissistic desire for gendered sameness by dismantling the very concept of gendered sameness, making it impossible to read Ennis and Jack’s erotic desires for each other as desire for self-likeness. If we take the already archetypal image of Ennis standing while Jack lies on the earth (which commences the scene in which Ennis and Jack tell each other that they’re not queer but also establish that their sexual relationship will continue) as iconic, we can see clearly the manner in which Lee’s film renders gendered sameness as gendered difference. With his handsome flat-canvas face and brown-blond hair, tan jacket and white Stetson, holding a rifle pointed down in his right hand, his blue jeans a pale blue that contrasts with pale tan boots, Ennis stands, the classic Western hero with an apparently imperial eye through which he masters the landscape and its inhabitants; with his black Stetson, dark hair and sideburns, dark green, brown, and black jacket, and dark blue jeans and dark boots, Jack lies close to the earth and resembles it.

They are a study in contrasts, as distinct as the Apollo Belvedere is from a faun or satyr. (Jack has furry sideburns and the immense eyes of a woodland creature, and he plays the harmonica, badly—he is a would-be Pan to Ennis’s stonily distant but inwardly tender young Apollonian god.) If Ennis provides the more traditionally masculine role and Jack the more feminine, the film

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain 1
asks us to remember that, despite the familiar homophobic charges (“Which one of you plays the girl?”) the top/bottom, active/passive dichotomy in male same-sex relationships, clichéd though it is, profoundly resists the notion of gay desire as narcissistic desire for sameness, the clone. I can think of no other film that more appositely matches Freud’s stunning contention in his 1925 essay “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” that “all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and their cross inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.”3

Moreover, Ennis is not always consistently the masculinist one, nor Jack the feminine. As we will see, if Jack’s desire to stare at Ennis unnoticed is masochistic, Ennis’s attempts to stare unnoticed at Jack as wel , also puts him in the masochistic position. (Notice the downright sustained visual appraisal Ennis gives Jack when he rides away after saying the bucking horse he’s on can’t throw him [she does, of course]. Though we do briefly see that he’s a successful salesman, poor Jack’s major talent is loving Ennis.) The film insists on demonstrating the gendered fluidity of its protagonists. Ennis is as capable of brutality as of great tenderness, as we will discuss, but at times he expresses bewilderment that refuses his access and allegiance to the rationalist and masculinist realm of the Symbolic order. (“Wel , what are we going to do now?”

Ennis asks when the Chilean sheepherder’s sheep become entangled with the ones they watch; it’s Jack who comes up with a plan to disentangle them.) Jack also exhibits traditional masculinist strength when he opposes his obnoxious father-in-law, self-styled as the “stud duck,” but also when he angrily stands up to Ennis even after he has threatened to kill Jack for going to Mexico.

Ennis and Jack combine and intermix masculine and feminine elements.

As such, they represent between them the continuum of gendered and sexual signs, associations, and attributes. If the film comes close in any way to a universalizing message, it is that gender is difference.

Hetero-Narcissism and Homo-Masochism . . .

Or Is It the Other Way Around?

If the film remarkably revises traditional notions of gendered identity, it does so through the profound force by which it mounts its double-protagonist narcissistic/masochist split. But the film also deeply problematizes this split, refusing a ready sense of how it organizes its narcissistic/masochistic themes.

In the very early scene in which both Ennis and Jack are introduced to each

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush other, the film stages a narcissistic conflict within masculine identity. Waiting for Aguirre (Randy Quaid), the boss who will give them their fateful jobs on Brokeback, Ennis and Jack size each other up, an appraisal Lee renders visually in a homo-homage to Sergio Leone’s languorous opening scenes in his immortal western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In Proulx’s story, Ennis and Jack awkwardly meet and introduce themselves to each other in Aguirre’s office; Lee seizes upon the wordless time before they step into the office as an opportunity for a visual commentary on their identities and longings, making the first words of introduction, spoken after they leave the office, that much more momentous. His hat over and obscuring his face, Ennis stands outside of Aguirre’s office, a visually rendered sign of Ennis’s problematic allegiance to the social superego of prohibition and order that Aguirre (unstably, as we will see) represents. Jack, on the other hand, parks his rickety black pickup a distance from the office and seems as interested in appraising Ennis as he does in offering himself up for employment. Seeing Ennis standing, Jack looks at him and momentarily offers himself up in a sculptural pose that signals both narcissistic pride and a masochistic willingness to be seen as an object for visual appraisal. Ostensibly unnoticed, he retreats into an autoerotic world of self, an attempted immersion in a narcissistic logic. Unseen by Jack but seen by us, Ennis also takes Jack in visually, but from a cautious remove. If removed, isolate Ennis represents narcissistic solipsism, his desire to see Jack while remaining himself unseen as a desirer returns us to the theme of the masochistic gaze. It is precisely the vulnerability within his anxious negotiation of the gaze that signals the instability in his masculine self-composure that will manifest itself as queer desire. For his part, Jack’s attempt to overinscribe normative narcissistic desire upon his own subjectivity ends up locking him into masochistic identity: attempting to shave by looking at himself in the rearview mirror of his pickup, Jack both cannot help looking at Ennis and finds his ritual interrupted by Aguirre’s arrival. Jack falls into masochism both for his desire for Ennis and as a result of the piercing of his attempted narcissistic ritual by Aguirre’s arrival: in other words, the superego, the castrating father.

That Aguirre, when he later spies on the two, inserts himself into the broken circuit of the male-male gaze, signals “order’s” ambiguous interest in both narcissistic visual mastery and male-male desire. Aguirre, as Randy Quaid plays him, a cold, dead-eyed, but strangely brooding presence, does and does not represent patriarchal order; there is an instability in the depiction of him. If Ennis and Jack had been able to satisfy Aguirre’s idiosyncratic workplace demands, it is unclear that he would have taken such a hard-line disposition toward their re-hire. As it is, when he does spy on them in the full,

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain distantly-observed throes of their roughhousing passion, Aguirre does nothing in this moment to suspend or thwart it, though he does use the pretext of an incoming storm to end it prematurely.

Aguirre dehumanizes the economically vulnerable men as he gives them employment. “You pair of deuces lookin’ for work better get your scrawny asses in here,” he spits out at them. Given Ennis’s astonishing, as we will see, capacity for violence, it is remarkable how abashed, as if afraid of being punched in the face, he is in Aguirre’s presence. Aguirre, his name a nod to the history of conquistadors and colonization in the Americas (and the protagonist of Werner Herzog’s great, hypnotic 1972 epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God), represents, for the most part, the Symbolic father in his most pitiless, anti-nurturing form. This is apparent in this scene as he gives Ennis his task, to keep camp, and Jack his, to keep watch on the mountaintop over the sheep and surreptitiously to fold his pup tent each morning lest the authorities notice he’s there. In this film obsessed with cold, unloving, or absent fathers—Aguirre, Jack’s hard, unyielding father, and Ennis’s dead one, who forced him to see the ravaged body of a cowboy murdered because of his homosexuality—Aguirre represents both the economic and emotional power wielded by the patriarchal father, to give and take away at will. (It is worth noting that though terrible husbands, both Ennis and Jack, associated with their own mothers, appear to be warm, loving fathers.) Again, in this scene, Lee depicts the careful negotiation of the gaze, with Aguirre’s ability, highlighted by camera movement, to seize and isolate either man at will with his eyes; Jack looks over at Ennis, and at another point Ennis looks at Jack, neither acknowledging the other’s gaze, though we see them all. The impression subtly given is of a kind of shared complicity—a plea for sympathy as well—between the two as Aguirre’s cold, pitiless glare threatens to obliterate them. So hypnotically threatening is Aguirre that he holds them in his sway after he’s finished speaking, having to aim an even more threateningly blank expression at them to startle them into leaving.

The Masochistic Gaze/Narcissus Shattered

To consider the way in which the film generally renders Ennis as narcissistic and Jack as masochistic, we can compare the visual depiction of Ennis shaving during the day at the camp base to Jack’s earlier one. Pointedly, Ennis shaves without looking at himself in the mirror and therefore without surreptitiously attempting, as Jack did, to take the other man into his own mirrored reflection. In this case, Narcissus affirms his beauty by negation; closed-off Ennis

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. The masochistic gaze: Jack averting his gaze from naked Ennis does not need to see his own reflection to maintain his self-regard as his primary object-choice, though, as we have seen, there have been subtle hints of his growing curiosity about Jack. Or more properly, Ennis is an unself-aware Narcissus. As Theodor Reik argues, masochism needs a witness; narcissism needs no one else at all.

Lee’s staging of the masochistic gaze reveals a great deal about the sexual tensions between the men. In one of the most homoerotic moments in the film, we see a close-up of Jack’s face, pointedly not looking at Ennis as he bathes, crouching, in the distance. Jack’s decision not to look is the chosen route of masochistic passivity, in which considerable pleasure can be had in renouncing one’s access to mastery, here in the form of the visual spectacle of Ennis’s naked, desired body. Ennis’s indifference to Jack’s quiet interest—

Gyllenhaal’s eyes subtly flicker beneath their heavy lids—confirms his narcissistic solipsism, which the film will undertake as its chief project to check and transform. This is one of the rare Bush-to-Bush films in which the transformation of narcissistic manhood into masochistic manhood is not phobic.

Considering the overlaps with Casualties of War’s deployment of this imagery brings this study full circle. As we saw in Chapter Two, shaving in Casualties emerges as a ritual of personal despair falling into narcissistic blankness, a cold deadening of feeling that makes it possible for Meserve to foment his horrific plot to kidnap, rape, and murder Oanh. Looking at his own image signals that Meserve will soon be unable to see anyone else. As a ritual that must be performed, shaving metonymically represents manhood itself, a sustained cultural performance ostensibly as effortlessly calibrated as

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain the strokes of razor against lathered skin. Meserve’s increasingly clumsy, jerky hand movements signify the faultiness of his performance. Ennis’s unself-conscious and uninterrupted shaving, in contrast to Jack’s Ennis-minded and interrupted one, subtly convey his stature as a man, sturdily, unimpeachably masculine. Ennis is therefore a new Billy Budd, an object of desire upon whom the prohibition against looking is placed, hence, in this straight-queer double-gazing film, Jack’s not looking-looking and our own. I return to the prohibition point below.

We do see Ennis reflected in a mirror later in the film in an extraordinary shot that diagnoses Ennis’s narcissism as not only the barrier to his ability to connect with others but also as the fundamental schism in American male identity. Ennis briefly comes back inside his family’s apartment in Riverton the morning after he has spent the night with Jack in a motel, their triumphant romantic and sexual reunion after a four-year hiatus. Alma, who witnessed surreptitiously (like Aguirre, but with much more audience sympathy), the men’s furiously lip-locked reunion, remains benumbed but still challenges Ennis that “your friend could come inside and have a cup of cof-fee.” (“Jack’s from Texas,” Ennis cryptically responds.) We want more than anything for Ennis and Jack to find happiness together, and Ennis’s incredible excitement—at seeing Jack again (“Jack Fucking Twist!”), over the prospect of getting away with Jack—touches and thrills us. If there is a more exhilarating and anguished depiction of overwhelming erotic need in the cinema than Ennis and Jack’s reunion kiss, I have not seen it. Ledger is particularly brilliant here, showing us the waves of desire pounding away at Ennis’s reserve like a raging tide against a rock. In bed together at the motel, Jack tells Ennis,

“Brokeback got us good, didn’t it?” Them and us both. Yet, it is undeniable that their happiness—ultimately unrealizable, anyway—has severe human costs for their wives and children. The point Lee’s film makes is that the closet is the ominous maw of American culture, devouring all in its proximity.

Ennis’s inability to recognize Alma’s impossible position and her suffering confirm that Ennis remains stuck in the position of narcissistic solipsism.

Nervous and determined, Ennis attempts quickly to pack up stuff for his weekend getaway with newly returned Jack, stopping in the bathroom for a moment. Toothbrush in mouth and pointed downward, Ennis opens the medicine cabinet, whose mirrored surface captures his image. Lee holds this image up against the parallel one of Ennis’s actual body, so that we can his face and its reflection, the narcissistic conduit visually captured. Yet, uncannily, the mirror reflection, because of the angle at which it hangs, appears to have a different expression from Ennis’s own. If Ennis is narcissistic, as the shot suggests, his narcissism is not only an inability to recognize others but

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush also to recognize the self, as remote and removed as his feelings for Alma.

Ennis’s unconscious narcissism signs the essential narcissism of American male identity in its negative form, even as his entrancing beauty on Brokeback signals the radical power of narcissism to galvanize desire.

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren writes of the necessity for the textual Narcissus’s transfiguration, which demands that Narcissus “shift the cathexis of his libido from his own self-representation to a textual body that enters the chain of signification. . . . When Narcissus moves from the imaginary register of reflexive mirroring to the symbolic dimension of subjectivity that acknowledges the necessity of otherness, the body emerges from the chrysalis of reflection.”4 Death emerges as the fate Narcissus attempted to elude with his self-mesmerized desire and acknowledging its inevitable presence provides cold comfort. But it is the very acknowledgment of death that frees the narcissistic subject to experience the larger world beyond the self. Parsing Freud’s “On Narcissism,” Kochhar-Lindgren frames this discussion as a meditation on the dangers inherent in loving; narcissism leaves a fatal, indelible scar. “Wounds and demolitions, pain and the recourse to a violence that is directed either to one’s self or another” are inherent in all of our attempts to love, to break free of “the gravitational entrapment of the ego.” But, as Kochhar-Lindgren maintains, “unless we break out of the magic circle of the ego, unless the self-reflecting mirror of Narcissus is somehow shattered . . . there is no hope that the wound may be healed. And even if it is healed, the scar that marks the place of struggle will remain.”5

Of the many ways in which Brokeback Mountain can be understood, tracking the process whereby Ennis’s soul-crushing narcissism is shattered yields especially poignant insights into Lee’s film. Of course, this shattering is a shattering experience to live through, for him and for us.

Unname Me Here

Though this perspective also illuminates Jack, Ennis can be understood as a double protagonist of one, a portrait of a simultaneously gay and straight manhood. I want to be clear about what I mean here, because the most irresponsible and patronizing trend in criticism of the film has been to read it as a universal love story, in other words, to read it as an allegory for heterosexual love that “just happens” to have two men at the center. As Daniel Mendelsohn demonstrated in a brilliant essay in the New York Review of Books, nothing could be further from the truth. Though there are resonant traditional themes in the film—especially in its connection to the figure of the homoeroticized

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain shepherd in the pastoral genre—and lyrical passages, Brokeback Mountain is a work of unflinching realism, the project of which is to chart, empathetically but unremittingly, the pernicious and murderous effects of the closet and homophobia on the lives of people who love members of their own sex, and, to a secondary degree, on those around them, principally wives, children, and parents.6 So, when I claim that Ennis is to be read as straight and queer manhood simultaneously, what I wish to suggest is that the film deconstructs normative male identity in his character even as it explores the fate of queer desire in such a character.

Ennis bears a not incidental resemblance to several key figures from classical and contemporary literature. He resembles the virginal—and decidedly not dulcet—hunter Hippolytus, who rejects sexuality altogether; James Fenimore Cooper’s sex-phobic Natty Bumppo; and the unyielding, taciturn, isolate cowboys played by John Wayne in films like Red River (1948) and The Searchers (1956).7 In contrast, Gyllenhaal’s Jack—a criminally undervalued, abundantly empathetic and generous performance no less crucial to the film than Ledger’s justly acclaimed one—is like Montgomery Clift crossed with a faun, and as such an exquisite study in masculine contrast to Ledger’s stolid, looming Ennis. I will return to the important valences between Ennis and the traditional Western hero, but for now I want to focus on precisely the aspect of Ennis’s character most likely to be overlooked: his queerness. Perhaps because Jack is the active seducer in their first sexual encounter (which complicates the view of him as passive-masochist), a common misperception of the film’s representation of Ennis is that he was straight until Jack seduced him.

Nothing of this nature is suggested by the film—in fact, quite the reverse.

Interestingly enough, back outside in the light of day after Aguirre has given them their jobs, when Jack introduces himself (“Jack Twist,” holding out his hand), Ennis responds with his first name only. “Your folks just stop at Ennis?” Jack asks. “Del Mar,” responds Ennis, in the first sonorously delivered words of Ledger’s extraordinarily realized performance. If Aguirre represents the father as brutally indifferent to the lost sons of patriarchy, namelessness emerges as both an emblem of the filial wound and a resistance to the Name of the Father, sign of His Law.

Judith Butler asks that we consider the name as a “token of a symbolic order, an order of social law, that which legislates viable subjects through the institution of sexual difference and compulsory heterosexuality.”8 Ennis’s deferral or even rejection of his patronym here makes this a suggestive moment for the queer interpretation of this avowedly queer work. As Butler writes, “the name as patronym does not only bear the law, but institutes the law. . . . producing a subject.” Insofar as it has the power to do so, the patro-

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush nymic name produces the subject “on the basis of a prohibition, a set of laws that differentiates subjects through the compulsory legislation of sexed social positionalities.”9 Ennis’s namelessness does not free him from compulsory inclusion into heterosexualized and patriarchal manhood, but it symbolically associates him with that which cannot be named, what Ennis later calls “this thing,” queer desire.

Both Ennis and Jack provide new versions of a nineteenth-century phenomenon: in Geoffrey Sanborn’s words, the “white boy who will not accept his patrimony, who represents the end of the familial line,” who allows himself

“to be sucked into what Lyn Lofland has called ‘the world of strangers.’”10

What Brokeback Mountain contributes to this category of white male anomie and resistance is the Western setting as a site for freedom from social constraints that can potentially transform the world of strangers into the world of deep and abiding ties. In some ways, this fits in with the famous Fiedlerian view of a mythic male bonding that allows the protagonist to escape “the gentle tyranny of home and woman.”11 It also seems to draw on the famous

“frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that the American frontier was crucial to American identity because it endowed Americans with a sense of limitless futures with no boundaries; the frontier was a place in which anyone could go to discard their old identities and make themselves anew. But the sexual as well as friendly ties between Ennis and Jack challenge the de-eroticized homosociality so crucial to homophobically minded American identity. Moreover, although Lee fully exploits the vast, expansive mountainous settings for homoerotic pastoral idyl , he also makes antithetical use of this expansiveness precisely to demonstrate the men’s ironic imprisonment within it. Enclosed in openness, the men shout murderously at each other at the film’s climax about the constriction of their lives as the infinite spatial reaches of the mountains surround them.

In the bar, after being given jobs by Aguirre, Ennis and Jack compare notes over beers. Jack begins to speak of his distant father’s emotional stinginess (a rodeo rider who kept his secrets to himself, he never came to see Jack ride), and Ennis remarks that he hasn’t seen his parents since he was a child. “Your folks run you off?” Jack asks. “They run themselves off,” Ennis responds, describing the car accident in which they died. Throughout the Brokeback days of their youth in the film, Jack will subtly try to discover the truth of Ennis’s sexuality or present their subaltern sexuality as shared. “What’s the Pente-cost?” Ennis, whose parents were Methodist, asks Jack. “I don’t know . . .

when the world ends and fellas like you and me march off to hel .” “Speak for yourself,” Ennis wryly remarks. “You may be a sinner but I ain’t yet had the opportunity.” It is crucial that Ennis be a virginal hunter, like Hippolytus,

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain who rejects compulsory sexuality in favor of homosocial companionships (and the worship of the goddess of chastity Artemis), and, even more pertinently, like Narcissus. Certainly there is no shot in which Ledger is more beautiful than that in which Ennis shoots and—in contrast to Jack—kills the elk. As I discuss below, Ennis is a crucial contribution to—but also a correction of—
the inviolate male of American culture.

A Cowboy is Being Beaten: Masochistic Phantasy
and Patriarchal Sadism

Perhaps the queerest dimension of Ennis’s character is his phantasy of a gay man being beaten. That this phantasy is also a memory makes a powerful political point; in a harrowing irony, a young gay college student, Matthew Shepard, was murdered by two young men in Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998, the year after Proulx’s story came out. When Ennis fantasizes about seeing Jack murdered by a murderous homosocial group, and we see Jack’s bloodied, tire-iron beaten face, we automatically think of Shepard’s hate-crime murder. Although it is not implausible that Jack, who has been (it is strongly suggested) having an affair with a Texas rancher, was actually gay-bashed, it is important to keep in mind that there is no conclusive evidence for this given in the film (or the story), and that Jack’s murder is Ennis’s phantasy. The phantasy is the link to Ennis’s harrowing memory of being taken as a child, along with his brother, by his father to see the corpse of Earl, one of two men killed for being gay, “tough old birds” though they were. As Ennis describes it in Proulx’s story, “They took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel.” “You seen that?” Jack asks. “Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K. E. [Ennis’s brother]. Dad laughed about it. Hel , for all I know he done the job.”12 In Proulx’s story, Ennis recalls this memory to Jack as they lie in bed at the motel, going on to say that if his father were to see them in bed together, he’d be sure to get his tire iron. In the film, Ennis tells the story during a nighttime campfire scene during the men’s post-motel weekend trip.

What’s most important here is Ennis’s masochistic phantasy of being beaten by the father. This phantasy incorporates Jack, given the ultimate inclusion within the phantasy through Ennis’s vision of his murder, and provides the chief basis for his emotional—and pragmatic—inability to commit to the “sweet life” of their living and ranching together that Jack plangently

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush proposes. Ennis’s fear of violent death places him in a masochistic queer/
feminine position of awaiting anticipated violence. It also relates to one of the story’s and, even more decisively, the film’s great themes, the murderous nature of the father, in other words, patriarchy. In Ennis’s memory of being taken by his father to see murdered Earl, Lee shows us the father’s noose-like hand on the child Ennis’s neck, grasping the boy’s flesh. This scene is both iconic and symbolic: it is a representation of something that actually happened to Ennis but it also stands in for the queer male subject position to the disciplining, crushing Symbolic order of the castrating, murderous father.

As I have argued throughout this book, a powerful anti-patriarchal theme informs the majority of the films we have considered. Brokeback Mountain offers an especially vivid critique of patriarchy, which makes it, far from the conservative, “straight” film critics such as J. Hoberman have derisively called it, one of the most radically political films of recent years—as well as one of the most rigorously beautiful.13 And as a memorial to Wyoming’s Matthew Shepard, the film is immensely more powerful than Moisés Kaufman’s unbearably self-congratulatory and universalizing 2001 film The Laramie Project, based on his equally lugubrious play.

Freud’s famous 1919 essay “A Child is Being Beaten” sheds light on the metaphorical significance of Ennis’s beating phantasy. Roughly speaking, there are three phases in a child’s beating-phantasies. Phase One is “My father is beating the child, ” which can be more precisely stated as “My father is beating the child whom I hate. ” Phase Two is “I am being beaten by my father. ” In Phase Three, in which the father has been replaced by some authority figure, such as a teacher, it is not one child but several children being beaten, and the fantasizing child no longer appears in the phantasy (“In reply to pressing inquiries,” Freud writes, “the patients only declare ‘I am probably looking on.’”).

Freud describes the second phase as both the unconscious and masochistic one, “and incomparably the more important. Not only because it continues to operate through the agency of the phase that takes its place; but we can also detect effects on the character which are directly derived from its unconscious setting. People who harbor phantasies of this kind develop a special sensitive-ness and irritability towards anyone whom they can put among the class of fathers.”14

Ennis’s phantasy of Jack being beaten by a group of men parallels the “third beating-phantasy” phase involving several children, in the Freudian view a sadistic phantasy that leads to onanistic gratification although one haunted by the masochism of the unconscious second phase. But in Ennis’s version of this third-phase phantasy in which he does not appear, it is not a group of boys being beaten but one man, Jack, by several other men. And clearly,

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain 1
heartbroken Ennis does not derive sadistic or onanistic gratification from the phantasy. Rather, it is this phantasy that finally renders Ennis’s position, in terms of his own self-regard and his view of his and Jack’s place in the world, as masochistic. The film performs a process of transformation that we have seen in several films, usually in highly conservative ways, of turning the narcissistic male into a masochistic one. But here this transformation does not have that conservative ideological agenda. Rather, Ennis’s transformation in the film is about his realization of his own need for and love for Jack, a recognition that breaks the narcissistic chain, results in the transfiguration of Narcissus into a textual subject that recognizes others and his own mortality.

That Ennis can do this only after Jack dies makes this transfiguration a deeply and piercingly ambivalent one.

The phantasy of Jack’s death at the hands of several men also conveys the idea that, at heart, gay male identity is fundamentally opposed to male homosociality, and that it is precisely male homosociality that threatens and opposes, often with murderous force, homosexuality. As we discussed in Chapter Two, male homosociality is another facet, another face, of patriarchy, the Law of the Father; the fraternal order is not opposed to patriarchy but is the very logic through which it is organized. In fantasizing about a murderous homosocial group, Ennis fantasizes about the killing conduct of the Father.

In this film, the Father emerges as a violent, vengeful, unyielding force that threatens to obliterate queer manhood. Brokeback, as films as disparate as The Silence of the Lambs and The Passion of the Christ also do, forces us to reexamine the much-maligned Freudian theory of homosexuality in men as a result of identification with the mother.

Sons and Mothers

All the father figures in the film—Aguirre, Ennis’s father in flashback, Jack’s father—represent manhood at its most pitiless, ungenerous, and frightening.

Mothers, on the other hand, are valorized, as are bonds between mothers and sons. As I have been suggesting throughout this book, the Freudian paradigm of the centrality of the mother-son bond to homosexual male development may have more validity and explanatory power than many critics allow (even if these Freudian views have been put to pernicious uses by those in the psychoanalytic profession who inherited and abused them). A crucial aspect to the extraordinarily moving quality of the penultimate scene in which Ennis visits Jack’s family after learning of Jack’s death is the unspoken connection between Ennis and Jack’s stoic yet emotionally telegraphic mother, who puts

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush a hand on Ennis’s shoulder as she encourages him to visit Jack’s room, kept the same way it was when he was a boy. “I think that he appreciated that,” she says, a line that strikes a defiant note in relation to the caustic, biting words of the father who represents in human form the symbolic register of identity that Jack, as a queer man identified with the mother, disavowed.

Robert Corber notes the centrality of sound to psychoanalytic notions of the developmental importance of the mother-son bond: The maternal voice contributes significantly to the child’s perceptual development by organizing the child’s auditory field. In particular, it defines space for the child by identifying and explaining the world of objects. Moreover, it is generally the first object the child introjects. The child identifies with the mother’s voice long before it identifies her body, and thus her voice continues to mediate the child’s relation to her body. Finally, the mother’s voice prepares the child for its entry into language. The mother organizes the world linguistically for the child. The child learns to speak by imitating the sounds emitted by the mother and by modeling its voice after hers. For this reason, the mother’s voice can function as the sonorous envelope or comforting blanket of sound in which the child experiences an imaginary plenitude and bliss.15

If the sonorous exchanges between mother-son chiefly occupy a central position in the psychoanalytic and social imaginary, it is highly significant that it is mothers’ songs that provide Jack and Ennis with a special, shared language of intimacy-building and tenderness. Before they have made their growing mutual feelings explicit through physical contact, Jack and Ennis forge a deeper intimacy through Jack’s renditions of the songs his mother taught him, such as “Water-Walking Jesus.” And, in one of the most intensely moving moments of the film, during the heated and anguished argument that Ennis and Jack have during their last meeting (in which Jack tells Ennis that all they have is Brokeback Mountain), Jack remembers—and we see in flashback—a moment during their Brokeback days unseen till now, when Ennis puts his arms around Jack, standing in the morning light, sleeping as he stands, “sleeping like a horse,” as Ennis says, recalling the words his mother said to him. Ennis then attempts to sing to Jack, as he holds him, the song Ennis’s mother sang to him when he was a child. This fragment of maternal song memorializes Ennis’s own lost connection to his dead mother.

If, as Freud theorizes, the homosexual male child internalizes his mother’s desire and projects it out toward another boy whom he can desire as his

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain mother desired him, this flashback restores a lost plangency to the Freudian paradigm—or perhaps endows it with one it never had. If Ennis’s mother taught him to love, Ennis projects this love outward to Jack, who, with his back to Ennis, is as familiar and as foreign as any object of desire could be. The entire Brokeback idyll emerges, through this flashback, as an imaginary time spent in the maternal bosom of the mountain before the forced expulsion into the post-lapsarian symbolic world of the father—the trappings of compulsory heterosexuality and capitalist productivity.

On the whole, Lee’s sensibility is tenderer, more empathetic, than Proulx’s.

There’s something cold about her prose style and attention to the inescapable signs of physical and emotional decay. Her masterly story is emotionally devastating, but in a way that is distinct from Lee’s film, which puts its melodramatic heart out there for all to see (the film is a queer revivification of the genre). In the story’s depiction of the flashback scene, Jack remembers when Ennis holds him from behind as the one truly charmed moment of his life, but even in this memory he recalls that Ennis held him in this way because he didn’t want to look him in the face.

In Lee’s film no such suggestion is made; indeed, this is perhaps the most achingly tactile, intimate moment in the film. What is especially interesting about this scene is that it inscribes tender emotionalism over the audience’s fear of male sodomy—a man coming into another man from behind. Which is to say, it is the movie’s shock of sodomitical sex in the first act that prepares the audience for tenderness between them, not the reverse. (Queer theorists like David Halperin have been exhorting gays for years not to let “sex degen-erate into love”; the most radical aspect of Brokeback may be its depiction of love blooming from sex.)

Ennis’s orgasmic sounds during lovemaking, as Ledger delivers them in his wrenchingly felt performance, sound more like cries of anguish, a series of birth pangs. When Ennis (in a scene Lee poignantly added) comes to Jack’s tent the night after their initial sexual contact, he embraces Jack, putting his head on his bosom, as if Jack were as much mother as mate. The way Ledger plays the scene, Ennis’s sexual awakening is indistinguishable from shocked, blinking birth (he keeps his eyes squeezed shut as if bewildered by even the dim light of the tent). Ennis’s youthful embrace of Jack in the flashback complements middle-aged Jack’s embrace of Ennis, crumpled and involuntarily weeping, in their final scene together. Both of these contrapuntal male-male pietà scenes narrate a version of masculinity that identifies with the mother and extends her embrace.

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Brokeback’s Queer Femininity

It should be noted, however, that actual mothers (with the exception of Jack’s mother) are ambivalently treated in the film. It is striking that we never see Alma’s relationship with her grown-up daughters (one of whom wants to escape her and her “awful” strictness and live with Ennis), only her apparently easy but peripherally disclosed relations with her young daughters. And the film depicts Jack’s wife, Lureen (Anne Hathaway) as an anti-mother: her son defies her (the Thanksgiving scene). It is only Jack who displays concern for the boy’s scholastic progress, whereas Lureen, her hair and makeup frosted, icy, as if she were a manicured show poodle, demonstrates little concern, preferring to focus on her job. Considering Lureen as another queer character opens up an entirely new dimension of the film as a queer text.

In a film like Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), heterosexuality, figured as hot brunet-on-brunette eros (dark-haired Daniel Day Lewis and dark-haired Madeline Stowe), emerges as queer narcissism. In its different terms, Brokeback deploys the same man-woman narcissistic relation: the film strongly codes Lureen as dark-haired Jack’s initially dark-haired double.

If in the scene in which she essentially propositions him in the rodeo bar (“What are you waitin’ for, cowboy, a matin’ call?”) Lureen comes across as the sexual aggressor, the sexual aggression emerges as a mechanical, disciplined performance of sexual interest. Jack’s fellow rodeo-rider (and a more accomplished one), Lureen, atop Jack in the back of her car, rides him like a piece of stock. (Jack prefers the bottom position regardless of his partner’s gender.) When she takes off her blouse, a nonplussed Jack says, “You are in a hurry,” after initially reassuring her about her sexual forwardness. Seeing sexual relations with Jack as rote and mechanical, Lureen suggests that her approach to heterosexual sex may be pragmatic rather than erotic. “My daddy’s the hurry,” Lureen responds. Later, Jack says of their marriage “we could do it over the phone.” If Jack, it is made all but explicit, married Lureen for her daddy’s money, Lureen may have married Jack for her daddy’s relief.

Given the analytical disposition to sex she exhibits in this scene and her later hard, lacquered frostiness, Lureen can be read as Jack’s narcissistic double in terms of her lack of heterosexual desire: Lureen’s caustic insight into Jack’s closeted sexuality may stem from her own. Her coded lesbianism here makes her Jack’s narcissistic double, the woman who refracts his own desire, just as he does her own.

This complicates the Freudian view of the lesbian as, unlike the homosexual man, precisely not narcissistic enough. “As Diana Fuss and Mary Jacobus make clear,” writes Steven Bruhm, “lesbianism in Freud is theorized on a

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain linear trajectory of development and falling back, in which the butch dyke does not assume the (appropriately narcissistic) place of converting her desire for the mother into an identification but rather falls back from this development into an identification with the father. It is that identification with the father and his phallus,” Bruhm continues, “that allows Sue-Ellen Case to posit a butch-femme aesthetic based on a parodic assumption of the paternal phallus, one that remains outside the narcissistic register of one’s attraction to sameness.” As Bruhm bluntly puts it, Freud’s lesbian “is not narcissistic enough.”16

Lureen is poised between being daddy’s little girl and a woman who resists the father: her penchant for business and her preference for numbers associate her with the trappings of conventional masculinity, and her indifference to her son corresponds more properly to the “absent father” image than to conventional maternal warmth. On the other hand, when she hears a group of Texan men disparaging Jack, she says nothing, which can be taken as silent endorsement or silent protest; and when Jack defies her father, a secret smile plays over her face. In the scene in which she tells Ennis about Jack’s death, the film humanizes her in a way in which Proulx’s story never does: as Anne Hathaway (in an underrated performance better than any other I have seen her give) plays the scene, Lureen’s eyes well up with tears as she, in measured, icy, yet strangely vulnerable tones, conveys a sense of the despair of Jack’s life, and of her own life with him. Lureen remains a highly ambivalent figure, but less so if one thinks of her as another of the film’s queer personae.

Inviolate Manhood Violated

If this film conveys a strongly anti-patriarchal message, there is nevertheless an essential masculinism at its core that accounts, in my view, for a considerable part of its appeal. This is by far the most disturbing aspect of a film that I believe heroically represents loving feelings between men. I think that Brokeback is a great and intensely affecting film, certainly one of the most emotionally devastating Hol ywood films of recent years. Yet, an inescapable element in it is a particular masculinist politics with a peculiar history.

Brokeback Mountain represents the most tangible cinematic version of a profound cultural wish to “see” manhood—a seeing that is seizure, both arrested contemplation and possession. Behind every prohibition against gazing at the nationally fetishized model of normative American manhood lies the fervent desire to look at and possess by looking at this body. The ongoing ban against male full-frontal nudity in Hol ywood film metonymically signs the

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush massive social and cultural apparatus of prohibition upon the fully viewed male body. But far from occupying some sacrosanct zone of impervious indifference to these competing desiring gazes, the white male subject’s entire historical and experiential subjectivity is devoted to a counterprogram of resistance and defiance against these perceived rapacious, consuming gazes.

One could even go so far as to say that the straight white male unconscious is the residue of an infinite series of defenses against being consumed by the desiring gaze, defenses both consciously realized and repressed—consciously realized in that they constitute white male attentiveness to the desiring gaze, repressed in that the sheer bulk of psychic energies marshaled by this counterprogram of prohibition must be kept unknown and unacknowledged in order for the subject to experience himself as the master of the visual spectacle at which he lies not in the margins but in the very center.

An idealized and sentimental view of the famous Lawrentian paradigm of hard, isolate, stoic, killer manhood undergirds this anxious morass of male fantasy, anxiety, and illusory mastery. A central component of the enduring fantasy of possessing manhood through the gaze is the wish that visual possession will grant emotional possession, an access to male feelings as hidden beneath prohibitive psychic and behavioral layers as mythic male sexual organs are beneath their compulsory drapery. Part of the extraordinary emotional power and appeal of Brokeback is the sensation it imparts to us of seeing and having iconically taciturn and inaccessible Ennis, body and soul. That he does possess an anguished heart is the real revelation of the film, and that it only belongs to Jack the real gift to the audience longing to possess Ennis specifically and American manhood generally.

Proulx’s story falls within several textual attempts to satisfy the transgressive desire to see and possess manhood, some establishment, others culturally subaltern. Proulx joins the ranks of women writers of popular novels that represent male-male sexuality for both gay and straight audiences: Carson McCullers (whose lyrical Southern gothics demonstrate great sympathy for homosexual characters), Patricia Nell Warren (author of the The Front Runner, about the relationship between a track coach and running star Billy Sive), Patricia Highsmith (lesbian author of homosexually themed mysteries), Mary Renault (lesbian author of homoerotic novels set in the Classical Antiquity), Laura Argiri (author of The God in Flight, an irresistible queer pastiche of the Victorian novel), and Maria McCann, whose marvellous 2002 novel As Meat Loves Salt, set in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, offers us a dark-haired queer hero as seductive as he is sadistic. Below (though not, I suspect, in this fanfic-driven era, for long) the cultural radar, women writers, most prominently based in the Internet, of slash fiction—stories, with varying

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain degrees of sexual explicitness, that pair same-sex tv and film characters in romantic and sexual situations—create endless scenarios in which the fantasy of seeing and possessing manhood, in ways specifically prohibited by establishment narrative forms and the social order, can be realized. Proulx’s story reads like a fusion of both the hyper-literary and the underground modes, like the best, most literate slash ever written. (The issues involved in the female representation of gay male experience are left thoroughly unilluminated in D. A. Miller’s predictably hostile and astonishingly myopic Foucauldian reading of the film.17)

Most of these works are aimed at straight women and queer men, long viewed as a cross-fertilizing desiring dyad. That’s why the great surprise of Brokeback is its allegiance to the very codes of masculinist authority it would appear to scorn and subvert. It does indeed, in Lee’s hands, scorn and subvert them, but it also enables by updating them. Brokeback, much like David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, also released in 2005, relies upon a view of American manhood as intrinsically, essentially, and stirringly violent.

In Cronenberg’s film, this violence emerges as salvational, as we experience profound relief in the terrorizing scene in which the hero, seemingly quiet and genial small-town diner owner and family man Tom Stall (Viggo Morten-sen), decimates the murderous thugs who threaten him and his diner staff and patrons. The powerful fantasy presented by the film is that, far from acting on situational adrenalin, Tom is always already a killer, his murderous energies only banked, waiting to be tapped. (Literally true, since Tom is a former, reformed Mafia hit man.) Though highly impressive, this film is a comedown after Cronenberg’s haunting masterpiece, Spider (2002), one of the most indelible cinematic deconstructions of Oedipal tensions. Still, Cronenberg provides some off-kilter commentary on sex and violence in History that makes it occasionally radical. Sex between Tom and his wife Edie (Maria Bello) plays out like narcissistic violence, with hard-bodied limber Edie a double in whom Tom dissolves. Even more subversively, we watch the transmogrification of their delicate, sensitive son Jack (the very fine Ashton Holmes) into a potentially murderously violent man himself; the upshot of this dark joke is that the bullying target of Jack’s retributive violence is as homoerotically feminized as he is. The film concludes ambivalently with the reabsorption of the murderous father into the family circle, symbolized by the dinnertime ritual. The underlying message appears to be that what will be necessary for the Stalls is their successful forgetting of the exposed truth of Tom’s horrifying capacity for violence, not the violence itself, shown to saturate every aspect of the Stalls’

life. The family must always repress revealed knowledge of its own traumatic origins.

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

Figure .. The inviolate male: Ennis poised against an orgasmic sky, alienated from both the family and the homosocial at once

Access to the tradition of American male violence defines Brokeback’s Ennis. Ennis’s killing of the elk elicits Jack’s most heartfelt cheer, and perhaps the first indication of his genuine infatuation with him, popping up again as a poignant nod to the past in their last conversation. When Ennis broods silently over having to leave Brokeback early, which means both having to miss out on a month’s pay and a month of Jack, and Jack playfully tries to jol y him out of his brooding by roping him, the two men wrestle, which we saw them do joyfully through Aguirre’s voyeuristic eyes (this brief slow-motion footage, redolent of silent film, is one of the most acutely tender and painful images of desire in film). But this time, the wrestling takes on a violent character, and, after Jack accidentally punches him, Ennis deliberately and powerfully clobbers Jack in the face, linking Ennis with the homosocial mob of Jack’s killers in his fantasy. Jack, we will see, keeps their bloodied shirts, stealing Ennis’s, a fetishization of their fraught, bloody bond. Later, married Ennis takes his family to an outdoor nighttime Fourth of July celebration.

Infuriated by some mustachioed, foulmouthed Hel ’s Angels-type louts who fail to heed his verbal warnings, Ennis stands and kicks one man mightily in the face, intimidating the other into submission in the process. Rising up in full shot, his face poised between the exploding national fireworks and our gaze, Ennis hovers between national manhood and a bewildered, disorganized version of it with resonant valences for queer sexuality—an exact image for its time. (This shot recalls the one of Jack [John Travolta] holding

Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain the dead Sally [Nancy Allen] against the harrowingly hollow backdrop of an exploding nighttime sky of Fourth of July fireworks in De Palma’s 1981 Blow Out. ) In another scene that reveals Ennis’s violent nature, he twists Alma’s arm and threatens to punch her in the face and make her new husband “eat the fucking floor” when Alma confronts him about his relationship with Jack (“Jack Twist? Jack Nasty, ” she says, with mingled sadness, bitterness, and contempt). In the most explicit demonstration of his violent tendencies, Ennis threatens Jack during their last conversation. Ennis asks Jack if he’s ever been to Mexico, i.e., ever gone south of the border to buy homosexual sex, which Jack has (the screenplay reproduces Proulx’s dialogue):

“I got a say this to you one time, Jack, and I ain’t foolin. What I don’t know,”

said Ennis, “all them things I don’t know could get you killed if I should come to know them.” (275)

Ennis’s amply exhibited potential for murderous rage must, then, be an intrinsic part of his appeal. The fantasy of possessed manhood hinges upon a desire to possess not only the male body and feeling heart but also this murderous drive and acumen.

Brokeback restores access to the maddeningly inviolate male body of the American tradition; it brings this body back into sexual and emotional ac-cessibility. In Men Beyond Desire, I argue that, in opposition to the numerous social and psychosexual forces that targeted male sexuality as a site of explosive force that must be controlled, the male characters of nineteenth-century fiction resist both female and homosocial desire, opting for a willed sexual inviolability. The emotionally and sexually inviolate males of nineteenth-century fiction—among them, Hawthorne’s Fanshawe and Dimmesdale; Cooper’s Natty Bumppo of the Leatherstocking tales; and Melville’s Ishmael and, especially, Billy Budd—resist sexuality, even unto death. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, with Billy Budd, the resistant object of desire who chooses death as an escape transforms into the retributive agent of retaliatory violence who acts as agent of death. Billy Budd does not immolate himself in order to elude duplicitous homosexual Claggart’s envying desiring gaze; rather, he kills Claggart on the spot with one decisive blow of his impeccably and implacably murderous fist. The homoerotic icon has transformed into the homophobic annihilator.

Brokeback Mountain fuses the icon and the killer, homoeroticism and murderous violence. What makes the final moments of Brokeback so unbearably moving is Ennis’s recognition, as he clutches and inhales both his and Jack’s

40 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush bloodied shirts, the vestige of their one brief stretch of paradisiacal happiness, of his own imagined and real complicity in Jack’s death, and his own capacities for murderous violence, as profoundly felt as his longing for dead Jack’s return. The power of Brokeback Mountain lies in its ability to critique American manhood as it indulges in its fetishization of it.

epilOgue

The Reign of Masochism

The narcissistic-masochistic split that has defined Hol ywood masculinity from Bush to Bush continues to do so well into the waning days of the period and the dawning days of a new era. It spans numerous genres; masculinity’s anxieties know no borders.

The double-protagonist film continues its rise—as of this writing, 2007
films such as American Gangster, We Own the Night, and 3:10 to Yuma all rely on a fraught, conflicted relationship between two male stars. The abc television series Lost suggests that its chief male characters, blond, narcissistic Sawyer and dark, masochistic Jack, together would make one man (to lift from Emerson, making a wry joke about Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott). This pattern extends to many other significant current television series as well— Prison Break, Deadwood, Smallville, Supernatural. Increasingly, masculinity seems to make sense only in the dyadic form of the ostensibly heterosexual male couple that jointly represents the fundamental split in the New Male subjectivity.

The serial killer whose torments signal psychosexual conflict continues to command attention, though in treatments that bear nothing of the elegance and empathy of Jonathan Demme’s work in The Silence of the Lambs. The chief distinction of such torture-porn films as Saw and Hostel (and their sequels) would appear to be that male bodies have emerged as a special site of horror-movie fascination, no more so than when these bodies are being dismembered in all manner of horrific ways. The torture-porn genre more violently than any other genre contests the power and allure of male beauty, which it renders indelibly dismantled, shattered. David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) more probingly explores serial killer subjectivity than most recent films, especially by charting its effects on the homosocialized members of the law and the media who are obsessed with it. There are few scenes more chilling than the one in which investigators check out the probable killer’s home, filled with such

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush grisly sights as squirrels kept in cages, an acute metaphor for the killer’s own trapped, squirming psyche.

Yet, this film also reveals Fincher’s ongoing bewilderment over femininity; when it comes to women, this director draws a blank (as revealed by Fincher’s ambivalence toward the heroine [Jodie Foster] of his 2002 Panic Room). Or perhaps doesn’t: it’s telling that in the opening sequence of Zodiac, presumably from the killer’s point of view, driving through the suburbs at night and looking for prey, the subjective vision we share belongs not to the killer but to a young woman picking up her boyfriend, both of whom will be among the Zodiac killer’s first victims. The misogyny that characterizes Fincher films is especially jarring when we consider that he made one of the great feminist films of the first Bush era, Alien 3 (1992).

Masculinity has become self-aware, yet it still clings to strategies of disavowal. Unable to acknowledge the truth of its own dismantling, masculinity continues to mount strategies of masculine re-entrenchment, shoring up its ruins in efforts that seem more and more like hysterical overcompensation, as Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006) emblematizes. Its digitized hypermasculine men fight against the literally looming threat of queerness and otherness figured in the effeminate yet all-powerful body of the Persian king, who is mysteriously able to shift from loomingly tall to intimately, whisperingly close, wrapping his arms around Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and seducing him into submission.

The film thrashes against knowledge of its own affiliations, of its homoerotic attraction to otherness. Reaching back down into one of the fundamental myths of Western culture, the film attempts to destroy homoeroticism and a longing for contact with the other precisely by immersing itself in deliriously, interracially homoerotic tableaux. The increasing digitization of the human image in film—as films like 300 and Beowulf (2007) demonstrate—signals a longing to turn back the clock of representation, to find entirely new ways to depict a human being. That the chief films announcing the new digitized-human trend hinge upon conflictual male sexuality and amply feature strategies of hypermasculine overcompensation reveals a great deal about the fantasies fueling this emergent digital era in filmmaking: a desire to restore the body to a state of prelapsarian perfection generally, and, specifically, to restore masculinity to an unvarnished—and, implicitly, sexually pure (i.e., not queer)—state.

In this regard, one of the major trends of recent years—the creation of a new Adam—especially fascinates. For several years now, male characters have been cast in the mold of the biblical Adam, the First Man who is also the Last Man, the first and last to have tasted Paradise. In Memento (2000), Leonard (Guy Pearce), bereft of the ability to build new memories, awakes again and

The Reign of Masochism 4
again to a new life; he uses his own body, covered in signs and markings of previous events, as a memorial tableau of his own inaccessible past: Adam with the mark of Cain. Cultural truths are now written on the masculine body, as the clue-revealing tattoos of Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), one of the co-protagonists of the fOx tv show Prison Break, also attest. The Bourne Identity films pivot upon a protagonist with no memory of his past, only the power to inflict harm with consummate skill. This is a return to Melville’s fantasy in Billy Budd: the beautiful and innocent young man with the hidden, banked power to kill. Matt Damon, the star of the wildly popular Bourne series, also played a man with no clear identity in The Talented Mr. Ripley: Tom Ripley longs to be someone and will kill in order to realize this longing.

On television, numerous series have made the Adam topos foundational. On Lost, for example, the protagonist Jack wakes up dazed and confused in a forest in the first episode (he even has a wound on his left side, as if one of his ribs had been removed, and soon encounters an Eve-like woman, Kate, who tends to his wound). Both John Doe (fOx) and Kyle XY (abc Family) begin by showing their male protagonists—both endowed with a godlike power of knowledge—lying naked in the forest. ( Kyle XY goes one better by giving us a boy-hero without a bel y button, the ultimate fantasy of newness, to be born of air, not the mother’s flesh.) The film I am Legend (2007), based on Richard Matheson’s classic horror/sci-fi novel, gives us an exemplary First/Last Man in the titular role. Will Smith plays Robert Neville, a scientist trying to find a cure to a plague that has wiped out all of humanity save himself and those it has transformed into sunlight-loathing, bloodsucking cannibal-vampires.

The character moves throughout the course of the film from an independent self-sufficiency that suggests autoerotic plenitude to an increasingly desperate loss of self-resolve that culminates in a wildly improbable but—as I have shown throughout this study—entirely inevitable descent into bathetic, self-sacrificing masochism. None of these new Adam narratives explore the pleasures of being a New Man in a new world; they each strive to restore Adam not to a narcissistic paradise but to the hell of masochistic anguish.

One of American culture’s most powerful themes, if Hol ywood is any indication, is the desire to present a beautiful, feminized Narcissistic male youth in all of his splendor and then systematically destroy his beauty. Narcissus transforms into Sebastian, the homoerotic Christian martyr, ecstatically suffering as his beautiful lithe body is pierced by innumerable arrows. Such a spectacle marks the 2005 Revenge of the Sith, the last entry in the newer Star Wars trilogy. In this film, the Evil Emperor successfully turns Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi who becomes Darth Vader, to the Dark Side. Hayden Christensen’s Anakin—cal ed “Ani”—is a gender-blurring male figure.

44 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush With his lush brown tendrils and imposing chest and chiseled musculature, his haunted, troubled eyes, and his terrifying physical power, Christensen’s Anakin takes the trope of the “beautiful boy as destroyer” to a literal level, even destroying a group of “younglings,” young Jedis-in-training.1 Anakin’s corruption by the Emperor plays like a pedophilic seduction scene as wel .

Like Michael Cuesta’s 2001 film L.I.E., Revenge of the Sith figures male beauty as endangered and beguiling and signifies it as such through the depiction of literal and metaphorical pedophilia. The pedophilic Emperor, sniveling, snide, effeminated, English, preys upon Anakin, American yet dangerously sensitive and vulnerable and beautiful, so that we may watch his masculine integrity disintegrate, his beauty crumble into corruption. It’s like an enactment of homophobic fantasies of the homosexual seducer as pedophile, writ large on looming, vast, hypnotic digital sci-fi screens.

In terms of our ongoing fetishization of entrancingly beautiful straight white manhood, Hayden Christensen and the uses made of him by the director, George Lucas, also correspond to a great American trope, eternal youth.

Part of his ongoing campaign to remake his own original Star Wars films, Lucas inserted Christensen—wel , Christensen’s head—at the end of his newly redone, now expansively computer-generated imagery version of Return of the Jedi (1983). At the climax of the film, Darth Vader finally chooses Good again and saves his son Luke from the Evil Emperor. Luke takes off his helmet and reveals the face of the dying Vader—that of an elderly English actor, Sebastian Shaw, who was born in 1905. In the penultimate shot of the film, Luke sees a spectral vision—the ghosts of his old master Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), Yoda, and the now good Anakin (Shaw). But in Lucas’s new version of Return, Christensen’s head is superimposed over Shaw’s body, a kind of reverse-decapitation. Replacing the elderly English actor’s head with that of a grinning American youth, Lucas in one fell swoop consolidates his films as paeans to American male virility, beauty, and ever-lasting youth. He does what it took James Fenimore Cooper five Leatherstocking books to do—restore his hero Natty Bumppo to his youth. The same description D. H. Lawrence used for the mythic character of Natty Bumppo also applies to Lucas’s Anakin: he incarnates “the true myth of America”: to

“go backwards, from old age to golden youth.”2

Yet, Revenge of the Sith, with more urgency than any other film I’m aware of, depicts the violent loathing of beautiful male youth (perhaps this urgency accounts, bizarrely and disturbingly, for its being the aesthetic pinnacle of the newer Star Wars films; it’s brilliantly made sci-fi). By the end of the film, the beautiful Ani has been maimed, dismembered, burned, left in a smoking ruin on the smoldering surface of a volcano planet. As we watch Ani’s trans-

The Reign of Masochism 4
formation into the evil metallic man Darth Vader, the insertion of each new metal limb and rod into his battered flesh causes unbearable pain; his transformation into a new metallic life is a grotesque parody of birth, full of pitiable cries and loathsome imagery. This sequence concludes with an image that metonymically conveys the trends governing Bush-to-Bush Hol ywood film: the destruction of male beauty and its transformation into the wracked, agonized form of the masochist, howling in pain and despair.

Not all Bush-to-Bush films follow this pattern, however. In Bryan Singer’s flawed but glorious Superman Returns (2006), striking images denature this anti-Narcissus pattern. In one scene, criminals shoot bullets at unflappable Superman (the touching Brandon Routh); in the most daring shot I’ve ever seen in any science-fiction film, a bullet hits Superman’s eyeball and bounces off of what the film depicts as a shockingly invulnerable organ. The film endows its beautiful young man with infinite strength at the very heart of the sign of physical vulnerability. At the climax, Superman, near-fatally incapacitated by Kryptonite and stabbed by Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), heroically rouses himself to save the Earth. Flying into the sunlight, Superman soaks up the rays, revivifying and restoring himself, embodying the Life Drive as he recalls the beautiful, youthful classical God Apollo, whose beauty is lit by the sun.

Images like these live beyond the reactionary patterns of conventional Hol ywood film and inspire fresh hopes in the ever-desiring viewer.

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Notes

Introduction

1. As Charles Isherwood writes of a recent revival of the stage version of Lucas’s Prelude, “Lucas was writing at the end of a decade in which aiDS had ravaged the gay population. Young men were almost literally turning into old men overnight, as the disease ran its relentless course largely unchecked by medicine. So while it ends as fairy tales tend to, Prelude to a Kiss is steeped in the ache of loss and a sorrowful awareness that life’s joys can be as fleeting as its griefs are unavoidable. It is a romantic comedy of an oddly brokenhearted kind.”

2. Burston, “Just a Gigolo,” 120.

3. Kauffman, Bad Girls, 266.

4. Lawrence, Studies, 64.

5. I should point out that I remain profoundly ambivalent about Oliver Stone’s work; I am not, however, in any way ambivalent about Tarantino’s, which I generally loathe. Spielberg and Cronenberg have been doing some of their very best work in recent years.

Chapter One

1. Drukman, “Why I Want My mtv,” 91.

2. See Lewis, “Introduction,” in End of Cinema, 6. Lewis refers to Juhasz’s essay in this collection, the subtitle of which includes the phrase “the end of masculinity as we know it.”

3. Juhasz, “Phallus Unfetished,” in End of Cinema, 211, 215, 218.

4. Freud, Sexuality, 193.

5. Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 153.

6. Ibid., 172, 176.

7. For a discussion of this new ironic manhood, see Jim Collins, “Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,” in Film Theory, 242–263.

8. In perhaps the chief legacy of the Ronald Reagan era, our presidents have come

4 Notes to pages 16–24
to embody this meta-masculinity. Like never before, the poses, appearances, dress, and so forth of the national leader have been revealed as strategic, planned choices.

The president gives an ongoing performance of national male identity. Bush 41 foregrounded meta-masculinity in his responses to Dana Carvey’s merciless parodying of him on Saturday Night Live. “By the end of 1991 Bush was doing imitations-of-Carvey-doing-imitations-of-Bush, during televised press conferences, whipping back his hand and sometimes suggesting that he had begun to resemble his impersonator.”

See Duffy and Goodgame, Marching in Place, 42.

9. See Wyatt, “Identity,” in Masculinity, 61.

10. Mayne, Cinema, 97.

11. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, 339–510.

12. Bruhm, Narcissus, 15.

13. A recent example of the popular view of narcissism as pernicious can be found in many of the reviews of Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, Steven Bach’s 2007 biography of the most prominent filmmaker of Nazi Germany. These reviews share a common preoccupation with Riefenstahl’s “pathological,” “monstrous,” and

“fascinating” narcissism, as if her narcissism were somehow the explanatory heart of her maddening puzzle, as if her narcissism explained the source of what Susan Sontag famously described as “fascinating fascism.”

14. See Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender, 10. In this study, Stewart discusses the masochistic, “shriveled male body at beauty’s feet . . . the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1940 and that articulated masculinity as and through its own marginalization. Male masochism was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering.”

15. “Now this does not mean that human beings are to be divided into two sharply distinguished groups, according as their object-choice conforms to the anaclitic or to the narcissistic type; we rather assume that both types of object-choice are open to each individual, though he may show a preference for one or the other. We say that the human being has originally two sexual objects: himself and the woman who tends him, and thereby we postulate a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in the long run manifest itself as dominating his object-choice.” Freud’s 1914 essay “On Narcissism”

is collected in General Psychological Theory, 56–83.

16. Holmes, Narcissism, 7.

17. See Warner, “Homo-Narcissism,” in Engendering Men, 190–207.

18. Ibid., 200.

19. Ibid., 202.

20. Ibid., 206.

21. “The increasingly fervent adoption of Freud by the Hol ywood film industry

[provides] a sobering example of the power of the American cultural apparatus to remake even the most corrosive of discourses into alternative fudge. . . . The postwar American vogue [for psychoanalysis] . . . Philip Rieff was later to label ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’: the rise of a new social ethos that replaced religious or moral sanc-tions with considerations of mental hygiene, psychic balance, and above all personal

‘growth.’” See Freedman, “Alfred Hitchcock,” in Hitchcock’s America, 79, 80.

22. As Jonathan Dollimore points out in his superb treatment of Freud in Sexual

Notes to pages 24–27 4

Dissidence, “Freud described homosexuality as the most important perversion of all as well as the most repellent in the popular mind,” while also being “so pervasive to human psychology” that Freud made it “central to psychoanalytic theory.” As Dollimore writes, if the value of psychoanalysis lies in its exposure of the essential instability of identity, “then this is never more so than in Freud’s account of perversion. At every stage perversion is what problematizes the psychosexual identities upon which our culture depends.” Dollimore, Sexual, 174, 181.

23. In a footnote added in 1910 to his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud conjectures that homosexual identity emerges from an identification with the mother. See Freud, Three Essays, 10–11, n1.

24. Despite the difficulties of this project—which sounds awfully similar to the

“familiar homophobic charge”—

Bersani wants to move beyond an understanding of desire centered on [the familiar psychoanalytic concept of] lack altogether. This is partly because psychoanalysts, when they pathologize homosexuality, tend to do so in terms of lack, deficiency, developmental arrest, and other similarly negative terms. By contrast, Bersani sees in homosexuality a form of desire based on self-replication—an attraction in which one desires not what one lacks but what one is. Bersani’s neologism “homo-ness” points to a desire for sameness that, though it might look like straightforward narcissism, resists both the impulse towards identity and that towards absolute difference. . . . Indeed, his account of sexuality becomes fully intelligible only within the context of his theory of aesthetics. . . . Homo-ness is what, in their theory of art, Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call “inaccurate self-replication,” a type of identification that, by undermining the very terms self and other, pushes psychoanalytic theory to its breaking point.

See Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, 24–25. Bersani’s essay in this collection, “Genital Chastity,” in which he discusses “inaccurate self-replication,” can be found on pages 351–367.

25. Dean, “Homosexuality,” in Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, 123.

26. Ibid., 130.

27. Noyes, Mastery, 56.

28. Ibid., 9.

29. Collected in Freud, General Psychological Theory.

30. Noyes, Mastery, 144–146.

31. Reik, Masochism, 88–89.

32. In Caravaggio’s Secrets, Bersani and Dutoit discuss masochistic narcissism in the context of Freud’s 1915 essay, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” an essay “concern-ing the fundamental antagonism between the ego and the external world. . . . Within the Freudian scheme . . . the ego’s profound mistrust of the world can be ‘overcome’

only by a narcissistic identification with the hated object, one that masochistically introjects that object. This masochistic narcissism sexualizes our relation to the world at the same time that it eliminates the difference between the world and the ego.”

Bersani and Dutoit, Caravaggio, 40–41.

33. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” in Feminist Film Theory, 63–64.

34. Ibid., 62–63.

0 Notes to pages 28–41

35. Ibid., 65.

36. Mulvey, Citizen Kane, 17.

37. See White, “Problems of Knowledge,” in Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, 278–298.

38. See Shaviro, Cinematic, 56–65; Farmer, Spectacular, especially the last chapter on Montgomery Clift and the “dephallicization of the male.” Both critics draw on Deleuze’s treatment of masochism, which I critique in Chapter Three.

39. Neale, “Masculinity,” in Sexual Subject, 280–281.

40. This passage from D. N. Rodowick’s essay “The Difficulty of Difference” is quoted by Neale in “Masculinity,” 281. See also Rodowick’s book, The Difficulty of Difference, in which he unpacks Mulvey’s argument with great care and respect for her endeavor.

41. Neale, “Masculinity,” 281.

42. I admire Corber’s intelligence as a critic, but I should make clear that I am often in disagreement with his views of Hitchcock, in my view a much more radical artist than Corber allows.

43. See Corber, In the Name of National Security, 57–60.

44. Ibid.

45. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 166.

46. Socarides was a pioneer in the movement to “cure” homosexuality through psychiatry. As Ronald Bayer discusses, Socarides was to become, “in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a leading and forceful proponent of the view that homosexuality represented a profound psychopathology.” In Socarides’s own words, “Homosexuality is based on fear of the mother, the aggressive attack against the father, and is filled with aggression, destruction and self-deceit. It is a masquerade of life in which certain psychic energies are neutralized and held in a somewhat quiescent state. However, the unconscious manifestations of hate, destructiveness, incest and fear are always threatening to break through.” See Bayer, Homosexuality, 34–38. Socarides quoted in Bayer, 34.

47. Clover, Men, 227–228.

48. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 211.

49. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” in Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, 358.

50. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 213.

51. Ibid.

52. I am more receptive to readings of masochism in texts before the fin de siècle construction of masochism as such. I think the spectacles of masculine failure in the works of antebellum American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, readable as pre-psychoanalytic figurings of masochism, lend themselves suggestively to a utopics of masochism.

53. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 223–225.

54. Ibid., 257–259.

55. See Viano’s A Certain Realism, 299.

56. Silverman, Threshold, 63.

57. Ibid., 41.

58. Ibid., 62.

59. See Chapter Three, “The Gay Daddy,” in Bersani’s Homos.

Notes to pages 42–53 1

60. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, especially 1–51.

61. Discussing Crimp’s writing about gay ambivalence over those living and dying with aiDS, Dean both praises Crimp’s willingness to engage in psychoanalytic theory and critiques his reliance on “pop psychology.” See Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 119–120; Crimp, Melancholia.

62. Butler, Gender Trouble, 64. Though space limitations forego a discussion of them here, several innovative projects on the intersections of melancholia, race, and queer desire have been undertaken in the wake of Butler’s retooled Freudian paradigms: see, especially, Crimp, Melancholia; Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race; Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Eng and Kazanjian, in their introductory essay, provide an especially helpful updating, for queer theory purposes, of Freudian melancholia theory); and Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings.

63. Chodorow, Power, 71.

64. This is, I realize, a highly odd claim to make considering the extent to which Foucault dwells on the destruction of the body by the state in Discipline and Punish.

Yet, Foucault maintains a chilly clinical distance from even his most graphic depictions of bodily annihilation; indeed, I would argue that it’s precisely the effect of the disjunct between cool tone and grotesque imagery that gives Foucault’s writing its kick for many people.

65. See Chapter Four, “The Gay Outlaw,” in Bersani’s Homos.

66. Edelman, No Future, 47–49.

67. Ibid.

68. Bersani, “Genital Chastity,” in Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, 358.

69. Ibid., 365.

70. See Stanley Aronowitz’s essay, “On Narcissism.”

71. Brown, Life, 45–46.

72. Wood, Sexual Politics, 11.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. See Wood, “On William MacGillivray.”

76. Freud, “Economic Problem of Masochism,” in General Psychological Theory, 194–195.

77. Freud, “On Narcissism,” in General Psychological Theory, 56.

78. Freud, “Economic Problem of Masochism,” in General Psychological Theory, 195.

Chapter Two

1. “In the 1980s, as U.S. economic and political hegemony declined throughout most of the world, the decline was manifested, in excess, in a series of films that”

ideologically rewrote the war to fit the imperialist foreign policy goals of the Reagan era, i.e., as a narrative of U. S. foreign policy success. See Dittmar and Michaud, From Hanoi, 23.

2. To De Palma, the story had “all the elements of classical tragedy.” The film con-

Notes to pages 53–64
tains, writes Lawrence Suid, “the singular metaphor for the inferno that the United States inflicted on Vietnam, one far more truthful and powerful than the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter. Just as the four soldiers raped and murdered the innocent peasant girl, American forces in Vietnam ravished the countryside and killed its people, both friends and enemies.” Suid, Guts, 541.

3. Lawrence Suid details the controversies Casualties met upon release. John Wheeler, chairman of the committee that built the Vietnam Memorial, said at a press conference on August 23, 1989, that the film “is a lie about what we were really like in Vietnam. By focusing on a rape, De Palma declines to tell the greater truth, that in Vietnam the overwhelming number of us were decent, (and) built orphanages, roads, hospitals, and schools.” Critics like David Halberstam, on the contrary, thought the country “badly needed” films like Casualties of War. Wheeler and Halberstam quoted in Suid, Guts, 543–544.

4. The separate-spheres model has come under considerable scrutiny of late—see especially Monika M. Elbert, ed., Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930; Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds. No More Separate Spheres! —and has been actively reevaluated. But although clearly there was a tremendous blurring of the lines—as the new research on, for example, the masculine investment in domesticity and privacy vividly evinces—nevertheless, in experiential terms, people in the nineteenth century were deeply and pervasively homosocialized. Until marriage—compulsory, heterosexual—most people had experienced only the company of their own sex. Homosocialization and compulsory marriage necessarily figured heterosexuality as mysterious, alien, the sexual uncanny. Marriage meant the inevitable normalization of naturally unruly manhood, considered socially irresponsible and animalistically passionate.

5. Certainly, media representation has made such a gendered merging appear unthinkable. More recent scholars, such as Karen Zeinert (2000), have argued that women did indeed play a significant role in the war, even in combat, beyond their acknowledged ones as reporters and nurses.

6. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 177.

7. See Pateman, Sexual Contract, 113–114.

8. See Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, 173–175, 129–132.

9. Fiedler, Love, 211.

10. I will be quoting from the book version of Lang’s essay, and all references from it will be noted parenthetically in the text. See Lang, Casualties of War.

11. Kael, Movie Love, 167–168.

12. Like Hitchcock, De Palma’s career has been an attempt to tell stories in film through visual rather than literary terms, to let the film speak through images, in other words, “pure cinema.”

13. See James Moran’s 2004 essay “Casualties of Genre, Difference, and Vision: Casualties of War,” which can be found at www.thehousenextdooronline.com/search

?q=james+moran+casualties (accessed December 12, 2008). Most of the truly exciting De Palma scholarship of the moment is happening online.

14. Ibid.

15. Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” in Sexuality, 123.

16. The hegemonic critical view of De Palma is best expressed by Robert Philip Kolker:

Notes to pages 64–77

Brian De Palma has made a career of the most superficial imitations of the most superficial aspects of Hitchcock’s style, worked through a mysogyny [ sic] and violence that manifest a contempt for the audience by his films (though in Scarface [1983] and The Untouchables [1987] he has shown a talent for a somewhat more grandiloquent allusiveness).

See Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 161. Kolker’s insightful work elsewhere is belied by his crude, banal treatment of De Palma. His emblematically negative view of the director carelessly collapses issues of imitatio and misogyny, without bothering to give evidence for either reading, and predictably praises two of De Palma’s most mainstream efforts. Tony Williams echoes Kolker’s views in his book on Larry Cohen, an otherwise insightful study of another great 1970s auteur. Eyal Peretz’s 2007 Becoming Visionary is a provocative, not altogether satisfying, but brilliant and incisive philosophical study of De Palma’s films and their interrogation of the nature of the cinematic image.

17. Wood, Hollywood, 128.

18. For a provocative discussion of De Palma as a Catholic filmmaker, see Blake, Afterimage.

19. See Moran, “Casualties of Genre.”

20. Caleb Crain discusses the critique of shipboard sodomy in Melville’s novel White-Jacket. See Crain, “Lovers,” in American Literature, 25–53.

21. Reich, Character, 219–220.

22. Wood, Hollywood, 129.

23. Rafferty, Thing Happens, 218.

24. The split-diopter technique uses a distinctive camera lens with two focal distances that allows objects at different distances from the camera (usually on the left and right side of the screen) to be in simultaneous focus.

25. Kael, Movie Love, 175.

26. Moran, “Casualties of Genre.”

27. Collected in Freud, Sexuality, 160–171.

28. A publicized controversy over this ending marred the release of the film.

Though he wrote the ending himself, Rabe decided to cut it out of the screenplay, but De Palma insisted on using it. Not only is the dream narrator crucial to De Palma’s art (many of his films end with a dream sequence) but also De Palma personally felt he needed this redemptive ending. “I couldn’t stay haunted by this story for the rest of my life,” De Palma has reported.

29. In a typical example of the end-directed criticism of art, in which the concluding images are taken to represent the work as a whole, Stephen Prince reads this last scene as “the most amazing contextualization of the war in any of the films of this period”: “Vietnam turns out to have been a dream.” Beyond exhibiting a total ignorance of the crucial function of oneiric themes in De Palma, Prince displays a callous disavowal of the harrowing evidence of the brutality of not only this war but all wars in this film. See Prince, Visions, 146–147.

30. I don’t mean to romanticize the woman on the train’s act of generosity toward Eriksson, only to suggest the power her words presumably have on him. The scene as it plays is highly ambiguous; if watched carefully, we can see that the woman seems to have little patience with Eriksson, largely attempting to get on with her walk and away

4 Notes to pages 78–88
from this strange, haunted man eying her. It appears that something in Eriksson’s wounded look touches her in some way. “Do I remind you of someone?” she asks, in a tone less of empathy than of slight irritation. The theme of recognition is powerfully important here, but it trenches upon some highly complex and difficult issues at stake in the scene (and, of course, the entire film). Jessica Benjamin theorizes that “the need for recognition gives rise to a paradox. Recognition is that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way. But such recognition can only come from an other whom we, in turn, recognize as a person in his or her own right.” See Benjamin, Bonds, 12. However sensitive Eriksson is, it is unclear whether or not he truly recognizes this new, “modern” woman as anything other than the surprising, uncanny reappearance of the woman he could not save. In this respect, this scene subliminally nods, again, to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, albeit with an important difference: while Judy Barton not only submits to James Stewart’s Scottie but also loses her life as a result of her submission to him, this woman says her peace and moves on, away from Eriksson. That she is given Amy Irving’s dubbed-in voice further distances her from Eriksson and from us, as it thematically links her to Eriksson in that Amy Irving played a female version of the woman who could not save a woman in Carrie (Sue Snel , who witnesses the last stage in the plot to pour pig blood on Carrie but fails to stop the plot and, ultimately, save Carrie, not to mention everyone else in the gymnasium).

31. See Tania Modleski’s essay on Notorious in her study The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, especially pages 69–70. Though I find myself often disagreeing with her, Modleski provides a sharp critique of Hitchcock’s depiction of women in films like Rebecca, Notorious, Vertigo, and Frenzy. The major lapse in her work is the complete absence of queer sexuality and its considerable significance to both Hitchcock and the feminist project.

32. Ibid., 10–11.

33. See Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 130, 146, 152.

34. Dean critiques Lee Edelman’s conflation, in his Homographesis, of vision and gaze. See Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 195, n26.

35. Krips, Fetish, 27.

36. Ibid., 174.

37. Peretz, Becoming Visionary, 18.

38. Reich, Character, 220.

Chapter Three

1. Freud, “Fetishism” in Sexuality, 214–220.

2. Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation, 134.

3. Ibid., 32–33.

4. Collected in Freud, Sexuality.

5. I think that Deleuze’s version of the masochistic mother can have important uses for the consideration of certain types of figures in the action heroine genre, especially dominant and powerful heroines like Captain Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager.

6. Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation, 55.

Notes to pages 88–99

7. Ibid., 51.

8. There is an excel ent discussion of male homosexual-incest phantasy in Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference, 76–77.

9. Deleuze, Masochism, 53–54.

10. “The role of Clarice Starling was one of the most self-directed, nonsexual-ized, powerful female roles that Hol ywood has produced in years. In addition, director Demme publicly and explicitly denied any homophobic motivation, arguing instead that the character of Buffalo Bill is not gay at all, but rather simply crazy. In a dossier on the film in the Village Voice, many feminist critics took issue with the gay critique of the film, arguing instead that the focus should be on the uniqueness of Foster’s portrayal as powerful heroine, not on the relatively minor status of the killer.”

See Suzanna Danuta Walters, All the Rage, 158. Demme’s empathetic filmmaking in Silence and elsewhere gives more credence to his non-homophobic intentions than the various ham-fisted interviews he gave about the film (which he rarely ever discusses anymore).

11. Benjamin Franklin’s iconic 1793 Autobiography was widely circulated as a success stimulant for enterprising young men. In 1826, the Vermont printer Simeon Ide, having dedicated new copies of Franklin works to mechanics and farmers, urged workingmen to seek “the good fortune” that awaited them by emulating Franklin’s

“resolute determination.” In Boston, in 1831, a series of Franklin Lectures encouraged young men to make the most of themselves. Giving the growing trend a classificatory name in 1832, Henry Clay called these enterprising young men “self-made.” See Wylie, Self-Made, 9–10, 14. As E. Anthony Rotundo describes the shift from the earlier communal to the new self-made American manhood, “The individual was now the measure of things, and men were engrossed with themselves as selves. The dominant concerns were the concerns of the self—self-improvement, self-control, self-interest, self-advancement.” See Rotundo, American Manhood, 20.

12. Fuss, “Oral Incorporations,” 83–107.

13. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 17.

14. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 167–168.

15. His use of the close-up in this film recalls and rivals—not insignificantly—Carl Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, which, like Demme’s film, brings us into shocking and at times even unbearable intimacy with its heroine’s emotional experiences. Also like Silence, the 1982 Polish film Interrogation, directed by Ryszard Bugajski, with the great Krystyna Janda as a woman wrongly imprisoned and tortured for several years, uses the close-up to make our intimacy with the emotional life, especially the suffering, of its characters unbearably close. Like Dreyer’s and Bugajski’s films, Silence examines the position and experience of an embattled woman in patriarchy.

16. Lang, Melodrama, 34.

17. In Paradise Lost, Satan specifically lures Eve into eating the fruit with the promise that she will become more like God, experience the knowledge that he has denied her. She eats the fruit and undergoes a profound transformation. During her impassioned apostrophe to the Tree that has given her the “Experience” that wipes out her “ignorance,” Eve begins to ponder Adam’s possible responses to her transformation (IX. 816–833).

Ostensibly, the knowledge Lecter provides Clarice does not distance her from the

Notes to pages 99–100
patriarchal institution in which and for whom she toils. But, as I argue in the last section of this chapter, the revelation of her own traumatic memory of the lambs brings Clarice into a deeper psychic connection with Gumb, no less the human version of the lamb Clarice could not save than Gumb’s victim, Catherine Martin. At the very least, Lecter leaves Clarice in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis her own relationship to institutions of power, just as Milton’s Satan does for Eve.

18. In any event, one wishing to see the heterosexist version of the Clarice-Lecter relationship should look no further than Ridley Scott’s execrable sequel, Hannibal (2001), adapted from Thomas Harris’s even more execrable book. Scott’s film transforms Clarice into an ineffectual dolt while transforming Lecter’s highly ambiguous and complex teasing interest in her in Silence into literal-minded, concrete heterosexual lust. (Harris’s book mind-warpingly turns Clarice into Lecter’s lover and fellow cannibal, revealing the essentially misogynistic nature of his sensibility, so unlike Demme’s.)

19. In one of the monolithic texts of our culture, Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, The Whale, homoeroticism and cannibalism are linked in the relationship Ishmael, the first-person narrator, develops with Queequeg, the “savage” South Seas cannibal with whom Ishmael shares both a bed in the appositely named Spouter-Inn and an increasingly physically intimate friendship (at first, Ishmael balks at having to share the bed with Queequeg; in a short time, they become quite affectionate toward each other, embracing and embarking on a “heart’s honeymoon”).

20. Noting the significance of the sperm-squeezing passage in Melville’s novel Moby Dick, Geoffrey Sanborn writes,

By expressing a willingness to splice with Queequeg, Ishmael indicates that he has overcome the dread that was conventionally associated with the experience of being touched by a cannibal, a dread inseparable from the conditions of the spectacle. This dread was generally composed, in early-nineteenth century travel narratives, of equal parts “homosexual panic” and “cannibalistic panic.”

The “violent longing” of the cannibal appraising the delectability of the white male visitor’s spatialized bodies—the cannibal appraising “muscular parts of our arms and thighs” in travel narratives such as Jacques de Labillardière’s account of his 1802 trip to New Caledonia—has clear “sexual overtones.” Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal, 138.

21. One of the most significant, culturally loaded of American tragedies, the Donner Party saga, which began in 1846 and lasted until 1847, occurred in the middle of the “westering fever” that drove thousands to California for its promise of work and bounty. In mid-April 1846, the Donner and Reed families departed from Springfield, Illinois, for California. After many hardships, the party took a disastrous “shortcut”

suggested by the promoter Lansford Hastings that cost them three weeks. By the time they reached Sierra Nevada, a calamitous snowstorm prevented them from entering California. When the remaining pioneers were rescued many months later (the last survivor reached California in April 1847), many of the members of the Donner Party had been forced to eat their own dead.

22. In her chapter, “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time,” Maggie Kilgour doesn’t demonstrate much sensitivity to the radicalism of the Clarice-Lecter

Notes to pages 100–106
relationship as depicted in the film, calling its use of cannibalism “cheap” and “tidy”

in its resolution of differences between them at the end, i.e., Lecter goes off to eat their common foe Dr. Chilton. Lecter’s cannibalism is a telling rebuke to Clarice that she, too, as a queer figure has “eaten her own” in her killing of queer Gumb. Kilgour,

“Function of Cannibalism” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 253.

23. The dandy did not come to be associated with homosexuality until later with the Oscar Wilde figure. The “diabolical” dandy was just as much a problematic figure because of his rapacious lust. Though generally conceived as heterosexual, the dandy’s

“cross-sex philandering” exposes him as effeminate, unmanly in his lack of normative self-control and properly marital sexuality, even if women are the object of his rapacious sexual aims. See Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 27, 70–71.

24. See Barbara Creed’s chapter in The Dread of Difference and her book, The Monstrous-Feminine, particularly the chapter on Alien, 16–31, in which Creed unpacks Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection for feminist readings of the horror film, focusing on the figure of the archaic mother.

25. See especially The Newly Born Woman by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément for an exemplary feminist reinterpretation of such figures as the sibyl and the witch, particularly Part One by Clément. I am not sure how accurate a portrayal classicists would find it, but in Clash of the Titans (1981), the film version of the Perseus story, the most apposite model for Clarice’s own quest narrative, the old women seers, the Graiae (Gray Ones), whose occult clairvoyant knowledge Perseus seeks out, threaten to devour him. He keeps at a safe distance from their ravenous maws, just as Clarice does from Lecter’s.

26. Fuss, Identification, 95.

27. Ibid., 89.

28. Not incidentally, the Ovidian myth of the rape and kidnapping of Proserpine by Hades is another tale of a mother’s search for an abducted daughter.

29. Fuss, Identification, 94–95.

30. Larry Cohen’s Uncle Sam (1997) is a brilliant allegorical treatment of just such themes.

31. See my book Men Beyond Desire, in which I examine the figure of the inviolate male in nineteenth-century American literature.

32. See Clover, Men, 233.

33. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 48.

34. In his chapter, “Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness,” Tim Dean provides a helpful unpacking of Lacan’s views. Although Lacan considers narcissism pathogenic, writes Dean, it is “as a consequence not of homosexuality but, more generally, of the ego’s delusional attachment to a mirage.” See Dean, “Homosexuality” in Dean and Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, 127.

35. Halberstam writes:

I would agree with Hannibal Lecter’s pronouncement that Buffalo Bill is not redu-cible to “homosexual” or “transsexual.” He is indeed a man at odds with gender identity or sexual identity and his self-presentation is a confused mosaic of signifiers. In the basement scene he resembles a heavy-metal rocker as much as a drag queen and that is precisely the point. He is a man imitating gender, exaggerating gender, and

Notes to pages 107–114
finally attempting to shed his gender in favor of a new skin. Buffalo Bill is prey to the most virulent conditioning heterosexist culture has to offer—he believes that anatomy is destiny.

See Halberstam, Skin Shows, 167.

36. Pauline Kael notes that a “few of the original prints” of James Whale’s 1931

Frankenstein “were tinted an eerie green—‘the color of fear.’” See Kael, 5001 Nights, 265.

37. Freud theorizes the invert this way: “An inverted man, it holds, is like a woman in being subject to the charm that proceeds from masculine attributes both physical and mental: he feels he is a woman in search of a man.” Freud, Three Essays, 10.

38. For a discussion of the fears that undergird American cults of self-making, specifically of the achievement of an autonomy that might rule out relations of any kind, see Greven, Men Beyond Desire, Chapter Two.

39. Considering the ambiguous nature of the television screen in this film, alternately a punishment for Lecter (Chilton incessantly plays images of religious funda-mentalists for him) and the means whereby Senator Martin pleads for her daughter, and the copies of newspaper articles of his own gruesome “Buffalo Bill” killings Gumb keeps, it is not difficult to see a linkage made in the film between serial killing and viewing practices of the Information Age. See Mark Pizzato’s essay about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, in which Pizzato theorizes that:

[t]heater, film, and television . . . turn the lost mortal body into a ritual prop for cathartic consumption—if only through the eyes and ears and imagination, not, of course, the mouth. . . . Television . . . gives us not only the physical thrill of imaginary action, but also the illusion of personal power over so many faces and body parts and channels—in “remote control”—as we submit our bodies to the control of that ritual act and its lens.

Mark Pizzato, “Jeffrey Dahmer and Media Cannibalism,” in Mythologies of Violence, 97.

40. In his chapter on Psycho, in his Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon, Alexander Doty claims Lila Crane (Vera Miles), the tough, icy sister of the murdered Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), as a lesbian heroine, 155–188. That reading has implications for Silence if we read Clarice as a lesbian heroine. Yet, because I read Gumb as a fetishist and not, in Norman Bates terms, as a homosexual figure, the lesbian investigator role Clarice inherits from Lila does not have the same valences.

41. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 165.

42. Hawthorne, A Wonder Book, 17.

43. Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 101–103.

44. “If we could give greater recognition to boys’ desires to bear children . . . our boys and men might feel less envy and anxious hostility towards girls and women. . . .

The freer men are to acknowledge their positive wish to create life, and to emphasize their contribution to it, the less will they have to assert power through destructive inventions.” Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds, 151.

45. “The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. . . . She alone looks death

Notes to pages 114–121
in the face, but she alone also finds the strength to either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued or to kill him herself.” See Clover, Men, 35.

46. Ibid., 233.

47. In fact, when discussing the charges of homophobia leveled against the film, the actor playing Gumb, Ted Levine, remarked that the idea that Gumb was abused by his mother provided motivation for his portrayal, not a desire to caricature gay men. Specifically citing the “it puts the lotion in the basket” moment, seen by many as iconic of the film’s homophobic construction of Gumb, Levine has said that he played the scene with the intention of demonstrating the residual effect of Gumb’s mother’s abuse of him. When Gumb mocks Catherine, he is imagining speaking as his mother in her tormenting of him. An actor’s own account of his performance and the motivations he found do not resolve the difficult issues over representation, but I find Levine’s discussion of his own performance in keeping with the excruciating and heartbreaking scene as I observe and experience it. Interview with Ted Levine in the 2001 Special Edition release of The Silence of the Lambs.

48. Freud, Three Essays, 10–11 n1.

49. See Bellour, “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion,” in A Hitchcock Reader, 324.

50. Freud, “Fetishism,” in Sexuality. All references will be noted parenthetically in the text.

51. Though this passage lends itself to one of the eeriest and most beautiful readings of the Freudian canon, it is also the chief site of the controversy surrounding Freud’s Leonardo because he relies upon a German mistranslation of the Italian word nibio, which means “kite,” “not vulture.” (Kites are, on occasion, like vultures, carrion birds; many critics have seen the mistranslation as extremely problematic for the validity of Freud’s findings in Leonardo. The mistranslation also excludes a word: dentro, meaning “within,” as James Strachey points out.) Freud, Leonardo.

52. See Ian, Remembering, 8–9.

53. Ibid.

54. Freud, Sexuality, 212–213.

55. “As Melanie Klein (1929) explained, one cannot have feelings or thoughts about that which we are unable to symbolize, unable, in other words, to allow into consciousness. Without symbols we cannot recognize our fantasies in order to narrativize them.” See Ian, Remembering, 92–93. If Gumb remains haunted by his harrowing realization that his mother did not possess a phallus, as the classic fetishist would have to be, his desire to make the woman-suit symbolizes his psychic wound and need, makes it conscious.

56. This reading of the film depends upon the film’s allusive, intertextual relationship with the mother-son horror genre rather than on Thomas Harris’s novel, on which the film is based. In the novel, Jame Gumb fetishizes the mother, but he has never had any physical contact with her. Abandoned as a child, he obsessively watches videotapes of her apparent beauty queen youth. Harris leaves the “cause” of Gumb’s pathology deeply ambiguous. An effort to illuminate the film’s own distinct ambiguity over Gumb’s sexuality needs the context of the Psycho tradition, which Silence deconstructs. Silence examines the implications of psychotic mother-obsession for American manhood; it extends the theme of the fetishized mother in Psycho to a broader set of concerns, namely, the essential misogyny of American culture.

In 2006, a deeply controversial scandal involving the Duke University men’s

0 Notes to pages 122–124
lacrosse team made the fetish newly resonant as an interpretive strategy for decipher-ing twenty-first-century manhood. One piece of evidence in the scandal—a black woman stripper charging some members of the team with rape—was an e-mail, sent by a player a few hours after the party at which the alleged rape occurred: To whom it may concern
tommrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c..however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.. all in besides arch and tack please respond [quoted as printed].

The outraged newly elected Duke President Richard Brodhead, a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, suspended the student for his “sickening and repulsive” message. But later, Brodhead reconsidered, recognizing the e-mail as “a morbid joke derived from American Psycho. ” Strikingly, the Bret Easton Ellis-inspired imagery here combines a murderously fetishistic regard for women’s bodies—which exist to be skinned—and a highly narcissistic, onanistic self-fetishization—ejaculating inside spandex that bears the insignia of a looming patriarchal institution. And the entire spectacle is targeted at the men, designed for homosocial consumption. What fascinates, as wel , is the remarkable effort to denude women of their very flesh while keeping male sexuality hidden, inaccessible, even as this hiddenness is itself made unhidden by the e-mail invitation. See Peter J. Boyer’s article, “Big Men on Campus,”

44–61. It should be noted that the young men accused in this trial were all exonerated in court.

57. In David Cronenberg’s 1983 film version of Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone, about a man who wakes up from a coma with psychic abilities, the serial killer Frank Dodd (Nicholas Campbell), who strangles women at the moment he reaches orgasm when raping them, was also the victim of a sadistic mother (briefly but indelibly played by Colleen Dewhurst). Discovered, Dodd kills himself in the bathtub.

58. The Freudian notion of love/hate ambivalence, one of his most suggestive, infuses Silence. Lecter quotes Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Roman philosopher, to Clarice:

“Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?” Freud writes:

“One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature.” Though it is easy to read Gumb as homosexual-artist-monster Leonardo, as Diana Fuss does, Clarice in many ways, as embodiment of the action heroine, in her relationship to Gumb and knowledge, more appositely fits Freud’s interpretation: “A man who has won his way to a state of knowledge cannot properly be said to love and hate; he remains beyond love and hatred. He has investigated instead of loving. And that is perhaps why Leonardo’s life was so much poorer in love than that of other great men, and of other artists. The stormy passions of a nature that inspires and consumes, passions in which other men have enjoyed their richest experience, appear not to have touched him.” Freud, Leonardo, 21, 23. We can say that in Silence’s queer pantheon, Lecter and Gumb act on their desires while Clarice sublimates her own, transmutes them into investigation, the quest for knowledge. In a way, Clarice punishes Gumb for acting on desires—albeit in their monstrously inverted form—she cannot acknowledge.

59. If, as I have been suggesting, Lecter’s role as the perverse strikes a blow for

Notes to pages 127–135 1
queerness, this is not an issue without complications, of course. As Claire Pajaczkowska writes:

Queer Theory also acknowledges the scapegoating of “aberrant sexualities” which enables those “nice normal people” to feel themselves different from (superior to) the nasty “perverts.” Scapegoats receive projected and disowned fears of the darker side of “normality,” and are made to feel ashamed, dirty and sinful. But a celebration of

“queerness” may be (politically and personally) inadequate if it is used to deny the real predicament of a perverse subjectivity—for example, that the “solution” created in perversion for the anxiety of sexuality is the best of all possible worlds, is superior to bland, “normal,” “vanilla flavoured” sexuality.

Pajaczkowska, Perversion, 7.

Chapter Four

1. Sometimes, of course, the villain will have such zest that he will threaten to overtake the narrative—examples include Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death (1947), Jack Palance in Shane (1953), and Lee Marvin in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). There may also be a supporting male role, such as Jeffrey Hunter’s young, mixed-race Martin Pawley in The Searchers, Ethan’s conscience but, more importantly, his sidekick—no one would ever think of Jeffrey Hunter as John Wayne’s co-star, much less his leading man.

2. Robert Ray, in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, argues that several Hol ywood films operate as “concealed westerns” (70–89, especially).

3. Thelma and Louise (1991) and the recent Notes on a Scandal (2006) are distaff versions of the male double-protagonist film, which Thelma and Louise may be said to have inspired, but not for the continued benefit of the female star. Pulp Fiction (1994) isn’t on this list because it’s an ensemble cast film, but certainly the Samuel L. Jackson-John Travolta relationship is the central one in the film. Similarly, David Fincher’s 2006 film about San Francisco’s most notorious serial killer, Zodiac, uses an ensemble cast but focuses primarily on Mark Ruffalo’s Inspector David Toschi and Jake Gyllenhaal’s cartoonist-turned-investigator Robert Graysmith.

4. Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, 113.

5. Ibid.

6. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Film Noir: A Reader, 55.

7. Cohan, Masked Men, 88.

8. Ibid., 89.

9. See Durgnat, “Paint it Black,” in Film Noir: A Reader, 47.

10. See Porfirio’s chapter, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir,” in Film Noir: A Reader, 87.

11. Mulvey, “Afterthoughts,” in Feminist Film Theory, 126–127.

12. On American psychiatry’s distortion of Freud, see Chapter One, n21.

13. Taubin, Taxi Driver, 20–21.

14. Drawing on Otto Rank’s famous study of the double in psychology, folklore, and literature, Dennis Bingham writes, in a study of Clint Eastwood’s star manhood, that

Notes to pages 136–149

Rank theorized the double as a “disastrous wish-fulfil ment apparatus that acts out the darkest repressed desires of the subject.” As Rank theorized it, the classic doppelgänger plot is resolved by the slaying of the double, an act the hero performs in the belief that he can once and for al eradicate himself of the double’s threat. But though the hero believes that he is protecting himself by kil ing his double, in so doing he is real y committing a suicidal act. “The difference between the classical double and characters like Block,” writes Bingham, “is that they are granted a recognition. In the other they recognize the dark instincts they themselves repress. Block final y confronts himself in the mirror, il ustrating the Hegelian notion that the need to change is motivated by self-disgust.” Bingham, criticizing the film for its failure to show how Block “sheds his violent impulses and his taste for prostitution and pornography,” notes that the final slaying of Block’s double is “awkward and unconvincing.” Bingham, Acting Male, 214–215.

15. Wood, Hollywood, 203–205.

16. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 280.

17. Ibid.

18. “In each case,” writes Jeffords, “these heroes are shown to be representing the self-serving empowerment of government bureaucrats who are standing in the way of social improvement.” Hence the popularity of the Rambo films in which the hero rescues Vietnam War pOwS in defiance of an obdurate government trying to hide its own incompetence. As Jeffords notes, “Unlike the Dirty Harry films, in which a lone hero is pitted against a widely corrupt society, the hard-body films of the 1980s pose as heroes men who are pitted against bureaucracies that have lost touch with the people they are to serve, largely through the failure of bureaucrats themselves to attend to individual needs.” Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 18–19.

19. Fiedler, Love, 211.

20. See Sedgwick, Between Men, 25.

21. Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic,” in Screening the Male, 201–203.

22. Graves, The Greek Myths, 287.

23. See Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 488–490.

24. Mulvey, “Afterthoughts,” in Feminist Film Theory, 127.

25. Tasker, Spectacular, 162.

26. Willeman, “Anthony Mann,” 16; Neale, “Masculinity,” in The Sexual Subject, 281.

27. For Freud’s discussion of scopophilia, see Three Essays, 58–59.

28. See Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 130, 146, 152.

29. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 182.

30. Sean Redmond finds Keanu Reeves’s performance of masculinity in this film

“knowing, excessive parody,” a camp performance that parodies hypermasculinity.

Redmond, “All That is Male,” in The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow, 112.

31. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 92.

32. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 163.

33. “[At] the end of Point Break, when Utah lets Bodhi go ‘free,’ (freedom to surf, to die, to transcend), and he throws his badge into the ocean, it is because he has rejected law and order, or the dominant order, because it has no place, no space, no time for the ideas values and attitudes of the subordinate culture.” Redmond, “All That is Male,” in The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow, 115.

Notes to pages 150–163

34. Taubin, Taxi Driver, 55.

35. Dean, Beyond Sexuality, 198.

36. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” in Sexuality, 200.

37. See Frank, G-Strings and Sympathy, 28–29.

38. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, 67.

39. Benshoff and Griffin, Queer Images, 6.

40. Another film by Bigelow, Strange Days (1995), set slightly in the future (the 2000 millennium), also explores this theme, as its sad sack protagonist (Ralph Fiennes) endlessly reexperiences preserved memories of happier times with his ex-girlfriend.

“Memories were supposed to fade!” his best friend (ass-kicking Angela Bassett) ad-monishes him.

41. See Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 488–490.

42. Hardcore, like Taxi Driver, is a reworking of The Searchers (1956), substituting the pornographic for the Comanche underworld and maintaining the plot of a search for a violated femininity lost in this underworld.

43. Brett Kahr notes that exhibitionism has been read as both “functions of narcissistic display” and as expressions of “masochistic tendencies,” which often attempt to “court capture by the police and other authorities, thus gratifying the desire to be punished.” See Kahr, Exhibitionism, 54.

Chapter Five

1. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 73.

2. Jackson’s defeat of John Quincy Adams helpfully indexes the terms of the oft-discussed debate between American and European values. See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 157–159, for an excellent analysis of Jacksonian hostility to European “decadence.”

3. “Inspired by the 1999 film Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs have sprung up across the country as a way for desk jockeys and disgruntled youths to vent their frustrations and prove themselves.” The violent repercussions of these fights so painstakingly depicted by the film continue to occur in real life: “In recent months, police in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have broken up fight clubs involving teens and preteens who posted videos of their bloody battles online. Earlier this month in Arlington, Texas, a high school student who didn’t want to participate was beaten so badly that he suffered a brain hemorrhage and broken vertebrae. Six teenagers were arrested after DvDs of the fight appeared for sale online.” “Fight Club Draws Techies for Bloody Underground Beatdowns,” USA Today, March 29, 2006, www.usatoday

.com/tech/news/2006-05-29-fight-club_x.htm?loc=interstitialskip.

4. Bly, Iron John, 2–3.

5. Ibid., 14–15. Bly’s emphases.

6. Thomas, “Reenfleshing the Bright Boys,” in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, 61.

7. In Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, the male subject must enter the Symbolic patriarchal realm of language and reason and transcend the messy, unintelligible

4 Notes to pages 164–172
pre-Symbolic realm of the maternal. There is a powerful discussion of the misogynistic implications of this psychoanalytic narrative in Barbara Creed’s chapter, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” in The Dread of Difference, 35–65, and generally in her book, The Monstrous-Feminine.

8. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 34–36.

9. The best study of sexual reform in the antebellum United States remains Nissenbaum’s.

10. Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, 58. See also Nichols, Solitary Vice, in which onanism is described as learned through same-sex tutelage.

11. Swallow, Dark Eye, 143.

12. As Anne Billson writes, “a severed head . . . [is] a symbol of castration, hence the Symbolist movement’s fondness for femmes fatales like Judith and Salomé. Bram Dijkstra, in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture, writes that ‘woman’s lust for man’s severed head, the seat of the brain, “that great clot of seminal fluid” Ezra Pound would still be talking about in the 1920s, was obviously the supreme act of the male’s physical submission to woman’s predatory desire.” Billson, The Thing, 75.

13. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 70–79.

14. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 153.

15. Patriarchy itself, the system of male rule, makes no such distinction: fraternal and paternal worlds are interlocking halves of the same, homosocialized patriarchal system. “Civil individuals form a fraternity because they are bound together by a bond as men. They share a common interest in upholding the original contract which legitimizes masculine right and allows them to gain material and psychological benefit from women’s subjection.” See Pateman, Sexual Contract, 113–114.

The fraternal American brotherhood of the nineteenth century hinged on the exclusion of women, racial minorities, and immigrants. See Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, 129–132, 173–175, and Nelson, National Manhood.

16. See the discussion in Chapter Two of the separate-spheres model of gendered relations in the nineteenth century, as well as n4 of that chapter.

17. See Greven, Men Beyond Desire, last chapter, for a discussion of Billy Budd.

18. Released in the same year as Fight Club, French director Claire Denis’s Beau Travail ( Good Work), more explicitly inspired by Melville’s Billy Budd, deploys many similar themes but produces radically different results, using the template of Melville’s mythic narrative to critique European-American manhood’s propensity for war, violence, and abjectified isolation, seeing homoeroticism not as corruption but as a crushed potentiality. It concludes with a harrowing image of its solitary and murderous Claggart figure dancing alone.

19. Swallow, Dark Eye, 139.

20. Robinson, Marked Men, 133.

21. Ibid., 135–136.

22. Ibid., 139.

23. For a study of male mothers, see Greven, “The Fantastic Powers of the Other Sex,” in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

24. For more discussions of the “spermatic economy,” see G. J. Barker-Benfeld, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life.

Notes to pages 172–176

25. For a discussion of the New Male sexuality of recent teen comedies, see Greven,

“Dude, Where’s My Gender?” in Cineaste.

26. See Dudley, Man’s Game, 140–141. Dudley links the rise of prizefighting as a public entertainment to the practice of lynching, which he then links to the historical racism of organized sports in America.

27. See Kimmel, Manhood, 138–139. Kimmel discusses the late nineteenth-century rise of boxing within the larger one of sports in America.

28. For more on Jackson, Dickinson, and the duel, see Greven, Men Beyond Desire, Introduction.

29. Burstein, Passions, 54.

30. See Kimmel, Manhood, 138–139.

31. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor, 21, 26–29.

32. Ibid., 43–44.

Chapter Six

1. According to the Web site www.NNDB.com, which bills itself as “an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead,” Diesel’s ethnicity is “multi-racial” and his sexual orientation “straight.” The site’s bio for him deserves to be quoted at length: Vin Diesel was born Mark Vincent, and grew up in an artists’ community in New York’s Greenwich Village. He spent his formative years occasionally acting and more often trying to find acting work on tiny off-Broadway stages while going to school.

He started calling himself Vin Diesel when he started working as a bouncer. With several stage roles on his résumé, Diesel moved to California in 1988, hoping his New York stage credentials would get his foot in the door in Hol ywood, but success did not find him, and he moved back to New York a year later. He fell into depression, wallowing in his failure until his mother bought him a book called Feature Films at Used Car Prices, by Rick Schmidt, which empowered him to make his own movies.

His 20-minute short, Multi-Facial, was written and directed by Diesel, starring himself a struggling actor. Multi-Facial was screened at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, and later accepted at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. He returned to New York and took a second job as a telemarketer. It took him two years to save up the $50,000 he’d need to make a feature-length film.

Blackflix.com’s entry on Diesel in a list of multiracial celebrities illustrates the slippery nature of his race, but also how it is this very slipperiness that seems to stand in for race:

Vin Diesel—Actor. (You can put a question mark by this one.) Born Mark Vincent in New York City on November 1967. He doesn’t like to get too specific about his background. He’s Italian and a lot of other things. One of his fan clubs says, “His father is black. His mother is Irish, and he’s also got some Dominican, Mexican, German and Italian thrown in.” It seems that nobody knows for sure. When asked directly to

Notes to pages 177–184
resolve the issue, Mr. Diesel does admit that he is both multiracial and multinational, but he avoids specifics.

Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism describes Diesel in their list “Almost Everything: Six Ethnically Evasive Celebs”:

Vin Diesel: For some time, busybodies everywhere wanted to know the exact racial mix of this yoked-up action star. (It has since been reported that his mom’s Italian and his old man’s Black.) From the looks of it, Mr. XXX prefers to keep things extra vague, even going so far as to write, direct, and act in a 1994 film-short called Multi-Facial about the perils of being hard to pin down in the acting game. Still, people talk: Is he Irish? . . . Italian? . . . German? . . . ¿¿¿Dominicano, maybe??? . . . One thing’s for sure, though: Dude used to be a bouncer at notorious nyc club The Tunnel back in the day. So you know he’s down for whatever.

2. Mary C. Beltrán, “The New Hol ywood Racelessness,” in Cinema Journal, 54–55.

3. Ibid., 55–56.

4. Talty, Mulatto, 6–7.

5. Snead, White Screens, 139–147.

6. David Yuan convincingly makes the case that Michael Jackson’s career has been a carefully and commercially calibrated display of freakishness, but certainly in recent years the uncontrolled effects of Jackson’s performed freakishness would appear to have surpassed any intentionality. See Yuan’s essay “The Celebrity Freak,” in Freakery, 368–385.

7. Snead, White Screens, 139.

8. Ibid., 143.

9. Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, 17.

10. Alex-Assenoh, “Epilogue,” in Black and Multiracial Politics, 396–398.

11. Ibid.

12. For a discussion about racism in gay pornography, see Richard Fung’s brilliant essay, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in How Do I Look? 145–161.

13. Riggs, “Black Macho,” in Out in Culture, 470–471.

14. A scathing critique of the privileging of fraternal white masculinity within queer culture can be found in the article, “Where Has Gay Liberation Gone? An Interview with Barbara Smith,” in Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed’s Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life, 195–207.

15. Mercer, Welcome, 133.

16. Wallace, Constructing, 153–154.

17. Alexander, Performing Black Masculinity, 72–73.

18. Lahr, “Disappearing Act” in New Yorker, 38–45.

19. As Stephan Talty notes:

Lena Horne was the first socially acceptable black sex object—one that it was permissible for white men to lust after, not only in private but in public. When she first got bookings into swanky white clubs, Horne was advertised as the first black “sex

Notes to pages 184–194
symbol” outside of the all-black stage shows. And she resented it. Performing in night-clubs to largely white audiences, propositioned at every turn, Horne threw up a wall around herself with her cold affect and death-ray stares. She was present, but not available. In that stance we see the first appearance of the black showbiz-diva.

The stage hauteur, the regal distance, the talent and loneliness, the strength through tragedy, have been adopted by divas from Tina Turner to Whitney Houston to Patti LaBelle (all of whom followed Horne into crossover success). The word “diva,” of course, is Latin for “female god” and was originally given to opera singers, but its American pop origins date back to Horne’s desperate attempt to maintain some dignity while being marketed as a chocolate bonbon.

Mulatto, 143.

20. Eribon, Insult, 73.

21. Sympathetically drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Maurice O. Wallace calls for an end to “monocularity,” which is “a metaphor for a single mode of colonial (super) vision maintained in the evil eye of objectification,” in favor of an embrace of an eye that is “capable of a multiplicity of perspectives, is heterocular, and therefore compels nothing of the absolute look of monocularity.” Pitch Black achieves precisely this utopian vision of a heterocular gaze of the raced subject, transforming Diesel into a “visual carnival” that, in Fanon’s language, refracts, reverses, and double-crosses “the spectatorial space.” Wallace, Constructing, 177.

As much as I admire Wallace’s work and commend his explication of Fanon, I find it disappointing that he does not address either Fanon’s deeply homophobic depiction of homosexuality as a white man’s disease, or, for that matter, his sexism. See Fanon’s famous Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967). Paul Morrison provides an incisive reading of Fanon’s anti-homosexual stances in his The Explanation for Everything.

22. This scene was—tellingly?—cut from the theatrical version.

23. Barrett, “Black Men in the Mix,” in Constantine-Simms, Greatest Taboo.

24. Dyer, White, 89.

25. Freud, “The Uncanny,” Writings on Art, 222.

26. Ibid., 217.

27. In other words, popular culture texts enact the subversion and containment model New Historicists of the 1980s located in Shakespeare’s plays: that he set loose transgressive forces only to contain them by the end through the restoration of order.

(Or so was the thinking; Shakespeare’s plays, the popular culture of their era, defy such defining categorizations.)

28. Discussing the documentary on the new DvD release of the film, White writes:

On the new DvD, a 20-minute documentary made by music video director Benny Boom lets a platoon of hip-hop-culture icons comment on what Scarface has meant to their lives and careers. P. Diddy, Method Man, Geto Boys’ Scarface, Eve, Outkast and more express their admiration for Tony Montana, the Castro exile played by Al Pacino who took advantage of the 1980 Mariel boatlift and Miami’s Cuban criminal class to enter the drug trade, grasping after the vaunted American dream with brutal tenacity. This drama was the beginning of “gangsta” as an appellation for ruthless

Notes to pages 199–207
bravery. Its seeds were planted by the big-screen vision created from De Palma’s extravaganza realization of Oliver Stone’s screenplay—a cynical, sociological update of the 1932 Scarface directed by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht. (Def Jam has released a cD of songs by various rap artists influenced by Scarface. It’s a funny, melodramatic array, although it omits Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome”

in which Flavor Flav imitates Tony’s “Who I trust? Me!”) White more uncritically celebrates the African-American appropriation of Scarface than I do—on some level, to turn this cautionary tale of the conflation of accumulat-ing wealth and devolving morals into a cultural cris du coeur is to miss its point; the bling-bling materialism of hip-hop culture seems to stem from this galvanizing but also troubling misreading.

29. See Edelman’s No Future.

30. See Freud, Three Essays, 64.

31. “At a later date [1923] I myself modified this account by inserting a third phase in the development of childhood, subsequent to the two pregenital organizations.

This phase, which already deserves to be described as genital, presents a sexual object and some degree of convergence of the sexual impulses upon that object; but it is differentiated from the final organization of sexual maturity in one essential respect.

For it knows only one kind of genital: the male one. For that reason I have named it the ‘phallic’ stage of organization.” Ibid., 65, n2. In his 1924 footnote, Freud puts the organ back into organization as if defensively to correct the free-floating gendered indeterminacy at which he left off pregenital sexuality in his first version of Three Essays. This fits the pattern of Freud’s career: his earlier work bears a less phallocentric approach, as evinced by its concomitantly greater empathy for women. As Catherine Clément points out, in Freud’s early work on hysterical women, Freud “discovers that the patients have been victims of early seductions. These hysterics are thus ‘accusing—
they are pointing’. . . . And they point to either the father, a dreadful figure, or to some other male kin.” But Freud ended up revising his theory of early seductions, which Clément reads as a defensive betrayal of the daughter and exoneration of the father.

See Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, 41–42, 47. If Freud becomes more male-identified in his work, this matches his intensifying insistence on the supremacy of the phallus, which insistence can be read as a defense against the sexual anxieties generated by his early identification with the hysterical woman.

32. Moore and Fine, Psychoanalytic Terms, 43.

33. Kovel quoted in Adamson and Clark, Shame, 210.

34. Moore, Psychoanalytic Terms, 14.

Chapter Seven

1. Reik, Masochism, 363.

2. Ibid., 364–365.

3. Denby, “Nailed,” in New Yorker.

4. There may or may not be biblical precedent for the inclusion of Satan in the Gethsemane scene. Some have taken Luke’s account of the temptation in the wilderness, in which the Devil leaves Jesus “to return to him at the appointed time,” as a

Notes to pages 208–214
signal that the Devil will return to Jesus in Gethsemane. This suggestion occurs only in the Gospel of Luke. (About Luke’s suggestion of the reappearance of Satan in the Gethsemane episode, I consulted John McDade, whose generous guidance I gratefully acknowledge.) The recorded visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824), a German Augustinian nun, provide the basis for several of the episodes in Gibson’s film that have no clear precedent in the four canonical Gospels. These include the appearance of Satan in the garden of Gethsemane and the provision of towels, on the part of Pilate’s noble, proto-Christian wife Claudia, who urges her husband to free Jesus, with which Mary and Mary Magdalene can wipe Jesus’s blood after his scourging.

Hol ywood, “Kill Jesus,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible, 162.

5. Camille Paglia uses this phrase to describe Dorian Gray. See Paglia, Sexual Personae, 512–532.

6. Chilton, “Mel Gibson’s Lethal Passion, ” in Mel Gibson’s Bible, 54.

7. Rubenstein, “Mel Gibson’s Passion, ” in Mel Gibson’s Bible, 112.

8. Disseminating both Lacan and his interpreters and the sequence of the mirror stage, Jane Gallop writes:

According to [Jean-Michel] Palmier, “what seems to be first . . . is the anguish of the corps morcelé [body in bits and pieces].” . . . The corps morcelé is a Lacanian term for a violently nontotalized body image, an image psychoanalysis finds accompanied by anxiety.

Gallop, Reading Lacan, 79.

9. DeAngelis, Gay Fandom, 182–183.

10. Ibid., 168.

11. “Mel Gibson, director of Jesus gore-fest The Passion of the Christ, was pulled over for drunk driving early Friday morning, launching almost immediately into a Jew-hating tirade of, wel , biblical proportions.

“F*****g Jews. . . . The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

In addition he threatened to ‘fuck’ the officer several times, snapped at a female officer,

‘What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?’ bragged that he ‘owns Malibu’ and that he ‘will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me,’ according to Deputy James Mee’s report.” See the online article “Mel Gibson, Jew hater,” which can be accessed at www.alternet.org/bloggers/evan/39662.

Fascinating to me is that in the picture of Gibson taken during this arrest, with his long beard and manic eyes, he looks like an Old Testament prophet.

12. Reik, Masochism, 87.

13. Chilton, “Mel Gibson’s Lethal Passion, ” 57.

14. The exception is Jesus’s restoration of Malchus’s ear. Malchus was a servant of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas. His ear was cut off by Simon Peter in the scuffle that ensues when the crowd arrests Jesus in the nighttime Gethsemane scene.

15. For Julia Kristeva, abjection is the traumatic recognition of the loss of the boundaries between self and other. The maternal is abject for Kristeva because of its association with that which we associate with the not-us—blood, feces, tears, waste—

0 Notes to pages 214–226
and because it must be rejected in order for the subject to enter the mirror-stage in which s/he assumes an identity independent of the mother, once thought of as part of the subject’s own body. See her Powers of Horror.

16. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 12.

17. Ibid.

18. Heschel, “Christ’s Passion,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible, 104.

19. Schaberg, “Gibson’s Mary Magdalene,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible, 73.

20. This maneuver fully follows the theme of the splitting of frightening elements in the familiar into unfamiliar, repressed elements in Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.”

But in some ways, Gibson calls attention to that which is unheimlich in the Jesus-Mary relationship, presumably made utterly heimlich by its ubiquity in Western art, by contrasting it to the demonic-allegorical version of its doubling as Satan-child.

21. As Heschel writes:

Jesus emerges from the Jews to become a non-Jew, a Christian. By retreating emotionally, spiritually, and physically into a solitary experience of horrific death, Jesus cleanses himself not simply of this world but of his environs, a religious purification that rids the Christian of the Jewish. . . . The disavowal of Jesus’s Jewishness is reinforced by the film’s homoerotic politics, which Gibson undoubtedly did not intend but emerge almost inevitably through the denial of Judaism as Christianity’s mother religion.

Heschel, “Christ’s Passion,” in Mel Gibson’s Bible, 102.

22. Ibid., 103.

23. Ibid.

24. Horner, Jonathan, 120–121.

25. Ibid.

Chapter Eight

1. Rich, “Hello Cowboy.”

2. Brokeback derives from a long-standing tradition of homosexual pastoral. As Paul Hammond writes of the representation of homoerotic themes in the English Renaissance:

The pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil (especially the latter’s Eclogue 2) spoke of the unrequited love of shepherds, and Virgil’s poem would have been familiar to any man with a grammar school education. Virgil himself was said to have preferred sex with men. . . . Eclogue 2 speaks of the love of [between shepherds] of Corydon for Alexis.

. . . Eclogue 2 was a notorious text, and Renaissance commentators had difficulty explaining away the apparently sexual nature of Alexis’s passion.

Hammond, Figuring Sex, 16–17, 45.

3. Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” in Sexuality, 193.

4. Kochhar-Lindgren, Narcissus, 128–129.

Notes to pages 226–244 1

5. Ibid., 37–38.

6. See Mendelsohn, “An Affair to Remember,” in New York Review of Books.

7. Brokeback carries the homoerotic themes of Howard Hawks’s Red River—emblematized by the scene in which John Ireland’s lazily sensual cowboy Cherry Valence and gay icon Montgomery Clift’s Matt admiringly compare each other’s guns—to dizzying heights.

8. Butler, Bodies, 152.

9. Ibid., 154.

10. As Geoffrey Sanborn writes:

Popular advice books were packed with vivid accounts of the fate of white boys who allowed themselves to be sucked into what Lyn Lofland has called “the world of strangers.” That world was, or was next to, the urban underworld of confidence men, prostitutes, drunkards, and gamblers, a place where the wandering white boy might experience disaster, famine, death, captivity, and the sorrow common to those who are unapproachable and unknown. . . . [worlds like that a white boy might find on a whaling voyage or an African, as Henry Ward Beecher put it, on the middle passage].

See Sanborn, “A Confused Beginning,” in The Cambridge Companion, 165–167.

11. See Fiedler, Love, 179–214.

12. Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain,” in Close Range, 268.

13. I greatly admire J. Hoberman’s film criticism, but his propensity for derisive-ness is his worst tendency as a critic.

14. Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” in Sexuality, 123.

15. Corber, In the Name of National Security, 149. Once again, I’m in the position of finding Corber very valuable in psychoanalytic terms generally while strongly disagreeing with his reading of a Hitchcock film, here Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much.

16. Bruhm, Narcissus, 19.

17. D. A. Miller, “On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain, ” in Film Quarterly, 50–62.

Epilogue

1. Camille Paglia uses the phrase “beautiful boy as destroyer” to describe Dorian Gray. See Paglia, Sexual Personae, 512–532.

2. Lawrence, Studies, 64.

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Index

Acker, Kathy, 101

Bad Boys, 128
aesthetics: as life force, 47–51

Basic Instinct, 4, 5, 37, 90

Affair to Remember, An, 126

Beau Travail (Good Work), 264n18

Alger, Horatio, 176

Bellour, Raymond, 31, 115–116

Alien 3, 4, 90, 242

Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 193

American Gangster, 128, 241

Beltrán, Mary C., 176

American Pie, 172

Benshoff, Harry M., 152

American Psycho, 20, 260n56

Beowulf (film), 6, 242
androgyny: the new, 211; in Revenge of

Bersani, Leo, 20, 24, 26, 40, 78, 178,
the Sith, 243; and Satan in Passion 249n24; on masochism and homo-of the Christ, 207–213, 217. See also sexuality, 41–45; on narcissism as
gender
basis for all desire, 46

Apocalypse Now, 53
beta male, 159

Apparatus Critics, 27

Bigelow, Kathryn, 16, 49, 125, 140, 146,

Apter, Emily, 92

192

Arlington Road, 128

Billy Budd (Melville character), 147,

Aronowitz, Stanley, 47

167–168, 225, 239, 243, 264n18; as

As Meat Loves Salt (Maria McCann
both homoerotic icon and homo-
novel), 236
phobic retaliator, 167, 168, 239, 243;

Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,
as inviolate male, 239; new cine-

The, 180
matic versions of, 168, 225. See also

Auto-Focus, 125, 128, 144, 145, 150–159.

homosexuality; inviolate manhood;

See also double-protagonist film;
violence
echoistic male; fetishism; group sex;

Billy Budd (1962 film), 168
homosexuality; narcissism/masoch-

Birds, The, 110, 214
ism split; pornography; video tech-

Black Dahlia, The, 71, 74, 128, 150
nology; voyeurism

Blanchett, Cate, 184, 188

Blithedale Romance, The, 152–153
bachelor sub-culture of the nineteenth

Blow Out, 71, 239
century, 173–174. See also Fight

Bly, Robert, 163

Club

Body Double, 71, 72, 81

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Body in Pain, The, 39

California Split, 136

Bogart, Humphrey, 126, 130, 135

Cameron, James, 15

Bordwel , David, 29
cannibalism, 99–100

Born on the Fourth of July, 52

Cape Fear (1991), 127

Bourne Identity series, 243

Carpenter, John, 122, 186, 198
boxing: nineteenth-century subculture

Carrie, 71, 73, 115, 214, 264n30
of and Fight Club, 172–174

Casanova, 12

Boyz n the Hood, 196

Cassandra’s Dream, 128

Braveheart, 211–212
castration: in Auto Focus, 156; Bellour’s Bringing Up Baby, 162
film theory and, 31; in Fight Club,

Brokeback Mountain, 6, 17, 24, 128, 144, 166; Freud’s theory of fetishism and,

159, 218–240; and Billy Budd, 239;

117–119, 121; Mulvey’s theory of male
and erotic virginity of males, 227;
spectatorship and, 27–28, 33; phallus
fantasy of possessing male, 236–240;
symbolic of, 6; Studlar’s film theory
gendered sameness as gendered
and, 34; and Symbolist movement,
difference in, 220–221, 227; and

264n12
homoeroticism, 220, 224, 225, 226,

“Casualties of War” (Daniel Lang

228, 236, 237; and inviolate manhood,
essay), 57–62

227, 235–240; and killer masculinity,

Casualties of War, 21, 52–84, 85, 93, 108, 237–240; and male beating phan-127, 141, 143, 149, 224; Catholicism
tasies and Freud’s essay “A Child is
and, 68; compulsory fraternity and,

Being Beaten,” 229–231; masochistic

52, 55; in the context of 80s wave of
gaze in, 223–225; and maternal voice,

Vietnam War films, 52–53; critique

231–232; and Matthew Shepherd,
of phal ic power and penis as weapon

229; and mother-identified homo-
in, 53, 56, 70, 73, 79, 82; Daniel Lang
sexuality, 231–233; and murderous
essay considered in terms of, 57–62;
father, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235,

De Palma and the image, 80; De

237; namelessness and, 227–228;

Palma compared to Cronenberg,
narcissism/masochism split, 221–223;

79–80; De Palma’s Hitchcockian
and pastoral, 227, 228, 270n2; and
aesthetics and, 64–65, 77–78; De
queer femininity, 235–236; and shat-

Palma’s use of split-diopter, 80; femi-
tering of narcissism, 225–226; and
nist film theory and, 77–79; Freud’s
straight white male unconscious, 236;
essay “A Child is Being Beaten” and,
and women writers of queer fiction,

63; gang rape, 55, 57, 58, 59, 68, 69,

236–237

71, 74; Hol ywood pattern of trans-

Brown, Norman O., 47
forming male narcissism into mas-

Bruhm, Steven, 19, 234–235
ochism reversed in, 76; homoeroti-
buddy films, 135–137
cism in, 69, 71, 75, 76; homosocial

Bundy, Ted, 109
and American culture, historical,

Buñuel, Luis, 40

54–56; homosocial-homoerotic inti-

Burstein, Andrew, 173
macy and violence in, 65–66, 69–70;

Bush, George Herbert Walker, 3, 4. See

Lacanian gaze theory, 79; male dou-
also queer Hol ywood renaissance of
bling of violated femininity, 74; male
the early 90s
intimacy as poisonous exchange, 75;

Bush, George Walker, 3
male masochism as political y useful

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 136
in, 56; male masochism in relation

Butler, Judith, 43, 227, 251n62
to homosocial, 70; male rape threat-

Index
ened, 70; male sexuality as unclas-

Dahmer, Jeffrey, 109
sifiably weird in, 71; masculinity

Damon, Matt, 38, 170, 143, 144, 243
depicted as impossible predicament

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 24, 118, 217. See also
in, 63–64; masochism as witness, 72;

Freud, Sigmund
masochistic gaze, 56, 67; masochistic Da Vinci Code, The, 216–217
gaze theorized, 77–80; masochist’s

Dead Reckoning, 130
attempts to reclaim narcissism, 75;

Dead Ringers, 4, 170
misogyny and, 53, 55, 62, 64, 70, 73;

Deadwood, 241
narcissism/masochism split and, 56,

Dead Zone, The (David Cronenberg

71; narcissistic doubling, male, 75–77;
film), 122, 260n57
non-volitional suffering, 74; rape and Dean, Tim, 24, 25, 42, 79, 150
murder of woman as al egory for war, death-drive: American psychiatry’s 73–74; Redacted in relation to, 83–84;
rejection of Freudian theory of, 23;
relationship to De Palma’s other

Bersani’s theory and, 41, 44; in Be-
films and theme of failed heroism,
yond the Pleasure Principle, 26; Edel-

71–72, 81–82
man’s theory and, 45; Freud’s theory
child: the ideological construct of,
of masochism and, 25, 50; masoch-

45–46, 199
istic male’s incitement of narcissistic

Christensen, Hayden, 245
male’s own masochism and, 149, 150;

Christianity, representation of. See Jesus; and Mel Gibson films, 211; penis,

Mary; Passion of the Christ
phallus, and, 70; persuasive power of

Christmas Carol, A, 45

Freud’s theory of, 47; queer theory

Chodorow, Nancy, 43
fetishization of, 38, 41, 44, 45; versus

Chronicles of Riddick, The, 177, 185, 188–
the life-drive, 47, 51

191. See also Diesel, Vin

Deep Throat, 155

Citizen Kane, 28

Deer Hunter, The, 52, 252n2

Clift, Montgomery, 127, 250n38, 271n7

Deleuze, Gilles, 33, 34, 36; Coldness and

Clinton, William Jefferson, 3, 6, 14, 160,

Cruelty, 85–89. See also fetishism; 161, 171, 178
masochism; misogyny

Clover, Carol J., 29, 32, 35–36, 77, 105,

Denby, David, 205–206

114, 122

De Palma, Brian, 5, 15, 21, 52–84, 85, 113,

Cohen, Larry, 49, 134, 252n16, 257n30

115, 141, 143, 160, 194, 239. See also

Cohen, Rob, 141, 192

Casualties of War
collage manhood, 66, 93, 106–111, 112,

Departed, The, 128

115, 219
diabolical dandy, 100, 257n23

Collateral, 128, 158

Dickinson, Emily, 99

Columbine, 170

Diesel, Vin, 12, 14, 16, 140, 158, 176–203.

compromise formation, 202

See also male sexuality; race

Cooper, Gary, 127

Dietrich, Marlene, 28, 33

Cooper, James Fenimore, 55, 194, 227,
digital technology: idealized male

239, 244
bodies and, 6, 242. See also video

Corber, Robert J., 31–32, 232
technology

Creed, Barbara, 101, 113, 214, 257n24,
disgust: at effeminacy, 164; homopho-

264n7
bic, 212; race and, 178, 203; related

Crimp, Douglas, 42
to misogyny, 118–119; self-disgust,

Cronenberg, David, 5, 7, 30, 79, 170, 237

202, 262n14; shame and, 42. See also

Crying Game, The, 5
shame

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Doane, Mary Ann, 165

See also lesbian sexuality; misogyny;

Dollimore, Jonathan, 24, 34
mothers; women

Donner Party, 100, 256n21
fetishism: and Auto Focus, 150; and

Double Indemnity, 126

Deleuze, 85–91; destruction of
double-protagonist film, 27, 56, 140–159,
youthful male and, 244; and eyes,

218, 241; female, 261n3; narcissism/

185; and Freud’s theory of, 33–34,
masochism split and, 18. See also

115–119, 120; historical emergence of,
echoistic male; male sexuality; mas-

92; and Mulvey, 28; normative mas-
ochistic gaze; narcissism/masochism
culinity and, 235, 238, 240, 260n56;
split
and queer male, 153; racial and sexual

Douglas, Michael, 90
ambiguity and, 188–189; and Silence

Dressed to Kill, 70, 72, 82
of the Lambs, 115–119, 120, 121, 122–

Dudley, John, 173

123; slavery, black male sexuality,

Dyer, Richard, 189
and, 183; and Studlar, 33–34; as
subset of masochism, 85–91; versus

Eastwood, Clint, 1–3, 133, 134, 135, 136,
homosexuality, 9, 92–94, 115–119,

261n14

258n40, 259n55; and voyeurism, 28,

Easy Rider, 135

31, 33

Echo (myth figure), 138–141

Few Good Men, A, 127
echoistic male, 138–141. See also double-Fiedler, Leslie, 55, 65, 131, 137, 228
protagonist film; male sexuality;

Fight Club, 10, 13, 15, 128, 129, 133, 158, masochism; narcissism

160–175; and artificiality of 90s

Edelman, Lee, 20, 38, 78, 183, 199; on
manhood, 161; and bachelor sub-
queer theory and death-drive, 42,
culture of the nineteenth century,

44–46

173–174; castrating woman in, 165;

Edge, The, 196
emotionalism and violence in, 170–

Eliot, T.S., 106

172; fascism and, 165; homoerotic/

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 91, 241
homophobic Billy Budd theme and,

Enemy at the Gates, 128

167–168; homosocial and, 165–168;

English Renaissance, 270n2
lachrymose economy theorized, 172;
envy: homosexual, 239; male of femi-
male mother in, 171; as male-male
ninity, 112–113, 258n44; narcissism, 46
version of screwball comedy, 160; as
evaluative criticism. See aesthetics
new version of classic American lit-

Evita, 105
erary manhood, 162; and nineteenth-

Eyes Without a Face, 185
century boxing, 172–174; relationship
to Jacksonian America, 163–165; re-

Face/Off, 128
lationship to more radical cinematic

Fanny and Alexander, 205
depictions of male sexuality, 167–169;

Fanon, Frantz, 186
and Robert Bly, 163; spermatic econ-

Farmer, Brett, 17, 30
omy and, 172; Victorian culture and,
fascism, 40, 109–110, 170, 248n13; and

167. See also Billy Budd; castration;
castrating woman, 165
double-protagonist film; echoistic

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 37–39
male; homosexuality; homosocial;

Fast and the Furious, The, 16, 128, 131, lachrymose economy; masochism;

140, 189, 191, 192, 198
masturbation; narcissism; Strangers
feelings, importance of, 43
on a Train; Sylvester Graham; tears;
female sexuality, 116, 119, 120, 156, 163.

Victorian culture; violence; women

Index

Fincher, David, 90, 133, 160–175, 241,

226, 234; theory of phal ic mother,

242

120–122; Three Essays on the Theory

Fisher King, The, 127
of Sexuality, 115, 201, 249n23; Totem food: as substitute for sex, 197
and Taboo, 54, 192; transference, 99;

Foster, Jodie, 5, 90, 91, 94, 95, 134, 242
the uncanny, 190; voyeurism, visual

Foucault, Michel, 41–42, 92, 106,
mastery, and, 79, 142, 157. See also fe-

251n64
tishism; homosexuality; masochism;

Fox, Michael J., 62, 65
mothers; narcissism; phal ic mother;

Frankenstein, 108; in xXx, 193
voyeurism

Frankenstein (1931), 107, 258n36

Friday the 13th, 14, 122

Franklin, Benjamin, 91, 104, 255n11

From Here to Eternity, 127

Freud, Sigmund: ambiguity of male
frontier thesis, 228
sexuality and, 122; ambivalence, 123–

Full Metal Jacket, 52

124; anal phase, 201; Bersani’s cri-

Funeral Rites, 45
tique of Foucault and, 42; castration

Fury, The, 71, 81
and, 85, 121; childhood psychosexual

Fuss, Diana, 92, 102, 234, 260n58
development, 101, 191, 201; “A Child
is Being Beaten,” 63, 87, 230–231;

Gallipoli, 211
death-drive, 47, 50; Deleuze less

Garfield, John, 127
radical than, 34, 87–89; desire, 151;

Gattaca, 169

“The Economic Problem of Mas-
gay male sexuality, 24, 43, 178, 203. See
ochism,” 25, 51–53, 72; explanatory
also homosexuality
power of, 21; “Fetishism,” 116–122;
gaze. See gender; masochistic gaze

Foucault chal enge to, 41; gender

Gein, Ed, 109
as theoretical construction, 14, 221;
gender: decoupled from biology, 14; as

Hannibal Lecter as parody of, 98;
difference, 219–221; feelings and, 43;
homosexuality and group identity,
gaze, spectatorship, and, 17, 27, 29,

76; homosexuality and narcissism,

32, 34, 51, 80; group, 54; Iraq War

23–25, 132, 214, 230–233; homosexu-
and, 82; irony and, 16, 178; melan-
ality as opposed to fetishism, 92, 121;
cholia and, 43; narcissism and, 19, 23,
inversion, 108; Lacan’s reinterpre-

46; national construction of, 56, 164;
tation of, 79–80, 145; Leonardo da
parody of, 215; Point Break’s prob-

Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,
lematization of, 146; race and, 179,

24, 118, 217; lesbianism, 234–235;

188; and separate spheres, 54, 166–
life-drive, 47, 49; “Medusa’s Head,”

167, 252n4; shifts in Hol ywood rep-

120; moral masochism, 56; “Mourn-
resentation of, 4–5, 17–18; and Silence
ing and Melancholia,” 42; negative
of the Lambs, 105, 109–111, 120

Oedipus complex, 63; Oedipus com-

Genet, Jean, 44–45
plex in film theory and, 31, 33–34,

Godard, Jean-Luc, 40

131; “On Narcissism,” 22, 50, 226,

Go Fish, 4

248n15; orality, 101–103, 201; penis

Gone with the Wind, 126
envy, 112; phal ic phase, 201; primal

Goodfellas, 192
sadism, 50; queer aesthetics and, 49;

Graham, Sylvester (19th century Ameri-
repression, 157; Robin Wood and,
can health reformer), 164–165

47; theory of fetishism, 115–120,

Granger, Farley, 132

188; theory of masochism, 25–27, 72;

Greatest Story Ever Told, The, 207; figure theory of narcissism, 20, 21–25, 46,
of Satan in, 208

0 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Green Man, 112. See also Male Medusa

218–240; and buddy film, 135–136;
group sex: difficulty of distinguishing
and death-drive, 45; doubled by
from queer sex, 151
straight masculinity, 144–145; and

Gyllenhaal, Jake, 17, 138, 218, 227
gender identification, 43; and group
sex, 152; and Hol ywood, 16; and

Halberstam, Judith, 4, 14, 32, 93, 111,
masculine tolerance of, 94; and

257n35
masochism, 37, 51, 63, 87, 88, 89, 142,

Halloween, 122

157, 229–230; and misogyny, 93; and

Hamlet, 13
narcissism, 20–25, 46, 146, 167–169,

Hardcore, 156, 263n42

180, 231–234; as opposed to fetish-

Hard Way, The, 127
ism, 92–94; and social relations, 45;

Hathaway, Anne, 234
and spectatorship, 17, 31–32, 34; and

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 55, 111, 114, 152,
voyeurism, 29, 142, 145, 149. See also

153, 164, 239, 241, 250n52

Billy Budd; Freud, Sigmund; gay

Haynes, Todd, 4, 49
male sexuality; gender; lesbian sexu-

Heat, 128
ality mothers; queer theory
heterosexuality, 23, 122, 126, 147, 158, 217, homosocial, male: African-American, 227, 233, 234, 252n4

198–199; in Alien 3, 4; American

High Culture, 39, 110, 160, 195
culture and, 54–57; and buddy film,

Highsmith, Patricia, 132, 169, 236

135–137; castrating woman and,

Hi, Mom!, 150

165–168; emotionalism and, 170–175;

Hippolytus, 227, 228
individual as embodiment of, 65;

Hitchcock, Alfred, 28, 31, 49, 64, 71, 77–
interracial, 65, 131; nothing essential

78, 95, 107, 110, 113, 115, 125, 131–133,
or authentic about, 69; opposed to

169, 185, 248n21
homosexuality, 69, 70, 71; opposed
homoeroticism: blurred with homo-
to individual, 59, 67; and patriarchy,
social, 147, 153; and group identity,

54–57, 82; Point Break and, 147;

76; incestuous, 4; interracial, 242;
pornography and, 156–158; threat to
and Lacan, 145; and male inti-
normative as well as queer men, 72,
macy, 75, 130, 187; and male stars

74; violence and, 170–175; women
of double-protagonist film, 139,
assimilated into, 82; women sexually

141, 152; narcissistic, 133; and racial
exploited by, 155
otherness, 242; and violence, 2; with- Hopkins, Anthony, 5, 91, 98, 196
out homosexuality, 216; in Zodiac,

Horne, Lena, 184

241

Hostel, 241
homophilic, 181, 211–212; internalized,

Hot Fuzz, 36

41, 42; and masculinity, 99, 137; Mel

How the West Was Won, 126

Gibson and, 206–207, 211–217; psy-
hypocritical narcissism. See masochism
chiatry and, 34; racial discrimination
and, 183; racism and, 203; Revenge

I am Legend (Will Smith film), 243
of the Sith and, 243; of Silence of the Ian, Marcia, 119

Lambs disputed, 93, 101–124; vio-

Ice Cube, 196–197
lence and, 170–175

In a Lonely Place, 135
homophobia: and African-American

In a Year of Thirteen Moons, 37–39
community, 182; and cannibalism,
insult: and race and sexuality, 183

100; and Hol ywood, 5–6, 89–91

In the Line of Fire, 1–3
homosexuality: in Brokeback Mountain,

Interview with the Vampire, 4, 16, 21

Index 1
inviolate manhood, 55, 105, 198, 200,

Larsen, Nella: and Passing, 179

216, 229, 235–240, 257n31

Last of the Mohicans, The, 63, 137, 194, Italian Renaissance, 206

234

It Happened One Night, 126

Law, Jude, 16, 17, 38, 143–144, 169, 170

Law-of-the-Father, 97, 231

Jackass, 193

Leavis, F. R., 49

Jackson, Andrew: and Fight Club, 160,

Ledger, Heath, 11, 218, 225, 227, 229, 233

163–165

Lee, Ang. See Brokeback Mountain

Jackson, Michael, 179

“Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The” (Irving

Jackson, Samuel L., 193, 194, 196, 261n3
story), 162

Jeffords, Susan, 15, 136

Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His

Jesus: biblical, 204, 206, 216–217. See

Childhood, 24, 118, 217
also Passion of the Christ
lesbian sexuality, 234–235

Jews: representation of. See Passion of

Lethal Weapon, 128, 137, 211
the Christ
life-drive, 47–51, 245

John Doe, 243

Living End, The, 4

Jordan, Neil, 4, 16

Looking for Langston, 4

Julien, Isaac, 4, 49

Los Olvidados, 40

Lost, 241, 243

Kael, Pauline, 47, 57, 64, 74, 258n36

Love and Death in the American Novel,

Kimmel, Michael, 164, 173

55, 131

Kindergarten Cop, 199
love-hate ambivalence, 123–124

King, Stephen, 205

Lynch, David, 97

King of Kings, 205

Kiss of Death, 261n1

Macbeth, 70, 112; black Lady Macbeth,

Knockaround Guys, 191, 192–193, 198, 199

190

Kolker, Robert, 136, 137, 252n16
male bodies, 16, 164, 241

Kristeva, Julia, 214, 269n15

Male Medusa, 111–113

Kyle XY, 243
male mother, 171–172, 207, 264n23. See
also maternal phallus; mothers

Lacan, Jacques: Christianity and, 210–
male sexuality, 19, 241, 260n56; ambi-

211; and desire decoupled from bio-
guity of, 122; American masculinity
logical needs, 150–151; Edelman and,
and, 89, 239; digitization and, 243;

45; film theory and, 29; gaze and,

Duke University scandals and,

79–80, 145; limitations of for queer

260n56; homosocial and, 147; horror
theory, 42–43; narcissism and, 39–41,
and, 93, 97; and masochism, 30, 32,

106, 257n34; race and, 183; Symbolic

85–89, 209; post-oedipal, 33; race
order, 24, 64, 115, 214; theory of the
and, 176–203; as spectacle, 12; and
mirror stage, 37, 105, 210–211, 213;
violence, 56, 70; teen comedies and,
voyeurism and, 79

265n25. See also gay male sexuality
lachrymose economy: defined, 172, 170–

Malkovich, John, 1, 3, 192

172. See also tears (crying)

Man Apart, A, 191, 192, 198–199

L.A. Confidential, 128

Mann, Michael, 137, 158, 234

Lancaster, Burt, 127

Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The,

Lang, Daniel, 55, 57

130–131, 140

Lang, Fritz, 49

Man Without a Face, The, 211

Lang, Robert, 96

Marnie, 107

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Mary, mother of Jesus, 207, 210, 213, 215, “Medusa’s Head” (Freud essay), 120

216, 217
melancholia: and Freud’s theory of, 43;

Mary Magdalene, 215, 216, 217
and gay psychology, 42; and gender
masochism: as Death force, 48–50;
identification, 43; of racial passing,

Deleuze’s theory of, 86–89; de-

179; of racial integration and white
monstrative form, Reik’s theory,
cultural inertia, 195; queer theory

212; feminine, 25, 51, 142; fetish-
and, 251n62; and violent masculinity,
ism as subset of (Deleuze), 85; film

66
spectatorship, feminist film theory,

Melville, Herman, 69, 76, 108, 147, 167,
and, 77–78; film’s positive valuation

195, 239, 243
of, 18–19, 20, 76, 158, 178, 185; film

Memento, 243
theory’s positive valuation of, 28–41;

Mercer, Kobena, 183

Freud’s theory of, 25–27; hetero-male Merchant-Ivory, 187
and, 56, 149, 219; homosexual, 51,

Metamorphoses, The, 102

221; as hypocritical narcissism, 39, 89; Metaphysical Poets, the, 105

Jesus and, 204, 209, 211; Mel Gibson Miami Vice (film), 128
and, 211; and misogyny of valoriza-

Miller, D. A., 237
tion of, 34–35, 37, 89; narcissism and, Miller, Wentworth, 178, 243

7, 18, 56, 156, 158, 210; and narcissis-

Minghella, Anthony, 38, 169
tic male’s own, 149; potential radical- Mirren, Helen, 90
ism of, 51, 56; primal sadism and, 50; mirror stage. See Lacan queer theory’s positive valuation of,
misogyny, 34–35, 37, 55, 64, 70, 73, 89,

41–47, 79; Reik’s theory of, 26, 204,

93, 109, 113, 119, 135, 139, 242

212; Vin Diesel’s career as movement Mission to Mars, 71
toward, 185, 198, 202; as witness, 50,

Modleski, Tania, 29, 77–79, 254n31

72, 77, 81, 155, 178; witness required
mothers: and Ceres-Proserpine myth,
for (Reik), 1, 204, 212, 224. See also

257n28; in “A Child is Being Beaten,”

fetishism; Freud; homosexuality;

63, 231–233; and Creed’s theory of
masculinity; masochistic gaze; nar-
archaic mother in the horror genre,
cissism; non-volitional suffering

101, 113, 257n24, 259n56, 260n57;
masochistic gaze: in Brokeback Moun-
and Deleuze, 85–89; and Imaginary,
tain, 222, 223–225; in Casualties of 63; and Judaism and Christianity,

War, 80–82; defined, 77–82, 141–146;

209–217, 270n20; and Jung’s Terrible
in the double-protagonist film, 148,

Mother, 101; Kristeva’s theory of

157
abjection and, 214, 269–270n15; and
masturbation: in Auto Focus, 154–155; in lesbianism, 234–235; and male fan-Fight Club, 164–165
tasy of birth without, 243; and male
maternal phallus, 33, 85, 120–121, 188,
homosexuality, 20, 22, 24–25, 102,

259n25. See also phallic mother

115, 214, 231–233, 249n23, 250n46,

Matheson, Richard, 243

259n47; and male masochism, 33, 36,

Matrix, The, 170

77, 85–89, 254n5; Medusan, 120, 207;

Mayne, Judith, 17
and narcissism, 22; and Narcissus,

McMurtry, Larry, 218

157; and Robert Bly, 163; and serial

Mean Streets, 136
killers, 109; spectral, in the horror

Meat Loaf, 171
genre, 113–115; in Totem and Taboo,

Medusa, 37, 91, 111, 112, 120, 207. See

54. See also female sexuality; fetish-
also Male Medusa
ism; Freud; homosexuality; lesbian

Index
sexuality; male mothers; maternal

Freud on, 24; homoerotic image
phallus; phallic mother; women
evoked in film, 38, 108, 143–144, 168,
mulatto identity, 177, 178–180

223; and Saint Sebastian, 243; shat-

Mulvey, Laura, 13, 18; “Afterthoughts
tering of, 223–226
on ‘Visual Pleasure,’”130–131; and

Natty Bumppo, 55, 137, 166, 227, 239,
curious spectatorship, 28, 51; “Visual

244

Pleasure,” 27–29

Neale, Steve, 29, 30, 142

My Own Private Idaho, 4, 127

Nemesis (myth figure), 149, 156

New Man: of new Adam narratives,
narcissism: abjection, mother, and,

243; of the 90s, 15–16

214; anti-narcissism in film, 20–21,

New York Society of Film Critics, The, 90

158–159; Aronowitz and Norman O.

Night of the Hunter, The, 65, 108

Brown on, 47; Bersani and, 42;
noir, 129–130
death-drive and, 149; fetishism,
non-volitional suffering, 43–44, 73

Freud, and, 117; film theory and,

North by Northwest, 64

27, 29; Freudian theory of, 21–25;

Notorious, 77–78
hetero-, 221; homosexuality and,

23–25, 168–170, 180–185, 209, 234;

Obama, Barack, 176
hypocritical, 38, 39, 89; inability to

Obsession, 71, 72
recognize others and, 225; Jesus’,

Oklahoma!, 99

210; Lacanian view of, 106, 257n34;

Olyphant, Timothy, 198, 199
as life-force, 48, 50; masochism and,

120 Days of Sodom, The (de Sade), 40

26, 139, 141, 152, 156, 159, 249n32;

Ophuls, Max, 49
mother–homosexual son relationship oral sex: male-male, 3, 69; male-female, and, 19, 22, 214; negative, 56, 71, 76,

12

82, 149, 248n13; normative mascu-

Orphée (Orpheus), 38
linity and, 209, 225; nostalgic, 131;

Out of the Past, 129

Paradise Lost and, 39; as perversity to Ovid, 19, 25, 102, 138, 149, 157
be eradicated, 174; phallic form of,

56, 82; positive, 76, 180, 213; pun-

Pacifier, The, 177, 185, 191, 199–203
ished, 199; race and, 180–185; Reik’s

Paglia, Camille, 69
view of distinction from masochism,

Panic Room, 242

26; Satan’s, 39, 213; self-sufficiency,

Paradise Lost, 39, 99, 255n17
total, 224; Silverman and, 40–41;

Paris is Burning, 184
straight male, 157; thesis of study, 18, Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 40

19, 125; transfiguration of, 226; uto-

Passion of the Christ, The, 204–217
pian possibilities of, 20, 47, 48, 50,

Pathfinder, The (Cooper novel), 55

159; visual pleasure and, 148. See also

Pearl Harbor, 128
echoistic male; fetishism; homosexu-

Peck, Gregory, 127
ality; masochism; mothers; narcis-

Peeping Tom, 107, 114, 185
sism/masochism split

Penn, Sean, 65, 108
narcissism/masochism split, 7, 18, 26,

Perseus (myth figure), 91, 111, 112

51, 125, 162, 209. See also echoistic

Persona, 129
male
perversion/normalization, 174, 191

Narcissus (myth figure), 13, 16, 17, 149,

Petersen, Wolfgang, 1

155, 157–159, 229, 231; as caution-
phallic mother, 33, 118–122, 188, 207. See
ary tale, 19–20; and Echo, 138–139;
also mothers

4 Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush phallic-narcissistic character (Reich’s

Club, 174; and Vin Diesel films,
theory), 56, 70, 82

176–203
phallus, 2, 6, 14, 36, 53, 70, 79, 106, 117,
racelessness: new Hol ywood, 176–177.

145, 235, 259n55, 268n31. See also

See also Diesel, Vin
maternal phallus
racial ambiguity. See Diesel, Vin

Philadelphia, 4, 5, 95, 127, 158
rage: female, 138; gendered male in

Philadelphia Story, The, 126

Victorian America, 164, 171; of

Pitch Black, 12, 16, 177, 181, 185–188, 190, inviolate male, 239; male, 66, 68, 72,

193, 202

82, 109; masochistic, 156, 159; race

Platoon, 8, 52, 53
and, 203

Poe, Edgar Allan, 138, 162, 168, 250n52

Raising Cain, 15

Point Break, 16, 125, 127, 131, 140, 146–

Rambo, 15, 52, 133, 262n18

150, 159, 192

Reagan, Ronald, 2, 6, 8, 15, 16, 52, 133,

Poison, 4

136, 148, 161, 247n8, 251n1
pornography: and Auto Focus, 150–159;

Rear Window, 107, 185
and Deep Throat, 155; in De Palma,

Redacted, 55, 83–84

61, 150; male despair, video tech-

Red River, 227, 271n7
nology, and, 156–158; race and, 182;

Reich, Wilhelm, 56, 70, 82
in Taxi Driver, 150; torture-porn,

Reik, Theodor, 26, 204, 212, 224

241
representation: burden of male, 125;
porn stars: gay, 182
historical burdens of queer male, 127;

Prelude to a Kiss, 4, 247n1
history of black male and, 183; of

Prestige, The, 128

Jesus, 209; of a Jewish Veronica, 216;
primal sadism, 50
of the Passion, 205–206; problems in

Prime Suspect, 90
gay male, 90, 93, 102; queer shifts in

Prison Break, 178, 243

Hol ywood, 6, 13, 16, 18, 51, 142, 218;
prizefighting. See boxing; Fight Club of Satan, 206–207; shifts from 70s

Proulx, E. Annie, 218, 222; sensibility
film masculinity and, 133, 134, 136;
compared to Ang Lee’s, 233, 235; and
and violence, 176; women writers,
story, “Brokeback Mountain,” 229;
gay men, and, 237
and women writers of male-male

Revenge of the Sith, 243–245
fiction, 236–237

Rich, B. Ruby, 219–220

Psycho, 108, 110, 113, 115–16, 258n40

Riggs, Marlon, 182–183

Psychopathia Sexualis [Krafft-Ebing], 25

“Rip Van Winkle” (Irving story), 162
psychosexual thriller, Hitchcockian,

“Road” movies of Bing Crosby and Bob

131–133; of the 70s and 80s, 133–135

Hope, 126

Robinson, Sally, 171
queer Freudian aesthetics, 49

The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), 176
queer Hol ywood renaissance of the

Rockwel , Norman, 154
early 90s, 4–6

Rodman, Dennis, 188
queer theory, 18, 21, 32, 41–47, 50, 79,

Rodowick, D. N., 29–30

139, 142, 251n62

Rodriguez, Michelle, 189

Romero, George A., 30

Rabe, David, 57, 76

Rope, 132
race: and disgust, 203; and double-
protagonist film, 158; and Victorian

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 25, 33,
boxing underworld evoked in Fight

37, 86

Index
sadism, 50, 56, 76, 78, 86, 142; Deleuze’s

109–110; fetishism versus homosexu-
theory; Freud’s theory of primal, 50;
ality in, 92–94; film cutting related
of masochism and, 86; patriarchal,
to queer sexuality and feminism in,

229–231; voyeurism as form of, 142.

103–106; Freud’s theories of fetish-

See also Brokeback Mountain; Casualism, homosexual artist, phallic
ties of War; Deleuze; Freud; masoch-
mother, and ambivalence in relation
ism; violence; voyeurism
to, 115–124; Freud’s theory of inver-

Salò, 40
sion exploded in, 108; implications

Satan: Miltonic in Silence of the Lambs,
of fetishism for reading of character

99; and Paradise Lost, 39, 255n17;
as gay man, 122–123; Jame Gumb
in Passion of the Christ, 207–211,
read as fetishist, 115–122; Lecter as

213, 215. See also androgyny;
sibyl, 100–102; love-hate ambiva-
homosexuality
lence and, 123; and Male Medusa,

Saving Private Ryan, 63

111–113; monsters, 91–92; narcissism

Saw, 241
versus masochism in, 106; orality and
scar: of race, 194–196

Freud’s theories of homosexuality,

Scarecrow, 136

102–103; phallic mother, 120–122;

Scarface, 193
relationship to Hol ywood homo-

Scarlet Letter, The, 114
phobia and shifts in representation

Schrader, Paul, 125, 129, 134, 150,
of gender and sexuality of early 90s,

154–155

90–91; self-made masculinity and,

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 15, 133, 199

91–92; and serial killers, 109; spectral
scopophilia, 28, 33, 79. See also fetishism; mothers and mother-son bond in
gaze; voyeurism
horror movie tradition, 113–115; trope

Searchers, The, 127, 134, 194, 227, 263n42
of faces, 94–99. See also female sexu-

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 137, 147
ality; fetishism; Freud, Sigmund;
self-made manhood, 120, 123, 91–92
homosexuality; lesbian sexuality;
serial killers, 109–110, 122, 133, 241,

Male Medusa; Medusa; mothers;

258n39
phallic mother; representation; video

Seven, 128
technology; violence; voyeurism
sexual addiction, 151

Silverman, Kaja, 29, 36–41, 50, 78, 79,

Shakespeare, 13, 75, 112, 162, 267n27

145
shame: gay self-loathing and, 42; queer

Sinatra, Frank, 127
predicament of perversity and,

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 107

260n50; race and, 202, 203; voyeur-

Sirk, Douglas, 49
ism and, 142. See also disgust

Sisters, 72

Shane, 200, 261n1

Smallville, 241

Shaviro, Steven, 30

Snake Eyes, 75, 128, 160, 169

Shepherd, Matthew, 44, 229

Snead, James, 179
sibyl, 100–101, 111, 257n25

Socarides, Charles (psychiatrist), 34,

Silence of the Lambs, The, 4, 5, 70, 85–124, 250n46

147, 172, 231, 241; anti-masculinity

Sound of Music, The, 200
in, 94–99; cannibalism and homo-

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, 13
sexuality, 99–100; collage manhood,

Spellbound, 95

106–111; compared to Hitchcock
spermatic economy: of Hol ywood
films, 110; Deleuze’s theory of mas-
film, 171–172, 264n24; in Moby Dick,
ochism and, 85–90; fascism and,

256n20

Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush Spielberg, Steven, 7, 63
transgendered sexuality, 16, 38; body, 112
split heroes in the western, 130

Troy, 128
splitting, psychic: in Fight Club, 166, Twohy, David N. See Chronicles of Rid-175; in Passion of the Christ, 215; in
dick, The; Pitch Black

Silence of the Lambs, 101–103; and the Typee (Melville novel), 195
uncanny, 270n20

Star Wars films, 243

Un Chien Andalou, 185

Sternberg, Josef von, 28, 33

Untouchables, The, 71, 253n16

Stewart, James, 1, 63, 107, 127, 130, 131,

185, 254n30

Venus in Furs, 37, 86

Stone, Oliver, 7, 8, 52

Verhoeven, Paul, 37

Stone, Sharon, 37, 90

Vertigo, 1, 28, 64, 71, 76, 104, 107, 108, Strange Days, 263n40

254n30

Strangers on a Train, 131–133, 169

Victorian period: and Fight Club, 160–

Studlar, Gaylin, 29, 32–35, 78

175, 167, 172, 174; and Foucauldian

Superman Returns, 245
theory of sexuality, 41–42; and his-

Supernatural, 241
torical emergence of fetishism, 92;

Swoon, 4
and historical emergence of mas-
ochism, 20; and the homosocial and

Talented Mr. Ripley, The, 16, 38, 128,
gendered separate spheres, 54. See

143–144, 169, 170, 243
also bachelor subculture; boxing;

Tally, Ted, 113

Fight Club; lachrymose economy;

Tamahori, Lee, 196
masturbation; rage

Tarantino, Quentin, 7, 247n5
video technology: in Auto Focus, 150–

Tasker, Yvonne, 95, 140

159; in Redacted, 83; in Silence of the Taubin, Amy, 134, 150

Lambs, 107, 110. See also gaze; Nar-Taxi Driver, 134, 135, 150, 156
cissus; pornography

Taymor, Julie, 49, 146

Village of the Damned (1995), 198
tears (crying): and the homosocial,
violence, 2, 15, 16, 92, 105, 121, 135, 137,

170–175. See also Fight Club; rage;

150, 156, 192, 205, 223, 226, 230, 237,
violence

239–240; and Christian myth, 204–

Ten Commandments, The, ix, 126

218; directed against women, 52–85;

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 15
and the homosocial, 160–178. See

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (1974), 36, also Fight Club; lachrymose econ-114, 115
omy; rage

Thelma and Louise, 141, 261n3
voyeurism, 27, 28, 31, 33, 142, 145, 149,

There’s Something about Mary, 172

185; repressed homosexual, 30, 31,

Theweleit, Klaus, 165

142, 149. See also masochistic gaze

Thoreau, Henry David, 91, 161, 163

300, 242

Walden, 163

Three Stooges, The, 211

Wallace, Maurice O., 184, 186

3:10 to Yuma (remake), 241

Warhol, Andy, 30

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 136

Warner, Michael, 23–25, 220

Tiger, Lionel, 69

Warren, Patricia Nell (author of novel

Tightrope, 2, 133–134, 146

Front Runner, The), 236

Torquato Tasso, 39

Washington, Fredi, 179

Tourneur, Maurice, 63

“The Waste Land,” 106

Index

Wayne, John, 127, 130, 227, 261n1
sexual power of, 162; war and exploi-

Weekend, 40
tation of, 61; writers of queer male

Welles, Orson, 28, 49
fiction, 236. See also female sexuality; We Own the Night, 128, 241
fetishism; Freud, Sigmund; Medusa;
westerns, 130–131
misogyny; mothers; phallic mother

Wilder, Billy, 49

Wood, Robin: “From Buddies to

“William Wilson” (Poe story), 138, 162,

Lovers,” 135–136; Hitchcock’s Films,

168

48; Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 48;

Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 96–97

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan,
women: Biblical view of, 68; bodies

14, 48, 64, 70; Sexual Politics and
of appropriated, 114; castrating,

Narrative Film, 47–48

165–168; in combat, 54, 82; cruel, 25;

Wyler, William, 49
destruction of in patriarchy, 73; Echo
myth and, 139; envy and, 111–112;
xXx, 10, 12, 177, 189, 191, 192, 193–195
in film, 16, 27, 145; homosocial and,
xXx: State of the Union, 177, 196–198

72, 82, 136; male fantasies of, 34, 78;
masochism and, 25, 37, 51, 85–89;

Zodiac, 15, 162, 241

Document Outline

- Contents

- Acknowledgments

- Introduction: When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware

- Chapter One. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

- Chapter Two. An Ill-Fated Bacchanal: Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial

- Chapter Three. Male Medusas and Female Heroes: Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs

- Chapter Four. The Hollywood Man Date: Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film

- Chapter Five. Destroying Something Beautiful: Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club

- Chapter Six. “Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality

- Chapter Seven. The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ

- Chapter Eight. Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain

- Epilogue: The Reign of Masochism

- Notes

- Introduction
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Epilogue

- Bibliography

- Index

Table of Contents

- Contents

- Acknowledgments

- Introduction: When Hollywood Masculinity Became Self-Aware

- Chapter One. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush

- Chapter Two. An Ill-Fated Bacchanal: Casualties of War and the Horror of the Homosocial

- Chapter Three. Male Medusas and Female Heroes: Fetishism and Ambivalence in The Silence of the Lambs

- Chapter Four. The Hollywood Man Date: Split Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film

- Chapter Five. Destroying Something Beautiful: Narcissism, Male Violence, and the Homosocial in Fight Club

- Chapter Six. “Am I Blue?” Vin Diesel and Multiracial Male Sexuality

- Chapter Seven. The Devil Wears Abjection: The Passion of the Christ

- Chapter Eight. Narcissus Transfigured: Brokeback Mountain

- Epilogue: The Reign of Masochism

- Notes

- Introduction
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Epilogue

- Bibliography

- Index