(Ir)Religious Violence and the (Ab)Use of 'Innocent Weapons': (Re

(Ir)religious Violence and the (Ab)use of ‘Innocent Weapons’: (Re)imagining Juvenile Masculinities in the Secular-Religious Conflicts of World Cinema James Magee, Jr.

An increasingly-popular and vocal group of ‘New Atheists’1 has promulgated the idea that religion is an inherently violent phenomenon that the world would be better off without. The late Christopher Hitchens claimed religion to be “a menace to civilization” and “a threat to human survival” (2007, 25). Sam Harris, still active, refers to religion as “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present” (2004, 35). Such accusations are not reserved for fanatical adherents of various faith traditions, but are also leveled against ‘religious moderates’ who are, according to Harris, “in large part, responsible for the religious conflict… because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed” (ibid, 45). Both writers propose an aggressive solution to the problem of ‘religious violence’,2 a hypocritical defense of ‘secular violence’ (Cavanaugh 2009, 212-20) that exacerbates the existing tensions rather than trying to defuse them. As an agnostic committed to “peaceful co-existence between different religious faiths, and between religious and humanist groups” (Le Poidevin 2010, 118), I offer critique from a non-religious tradition of this ‘irreligious violence’ and the crisis of authority that fuels it (Stahl 2010, 101-5).3 Rejecting a bifurcation of humanity into in- and out-groups, a feature prevalent in the ideologies of both ‘New Atheism’ and fundamentalist expressions of religious faith (Reitan 2009, 217; Stahl 2010, 97), I identify ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (HM) as one common factor in much religious and non-religious violence. First introduced in the mid-eighties (Carrigan et al. 1985), the concept of HM has eluded a clear and concise definition (Donaldson 1993; Whitehead 2002, 93).4 A grassroots understanding of HM as “a ‘dominant’ form of masculinity that influences boys’ and men’s understanding of how they have to act in order to be ‘acceptably’ male” (Frosh et al. 2002, 75) is the definition adopted in this essay. Also, an

1 The four most famous ‘New Atheist’ authors are Sam Harris (2004), Richard Dawkins (2006), Daniel Dennett (2006) and Christopher Hitchens (2007). LeDrew points out that “[w]hile the New Atheism is not in the public eye as much as it was in the late 2000s, it is still alive and well in the secular movement” (2016, 51). 2 While Harris expresses some regret over the alleged necessity of violent measures (2004, 129), Hitchens seemed to relish the idea of eliminating his enemies (see the various casual remarks compiled by Cavanaugh 2009, 219). 3 Stahl (2010) argues that the (failed) ‘New Atheist’ quest for certainty leads to a crisis of authority and then to sociopolitical backlash against the religious fundamentalists with whom they share this epistemological outlook and reactionary chain. 4 Connell’s definition illustrates this obfuscation: “Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (2005, 77).

1 association of HM with “heterosexuality, toughness, power and authority, [and] competitiveness” (ibid, 75-76) is assumed.5 While “[i]t is the successful claim to authority, more than direct violence, that is the mark of hegemony…[,] violence often underpins or supports authority” (Connell 2005, 77). The ‘innocent weapons’ of the essay’s title is a concept drawn from Margaret Peacock’s work on the Soviet and American politics of childhood during the Cold War and refers to the “deployments of innocent, threatened, and mobilized youth” in “visual and rhetorical projects” (2014, 7). Resisting both the ‘Hollywoodcentrism’ of much writing on religion and film (Plate 2003, 9) and the adultcentrism of contemporary masculinity studies,6 I have chosen ten world cinema ‘projects’ to explore the connection between HM and violence7 in depictions of juvenile8 masculinity. The boys in these films, both victims and perpetrators of violence, resist and conform to HM in a variety of sociopolitical and historical contexts. The religious and non-religious violence portrayed in these movies is embedded within these broader cultural conflicts and commonalities across the permeable secular-religious divide (Göle 2010) suggest the roots of violence run deeper than the vocal critics of religion seem willing to admit. I will propose ways in which juvenile masculinities might be reimagined as part of the solution to reducing the amount of violence in the world, an urgent task that will involve the cooperation of both religious and non-religious peacemakers.

1. The Violent Falls of (Hu)man(ity) in Butterfly (1999) and Black Bread (2010)

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39)9 has been characterized as “a war of religion,” one waged “between Catholicism and anticlericalism” (Casanova 2010, 2) or, by some “[r]ightists and conservatives[, as] a struggle of ‘Christianity versus atheism’” (Payne 2012, 1), but also as a battle between fascism and democracy or communism. This clash of cultures and ideologies on the Iberian Peninsula ushered in the nearly forty-year dictatorship (1939-75) of Francisco Franco and “has gone down in history…for the horrific violence that it generated” (Casanova 2010, 2). Cinema, a tool for propaganda on both sides of

5 Frosh et al. also include “the subordination of gay men” in their list (2002, 76); this not only overlooks – shockingly so in a book on young masculinities – gay boys (though the authors do explore the subject of boys and homosexuality at several points in their book), but the subordination of alternative masculinities that are not directly linked to sexuality (Connell 2005, 79). 6 The elision of ‘males’ and ‘men’ or discussions of ‘masculinities’ that infer only men as their subjects are ubiquitous in the literature. Boys, where they are mentioned, are typically afterthoughts; usually they are subsumed or ignored altogether. This is true even in Connell’s The Men and the Boys (the order of subjects in the title is not accidental) where the reader is redirected under the index entry for ‘boys’ to the subjects of “education; peer groups; schools; [and] youth” (2000, 248). 7 The definition of ‘violence’ that I assume in this essay is “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has the high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (Krug et al. 2002, 5). 8 The concept of juvenility is drawn from evolutionary biology where it describes the period in the life course during which an organism is likely to survive the death of its caregiver, but does not yet sexually reproduce (Pereira 2002, 19). 9 For broad overviews of the Spanish Civil War, see Anderson (2003), Graham (2005), Casanova (2010) and Payne (2012).

2 the conflict (Archibald 2012, 20-21), has primarily been used in post-Francoist Spain to present the viewpoint of the vanquished Republicans, a perspective censored throughout most of the Nationalists’ autocracy (ibid, 22). The first film reviewed in this section of the essay participates in this trajectory of Republican sympathy and is an example of Spanish filmmakers’ marshaling of juvenile characters for recovering memory of the nation’s traumatic past (Wright 2013, 14); the second movie deconstructs this. The 1999 La lengua de las mariposas, released in North America as Butterfly,10 begins in the months leading up to the outbreak of civil war (July 1936) in rural Galicia, which is presented as a quasi- paradisiacal setting (Gómez López-Quiñones 2014, 111) for its juvenile protagonist’s ‘coming of age’ (Boán 2018, 641; Hogan 2018, 165).11 Moncho, conforming to the Romantic ideal of childhood (Yim 2017, 203), explores his bucolic surroundings under the guidance of his kindly Republican teacher Don Gregorio (DG). The boy’s churchgoing mother and his anticlerical father represent the main divisions within Spanish society in regards to religion (Hogan 2018, 169)12 with their son caught in the middle. While rumors of church-burning reach the village,13 they are unsubstantiated and the film’s Republican characters presented as non-violent,14 their opponents as violent and exemplars of HM.15 DG models an alternative form of masculinity for Moncho: egalitarian, peaceful and attuned to nature.16 The film’s tragic conclusion comes swiftly as news of a coup d’état spreads and pro-Nationalist soldiers arrest the village’s Republican sympathizers, but not Moncho’s father, whose wife has destroyed evidence of his affiliation. While the boy is startled when his teacher is led out among the ‘criminals’ to a nearby truck and hesitates when urged by his mother to add his voice to the gathered crowd’s cacophony of verbal assaults, he nonetheless launches an attack: “Atheist! Red!” (Figure 1.1) As the vehicle pulls away, taking DG and the other prisoners to their deaths,17 Moncho joins in with a group of boys who run

10 The film is alternatively titled Butterfly Tongues or Butterfly’s Tongue (UK), the literal translation of the Spanish title being ‘The Tongue of the Butterflies’, which is one of the three short stories by Manuel Rivas on which the movie was based, the others being ‘Carmiña’ and ‘A Sax in the Fog’. 11 Bildungsfilms can approach the subject positively or negatively; Butterfly offers an example of the latter type of movie, which “overturn[s] positive expectations about coming of age, showing how such development is often thwarted by time, place, politics, and other external and internal factors” (Hardcastle et al. 2009, 2). 12 Hogan refers to Moncho’s father as an atheist (2018, 169) and the boy labels him as such because he curses ‘God’. The film is ambiguous concerning the man’s lack of religious beliefs; his wife – probably in denial – tells Moncho that his father believes in ‘God’ “like all good people”. 13 Payne situates this vandalism of churches within larger anticlerical sentiments in Europe and notes how it was directed at the Catholic Church in particular rather than Christianity generally, this because “the Church was the cultural and spiritual bulwark of the traditional order, and that the clergy, church buildings, and their strongest supporters were both symbolic and tangible representatives of that order” (2012, 111-12). 14 Several Republicans (though not DG) take up arms toward the end of the film, but this is presented as a measure of self- defense when news of a pro-Nationalist coup breaks and they are, in any case, never seen using them. 15 The rich and powerful Don Avelino, who orders about his daughter like a servant and who speaks positively of physically disciplining children, is one model of HM in the film, as is his son José María, who bullies Moncho and his friend Roque. 16 It appears significant that the elderly DG has lived most of his life as a (presumably celibate) widower, his wife having died long ago in her twenties. 17 The priest boards the truck, presumably to offer last rites to the condemned. While the man has, throughout the film, shown no sympathy for the Republican cause, he appears opposed to the summary executions of DG and the others, exclaiming “God forgive us, God forgive us all!”

3 after it throwing rocks and he continues to hurl malicious epithets (Figure 1.2).18 DG’s grim prediction that the wolf will never lay down with the lamb – a negation of Judeo-Christian eschatological hope for peace throughout all creation (Isa 11:6) and a cryptic self-identification with the lamb (Hogan 2018, 173) – materializes and is accompanied by his silence as he is led away for slaughter (Isa 53:7). Moncho, for his part, becomes the wolf when he aligns himself with the triumphant right (Hogan 2018, 178). Feeling betrayed by DG (ibid, 176; Boán 2018, 650), the boy participates with ferocity in the Nationalists’ violence against his teacher.19 Moncho rejects DG’s alternative model of masculinity and embraces HM, a choice foreshadowed in the boy’s retaliation against a bully that escalates into a fight. DG intervenes and chides both combatants as ‘butting rams’,20 an illustration of HM from the animal kingdom. The man identifies hell with the hatred and cruelty of this world, into which brutality Moncho plunges himself in the movie’s tragic climax. The boy’s ‘coming of age’ has mythic dimensions, his movement from innocence to depravity representing the fall of humanity (Yim 2017, 205). The same can be said about the protagonist’s journey in the 2010 film Pa negre (Black Bread),21 which is set in 1944 during the early postwar period and offers “even-handed demonisation of Francoists and Republicans” (Hogan 2018, 145). While the movie’s setting is rural – the mountains of Catalonia22 – it lacks the Romantic atmosphere of Butterfly, instead featuring numerous dark sequences23 and tales of a ghost named Pitorliua24 who lurks in the forest. The film’s ominous tone is established at the start with a double murder, the carnage first spotted by Andreu, the protagonist whose “transform[ation] from witness to accomplice” (Hogan 2018, 144) involves a Moncho-like descent into violence and alignment with the

18 In addition to “Atheist!” and “Red!” the boy shouts “Tilonorrinco!” and “Espiritrompa!”, which refer to an Australian bird and the proboscis (ie. ‘tongue’) of a butterfly respectively, terms Moncho picked up earlier in the film from DG and which he now angrily throws back at him. 19 Braggio et al. suggest Moncho only joins in as a means of survival (2014, 197) while Ryan, pointing to the boy’s use of the two terms specific to his time with DG, “allows for the possibility that [Moncho] is covertly communication his support and his sympathy for his plight to Don Gregorio” (2012, 448), thereby “assert[ing] his burgeoning agency” (ibid, 449). While I do think children are far more capable than most adults give them credit for and thus support and practice advocacy scholarship on behalf of children to increase their capacity for and champion their use of agency, I think that presenting Moncho as “a sophisticated and skilled…agent of resistance” (ibid, 458) is a fundamental misreading of this scene, which is not about the triumph of Moncho’s subjectivity or his survival instincts (contra Braggio et al.), but the tragic betrayal of the Republicans by their friends. 20 While this altercation may well mark “the emergence of the young boy’s self-assured individuality,” it is not the positive event that Ryan presents it as (2012, 457). Beginning her analysis with the erroneous claim that “Moncho pushes [the bully] from [his] bike” – in actuality he kicks a ball into José María’s head and he drops his own bike to retaliate – she interprets the fight as Moncho’s “unequivocal rejection of // discourses of power” (ibid, 457) when, in fact, the exact opposite appears to be the case. She remarks that this “fighting Moncho is unrecognizable from the small boy who [earlier] crouched …and cowered… His facial expressions [are] replaced by an angry semblance” (ibid, 457), an observation with which I wholeheartedly agree since it reflects the boy’s capacity for rage and willingness to use violence. Here it is in defense of a friend (Roque); in the end it will be to betray one (DG). 21 The movie is a pastiche of anecdotes and characters from the short stories and novels of Catalán writer Emili Teixidor (Bru- Domínguez 2016, 1009) and won nine Goya Awards, leading Allbritton to remark that “despite its bleak content, the film struck a chord with its audiences” (2014, 622). 22 That is, the Pyrenees, which form the border between Spain and France. Bru-Domínguez notes how those “[p]ersecuted for their political views…were forced to trek through these mountain passes in order to seek refuge in France” (2016, 1019). 23 Bru-Domínguez observes how the juvenile protagonist’s “dark” home is “partially built into the mountain’s rock” and how “recurrent candlelit night scenes with concomitant distorted shadows and creeping noises often create an effect of the uncanny” (2016, 1014). 24 The pitorliua is a bird native to Catalonia (Bru-Domínguez 2016, 1018).

Nationalist regime (ibid, 145), only one that is far more sinister (Messeguer 2013, 58) since the boy “emerges as the ultimate monstrous figure” in the movie (Bru-Domínguez 2016, 1020). Catalonia, considered by the right-wing victors of the Civil War as a space “polluted by extreme left-wing political thought” (Bru-Domínguez 2016, 1014), was subjected by the fascists to “linguistic and cultural repression” (Allbritton 2014, 623). Andreu is proud of his father’s nonconformist ideals, despite the hardships he and his family endure because of the man’s Republican affiliation during the war, and he resists Francoist indoctrination at school. Within a phallocratic society that suppresses homosexual desire (Bru-Domínguez 2016, 1021), the boy nonetheless finds himself drawn to a teenaged tuberculosis patient cloistered at a Camillian monastery.25 Andreu discovers not only that the basis for the legend of Pitorliua was an act of homophobic cruelty – the castration of a gay man26 – but that his father led the attack27 and he was also the cloaked murderer at the film’s beginning, an assassin hired by the Manubens, a rich and powerful pro-Francoist family in the village. After his father’s execution and with his illusions of both parents shattered,28 Andreu lashes out at the birds his father kept, butchering them with an ax; his cousin later remarks of his school photograph that it is the portrait of a bird killer (Figure 1.3). Rendered feeble under “hegemonic systems of violence” (Allbritton 2014, 629), the boy attempts to reclaim a sense of control by exerting power over creatures smaller and weaker than himself. The association of birds and death with the film’s gay characters29 also anticipates the boy’s mortification of his same-sex desires.30 Andreu disavows his sexual, political and cultural differences by consenting to adoption by the childless Manubens (Hogan 2018, 143). Christened Andrés31 Manubens (ibid, 154) and enrolled in a Catholic school, the boy rejects his Catalán heritage, the anticlerical views of his father32 and familial ties with his mother, whom he coldly rebuffs in the movie’s closing moments, choosing instead to uphold the regime’s “violently enforced heteronormativity” (ibid, 151) and project an image of HM.

25 Allbritton points out that the Order of Camillus models its ministry to the sick on the pertinent sections of Matthew 25 (2014, 633). 26 After suffering this painful and humiliating mutilation, it is intimated that this man (Marcel) flees into the forest and commits suicide, from which the ghost story arises as a means for the community to repress its act of mob violence (Bru- Domínguez 2016, 1012). 27 It is not clear whether this castration is the accident Andreu’s mother claims it was or the deliberate mutilation that the boy imagines with the TB patient as the mob’s victim. 28 The extent of the mother’s knowledge and/or involvement in her husband’s crimes is not clear, but Andreu catches her in some lies and refuses to forgive his father as she has. 29 Andreu’s mother keeps a photograph of Marcel in which he is costumed as an angel with conspicuous wings and the TB patient talks about growing wings and flying away to another world (Bru-Domínguez 2016, 1018). 30 Allbritton refers to Andreu as a “neo-Pitorliua” (2014, 632) and the link between them through the nightmare sequence of the castration (Bru-Domínguez 2016, 1018) serves as a portent for the boy (Hogan 2018, 149); his attempt at putting his same-sex desire to death is to avoid Marcel’s fate and thereby framed in terms of the Catholic practice of mortification (cf. Rom 8:13). 31 Andrés is the Castilian (Spanish) equivalent of the Catalán name Andreu. 32 Andreu’s father refuses to see a priest for last rites, referring to clerics as ‘leeches’ and ‘traitors’ and he is subsequently denied a Catholic funeral.

The movie’s “destruction of innocence and its rebirth as monstrosity” (Allbritton 2014, 621) is illustrated through the character of Andreu/Andrés, who is presented by film’s end as the converse of the angelic male child who appeared in Francoist cinema (Boán 2018, 639).33 Seated within an academy of monsters (ibid, 660),34 Andrés listens to a lecture on The Odyssey’s one-eyed giant Polyphemus, the instructor remarking how his human nature was corrupted to the point he became an entirely different type of being. The camera’s focus on Andrés (Figure 1.4) implies a connection,35 a change in the boy’s nature, a fall from innocence in his ‘coming of age’ similar to that of Moncho. Each character’s fall is accompanied by an act of violence that aligns him with the Francoist regime and its embrace of HM. While religion plays a role in the conflicts of both movies, it is only one aspect amidst other social, political and economic problems from which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle.36

Butterfly Black Bread

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 1.4

2. The Art(s) of Resistance in Song for a Raggy Boy (2003) and Red Like the Sky (2007)

The Spanish Civil War drew international attention, both in terms of military aid37 and cultural responses. The Communist International mobilized volunteers to fight in ‘International Brigades’ on behalf of the Republicans (Casanova 2010, 222) and this side of the conflict inspired support from a number of “artists, writers and intellectuals” (Payne 2012, 163).38 These aspects of the Civil War provide the backdrop to the 2003 Irish film Song for a Raggy Boy: the character of William Franklin has recently returned to Ireland

33 Wright notes how these “boys…were often longing for their absent or dead mothers” (2013, 24); Andrés, as the antithesis of these characters, rejects his mother who is still very much alive. 34 Wright remarks that “[t]he aesthetics of the Francoist school are lovingly recreated in starchy uniforms, crosses and wooden desks – this is a glossy view of the past which reveals the seductive power of Francoist iconography” (2013, 125). 35 Indeed, all of the secondary sources I consulted make reference to Andreu’s/Andrés’ monstrosity; in addition to Bru- Domínguez cited earlier in the main text, there are Messeguer 2013, 58; Wright 2013, 125; Allbritton 2014, 628; Corral Rey 2016, 4; Boán 2018, 659 and Hogan 2018, 153. 36 Despite similarities, the two films differ with respect to their use of juvenile protagonists in recovery of historical memory on behalf of the beaten Republicans; while Butterfly suggests such memory can be retrieved, Black Bread questions this since “Francoist ideology obliterated its opposition so effectively” (Wright 2013, 126). 37 The Nationalists were supported militarily by the two key fascist powers in Europe, Germany and Italy, while the Republicans were aided by the Soviet Union (Casanova 2010, 212). 38 Most famously was the American journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), who journeyed to Spain and published his best-selling novel For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940 based on his experiences there as part of the international pro-Republican efforts (Payne 2012, 167-68).

6 after fighting in the brigades to be a lay teacher at the Catholic-run reformatory of St. Jude’s,39 quickly clashing with the institution’s brutal prefect Brother John (BJ), who suspects the man is a ‘God-hating communist’. The movie appeared within a wave of anticlerical sentiment that followed exposure of the widespread abuse of children inside Ireland’s industrial school system (Pérez-Vides and Carrasco- Carrasco 2015, 16, 25),40 its plot revolving primarily around the experiences of reformatory ‘veteran’ Liam Mercier and newly-sentenced Patrick Delaney.41 A strict hierarchy is maintained in the all-male environment of St. Jude’s with clothes functioning to distinguish the men from the boys42 and a wall separating the younger inmates from the older ones. The breach of this structure by two brothers on Christmas Day43 leads to a pivotal scene in which the boys are publicly humiliated44 and flogged with Liam staging a small but significant act of resistance among the involuntary spectators (Figure 2.1). Turning their backs to the exhibition of violence, the boys begin to chant “No floggin’!” This infuriates BJ, who promises to ‘crucify’ the instigator, and the man makes good on this threat, later beating Liam to death under the auspices of a wooden cross.45 Franklin, disheartened that he could not prevent this tragedy, prepares to leave St. Jude’s, but is convinced to stay when the timorous Patrick speaks up46 to recite the poem “Comrades” by the Irish suffragist Eva Gore-Booth (Figure 2.2).47 While the film ends with this “rhetoric of liberation” (Pérez-Vides and Carrasco-Carrasco 2015, 15), a form of HM remains insofar as the adult-child hierarchy itself is left unchallenged: the malevolent patriarchy of BJ is replaced by the ‘benign’ paternalism of Franklin. This is undoubtedly an improvement, but it is not ideal since the boys remain subordinate and thus vulnerable to the vicissitudes of St. Jude’s turnovers in authority. Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides and Rocío Carrasco-Carrasco suggest that the movie

39 The movie is based on the memoirs of Patrick Galvin (1927-2011) about his time served in an Irish reformatory, which are found in Song for a Raggy Boy: A Cork Boyhood (1991), the second book of the author’s Raggy Boy Trilogy. 40 Industrial schools and reformatories were different institutions, but often confused by the general public; in any case, their young detainees were abused in similar ways and for a book-length treatment of the issue, see Raftery and O’Sullivan (1999). 41 During his intake, Patrick is assigned #743 and BJ addresses the boys, whom he refers to as “creatures…not to be confused with intelligent human beings,” using these numbers in a systematic program of dehumanization. According to Haslam’s two senses of dehumanization (2014, 36), the boys are denied both human nature and human uniqueness. 42 Pérez-Vides and Carrasco-Carrasco note how the men “wear impeccable habits” while the boys “wear loose and worn-out uniforms [that] not only homogenize and denigrate them but also serve as constant reminders of their imprisonment and low- grade position inside the institution” (2015, 18). 43 BJ frames the boys’ transgression in religious terms, claiming it to be “an affront to God and a blasphemy of the soul.” Just prior to punishing them, he asserts that it “is just the beginning. In the hands of Almighty God lie future punishments and they will be more terrible than anything you can ever imagine.” 44 There are two aspects to this humiliation: First, the boys have been stripped to their underwear, a liminal form of clothing (Barcan 2004, 17) that can carry the same associations of shame that (full) nakedness does in certain contexts and thus its use as a form of “punishment, humiliation or degradation” (ibid, 134). Second, with “hair [on the head being] an important part of [one’s] individual and social identity” (ibid, 25), the boys have their hair “butchered” (Pérez-Vides and Carrasco-Carrasco 2015, 26 n.7). 45 The prefect’s ‘punishment’ for this is to be removed from his post and reassigned to the Church’s missions in Africa. 46 Patrick’s finding of a voice at the end is pivotal given his earlier attempt to speak out during confession about the sexual assaults he was suffering at the hands of another brother, only to endure a humiliating reprisal when his abuser is informed, the boy’s “articulation of pain [used] as a further catalyst for victimization” (Pérez-Vides and Carrasco-Carrasco 2015, 20). 47 Gore-Booth (1870-1926) was also involved in fighting for prison reforms and Irish independence from British hegemony; for a biography of her life, see Tiernan (2012).

“challenge[s] cultural fantasies of power and privileges” (ibid, 15), but ignoring children’s structural oppression by adults48 allows them to uncritically swap one fantasy for another. True, the film does not replicate Hollywood’s use of “suffering male [read: men’s] bodies…as an enjoyable reassertion of male [read: men’s] power” (ibid, 15),49 but it does offer suffering boys’ bodies as fuel for men’s (and some, perhaps many, women’s) rescue fantasies,50 thus reinforcing rather than challenging HM, which marginalizes both females of all ages and younger males. The seeds of an alternative form of masculinity are nonetheless present in the boys’ use of art in persuasion and non-violent protest.51 The role art can play in resisting oppression is also a feature of the 2007 Italian film Rosso come il cielo (Red Like the Sky),52 which expands violence beyond armed conflicts and interpersonal assaults to include more subtle, structural forms of cruelty. The movie begins in 1970 Tuscany where Mirco Balleri, an avid fan of cinema and the Western genre in particular with its macho adult protagonists,53 is blinded while accidentally firing his father’s rifle (Figure 2.3).54 With a law in place that prevents him from attending public school,55 the boy is sent to the Cassoni Institute in Genoa, a Catholic-run school for the blind.56 Mirco models the HM of his cinematic heroes, getting into a fight with the school bully Valerio after he and his new friend Felice are ridiculed for discussing colors ‘like girls’. The irreligious boy also clashes with the nuns57 and the school’s aging director when he records over sermons to produce an innovative sound project on the seasons (Figure 2.4). A young teacher at the institute, Don Giulio (DG), recognizes Mirco’s gift for sound editing and encourages the boy to continue his artistic pursuits, an act of resistance that leads to his expulsion. A demonstration by working-class communists58 and likeminded university students achieves Mirco’s readmission and DG becomes new director with a program designed not to rob the boys of their dreams as the former director’s debilitating curriculum had.

48 Kitzinger notes how a “focus on children’s innate vulnerability (as a biological fact unmediated by the world they live in) is an ideology of control which diverts attention away from the socially constructed oppression of young people” (1997, 175). 49 The necessitated clarifying insertions provide an example of my aforementioned claim concerning adultcentric use of terminology that permeates contemporary studies of masculinity. 50 Indeed, it is Franklin’s intervention and assault on BJ that brings the flogging of the two brothers to an end rather than the resistance staged by Liam, which act of defiance leads directly to the boy’s death. 51 In addition to Patrick’s poetic recitation, which helps secure Franklin’s continued protection of the boys, Liam delves into and is inspired by the man’s books of communist poetry from the Spanish Civil War. 52 The movie premiered at the Rome Film Fest in 2006 and is based on the early life of Mirco Mencacci (1961-) who now works as a film sound editor. 53 Fridlund notes that the heyday of the ‘spaghetti Western’ – that is, Western films “produced with a substantial participation of Italians or Spaniards in financing and actual production behind and in front of the camera” (2006, 5; italicized emphasis in original) – was the period 1964 to 1973 (ibid, 7). 54 The bullet shatters glass that is propelled into Mirco’s eyes and while the boy can initially see some shadows after medical intervention, he loses his sight completely about half way through the film. 55 An intertitle at the end of the film notes that this law was abolished in 1975. 56 Both priests and nuns work at the school, but there is none of the physical or sexual abuse so prevalent in Raggy Boy. 57 Mirco does not participate in saying grace before meals, spews out profanity in response to a nun’s nighttime reading about hell and rejects the idea of a loving deity since such a being would never have let him play with the gun that led to his blindness. 58 Kertzer notes how Italy’s communist party was the largest of any country in which it did not also hold power (1996, 4) and that “the 1970s saw…a surge in membership and greater visibility in society at large” (ibid, 38).

Song for a Raggy Boy Red Like the Sky

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4

Both films reflect anticlerical sentiments of the early twenty-first century with Raggy Boy offering little in the way of redemption for the religious order. Those clerics at St. Jude’s who do not participate directly in the abuse are nonetheless complicit through their inaction; only Franklin, a non-Catholic communist (and conceivably an atheist), intervenes on the boys’ behalf, doing so through an alternative form of HM. Red Like the Sky, on the other hand, distinguishes between outdated, oppressive elements in the Church and new, liberating ones; the latter instigated by an irreligious boy challenging his marginalization. Mirco’s conformity to HM is weakened throughout this process as he develops a new way of interacting with the world through his remaining senses, that of sound in particular. The boy’s violent outbursts, both verbal and physical, diminish and he makes peace with Valerio, even involving the former nemesis in his artistic project.59 In both movies, an adult male teacher sensitive to the plight of the film’s juvenile protagonist(s) is the primary agent of change rather than the boys and their acts of resistance.

3. Juntas, Juveniles and ‘Infants’ in Machuca (2004) and Clandestine Childhood (2012)

While the Catholic Church is presented as a violent and antiquated institution in need of reform from an exterior secular source in Raggy Boy and Red Like the Sky, it is at the cutting edge of change and social justice in the Chilean film Machuca (2004). Reforms to the country’s education system were the catalyst for the 1973 coup d’état60 and this “hostility to government interference in private school education [is] restaged and explored in Machuca” (Randall 2017, 42). Several boys from a nearby shantytown arrive at the Saint Patrick English School for Boys in Vitacura61 at the invitation of its principal, Father McEnroe (FM),62 who aims to break down the class and race divisions of Chilean society by enacting a theology of

59 The project takes the form of a fairytale that is performed for the boys’ blindfolded parents toward the end of the film and this element, together with Mirco’s gradual embrace of an alternative masculinity, provide another example of the trend that Ide (2014) identifies in her essay on boyhood melodramas in contemporary Italian cinema. 60 On September 11 of that year the left-leaning government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a right-wing military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet and backed by the US government as part of their Cold War politics to block the spread of communism in Latin America (Randall 2017, 41), this latter fact absent from the film so as to make it “appealing to a global audience who may not want to feel implicated in the events they are witnessing” (Sorensen 2009, 96). 61 Vitacura is a commune of the Santiago Metropolitan Region, one of the richest areas of the city (Sorensen 2009, 85). 62 The character of FM is modeled after Father Geraldo Whelan, the rector of Saint George to whom the film is dedicated in a closing intertitle; his experiences, as well as those of his students and the director Andrés Wood (also one of his students), serve

9 liberation on behalf of the poor (Bost 2009, 57).63 One of these boys is the dark-skinned Pedro Machuca, but despite tribute in the title,64 it is the light-skinned Gonzalo Infante, an upper-middle-class boy already enrolled in the school, who is the movie’s protagonist (ibid, 50; Martin 2019, 142).65 As an allegory of the priest’s experiment in social integration (ibid, 140; Yim 2017, 207), the boys’ subsequent friendship is doomed to failure as their society’s class struggles, “staged on the streets of Santiago in competing marches” (Randall 2017, 42), are now replicated in classroom and schoolyard (Braggio et al. 2014, 194). Violent altercations are instigated on a number of occasions by the school bully, Gaston Robles, whose posse insults Pedro and Gonzalo as girls and gays using vulgar epithets. Pedro, initially defending his own HM with fisticuffs, is swayed by FM’s lecture on non-violence and displays an alternative form of courage following the junta’s removal of the ‘communist’ priest from Saint Patrick by standing up and bidding him goodbye (Figure 3.1).66 While Pedro divests himself of HM and is expelled for his defiance of the new hegemonic military presence at the school, Gonzalo’s relationship to HM is more complex. Initially timid and a target of Gaston’s bullying before Pedro’s arrival, he eventually joins one of the schoolyard fights.67 The boy’s trajectory toward HM, however, is bound up with his ‘coming of age’, both of which are thwarted in the film’s tragic climax. Numerous scholars identify Machuca as narrating Gonzalo’s ‘coming of age’ (Martín-Cabrera and Voionmaa 2007, 66; Bost 2009, 49; Rocha 2012, 97; Randall 2017, 40; Hogan 2018, 178) and while it has many elements associated with such stories, it culminates in the character’s reversion to infancy.68 Inadvertently caught in the junta’s liquidation of the shantytown, Gonzalo witnesses a girl being shot and narrowly escapes the roundup of slum residents by drawing the soldier’s attention to his high-income clothing. Turning back before he mounts his bike (Figure 3.2),69 the boy locks eyes with Pedro, then

as source material for the movie (Vilches 2016, 46; Randall 2017, 42) along with Amante Eledín Parraguez’s 2002 novel Three Years to Be Born (Sorensen 2009, 83). 63 Bost mentions specifically the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the founders of liberation theology, in connection with the concept of the ‘preferential option for the poor’ (2009, 59 n.4). For a brief introduction to this theological praxis, see Rowland (2007). 64 Rocha overstates the case when she “propose[s] that the title…does not refer to Pedro’s last name,” but rather to “the pain and trauma of the Chileans” (2012, 90). The word does mean ‘hurt’ or ‘bruise’ (Bost 2009, 50) and the novelist referred to ‘Machuca’ as a metaphor (Sorensen 2009, 84), which allow for a polysemous understanding of the title rather than any singular one. 65 Hogan refers to Pedro and Gonzalo as “co-protagonists” (2018, 176), but it is the latter’s experiences and point of view that are foregrounded throughout; indeed, as Sorensen points out, “[t]he story begins with Gonzalo getting dressed for school – an indication that the story is being told through him and his memories” (2009, 84). 66 On their first meeting in a humorous exchange in which Pedro yells out his name, FM encourages the boy to make his voice heard, which is actualized in this final exchange. 67 Gonzalo follows Pedro’s lead not only in this, but in stating his intention to become a priest when his friend embraces FM’s non-violent form of masculinity. Even though their friendship is already disintegrating at the time of the coup, Gonzalo is first among the students to follow Pedro’s example of standing up and showing respect for FM as he leaves Saint Patrick. 68 Hogan comes close to this conclusion when she refers to “the defeat of [Gonzalo’s] growth” (2018, 178), but stops short of seeing the boy’s ‘coming-of-age’ curtailed. 69 The bike is another indicator of Gonzalo’s class and access to wealth (Martín-Cabrera and Voionmaa 2007, 69).

10 irrevocably severs their friendship by riding through the smoke and fire to safety,70 abandoning him to an unknown fate.71 Gonzalo’s ‘baby face’ (Martin 2019, 141) and his last name ‘Infante’72 both hint toward an interrupted ‘coming of age’ and symbolic reversal to infancy. The Latin infans means ‘speechless’ and the boy remains so for the duration of the film (Randall 2017, 61), silently bearing witness to “the events that have scarred him and his nation” (ibid, 62).73 While Gonzalo is rendered impotent (Sorensen 2009, 98) – at least for now – under the military’s “more hierarchically-arranged social arrangement wherein men rule and women obey” (Bost 2009, 56) – and children must be included among the subordinates – the juvenile protagonist in the 2012 Argentine film Infancia clandestina (Clandestine Childhood) is groomed for an active role in overthrowing the junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.74 The movie is predominantly set in 1979 when Juan75 returns to the country with his baby sister and fugitive parents,76 who are Montoneros guerillas,77 to participate in a counteroffensive. Juan’s father commands ‘special agitation troops’ that are, like similar militant groups, “authoritarian and hierarchical in form” (Marchak 1999, 93); having ‘balls’ is connected to bravery and courage, thereby associating the group with HM. Juan’s hero, as with likeminded militants of the period (ibid, 93), is the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (1928-1967),78 and he uses the man’s given name ‘Ernesto’ for his alias at school. Having two identities and mimicking his idol’s clandestine activities is initially something of a game (Maguire 2017, 143),79 but one that ends tragically.

70 Hogan notes how Gonzalo’s flight on his bike is shot in “an emotionally charged slow motion,” noting how this is similar to the scene featuring Moncho at the end of Butterfly (2018, 177). Slow motion is used to convey meaning in a number of ways, but typically and in the present case “for emphasis, becoming a way of dwelling on a moment of spectacle or high drama” (Bordwell and Thompson 2013, 168). 71 Bost suggests that Pedro and the others in the shantytown have been dispersed (2009, 57) whereas Hogan understands the boy to have been murdered, “erased liked the roadside graffiti that bears witness to the civil unrest” and claims inspiration for the character from Carlos Fariña, a thirteen-year-old dissident “whose remains from 1973 were found thirty years later…with twelve bullet wounds” (2018, 171). The latter seems the most likely inference and Hogan documents her assertion with a talk that the film’s screenwriter gave in Baltimore in 2016 (ibid, 198 n.9), the content of which I am unable to verify. 72 The Spanish infante carries the same meaning as the English cognate infant. 73 Sorensen (2009, 92) wonders whether Gonzalo will “now suppress the memory and conform to the expectations of his sheltered life of material wealth and superficialities” or “will this experience transform [him] into a man of deep humanity who will honor Pincohet’s victims and work for truth and justice?” She leans, correctly in my estimation, toward the latter based on the autobiographical nature of the material. To this may be added, from the film’s own denouement, the boy’s refusal to help Gaston cheat on a test as he implicitly used to and his own “small but notable act of resistance to the new regime” (Bost 2009, 57) in handing in a blank test to the junta-installed instructor. 74 This period in Argentine history is known as the ‘Dirty War’, but use of the term is contested since “[i]t was coined by the military junta in order to justify their clandestine actions: a ‘dirty enemy’ allowed for ‘dirty methods’ and for a ‘dirty’ war’ [and] use of the term…indirectly repeats the military’s justifications” (Garibotto 2015, 258 n.1). 75 The boy is named after Juan Perón, the president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 who inspired violent revolution during his subsequent exile and who returned to the country in 1973 for another brief term as presidency that terminated with his death the following year (Marchak 1999, 57, 65-66, 69-70, 102-5, 111). 76 The film opens with a scene four years earlier of an attack on the family that precipitated their flight to Cuba. 77 The Montoneros first appeared in 1970 as “the militant arm of Catholic youth” (Marchak 1999, 96) and were Peronists who followed their exiled leader’s call to “mount [a] revolution and to be as violent as necessary in order to seize power” (ibid, 98). 78 Garibotto points out that Guevara, “instead of being a political figure, embodies the fairy-tale features of a child’s hero: he is an epic character who travels around the world and skillfully outwits his enemies by changing his clothes” (2015, 262). 79 Hogan refers to Juan as a “toy soldier,” one “[n]ot fully cognizant of the sacrifice and danger of the montonero endeavour” (2018, 190).

After learning the details of his uncle’s death-by-suicide during an altercation with the military police, the boy has a dream in which he is present at the man’s demise, one of three sequences in the film where the live action gives way to illustrations, a “graphic novel in motion” (Thomas 2015, 248).80 These comprise the “most traumatizing moments in Juan’s story” (Ghiggia 2018, 1) where the boy is “a witness to or a victim of acts of violence” (ibid, 6) and often shown “paralyzed with fear” (ibid, 7; Figure 3.3). The cartoons feature yellow and red prominently, colors introduced in the first sequence as Juan’s urine and his father’s blood respectively, the former a reflexive discharge linked to the boy’s experience of fear (Maguire 2017, 138). Later, when Juan dreams about a girl from school and a nocturnal emission might be expected, he instead wakes up to a urine-stained bed. Such involuntary urination, more common in infancy or early childhood, is at odds with the recurring claim (Garibotto 2015, 257; Thomas 2015, 237; Jacobs 2017, 41; Ghiggia 2018, 4; Hogan 2018, 191) that the boy’s ‘coming of age’ is narrated.81 Juan is presented, rather, as a pseudo-adult with certain infantile characteristics,82 the normalization of violence (Maguire 2017, 140) and its domestication (Garibotto 2015, 260) having catapulted him prematurely into adulthood.83 The implied remedy for this ‘theft’ of childhood (Jacobs 2017, 43; Tal 2018) is a reversal of the developmental trajectory so when the boy, having been deposited at his grandmother’s doorstep by the junta who has already killed his father and ‘disappeared’ his mother and baby sister,84 begins to heal his fragmented identity85 by identifying as Juan rather than ‘Ernesto’ (Figure 3.4), he also implicitly demands a ‘normal’ childhood.

Machuca Clandestine Childhood

Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4

80 Both Thomas and Maguire (2017, 149) note how this medium is often associated with children. 81 This tendency to label films that involve protagonists of twelve (or thereabouts) who experience some sort of trauma and/or the first stirrings of sexual attraction as ‘coming-of-age’ stories reflects a lack of critical attention to how these elements are used in the plot, as well as the highly symbolic and contestable nature of what is a cultural rather than biological phenomenon. 82 Garibotto uses ‘child’ and ‘infant’ interchangeably in reference to Juan (2015, 264), probably under the influence of the Spanish infancia, which covers the periods of both infancy and childhood. Jacobs refers to Juan as being twelve years old (2017, 40) and elsewhere as being a teenager (ibid, 35); toward the end of the film, the boy claims to be eleven years old while being interrogated. Another term Jacobs uses in reference to Juan is ‘adolescent’ (ibid, 40) whereas Tal views him as ‘pre-adolescent’ (2018). This fluid and often mutually-exclusive terminology in reference to young characters begs for more critical examination. 83 This is most evident from the scenes in which Juan is shown as the primary caregiver to his baby sister while his parents concentrate on the counteroffensive operation. As Maguire summarizes it: “the parents repeatedly neglect their familial duties and focus instead on discussing strategies, distributing munitions and organising propaganda material, it is [therefore] Juan who is left to nurse, feed and, during the most violent episodes of the film, protect his younger sister” (2017, 138). 84 Marchak notes how the verb is used transitively in Latin-American Spanish “as a consequence of the terrorist regimes in Argentina and neighboring societies” (1999, 16). An estimated 30,000 people were ‘disappeared’ in Argentina (ibid, 154), among whom was the mother of the film’s director, Benjamin Ávila; the movie is thus a mix of fictional and autobiographical elements (Aguilar 2013, 17-18; Ghiggia 2018, 4) 85 This fragmentation is graphically portrayed when Juan is in a house of mirrors with his girlfriend (Aguilar 2013, 22).

4. (Un)holy Dissidents and the Real/Surreal in Abandoned (2001) and The Great Water (2004)

Even though the junta that ruled Argentina framed their actions in terms of a religious crusade against “subversives, communists, atheists, and dissidents who, in their view, constituted a serious threat to the well-being of ‘Western civilization and Christianity’” (Marchak 1999, 3), this aspect is submerged in Clandestine Childhood.86 A clash between atheism and religion, however, is conspicuous in some films from Eastern Europe in which there were efforts by communist states under the hegemony of the Soviet Union87 to control the practice of religion and thus reduce its influence as a competing ideology (Ramet 1998, 5-6). The communists assumed formal power in Hungary in 1948 (Kenez 2006, 2). Two-thirds of the population were Roman Catholic (ibid, 164)88 with nearly half a million students enrolled in Church schools (ibid, 284).89 These institutions were brought under state control, convents were closed and numerous clergy members were imprisoned (Molnár 2001, 299). A national uprising in 1956 was quelled through direct Soviet intervention (ibid, 311-21),90 following which the suppression of various dissidents was intensified (ibid, 323-24).91 The 2001 film Torzók (Abandoned) is set in 1960 during this period of severe repression.92 The movie draws its title from the desertion of the juvenile protagonist Áron by his father to a state-run orphanage for boys,93 but it is the supporting character Máté who will be the focus here.94 The boy, a Catholic,95 repeatedly defies the institution’s ban on prayer (Figure 4.1) and, when informed on,96 is forced to write ‘There is no god and I won’t pray to him anymore’ a hundred times. When Máté is later

86 It appears obliquely and situated in the past with references to the Christianizing colonization of the Americas in Juan’s school and the boy’s part as an indigenous American in a skit performed while he and his class are on a camping trip. 87 This ‘sphere of influence’ was the result of informal and formal (Yalta) agreements between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union as the Second World War drew to a close (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007, 459-63). 88 Kenez also notes that over ninety percent of the country’s population were ‘believers’ of some sort, perhaps owing in the immediate postwar period to “the people’s craving for consolation in religious faith at a time of great poverty, misery, and uncertainty” (2006, 163-64). 89 The total student population of Hungary in 1948 was about 1.2 million (Kenez 2006, 284). 90 Molnár reports how “the Russian army installed itself in Hungary and stayed for 35 years” (2001, 319). 91 Soviet propaganda presented the revolution as “instigated by Catholic, peasant and ‘bourgeois nationalist’ opponents of Communist rule,” but it was “a campaign for ‘real socialism’, a radical attempt by embittered and disillusioned workers and intelligentsia to bring about a more authentic socialist revolution with more far-reaching gains for the working class and the peasantry” (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007, 477; italicized emphasis in original). 92 In addition to the several thousand Hungarians who were killed during the uprising or executed in its aftermath, more than 15,000 were imprisoned (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007, 477). Beginning in 1961, “political censorship and travel restrictions were progressively relaxed, the political police were reined in, there was increased observance of due legal process and the rule of law, the state negotiated a concordat with the Roman Catholic Church (in 1964) and most of Hungary’s political prisoners were gradually amnestied, released and rehabilitated” (ibid, 496). 93 Áron has ‘dreams’ about his mother who is blind and institutionalized; these sequences number four (though one of them does not involve his mother), the same number as in the Thaw-Era Soviet film Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and, like them (Synessios 2007, 111), they are a mixture of memory and reverie. 94 The three key juvenile characters are Áron, Máté and Attila, whose father is one of the state’s many political prisoners. The four other ‘orphans’ who are named and play roles of varying significance are Seprödi, Csontos, Hajós and Váradi. 95 Máté crosses himself left to right and believes his parents, who died in a car accident, are presently in purgatory. 96 Máté prays openly in front of the other boys in their sleeping quarters and the prefect has just recruited Hajós through intimidation and bribery to report back to him on the others’ activities.

13 caught praying with a group of boys seated around him listening intently, the director forces them to take turns lashing their recalcitrant religious peer (Figure 4.2)97 who eventually cries out under the beating, but does not resist (Matt 5:39). Máté’s commitment to non-violence and an alternative form of masculinity is evident from his refusal to participate in hazing rituals; most of the boys, however, model the prefect’s HM and belief that such ‘discipline’ will help them survive in a cruel world. Máté joins five other boys in an escape from the orphanage98 that ends in tragedy when one falls through ice99 and Máté, who tries to rescue him, suffers what appears to be irreversible brain damage from the ensuing hypothermia.100 As a dark and realist meditation on the bleakness of a universe without ‘God’,101 Abandoned contrasts sharply with the mix of surreal and supernatural in the 2004 movie Golemata voda (The Great Water),102 an international collaboration filmed in the Republic of Macedonia.103 The movie opens in the present day with the elderly Lem Nikodinoski rushed to the hospital in critical condition where he passes over to an alternate plane of existence (Medencevic 2005). Here he observes and at times interacts with his boyhood self in a postwar Yugoslavian orphanage,104 an abandoned factory where the children of the state’s enemies105 were sent for Stalinist indoctrination. The communist party was at that time “permeated by the Stalin cult” (Benson 2004, 86)106 and the institution’s propagandist and deputy warden, Comrade Olivera, worships Stalin like a god (Medencevic 2005).107 The warden publicly condemns the practice of religion in conformity with state policy,108 but keeps his and his wife’s Christian faith a secret.

97 Áron is hesitant, but Seprödi insists he participate otherwise the director will beat Máté even worse. 98 The idea to escape is Áron’s and all of the named ‘orphans’ with the exception of the director’s spy Hajós participate. 99 This is Attila, who had become Áron’s best friend; upon the survivors’ return to the orphanage, Áron is labeled a murderer and placed in solitary confinement. The movie ends with Áron being transported to a stricter facility from which he will not be able to escape. 100 The viewer learns only that Máté has been hospitalized where he continues to pray but recognizes no one. 101 Nyitrai, a former astronomer recently released from prison for political crimes, entertains questions from Áron about the existence of ‘God’ and tells the boy that he has been searching for him for thirty years and not found him. After the boys’ ill- fated escape and Áron’s return to the orphanage as a ‘murderer’, Nyitrai hangs himself. Áron’s brief ‘dream’ sequences offer some respite, but ultimately reinforce the harshness of the reality depicted. 102 The film is based on the same-titled novel by Živko Čingo. 103 Macedonia is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and passed its first independent constitution in 1991 (Ramet 2006, 567). 104 The orphanage is situated on the shores of Lake Prespa in southern Macedonia (Medencevic 2005). 105 These are given without elucidation as “the wealthy, the traitors, the collaborators.” The kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by a coalition of German and Italian forces in April 1941, its teenaged monarch fleeing to Britain where he and his ministers established their government-in-exile (Ramet 2006, 111). Yugoslavia was carved up by the fascist invaders with Macedonia split between their Bulgarian allies and Italian-controlled Albania (ibid, 113). The Serbian-nationalist Chetniks wound up collaborating at various times with both the Italians and Germans (ibid, 113-14) while the Partisans, under the leadership of Josip Broz (better known as Tito), were ultimately successful in their ‘liberation’ of Yugoslavia and set up a communist state in 1945 with Soviet assistance (ibid, 151-62; Benson 2004, 76-86). 106 The film’s postwar sequences (the majority of the movie) are set in 1945 and 1946; that is, during the period before the split between Tito and Stalin, which occurred between 1948 and 1949 (Benson 2004, 94-95) even though several of its roots reached backed into the wartime period (Ramet 2006, 175-76). 107 Olivera has a portrait of the Soviet leader lit by candles and works to fashion a bust of her idol that she kisses. 108 Ramet refers to “communist hostility toward organized religion” in postwar Yugoslavia, noting that “[o]ver the succeeding months and years there were repeated arrests and trials of clergy, physical attacks on clergymen, seizures of Church publications which offended the regime in one or another way, and a steady barrage of propaganda depicting the clergy, especially the Catholic clergy, as backward, primitive, and reactionary” (2006, 196).

Central to the film is Lem’s friendship with Isak Keyten, a mysterious boy found hiding with monks who is led into the orphanage with hands bound. This conspicuous entrance is accompanied by a sudden downpour that stops when he looks heavenward. Later, during a drought, Isak brings the rain to revive a dehydrated Lem. While having the façade of a miracle-working ‘messiah’, there is a dark and violent side to the boy’s ‘magic’. Isak, referred to by peasant informants as “a devil’s seed”, resurrects an electrocuted cat, but had also delivered the animal up to the sadistic bellman who tortured it to death in the first place.109 While affiliating himself with ‘the Lord’ of Judeo-Christian worship,110 Isak initiates Lem into a sacred brotherhood through the mutual ingestion of their mixed blood, a practice anathema in both religious traditions (Lev 17:10-12; Acts 15:20, 29). Despite adjuring Lem before the eerie candlelit ceremony to never lie,111 Isak encourages his ‘brother’ to speak falsehoods to feign conformity, smearing the boy’s lips (Figure 4.3) with a red concoction in which he has drowned insects, the application having (supposedly) the power to absorb his deceitful words. Lem, jealous of the attention Olivera gives to Isak, desecrates her bust of Stalin,112 for which she blames Isak and stabs him in the eye and face with a pen (Figure 4.4). Both the practice of religion and the attempt to suppress it are fraught with violence. Instead of exonerating his ‘brother’,113 Lem perpetuates his duplicity among the ranks of the hierarchic Pioneers, embracing the HM implicit in their oath to respect adults and discarding all outward signs of faith.114

Abandoned The Great Water

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4

5. ‘Secular’ Utopias/Dystopias in The White King (2016) and Partisan (2015)

The totalitarian regimes in Hungary, the former Yugoslavia and other Eastern European nation states that persecuted the adherents of various faith traditions were themselves ‘religious’ as viewed through the

109 While Lem is horrified by the bellman’s actions and covers his ears as the kitten ‘sings’, Isak looks on emotionless. 110 When the warden asks the children if any of them believes in ‘the Lord’, Isak immediately stands up. 111 It is during this blood-brother ritual that Isak speaks for the first and only time in the film, proclaiming “Now we’re brothers.” The boy’s words are everywhere else conveyed through the narration of old Lem. 112 Lem smears red paint on Stalin’s lips and draws crosses over his eyes and on his forehead. 113 Isak, in any case, disappears from the cellar in which he is locked, never to be seen again. 114 Lem arrived at the orphanage wearing a jeweled cross he received from his grandmother. The precious item is confiscated, but returned by the warden shortly before his departure. Upon his return to the orphanage and its grounds some sixty years later, old Lem finds the cross inside a box gifted him from Isak among the overgrown grass, implying the boy had discarded it and the faith it symbolized before leaving the facility.

15 functionalist lens of understanding religion.115 This is most obvious in Olivera’s worship of Stalin, but is also evident through the prominent display of certain symbols and flags. Other important elements of the ‘liturgical’ nature of contemporary ‘secular’ societies are ceremonies and music (Cavanaugh 2009, 113). All of these appear in the British dystopian film The White King (2016), which was adapted from György Dragomán’s same-titled novel (2007), itself loosely based on the author’s childhood as a member of the repressed Magyar (Hungarian) minority living in communist-era Romania.116 The movie is set within a future regime known as the Homeland that revolves around the founding myth of ‘young Hank Lumber’ who abandoned modern technology in pursuit of a simple agricultural utopia.117 The thirtieth anniversary of the Homeland’s independence is celebrated with a display of the military might that keeps them ‘free’ and Djata Fitz energetically participates in the festivities (Figure 5.1). Djata’s ‘homemade’ flag,118 however, was stolen from a public monument since the boy had no time to prepare one of his own, an act which draws the ire of his teacher,119 who punches him with metal knuckles and shames him with a sign that reads ‘Thief’ for the rest of the celebration. Later that same day, Djata discovers his father is not, as he was led to believe, away working, but languishing in a military prison for speaking out against the regime.120 Subject to increasing harassment and discrimination as a traitor’s son, yet knowing his father to be a ‘good man’, the boy begins to question the Homeland while struggling with his grandparents’ attempts to instill in him loyalty to the regime and a willingness to kill for it.121 The “violence [that] is like air” (Dragomán 2017) spills over into Djata’s leisure activities and a small-scale war is launched over the seizure of his ball. In the process of retrieving it, the boy stabs one of his ‘enemies’ and narrowly escapes being shot with a flaming arrow (Figure 5.2). The film offers a bleak outlook on humanity’s future as increased isolationism and hatred of the other leads to totalitarianism and boys’ roles as both victims and perpetrators of violence (ibid) within hegemonic masculine regimes.

115 Cavanaugh summarizes the functionalist approach to religion as one that “expand[s] the definition of religion to include ideologies and practices – such as Marxism, nationalism, and free-market ideology – that are not commonly considered religious. They do so by looking not at content but at the way that these ideologies and practices function in various contexts to provide an overarching structure of meaning in everyday social life” (2009, 58). While Cavanaugh is critical of both the functionalist and substantive approaches to defining religion – the latter summarized as “restricting the meaning of religion to beliefs and practices concerning something like gods or ‘the transcendent’” (ibid, 57) – he is more amenable to the former (ibid, 113, 118), which he nonetheless notes produces a “meaning of religion so wide[] as to render the category virtually useless” (ibid, 118-19). 116 Dragomán’s childhood coincided with the final decade of Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime in which the dictator unleashed “the most draconian austerity programme of any state in the Soviet bloc[, which] included power cuts and the rationing of food and petrol[, as well as] the widespread neglect and rapid decay of Romania’s social infrastructure” (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007, 518). 117 Technology has not been abandoned, however, but is in the sole possession of the Homeland’s military elites who use it for their own benefit and pleasure, as well as to spy on the general populace whom they exploit economically. 118 The Homeland flag is black and features the tip of a yellow pitchfork, a symbol of agriculture associated with ‘young Hank Lumber’. Djata’s community lives in the shadow of a menacing statue of the Homeland’s supposed founder holding a full-length pitchfork, which presents as more a tool of violence and intimidation than agriculture. 119 While there are women in the Homeland military, even in high positions, there is still a patriarchal order and the children are segregated by sex with Djata in a school for boys preparing for entrance into the paramilitary ‘Junior Defense’. 120 The precise nature of the man’s dissidence is not revealed, but comments made early on suggest it involves redistribution of wealth into the hands of the military elite and questioning the existence of the Homeland’s founding figure. 121 Djata’s grandfather gives him a gun for his birthday and both he and his wife compel the boy to shoot a cat, the woman trying to break down his resistance to doing so by claiming it is natural and they are all hunters.

Traditional forms of religion have disappeared in the world of The White King, which is also true of the small commune in the Australian dystopian film Partisan (2015). Gregori “presides as the patriarch of a secret Edenic community of children and their estranged mothers” (Briggs 2015, 10) and while he is not ‘religious’, he exudes the same “charisma and authority” as do the leaders of cloistered religious sects (Ramji 2015, 2). The misanthropic Gregori stokes fear of and hatred for those outside the compound and trains the children as assassins,122 the most successful of those sent out on missions being eleven-year-old Alexander.123 He and his mother were the first to be brought into the polygamous commune and the high value the boy places on self-preservation124 is reflected in his answer to Gregori’s question of whether he would rather be hit by a man or hit a man first: “Hit a man first.” When Alexander’s mother becomes pregnant, Gregori instructs the boy in HM, to be his mother’s and younger sibling’s protector, by using lethal violence if necessary. The insular utopia that Gregori has created is disturbed by the arrival of Leo, a boy much older than the infants who typically accompany their mothers into the compound. He challenges Gregori on a number of occasions and, respecting “the sanctity of all life” (ibid, 14), installs himself in the chicken coop to protect them from being slaughtered for food (Figure 5.3). Leo disappears with Gregori claiming he ran away;125 knowing this to be a lie and inspired by the boy’s example, Alexander defies the man himself and in the film’s climax, cradles his newborn brother Tobias while holding a gun on Gregori (Figure 5.4). It is implied that the boy will shoot him, both to ‘hit a man first’ and to protect his mother and brother. To propose, as Briggs does, that “Gregori evokes the old, the archaic and the broken” and “Alexander embodies the new, the progressive and the optimistic” (2015, 13), is to miss the tragedy of this final scene: Alexander is the perfect partisan to the ideas Gregori espouses and, by dethroning him, will more likely than not perpetuate the role of patriarchal protector.126

The White King Partisan

Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4

122 These ‘jobs’ for which Gregori is paid are given to him by his one outside contact, known affectionately to the children as ‘Uncle Charlie’. 123 The film’s director claimed inspiration for the character from a New York Times article on Colombian boys recruited by gangs to kill for them in exchange for money (Briggs 2015, 10). 124 Briggs notes how this, in the addition to the inculcation of hatred, comprise “a moral stance that has underpinned countless totalitarian regimes throughout the ages” (Briggs 2015, 12). 125 It is unclear whether Gregori ejected Leo and his family (mother and infant sibling) from the commune or killed them. 126 Briggs seems to acknowledge this when he writes “Alexander, in an absurd circular refusal and demonstration of what Gregori has taught him – to wield a gun, to hit a man before he hits you – saves his brother and overthrows his father” (2015, 15), but there is nothing progressive or optimistic in this, the boy is perpetuating violence and a circle of patriarchal authority.

6. Non-Hegemonic (Juvenile) Masculinities and Reducing (Ir)religious Violence

This essay has focused on ten world cinema films from the turn of the millennium onward. With the exception of the last two, which imagine dystopian futures within a totalitarian regime (The White King) and a patriarchal commune (Partisan), these movies are set in various contexts of the twentieth century, reimagining diverse conflicts between secular and religious groups. There is the clash between the left- wing Republicans and right-wing Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (Butterfly, Black Bread); the attempts by non-religious figures to reform Catholic-run institutions for juvenile delinquents (Song for a Raggy Boy) and the blind (Red Like the Sky); the armed revolutions in Chile (Machuca) and Argentina (Clandestine Childhood) against the backdrop of the Cold War; and the attempts by communist dictators to curtail the practice of religion in post-revolutionary Hungary (Abandoned) and post-war Yugoslavia (The Great Water). The wording of these summaries highlights the difficulty in isolating religion as a primary factor in these various conflicts. While cinema does not (and cannot) offer unmediated access to these historical moments, its projects do reflect how they are remembered and made relevant to contemporary audiences, which is perhaps more important than what actually happened. The religious and non-religious violence depicted is interwoven with sociopolitical and economic issues, particularly class struggle. Communism (or a form of it) is present in all ten movies, often aligned by its detractors with godlessness even though Father McEnroe is a Christian and it is not clear whether characters such as Don Gregorio and William Franklin are, in fact, atheists. Given this fluidity and insofar as violence is realistically portrayed in non- religious (at least in the traditional sense) dystopian futures, the idea of violence as a problem particularly associated with religion is indefensible, as would be ridding the world of religion to allow for the creation of a secular utopia, itself “incipiently totalitarian” (Stahl 2010, 106) and reliant on violence to attain. The dilemma of violence is multifaceted (Connell 2000, 223-24) and I have drawn attention to HM as one aspect among many that should be explored and challenged in order to reduce the amount of violence in the world. An adultcentric bias in contemporary gender scholarship leads to a focus within studies of masculinities on a horizontal plane of HM (men’s power over women) while overlooking a vertical dimension (adults’ and particularly men’s power over children of both sexes). The various forms of cruelty that the boys in these films experience, which have genuine correlates outside the fictional world of cinema, take place within an adult-dominated social hierarchy and the violence perpetrated by boys – usually against animals or other boys – is connected to feelings of powerlessness and/or reflects an attempt to move up in the male hierarchy. To ignore social hierarchies and overlook the oppressive nature of childhoods (Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1992, 191; Kitzinger 1997, 185) is to miss a crucial element in the perpetuation of violence against and by juvenile males.

Moving toward a genuinely egalitarian society – not only in terms of gender, but also age – is thus an essential step in the reduction of violence. Celebrating alternative forms of masculinity – ones that embrace diverse sexualities, emphasize cooperation over competiveness and are not afraid of displaying gentleness – are also important, but those who model them remain vulnerable to the violence that often supports HM. Those characters in the movies herein surveyed who embrace these alternatives generally do not fare well as the examples of Pedro (Machuca), Máté (Abandoned) and Leo (Partisan) illustrate. If non-hegemonic masculinity is not extinguished violently from without, it may be suppressed from within as in the case of Andreu (Black Bread). Still, there is hope, as Mirco (Red Like the Sky) helped contribute to reform and model a successful transition from HM to a more inclusive and non-violent masculinity as he struggled with and embraced his disenfranchising difference. Cultivating empathy – “the ability to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others…and to respond appropriately” (Gordon 2010, 155) – in humans from the beginning of their life’s journey to its end is imperative to the peacemaking process, a task that falls to both those who identify as religious and those who do not.

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