ALL AND NOTHING:

WHITE HETEROSEXUAL MASCULINITY

IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR CINEMA

by

Nicola Rehling

A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture,

School of English, Faculty of Philosophy,

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2005 i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………page iii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………v

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………... 1

Part One: The Politics of White Heterosexual Male Victimology

Introduction to Part One From Backlash to Betrayal ……………………………………………………………………32

Chapter 1 Losing Ground: Spatial Inscriptions of White Male Disenfranchisement in Popular Cinema 1.1. Falling Down: The “Angry White Male” in a Reterritorialised America…………………..43 1.2. Disclosure: The Feminisation of the Workplace……………………………………………57 1.3. The Full Monty: The Reversals of Gendered Spaces and Places……………………………68

Chapter 2 Literalising the Wound: White Heterosexual Masculinity, Masochism and Popular Cinema 2.1. Wounded White Men………………………………………………………………………..79 2.2. Regarding Henry: The Damaged White Male and the Child Within……………………….84 2.3. Forrest Gump: Wounded Intellect and White Male Redemption…………………………...90 2.4. Paternal Melodramas………………………………………………………………………..96 2.5. Fight Club and the Art of Disavowal ……………………………………………………...101 2.6. Male Hysteria……………….……………………………………………………………...104 2.7. Absent Fathers……………………………….………………………………………….…111 2.8. Fight Club and Male Masochism: Taking It Like a Man………………………………….115

Part Two: Coming Apart at the Seams? White Heterosexual Masculinity and the Body

Introduction to Part Two Unveiling the Unmarked Body……………………………………………………………….127

Chapter 3 Fleshing Out White Heterosexual Masculinity: The Commodification of the White Male Body 3.1. The White Male Body on Display…………………………………………………………136 3.2. Sex, Flies and Underpants: The White Male Body as Commodity……………………..…142 3.3. Anxieties of the Flesh: The Commodified White Male Body as a Social Problem……….148 3.4. White Male Bodies in Action……………………………………………………………...162 3.5. Re-Determining White Masculinity: Terminator 2: Judgement Day……………………...168

Chapter 4 Terminal Bodies and Cartesian Trips: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Virtual Reality Fantasy Cinema 4.1. From Cyborgs to Virtual Bodies…………………………………………………………...180 4.2. The Virtual Reality Debate………………………………………………………………...182 4.3. Strange Days: Recycling the Cartesian Legacy……………………………………………189 4.4. Transcending the Flesh: Race, Gender and Christian Discourse in The Matrix…………...197

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4.5. Fusing with the Matrix: Pre-Oedipal Imagery and the Monstrous Feminine……………...207

Chapter 5 Queering White Heterosexual Masculinity: Cross Dressing and Transgender Cinema 5.1. Border Crossings…………………………………………………………………………...213 5.2. Contesting the Natural……………………………………………………………………..215 5.3. Queering Sexual Difference: Gender Trouble and the Trouble with Gender Trouble…….217 5.4. The Subversive Potential of Drag………………………………………………………….224 5.5. White Masculinity in Cross-Dressing Comedies………………………………………..…228 5.6. The Crying Game: Queering White Male Heterosexual Identifications…………………...233 5.7. Boys Don’t Cry: Performing White Masculinity…………………………………………..246

Chapter 6 White Skin, Black Masks? “Wiggers” in Contemporary Popular Cinema 6.1. Racial Cross-Overs………………………………………………………………………...263 6.2. Visual Matters: The Performativity of Race……………………………………………….266 6.3. From Minstrels to Wiggers………………………………………………………………...276 6.4. Quentin Tarantino: White Cool, Black Masks……………………………………………..282 6.5. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled: Minstrelsy in the 21st Century...……………………………….288 6.6. Ali G Indahouse: British Wiggers, American Minstrelsy?………………………………...292 6.7. 8 Mile: Eminem, “White Trash” Masculinity and Rap Authenticity………………………299

Part Three: Marking White Male Violence: The Gangster and the Serial Killer

Introduction To Part Three White Male Violence in Postmodern Media…………………………………………………309

Chapter 7 White Male Violence in the Gangster Films of Quentin Tarantino 7.1. Quentin Tarantino and his Cinema of Postmodern Cool…………………………………..317 7.2. “Are you going to bark all day little doggie … or are you going to bite?” Deconstructing the Gangster Ideal…………………………………………………………………………..319 7.3. White Heterosexual Masculinity in Tarantino’s Cinema of Hyperreal Violence………….327 7.4. The Violence of Hate Speech: The Instabilities of White Masculinity……………………338 7.5. Phallic Women, Infantilism and Aggression in Tarantino’s Gangster Chic……………….343

Chapter 8 Hollow Men: White Masculinity in Contemporary Serial Killer Movies 8.1. Gendering and Racing the Serial Killer……………………………………………………350 8.2. Sexually Deviant Serial Killers…………………………………………………………….352 8.3. “White Trash” Serial Killers……………………………………………………………….359 8.4. The “Abnormally Normal” Serial Killer…………………………………………………...367

Afterword Popular Cinematic Representations of White Heterosexual Masculinity in a Post-9/11 America………………………………………………………………………………………...376

Works Cited Film and Television Programmes………………………………………………………………385 Books, Articles and Miscellaneous……………………………………….…………………….399

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the help, support and inspiration of many people. However, most thanks must go to my supervisor, Dr. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, whose encouragement, warmth, generosity and sense of humour have sustained me throughout the past four years. Her questioning mind, intellectual and theoretical rigour, and perceptive readings of the chapters that follow have helped me to produce work to the best of my abilities. I will be eternally grateful for her enthusiasm for this project, for her unfailing faith in me, and for making the writing of this thesis such an enjoyable as well as academically rewarding experience. She has taught me the true meaning of being a scholar and a teacher.

I would also like to thank my co-advisor, Dr. Elsi Sakellaridou, for her careful reading of my work and her insightful comments, which often caused me to question assumptions that I had taken for granted. I am also grateful to my other co-advisor, Dr. Michalis Kokkonis, for his ongoing support throughout both the writing of this thesis and my teaching work at Aristotle

University of Thessaloniki. In addition, I would like to thank the other members of my examining committee, Dr. Karin-Boklund Lagopoulou, Dr. Nikos Kontos, Dr. Effie

Yiannopoulou and Dr. Alexandros Lagopoulos, for their constructive comments and criticisms.

I am also hugely indebted to my close friend Sara Hannam for her perceptive comments on drafts of this thesis, for keeping me politically attuned, and, most importantly, for offering invaluable emotional support throughout the past four years. I am also grateful to Cleopatra

Kondoulis for her meticulous reading of my work, and for being a good friend in a time of need.

I would also like to thank Aneta Karagiannidou for the many fascinating and thought- provoking discussions we have had about popular cinema, as well as for her friendship and interest in my work during the past few years. Conversations with colleague and friend Sean

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Homer have also proved enlightening, and I am grateful to him for sharing his vast theoretical knowledge with me, as well as for his constructive advice throughout the writing of this thesis.

There are also numerous people who have helped me throughout my academic career. In particular, I am deeply indebted to Steve Watts and Steve Xerri for believing in me at a crucial time and for kindling my interest in gender theory. They may not realise it, but I would never be where I am now without them. Mandy Merck has also influenced my work in immeasurable ways, particularly in arousing my interest in the complexities of popular cinema, gender, and sexuality. I look back on her stimulating and inspiring MA courses at Sussex University (1994-

95) with great fondness. I also need to thank my students at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and City College of Thessaloniki (Affiliated Institution of Sheffield University) for their love of popular cinema, their lively and enthusiastic discussions, and their taxing questions, which have kept me on my toes and have helped shape my own research interests.

These acknowledgments would not be complete without thanking friends and family who have encouraged me (and put up with me!) throughout this project. I am grateful to my sister,

Clare, for keeping me grounded and for always being able to make me laugh. I am also indebted more than I could ever say to my parents for their ongoing emotional and financial support, for instilling in me the confidence to realise my ambitions, and for always letting me know that I am loved. Lastly, words cannot express my gratitude to my own white heterosexual male, Yiannis, for persuading me to embark on this thesis, for helping me in whatever ways he could, for demonstrating unlimited reserves of patience when I shut myself in my study for hours at a time, and for always having faith in me. This thesis is dedicated to him, with love.

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ABSTRACT

This thesis explores popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity, primarily in contemporary Hollywood texts. Through a detailed textual analysis of films, which are firmly placed in the specific historical, social, cultural and political context in which they were produced and consumed, it explores how white heterosexual masculinity in popular

American cinema is often represented as an “all and nothing” subjectivity, one both universal and invisible, privileged and victimised, phallic and lacking, unified and deconstructed, enfleshed and disembodied, ordinary and anxiously vacuous, the locus of origins and ontologically empty – a flaying of binary oppositions that only a subjectivity that can construct itself as the dominant norm can wield. Approaching this topic through a variety of theoretical frameworks, including feminist theory, critical race theory, whiteness studies, queer theory, and

Lacanian psychoanalysis, it contends that white heterosexual masculinity is a radically unstable, performative construct that consolidates itself through discursive strategies. It also explores how the category of class always traverses white heterosexual masculinity, destabilising its construction as a coherent, seamless category. Finally, it argues for the importance of interrogating popular cinematic representations of “ordinary” straight white men, who are always also extra-ordinary as well.

1

INTRODUCTION

The 29 March 1993 edition of Newsweek featured an extreme close-up of a harassed

Michael Douglas in Joe Schumacher’s controversial 1993 box-office hit Falling Down (see figure i). The headline - “White Male Paranoia: Are They the Newest Victims - or Just Bad

Sports?” - signalled Douglas’s character as the apotheosis of a newly emergent figure in 1990s

America - “the angry white male” - a cultural icon that was circulated in both the popular media and popular cinema throughout the decade. The accompanying article included interviews with several white (presumably heterosexual) men, most of whom expressed their resentment at what they perceived to be their victimisation by feminism and affirmative action. “The white male is the most persecuted person in the United States,” claimed one interviewee, while an African-

American respondent bitterly retorted, “European males have always had the propensity to say ‘I feel threatened’ while holding a gun to somebody else’s head” (qtd. in D. Gates 49).

This Newsweek article underscores the mutual imbrications of the popular media and popular cinema; not only do popular films frequently respond to cultural flashpoints that circulate endlessly in newspapers, magazines and talk shows, feeding off controversy as part of their own marketing strategy, but also film reviews and journalism, as Paul Smith argues, “set parameters for cultural discussion, and one of the centrally important strategies in that task is the attempt to construct intentions for any given film” (qtd. in Willis, High Contrast 7). Newsweek, along with other reviews of Falling Down (a film I analyse in detail in chapter one), suggests that the intention of the film was to play into fantasies of white male victimisation in a

“postfeminist,” “post-civil rights,” multicultural America.1 While this is undoubtedly the case, what is perhaps more interesting is what this interpretation leaves out: the film’s more implicit

1 I insert scare quotes around “postfeminist” and “post-civil rights” since I do not wish to suggest that we have reached a time beyond feminism or racial struggle, but to indicate the huge impact of these movements on American social reality. This applies to other uses of “post” throughout this thesis, such as “postindustrial.” Future references with “post” will not use scare quotes, however. 2 understanding of white heterosexual masculinity as a specifically raced, sexualised and gendered identity. This thesis explores popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity now that its neutrality has been challenged by the politics of identity, analysing how the marking of the universal subjectivity produces a host of anxieties that are worked out in popular films. It focuses on contemporary Hollywood texts, but also refers to key crossover independent and UK productions, primarily for the purposes of comparison, in order to explore the import of national context and representational codes on my object of study. In so doing, it attempts to problematise the dominant subjectivity, highlighting its internal contradictions and instabilities through a detailed textual analysis of films, which are firmly placed in the specific historical, social, cultural and political context in which they were produced and consumed. At the same time, it explores the recuperative strategies that are often deployed in popular films in order to reassert white heterosexual male hegemony, strategies that often recentre the dominant identity in the very act of decentring it.

The fact that Newsweek asks whether white heterosexual men are America’s “newest victims” is indissociable from the identity critiques that have dominated the US political arena for the last three decades. The structural logic of identity politics is such that it requires a dominant identity - white heterosexual masculinity - with access to the privileges to which minority groups aspire. In the process, as Slavoj Žižek notes, white heterosexual masculinity is emptied out of positive content, all the while being retained as “a universal form of identity”

(qtd. in M. Hill, “Can Whiteness Speak?” 166), even as its gendered, raced and sexual privileges

- that is, its particularities - are unveiled. The political successes of investment in minoritised status have thus left the middle-class white heterosexual male with no distinct politicised identity to lay claim to but that of the oppressor. Throughout this thesis, I tease out the implicit anxieties about the emptiness and sterility of normative white masculinity articulated in contemporary popular films, as well as exploring more explicit screenings of white heterosexual male 3 redemption. One important recuperative strategy includes the contemporary tendency to particularise white heterosexual masculinity though appeals to victim status - a tendency common not only to popular cinema but also the popular media at large, neo-conservative political discourse, and social phenomena such as the men’s movement, all of which I discuss in detail in part one of this thesis. This discourse of victimology not only endows the universal subjectivity with a minoritised identity, but also works on the common correlation between victimisation and innocence, thereby insulating “wounded” white heterosexual males from “evil white male” status. For many commentators, particularly those on the left of the political spectrum, this tendency is symptomatic of the political problems that attend identity politics, where entry into the political order often seems to demand the assumption of victimhood.

Certainly, the steady erosion of class politics in the US has meant that many white men articulate the disenfranchisement they experience in terms of losing ground to their others, rather than attributing the blame to the real culprit - the downsized, deindustrialised economy of late

Western capitalism. Throughout this thesis, particularly in chapter one, I attempt to explore how the current “crisis” in white heterosexual masculinity, which in the backlash narratives of

Hollywood texts is most often attributed to the gains made by women and people of colour, must also be placed in an economic context in which the post-war boom is all but a distant memory, and job and economic security a thing of the past for most US citizens, including the majority of white men.

The notion that white males have lost out to their others also reveals the extent to which identity is always a highly relational affair. As Sharon Willis puts it, the contemporary figure of

“masculinity in crisis” “is really white heterosexual masculinity desperately seeking to reconstruct itself within a web of social differences, where its opposing terms include not only femininity, but black masculinity and male homosexuality” (High Contrast 31). In other words, the gains made by feminism, the civil rights movement, and lesbian and gay activism have 4 inevitably impacted on white heterosexual masculinity, which, like all identities, constructs itself in relation to its others. Those others, however, never provide the required stability, rendering white heterosexual masculinity a site of ongoing resignification and contestation. It is precisely this instability that popular films which narrativise the current discourse on “(white) masculinity in crisis” screen.2 Throughout this thesis, I attempt to disrupt ontological understandings of identity, revealing how white heterosexual masculinity is a performative construct that must continually reconsolidate itself through discursive practices. At the same time, in underscoring that identities are fictional, provisional and ultimately trangressable, I do not wish to deny their hegemonic force, since the embodiment of a specific identity entails real material effects, as identity politics have amply demonstrated. In the case of white heterosexual masculinity, its ideological strength, as well as its underlying anxieties, lies in its status as the default identity.

This thesis thus explores the ways in which white heterosexual masculinity is often represented as what I term an “all and nothing” subjectivity, both universal and anxiously empty. At the same time, I explore how class traverses and therefore problematises white heterosexual masculinity as a coherent category.

As Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith argue, popular cinema is becoming increasingly self- conscious about discourses of politicised identity, though its films often attempt to naturalise and thereby depoliticise identities in the very act of performing them (6). Commerical imperatives have also led to the increased use of identity-based market research for potential films, which, once made, are often advertised through niche marketing. While this underscores the cooption of identity politics by contemporary capitalism, as Robyn Wiegman notes, this “does not mean that identity politics were somehow wrong all along” but reveals how the successes of identity politics have revised and are constantly revising the structure of the dominant culture; at the same time, capitalism’s “adept resistance to the insurgencies of identity-based political

2 I insert “white” in parenthesis here since most discussions of “masculinity in crisis” fail to comment on the fact that they refer specifically to white masculinity. See introduction to part one. 5 organisation” also “demands a rethinking of the force and function of identity as the primary framework for articulating disempowerment and inequality today” (American Anatomies 5).

However, it has always been the case that popular cinema is a prime site in which identities are played out, produced, consumed, negotiated and contested. As I explore in part two, in the dominant scopic regime of modernity, in which identity is written indelibly on the flesh, the bodies that populate the cinematic screen are necessarily marked by categories of sex, gender, race, age and ability (though not always with epistemological certainty, as my discussions of transgender and racial passing narratives in chapters five and six reveal), though other identities such as class, religion, sexuality and nationality are less obviously visually inscribed. In Western societies, it has been the historical privilege of white male bodies to function as unmarked in a visual economy in which only those bodies that are particularised acquire significance. Throughout this thesis, I thus attempt to highlight the whiteness and maleness of white male characters in order to challenge the seeming invisibility of white masculinity. I have also analysed several texts that do not play the white heterosexual male characters off against their others, so as to dispel the notion that white masculinity is only gendered and raced when seen in relation to bodies that carry a surplus of signification. In so doing, I aim at politicising the identities that, as Sharon Willis has observed, popular cinema most often fetishises and aestheticises, “transform[ing] only the rhetoric of the dominant discourses without changing their structural effects” (High Contrast 2). As Willis shows, this is particularly evident in films screened through the perspective of the white heterosexual male protagonist in his attempt to manage otherness (9). The reproduction of existing hierarchies is also evident in the sheer screen space that white heterosexual males continue to command. For example, Allan G. Johnson has observed that even though white heterosexual males make up less than twenty percent of the US population, they represent ninety percent of the characters in

Academy Award-winning pictures (qtd. in Vera and Gordon 9). The fact that many of these films 6 screen “(white) masculinity in crisis” suggests that laying bare the insecurities of the dominant subjectivity need not necessarily rob it of its structuring and ideological force. As Tania

Modleski puts it, “we need to consider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution” (7).

Such films are inextricable from the emerging discourse on “(white) masculinity in crisis” that also appeared in the popular and academic arena in the 1980s. The media on both sides of the Atlantic soon became obsessed with the beleaguered white male, who was represented as increasingly victimised as the years progressed, a trajectory that I chart in part one. The 80s also witnessed a burgeoning production of books on masculinity, both popular publications, from self-help manuals to popular psychology, and academic literature, particularly from the new discipline of Men’s Studies that was established in the academy by the decade’s end. The rapid institutionalisation of Men’s Studies and Gender Studies (as opposed to Feminist or Woman’s Studies) has been greeted with considerable suspicion by many feminist theorists.

For example, Rosi Braidotti views this development as a “take-over,” noting that academic positions are now advertised as “Gender Studies,” with jobs “being given away to the ‘bright boys’” (“Feminism” 43). Likewise, Modleski has expressed concern that the political insights of feminism are in danger of being lost and marginalised (1-15) - an argument expressed in the title of her influential book Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist”

Age (1991). Other theorists express concern that academic research into masculinity by (female) feminists represents “significant digression from a feminist project that remains underdeveloped in its attention to differences among women” (Penley and Willis vii).

The very phrase “masculinity in crisis” is also intrinsically problematic in that it postulates a once stable, coherent, unified masculinity that can therefore be restored. In fact, almost every period of rapid social change in modern Western civilisation has witnessed outpourings of anxiety about the state of (white) masculinity, with masculinity most often 7 synonymous with nation. Rather than asserting that masculinity is currently in crisis, I would thus join Yvonne Tasker in arguing that it is more productive to pay attention to which specific forms of male insecurities are made manifest at particular historical junctures (Spectacular

Bodies 119). Moreover, as Sally Robinson contends, discussion as to whether or not masculinity is really in crisis is moot since “masculinity in crisis” is a performative discourse that enacts what it seemingly names (10).

Throughout this thesis, I have been aware of the political risk I run of recentring the dominant identity. However, if theoretical interrogation is combined with a feminist political framework, I am convinced that it is a risk worth taking. Probing into anxiety-ridden cinematic representations of straight white men works towards shattering the illusion that normative masculinity is a seamless identity, revealing it instead to be a volatile category that can only be stabilised through reiteration. In other words, academic theorising may serve to demonstrate that the hegemony of white heterosexual masculinity, and therefore patriarchy, is never totalising.

Feminist-inflected inquiry has also asserted the political importance of exploring “masculinities”

- that is, the differences within masculinity. As Wiegman notes, the linking of maleness, masculinity and male supremacy was imperative in early second-wave feminism, facilitating the articulation of a politicised feminist subjectivity and the forging of female solidarity in opposition to a common enemy (“Unmaking” 34). However, many feminists, particularly feminists of colour and socialist feminists, whose allegiances crossed over into the axes of race and class, took second-wave feminism to task for its white, middle-class prejudices in its failure to theorise not only the differences between women, but also the differences between men (34-

35). As Wiegman puts it, “[b]ecause all men do not share equal masculine rights and privileges - because some men are, in fact, oppressed by women of prevailing race and class - assumptions about power as uniformly based on sexual difference (men as oppressor, women as oppressed) have long been under pressure to give way” (35). Recent scholarship has thus argued against 8 viewing masculinity as a monolithic category. The postmodern valorisation of difference, which in itself must be understood as one of the underlying causes of the current discourse on “(white) masculinity in crisis,” has also led to work exploring how identities are always traversed by other identities. Rather than simply adding the oft-cited mantra of “race, nation, sexuality and class” to a discussion of an already given masculinity, this thesis attempts to explore how masculinity, whiteness and heterosexuality are always articulated through each other, as well as through and against those other identity categories in opposition to which they define themselves. Moreover, it probes into those gaps between and excesses within identity categories that always render identification such a profoundly precarious affair. The recent understanding of gender as a performative category in the wake of the groundbreaking work of Judith Butler, in particular her seminal Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), has also trickled down into discussions of masculinity. My own work is greatly indebted to Butler’s contention that gender is internally assumed by the subject through identifications - not in the sense of a volitional “gender as performance,” but through discursive, regulatory practices, themselves governed by hegemonic norms, which “perform,” that is produce, the categories which they purport to describe. For Butler, gender categories are always inextricable from the social context that produced them. Since identifications are always radically unstable, heterosexist patriarchy is forced to adapt itself continually, opening up space for potential subversion. Butler’s work is thus important in exploring how masculinity is a citational category that can therefore be cited differently in potentially trangressive (but equally potentially hegemonic) ways - an argument I explore in my queering of white heterosexual masculinity in chapter five. By arguing that gender resides not in the body but in identifications, Butler’s work has opened up discussions of alternative masculinities to include what Judith Halberstam has termed “female masculinity” in her 1998 book of that name, an ethnographical study of biological women who identify as masculine or male. This questioning of the ontology of gender obviously has implications for 9 normative masculinity, which has secured its hegemony through appeals to essentialism.3

As well as the impetus to explore alternative masculinities, the 90s also witnessed research into white heterosexual masculinity, a project to which this thesis hopes to contribute. In a 1992 article, “White Men Aren’t,” Thomas DiPiero argues for the importance of theorising

“average white guys,” despite the attendant risk of further normalising them, “since the work that goes into obfuscating white men’s gender and racial characteristics is also responsible for sustaining their political, cultural, and economic dominance” (115). In a similar vein, in White

Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (1995), Fred Pfeil, who objects to what he regards as the common (essentialist feminist) assumption that “there’s but one white masculinity, and it is bad” (ix), ominously warns that “if, as activists and theorists, we find ourselves uninterested in the task of seeking to manage, mine, and redefine [the] straight- working-man sign, other groups and forces will certainly be more than willing to shoulder the task for us, and in ways we are unlikely to approve” (33).4

The interrogation of white heterosexual masculinity also forms part of what has become known, often pejoratively, as “whiteness scholarship,” which gained a foothold in the US academy in the 90s.5 While it tends to refer to the work carried out by white theorists, it is important to note that the impetus to explore whiteness emanated from theorists of colour. Post- colonial theory critiques the notion of an autonomous white colonial subject by theorising its dependence on its colonised other for self-definition, while critical race theory argues that race is socially constructed. Whiteness scholarship makes frequent reference to the work of theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin and their comments on the damaging effects of

3 Nonetheless, Halberstam has been accused of extending the sway of “masculinity” in the academy by Susan Fraiman, who doubts “whether or not Halberstam's female masculinities are substantially different from dominant masculinities in their gender effects” (139), and expresses concern that the title of Halberstam’s book gives “masculinity” the status of a noun, while “female” functions as an adjectival modifier (145). 4 Here Pfeil is referring to Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988), though his point equally applies to the neo- conservative rhetoric of white male victimisation that I examine in part one. 5 According to Howard Winant, whiteness studies must be seen as part of the “new politicisation of whiteness,” attributable to the erosion of white ethnicity in the post-war period, the waning of US class-based politics in a postindustrial, down-scaled economy, and the reforms gained by the civil rights movement (42). 10 people “becoming” or believing themselves to be “white.”6 A founding text of whiteness studies is also Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which uncovers the crucial “black presence” in white-authored American national literature (5-

6). Feminists of colour such as Morrison were also instrumental in critiquing white feminists for ignoring the racial privileges their whiteness afforded them in a patriarchal order that is always racialised. bell hooks, for instance, who notes that whiteness is associated with “the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorising” in the black imagination (Black Looks 170), has called upon white folks to examine the privileges of their racial identity, arguing that white supremacist attitudes can only be unlearned by “the destruction of the category ‘whiteness’” (12).

The most useful branches of whiteness scholarship aim at revealing whiteness to be a historically contingent, socially constructed, ontologically empty, fundamentally unstable category, caught up in a dialectical tension with its polar other - blackness - upon which it depends for self-definition. Most theorists categorically state the need to make whiteness visible in order to rob it of its normative status. By drawing attention to the fact that whiteness is “a space defined only by reference to those named cultures it has flung out of its perimeter” (Negra

7) and is therefore “always in the process of being made and unmade” (Frankenberg,

“Introduction” 16), the best work in whiteness studies hopes to reveal that “whiteness is not just about bodies and skin colour, but rather more about the discursive practices that, because of colonialism and neo-colonialism, privilege and sustain the global dominance of white imperial subjects and Eurocentric worldliness” (Shome 108).

However, like masculinity studies, whiteness scholarship is inevitably caught up in the institutional privileges that it attempts to dismantle, as its rapid establishment in the American

6 For instance, in 1935, Du Bois analysed how cross-racial class struggle was impeded by the ethno-Europeans’ investment in whiteness (700). Moreover, in 1984, James Baldwin wrote that “[n]o one was white before he/she came to America,” adding that “by deciding they were white […] White Men - from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians - became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women” (90). 11 academy effectively demonstrates.7 It can also gesture at “me-too-ism” (Dyer, White 10) in staking out a distinct turf for white scholars to examine their own whiteness, and has often been viewed by theorists of colour as white academics muscling in on race.8 Moreover, in exploring how whiteness and blackness are locked in a mutually informing binary in the US imaginary, whiteness studies often marginalises other racial identifications, as well as rendering the discipline very much a North American affair, with little exploration of how whiteness differs across different cultural or national contexts.9 In this thesis, therefore, I have also attempted to explore whiteness in relation to non-black American racial identities, in addition to referring to key British films in order to explore the historical contingency of white identifications. There is also the risk that calling attention to whiteness’s particularities might inadvertently feed into the current clamour for minoritised status among whites who believe themselves to be disenfranchised in post-Bakke America (Wiegman, “My Name Is Forrest Gump” 228).10 For instance, in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994), David Roediger argues that “whiteness is used to make whites settle for hopelessness in politics and misery in everyday life” (16), an assertion that comes dangerously close to claiming that whites are victimised by their whiteness.

Moreover, Roediger argues that “while neither whiteness nor Blackness is a scientific (or

7 According to Wiegman, “[t]o consecrate the study of white racial identity and power as a field formation called whiteness studies (as opposed to its earlier operation within ethnic studies) is not to divest whiteness of its authority and power but to rearticulate the locus of its identity claims from the universal to the particular” (“My Name Is Forrest Gump” 250). For Wiegman, this does not rule out the usefulness of studying whiteness, but underscores that “the political project for the study of whiteness entails not simply rendering whiteness particular but engaging with the ways that being particular will not divest whiteness of its universal epistemological power” (251). 8 As the editors of Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (1997) put it, the fear is that “whiteness could resurface as the new intellectual fetish, leaving questions of power, privilege, and race/ethnic political minorities behind as an intellectual ‘fad’ of the past” (Fine et al. xii). 9 There have been applications of whiteness studies to other cultures and nations, however. For instance, Displacing Whiteness (1997) includes essays about Chicana/o constructions of whiteness (Chabram-Dernersesian), British nationalism (Ware, “Island Racism”) and the film Ghandi (Muraleedharan). Vron Ware and Les Back also translate the discipline to British social reality in Out of Whiteness (2002). For instance, see Ware, “Ghosts.” Martin Bernal’s influential Black Athena (1991) has also charted how the advent of colonialism necessitated a rewriting of history, purifying classical Greece from its “contaminating” African and Asian influences. Most work in this field, though, has explored the influence of African-American culture on US popular culture. See chapter six. 10 Allan Bakke became an iconic figure of “white male as victim” when, in 1974, he brought a lawsuit against the University of California for denying him entry into medical school, claiming that the university’s quota system under civil rights affirmative action legislation constituted an infringement of his constitutional rights. The Supreme Court supported his claim four years later (Savran 5). Linda Williams notes that he neither challenged the white students with lower grade points averages, nor those students who were admitted because their parents had attended or donated money to the school (290). 12 natural) category, the former is infinitely more false” and therefore “more dangerous” (12), adding that “[i]t is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false” (13). Despite his laudable aims in underscoring the social construction of whiteness, the notion that Blackness (written with an upper-case “B”) is a less

“false” identity also risks reinscribing stereotypical notions of blackness as authenticity.11

Despite these problems, I would agree with Ruth Frankenberg that “there are tremendous risks in not critically engaging whiteness” (“Introduction” 1). To avoid the political pitfalls, however, I have combined the insights of whiteness studies with the work on race carried out by theorists of colour, and have attempted to address whiteness in relation to questions of racism, power and hierarchy, rather than merely difference. In so doing, one branch of whiteness studies

I have found useful is recent research into labour history, which has been highly instructive in revealing the complex economic and political processes involved in racial formation. Particularly influential has been Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American

Working Class (1991), which argues that working-class formation in the US went hand in hand with a sense of whiteness and Americanness (8). The title of his book refers to Du Bois’s observation that white workers were compensated for their low wages and inimical working conditions in the emerging capitalist system of 19th-century America by a “public and psychological wage” - the knowledge that at least they were not black (Du Bois 700; qtd. in

11 Roediger’s work falls into a controversial strand of whiteness scholarship known as “New Abolitionism,” which argues that the only way forward to a post-racist society is the abolition of whiteness, an argument that is problematic in isolating whiteness as an aspect of identity that one can simply discard, thus ignoring the complexity of identity formation across mutually imbricating axes of geography, location, culture, gender, sexuality, class, nation, age and religion (to name just a few), as well as underestimating the power of a visual regime in which race is visually inscribed on the body (see chapter six). This school of thought is most evident in the journal Race Traitor, whose motto is “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity” (Ignatiev and Garvey 10). New Abolitionism posits, among other things, white identification with black culture as a form of race treason, an argument that is difficult to extricate from discourses of appropriation precisely because of America’s minstrel past, which I explore fully in chapter six. However, unlike most New Abolitionists, Roediger admits that “there is a sense in which whites cannot fully renounce whiteness even if they want to” (Towards 16). Other theorists, aware of the problematics of a field of study intent on destroying its object of study, have thus suggested disaffiliating whiteness from white supremacist practices rather than abolishing it (Winant 48; Newitz, “White Savagery” 149-152; Kinchloe and Steinberg 13). For an excellent summary of whiteness scholarship, see Wiegman, “My Name is Forrest Gump.” 13

Roediger, Wages 13).12 Roediger’s work does little to explore how non-working-class men lived their whiteness; nonetheless, his positing of whiteness, class and masculinity as mutually informing categories render his work highly relevant to my own concerns.13 I have also found

Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) by fellow labour historian Eric Lott invaluable. Lott explores the 19th-century minstrel show from the perspective of white male audiences, exploring the class anxieties as well as racism that minstrelsy mediated

- a perspective that informs my own study of contemporary popular films which screen white male appropriations of black culture.

I have also referred to “white trash” scholarship throughout this thesis. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, the main proponents of this school of thought, focus on the racialised identity of America’s white poor in order to “examine the differences within whiteness” and thereby destabilise essentialist appeals to “white identity as the primary locus of social privilege and power” (169). Newitz and Wray argue that “white trash” is a non-hegemonic identity,

“which must be discarded, expelled, and disposed of in order for whiteness to achieve and maintain social dominance” (169). Their work is useful in illuminating the inextricability of racial and class identities, as well as “[delineating] a separation between race and class” by revealing that class “cuts across race lines” (Wray and Newitz, Introduction 8), a fact often eclipsed in the US, where discourses of class are frequently subsumed into racial discourses.14

12 Roediger pays particular attention to the Irish, deemed an inferior race in the early 19th-century, often dubbed inside-out “niggers” (Wages 133; Towards 184). Similarly, both Noel Ignatiev in How The Irish Became White (1996) and Theodore Allen in The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1 (1994) use the Irish as a case study, since Irish history is an example of “racial oppression without reference to skin colour” (T. Allen 22). George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998) has added to this work, charting how the investment in whiteness was not solely a black and white affair, noting that African slave trade only began when Native American slavery proved impractical, and that all forms of stigmatised non-whiteness, such as low-wage labour from Asia and later Mexico when Asian immigration was outlawed, preserve the value of whiteness (3). 13 For an interesting ethnographic research into how contemporary American white women live and understand their whiteness, see Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters (1993). Vron Ware’s Beyond the Pale (1992) is also a fascinating account of white women involved in the Abolitionist movement. Also see Ware’s “Island Racism,” which examines the role of white women in racist practices. 14 However, it would seem that a discussion of class requires fracturing through a discourse on race to become academically fashionable - a fact that reveals the lamentable state of Marxism in the US academy. I am indebted to Sean Homer for this point. 14

Where their work becomes problematic is in their assertion that white trash is a racist category that marks poor whites as a “dysgenic race unto themselves” (2), an argument that risks underplaying the privileges of possessing white skin, even if those privileges are unevenly distributed across the axis of class.

This thesis is also deeply indebted to queer theory, one of the most exciting and fertile recent developments in gender studies. Drawing on Freud’s assertion of the bisexual disposition of the subject, queer theory attempts to destabilise the heterosexual/homosexual binary of sexual identifications, often by reading texts “against the grain” to locate potentially “queer” readings in ostensibly “straight” texts. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s groundbreaking study Between Men:

English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) forms part of this work, and has undergridded my own discussions of homosocial bonding, homoerotic desire and concomitant misogyny in contemporary films such as Fight Club (1999). Judith Butler’s exploration of how heterosexual identifications are always dependent on the abjected homosexual other (Gender

Trouble 57-65) has also informed my own queering of white heterosexual masculinity in chapter five. In its post-structuralist critique of the subject and problematising of lesbian and gay identity politics, queer theory has been criticised for inhibiting political agency, though queer theorists themselves argue that deconstructing sexual identity is itself an inherently political act. Yet, for the purposes of this thesis, queer theory has provided an important framework for exploring the fragility of heterosexual identifications, as well as for interrogating the heterosexist assumptions not only of the dominant culture, but also of established theoretical paradigms, in particular psychoanalysis, which queer theory both deploys and queers.

This thesis has itself drawn heavily on certain tenets of psychoanalysis, which provides an essential tool in exploring how, in the words of Sigmund Freud, “[i]dentification is, in fact, ambivalent from the very start” (“Group Psychology” 134). Building on the Freudian model of the unconscious, “the guarantee of non-closure in the practices of subjectivity” (Braidotti, 15

Metamorphoses 39), Jacques Lacan has theorised that all subjects are structured by lack, an insight that renders the Symbolic Order and its governing Law of the Father mutable and historically contingent. Particularly interesting for feminist inquiry, therefore, is that fact that the symbolic structure of patriarchal power “cannot take account of the contingencies of actual

[male] experience” (Kirkham and Thumin, “Me Jane” 13). Popular cinema obsessively dramatises the gap between the phallic ideal and the individual male subject, often in a melodramatic mode, a tendency I explore most fully in chapters two and three. Lacan’s discussion of narcissistic identification in his seminal text “The Mirror Stage” (1949), in which he explores how the infant’s recognition of its image in the mirror is always a misrecognition since the unified gestalt conflicts with the infant’s own experiences of bodily fragmentation (3), has also proved useful in exploring “the self’s radical ex-centricity to itself” (“Agency” 189), as well as explaining why aggressivity always accompanies “the coming-into-being (devenir) of the subject” (“Aggressivity” 24). For Lacan, the paradigmatic mirror phase accounts for aggression that is directed at the subject’s others, which is always also aggression directed at “the other within,” since, as Sean Homer puts it, “[w]e are at once dependent on the other as the guarantor of our own existence and a bitter rival to that same other” (26). Lacan’s mirror phase has thus been indispensable, not only in underscoring the specular nature of identification, which is obviously key to any discussion of cinematic identifications, but also in providing a framework within which to understand representations of white heterosexual male violence. It also helps contextualise the pivotal mirror scenes in many of my film texts during which the white male subject not only experiences his identity in the look of the Other, but is often forced to acknowledge his own lack, most often in scenes fused with aggression. Lacan’s most radical contention, however, is that “the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack” (Žižek, Sublime 122). Since, for Lacan, “there is no Other of the Other” 16

(“Subversion” 349), the Other can never give us what we want from it - “our lost/impossible jouissance” (Stavrakakis 53). It is precisely this “lack-in-being” and the subject’s traumatic encounter with the Real (that which resists symbolisation) which fantasy attempts to fill.

Fantasy, in the Lacanian paradigm, is never a purely individual affair, but is always played out in the public domain (Homer 85). Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have influentially argued that the pleasure offered by fantasy “is not the object of desire, but its setting” (26).

Similarly, Žižek notes that “fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires” (Looking Awry 8). As Žižek’s reference to “screen” underscores, cinema is one such space in which fantasy is staged, hence the dominance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in contemporary film theory.

However, I also agree with David Savran that, while providing a compelling discourse for explaining how identifications are always caught up in a circuit of fantasy, disavowal and desire, we need to be aware that the categories of psychoanalysis are themselves complicit “with a particular history of the subject” (10). In this respect, it is important to think through the ways in which psychoanalysis is itself a performative discourse, as Michel Foucault argued in The

History of Sexuality (1976). Moreover, while psychoanalysis is deeply bound up in the social, the goals of this thesis also required a more historicising paradigm, one which, as Fredric Jameson has argued in The Political Unconscious (1981) (which opens with the injunction “[a]lways historicise!” [ix]), has its roots in Marxist hermeneutics. Consequently, as well as utilising psychoanalytic theory, I have also grounded representations of white heterosexual male identifications in their historical, social, cultural, political and economic context, paying attention to the material effects of late capitalism on white heterosexual male identity in texts which most often represent these concerns in what Jameson terms a “repressed” or “allegorical” form (The

Political Unconscious 4, 13).

In addition to accusations of ahistoricism and heterosexism, psychoanalysis has also been 17 charged with failing to theorise the psychic construction of race. However, certain attempts to insert race into the Lacanian schema have been made, the insights of which have been indispensable to this thesis. Most famously, Franz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), mapped the Lacanian paradigm onto a colonial context in order to explore the psychic damage caused to (mainly male) black subjects by the internalisation of white racist norms, as well as the coloniser’s dependence on the subjugated other to structure his/her colonial identity - work that post-colonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha have expanded upon in order to uncover the strategies of resistance practised by colonised subjects. Žižek has also inserted ideologies of nationalism and racism into the Lacanian model, explaining racism through the subject’s fantasy that the racial other has stolen his/her enjoyment (Looking Awry 165), a point I explore more fully in chapter six. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Reading of

Race (2000) considers race to inhabit an indeterminate site between sexual difference, which, she argues, is in the Real, and symbolic and cultural identities such as class and ethnicity (4).15

Unlike orthodox Lacanians, she argues elsewhere that “if we are to understand the reality of race, it must be granted coevality with sex; not to do so trivialises the effects of racial identification”

(qtd. in DiPiero, White Men Aren’t 112). Most Lacanians, however, such as Joan Copjec, argue that only sexual difference is Real, though Copjec takes pains to stress that this neither

“disparage[s] the importance of race, class, or ethnicity” nor means that sex should be isolated from other differences, since “[i]t is always a sexed subject who assumes each racial, class, or ethnic identity” (208). As Judith Butler puts it, the symbolic “is also and always a racial

15 However, this distinction is not unproblematic. For instance, Seshadri-Crooks argues that class is “purely a category of economic discrepancy” [emphasis added] which “can be manipulated by its subjects” (4) - an oversimplified understanding of agency that delimits the subjugating force of macro and micro networks of power under capitalism; race, on the other hand, like sexual difference, is deemed “not at all malleable” (4), an assertion that might well underscore the undeniable corporeal visuality of race in the visual regimes of modernity, but also fails to historicise those regimes, as well as enacting a conflation of the discursive category of race with particular phenotypes by ignoring the fact that certain ethnic groups have managed to change their racial assignation through political or legal struggle. Her positing of whiteness as a “master signifier” (not “transcendental,” a title accruing only to the phallus) also shares the political problems that beset the Lacanian phallus (see chapter five). While she is careful to note that our desire for whiteness is not a desire to become Caucasian but a desire to overcome difference, she risks reifying whiteness in the process. 18 industry” and “it seems crucial to rethink the scenes of reproduction and, hence, of sexing practices not only as ones through which a heterosexual imperative is inculcated, but as ones through which boundaries of racial distinction are secured as well as contested” (Bodies 18).

Psychoanalysis is also essential to an exploration of “the fundamental social antagonism, the tension between the individual’s urges and the demands of society” (Žižek, Metastases 13).

However, as Žižek warns, while the psyche is always socially mediated, “it is imperative to maintain the dialectic tension between the psychic and the social, in order to avoid the hasty

‘socialisation’ of the unconscious” (14). In other words, as theorists, we must bear in mind the radical otherness of the psyche and its capacity to resist the demands of Symbolic Law (Penley and Willis x). At the same time, as Sharon Willis notes, “the operations of the cinematic apparatus are social, and the subject they construct and seduce is a social one” (“Disputed

Territories” 265). It is precisely this oscillation between cinema’s production of subjectivity and the cinematic subject’s potential resistance to the imposition of ideology that has proved to be a useful point of entry for psychoanalysis into film theory.

The filmic application of psychoanalysis is most evident in “apparatus theory,” which dominated film theory in the 70s, particularly with the work of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian

Metz. Apparatus theory combined Lacanian psychoanalysis (in particular, the narcissistic identification with an image of the mirror phase), Althusserian Marxism (most notably, the concept of interpellation) and semiotics (the specificity of cinematic signification) in order to explore how the cinematic apparatus constructs a cinematic subject complicit with the ideology of bourgeois capitalism. Apparatus theory was critiqued by feminist psychoanalytic film theorists for failing to engage with the crucial psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference, an omission corrected by Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975).

Mulvey inserted gender into the paradigm by arguing that Classical Hollywood encodes patriarchal norms into the grammar of cinema, with the male protagonist bearing the look of the 19 spectator (20) as he looks upon the female, who connotes to-be-looked-at-ness (19). The spectator was attributed the pronoun “he” in Mulvey’s account since she argued that Classical

Hollywood is orchestrated around male pleasure, a contention that unleashed a flurry of scholarship on the female spectator. As I will elaborate in chapter three, Mulvey’s work, like apparatus theory in general, has been taken to task for being overly schematic and for failing to engage with the fluidity of identifications - one of psychoanalysis’s foundational tenets.

However, her essay has provided a language to which feminist film theory will always be indebted, as my analysis of filmic representations of the objectified white male body reveals.

Apparatus theory has also been critiqued for failing to account for resistant readings. This challenge has been issued from certain branches of cultural studies (itself no monolithic discipline), which turned from Althusser’s concept of interpellation (the “hailing” of the subject into ideology) to Antonio Gramsci’s work on hegemony and counter-hegemony. Such studies concern themselves with the consumption rather than production of cultural texts, often engaging in ethnographic research focusing on how subcultures read texts “against the grain,” often in empowering ways. However, while apparatus theory had a tendency to be rigidly formulaic, it could account for how Hollywood, as a “dream machine,” reproduces the dominant ideology; ethnographic studies, on the other hand, while important in locating potential sites of resistance, can run the risk of becoming what Modleski terms an “anything-goes kind of criticism” (37).16

Consequently, most contemporary popular culture theorists, myself included, interrogate the ways in which “popular culture both reflects and shapes broader social forces” and forms part of an ongoing interaction between the processes of production and consumption (Harrington and

Bielby 6, 9). This dialectical framework is essential if we are to interpret “a cinema that is always reading us - reading our social configurations of power and desire, pleasure and violence.

This is part of film’s allure: as we read it, it also reads us” (Willis, “Disputed Territory” 266).

16 As Douglas Kellner notes, some strands of cultural studies have fetishised audience pleasure, but pleasure is also learnt, and bound up with power and knowledge, and should not be valorised per se (39). 20

Throughout this thesis I have thus focused on what Stuart Hall terms “dominant-hegemonic” readings (“Encoding/Decoding” 101) - that is, readings that decode the dominant ideologies that seem to underpin the text - in order to help me place my chosen films firmly in their political context and engage with the debates of representational politics. Along with Richard Dyer, I strongly believe that representation matters and has consequences for how social groups are seen and treated (The Matter of Images 3).17 At the same time, I have attempted to go beyond the simple process of critiquing stereotypes, which often fails to take on board the ways in which cinema mobilises unconscious desires and contradictory, unresolved identifications. At times, therefore, I locate the potential for spectators to engage in what Hall terms “negotiated” readings, which constitute “a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements” (“Encoding/Decoding” 102), and/or “oppositional” readings, where the interpreter “detotalises the message in the preferred code in order to retotalise the message within some alternative framework of reference” (103). It thus seems equally imperative to resist the assumption of Frankfurt school critics Theodor

Adorno and Max Horkheimer that “mass culture” is necessarily politically regressive, in spite of the importance of their invaluable ideological critique. Without doubt, Hollywood is one of capitalism’s biggest success stories, not only reaping in huge financial gains, but also supporting neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologies; Hollywood films are undeniably market-driven and therefore render pleasurable potentially uncomfortable material for mainstream audiences. At the same time, as Jameson argues, careful decoding can show that “even the most degraded type of mass culture,” “no matter how faintly,” is able to be “negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and commodity, it springs” (Signatures 29). Popular films are often infinitely more complex than they tend to be given credit for, and it is my contention that such texts frequently contain ruptures, gaps, tensions and incoherencies that indicate the site of

17 As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam put it, “[t]hat something vital is at stake […] becomes obvious in those instances when entire communities passionately protest the representations that are made of them in the name of their own experiential sense of truth” (181). 21 collective anxieties and desires, as well as ideological conflict. At the same time, I heed Tania

Modleski’s warning that “the cultural analyst may sometimes be a ‘cultural dupe’ - which is, after all, only an ugly way of saying that we exist in ideology” (45). Moreover, I am aware that my own identity as a white, British, heterosexual, feminist, socialist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic woman living in Greece (to label some of the never totalising identities that I claim) inevitably affects my own readings of films. I am particularly conscious that I am often caught up in the tension between my own pleasure in viewing mainstream texts and my concerns about their political implications. This is a quandary that Laura Mulvey describes when she writes of her

“sense of loss” when her politics “[broke] the spell” of her pleasure in watching Hollywood texts

(The Spectratix 249, 248): “Then feminism intervened, like an instant tug at one’s sleeve, […] so that sometimes films that had previously thrilled me or moved me to tears simply turned into irritants before my eyes” (248-9). For Mulvey, psychoanalysis supplied her with a compensatory

“different kind of pleasure” (249), “set[ting] in motion a transition from fascination with the cinema to fascination with the mechanics of fascination with the cinema” (249). For my own part, I am happy for these two pleasures to co-exist.

My understanding of “popular cinema,” however, requires some clarification. Cultural studies, as is well known, has been instrumental in breaking down the elitist boundary between high and low culture. The beginnings of British cultural studies has been attributed to Raymond

Williams’s declaration in 1958 that “culture is ordinary,” shifting British Marxism from a view of mass culture as “simply a vehicle of false consciousness, while also breaking with the view that high culture was the central liberatory form for all classes” (Jenkins, McPherson and Shattuc

35). However, if “culture” has proved notoriously difficult to define, “popular culture” (for some a contradiction in terms) has proved even more slippery. Raymond Williams has noted that

“popular culture” has four potential meanings: cultural objects deemed inferior (what remains when high art is subtracted); “work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people” (that 22 is, commercial culture); cultural objects that are “well-liked by many people,” which obviously overlaps with the first two definitions; and a rather different understanding referring to cultural objects and practices “actually made by the people for themselves” (237). My own use of

“popular” focuses primarily, though not solely, on the third definition, since I am concerned not only with Hollywood genre films, though such films do make up the bulk of my texts, but also non-Hollywood films that fared well at the box-office. This is because I am interested in films that seem to tap into collective cultural demands and therefore constitute important barometers for exploring prevailing fantasies and anxieties. Consequently, I have also analysed certain key crossover films, such as the art-house The Crying Game (1992), a surprise box-office hit about an IRA volunteer and a mixed-race transgendered woman, which grossed $62.5 million worldwide. I have also devoted chapter seven to the gangster films of Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino’s films are made by his own production company and are famed for their postmodern, avant-garde aesthetics, intertextually citing popular culture, of which they now also form an integral part. Tarantino has become one of the most influential, successful and “popular” directors of recent years, acquiring a huge fan base, particularly among youth audiences rather than the cultural elite audience associated with “art-house” productions, ever since his first film,

Reservoir Dogs (1992), broke out of the festival circuit to gain a general release. Moreover, in the postmodern era of late capitalism, distinctions such as Hollywood and Independent cinema are increasingly hard to maintain. In the 90s, Hollywood studios began forging partnerships with independent production companies whilst maintaining control over distribution. The 90s also witnessed the rise of what Justin Wyatt terms “the major independents,” namely Miramax Films and New Line Cinema, companies that distributed many of my film texts (“Formation”). In 1993

Miramax was bought by Disney, and New Line became a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting

Corporation (84), itself acquired in 1996 by Time Warner, which merged with AOL in 2001 to form the world’s biggest media conglomerate. In the process, the market for independent films 23 has been effectively polarised, and unaffiliated distributors edged out of the competition (87).

I have also included several films produced in the UK (though most often US-financed) in this thesis. In many cases, this focus has served to illustrate that models of American white heterosexual masculinity cannot simply be mapped onto other cultures and social realities.

However, in an age of globalisation, the notion of national cinema is itself becoming problematic. As Jon Lewis notes, at some points in the 1990s, Japanese, French, Australian,

Canadian and Italian companies took control of a major “American” film studio, rendering the term “American Film” relative at best (“The End of Cinema” 2-3). Moreover, the shift from the

Studio Era’s system of vertical integration (control of the film product from inception to exhibition) to New Hollywood’s package system, where production is tendered out to independent companies, has resulted in many international partnerships. As Tino Balio notes, during the 80s, Hollywood’s overseas markets “increased at an unprecedented rate” (58), almost equalling the domestic market by the 90s (60).18 Hollywood capitalised on these conditions by

“expanding ‘horizontally’ to tap emerging markets worldwide,” and “vertically” by making partnerships with foreign production companies and investors (58).19 One of my key texts is The

Full Monty (1997), whose subject matter, director, actors and aesthetic are very much British, but which was funded and distributed entirely by Twentieth Century Fox. The fact it grossed over

£250 million worldwide reveals that concerns about “(white) masculinity in crisis” are not limited to American soil, even if that “crisis” is presented in profoundly different ways (see chapter one).20 Moreover, the cultural domination of Hollywood texts, particularly in

18 This growth is due to factors as diverse as: economic growth in Western Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America; the end of the Cold War; the commercialisation of state broadcasting systems; the development of new distribution technologies, such as cable TV, video and DVD sales and rentals (Balio 58-9). 19 Hilary Radner cites Gladiator (2000) as a case in point; it was produced by Universal Pictures and DreamWorks, has an English director, was shot in a number of locations including Venice and Morocco, and has an international cast, crew and financial structure (“Hollywood Redux” 72). 20 At the same time, Hollywood aesthetics and genres, if not subject matter, have always been incorporated into many national cinemas, a process that seems to be accelerating, as demonstrated by films such as the French crime thriller Les Rivières Poupres (The Crimson Rivers, 2000), which was distributed in the US by Tristar Pictures. This trend is also always two-way, as the recent influence of Hong Kong martial arts films on Hollywood’s The Matrix (1999) or Tarantino’s Kill Bill films demonstrates. 24

Anglophone nations such as Britain, means that non-American viewers are mediating their experiences through American films even if they resist the ideologies they encode, a process that is reversed when foreign films fare well in the US.

New Hollywood is also characterised by its interaction with other media, most obviously television, but additionally those as diverse as literature, popular music, video clips, advertising, computer games, and, perhaps most importantly, the popular media, be it talk shows, journalism, or film reviews, as my opening discussion of Falling Down illustrates. Indeed, many of these media now make up essential ancillary markets in the New Hollywood impetus towards synergy.

I thus occasionally refer to other media and the effect they exert on Hollywood texts, and explore commonalities and divergences in their representations of white heterosexual masculinity. For instance, certain films are produced as vehicle pieces for already-established musical artists with their own star persona, thereby providing a ready-made audience, as well as allowing plenty of opportunities for joint advertising of both the film and its soundtrack. I explore this phenomenon in my discussion of 8 Mile (2002), starring white rap artist Eminem, a film which reveals the huge influence that rap and African-American culture wield over current constructions of

American white heterosexual masculinity. Moreover, while films have become an important arena for product placement, many contemporary directors began their career directing advertisements and continue to deploy some of their representational codes, a transaction I explore in my analysis of representations of the commodified white male body.

To this extent, this thesis has attempted to break down the territorialism of academic disciplines and their defined objects of study. Taking my lead from cultural studies, I have adopted a rigorously interdisciplinary approach, responding not only to the hybridised nature of postmodern media, but also to the multi-faceted nature of my topic, which required a variety of interrelated theoretical frameworks. In part, this diversity is attributable to the relatively recent institutionalisation of film and media studies in the academy, with both often functioning as an 25 ancillary subject to established departments, thereby cutting across disciplines and deploying a range of theoretical tools.

As with all projects, this thesis is substantially indebted to existing research, particularly work on masculinity and film, which developed throughout the late 80s and 90s, at a time when feminist film theory was working through the seeming impasse of the Mulveyan framework and began to question its structuring male/active female/passive binary, and when gay theorists and theorists of colour were turning their attention to non-hegemonic masculinities - a theoretical inquiry which was aided by the resurgence of certain “male” Hollywood genres, such as the revisionist western, the establishment of the blockbuster as Hollywood’s prime money-making enterprise, and the revival of British social realism with films which took working-class masculinity as their central problematic (Powrie, Davies and Babington, “Introduction” 2-3).

During this period, Steve Neale inserted the male body into the Mulveyan schema in his Screen essay “Masculinity as Spectacle” (1983), providing a framework for my own analysis of the objectified white male body. Susan Jeffords’s The Remasculinisation of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (1989), which analyses Vietnam texts which function as an ideological vehicle for screening the remasculinisation of a feminised American nation, along with her later Hard

Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), have both influenced my analysis of wounded white males and the hypermuscular white male body in chapters two and three respectively. Other critics turned their attention to the proliferation of sensitive white men on the screen, which has been read as a strategy of appropriation by Tania Modleski, Elizabeth Traube, and Fred Pfeil (White Guys), whose arguments inform my own discussion of damaged white men and cross-dressing comedies. In Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), Kaja Silverman, in an

Althusserian-inflected Lacanian reading, explores “deviant masculinities” which “embrace castration, alterity, and specularity” (3), a study that has influenced my analysis of white male masochism. Several anthologies were also published in the 90s which helped form this project. 26

Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood

Cinema (1993) takes issue with earlier film theory that “for the most part confidently equated the masculinity of the male subject with activity, voyeurism, sadism, fetishism, and story, and the femininity of the female subject with passivity, exhibitionism, masochism, narcissism, and spectacle” (Introduction 2). In the same year, Constance Penley and Sharon Willis edited Male

Trouble, based on a Camera Obscura special issue, which roughly shared the same premise, as did the two (superbly named) anthologies edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin - the male- authored You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men (1993) and female-authored Me Jane:

Masculinity, Movies and Women (1995).21 Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (1993) was also instrumental in kindling my own theoretical interest in popular filmic masculinities. Tasker argues against the common conception of action movies as

“Dumb Movies for Dumb People” (5), exploring the instabilities of gendered representations and identifications, as well as the viewing pleasures of “muscular cinema” (5). Her assertion that action films often require a postmodern “both/and” critical approach (109) has been pivotal to my own formulation of white heterosexual masculinity as a “both/and” category. Sharon Willis’s

High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (1997), which subjects popular film texts to a politically-informed psychoanalytic reading, has also been instructive in shaping my own theoretical paradigm. In addition, Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith’s Gender,

Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film (1997) aided my exploration of the politicisation of identity in Hollywood films, as well as of the transactional usages to which identity categories are put.

As yet, there has been no book exclusively devoted to representations of white heterosexual masculinity in popular cinema. That said, this thesis is hugely indebted to several

21 Other later anthologies which contain useful essays on film and masculinity include Stecopoulos and Uebel’s Race and the Subject of Masculinities (1997), Lehman’s Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (2001), and Powrie, Davies and Babington’s The Trouble with Men (2004). 27 studies of white heterosexual masculinity that include cinema among their chosen texts. Fred

Pfeil’s White Guys (1995) explores white straight masculinity in a variety of texts and media, including the “rampage film” (namely, Lethal Weapon [1987] and Die Hard [1988]) and the

“sensitive-guy film.” Pfeil’s importance lies in his consideration of class, as well as his assertion that any gender politics must necessarily be anti-capitalist, a point of view I share. Sally

Robinson’s Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (2000) has also helped me theorise the common motif of “wounded” men in contemporary cinema. Robinson views this “wounding,” which she explores in a range of literary and filmic texts, to be a defensive strategy stemming from the marking of the universal subjectivity, but one which also attempts to obscure the political origins of this process (8-9). Her work has thus helped shape my own understanding of a white heterosexual masculinity that constantly transgresses the universal/particular binary.

David Savran’s Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary

American Culture (1998) has also been key to this discussion, exploring how masochism can function to reaffirm white male hegemony in a postfeminist, post-civil rights America. However, perhaps the most influential text for this thesis has been Thomas DiPiero’s Camera Obscura article “White Men Aren’t” (1992). With reference to Grand Canyon (1991) and White Men

Can’t Jump (1992), DiPiero explores how “[t]he white male protagonists of these films continually appeal to other people - primarily to women and to black men, to reveal to them the secrets of their own identities” (126). He contends that white heterosexual masculinity in these films “is not represented so much as an identity in our culture as what I will be calling a hysterical response to a perceived lack of identity” (117). He concludes with a paradox: “that white masculinity’s ideological strength and weakness, which might in fact coincide almost completely, inheres in the simultaneous privilege and responsibility it grants its others of defining what it is” (133). DiPiero has since extended his discussion into a book with the same title, White Men Aren’t (2002), though his only reference to cinema includes this original essay 28 in a modified form. Lastly, I am also indebted to Richard Dyer’s work on whiteness and cinema, based on an essay in Screen, “White” (1988), developed into a book similarly entitled White

(1997). Drawing on DiPiero’s article, Dyer not only underscores how the universality of whiteness, in particular male whiteness, incorporates anxieties of its sterility and non-existence

(White 212), but also explores the common association of whiteness with disembodiment in

Christian discourse (14-16), an observation that I build upon throughout this thesis.

In part, the contribution of my own project, as I perceive it, lies in its extension and combination of these insights into a comprehensive study of representations of normative masculinity in contemporary popular cinema. However, I have also formulated my own theoretical model, which argues that American white heterosexual masculinity is frequently represented as an “all and nothing” subjectivity, one both universal and invisible, dominant and minoritised, phallic and lacking, unified and deconstructed, the locus of origins and ontologically empty - an undoing of binary oppositions that only an identity with prior claims to the universal can enact, and one which forms a response to that identity being challenged by identity critiques.

Furthermore, I interrogate the transactional uses to which representations of a depleted, vacuous, white heterosexual masculinity are put, exploring how they provide a vehicle to articulate concerns not only about “(white) masculinity in crisis” but also about the increased technologisation and virtualisation of society and culture in postmodernity, a deployment which underscores white heterosexual masculinity’s ongoing ability to stand in for humanity. I also theorise how representations of this doubleness constitute a recuperative strategy that ultimately works to resecure white heterosexual male dominance through the very act of highlighting its insecurities. One such strategy lies in screening white male protagonists as victimised or wounded, thus endowing the universal subjectivity with specific content, as well as distancing white heterosexual masculinity from the role of oppressor. Another common representational strategy I analyse is parody, a self-legitimising, double-coded aesthetical practice which, in an 29 age of identity politics and political correctness, enables the screening of white heterosexual masculinities that are simultaneously phallic and deconstructed. Lastly, many of my film texts redeem the beleaguered white heterosexual male protagonist in narrative closure or chart his triumph over adversity, including his confrontation with difference. At the same time, I have attempted to mine the ruptures and ideological tensions in texts which themselves offer contradictory representations of white heterosexual masculinity. In the spirit of doubleness that characterises my object of study, I have also borne in mind the ways in which the filmic figure of the disenfranchised straight white male is not only a phallic ruse, but also a response, albeit most often a backlash response, to the very real suffering inflicted by a shrunken capitalist economy.

This thesis is divided into three parts, each with its own introduction and chapter outline.

Consequently, only a brief trajectory is necessary here. Part One, “The Politics of White Male

Victimology,” as the title suggests, explores the clamour for victim or minoritised status by white straight men, both on and off screen, providing the thesis with an overview of the historical, social, cultural, and political context that influenced representations of white heterosexual masculinity in cinema of the 90s and the early years of the current decade. Part Two, “Coming

Apart at the Seams? White Heterosexual Masculinity and the Body in Popular Cinema,” explores filmic representations of white heterosexual masculinity as disembodied, an association that has been a source of ideological privilege, but also provokes anxieties centred on white heterosexual masculinity’s perceived inner-emptiness, at times resulting in borrowings from other identity categories to fill the void. This section also explores anxieties that are unleashed when the white heterosexual male body is represented as marked or “enfleshed,” be it by identity critiques or its eroticisation and commodification, or when its seeming ontology is challenged by its others, whose bodies refuse to offer any epistemological guarantees. Part Three, “Marking White Male

Violence: The Gangster and the Serial Killer,” focuses on two screen figures that have dominated popular cinema in recent years. I not only aim at gendering and racialising the 30 apparent neutrality of white male violence, but also explore how that violence erupts when white heterosexual masculinity is posited as terrifyingly empty or precariously unstable, with violence against others providing a means of repolicing its inherently leaky borders.

As with all research projects, there are many areas that I have been unable to tackle. One such area is the category of age, which, like that of class, traverses white heterosexual masculinity and underscores the differences within. The 90s witnessed an array of aging white male stars appearing in narratives of “(white) masculinity in crisis” that most often conclude with white male redemption. Here I am thinking of Clint Eastwood as an aging CIA agent in In the

Line of Fire (1993) or a heart transplant patient in Blood Work (2002), Jack Nicholson in The

Pledge (2001), About Schmidt (2002), or the comedy in which he learns to give in gracefully to the ageing process, Something’s Gotta Give (2003), and Al Pacino playing older men losing their professional status in Insomnia (2002) and People I Know (2002). The category of religion also promises avenues for potential work in this field, particularly in the light of the resurgence of neo-evangelicalism that marks contemporary North America. 9/11 occurred during the writing of this thesis, and although the sluggish rate of Hollywood production means that it is still too early to trace with certainty how 9/11 has impinged on cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity, in the Afterword, I briefly predict its impact on representations of an identity that is given the universal function of standing in for nation. What these developments underscore, of course, is that identities are never static, a fact that points to the need for ongoing work on popular cinematic representations of “ordinary” white straight men, who are at the same time, always also extra-ordinary as well. 31

PART ONE

THE POLITICS OF WHITE HETEROSEXUAL

MALE VICTIMOLOGY 32

INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

From Backlash To Betrayal

In 1991, Susan Faludi caused a storm with her polemical but influential Backlash: The

Undeclared War Against Women, which, as the title implies, investigated the anti-feminist hostility “set off not by women’s achievement of full equality,” as the media had claimed, “but by the increased possibility that they might win it” (14). Nearly a decade later, Faludi followed up her success with Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man (2000), in which she states that in

Backlash she had been operating under an erroneous assumption: “that the male crisis in

American society was caused by something men were doing unrelated to something being done to them” (7). The resulting interviews with hundreds of angst-ridden men, who considered themselves to be victims of feminism, affirmative action, immigrants, absent fathers, and government and federal authorities, to name but a few, provide important personal accompaniments to the more public discourses on white male disenfranchisement that flourished in the 1990s. Faludi is careful to point out that the men interviewed were unable to understand that their problems were rooted in a downsized economy and/or unrealisable ideologies of

American manhood, leading them to believe that they had lost ground to women, people of colour and immigrants. At the same time, her closing argument that men should “forge a rebellion commensurate with women’s” in order “to create a new paradigm for human progress that will open the doors for both sexes” (607-8) not only echoes the cries articulated by anti- feminist right wingers that men now need an identity politics of their own, but also, coupled with her shift in tone from Backlash’s polemical diatribe to Stiffed’s more poignant, metaphorical prose, risks complicity in the very discourse she attempts to critique - male victimology. In that respect, Faludi’s own shift from “backlash” to “betrayal” is highly symptomatic of the general popularisation of discourses of white male disenfranchisement in the 1990s media, both in 33

America and, as we shall later see, Britain as well.

As Faludi points out, the American media in the 90s was preoccupied with probing into beleaguered manhood, with headlines crying out such slogans as “Men on Trial,” “The Trouble

With Boys,” or “Are Men Necessary?” - though “[t]he economic and social roots of young male pathology were largely overlooked by a media that preferred other culprits: testosterone, drugs,

‘permissive’ or neglectful working parents (which, either way, almost always meant Mom), or, increasingly by the decade’s end, feminism” (Stiffed 6, 46). This flurry of concern in the mainstream media largely focused on white male welfare, primarily because deeply entrenched racist discourses deemed black and Latino masculinities to be in crisis as a matter of course. Yet even within the African-American community, male-centred issues were the prime focus, with organisations and programmes springing up in American cities aimed at steering African-

American boys into manhood, effectively marginalising African-American women (McDowell

370). Overall, problems faced almost exclusively by women, such as date rape and domestic violence, were sidelined for laments over male failings, confirming that “‘manhood’ still has a symbolic weight denied to ‘womanhood’” (Segal x). For this reason, as Lynn Segal notes, “men appear to be emerging as the threatened sex; even as they remain, everywhere, the threatening sex, as well” (ix).

Media concern was most fully stoked in the 90s by the development of the men’s movement, an umbrella term used to define a series of diverse groups mobilised around discourses of male disenfranchisement. While, in the 70s, Britain had witnessed the socialist pro- feminist men’s movement and the publication of the anti-sexist, male-authored magazine

Achilles Heel, the 90s American men’s movement was a different affair, attracting huge media interest, as well as netting vast profits for its founders through publications, conferences and weekend retreats. The American men’s movement encompasses a small pro-feminist and gay liberation faction, but more often refers to movements populated by men who wish to restore the 34 patriarchal power of which they believe themselves to have been robbed. These organisations include overtly anti-feminist, right-wing groups, as well as the Christian Promise Keepers, whose convocation on the Washington Mall in 1997 outnumbered the 1995 “Million Man March” organised by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (Faludi, Stiffed 227-28).1 However, the men’s movement tends to be synonymous with Robert Bly and his devout, predominantly white following, though he rapidly spawned numerous imitators.2

Bly, a 1960s peace activist and poet, hit the headlines with his best-seller Iron John: A

Book About Men (1990), an eclectic mixture of myth, fairy stories, poetry, New Ageist biological essentialism, and naive (often inaccurate) historical analysis, all packaged up in a painfully melodramatic yet highly defensive prose. Bly argues that male grief “has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored” (x), placing the blame on the large-scale feminisation of society, a phenomenon that began in the 70s, and has resulted in generations of “soft males” (3). The inescapably phallic title of his book stems from Bly’s rendition of the Grimm Brothers' fairytale, in which a prince steals a key from his mother’s pillow in order to release the wild man that is held captive in the palace; after symbolically wounding his finger, the boy is eventually helped by the wild man to win the hand of the princess. For Bly, this fairytale is a paradigmatic male myth (of which the modern male is sadly deprived) that envisions a path to full manhood: young men must liberate themselves from the sway of their emasculating mothers, use the wounds they have received, especially from their father, in order to access the wild man within and restore rule to male elders (one of whom, supposedly, is Bly himself). Though he is careful to state that he has no objection to feminism (x), he joins a host of theorists, as well as contemporary neo- liberal and neo-conservative political discourses, in holding the absence of fathers and paternal

1 The Promise Keepers offered Christian men a vision of spiritual redemption and brotherhood designed to win them back their position in both the public and private sphere (Faludi, Stiffed 228). From her discussion with members of the Promise Keepers, Faludi argues that while the organisers tended to be strident anti-abortionists, and overly fond of quoting Saint Paul’s stricture “[w]ives, submit to your husbands” (229), most men she spoke to gained solace from groups hugs, male bonding, and the knowledge that their new father - Jesus - would not “wound” them as their real fathers had done (232; 266-7). 2 For details of other men’s movement writers, see Pfeil, White Guys 167-232. 35 authority responsible for male problems, noting that “[b]etween twenty and thirty percent of

American boys now live in a house with no father present, and the demons there have full permission to rage” (96).

Bly’s movement has now largely disbanded, though its decline might point to the assimilation of its main tenets (Clatterbaugh qtd. in Gardiner, Introduction 4), and certainly its sentiments are endlessly recirculated in Hollywood films. In its heyday, however, it was ridiculed by the mainstream press, especially for its weekend retreats comprised of male rituals, where men dressed in tribal masks or wild animal costumes in woods, held drumming workshops, and discussed anxieties, especially those relating to their fathers, in consciousness- raising seminars (see figure 1). Yet Bly acquired a loyal following, populated overwhelmingly by white, lower-middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual males, who, as Michael Kimmel and

Michael Kaufman point out, were the men hardest hit psychologically by the crisis in masculinity caused by the limited gains won by feminism, lesbian and gay activism, and the civil rights movement - all of which challenged white men’s assumptions of privilege at a time when, while among the most powerful sectors of American society, few in fact experienced any individual sense of empowerment (262).3

The movement’s overwhelming whiteness,4 its appropriation of Native American rituals

(such as the use of the talking stick at meetings), its implicit indictment of women for feminising the male population, its elision of differences between men, and its refusal to contemplate the privileges that inhere in white heterosexual masculinity, have all resulted in accusations of

3 In the retreats Kimmel and Kaufman attended, men of colour made up between 0-2% of participants and about 5% were homosexual; most men were white-collar workers, perhaps because of the $249 fee (263). Pfeil disagrees with these statistics, arguing that, in his experience, those who took part in the movement’s activities were often in their 20s and 30s, less affluent, and worked in the service industry with little hope of advancement (White Guys 188). 4 As McDowell points out, the cover page of 24 June 1991 Newsweek, which profiles the men’s movement with a headline that reads “Drums, Sweat and Tears: What Do Men Really Want? Now They Have a Movement of Their Own” (see Adler), offers its vision of a representative Bly “warrior”: a bare-chested (bar the pinstripe tie), tanned and toned middle-aged white man, holding a drum in one hand and a baby in another (369). For McDowell, this picture offers an incoherent version of masculinity but one that is “impossible to contemplate […] in the absence of its spectral counter-image, the denizen of the black ‘underclass,’ who is ‘unwilling’ to work, shirks his family responsibilities, and leaves a trail of babies as wards and burdens of the state” (371). 36 misogyny, white supremacy and heterosexism.5 Without the shadow of a doubt, as Segal claims,

“Robert Bly appeals to men who would like to turn back time: to reclaim and reaffirm the imagined origins of true masculinity” (xxi). However, Kimmel and Kaufman point out that there is a “progressive whisper” to the men’s movement in that it opens up space for a redefinition of manhood (283). Fred Pfeil follows suit. While critiquing the movement for its failure to recognise that the root causes of male suffering stem from corporate capitalism, job insecurity, and the erosion of wages in real terms, he argues that feminist condemnations of the movement as “another patriarchal ruse” are oversimplistic (White Guys 221).6 For Pfeil, the movement at least acknowledges that “there is something wrong with normative white heterosexual masculinity” (195), a point he sees related to the fact that a large number of participants seek the help of the movement “in resolving the ongoing external and internal crisis flowing from their inevitable complicity with the evil of white masculinity, their membership in a bad tribe” (217).

While Bly and his followers tended to subsume all differences under the banner of sexual difference, the 90s also witnessed sweeping hysteria in the US media over “the angry white male,” an iconic figure who soon became a repository for backlash anxieties that white men had lost out not only to women but also other minority groups, particularly people of colour - an assumption that takes for granted the fact that the playing field was white and male to begin with.

The “angry white male” discourse points to the difficulty of white heterosexual masculinity functioning as an unmarked category in the wake of the heated debates that raged in the US in the 90s over multiculturalism, illegal immigration, sexual harassment, feminist-inspired legislation, gays in the military, gay marriages, and numerous other issues that pointed to the increasingly hybridised nature of contemporary American life - all of which were manipulated by extreme-right figures, such as Pat Buchanan and David Duke, to produce a rhetoric of white

5 Bly admits that his book speaks mainly to heterosexual men though claims, with unashamed inaccuracy, that the mythology “does not make a big distinction between homosexual and heterosexual men” (x). Race and class are also elided in Bly’s account, which takes its reader to be the lower-middle-class, heterosexual, white male by default. 6 Pfeil claims that in his attendance at meetings he rarely heard expressions of anti-feminist statements but was more likely to hear men bemoan their suffering at the hands of an absent or distant father (White Guys 190-3). 37 male victimisation.7 As George Lipsitz argues, building on the Reagan administration’s fusing of a “possessive investment in whiteness” with masculinity, patriarchy and heterosexuality (71), current neo-conservative discourse encourages white men “to feel their losses as whites, as men, as heterosexuals, but not as workers or community members,” channelling all resentment in the direction of minority groups rather than “transnational capital and the economic austerity and social disintegration it creates and sustains” (97). In a remarkable reversal, white men, who had once been the oppressors, or at best inhabited the unmarked, universal position, transmuted into a self-proclaimed marginalised group.

While attacking a wide range of targets, from women to homosexuals, the “angry white male” was a particularly racially charged discourse.8 Key 90s media events involving African-

Americans, such as the Thomas-Hill hearings,9 the Rodney King affair,10 and the televised O.J.

Simpson trial,11 had resulted in race dominating the headlines in sensationalised accounts which failed to probe into institutionalised racial injustice. The 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, triggered by the Rodney King verdict, also led to race, as well as urban decay and social inequality, dominating the agenda in the final stretch of the 1992 presidential campaign (Omi and Winant,

7 Pat Buchanan was a 1992 Republican presidential candidate. He is known for his ultra-right stance, especially on immigration. David Duke left the Louisiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 to form the National Association for the Advancement of White People, which he termed a “civil rights lobby for white people” (qtd. in Langer 581). He was governor contender for Louisiana in 1991. He is the current President of the European-American Unity and Rights Organisation (EURO), an organisation dedicated to protecting the rights and heritage of Euro-Americans. Obviously, this appeal to ethnicity veils the white supremacy that underwrites his politics. 8 Along with anger at affirmative action’s role in correcting institutionalised sexism and racism, homosexuals and lesbians were also accused of threatening the sacred institution of marriage. In 1996, the Defence of Marriage Act was passed, “in which heterosexuality was cast as a vulnerable and chaste character under militant attack from ‘outside’ forces” (Lane, “Strange Days” 181). 9 In 1991, Anita Hill accused Republican Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Both Hill and Thomas are African-American and, predictably, the hearings were highly racialised: Republican Senators represented Anita Hill as a race traitor and mobilised a discourse of lynching to represent Thomas as a victim of a racist conspiracy (Staub 51-54). 10 Despite a videotape capturing LAPD officers beating Rodney King in a shocking act of unprovoked violence, the officers were acquitted by a court moved to a predominately white community that was home to a large proportion of LAPD police officers, a verdict that resulted in mass civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992. 11 O. J. Simpson, a former premier footballer, shocked the nation when he was arrested for murdering his former wife, Nicole Brown, whose whiteness and blondness no doubt increased media attention (L. Williams 268). Simpson was represented by prominent defence attorney Johnnie Cochran, who claimed that the law enforcement officers had tainted the evidence (Lipsitz 100). The verdict of the televised trial (Oct. 1995), which found Simpson not guilty, was watched by 142 million viewers (L. Williams 258). The verdict divided the nation, with many white members of the public believing that Simpson’s lawyers had “played the race card” (257). 38

Racial Formation 146-47). While the Los Angeles insurrections were in fact a multi-ethnic affair, with significant Latino and white participation, and a high percentage of Korean victims, the media chose to present it as a black “riot” with white victims, thereby robbing the insurgents of any political intent, as well as deploying a Manichean racial binary that eliminated poverty and urban disintegration from the discussion by refusing to link the category of race with class.12

Moreover, with social problems caused by deindustrialisation, economic restructuring and attacks on the welfare state largely disguised as racial problems in neo-conservative discourse and the popular media that sustains it (Lipsitz 18), it is little wonder that white male anger at affirmative action, which stems all the way back to the Bakke case (1974-78), reached a feverous pitch in the 90s, when it was commonly represented as a form of reverse discrimination rather than a righting of institutionalised wrongs. For example, in 1996, 54% of Californian voters passed Proposition 209, which effectively dismantled all affirmative action legislation, thereby propounding the notion of white racial innocence and the existence of a post-racist, colour-blind society (Wiegman, “My Name Is Forrest Gump” 236). Changes in the academic canon to include more authors of colour were also packaged up as attacks on white America by a right-wing hegemonic project that Henry A. Giroux has termed “new cultural racism” - a form of racism which “goes hand in hand with a definition of race as a matter of difference rather than a question of hierarchy” (“Living Dangerously” 7), and which parades under the politics of nationalism, patriotism and cultural uniformity at a time when explicit appeals to white supremacy are no longer tolerated (8-9). A prime example is Pat Buchanan, who deployed the language of identity politics in his campaign for presidential candidacy, but one divorced from discourses of democracy and social justice (7), such as when he asked, “[w]ho speaks for the

Euro-Americans? Is it not time to take America back?” (qtd. in Giroux 5). For Giroux, then,

“[t]here is a certain irony in the fact that at this current historical conjuncture, when many left

12 For a detailed analysis of the ethnic make-up and media representation of the 1992 LA uprisings, see Omi and Winant, “The Los Angeles ‘Race Riot’” and Oliver, Johnson and Farrell. 39 critics appear to be fed up with identity politics, conservatives have seized upon it with a vengeance” (6).

Certainly the appeals of Buchanan and others like him do not fall on deaf ears at a time of profound economic insecurity. According to a Kaiser Foundation/Harvard University Survey

(1995), 58% of whites think that the average African-American is as well or better off than the average white in terms of employment, and 41% think this is true as regards income, while black unemployment is actually double that of white, and black income 40% lower (M. Hill,

“Introduction” 9). Moreover, despite assertions that the wage gap between men and women has narrowed, on average, women still earn about two-thirds of that of their male counterparts

(Faludi, Backlash 396). Nevertheless, men’s real earnings have declined substantially.

Furthermore, in 1993, US Statistical Abstracts showed 24.5 million whites to be living in poverty, along with 10.6 million blacks and 6.7 million Latinos (M. Hill, “Introduction” 9). As

Doug Henwood points out, “white privilege these days means that your wages fall more slowly than those of non-whites, unless you’re a high school dropout, in which case racial advantage is actually eroding” (184).

White male paranoia took its most extreme form with The Patriot Movement, “angry white males” in extremis, a diverse but popular alliance of right-wing, anti-federalist groups, ranging from Christian to white supremacist militias. Beliefs differ in degree, though many factions oppose feminism, abortion rights, affirmative action, homosexuality, immigrants and, most vociferously, federal government organisations.13 Media hysteria about the militia movement peaked after the

1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma by Timothy McVeigh and

13 According to Pfeil, most militia members he spoke to attempted to distance themselves from the sexism and white supremacy of some factions, and expressed horror at the Oklahoma bombings (“Sympathy” 28). While Pfeil critiques both the men’s and Patriot movements for their self-appointed victim status, he argues that they exhibit some of the confusion over white heterosexual masculinity today (31), and that both movements will remain “chumps for the Right” until they “muster the strength to call their foremost enemy by its name, corporate capitalism, the enclave of those largely white men who really call the shots” (31). Faludi, however, found much more anger towards women and people of colour. For example, William Haines, the Third Continental Congress’s representative, told her that “[b]asically, the white male is the most discriminated-against minority, the largest minority in the country” (Stiffed 416). 40

Terry Nichols. The Oklahoma bombing shocked America partly because, as Michael Hill points out, McVeigh was the “all-American defendant” (“Introduction” 1) who implicated white subjectivity in his terror (“Can Whiteness Speak?” 172). Only after the bombings did the media investigate the relationship between the rise of the paramilitary right and the figure of the “white male as victim” (Savran 206). Yet, in many ways, McVeigh had merely taken to extremes the discourses of white male paranoia that neo-conservatives had exploited so effectively in their attempt to convince their constituency of white heterosexual males that they had lost ground to their gendered and raced others - discourses that, at least according to the widely publicised analyses of Michael Moore, will only strengthen in the loss of civil liberties, dismantling of welfare programmes, public spending cutbacks, increased military funding, right wing discourses and general paranoia that characterise post-9/11 American politics.

In chapter one, I aim to tease out the literal and metaphorical implications of the concept of “losing ground” in 90s films, focusing attention on Hollywood’s Falling Down (Joel

Schumacher 1993) and Disclosure (Barry Levison 1994) before turning to the British comic hit

The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo 1997), primarily for comparative purposes, in order to make the point that even in the highly globalised world of cinematic representations, white heterosexual masculinity is culturally and historically bound. In all three films, anxieties over white male disenfranchisement are spatially inscribed, with traditionally white- and male-controlled space occupied by women and/or people of colour. The shifts of late capitalism, namely the globalisation of capital, high unemployment, job insecurity, dependence on poorly paid female or immigrant labour, and the entry of women into management, have led to a massive restructuring of both public and private space wherein conventional gendered and racial encodings no longer necessarily apply. The American white male protagonists of Falling Down and Disclosure (both played by “the angry white male” par excellence Michael Douglas) perceive themselves not only as having no space to call their own, but also, in the wake of 41 identity politics - from which white men, as the dominant, structuring norm are excluded - as having no place from which to speak. They are thus forced to borrow the rhetoric of minority groups. In this respect, both films are symptomatic of white masculinity acting as an “all and nothing” subjectivity - that is, the structuring norm but also bereft of a positive identity. The Full

Monty translates concerns similar to Disclosure onto a British terrain, in particular in its self- conscious, often comic representation of the reversals of gendered space in an era of large-scale deindustrialisation and concomitant chronic male unemployment. However, it largely avoids falling into the backlash discourses of its Hollywood counterparts due to its willingness to tackle class and right-wing economic policies.

In chapter two, I focus on the tendency of many popular American films of the 80s and

90s to literalise the “wounds” borne by straight white men, producing a body of work which

Joseph Sartelle has dubbed “disability films” (522). I begin by focusing on two such films from the early 90s: Regarding Henry (Mike Nichols 1991) and Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis

1994). Both of these “melodramas of beset manhood,” to use Nina Baym’s useful phrase, represent their protagonist as an everyman figure, despite the fact that he has suffered brain damage. Mirroring the therapeutic discourse of the men’s movement, these films screen how the child-like, innocent outlook of the wounded white male puts him back in touch with his feelings, as well as with traditional family values, though the extremity of this solution to white men overcoming emotional blockage and “evil white guy” status suggests the difficulties of envisaging a redeemed white heterosexual masculinity. The motif of the wound allows the universal identity to inhabit a minoritised body, although neither film engages with the problems facing those minorities whose stories are erased in the act of white males claiming the margins for themselves. Importantly, as well as laying claim to both the universal and the particularised, these protagonists are also both children and fathers, with fatherhood comprising the means by which they are integrated into society and nation. I then turn my attention to a very different 42 film, Fight Club (David Fincher 1999), which rapidly became the decade’s archetypal film on white male angst. What interests me about this fin-de-millennium cult hit is that it takes to the limit the discourse on male wounds from the men’s movement, as well as the logic of an empowering victimology that underwrites identity politics, positing masochism as the solution to societal emasculation and the erosion of paternal authority. However, at the same time, its slippery, postmodern, parodic stylistics means that the film never allows you to take it too seriously, enabling it to employ a double discursive gesture - rehearsing the debates around

“(white) masculinity in crisis” whilst simultaneously undercutting them and ridiculing their excesses. On the one hand, this recourse to parody suggests that the melodramatic sentiments of the men’s movement were less tenable by the decade’s end. On the other, Fight Club’s ludic, auto-deconstructive aesthetic enables it to screen phallic masculinities in a manner that pre-empts criticism, thereby insulating it against ideological critique. In fact, as I hope to show through a psychoanalytic reading of the film, in addition to screening male masochism at a discursive level,

Fight Club also deploys a masochistic aesthetic, one that reinforces its discourse on wounded masculinity in the very act of disavowing its seriousness.

43

CHAPTER ONE

Losing Ground: Spatial Inscriptions of White Male Disenfranchisement in

Popular Cinema

1.1. Falling Down: The “Angry White Male” in a Reterritorialised America

Newsweek’s cover story on Falling Down (29 March 1993), which was also partly responsible for the circulation of the “angry white male” figure as a 90s media icon, described the film as “a cartoon vision of the beleaguered white male in multicultural America,” one that

“pushes white men’s buttons” (D. Gates 48). The film was singled out for attention in a similar vein within film criticism of the mid-90s for its portrayal of specifically white male grievances in a postfeminist, postindustrial, multicultural America. While the film has been discussed at length, I would like to add to the body of existing material, not only because the debates that grew up around the film inspired my own interest in popular cinematic representations of normative white masculinity, but equally because it is highly paradigmatic for my discussion of other films in this section, and the thesis as a whole.

As Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith point out, Falling Down is a prime example of a

“talky,” a film that overtly engages with debates of politicised identity or social issues, deliberately courting media attention and controversy as part of its marketing strategy (3).

Certainly, Michael Douglas, the protagonist, is no stranger to controversy, which is now intrinsic to his star persona, a fact that Douglas himself claims to enjoy: “what I try to do is try to push that line, to see how far you can go and still have audiences accept you” (qtd. in Salisbury 78).

This provocative edge was launched with Fatal Attraction (1987), a staunch attack on feminism and a saccharine reaffirmation of bourgeois family values, which laced Douglas’s persona with 44 what would become his enduring trademark: the victimised white male.1 Capitalising on this performance, Basic Instinct (1992) casts Douglas as a trigger-happy cop at the mercy of his desires for Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone), a wealthy, sexually independent, bisexual author with a predilection for stabbing her male lovers to death with an ice-pick while in the throes of orgasm. The film’s analogies between sexual deviance and serial killing, not surprisingly, led to

US cinemas being picketed by lesbian and gay activists.2 Released a year after Falling Down,

Disclosure (1994), in which Douglas’s character accuses his female boss of sexual harassment, amplified Douglas’s persona of the belligerent white male, furious at being labelled everyone’s oppressor and single-mindedly intent on proving his own victimisation. As Hoberman notes,

Douglas’s appeal stems from “his capacity to project simultaneous strength and weakness. He is the victim as hero - a bellicose masochist, aggressive but powerless, totally domineering while battered by forces beyond his control” (qtd. in Savran 207-8). If, as Richard Dyer argues, the charisma of stars stems from their embodiment of the ideological contradictions of the culture they belong to (“Charisma” 58), Douglas would seem to epitomise the instabilities of American white masculinity in the first half of the 1990s.

In Falling Down, Douglas’s character, D-FENS, is again both aggressor and victim (see figure 1.1), rendering the film “a rampage film that comes wrapped in its own critique” (Pfeil,

White Guys 239) and “a kind of critical commentary on the white male paranoia of which it was an example” (Startelle 525).3 As Jude Davies claims, in discussing the film, director Joel

1 If an interview with a reporter at the time of Fatal Attraction’s release is anything to go by, Douglas’s penchant for films screening men suffering at the hands of women stems from his own antifeminist sentiments: “If you want to know, I’m really tired of feminists, sick of them. […] It’s time they looked at themselves and stopped attacking men. Guys are going through a terrible crisis right now because of women’s unreasonable demands” (qtd. in Faludi, Backlash 150-151). Such well-publicised interviews obviously contribute to the framework in which films are consumed. It is also important to note that in Fatal Attraction, Douglas’s character did have an affair, but in Disclosure (1994), he resisted the temptation, thereby securing full victim status, a shift that, I would argue, is paradigmatic of Hollywood production in the 90s as a whole. 2 Lesbian and gay activists picketed cinemas with banners reading “Catherine Did It!” in attempts to ruin the fun of the who-dunnit narrative - an unsuccessful strategy for a film marketed through the promise of steamy sex scenes, with most spectators more interested in how she did it and with whom, rather than the thriller plot itself. 3 For Schumacher, “the fact that many people are disturbed by the fact that they can’t work out whether Michael is the good guy or the bad guy is the point” (qtd. in Salisbury 77). 45

Schumacher attempted to employ “two incommensurate rhetorics” of universality and particularity (216), positing D-FENS as both an everyday guy who compels audience identification and one of “those invisible people that we don’t pay attention to” (Davies 216;

Schumacher qtd. in Salisbury 77-8).4 Indeed, the tagline of the film was “the adventures of an ordinary man at war with the everyday world.” As both an everyman figure but also an “angry white male,” whose whiteness and maleness are no longer beside the point but whose injury can only be articulated from “an implicit and prior claim to the universal” (Wiegman, “My Name Is

Forrest Gump” 239), D-FENS epitomises the contested positioning of white masculinity, particularly as regards its marked or unmarked status, in the contemporary US political arena.

The desire to universalise D-FENS’s character is evident in the decision to use D-FENS in the film’s final credits rather than Bill Foster, the name of Douglas’s character that we only learn at the end. D-FENS is taken from Foster’s personalised registration plate, showing him to be a man who defines himself through his job of “building important things to protect us from the communists,” as his mother puts it - except that the Cold War is over, the defence industry massively downsized, and D-FENS left without a job and, we later learn, without a family or home, in a shrinking economy where whiteness and maleness no longer guarantee economic or social power. In a characteristically overdetermined manner, D-FENS represents the predicament of white lower-middle class men desperate to defend the territory they feel they no longer own in an America that has been drastically reterritorialised in the wake of the alleged feminisation of the workplace (which I discuss further in my analysis of Disclosure), as well as affirmative action policies, new immigration patterns, and the globalisation of capital.

The title of the film is itself a spatial metaphor, overtly proclaiming the fear of downward

4 Schumacher stated, “[m]ovies reflect society and there have been several movies in the US about anger in the street but they had all been by African-Americans. Well, they are not the only people angry in the United States. With Falling Down I tried to give a face and a soul to that Six O’Clock News story we see all the time, the one about the seemingly ordinary man who’s worked hard all his life, who’s been a law-abiding citizen who snaps suddenly and kills his family or his co-workers, and where they always show the clip of the neighbours saying ‘I don’t know how this happened, he was such a nice guy’” (qtd. in Salisbury 77). 46 mobility experienced by the white middle-classes,5 and several critics have picked up on the film’s mapping of the white male’s imagined fall from privilege in terms of space and territory

(Clover, “White Noise”; Liam Kennedy 33-42; Mahoney; Zilberg). Falling Down charts D-

FENS’s odyssey across Los Angeles on foot when he abandons his car in a traffic jam, exposing him to the parts of the city normally hidden to commuters on their car journey to and from the suburbs. On his journey, the film relentlessly pits him against an array of multicultural, multiracial, gendered and sexual others. These encounters with a proliferation of differences - be it the Korean shopkeeper, the Latino gang, rich golfers, the homeless beggar, or Nick, the homophobic fascist - are punctuated by scenes either of Prendergast (Robert Duvall), the police officer who eventually tracks him down, or D-FENS’s ex-wife, Beth (Barbara Hershey), and her panicked reaction to his phone calls and threats to come home for his daughter’s birthday. This narrative segmentation reflects the fragmentation of Los Angeles across class and race lines, as well as the battle of the sexes on the domestic front. In all these confrontations, D-FENS casts himself as victim in an unconscious desire to defend the white male’s ground.

The film opens with a disorientating, claustrophobic close-up of the inside of D-FENS’s mouth that then slightly pulls back to reveal his upper-lip, beaded with sweat, and slowly pans up, still with the same extremity of close-up, to his nose and bespectacled eyes, at which point the camera pulls away to reveal D-FENS stuck in a traffic jam. Despite the film’s discursive suggestion that D-FENS has no space to call his own (Clover, “White Noise” 9; Mahoney 174),

D-FENS literally dominates the screen. Only Fight Club (1999), which opens inside its beleaguered white male protagonist’s brain, has attempted to place its viewers so firmly inside the angst-ridden white male psyche. In a continuation of the same shot, the camera then scans the front of the car, still with uncomfortable proximity, to reveal other stationary vehicles, the soundtrack of D-FENS’s heavy breathing slowly being replaced by the diegetic cacophony of

5 See Barbara Ehrenreich’s similarly entitled book, Fear of Falling (1989). 47 urban chaos. As the objective camera continues to rove, registering a grinning Garfield stick-on toy, deals being closed on car phones, a woman applying lipstick in a distorting side mirror (an overt evocation of “the monstrous feminine,” to use Barbara Creed’s term), most attention is given to an obvious symbol of multicultural America - a bus draped in the American flag and packed with screaming children from a variety of racial backgrounds. The shot then ends as a fly buzzes in the car and a series of brief jump cuts register the various inane slogans attached to rear bumpers. While the fly buzzes mercilessly, the air conditioning stops working and the car window jams, another rapidly-cut series of these disparate, non-referential images, again predominately in close-up, flash across the screen, registering D-FENS’s rising panic at this claustrophobic encounter with the city. As Elana Zilberg points out in her Jamesonian reading,

“signifying chains have snapped, and D-FENS is left without a frame of reference with which to make sense of this changed grammar of urban life. D-FENS temporarily loses his capacity to organise his immediate surroundings perceptually and to map his position in relation to the external world” (185). Abandoning his car, D-FENS begins his journey home, though we later learn that his home no longer exists, rendering his odyssey a desire for things to go back to the way things were, to a culturally uniform America he could make sense of, an America where white middle-class men were guaranteed the privileges, on both the public and private front, that traditionally accompanied their sex and skin colour.

This desire to turn back the clock is most evident in D-FENS’s initial confrontation with the Korean shopkeeper (Michael Paul Chan), a scene that caused consternation among Korean organisations who picketed the film, outraged at such an exploitative stereotype of a rude, money-grabbing, Korean shopkeeper so soon after the Los Angeles uprisings (Salisbury 76), during which many Korean shopkeepers were attacked and several left dead.6 The racial

6 By all accounts, this scene was received with cheers and applause from spectators in certain cinema auditoriums in America. For an analysis of the Los Angeles uprising from a Korean perspective and a discussion of the strained relations between LA African-American and Korean communities, see Cho. 48 dynamics of this scene are initially masked through the depiction of commonly experienced frustrations. D-FENS is refused change for the telephone, but when he takes a can of coke (that all-American product) to the counter, the Korean charges him eighty-five cents, a price D-FENS not only considers extortionate but one which still leaves him without change for the telephone.

This confrontation quickly slides into a racially charged verbal exchange when D-FENS criticises the Korean’s English accent (“Don’t you have ‘Vs’ in China?”) and retorts, “You come to my country, you take my money, you don’t even have the grace to learn how to speak my language.” America here, then, is represented as the homestead of the white male, even if the

America that D-FENS consistently appeals to no longer exists, as symbolised by a none-too- subtle cutaway shot of a pot of American flags upturned in the ensuing struggle. D-FENS’s demand for linguistic uniformity is representative of the new cultural racism that Giroux identifies as endemic to neo-conservative discourse (“Living Dangerously” 5). Indeed, for D-

FENS, the preservation of the English language seems to be equivalent to preserving white hegemonic control, evident in his later encounter with a Latino gang, whose territory he has inadvertently wandered into because he failed to read their “sign”: “Maybe if you wrote it in fucking English I could fucking understand it.” When the Korean assumes that D-FENS wants to rob him, D-FENS expresses incredulous rage, presumably because, as a white male dressed in a suit and tie, he has never experienced the criminalising gaze.7 It is at this point that he announces, “I’m rolling back prices to 1965,” before smashing up the shop’s wares with a baseball bat (another key American symbol) until the Korean starts suggesting lower prices.

Obviously, this suggests a desire to roll back American life generally to 1965 (Davies 220-221), a time when white males still had economic currency and were guaranteed racial and gender privileges, a time before the full-scale technologisation of the workplace, before Asian economic competition, before the defeat in Vietnam, and importantly for D-FENS, an unemployed defence

7As if to drive this point home, after a confirmed sighting of D-FENS, Prendergast asks, “What would a white guy in a white shirt and tie be doing in gangland?” 49 worker, a time when the Cold War was strongly entrenched in the American imaginary.8

Los Angeles, which functions as synecdoche for America,9 is the perfect setting for a screening of white male grievances. Huge-scale downsizing, especially in the defence sector, and the collapse of the manufacturing industry have led to high unemployment among all sectors of the population and a shift to the badly-paid service industry. In the last twenty-five years, new patterns of segregation have emerged as whites have moved to the suburbs, while newer immigrants from Mexico, Central America and South East Asia have joined African-American inhabitants, resulting in decaying, neglected ghettoes with majority non-white populations. For example, whites in South Central Los Angeles comprised less than 5% of the population at the time of the film’s release (Omi and Winant, “Los Angeles” 102; Cho 198).10 Frenzied media concern over these statistics reveals how the signifier “race” is frequently deployed “to make legible the meanings of urban transformation for American society as a whole,” even though, in fact, it constitutes “a volatile and over-determined metaphor that is as often used to elide rather than illuminate the conditions of social inequality with spatial exclusion in urban centres” (Liam

Kennedy 169). California is also “a traditional hotbed for identity politics” (Clover, “White

Noise” 9), as recent debates over Proposition 209 and the scandal over gay marriages have shown, and thus a prime site for the contestation of politicised discourses of identity. D-FENS informs Beth that the city is “sick,” a point of view that the film would seem to concur with in its parasitical utilisation of exploitative images of inner-city poverty and suffering (the homeless, the unemployed, AIDS victims, immigrant fruit-sellers, to name a few) presented through the prism of the beleaguered white male gaze, thereby depriving those subjects of a voice, and

8 What is most disturbing about this scene is its attempts to court laughter: after D-FENS ironically retorts, “It’s been a pleasure frequenting your establishment,” a long shot reveals the damage he inflicted on this small business. Likewise, after taunting the Latino gang member for missing him in the drive-by shooting (a stereotype of Latino gang-bangers if ever there was one), D-FENS shoots him in the leg before delivering a Bruce Willis style wisecrack: “Take some shooting lessons, arse'ole!” The highly stylised scene at the Whammy Burger joint is also played for laughs as D-FENS holds the staff at gunpoint, demanding the breakfast they had refused to serve because it was two minutes past the allotted breakfast time. 9 Michael Keith and Malcolm Cross note that “[t]he urban narrative has re-emerged triumphantly as a genre in which the city can be read as both emblem and microcosm of society” (9). 10 For an analysis of the characteristics of the postmodern city, see Keith and Cross. 50 precluding any suggestion of the failures of economic, social and urban policies. As Elana

Zilberg points out, “[t]hese ‘inner city folk,’ therefore, serve as little more than a textured backdrop to the Anglo-American protagonist’s journey. Their fallen state is an underprivileged but necessary backdrop to the central tragedy, the privileged fall of the middle class Anglo-

American” (193).

Los Angeles is painted as a city where, for the white male, all urban spaces have become hostile, unreadable, and occupied by others (Mahoney 174). When D-FENS passes through the territory of the Latino gang, they accuse him of trespassing on private property and demand a toll. D-FENS acknowledges, with great condescension, that they are having a “territory dispute,” stating that he wouldn’t want them in his backyard either - a staggering conflation of the privatised space of the bourgeois home and a run-down, urban wasteland (see figure 1.2). When

D-FENS walks through a public park and refuses to give money to a homeless white man (who, the film takes great pains to show, is a scrounging waster), the man shouts after him, “This is my home, this is my park, what right do you have walking through it?” Later D-FENS is furious that the exclusive golf club, an oasis of lush, green fields, an area which D-FENS (rightly) claims should be made available for children and families, is fenced off.

Urban space is overwhelmingly coded as male, while Beth represents the domestic space to which D-FENS is also denied access: Beth has received a restraining order from a judge who wanted to make him an example, even though he had never become physically violent, positing

D-FENS as a victim of feminist-inspired legislation until the end of the film, when Beth’s intuition is finally validated. He is therefore forced to move back in with his mother, who is also held responsible for her son’s psychosis. With his soldier father absent, presumably killed in action, it is suggested that “the demons” have had “full permission to rage,” to use Robert Bly’s expression (96). Prendergast is able to coax answers out of D-FENS’s mother because she resembles his own wife, a point emphasised by the visual similarity between the two women, 51 with unkempt hair acting as a cliché symbol for their shared neurosis. Prendergast is every inch

Robert Bly’s “soft man,” feminised at the hands of his wife, for whose sake he took a desk job, rendering him the butt of office jokes. Such negative images of the feminine are indissociable not only from the grotesque, cloying image of the woman applying lipstick in the opening scene, but also from the billboard advertisement for sun lotion which enables Prendergast to track D-FENS down. The advertisement - which features a tanned woman in a bikini, with the added graffiti of a small cartoon man trapped in her cleavage crying out “Help me!” - connects D-FENS and

Prendergast both diegetically and thematically by spatially inscribing their shared fear of being suffocated by women. Sharon Willis also observes that the tanned woman, who implies white people’s desire to brown up, suggests that “a fear of engulfment by the feminine intersects with fears of being overrun by otherness” (High Contrast 16).

The doubling of D-FENS with Prendergast does not stop here.11 A Latina woman interrogated about the drive-by shooting tells Prendergast that D-FENS was a white guy like him but a bit taller with more hair. Both men are fathers who have lost children, Prendergast through infant death syndrome and D-FENS through the legal system. Furthermore, Prendergast’s assumption that his Japanese colleague can understand Korean is obviously paralleled with D-

FENS’s assumption that the Korean shopkeeper was Chinese. Despite this slip, though,

Prendergast generally functions well in a multicultural working environment and maintains a close but politically correct relationship with his female Latina partner Sandra (Rachel Ticotin), and the film positions him as a representative of the way in which white middle-class males should manage difference.12 However, his heroic status is only confirmed after a trajectory of

11 Several critics picked up on this doubling. See Clover, “White Noise”; Davies and Smith; Liam Kennedy; Dyer, White; Willis, High Contrast; Savran. 12 As Elana Zilberg notes, the film seems to offer a “redemptive narrative” of the police force after the LA uprisings, a worrying move when in 1992, Amnesty International reported large-scale violation of the rights of low-income minority populations in the LAPD's “fight against crime” (200). The LAPD has become a focus of filmic interrogations into police brutality since the King affair. Strange Days (1995) restages the King beatings, though it indicts two rogue cops rather than institutionalised racism. Training Day (2001) also reveals the corruption of the LAPD, though most focus falls on Denzil Washington’s brutal black cop rather than the evil white guys he worked 52 remasculinisation, when the “soft man” finds the “wild man” within (see figure 1.3). By the end of the film, Prendergast silences his wife in sexist language (legitimised by Sandra’s tacit approval), punches a colleague who insults his wife, swears at his police chief on national television, and decides not to retire despite the promises he had made to his wife. Most importantly, though, in the closing western-style shoot-out, D-FENS draws a plastic water pistol, while Prendergast draws the real thing, shooting D-FENS dead, screening the typical motif of

“regeneration by violence” that Richard Slotkin has located in frontier literature and mythology

(Dyer, White 34), and which is integral to many films of the period, as I explore in chapter two.

D-FENS is also paralleled with Nick (Frederic Forrest), the vicious, homophobic, sexist, fascist owner of the surplus army store, who assumes that D-FENS held up Whammy Burger because of “all the niggers working there” (see figure 1.4). As Carol Clover argues, Nick is an essential foil, allowing the film to “define D-FENS as your average short-tempered neighbour who just happened to break one day” (“White Noise” 8). D-FENS tries to enforce a similar distance, informing Nick, in a statement that reveals D-FENS’s investment in the notion of

(white) American innocence, “We are not the same. I’m an American, you’re a sick arse’ole.”

However, when Nick simulates being a black prisoner raping D-FENS, muttering “give it to me, give it to me” in a frenzy of homoerotophobic excitement, Nick’s mouth fills the screen in an extreme close-up that self-consciously mirrors the opening shot of D-FENS. This doubling is reinforced through the mirror that mediates shots between the two men; consequently, when D-

FENS shoots at Nick, he also shoots at his own reflection, suggesting a moment of utter self- hatred. This scene plays out the dynamics of Lacan’s mirror stage, which Lacan viewed “not simply a moment in development” but also as paradigmatic of “the subject's relation to his image” (qtd. in Fuery 15). According to Lacan, the subject of the mirror stage experiences narcissistic pleasure in recognising its own image; but because this is really a misrecognition,

for. Dark Blue (2003), set during the Rodney King trial, also screens the abusive practise of the LAPD, though Kurt Russell’s cop is predictably redeemed in narrative closure. 53 since the infant also experiences a lack of control over its body, this moment is also underpinned by aggression since “the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself” (“Aggressivity” 21). For Lacan, therefore, as we saw in the introduction, aggression directed at others also stems from aggression directed at “the other within.” D-FENS’s simultaneous shooting of Nick and his own reflection illustrates this point beautifully, as well as pointing to the difficulty of separating D-FENS’s white male paranoia from Nick’s neo-fascism.

In this respect, it is interesting that the simulated rape in Falling Down inverts the racial dynamics of the prison rape in the highly didactic American History X (1998), a film that charts how neo-conservative discourses can easily spiral into white supremacy. Derek (Edward Norton)

(see figure 1.5), an eventual recruiter for a neo-fascist movement, is highly influenced by his fireman father, who objects to affirmative action policies and the teaching of black authors at high school, and who is later killed putting out a fire in a black neighbourhood.13 Derek attracts poor, mainly male whites by convincing them that they have lost ground to people of colour, in particular illegal immigrants, who work at cheap rates. He also leads a basketball match against a black gang that decides who will gain exclusive use of the court.14 Their “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz vii) prevents whites from joining forces with blacks, despite the difficulties and alienation they share in a city that obviously suffers from a desperate lack of public space and resources. Sent to prison for crushing the skull of a rival black gang member,

Derek is again caught up in territory disputes between rival ethnic gangs. When Derek criticises a white neo-fascist for selling drugs to fellow whites, and plays basketball with inmates of colour after bonding with a fellow black prisoner Lamont (Guy Torry), he is punitively raped in the showers, left unconscious as water washes the blood streaming from his anus down the drains in

13 Gwendolyn Audrey Foster argues that films such as American History X enable white audiences to project their racisms onto white supremacists, thereby distancing themselves from the shocking behaviour of extremists, without necessarily acknowledging their own racisms or racial privileges (143). Certainly, while the film links Derek’s father’s neo-conservative beliefs with fascism, it does not suggest how more mundane practices work to reconfigure white power, while the film’s didactic message certainly comes at the risk of narrative credibility. 14 Unlike D-FENS, Derek is compelling eloquent, the film taking the risk of allowing him to be charismatic, using a flashback narrative shot in black and white in order to enforce a distance between the past and present Derek. 54 a shot reminiscent of Psycho (1960), while the camera lingers on his now ironic tattoo which reads “White Power.” Lamont had already warned Derek, “You’d better watch your arse.

Because in the joint, you’re the nigger, not me!” Likewise, Derek’s rapist informs him, “You wanna be a nigger sweet boy. Because we gonna treat you like one.” The film therefore suggests, not unproblematically (see chapter six), that being a “nigger” is a matter of power rather than skin colour. This white-authored fantasy of white male domination, which forces Derek into the role of an African-American, is highly suggestive of the subliminal homoerotic impulses that

Theodor Adorno and Klaus Theweleit have located in their studies of fascist masculinity.15

Indeed, in the American racist imaginary, black masculinity is often a contradictory site of repulsion and attraction, revealing how intimately we are tied to those we hate, dependent upon them for the exclusionary operations that secure our identity and demarcate its borders. Nick’s fantasmatic embodiment of blackness in Falling Down, on the other hand, while equally as homoerotophobic as the rape in American History X, reverses its function, facilitating the staging of a masochistic scenario wherein white men assume the victim function to a black male aggressor - a reversal indicative of the flexibility of racial stereotyping.16 In the manner suggested by Slavoj Žižek in his Lacanian theorisation of the theft of enjoyment by the racial other (Looking Awry 165), which I discuss more fully in chapter six, Nick unconsciously projects onto black masculinity the repressed pleasures that he believes are denied to him: racial domination and homosexuality. It is therefore important that, in a film seemingly determined to spare African-Americans from being one of the racial others against whom D-FENS is pitted, the masochistic fantasy that the white man is “fucked” by the black man is nonetheless articulated.

15 Adorno analyses the libidinal bonds between the fascist leader, who functions like Freud’s primal father, and his followers (136-39). Theweleit also traces the homoerotophobic elements of fascist identifications in Male Fantasies (1987). Fred Pfeil makes a similar point about Nick in Falling Down, pointing out that the simulated rape “plays out as a virtual incarnation and re-enactment of the homophobic/homoerotic impulses Klaus Theweleit has helped us see as a core component of proto-fascist masculinity” (White Guys 240). In the process, Falling Down suggests that homophobia stems from disgust at repressed homosexual desires, a point made in another failed American dream film, American Beauty (1999). 16 David Savran argues that this fantasmatic blackening is common to neo-fascist literature (33), giving as an example Tom Metzgar, the leader of the White Aryan Resistance, who stated in 1995 that in contemporary America, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are the “new niggers” (qtd. in Savran 3). 55

The simulated rape scene in Falling Down is equally as catalytic as Derek’s rape in

American History X, but inverts its narrative outcome: while Derek rejects his racist past, producing a melodramatic narrative of white male redemption, D-FENS is pushed ever nearer the spectre of fascism, trading in his nerdy short-sleeved white shirt and tie for military fatigues

(see figure 1.6), attire that obviously plays on the sartorial codes of the Patriot Movement, but also highlights the film’s reworking of the white male rampage genre, typified by the Rambo series, where the protagonist is posited as both aggressor and victim, a point I discuss further in the following chapter. Indeed, as Jude Davies points out, the fact that from this point on D-FENS is referred to as G.I. Joe, coupled with the use of helicopter blades as soundtrack even when no helicopters are visible, suggests that the film is intimating that the problem with Los Angeles is that it has become Vietnam, in turn suggesting that the problem with America is that it has

“become too foreign” (221-2), and is no longer the stomping ground of the white male.17

D-FENS’s attempt to reclaim America for the white male, a need which reveals “the inability of ‘America’ to function as a transhistorical sign” (Wiegman, American Anatomies

131), is apparent in his suggestion that he and Prendergast have a western-style “show-down” between the “sheriff” and the “bad guy,” bringing to a logical conclusion the film’s reworking of the western genre, and its motif of the “lone white male in the wilderness” (Liam Kennedy 39).

But D-FENS also expresses incredulity at his positioning as the baddie: “I’m the bad guy? How did that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles . . . I help to protect America. You should be rewarded for that but instead they give it to the plastic surgeons.” As Davies and Smith point out, “[i]nstead of being able to locate himself with respect

17 The 1965 that D-FENS wants to return back to was the time of the Vietnam War. Nick’s shop is adorned with illustrations of Vietnam, while he also refers to crushing the Viet Cong. The depiction of Venice Beach, with its noise, exotically dressed people, its Hare Krishnas and tacky foreign–made souvenirs imply that “D-FENS has arrived in Saigon” in a form of “reverse imperialism” (Davies 222). For Davies, this explains the anti-Asian slant to the film, and D-FENS’s anger at the Korean shopkeeper’s over-priced coke might be unpacked as signifying fear over Asian financial power (231). The spectre of Vietnam haunts many Hollywood representations of white masculinity. Susan Jeffords has analysed Hollywood’s re-fighting of the Vietnam War through a trajectory of remasculinisation (Remasculinisation). However, Davies and Smith argue that whereas Jeffords noted that Hollywood, especially the Rambo series, encoded the Vietnam war through a narrative of white masculinity, Falling Down reverses this logic, so that references to Vietnam “are used to encode a white male narrative” (36). 56 to a history of oppression and its contestation, and/or to establish an identity with others in the same condition, D-FENS experiences his loss of job, wife, home and daughter as an inexplicable victimisation which he is powerless to resist or put into words” (34). Bereft of a discourse and place from which to speak in “a culture that appears to organise itself around the visibility of differences and the symbolic currency of identity politics” (Robinson 3), he appropriates the words of the African-American he encountered outside a bank, who carries a placard saying

“Not Economically Viable” in protest at being denied a loan: “I’ve lost my job. Well, actually I didn’t lose it. It lost me. I’m overeducated, under-skilled. Maybe it’s the other way round, I forget. And I’m obsolete. I’m not economically viable. I can’t even support my own kid.”18 The iconic African-American protester has no obvious narrative function and his role is surprisingly limited in view of the fact that African-Americans are usually posited as a paradigm for race in popular representations. In part, this can be attributed to the film’s attempt to comment on the shifting racial dynamics of LA in the wake of new immigration patterns, as well as a desire to avoid provoking the African-American community, which has made significant gains in the politics of representation in Hollywood, so soon after the LA uprisings. For Liam Kennedy, the homology established between D-FENS and the African-American is a gesture of “historical amnesia” which “negates the alterity of the black subject” and elides the specificity of African-

American social, cultural and racial oppression (38-9). However, as Davies and Smith point out, this affinity does point to the similarity of the two men in terms of class (34), rendering Falling

Down more complex than a right-wing backlash (38). D-FENS, however, lacks a vocabulary of class, which might have enabled him to understand his predicament, and in conjunction with the film’s suggestion that “universalising discourses” have “little authority in a territorialised USA”

(Davies and Smith 33), Falling Down also screens the anxiety that American white masculinity

18 Unlike D-FENS, Sean Penn’s protagonist in The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) understands his plight and rails against the system. However, when it comes to collective action, he approaches the Black Panthers, since he knows of no organisation for white males like himself, and suggests a black-white alliance called The Zebras (!). 57 is an emptied-out identity that is forced to claim victim status if it is to compete with its raced and gendered others.

But while Falling Down screens heterosexual white masculinity as very much in crisis, the terms of white patriarchal hegemony are left intact, redeemed through the figure of

Prendergast, while even D-FENS sacrifices his life so that his daughter can gain his life insurance. As with almost all the “white male as victim” films of this section, therefore, fatherhood is offered as a means of exonerating contemporary white masculinity, offering a racially innocent path of redemption. Yet the film seems also to accept the unsatisfactory nature of this solution. The final scene features old home videos that D-FENS briefly watched on his own before his death, now watched only by the dog. Unlike the final shot of Fatal Attraction or

Disclosure, where Douglas’s character is reassimilated into the family via a close-up of a family photograph and an email sent by his children respectively, this postmodern self-reflexive gesture denotes his absence from the domestic space that, in any case, the home videos showed, he had never comfortably occupied in the first place.

1.2. Disclosure: The Feminisation of the Workplace

Disclosure (1994), released a year after Falling Down, deployed Douglas’s star persona of “angry white man” to full effect, though the film self-consciously espouses a more liberal position. As with Falling Down, Disclosure was also marketed as a “talky” and self-consciously mobilised the discourses of sexual harassment that had fuelled countless talk shows in the wake of the Thomas-Hill affair. As Herman Beavers notes, the Thomas-Hill hearings “connoted the emergence of a new kind of public scrutiny: for men, as it pertained to how they treated women in the workplace, for women, as it pertained to how they ‘threatened’ male hegemony” (272).

Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) certainly threatens male authority at work by falsely accusing

Tom of sexual harassment, a charge that Tom directs back at her, though it later turns out that 58

Tom’s conniving boss, Bob Garvin (Donald Sutherland), had orchestrated the harassment accusations in order to fire Sanders and blame him for the production line problems in Malaysia, thereby saving the merger of his computer firm, Digicom, with another American company. Tom is thus posited as the victim not so much of sexual harassment but of feminist-inspired anti- discriminatory legislation (Davies and Smith 46). Sharon Willis has argued that often in popular representations “one difference is made to stand in for, to do the job of, to trivialise or eclipse, the others” (High Contrast 6). In the case of Disclosure, the overdetermined “battle of the sexes” plotline, which is resolved some twenty-seven minutes before the end of the film (Davies and

Smith 38), veils other concerns aside from white male victimisation; more covertly, the sexual harassment narrative plays out anxieties over the perceived “feminisation” of the workplace, along with the restructuring and regendering of public and private space, while at a further level of displacement, as Davies and Smith argue, it transcodes the threat of the American economy losing ground to Asian others in the marketplace (39).

Despite the fact that the plot of Disclosure is actually driven by the intrigues of corporate conspiracies, the film was marketed through its sexual harassment narrative, no doubt a successful strategy in view of the film’s box-office takings of $221 million worldwide. One of the advertising posters, which featured a picture of Demi Moore and Michael Douglas wrapped in each other’s arms (neither seeming particularly harassed), accompanied by the slogan “sex is power,” offered the promise of the illicit sex scenes that Douglas had delivered in Basic Instinct

(see figure 1.7). The actual “non-sex sex” scene, to use the words of Tom’s wife, Susan

(Caroline Goodall), eroticises the sadomasochistic power dynamics of the workplace. On entering her office, Tom hears Meredith on the phone, flirtatiously telling an unnamed interlocutor, “I like all the boys under me to be happy.” This (spatially-encoded) power relation is reinvoked when Meredith actively seduces Tom, murmuring, “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna bite,” before performing oral sex on him in a scene that seems designed to screen the pleasures of 59 male passivity. However, when she conflates professional and sexual power to the tune of “let me be the boss,” an imperative which obviously touches a raw nerve, Tom aggressively assumes the active role, leaving Meredith to pant breathlessly, “Now you’ve got the all the power. You’ve got something I want.” The film self-consciously engages with the issue of consent that had driven discussions about date rape at the time of release. Tom moans “no” thirty-one times before he eventually pulls away (with no difficulty, as Meredith points out in the mediation hearings) after catching sight of his reflection in the glass partition. In her defence, Meredith suggests that sometimes no means yes, a statement for which she is reprimanded by Tom’s prominent feminist lawyer, Catherine Alvarez (Roma Maffia): “No means no. Isn’t that what we tell women? Do men deserve less?” The incommensurate power differentials between men and women are thus deftly elided. Nevertheless, Caroline does inform him that sexual harassment is something she has had to deal with throughout her professional life, and her accusation that

“nothing ever happens until it happens to you” could equally be levelled at a Hollywood that has yet to make a blockbuster out of women being sexually harassed in the workplace.

Catherine soon initiates Tom into feminist rhetoric: “Sexual harassment is not about sex.

It’s about power. She [Meredith] has it and you don’t.” As Davies and Smith note, while D-

FENS in Falling Down “[lacked] a discourse in which to articulate his identity,” Tom “quickly learns one” (44). When his wife tells him he should just apologise, Tom appropriates Catherine’s words: “Sexual harassment is about power. When did I have the power? When?”19 As with

Falling Down, therefore, the film articulates anxieties that white men lack a place from which to speak, forced to borrow from the political discourses of their others. This enables Tom to claim a new minority identity - the oppressed white guy unjustly accused of being everyone else’s

19 In this sense, he is remarkably similar to Nick Curran, the character Douglas plays in Basic Instinct, who mimics Catherine Trammell's language on several occasions. When questioned by Internal Affairs and told not to smoke, Nick uses Catherine’s exact words: “What are you going to do? Charge me with smoking?” Later he tells Catherine he will follow her “to see if I can get away with it,” a reiteration of Catherine’s earlier dialogue. To some extent, both Nick and Tom’s mirroring of female language can be read as traditional noir instability over male identity caused by the threatening sexuality of the femme fatale, but it also rearticulates the notion that white masculinity is an emptied-out subjectivity that lacks specific content. 60 oppressor: “Why don’t I just admit it. Why don’t I just be that guy, that white evil male you’re all complaining about. I’d like it. Then I could fuck everyone.” Then, parodying this evil white male role, he calls down his Asian maid so that he can satisfy a “patriarchal urge.” Tom’s outburst certainly reflects anger at the demonisation of white men that he believes to undergrid identity politics.20 At the same time, Tom is hugely ignorant of the privileges that he, as a straight, white, moneyed male, wields. His understanding of himself as persecuted has an ironic tinge in that it is undermined by the mise-en-scène of his luxurious home (Tasker, Working Girls

132). He also spares little thought for how his white patriarchal posturing might impact on his obviously intimidated Asian maid. Her reaction, however, is given no narrative space, as with the experiences of all the Asian women in the film, from the cleaner who is fired for witnessing Tom and Meredith’s encounter, to the workers in the Malaysian plant, whose labour enables American companies to reap in huge profits. In short, despite the discursive suggestion that middle-class white men have lost ground, popular cinema devotes a disproportionate amount of screen space to their disenfranchisement at the expense of their minoritised others.

As well as comprising a backlash response to pro-feminist legislation, the sexual harassment narrative also enables Disclosure to explore “[t]he sexualisation of work,” to use

Yvonne Tasker’s phrase, common to many neo-noir thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and The

Last Seduction (1994) (Working Girls 132). Meredith’s first appearance is mediated through

Tom’s approving gaze, revealing her shapely legs as she walks up the stairs, and then later, before their first meeting, the camera again lingers on her stiletto shoes, a signifier of sexual as well as professional power, before cutting to reveal Demi Moore’s face for the first time. This self-conscious fetishitic camerawork is an obvious intertextual reference to the film’s noir heritage; however, this deployment of the traditional male gaze, whereby Tom is “bearer of the

20 In reality of course, most strands of identity politics regard gender and race to be historically constructed power relations rather than an affair of individual failings, though in popular media representations, this politicised understanding is sidelined for paranoid and ill-informed discussions over political correctness. 61 look” and Meredith its passive object (Mulvey 19-22), is partially dislodged when it becomes apparent that Meredith is aggressive both in the bedroom and the boardroom. The film’s visual economy thus has it both ways: working women as eroticised sex objects and working women as threats to male professional dominance (see figure 1.8). Moreover, in accordance with the traditional noir male point of view, Meredith is rendered opaque and unknowable, a blank screen onto whom concerns about white heterosexual masculinity are projected.

The sexualisation of the workplace is represented as dangerous for Tom since it jeopardises not only his professional authority but also his home life. Writing of neo-noir films generally, Sharon Willis notes, “[l]oading anxieties onto the question of sexual difference and sexuality, these films figure a private war of the sexes that foregrounds masculine anxieties about incompetence, weakness, and failure in a universe where the boundaries between the private and the public or professional are constantly shifting” (High Contrast 64). Disclosure seems intent on exploring the collapse of the public/private space distinction, traditionally coded masculine/feminine, and the ramifications this has for traditional masculinity. Tom’s wife is not only a successful lawyer (albeit part-time) but, according to the film’s final credits, has also kept her maiden name (Davies and Smith 45). At the same time, the film takes pains to proclaim

Tom’s “New Man” credentials.21 The opening scene shows him arriving at work late on the day he was expecting to be promoted because he was helping Susan with the children. The toothpaste smeared on his tie, which attracts several comments throughout the day, and which Tom fruitlessly attempts to rub clean, reinforces his failure to keep the private and public sphere separate. Meredith, by contrast, has no truck with domesticity; on seeing a picture of Susan, she observes, “She looks like she always has food in the refrigerator. […] In my fridge back home

I’ve got a couple of bottles of champagne and an orange.” In fact, Meredith is shown to have little existence outside of the public space of work, even working out on her Stairmaster in her

21 In the 80s, the popular media waxed lyrical about the emergence of a “New Man” in touch with his emotions, while others regarded the New Man as nothing more than a media creation. 62 office, while plotting maliciously with senior management.

Meredith is exemplary of the neo-noir femme fatale, who, according to Yvonne Tasker, combines elements of both the traditional femme fatale and the 1970s stereotype of the

“independent woman,” and whose “threat quite overtly lies in the context of work” (Working

Girls 121). The traditional femme fatale has largely been explained as a complex ideological response to the shifting gender roles during The Second World War: played off against the good domestic woman, the femme fatale was criminalised in a representational strategy that attempted to facilitate the reassimilation of women, many of whom occupied professional positions in wartime, back into the home (Krutnik 57-65). The femme fatale has proved to be a popular object of study within feminist theory because of the power her sexuality affords her, even if she is punished or seduced in narrative closure. Mary Anne Doane has argued that the traditional femme fatale is “not the subject of power but its carrier” (Femmes Fatales 2), but as Tasker notes, the post-classical/postmodern femme fatales “know how to wield the power that they possess” (Working Girls 121). Indeed, while the traditional femme fatale represented fears of female entry into the workplace, in contemporary films, the fear is of women entering senior management; for example, Meredith and Bridget (The Last Seduction) humiliate the men that work under them, often through taunts about their failures as men. Of course, traditional noir had always explored the “discrepancy between, on the one hand, the licit possibilities of masculine identity and desire required by the patriarchal cultural order, and, on the other hand, the psychosexual make-up of the male subject-hero” (Krutnik 85). Neo-noir, however, seems intent on developing the masochistic potential of the male protagonist, with the “hero” emerging as even more vulnerable and inept than his predecessors (Tasker, Working Girls 127),22 a strategy which no doubt also fulfils a restorative function, putting phallic masculinity into crisis “so that we can mourn its loss” (Cook 40).

22 Tasker cites the example of Maddy (Kathleen Turner) in Body Heat (1981), who informs Ned (William Hurt), “You’re not too smart, are you?” adding, “I like that in a man” (Working Girls 127). 63

Nonetheless, Disclosure is careful to offer opposing positive images of women in the workplace, albeit women whose dress codes and/or age desexualise them, such as Susan, Cindy

Chang (Jacqueline Kim), Stephanie Kaplan (Rosemary Forsyth) and Mary Anne Hunter (Suzie

Plackson), who is consistently referred to by her surname (Tasker, Working Girls 132; Davies and Smith 43). As Tasker notes, rather than play off the femme fatale against the good woman who stays at home, as traditional noir or Fatal Attraction had done, Disclosure counters

Meredith with “good, supportive women at work” (Working Girls 132). Hunter, for example, expresses anger at women who exploit their sexuality for professional advancement.23 Moreover,

Stephanie is the anonymous sender of emails who helped Tom fathom the conspiracy against him. However, the fact that Stephanie is finally given the promotion that Tom had been expecting allows the film to flaunt its “‘liberal’ credentials” (Tasker, Working Girls 132) while suggesting that the fear of women taking over the workplace might well be justified.

The fear that men have lost out to women, a fear that assumes the workplace to be male territory by default, is indissociable from the spectre of male redundancy that haunts Disclosure.

This fear is largely voiced through an unnamed middle-aged man on the ferry who functions as one of the “ghosts with a résumé” that Tom is so terrified of becoming. This anonymous figure informs Tom that he had been “surplussed” by IBM but adds, “If they’d wanted a euphemism they should have said sodomised.” When Tom gives him Cindy’s phone number in case a job opening crops up, the man bitterly retorts, “You used to have fun with girls . . . Nowadays she probably wants your job.” As Davies and Smith point out, this man “operates as a means of disavowal, in that he articulates sentiments that the film explicitly distances itself from” (44).

However, while Tom never utters such anti-feminist sentiments, his masculinity is still very much tied up in traditionalist notions of the male as breadwinner. In fact, when Susan suggests

23 However, as Davies and Smith note, Hunter’s critique does not necessarily distance women and feminism from Meredith’s abuse of anti-discriminatory legislation by women; rather, it “helps justify the representation of Tom as white-male-as-innocent-victim of political correctness” (44). 64 that he should resign and that she should go back to work full-time, he indignantly replies, “I am perfectly capable of supporting my own family.” The end of the film also amplifies the fear that women are more employable than men when the fired Meredith informs Tom, “I’ve had calls from ten head-hunters with job offers in the last hour. Don’t be surprised if I’m back in ten years to buy this place.”

Meredith’s occupation of traditional male territory also transcodes anxieties about the feminisation of work per se. As Donna Harraway notes, “[t]o be feminised means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex” (86). One of the major contentions of this thesis is that gender relations have been affected by the shift from an industrial to a service economy.

This shift has widely been regarded as a process of feminisation, partly because no product is made, and also because the skills demanded are traditionally coded as feminine (Segal xix).

Meredith’s initial presentation at Digicom, with her use of flashy, electronic props, is all style and surface, causing Tom to state that she wouldn’t know the difference between software and a cashmere sweater. In other words, the film articulates the anxiety that the postmodern workplace privileges appearance (gendered feminine because of traditional notions of femininity as masquerade) over production (gendered masculine). A similar emphasis on performativity is also inscribed through the firm’s open-plan, glass-partition design, a spatial restructuring which functions much like the panoptica that Michel Foucault discusses in Discipline and Punish

(1975), allowing senior management constant surveillance of employees, a design which, coupled with the roving objective camera, inserts Tom’s paranoia firmly into the film’s mise-en- scène. As B. Ruby Rich has observed, in neo-noir, the male protagonists “turn out to be the sole repositories of authenticity” (“Dumb Lugs” 9) with a mandate “to hold fast in a post-modern 65 world of shifting significances, to reject dispersal and masquerade and therefore corruption, to be

‘themselves’ in the absence of any other comprehensive rules” (10). Conversely, Meredith’s rapid rise is attributed to her feminine ability to manipulate surfaces. This fear is also played out through Tom’s dream sequence, in which he arrives at work in a smart suit that contrasts starkly with his usual scruffy appearance. As he joins his smartly attired boss in the lift, Garvin compliments Tom on his suit, caresses the fabric, and then, repeating Meredith’s words, “Now you have the power. You have something I want,” he lunges at Tom, causing Tom to wake up with a jolt. Most obviously, this sequence suggests that Tom’s general paranoia might also function as a means of psychic defence against a latent homosexuality, in the manner theorised by Freud (“Some Neurotic Mechanisms” 201).24 However, as Tasker notes, in a film where the management is signified as feminised through its attention to dress (one manager even sinisterly files his nails as he schemes), it also screens the fear that being smartly dressed might involve becoming the object of homosexual as well as heterosexual desire (Working Girls 133). This dream also points to anxieties about the commodification of the male body that I discuss in detail in chapter three: as Benjamin Scott King observes, the man as consumer not only violates the traditional gendering of the production/consumption binary, but also brings a crisis in the arena that traditionally distanced men from consumption and helped define their masculinity - their work (286). Tom’s scruffy appearance, therefore, represents a self-conscious attempt to distance himself from management’s emphasis on performativity, which Meredith so excels at, representing himself as the “hands-on” productive type whose traditionalist masculinity is still firmly intact.25

The fear that the workplace is being feminised is also compounded by the film’s participation in discourses that code digital and virtual technologies as feminine due to their

24 I am indebted to Celestino Deleyto’s essay “The Margins of Pleasures” for this point, in which he reads Nick’s (Michael Douglas) heterosexual aggressivity in Basic Instinct as a defence against homosexuality. 25 In this respect, he is like the protagonist of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (2002), who works in Silicon Valley and laments that “you can’t hold a dot.com in your hands,” stating that he wants to be an “iron man” and actually make something, as his father had done. 66 miniature, internalised, passivity-inducing qualities (Springer, Electronic Eros 10, 104). In her first presentation, Meredith extols the abilities of virtual technology to free us from race, gender, nationality, personality, place and time in a speech that deftly skirts around the physical labour and exploitation of the female workers in Malaysia, whose small hands produce the technology that makes transcendence over the body a possibility for a privileged few. It is thus interesting that in the special effects representation of the virtual space where Digicom’s files are stored, which Tom enters in order to learn about the plot that Meredith has been hatching against him,

Tom appears in a naturalised human form while Meredith is denied a body. Meredith startles both Tom and spectator as her figure darts from behind a file and hovers around him as a two- dimensional facial photograph perched on a fetishistic, metallic skeletal frame, explained by the narrative logic of her accessing the system from her office PC (see figure 1.9). On seeing this image, a horrified Tom cries out, “she’s in the system!” But Meredith is not only in the system; the threat that digital and virtual technology pose to the average professional white male vis-à-vis the spectre of huge job losses and labour restructuring is actually conflated with the feminine through the monstrous figure of Meredith. In fact, if the film has left us in any doubt about this, the symbolic connotations are clear when Tom ends up being locked out of the system and saved by his use of more traditional technologies such as fax, e-mail, video, answer phone and mobile phone (Tasker, Working Girls 131). In the film’s representational strategies, therefore, Tom’s embodiment, which codes him as authentic, is juxtaposed to Meredith’s two-dimensionality and concomitant duplicity, as well as expressing the anxiety that she has usurped the traditionally white male Cartesian prerogative of disembodiment.26 The “white male as victim” discourse is further extended when it becomes apparent that women can have it both ways; that is, Meredith may well extol the joys of transcending the body, but can still appeal to embodied identity in order to mobilise anti-discrimination legislation to which white heterosexual men have no

26 I discuss representations of virtual disembodiment in more detail in chapter four. 67 access.

The Malaysian women that Meredith forgets in her western-centric, class-bound celebration of virtual disembodiment give another twist to the film’s backlash anxieties, suggesting that the future workplace is not only feminised but also Asianised. In their perceptive reading of the film, Davies and Smith have argued that, by means of a “strategy of encoding, the threat of the female other in the workplace figures the threat of Asian others in the marketplace”

(39).27 The threat posed by Pacific Rim economies to the American economy is represented in a displaced form. “Actual Asians are screened out almost completely” and the Malaysian plant is only shown briefly in a mediated form, primarily through recorded TV footage of Meredith visiting the factory, though, in order to disavow racism, the film adds the character of Cindy

Chang (Jacqueline Kim) to Michael Crichton's novel (39). Nobody in the film characterises the merger with the American company as a protective move against a possible foreign take-over, but in the novel, the American company with which Digicom merges is called Conley-White (39-

40). In short, the sexual harassment narrative allows a screening of a corporate takeover that

“focuses anxieties over both internal and external challenges to the American economy: the economic and social effects of the switch away from domestic manufacturing on the one hand, and the globalisation of capital and the emergence of Pacific Rim economies on the other” (39).

To build on Davies and Smith’s arguments, if Meredith is aligned with Asian competition, a displacement enabled through Western discourses that feminise the Orient, then once again, as with Falling Down, the victimised white male figure acts as a synecdoche for a threatened

America, with both having ceded territory to their others.

1.3. The Full Monty: The Reversals of Gendered Spaces and Places

27 This threat is also played out in Die Hard (1988), when the wife of John McClane (Bruce Willis) leaves him and pursues a career with a Japanese firm. 68

Anxieties about the feminisation of the workplace are screened more sympathetically in the British comedy hit The Full Monty (1997). The Full Monty avoids blaming individual women for male disenfranchisement by squarely placing the responsibility on the collapse of Sheffield’s steel industry, although the film again retains a male perspective, with little exploration of how unemployment or social deprivation affects female characters, unlike Ken Loach’s brilliant

Raining Stones (1993), for example. In this respect, The Full Monty joins a host of 90s British films, such as Naked (1993), Brassed Off (1996), Trainspotting (1996), The Van (1996), Nil By

Mouth (1997), Twin Town (1997), My Name Is Joe (1998), TwentyFourSeven (1997) and Billy

Elliot (2000), which take white working-class masculinity as their central problematic. Indeed, what with Hugh Grant’s middle-class neurosis, commitment-phobia, self-effacing awkwardness, and verbal incontinence in romantic comedies such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994),

Notting Hill (1999), About a Boy (2002) and Love Actually (2003),28 it would seem that British cinema’s alleged renaissance in the 90s was highly dependent on representations of “(white) masculinity in crisis,” which became its biggest cultural export. Nonetheless, many of these films received American financial backing. For instance, while The Full Monty is credited for showing that films with British subject matter can sell well overseas, the film was financed and distributed entirely by Twentieth Century Fox. 29

The popularity of these films in the US is no doubt due to the fact that they tapped into the heated debates about alleged male failings that consumed both sides of the Atlantic. The 90s

British popular media obsessed over boys’ failure at school, the higher rate of depression, suicide, drug addiction, accidents and cardiovascular disease among men, as well as their shorter life expectancy, in discussions which lacked substantial material analysis (Segal ix). For example, the cover of a January 1996 supplement of The Independent bore, in huge letters, the

28 Bruce Babington and P.W. Evans point out that masculinity has now replaced femininity as the central focus of the post-Classical romantic comedy (280). 29As Geoff Brown puts it, “[t]here was […] something typically and sadly British about the way the country failed to benefit financially from its own handiwork,” with all profits going to America (33). 69 question: “Call Yourself a Man or a Victim?” The accompanying article had the headline: “It could be the most powerful ‘minority ever. Fearful, anxious, vociferous and sometimes violent.

Meet the new victims of the Nineties: Men” (Wilkinson 2). Pressure groups mobilised around fathers’ rights also attracted, and continue to attract, sustained media attention, such as when, in

2004, a member of Fathers 4 Justice scaled the walls of Buckingham Place dressed as Batman in order to protest at his lack of access to his children. At the same time, the floor was increasingly given to strident anti-feminists, such as David Thomas, author of Not Guilty: In Defence of the

Modern Man (1993), who declared, “[t]he fact is, people are in pain. And right now, the ones who wear trousers and stand up to piss don’t seem to count for much when it comes to being healed” (7). Moreover, side by side the androgynous style of rave culture, the decade also saw

“laddism” rise to giddy heights, with hit television shows such as Men Behaving Badly, and films such as Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) - both of which create comedy from their sexist characters’ inability to inhabit the masculine ideal but screen that ideal nonetheless. More disturbing is the huge popularity of the magazine Loaded, which recently advertised its ten year anniversary by erecting billboards all over the country featuring a large- breasted woman with the words “Loaded: 10 Years of Fighting for Feminism” branded across her chest.30 On the whole, though, British white males did not articulate their losses as whites.

Primarily, this is due to Britain's very different racial history, most importantly the fact that it does not have 400 years of slavery on its own soil as part of its racial imaginary,31 as well as the rarity of positive discrimination (affirmative action) policies. However, this is not to dismiss

Britain’s shameful colonial legacy, which has nurtured an in-built sense of superiority and racist attitudes in many British citizens. Moreover, the Stephen Lawrence case highlighted the extent

30 For a discussion of Loaded magazine, see Rutherford, “Introduction” and Benwell, ed. Laddism is largely regarded as a rejection of the media icon of the New Man, the dimensionally opposite pole through which white masculinity is often articulated in British popular culture. 31 However, Liverpool used to be one of the largest slave ports in the world, which, for many commentators, explains why it is such a racially segregated city. I am grateful to Sarah Hannam for this point. 70 of institutionalised racism that exists,32 and racist hostility is often directed at ethnic minorities, asylum seekers and immigrants, many of whom come now from Eastern Europe, as well as

British Muslims in a post-9/11 context. However, this hostility is articulated primarily through the more insidious discourses of nation, ethnicity, religion and cultural uniformity rather than race or skin colour, with the obvious exception of white supremacists.

As well as representing a historically different model of white heterosexual masculinity than Falling Down, The Full Monty also partakes of a very different cinematic aesthetic tradition, self-consciously positioning itself within the “angry young men” films of 50s and 60s British

New Wave (Luckett 95), a body of films influenced by the Free Cinema Movement, which aimed at transferring documentary style to fictional films in order to celebrate what they termed

“the poetry of every life” (Domaille 32). Shot on location, using realistic lighting and mise-en- scènes, primarily set in the industrial north of England in order to comment on the British class system and rigid North-South divide, British New Wave films were often termed “kitchen sink” dramas because of their thematic concern with the nitty grittiness of everyday life (Domaille 32).

The use of realistic speech patterns, regional accents, and a non-star cast were all attempts to challenge the Hollywood model (Domaille 33). Importantly, though, a focus on the working- classes in fact meant a focus on the working man, in particular anxieties that consumerism, suburbanisation, and mass culture were assaulting traditional forms of working-class masculinity

(J. Hill, “From New Wave” 251), as played out in films such as Room at the Top (1959),

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Kind of Loving (1962), The Loneliness of the

Long Distant Runner (1962) and This Sporting Life (1963). However, the subject matter of an overwhelming majority of 90s “Brit-Grit,” to use John Hill’s term (“From New Wave” 250), which includes films such as Brassed Off, The Full Monty, The Van and Billy Elliot, is the non-

32 Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993 in south-east London. Lawrence’s parents claimed that the police had failed to fully investigate the case because the victim was a black youth. Their tireless campaigning led to a national inquiry, which resulted in the MacPherson Report (1999), which criticised the British police force for its institutionalised racism. 1999 also saw nail bombs going off in Brixton and Brick Lane, areas with well-established black and Asian communities. 71 working man, a symptom of large-scale deindustrialisation, especially in the North. These films are often set during the time of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979-90), under whose aegis two million jobs in the manufacturing industry were lost (J. Hill, “Failure and

Utopianism” 178), resulting in an undermining of the givens upon which traditional notions of working-class masculinity were predicated. These films are all marked by nostalgia for a time when the working-class man was guaranteed employment, homosocial ties, the breadwinner role and paternal authority. In this respect, these films differ from youth-orientated, postmodern

British films such as Trainspotting, Twin Town and Human Traffic (1999), which, as Claire

Monk notes, represent youth male unemployment and social alienation “not as a ‘social problem’ but as a subcultural ‘lifestyle,’” as “taken-for-granted states with no history, no proposed solution and no expectation of change” (“Men in the 90s” 160). These films thus “show little outrage at the supposed excesses of female empowerment or the loss of the male ‘right to work’”

(160).33

The Full Monty, on the other hand, like Disclosure, insists on showing how women have moved into all traditionally male space, resulting in gender reversals that are a source of the film’s humour as well as poignancy. This is most strikingly played out when the protagonist,

Gary (Robert Carlyle), and his friend, Dave (Mark Addy), discover that the traditional bastion of the working-class male, the working man’s club (an ironic and obsolete term in this context), now features a women-only night of male strippers. When Dave confesses that his wife Jean

(Lesley Sharp) is among the audience, but that he cannot prevent her from going because “its her money,” Gary replies, “She’s already got you hoovering, and I saw it and I let it go. But this, no, no! You want to get her out of there and tell her what’s for.” Gary’s laddish response expresses

33 These films appeal to “a young, post-political male audience” (Monk, “Men in the 90s” 160). The highly successful Trainspotting, for example, has its protagonist Renton (Ewan McGregor) state in voiceover, “There was no such thing as society. And even if there was, I most certainly had nothing to do with it.” The film’s surrealist stylistics, trendy soundtrack (punk, Brit pop and dance music), its refusal of any moral order, its self-conscious flouting of conformity, and its lack of any sense of community, all contrast starkly with those films that articulate more political, nostalgic representations of the working-class. 72 concern that male unemployment feminises men through enforced domestication, with Dave denied the role as head of the household because he no longer brings home the family wage.

Barred from entering the club, Gary and Dave are reduced to breaking into the men’s toilets in order to fetch Jean. However, at that moment Jean and her friends decide to use the men’s toilets to avoid the queue, thus invading even more revered male space, leaving Gary to peer through a hole in the wall in a shot that self-consciously mirrors Norman Bates’s (Anthony Perkins) voyeuristic gaze in Psycho. But instead of gaining an illicit glance at the female body, Gary is treated to the sight of a woman urinating like a man, accompanied by hoots of laughter from her friends. This ultimate usurpation of the male role is pondered over by the men at the job club

(another redundant term) in one of the film’s most self-conscious references to sexual difference:

Gary: When women start pissing like us, that’s it. We’re finished, Dave,

extincto.

Dave: I mean, how? ... You know, how?

Friend: Genetic mutation, innit? They’re turning into us.

Gary: The theory is men won’t exist, except in zoo or somethin'. I mean, we’re

not needed no more, are we? Obsolete. Dinosaurs. Yesterday’s news.

This rather masochistic discourse on male obsolescence is similar to a line in Disclosure, when one of Tom’s colleagues states of women, “They’re stronger, they’re smarter, they don’t fight fair. It’s the next step in human evolution. It’s like the Amazons - keep a few of us around for sperm and kill off the rest.” Unlike Disclosure, however, women in The Full Monty are not shown to be arrogating management positions;34 nor do they usurp skilled manual work, though the clip from Flashdance (1983) that Gary’s crew study for dance moves does allow this fear to be articulated, with Dave commenting that he knows a lot more about welding than “some

34 Brassed Off, on the other hand, does feature a young female management consultant, Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), who is employed to write a feasibility report on a mining pit marked for closure, though, as the miners knew all along, this was merely a public relations exercise, and her ultimate resignation enables her to be reintegrated into the working-class community from which she originates. 73 chuffin’ woman.” However, the job centre is populated solely by men, as if unemployment were purely a male social problem and the job centre were the only space to which men could lay claim. Moreover, women are represented as not only more employable than men, but also in a position to find jobs for their husbands or ex-husbands, albeit poorly paid work such as packers in the textile industry. What is in danger of being overlooked in the film, therefore, is the fact that women are more employable solely because they are prepared to accept low-paid, menial work that both Gary and Dave, as skilled workers, reject. When Dave tells Gary that Jean wants him to accept a job as a security guard in the supermarket she works for, Gary replies, “you’re worth more than that,” a point with which the film concurs by screening Dave’s decision to walk out on the job as part of the film’s feel-good conclusion. On the one hand, then, The Full Monty excels at showing the humiliation of skilled working-class men having to enter an unskilled labour market, humiliation that is conveyed through images not only of emasculation, most obviously through Dave’s impotence, but also infantilisation. This infantilisation is also spatially inscribed, such as when the men sit at school-like desks at the job centre, where they are patronised by staff who teach them how to write application letters, or when Gary’s gang wait for Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) in a crèche, where Dave gets a child’s hoop stuck on his wrist. The men’s childish antics, such as the Punch and Judy show they act out with gnomes in front of a window while Gerald is having his first interview in months, are coded as signifiers of irresponsibility but also escapist strategies for coping with the pressures of redundancy. Their retreat into infantilism is also contrasted with the maturity of Gary’s son, Nathan (William

Snape), who even lends Gary the money for the deposit on the working-man’s club in one of the film’s many poignant reversals. On the other hand, the film’s suggestion that the only jobs available are “feminine” ones implies that women, unlike Dave, are not “worth more than that,” an assumption that can only be arrived at through pre-feminist notions of male entitlement. In this respect, Claire Monk is right to argue that preoccupation with the “underclass” enables other 74 anxieties and resentments around gender to be displaced onto concerns about economic disempowerment (“Underbelly” 277).35 For instance, although women are not held directly responsible for male unemployment, they certainly exacerbate the men’s plight (Luckett 95).

While Jean is represented sympathetically, Gerald’s wife is an obsessive consumer, and with

Gerald too ashamed to tell her that he has lost his job, “she’s out there now, let loose on high street, with fucking Barclaycards, spending…” Gary’s ex-wife Mandy (Emily Woolf) is also portrayed as heartless (except for the utopian final scene when she cheers Gary on), refusing

Gary access to Nathan unless he can produce his maintenance arrears of £700, allowing the film to tap into the debates over fathers’ rights. In other words, as with Falling Down and Disclosure,

The Full Monty also suggests that the legal system is weighed against men. Moreover, while

Gary lives in a cold messy flat, Mandy has moved in with her boyfriend and inhabits a suburban house with “triple bloody glazing,” as Gary puts it, a domestic environment that Nathan prefers.36 Unemployment thus jeopardises Gary’s relationship with his son, as Nathan expresses frustration at the exploits his father involves him in, such as stealing girders from the abandoned steel works in order to make his maintenance payments: “You’re always making me do stupid stuff like last night. Other dads don’t do that!”

Having lost their claim to traditional working-class male territory, the men are forced to inhabit pastures new, which, in this case, becomes the stage of the working-man’s club, when

Gary puts together his troop of unlikely male strippers. The men also rehearse in “the very space where they had once performed in ‘properly’ masculine ways, as manual workers: the empty factory” (Tincknell and Chambers 149) (see figure 1.10). The humour produced by such reversals indicates that the trading of gendered spaces and places can never be symmetrical, a

35 Despite Claire Monk’s use of the term “underclass” as a descriptor of “a post-working class” created by globalisation, industrial decline, and the restructuring of the labour market, I use scare quotes here in order to distance my usage from the common neo-conservative deployment of the term. See Hill, “Failure and Utopianism” (187n10). However, in the remainder of the thesis, no scare quotes will be used. 36 In reality, in August 1993, the National Child Development Study stated that marital breakdowns were creating a new underclass of women (qtd. in Rutherford, Forever England 143). 75 point I explore in relation to the histories of the male and female body in chapter three.

Nonetheless, the film suggests that the occupation of traditionally female arenas, while ostensibly humiliating, can afford its own pleasures. Whereas Billy Elliot represents a male adolescent’s journey into the world of ballet as liberation from the repressive, heterosexist masculinism of his working-class father and brother,37 The Full Monty posits stripping as a means of re-establishing the much-missed homosocial bonds that existed in the workplace.

United by a common goal, Gary’s crew can enjoy spending time in male company, a pleasure that the otherwise unnecessarily long sequence of a football game, shot against the cityscape of

Sheffield, seems determined to document (see figure 1.11).38 As with David Fincher's Fight Club

(1999), which I discuss in detail in the following chapter, The Full Monty articulates a need for exclusively male space, though Fincher’s postmodern, Hollywood parody screens this need facetiously, offering up as solution to alleged male feminisation the creation of male-only fight clubs, where violence is posited as one of the few characteristics to which men can still lay exclusive claim. Fight clubs thus become the fantasmatic “elsewhere” that Deborah Thomas locates in melodrama, where the white male “can regain the ground he’s lost or is in danger of losing to the domestic domain” (59). However, paradoxically, Gary’s stripping scheme also remasculinises its participants, precisely because it renders them self-made men, though it is not without irony that this gestures at the same self-reliant and entrepreneurial spirit that the

Conservative government claimed to want to nurture in its allegedly benefit-dependent unemployed citizens. Gary’s business venture earns him the respect of his son - highlighting the importance awarded to fatherhood in constructions of white masculinity on both sides of the

Atlantic - while it is suggested that Dave will also be cured of his impotence (Howard 26-7;

37 The film, nonetheless, feels obliged to reaffirm Billy’s (Jamie Bell) heterosexuality, distancing him from his gay friend Michael (Stuart Wells), to whom he insists, “just ‘cos I like ballet doesn’t mean that I’m a poof.” Moreover, as John Hill notes, Billy’s dances are “manly” rather than classical ballet, such as his dance to The Jam’s “A Town Called Malice,” during which he expresses his frustrations (“A Working-Class Hero” 105). 38 The steel works’ all-male brass band, which continues despite the closures, also attests to the importance afforded to homosocial ties in traditional working class male culture, a theme also evident in Brassed Off. 76

30).39

As with Fight Club, the film also suggests that in the absence of women, homosocial bonds between men can transcend all differences. Unlike most Hollywood versions of beleaguered white masculinity, which are characterised by individualistic narratives, The Full

Monty tells the story of a group of men of different ages, races and sexualities, united by their shared experience of economic disempowerment. For instance, the middle-class Gerald, “a point of entrance, identification and empathy for non-working-class viewers” (Howard 32), was once a foreman but is now, Gary states, “scrap like the rest of us.” Gary’s crew also features two gay characters, Guy (Hugo Speer) and Lomper (Steve Huison), and one black character, Horse (Paul

Barber). But while this can be interpreted as a self-conscious attempt to represent a diversity of working-class masculinities, most narrative space is allotted to the stories of Gary and Dave, who fit the more traditional model of white, heterosexual, working-class men. The romance between

Guy and Lomper is devoted only a few seconds of screen time, and while it comes as rather a surprise, meaning that potential stereotypes can only be ascribed retrospectively (Guy is hugely endowed and Lomper still lives at home with his mother), their sexuality is given no narrative attention. Partly this undeveloped storyline is indicative of the nominal inclusion of gay characters in British mainstream cultural representations, but with homophobia still rife,40 it is more than a little utopian to imagine that heterosexual males would express no concern about stripping with gay men, the sole acknowledgment of their sexuality being Dave’s unwitting pun,

“there’s nowt so queer as folk.” Horse’s race also attracts no comments, except through the film’s self-conscious debunking of the mythical, huge, black penis (see chapter three). As with other minor black characters in the film, Horse speaks with a broad Yorkshire accent, suggesting

39 Nonetheless, the fact that the film ends with a freeze frame of the finale of the “one-night only show” implies an unwillingness to compromise its feel-good ending by suggesting the uncertainties and insecurities that the stripping troop might face in the future (Howard 28-29). 40 For example, 1999 witnessed the Soho bombings in London’s gay centre, for which numerous groups claimed responsibility. One of the men who survived the bombing was murdered five years later in a homophobic attack, a “coincidence” which points to the dangers that homosexuals still face in Britain. 77 full assimilation into British life. On the one hand, as with other anti-heritage films such as

Brassed Off, Trainspotting and Twin Town, this self-consciously rearticulates new conceptions of nation in an age of multiculturalism, devolution, and the ever-widening north-south divide, incorporating those identities which are often excluded from hegemonic notions of Britishness that the heritage film and its equivalents excel at representing (Luckett 91-4).41 On the other hand, though, race and racism, as with homophobia, are largely screened out in the film’s desire to represent social disenfranchisement solely in terms of economic class and gender. The film thus suggests that bi-racial male bonding is only possible if race remains unspoken. Some measure of this erasure is the fact that the film was based on an original script by Paul Buckner featuring a group of all black men from Coventry, through which Buckner wished to explore the changing nature of black British masculinity and sexuality (Baker 14; Domaille 10). Producer

Umberto Pasolini at Twentieth Century Fox replaced the story with a more box-office friendly story about white men, with the introduction of Horse’s family functioning as a token concession

(Baker 14). In other words, while the film suggests that regional differences are more important than racial differences, the idea of black men representing British regional masculinity was apparently unthinkable. Even as the film suggests that gender and class remain the dominant dividers of British social reality, this market-led decision shows the hegemonic power that inheres in whiteness, even if that power is unevenly distributed along the lines of class, gender and sexuality.

The Full Monty demonstrates that the American model of white masculinity cannot simply be mapped onto a British terrain. As well as having a different racial history, a point I discuss in more detail in chapter six, Britain’s rigid class system, combined with a labour

41 A prime example is Notting Hill, which was overwhelmingly white and middle-class despite being set in a part of London famed for its Afro-Caribbean community. The Full Monty’s desire for a more inclusive Britain also mirrored Tony Blair’s attempt on reelection in 1997 to christen Britain as “Cool Britannia” - a more youthful, inventive, multicultural nation - though this “re-branding” was an attempt not so much to promote social justice, but to attract investors to Britain who may have been put off by its dowdy image and industrial and imperial decline. See Ware, “Ghosts” 207-08; Luckett 89 and Klein 70. 78 movement that, while weakened under Conservative and New Labour governments, continues to make its presence felt, has resulted in cinematic representations of working-class male collectivism, though often articulated in a deeply nostalgic mode (Brassed Off, Billy Elliot, Full

Monty). It is The Full Monty’s overt discourse on economic class and deindustrialisation which prevents the film from lapsing into backlash discourses that blame women or people of colour for the ground white men have lost. Indeed, the opening sequence makes it clear where the responsibility lies: a promotional video of Sheffield, taken in the 60s boom and infused with regional pride, is undercut by a shot of the abandoned, gutted steel works which Gary is looting, a space which is emptied out rather than being populated with female or immigrant labour. While class is posited as the overriding difference between men in Britain, often at the expense of other identity categories, in the United States, on the other hand, class, which is most often represented indirectly through visual signifiers but rarely overtly articulated, is often eclipsed by racial discourse. The dominance of identity politics in the US, which has made notable inroads for women, people of colour, lesbians and gay men, as well as other minority groups, who were often responding to the failure of the left to embrace the politics of difference,42 has also resulted in white men of the middle- and working-classes, many of whom have only relatively recently suffered the devastating effects of job losses, bereft of a discourse with which to articulate their often very real disenfranchisement. The danger, already witnessed both on and off screen, is that

American white men direct their anger at feminism, multiculturalism, affirmative action and political correctness, and, to paraphrase Annalee Newitz and Martin Wray, by painting themselves as the victims of victims, they can believe that they have the richest and most marginalised identities around (174).

42 As Eagleton notes, “[t]he complicities between classical left-wing thought, and some of the dominant categories it opposes, have been embarrassingly laid bare” by postmodernism (Illusions 24). 79

CHAPTER TWO

Literalising the Wound: White Heterosexual Masculinity, Masochism and

Popular Cinema

2.1. Wounded White Men

In a lurid image of male masochism, one which plays into Christian iconography, most obviously the figure of St. Sebastian, Robert Bly elaborates on the problem of the “soft man,” who enjoys being tortured and persecuted by a castrating woman: “If his wife or girlfriend, furious, shouts that he is ‘chauvinistic,’ a ‘sexist,’ a ‘man,’ he doesn’t fight back, but just takes it.

He opens his shirt so that she can see more clearly where to put the lances. He ends with three or four javelins sticking out of his body, and blood running all over the floor. […] To be attacked by someone you love - what could be more wonderful?” (63). Deploying not only the logic of masochism but also hysteria, this highly visceral image corporealises the wounds inflicted on the male psyche at the hands of women, though wounds are also inflicted by absent, severe or emotionally distant fathers in Bly’s account.

The wound motif, a popular version of symbolic castration, is crucial to much 1990s mythopoetic men’s movement literature, in particular Bly’s seminal Iron John: A Book about

Men (1990). Wounds, by their very nature, penetrate the bodily boundaries, collapsing the distinction between inner and outer, private and public; in fact, tellingly, the Greek word for wound, τραύµα (trauma), encompasses both a psychic and somatic meaning, as its assimilation into psychoanalytic discourse reveals, and Robert Bly frequently collapses the two. Bly argues that there is a lack of male ritual in northern America, unlike Native American, African and

Eskimo cultures, where initiation ceremonies install a break from the mother’s world and influence (89), and lead the boy “far beyond his personal father and into the moistness of the swampy fathers who stretch back century after century” (16). Deprived of these rituals, many 80 young men in industrialised nations attempt to take the “grandiose road” and rise above their wounds, losing their humanity in the process, while others take the “depressed road,” becoming childlike victims who are in closer contact with their wounds but are no more human either (33-

34); however, initiation rituals in the presence of a “mentor” would offer a third path, allowing young men to acknowledge the scars delivered to the emotional body, most often by remote, harsh or absent fathers, and regard the wound as a “gift” which will enable them to unblock their repressed feelings (36). Wounds are thus therapeutic and empowering: “where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place from which we will give our major gift to the community” (42). In short, just as the threat of castration, which establishes the limits of paternal law within which the male subject must operate, also presupposes potential possession of the phallus, wounds, in Bly’s account, allow the articulation of a once unified, primal masculinity.1

Vietnam forms a crucial background to Bly’s discussion of emotional scarring and paternal betrayal. For instance, he asserts that “being lied to by older men amounts to a broken leg. When the young men arrived in Vietnam and found they had been lied to, they received immeasurably deep wounds” (32). Coinciding with feminism, the civil rights movement, the rise of the US counter-culture and its mistrust of authority and older generations, Vietnam became the key topos in which the “white male as victim” drama was played out. The war comprised a national trauma, not only because it was a war that America failed to win, but also because, on the domestic terrain, the myth of American unity was shattered. Intimately tied as they are, the crisis in nation was articulated as a crisis in masculinity, causing, in turn, a historical trauma

1 Indeed, as we have seen, in Bly’s rendition of “Iron John,” the young prince wounds his finger before he can release the “wild man” from captivity.

81 where large numbers of men were brought “into such an intimate relation with lack that [they were temporarily] unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus” (Silverman, Male

Subjectivity 55).2 The veterans, whether they were injured physically or psychologically, thus allegorised the ailing national body. However, concerns other than male hysteria and national trauma are played out through the Vietnam narrative. Intrinsic to the mythos of Vietnam is the notion that the most difficult wounds to bear were not physical, but those inflicted by the anti- war protesters and feminists (who, myth has it, spat on returning veterans), as well as the lies told by the government and the older generation, particularly fathers, suggesting that discourses of the beleaguered veteran also transcoded concerns about the erosion of traditional white male privilege and paternal authority.

As Lynda Boose has argued, Vietnam installed a traumatic break between fathers and sons: many sons were banished from their fathers’ houses and those who went off to fight felt bitterly betrayed because they never received the hero’s welcome they were promised (602). It is therefore not surprising that in retrospective cinematic representations, Vietnam is often staged as a domestic Oedipal tragedy; indeed, even anti-war films such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon

(1986) or Born on the Fourth of July (1989) spare little screen space for the suffering endured by the Vietnamese, preferring to represent the war as signifying the moment when the father was lost and the son betrayed (Boose 602). Often this is played out through representatives of patriarchal authority rather than biological fathers in films such as Rambo: First Blood Part II

(1985) or Platoon, where the protagonist is caught between competing good and bad figures of paternal identifications. Moreover, as Boose argues, even when the benevolent father is inserted into the fantasy, such as Rambo III (1988) and Born on the Fourth of July, his domestication and feminisation signal an eroded paternal authority (605). Importantly for the arguments of this chapter, even though many retrospective Vietnam films, as Susan Jeffords has influentially

2 Silverman is writing of The Second World War here, but her account holds equally for Vietnam. 82 argued in The Remasculinisation of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (1989), screen a trajectory from victimisation to the rebirth of a reinvigorated masculinity and, by extension, nation (134),3 it is important to add that it is precisely by means of their warriors’ victim status that such remasculinisation is achieved. This dynamic of remasculinisation through victimisation is visually imprinted on the sadomasochistic bodies of the “lone warrior,” a figure that James

William Gibson argues is common to post-Vietnam popular culture (the men’s movement included) (12). These bodies are subject to endless mutilations but prove their virility in the process, a point I develop in my discussion of Fight Club.

The fact that many of these retrospective Vietnam films were released in the late 80s, at a time when the (limited) successes of feminism, the civil rights movement, and gay rights activism were becoming apparent, suggests that Vietnam forms a site through which concerns over the status of white heterosexual masculinity as the universal, dominant subjectivity are played out. As Sally Robinson has asked in her insightful study Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (2000), “[w]hy is it that when dominant masculinity becomes visible, it becomes visible as wounded?” (12). The answer, she suggests, is two-fold:

On the one hand, the substitution of an individually suffering white male body for a

social class or gender and racial identity under attack betrays a desire to materialise,

literalise the wounds to white male privilege that come from puncturing the aura of

“universality” and “unmarkedness” historically claimed by whiteness and

masculinity. On the other hand, individualising a more properly social wound is a

way to evade, forget, deny the very marking that has produced those wounds in the

first place. In other words, narratives about wounded white men spring from, but

obscure, the marking of white masculinity as a category. (8-9)

3 In Rambo, Rambo even asks, “Do we get to win this time?” The answer, of course, is yes. Sylvester Stallone himself viewed America as a feminised body, stating of the war, “[i]t was like a bad marriage and America was the battered wife who didn’t know how to get out, didn’t know how to leave with dignity” (qtd. in Faludi, Stiffed 395). 83

“Making a virtue out of necessity,” white men have begun to access the conventions of identity politics (20). However, their wounded status can only come from the prior assumption that the position of universality was theirs for the taking in the first place.

For Robert Hughes, the “white male bawling for victim status” (6) is symptomatic of an

America which manufactures victims “whose one common feature is that they have been denied parity with that Blond Beast of the sentimental imagination, the heterosexual, middle-class white male” (19). In his desire to reinstate the politics of class struggle, Hughes refuses to recognise the advantages that inhere in white heterosexual masculinity, even if those advantages vary according to economic class; moreover, his lacerating attack on political correctness and multiculturalism, which he views as energy-wasting battles over territory, is indicative of the failure of some branches of the traditional left to recognise the need for a politics of difference, a need which identity politics filled. More measured responses can be found from left cultural theorists such as Annalee Newitz and Mathew Wray, who recognise the power and possibilities afforded to minorities by identity politics, even as they express concern that American politics lacks a substantial vocabulary of class and that, rather than focusing on creating strong communities capable of generating social change, “far too often, admission into the multicultural order depends upon one’s ability to claim social victimisation” (Introduction 5). Wendy Brown has also theorised how politicised identity “enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by retrenching, restating, dramatising, and reinscribing its pain in politics, and can hold out no future - for itself or others - which triumphs over this pain” (220). Her fear that the wound can be fetishised as evidence of identity is echoed by Laura Berlant, who worries that “a logic of fantasy” (48) confuses the recognition of suffering with the amelioration of that suffering in the political field (62).4 The fact that the dominant identity now wishes to decentre itself obviously

4 However, Berlant points out that this rhetoric has a longer history than Brown suggests, going back to the “sentimental” political tradition of the first wave feminist, labour and abolitionist movements (44).

84 attests to the political successes of the investment in minoritised status. While in the previous chapter I explored the white straight male appropriation of the rhetoric of identity politics, expressed through discourses of “losing ground,” in this chapter I am interested in the trend of white male protagonists being marked as literally wounded, producing a cycle of “disability films” (Sartelle 252) such as Rain Man (1988), Scent of a Woman (1992), Regarding Henry

(1991), The Man Without a Face (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994). What is disturbing about these films is that those minorities whose oppression has enabled moneyed white heterosexual masculinity to function as the universal and dominant subjectivity, are further marginalised, enabling the protagonists to claim minoritised status without renouncing white patriarchal power.

2.2. Regarding Henry: The Damaged White Male and the Child Within

Regarding Henry (1991) opens as brutal corporate lawyer Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) - whose name alone suggests a narrative of transformation - triumphs in his case defending a hospital against negligence charges, a case he won by suppressing vital evidence. As with films such as Wall Street (1987), Pretty Woman (1990) and The Firm (1993), Regarding Henry deploys an image of a sterile, materialistic, morally bankrupt but ultimately redeemable middle- class white heterosexual masculinity in order to critique the evils of capitalism, though these films simultaneously suggest that capitalism need not be overthrown but can simply be done differently by a transformed white male who does not have to give up privilege but merely rediscover his lost humanity. Henry’s wife, Sarah, played by Annette Benning, is largely excluded from this story of transformation, much like Benning’s neurotic character in the darker satire American Beauty (1999), which lacks Regarding Henry’s feel-good, sentimental mode, but charts a similar trajectory of white male redemption.

Henry’s transformation begins when he inadvertently walks in on a robbery in his local shop. In what must be one of the shortest hold-up scenes in cinematic history, after demanding 85

Henry’s wallet, the Latino robber immediately shoots before making his escape.5 Henry falls into a coma and is left brain-damaged, suffering from almost total memory loss. While Henry begins the film illustrating Bly’s example of men who have taken the “grandiose road,” he is cruelly pushed onto the “depressed route,” where he is brought closer to his wounds and his emotions but is barred from adult manhood.

As Fred Pfeil has pointed out, though, help is at hand in the form of “the healing power of

Blackness” (White Guys 40). When Sarah leaves a comatose Henry after one of her visits, a tracking shot picks up the movements of the black female nurse that Sarah greets, following her path to Henry’s bed (40). In a behind-the-shoulder shot, the nurse leans towards Henry, blocking him from view, her white uniform emphasising the blackness of her neck and hair (40). As she moves screen right, Henry is again revealed, this time miraculously awakened from his coma

(40). While the blackness of the nurse might seem contingent, the “black healing” motif appears again in the form of Bradley (40), Henry’s physiotherapist, played by Bill Nunn, who has stated that he was attracted to his character because he is “a regular saint” (qtd. in Homan 26). Indeed,

Bradley is one of 90s Hollywood’s newest stereotypes of African-Americans - the magical black helper, who devotes his/her life to helping white people. This representational trend may even make this character an actual angel (A Life Less Than Ordinary, The Family Man, Dogma) or even God himself (Bedazzled, Bruce Almighty) (Gabbard 143-76). As Krin Gabbard argues, this places African-Americans outside of white-dominated power structures, thereby rendering those hierarchical structures invisible in the very act of reproducing them, and although these black angels appeal to desires for racial harmony, the only solution to racial conflict deemed possible is fantasy (144). Not all black helpers are angels, though they are often armed with certain magical powers, reproducing the stereotypical notion that African-Americans are guardians of a lost

5 No context is given for the robber’s decision to shoot (he runs away without taking Henry’s wallet), rendering it another example of the senseless, unpredictable violence of poor people of colour in popular representations.

86 spirituality that white folks can no longer access, powers they use to help white people and not themselves, as we see in Ghost (1990), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000) and The Green Mile

(1999).6 Even if these black helpers lack spiritual powers, it has become a common motif for

African-Americans to tell the white male who he is, as Thomas DiPiero notes, citing Grand

Canyon (1991) and White Men Can’t Jump (1992) as examples (“White Men Aren’t” 126). In

Regarding Henry, Bradley fulfils a therapeutic function, as well as helping Henry discover his

“true self” (that is, a faithful, sensitive family man). Although Bradley is largely presented in a positive light, the film thus illustrates that positive images can be “as pernicious as overtly degrading ones” (Stam and Spence 3), assuaging white guilt (Appiah 83) whilst keeping racial hierarchies intact. Bradley's role is solely to heal white male wounds, wounds that allow white heterosexual masculinity to annex the minoritised status historically associated with African-

Americans, cancelling out its racial debt in the process.

From the moment that the ebullient and gregarious Bradley sings and dances his way into

Henry’s hospital room, Henry’s eyes express their first interest in the world around him, although, as with all buddy movies, which are dogged by the paradoxical demands of screening male intimacy whilst displacing homosexual anxiety (Fuchs, “Buddy Politic” 194-5), the film insists on Bradley’s heterosexuality with anxious overdetermination: whilst performing physiotherapy on Henry, an exercise that requires physical proximity (further enhanced by the use of tight framing), Bradley immediately declares, “This isn’t because I like you.” Moreover, throughout their meetings, Bradley engages in (hetero)sexist banter to a yet unresponsive, child- like Henry about nurses in the hospital. Reversing the dynamics of 80s bi-racial buddy movies, such as Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988), in which the incompetent black cop is remasculinised through his contact with the rampaging white male hero (Pfeil, White Guys 13),

6 In The Green Mile, Michael Clarke Duncan’s gentle black giant is falsely accused of raping and murdering two young white girls, but despite being subject to vicious racism, he decides to use his magical powers to heal white people. He even expresses pleasure that Tom Hanks’s prison guard would be performing his execution, outraging Spike Lee, who labelled the film an example of “that old grateful slave shit” (qtd. in Crowdus and Georgakas 5). 87

Henry learns how to become a man again through his contact with a hypersexualised black male, the polar opposite of the feminised, subservient African-American in the binary opposition that structures racial stereotyping. Indeed, Bradley heals Henry single-handedly, not only teaching him to walk again, but also taking over where Henry’s white female speech therapist had failed: teaching Henry to speak by using his own good old-fashioned home remedy - adding Tabasco sauce to Henry’s scrambled eggs.

It is also Bradley who lectures Henry on self-knowledge once Henry finds himself unable to re-enter the vicious world of corporate law. With Henry preferring the company of a black waiter to his former WASP friends (“I don’t like who I was. I don’t fit in”), his depression leads

Sarah, who is seemingly unable to help her husband herself, to invite Bradley into their luxury home to dispense valuable avuncular advice: “Don’t listen to nobody trying to tell you who you are.” In this moment of intimacy, shot in the kitchen (traditionally the site of the feminine, further highlighting Sarah’s marginalisation), Bradley relates the story of his own wounds - the knee injury which shattered his hopes of a football career. But, he states, this injury led him to a fulfilling career, allowing him to meet and help people like Henry (!). In this exchange, fetishised wounds become evidence of identity and self-knowledge, forming the site across which bi-racial male bonding, in the absence of women, becomes possible. Bradley thus fulfils the role of the mentor who helps Henry find Bly’s “third way” of acknowledging his wounds and rediscovering his humanity. The fact that this would only seem to be possible through contact with blackness certainly constitutes a critique of the vacuity of whiteness but also reproduces the stereotypical association of black masculinity with authenticity (see chapter six). Moreover, the film’s focus on Henry as its victim, along with the literalisation and concomitant depoliticisation of Bradley’s wounds, erases the power differential between the two men, even as Bradley comments on

Henry’s ability to buy “pretty expensive beer.” Richard L. Homan thus considers Regarding

Henry to be one of the key examples of the “everyman movies” that were released in 1991, films 88 which follow the thematic concerns and plot trajectory of the medieval morality play Everyman: a yuppie protagonist’s brush with mortality forces a reconsideration of personal values, while his contact with a character, often African-American, who is lower in social class, brings about his salvation (21).7 This enables the protagonist to “rest assured that [these subaltern characters] do not at all begrudge him the privileges from which they are excluded, and he need not feel guilty of those privileges” (25). Indeed, Bradley willingly gives up his free time to help a rich WASP male (26), allowing the Latino robber to function as pure exception whilst reinforcing stereotypes nonetheless. As Homan concludes, “the modern versions of Everyman offer their protagonists the appealing prospect of redemption without sacrifice” (25).8

Once Henry is redeemed, however, Fred Pfeil is right to note that the film has difficulty resolving how “the born-again, sensitised White Guy can keep the wisdom of his new-found or reborn childishness without dropping the reins of his power” (White Guys 42). Henry finds his

“inner-child,” as the men’s movement literature puts it, and in the process has transformed into a

“New Man” - literally, since his amnesia enables the film to insert a total break with his former self (see figure 2.1). Yet, at the same time, his childlike naivety, awkwardness and hesitancy put his masculinity at risk. The solution to this problem, though, is found in his role as father. Before being shot, Henry had treated his daughter Rachel (Mikki Allen) harshly.9 After Henry returns home from the rehabilitation centre, however, Rachel takes over the nurturing role from Bradley

(further placing Sarah on the periphery) in an overtly coded role reversal, teaching him to read and tie his shoelaces. When Rachel announces that she will be going away to a boarding school,

Henry hesitantly states, “I don’t want you to go anywhere,” adding, “but I am not sure it’s up to

7 Other films which Homan puts in this category include Ghost (1990), Switch (1991), The Fisher King (1991), The Doctor (1991) and Grand Canyon (1991). 8 Fred Pfeil also recognises that 1991 produced a body of “sensitive guy” films, all sharing a transformation motif, including Regarding Henry, City Slickers, The Doctor, The Fisher King and Hook, dubbing 1991 “The Year of Living Sensitively” (White Guys 37). 9 The film also suggests that this is how he was treated by his own father, who is called upon to contextualise Henry’s lack of scruples: after his success in court, Henry’s boss states, “Like father, like son,” to which Henry replies, “The old bastard would have loved this one.” 89 me.” He then yields to Sarah who insists on the decision she and Henry had taken before the shooting; we, like Henry, though, know better, as the film stridently declares that it is “a dangerous, destabilising idea for a woman to hold that kind of decision-making power” (Pfeil,

White Guys 42). Having been given his pep talk by Bradley on being his own man, however,

Henry rediscovers his patriarchal clout and convinces Sarah that they should become a proper family. Barging in on a school assembly, and embarking on his final battle with female authority,

Henry informs the officious headmistress, “I missed her first eleven years. . . and, I don’t want to miss any more.” As Pfeil notes, this exchange films Henry with a high camera angle that normally conveys the subject’s vulnerability, but the headmistress is soon put in her place by

Henry’s impassioned speech (White Guys 44), though I would add that this camera angle mirrors the power inherent in the victim function that the film elaborates throughout. The film ends with a long shot of the family leaving the school building and entering its beautiful grounds, isolated from any social context, allowing steadfast focus on the private terrain of the bourgeois nuclear family, with the wife having learnt to listen to her child and husband, and Henry and Sarah (both of whom had had affairs) having been taught the importance of the monogamous heterosexual bond (see figure 2.2).

Trying to imagine the common sense pleasures through which such a film can be enjoyed by liberal and essentialist feminists, Pfeil suggests that the film reinscribes the notion that white men are inherently evil: “if white straight men cannot be changed short of shooting them, there is not much use pressing them to do so; nor, since their terrible behaviour comes so naturally to them it might as well be rooted in the blood, is there much risk of turning into one of them if you happen to be a woman” (White Guys 61). While I find Pfeil's frequent imaginary dialogues with fantasmatic man-hating, essentialist feminists an irritating interruption to an otherwise insightful study, his point about the difficulties of imagining a redeemed white masculinity stands. As a middle-class straight white man, Henry represented the values of a sterile, shallow and selfish 90 capitalist culture, and the fact that he could only be exempt from both evil white guy status and the implied inner-emptiness of white masculinity by being damaged reveals the power and innocence inherent in the victim function in the American political imaginary. However, at the same time, the film’s own strategies of recuperation mean that as wounded white male Henry can appropriate the suffering of others, most obviously African-American males, a process that shares the same racial psychodynamics as Nick’s fantasmatic self-blackening in Falling Down

(1993). Indeed, as well as being both a patriarch and an innocent child, he is also a minority and an everyman figure - a flaying of binary oppositions that is a privilege only moneyed white heterosexual men, who lay claim to the universal subjectivity, can access.

2.3. Forrest Gump: Wounded Intellect and White Male Redemption

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis 1994), loosely based on Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, bagged a total of six Academy Awards and grossed nearly $680 million worldwide. Told almost exclusively through the point of view of a white heterosexual male with an IQ of 75, the film traverses three decades of American history, which act as backdrop to the structuring heterosexual romance. The film was embraced by the American mainstream for its anti-racism and good old-fashioned family values, and was heralded by Republican House Speaker Newt

Gringrich for showing that “the counter-culture destroys human beings and conservative values”

(qtd. in Boyle). Numerous critics, however, have lambasted the film for its reconstruction of an innocent white heterosexual masculinity, its rewriting of American history, and its insidious racial and sexual politics.10 Krin Gabbard, for instance, considers the film to be “surely the most important Angry White Male film ever made” (122-23). One of the most remarkable feats of the film is that despite Forrest’s goofiness and dull-wittedness, he was immediately seized upon as an everyman figure by the popular media. Obviously this is possible only because he embodied

10 See Boyle; Byers; Gabbard 122-123; Pfeil, White Guys 251-61; Wiegman, “My Name Is Forrest Gump.” 91 the universal subjectivity, but it is further enhanced by Tom Hanks’s star persona as “the extraordinary ordinary man” (Corliss qtd. in Savran 298).11 As Fred Pfeil notes, it is his characters’ “exclusive concern with private life and personal relations that constellates Hanks’s normative identity as an innocent, nice, American white man” (“Getting Up There” 137).

The film is structured around a series of flashbacks that unfold as Forrest waits for a bus to take him to his life-long love, Jenny (Robyn Wright), striking up conversations, or rather monologues, with whomever sits beside him. His first interlocutee is a female African-American nurse (see figure 2.3). As he comments on how comfortable her shoes look, ignoring her bleakly delivered response that her feet hurt, Forrest embarks on a discussion of his own pain, launching the film into its first flashback, which features Forrest’s “magic shoes,” the leg braces he had to wear as a child to correct his crooked spine. Before his story of victimhood fully unravels, however, he states that he was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, “a civil war hero,” who led the Ku Klux Klan, which Forrest considers to be a bunch of men who dressed up in robes and sheets, acting like “ghosts or spooks or something.” In one of the film’s many digital manipulations of original footage, inserting Tom Hanks into the undeniably racist The Birth of a

Nation (1915), the horror of white supremacy is rendered comic through Forrest’s limited intellectual capacities. Moreover, as Robyn Wiegman notes, the displacement of his forefather’s surname to Forrest’s first name, a name that his mother (Sally Field) gave him as a reminder that

“sometimes we all do things that just don’t make no sense,” installs a separation with the past, so that white power and privilege are distanced from any historical, ideological and political relations to white skin (“My Name Is Forrest Gump” 236). The context of this conversation with an African-American woman, therefore, is highly racialised, though Forrest’s childlike innocence and instinctive anti-racism, despite growing up in Alabama in the 1950s, neutralises

11 In most films, Hanks plays an old-fashioned, sensitive, everyday kind of guy, and even his role as a homosexual AIDS victim in Philadelphia (1993), his first non-comic role, was sufficiently assimilated into middle-class values (he is a lawyer in a long-term relationship) to be sympathetic to mainstream audiences. 92

America’s racist past. Significantly, however, the black nurse is also the only person who fails to be captivated by Forrest’s stories. Her presence would thus seem necessary to both evoke and disavow the power of race in the film’s reconstruction of American history.

Far from focusing on racial oppression, the film’s central discourse on prejudice and social equality is offered by Forrest’s mother: “my boy Forrest is going to get the same opportunities as everybody else.” Forrest is refused a seat on the bus on his first journey to school by all class-mates but Jenny in a scene that borrows scenarios from the south’s Jim Crow segregation policy. Unlike the indelibility of black skin, however, or the ongoing difficulties faced by the disabled, Forrest miraculously overcomes his social disenfranchisement when, chased by bullies, he breaks free from the shackles of his leg braces, becoming such an exceptionally fast runner that he wins a football scholarship to college (see figures 2.4 and 2.5).

This trajectory from disability to ultra-mobility is further underscored when, as an adult, after being deserted by Jenny, Forrest spontaneously begins a three-year coast-to-coast run across

America, inadvertently uniting the nation behind him. When asked the political cause for which he was running, Forrest’s reply is simply that “I just felt like running,” reflecting the film’s consistent privileging of the personal realm. This section of the film allows Zemeckis's choice of a wide screen format to be put to great effect, presenting spectacular shots of American landscapes which divorce Forrest from any social context. The exchange of leg braces for Nike running shoes not only celebrates the individual's identification with the commodity in scenes whose thematic logic is to invigorate the national Symbolic (Wiegman, “My Name Is Forrest

Gump” 238),12 but also completes his triumphant transcendence over his wounds.13 The film thus chimes in with his mother’s belief that “you have to make your own destiny,” mirroring the

American Dream ethos of hard graft and self-help, with hindrances such as institutionalised

12 As Weigman notes, this skilful example of product placement was no doubt designed to repair Nike’s reputation after the revelation of their bad labour practices in South-East Asia (“My Name Is Forrest Gump” 238). 13 David Savran has also read Forrest’s three-year run as his masochistic purging of the sins of the flesh since it immediately follows his sexual encounter with Jenny (307). 93 discrimination falling by the wayside to allow for an individualistic narrative of success despite the odds.

So central is the film’s need to literalise white male injury and then narrativise its self- healing that it represents it a second time through the figure of Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise), who loses both legs in Vietnam (see figure 2.6).14 Throughout the Vietnam sequence, the enemy remains off-screen, a self-conscious decision by Zemeckis to suture the viewer relentlessly to

Forrest’s point of view (“Audio Commentary With Director Robert Zemeckis”), a decision which also allows American soldiers to function solely as victims rather than aggressors since the suffering caused by their bullets is never screened. Furious at Forrest for rescuing him and denying him his patrilineal “destiny” of dying in action, Lieutenant Dan soon transmutes into a self-pitying alcoholic amputee, the butt of taunts by emasculating female prostitutes. According to Zemeckis, Dan is “a metaphor for the crippled part of America,” and his line “this wasn’t supposed to happen” was intended to reflect the feelings of an entire generation; nonetheless, he claims, Dan has to accept the fate he has been given and “come out the other side” in an important journey of “spiritual transformation” (“Audio Commentary”). Forrest, whose damaged intellect renders him too innocent to require such redemption, thus fulfils the role of Bly’s mentor, steering Dan from the “depressed road” to an acknowledgment of his wounds and his humanity. As metaphor for the wounded national body, the fact that Dan turns up at Forrest’s wedding walking with the aid of artificial limbs performs important ideological work. Moreover, as Peter N Chumo II notes, Dan’s “magic legs” are made of the same titanium alloy that is used on the space shuttle, which “conflates the restoration of Dan’s body with America’s future in new frontiers” (“You’ve Got to Put” 7). Dan is also accompanied by his Asian fiancée in an overdetermined gesture of national reconciliation, where America’s redemption is allegorised

14 Gump enlists despite his inability to comprehend what he is fighting for. While this could offer a critique of the military, Forrest inadvertently becomes a war hero. It also allows opportunities for humour, such as when a dying Bubba asks him, “why’d this happen?” - to which Forrest, taking his comment literally, replies, “you got shot.” 94 through a heterosexual romance in which America is cast as both reunified and remasculinsed, while Vietnam retains its feminise assignation.

Unlike Forrest and Dan, however, Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), Forrest’s African-

American buddy, does not overcome his wounds (see figure 2.7). The film’s narrative of bi- racial bonding begins when Bubba is the only character to allow Forrest to sit next to him on the bus, which this time, unlike Forrest’s first school journey, is populated by many African-

Americans, who were less likely to escape the draft than white middle-class college students.

Bubba is equally as dim-witted as Forrest, enhanced by Mykelti Williamson’s decision to play his character with a childlike protruding lower lip (“Audio Commentary”). He dies when his function of proving Forrest’s anti-racism and benevolence to the black community has been secured, and he is soon replaced by lieutenant Dan, the film’s iconic “white male as victim.”15

The marginalisation of African-American oppression is shored up through the film’s representation of American history, filtered through Forrest’s uncomprehending perspective. As with the treatment of the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace’s famous attempt to prevent the desegregation of Alabama University is rendered comic when Forrest thinks that the racist reference to “coons” means “racoons,” and when he inadvertently becomes an agent of racial reconciliation when he picks up a book dropped by an African-American female student in one of the many digitally manipulated sequences that “sidestep and evacuate the very concepts of history and politics alike” (Pfeil, White Guy 252). Moreover, as Thomas Byers notes, while the film refers to the assassinations of George Wallace, Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John

Lennon and the botched attempt on Ronald Reagan, the assassinations of black political leaders

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are written out of the film, an act, he suggests, that can only

15 Forrest, with Dan’s help, sets up the shrimping business he and Bubba had planned to run together. After a dismal start, Forrest prays to God in a black church, which miraculously produces a storm which wipes out all the other shrimping boats, making Forrest and Dan instant millionaires. The suffering that this might have caused the largely African-American community is ignored, though it produces another opportunity to prove Forrest’s magnanimous generosity when he builds a new church for the all-black congregation and gives Bubba’s share to his family.

95 be explained by the film’s desire to attribute victim status exclusively to white men (428). This marginalisation of African-American racial injury is also cinematically and spatially inscribed in the scene when Forrest is aggressively harangued by a Black Panther on the evils of African-

Americans being sent to war by a country that hates them. As the Black Panther launches into his verbal assault, the camera pans around Forrest, pushing his adversary into the extreme periphery of screen right until he is totally masked by a quarter shot of Forrest, leaving most of the screen free to focus on a scene between Jenny and her boyfriend. A cut to Forrest’s concerned expression is matched by a reverse shot showing Jenny’s boyfriend slapping her across the face.

As Forrest rushes to defend her, the Black Panther’s diatribe is drowned out by the frenzied soundtrack of “Hey Joe” performed by The Jimmy Hendrix Experience (despite its “whitening” of American history, the film is content to include plenty of black-authored tracks that were embraced by the white Baby Boomer generation). As well as dispensing with black rage, the film also implies that good blacks (Bubba) are ones who quietly die for America and bad ones (Black

Panthers) are those who refuse to do so, an opposition that “is coded as criminality” (Byers 431).

John Groch has also suggested of this scene that Forrest is the perfect embodiment of the “angry white male” since the black militant’s proximity to violence suggests that a strategy of displacement is in play, with Forrest also fantasmatically beating up the black militant (qtd. in

Gabbard 123). In these scenes, all collective political struggle is negatively portrayed. The Black

Panther is hyperaggressive and the anti-war boyfriend abuses Jenny, who requires protection from Forrest, the military hero. Moreover, for all her dabbling in the counter-culture (see figure

2.8), Jenny never discovers feminism. Indeed, as Byers notes, the fact that Forrest is naturally caring and sensitive reduces patriarchal oppression to a matter of character, erasing the feminist rhetoric of the period, which demanded that (white) men change (431).

Jenny’s story is only of interest in so far as it affirms Forrest’s goodness and contributes to his pain. Even her disturbingly punitive and perfunctory death from an unnamed virus, 96 presumably AIDS, a disease that the film cannot bring itself to name (Pfeil, White Guys 253), is screened only as it impacts on Forrest (Byers 434). (The film takes it for granted that Forrest’s innocence safeguards him against infection.) Jenny’s death immediately after their marriage solves the question of how a mature, intelligent woman could bear to live with an “emotionally and intellectually stunted, asexual idiot” (Pfeil, White Guys 257), but not before her narrative function of reuniting the bourgeois nuclear family, however fleetingly, has been achieved.

Lynda Boose argues that the traumatic father-son rift has produced a body of post-

Vietnam Oedipal narratives “stamped with the intensity of a generation stuck in its own boyhood and now playing out […] an unconscious cultural myth that attempts to recover the father” (602).

This would certainly seem to be the case with Forrest Gump, which, like Regarding Henry, uses the trope of fatherhood in order to propel its innocent, childlike protagonist into adulthood.

Forrest as father thus absolves the guilt of the bad fathers of the previous generation - including his own, who abandoned him, and Jenny’s, who sexually abused her. As luck would have it,

Forrest Gump Junior, one of the brightest children in his class, was conceived on the fourth of

July, offering hope not only for a reinvigorated white masculinity but also nation.

As Byers argues, “the attributes of otherness (Blackness, femininity) are assimilated to

Forrest himself, while the subject of the real position of such otherness (Bubba, Jenny) must die”

(422). Much like Regarding Henry, then, the embodiment of minoritised status distances moneyed white heterosexual masculinity from the position of oppressor, though safely within a narrative of transcendence. Indeed, Forrest becomes war hero, sports champion, millionaire, benefactor, racial conciliator, protector of battered women and ideal father not despite his wounds but because of them.

2.4. Paternal Melodramas

Both Regarding Henry and Forrest Gump should be seen as part of a trend of 97 representing straight white masculinity as paternity, evident in men’s movement literature, New

Man advertising images, and manifesting itself in popular cinema most visibly in comedies

(Three Men and a Baby, Father of the Bride, Mrs Doutbfire, Cheaper by the Dozen), but also feeding into action movies (Commando, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Ransom, Collateral

Damage, The Day After), male melodramas (Kramer versus Kramer, The Man Without a Face, I am Sam, Field of Dreams, Father’s Day, Road to Perdition) and even animations (Finding

Nemo, The Incredibles).16 On the surface, these films might seem to respond to feminist calls for greater male participation in child-rearing, which, according to object relations psychoanalyst

Nancy Chodorow, in her seminal The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), would produce more nurturing male subjects who experience less need to differentiate themselves from their mothers.

However, feminist critics such as Tania Modleski have expressed concern that these films demonstrate how it is possible for men to respond to feminist demands “in such a way as to make the women more marginal than ever” (88). Modleski ends her analysis of Three Men and a Baby

(1987) with an ominous warning that “daughters are being seduced away from feminism and into a world where they may become so ‘dazzled’ by the proliferating varieties of paternity that they are unable to see whose interests are really being served” (89).17 While Modleski is rightly concerned by the appropriation and marginalisation of the feminine in these films,18 it is equally important to investigate what anxieties might be screened (in both senses of the word) by

Hollywood’s current fascination with fatherhood. For instance, the fact that it has now become a cliché of the action genre that the hero is a dedicated father, often forced to rescue his own child,

16 Masculinity as paternity is also evident in films featuring African-Americans, such as John Q (2002) or Boyz ‘N the Hood (1991), a film which, as Michelle Wallace argues, suggests that black boys with fathers succeed and those without fail (125). 17 Here, Modleski is taking issue with Kristeva for “wax[ing] lyrical” (86) about the need for an Imaginary father - “a warm but dazzling, domesticated paternity” (Kristeva, Tales of Love 46). Kristeva argues that “[t]here has been too much stress on the crisis in paternity as a cause of psychotic discontent. Beyond the often fierce but artificial and incredible tyranny of the Law and the Superego, the crisis in the paternal function that led to a deficiency of psychic space is in fact an erosion of the loving father” (378). 18 Elizabeth G. Traube, for example, discusses Parenthood (1989) in a similar way, noting that Gil (Steve Martin) is able to get in touch with his feminine side but this does not extend to domestic tasks or the professional realm (154).

98 suggests that paternity offers a means of negotiating white heterosexual masculinity at a time when, as Barbara Creed observes, the values of hypermasculinity would seem to be difficult to take seriously (“From Here to Modernity” 65). While Creed, writing in 1987, was referring to the increasingly auto-deconstructive mode of the action movie, a point I explore further in chapter three, her argument that this shift to parody suggests “the failure of the paternal signifier” (65) is interesting in the light of the genre’s sudden interest in representing the action hero as idealised paternity. Regarding Henry and Forrest Gump resolve this problematic of a weakened paternal authority differently - by making the father both the inflictor of male wounds but also the site through which those wounds are healed in the following generation, when the damaged son accedes to a more sensitive paternal function. This enables white men to claim victimhood and entitlement simultaneously, a similar no-lose strategy that Kaufman and Kimmel argue is key to the rhetoric of Bly’s men’s movement: “When men speak as sons, men are angry and wounded by their fathers. When men speak as fathers, men expect veneration and admiration from sons.

Men are thus going to have it both ways, particularly whichever way allows them to feel like the innocent victim of other people’s disempowering behaviour, the victim of what others (fathers or sons) have done to them” (282).

In this respect, both films can be viewed as examples of male melodramas, a mode which is becoming increasingly popular to tell men’s stories “in the service of a beleaguered and victimised masculinity” (Rowe 185).19 In film studies, melodrama has long been associated with the feminine, despite the host of father-son melodramas of the 50s and 60s (Rebel Without a

Cause, Written on the Wind, Splendour in the Grass). However, along with Christine Gledhill, I would argue that it is more productive to regard melodrama not as a genre or sub-genre but as a

“modality” that informs all genres, even those understood as “male,” such as the gangster film,

19 This mode is also deployed in comedies such as Pretty Woman (1990), where Edward (Richard Gere) states that he needed thousands of dollars of therapy to get over his father (Rowe 189).

99 the western or the action movie, all of which are marked by visual excess (“Rethinking Genre”

223; “The Melodramatic Field” 12-13).20 In other words, while melodrama has often been read in opposition to Classical Hollywood because of its female address, domestic subject matter and stylistic indulgence, in fact it is “the norm, rather than the exception, of American cinema” (L.

Williams 16). For Linda Williams, “[i]f emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately concerned with a retrieval and staging of virtue through adversity and suffering, then the operative mode is melodrama” (15). As Williams notes, “[t]he key function of victimisation is to orchestrate the moral legibility crucial to the mode,”21 and “if virtue is not obvious, suffering - often depicted as the literal suffering of an agonised body - is” (29). “Melodrama,” Martha

Vicinus has claimed, “sides with the powerless” (qtd. in Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field” 21), and the fact these films proclaim the powerlessness of the dominant subjectivity through a strategic deployment of melodrama’s tendency to “[exteriorise] conflict and psychic structures”

(Brooks 35) invites two critical responses. On the one hand, the fact that melodrama invests heavily in the Symbolic Order but screens “the impossibility of actually living it” (Gledhill, “The

Melodramatic Field” 35) - what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith aptly terms the difficulty of subjects finding “a place in which they can both be 'themselves’ and ‘at home’” (73) - suggests that the generic mode is well-suited to exploring the inability of the male subject to live up to the masculine ideal and the demands of paternal law. A key contemporary example is Paul Thomas

Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), in which Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) runs workshops for all- male audiences entitled “Seduce and Destroy.” In one of Cruise’s most mesmerising

20 Gallagher has explored the action movie’s incorporation of formal melodramatic elements, regarding this shift as a strategic response to the current crisis in masculinity: “If narratives of male mastery can be transmitted only through texts structurally similar to those constructed for women audiences, the social order underpinning such narratives may also be under siege” (204). However, it can also be a recuperative strategy, as I argue below. 21 Since Peter Brooks’s influential inquiry, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976), melodrama has been understood as a genre that attempts to make an increasingly unstable world “morally legible” (42).

100 performances, he struts up and down on stage in figure-hugging trousers and a leather waistcoat, delivering strategic advice on “the battle of the bush,” gyrating his hips to an audience of cheering men, whilst shouting out slogans such as “Respect the Cock!” or “Tame the Cunt!” In this satirical reflection on the worst versions of the men’s movement, which mobilised entrenched misogynistic sentiment as a means of galvanising men into seizing back male power,

Frank crumbles before the African-American female journalist who, in a television interview, probes behind this masculinist façade, grilling him on lies he has told about his family background. As the film’s multi-levelled narrative unfolds, it becomes apparent that Frank’s phallic posturing is a self-defensive mechanism designed to veil his pain at his father’s abandonment of both him and his dying mother. At his father’s deathbed, when Frank’s phallic mask finally slips, and he sobs inconsolably, though is still unable to forgive, the scene is pure melodrama.22 However, on the other hand, it is also important to bear in mind that any nostalgic dramatisation of the unbridgeable gap between the individual father and his Symbolic ideal can also shore up patriarchal power, forming “part of a ubiquitous and routine testing of masculinity by means of which patriarchal masculinity continues to maintain itself. Such work inevitably entails both the discovery of and the mending of ‘cracks’ in masculinity. But ‘cracks’ do not necessarily imply collapse” (Radstone 155).23 In short, while wounding men might reveal the instabilities of masculine identifications as well as making men “more accessible to women’s imagination” (Kirkham 107), as Kathleen Rowe argues, in an age “when political correctness has

22 The film’s concern with paternal betrayal is made several times: once through an over-ambitious, pushy father of a child genius and again through another dying father who sexually abused his daughter and seeks absolution. 23 In her argument, Radstone refers to Steve Neale’s reading of Chariots of Fire (1981), which, in turn, is informed by Colin McCabe’s reading of the three stages of the male Oedipal complex: in the first stage, the male child fits himself to the mother’s desires; in the second, the child recognises that the mother’s desires are organised in terms of the father, who is understood as a rival phallus without lack. McCabe notes that “[t]he element of hate enters when the child realises, in a third stage, that the father is also articulated within an organisation of desire that he does not control. The father […] too, is lacking in his being” (qtd. in Neale, “Chariots of Fire” 50). McCabe argues that “[a]ll the efforts of society are devoted to encouraging as complete a regression to the second stage as is comfortable with sanity” (qtd. in Neale 50). Neale argues that this is the case in cinema, using Chariots of Fire as an example (50-53). Radstone, however, through a reading of Sea of Love (1989), argues that certain films are increasingly moving from the second to the third stage, but contends that this can work to consolidate patriarchal power (153).

101 become the target of ridicule and a Men’s Movement seeks, amongst other things, to ‘heal’ men wounded by feminism - we must be especially wary whenever melodrama, a friendly and familiar form to women, is used in ways unfriendly to us” (192).

With that in mind, I now wish to turn my attention to Fight Club (1999), which takes the impetus to literalise the wounds inflicted on the white straight male psyche to its ultimate conclusion in its screening of hysteria and male masochism. Fight Club certainly lacks the sentimentality of Regarding Henry and Forrest Gump, playing into a melodramatic mode that it then undercuts through postmodern stylistics, biting satire and parody. This double gesture, which screens white heterosexual masculinity as an “all and nothing” subjectivity, occupying both poles of the victim/oppressor, particular/universal, empty/totalising, dominant/invisible binaries, dovetails with its discursive concern with the empowering function of male masochism, in both the literal and figurative sense.

2.5. Fight Club and the Art of Disavowal

On its release, David Fincher’s neo-gothic Fight Club (1999), based on Chuck

Palahniuk’s eponymous novel, was immediately praised for exposing the alienation that the

American (white) male currently experiences in capitalist America, though an equal number of reviewers expressed fears that the film’s representation of gratuitous violence in the wake of the

Columbine high school shootings (1999) might have a profoundly disturbing effect on the young men the film was marketed at.24 Fight Club tells the story of another everyman figure (Edward

Norton), as Fincher himself terms him (qtd. in G. Smith, “Inside Out” 61), named Jack in the screenplay but “the narrator” in the credits, and the anarchic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), later revealed to be the narrator’s alter ego. “Together” they organise fistfights in order to rid men of their emasculation caused by a feminising commodity culture and the erosion of paternal

24 For a summary of varying responses to the film, see Emerson’s “Punch Counterpunch.” 102 authority, though, importantly, it is enduring rather than inflicting pain that reaffirms virility.

In defence of his film, David Fincher reiterated that Fight Club is “a fairy tale, a coming- of-age story about choosing a path to maturity” (qtd. in Svetkey). In interviews, he stated his agreement with Tyler’s philosophies whilst simultaneously insisting that the film should be consumed as a comedy or satire. Indeed, having it both ways is a desire that characterises Fight

Club as a whole: while it censures commodity culture, the director found fame directing advertisements and music videos, and the film itself, which grossed over $100 million worldwide, has since been made into an expensive video game; while it critiques the commodification of the male body, the main star, Brad Pitt, spends much of the film bare- chested, revealing the washboard stomach that won him fame in Thelma and Louise (1991); while it flirts with controversial ideas such as nihilism, anarchy and homoerotic desire, it often seems more determined to seduce the spectator with its own cleverness; while it screens a fantasy of patriarchal restoration, it also deflects criticism by claiming that Tyler is just a figment of the insane narrator’s imagination. Fight Club’s undermining of its own seriousness is also indissociable from the delight that the film takes in foregrounding its postmodern credentials. It entraps the spectator in the warped consciousness of a perilously unreliable narrator, whose paranoid thoughts and fantasies unfold as instantaneous, rapidly cut images (Romney) which,

Fincher himself notes, have to be “downloaded” (qtd. in G. Smith, “Inside Out” 61). The interior/exterior distinction is rendered obsolete as digitally created photography enables the spectator to hurtle from the inside of the narrator’s brain to the barrel of a gun lodged in his mouth. Codes of realism are joyfully flouted, such as the sex scene filmed as a special effect, the

IKEA catalogue which emerges in the narrator’s living room, complete with prices and descriptors floating in space, the direct addresses to the camera, and the intertextual references to 103 other films the main stars have appeared in.25 Even the penis frame that flickers on the screen at the end of the film, a self-reflexive reference to Tyler’s penchant for splicing pornographic shots into saccharine Disney animations while he worked as a projectionist, is a plastic prosthetic used to gain the film an R-rating (Wise, “An Everyday Story”), reinforcing the narrator’s postmodern anxiety that everything (even the phallus?) “is a copy of a copy of a copy.” In short, Fight Club revels in hyperreality despite its ostensible discursive concern about the virtualisation of white heterosexual masculinity.

Fight Club’s seemingly anti-authoritative sentiments and irresistible flaying of cinematic conventions are certainly prime reasons for the film’s cult status among young male audiences; yet the ease with which these sentiments are commodified and packaged up as “radical” is suspect in itself. Although Fight Club is definitely “in-yer-face,” its social critique is sketchy, to say the least, primarily because of its slippery aesthetics that undermine its seriousness.

Moreover, while reviewers of the film were undoubtedly right to recognise that Fight Club is indebted to ongoing debates over “masculinity in crisis,”26 it rehearses those debates but then undercuts them, particularly through its humorous impetus to literalise the wounds inflicted on the male psyche in its representation of male hysteria and male masochism (though this knowing film also toys with other psychoanalytic categories such as melancholia, fetishism, narcissism, abjection and paranoia, all of which persistently slide into each other). To apply to masculinity notions such as hysteria and masochism, which are traditionally associated with the feminine, is not simply a reversal of terms but rather “a continuation of a move begun by Freud and renewed by Lacan to understand these psychical positions of states as descriptive of subjectivity itself,

25 Towards the end of the film, a cinema advertises Seven Years in Tibet (1997), in which Brad Pitt starred. David Fincher has pointed out that there were also two other marquees in the background that were covered by a bus: one for Wings of the Dove (1997), starring Helena Bonham-Carter, and the other for People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996), starring Edward Norton (qtd. in Wise, “Menace II Society” 104). 26 Palahniuk himself even claims that Faludi’s book Stiffed struck a chord (qtd. in Jeffries). 104 rather than characterising a uniquely feminine subject position” (Penley and Willis ix).27

However, while Fight Club seemingly has no reservations in laying bare the fissures and instabilities of its unapologetically hysterical and masochistic protagonist, applying such categories to the film is problematic since its parodic deployment of psychoanalytic interpretations, coupled with its auto-deconstructive aesthetic, often makes a psychoanalytic reading a self-defeating attempt to quarry for meanings in a text that resists any monolithic or definitive interpretation. To some extent, this is symptomatic of the performative power of psychoanalytic discourse, as well as the prevalent cultural ambivalence about psychoanalysis itself. Moreover, Fight Club is exemplary of the way that hysteria and masochism might be inscribed in popular filmic texts in order to facilitate a depoliticised narrative of white male victimhood and legitimise a marginalisation of women, homosexuals and people of colour in a film that packages up its narrative of wounded male subjectivity in the veneer of postmodern cool.

2.6. Male Hysteria

Hysteria has long been of interest to feminist critics, who have regarded the hysterical symptoms of the female patients of Jean-Martin Charcot, Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud to have constituted a somatic expression of repressed opposition to patriarchy. More recently, male hysteria has received a great deal of attention from theorists interested in the cost that the repression necessary for the assumption of normative male subjectivity necessarily entails for the male subject.28 In popular cinema, male hysteria takes a variety of forms, be it amnesia, shell shock, neurosis (the verbally incontinent Woody Allen and Hugh Grant being prime examples), gender disturbance in cross-dressing comedies or the “breakneck speed” of action movies

27 Such work also signals a shift from narrow conceptions of masculinity being structured around voyeurism and fetishism, which assigned too much masterful agency to the male and passivity to the female (Penley and Willis ix). 28 The term “testeria” has recently been coined to denote “the crippled emotional condition found in males” (Loesch qtd. in Showalter 94). 105

(Creed, “Phallic Panic” 133). Paul Smith has also explored the hysterical excess that emerges in the interstices of male heroic texts as a symptom of the repression of homoerotic desire required within patriarchal culture (72). While male hysteria has a long history in popular cinema, the late-80s and 90s witnessed a plethora of films in which white heterosexual men flaunt their hysterical symptoms, such as the host of revisionist Second World War films (Thin Red Line,

Windtalkers, We Were Soldiers), perhaps best exemplified by the facial close-ups of petrified soldiers in the D-Day landings that open Saving Private Ryan (1998); therapy films, such as the melodrama of The Prince of Tides (1991) or the high comedy of Analyse This (1999), whose male protagonists enlist the help of analysts to unblock their repressed emotions; identity crises in films such as Face/Off (1997) and Being John Malkovitch (1999); memory loss in films like

Memento (2000) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004); and the hysterically split superheroes in films such as Batman (1989), where the hard, fetishistic batman outfit hides the vulnerable body of Bruce Wayne underneath (Showalter 112). However, most interesting for a discussion of Fight Club is the current trend for alter ego movies, in which a “soft man” develops a “wild man” double who vents his repressed rage and anger, primarily at women, such as Me,

Myself and Irene (2000),29 The Secret Lives of Dentists (2003) and Secret Window (2004). The current cultural fascination with male hysteria, therefore, suggests that it might not provide such a challenge to normative male subjectivity as first appears. Sally Robinson, for instance, regards male hysteria as the perfect vehicle in which to figure the particular dynamics of wounded white masculinity since it expresses, in personal and bodily terms, the “trauma of the social,” enabling a bypassing of the political root causes of that crisis (174-5).

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas has noted that “[h]ysteria is about gaps in texts: repressions, amnesias, paramnesias, even conscious silences” (143). This could equally be a description of

29 In Me, Myself and Irene, Jim Carrey’s overly nice protagonist, who allows himself to be bullied by women and an African-American dwarf who unfairly accuses him of racism, develops a sexist, crude, violent alter ego.

106 the unreliable, disjointed, non-linear self-narration of Fight Club’s protagonist. Opening inside the recesses of the narrator’s brain, the film begins at its chronological ending, with Tyler lodging a gun in the narrator’s mouth as the two halves of the narrator’s psyche battle for supremacy. When, in his numbingly monotone, affectless, confessional-style voiceover, the narrator casually states that suddenly he realises that all these events have something to do with a girl called Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), we are hurtled back to the chronological beginning of the film before the appearance of Tyler, an abrupt rewinding that, David Fincher explains, was a deliberate attempt to mirror the speed of the erratic thought processes of the narrator (qtd. in G. Smith, “Inside Out” 62). In a manner similar to The Usual Suspects (1995),

Fight Club exploits the conventions of the voiceover, a traditional guarantee of presence, authenticity and unity: told only what the narrator chooses to tell, the true identity of Tyler, and thus the extent of the narrator’s psychosis, is concealed until near narrative closure, so that Tyler acts not only as the repressed desires of the narrator, but also as the repressed of the text itself.

Jumping back to the time before he met Tyler, the narrator describes how he had been suffering from chronic insomnia laced with an elaborately scripted death-wish fantasy - death, at least, would rescue him from the inauthenticity and mediocrity of his life. A self-confessed victim of commodity culture and “slave to the IKEA nesting instinct,” stuck in a meaningless job where everything is “a copy of a copy of a copy,” the narrator openly expresses the postmodern anxiety, prevalent in Disclosure (1993) and The Full Monty (1997), that the male as consumer rather than producer threatens traditional masculine identifications. He eventually finds relief from his insomnia by visiting self-help groups for people with terminal diseases, since only in the face of death does he feel truly alive, and only when people think you are dying do they really listen to you. In a self-conscious, parodic literalisation of the logic of the “disability films”

I have already discussed,30 the narrator appropriates the suffering of others in order to lay claim

30 Fight Club even facetiously quotes the catchphrase “Run, Forrest, Run!” from Forrest Gump. 107 to a specific, particularised identity that he, as a white middle-class male, lacks. At the same time, his addiction to self-help groups, with their group hugs and guided meditations, ridicules the New Age therapeutic discourses and “absurd excesses” of the men’s movement (G. Smith,

“Inside Out” 58). The film thus both mocks and contributes to the “hysterical victim society” that many believe America to have become (Showalter 8). Indeed, if Elaine Showalter is right to argue that hysterical epidemics are tied in with fin-de-siècle anxieties (4), Fight Club, released in

1999, certainly participates in spreading the highly contagious hysteria over masculinity that gripped America at the end of the millennium.

It is no surprise, then, that the narrator’s favourite self-help group is “Remaining Men

Together” for sufferers of testicular cancer, the group that most clearly establishes the overdetermined relationship between pain, victimhood and masculinity that the film simultaneously articulates and satirises. There the narrator finds comfort crying in the arms of

Bob (Meatloaf), an ex-bodybuilder, who has lost his testicles to cancer, caused by his abuse of anabolic steroids (see figure 2. 9). In keeping with the film’s caustic humour, Bob, who was once responsible for a chest expansion programme on late-night television, has grown what the narrator misogynistically calls “bitch tits” in response to hormone treatment. As if the figurative emasculation of men in the film were not sufficiently obvious, in Bob it is cruelly literalised.

Tyler Durden surfaces shortly after the narrator’s homoerotic pleasure in crying “pressed against

Bob’s tits” is destroyed by the intrusion of a woman, Marla, into this all-male arena. However, four single-frame images of Tyler are spliced into the film before his emergence as a seemingly autonomous character at moments when the narrator’s feelings of emasculation and alienation are at their strongest.31 As well as constituting a self-reflexive reference to Tyler’s pornographic doctoring of family movies, they simultaneously point to the narrator’s spiralling hysteria, with

31 They flicker on screen when the narrator, photocopying at work, complains that everything is “a copy of a copy of a copy”; when the doctor recommends that the narrator experience real pain by visiting “Remaining Men Together”; when a member of “Remaining Men Together” relates how his wife left him to have children with another man; and after the appearance of Marla. 108

Tyler waiting in the wings of his psyche, finally materialising as his double (see figure 2.10).

Ever since Otto Rank’s The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (1914), the double in literary texts has largely been understood as a psychic projection of mental conflict. The double is the alienated part of the self who acts out the (normally male) hero’s repressed desires, responsibility for which is projected onto another ego, offering an “inner liberation” from the guilt caused by the “distance between the ego-ideal and the attained reality” (77). As a consequence, the protagonist invariably feels a simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards his double, resulting in a relationship that incorporates sadomasochistic as well as autoerotic and homoerotic features (Schmid 31). In a Lacanian reading, this aggressivity stems from the tension between our narcissistic identification with a Gestalt (the visual representation of the seemingly unified body) and the conflicting experiences of fragmentation during the paradigmatic mirror phase; the Gestalt thus “symbolises the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination” (Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” 3). In other words, “[t]he ego, the image in which we recognise ourselves, is always an alien alter ego” (Stavrakakis 18), a fact the double makes clear. Although the double acts out our repressed wishes, it does not simply enjoy at our expense, but rather, as the figure of jouissance, commands pleasure, forcing us to become slaves to our desires (Dolar qtd. in Parkin-Gounelas 110). Inevitably, though, the story ends with the suicidal slaying of the double “through which the hero seeks to protect himself permanently from the pursuits of his self” (Rank 79). Fight Club had definitely done its homework, flaunting its awareness of both its gothic and psychoanalytic inheritance. The narrator refers to himself and Tyler as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while Tyler, in a line that plays on Brad Pitt’s sexualised, narcissistic star persona, explains that he is the narrator’s ego-ideal, representing a masculinity unfettered by lack and free of any taints of a feminising commodity culture: “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck. I am capable, smart, and most importantly, free in ways you are not.” 109

Ruth Parkin-Gounelas has noted that in literature of the double, the externalisation of a feared self as other within the psyche gives temporary relief from disunity (109). Fight Club’s exteriorisation of Tyler works similarly, the narrative structure allowing the narrator’s profound psychosis to be concealed from both the narrator and the spectator until near narrative closure.

Thus, the use of the double thematically mirrors the film’s formal structuring around a double discourse, one which allows the film to celebrate Tyler’s vision of “fight club” that it only partially dislodges on second viewing, when Tyler becomes evidence of rather than solution to the narrator’s failed masculinity. It is this retrospective understanding of Fight Club that interests me most, since the film seems self-consciously to screen Freud’s understanding of hysteria as defence against lack, castration anxiety and homosexuality (Parkin-Gounelas 156-7). In this respect, it is no coincidence that Tyler emerges with the irruption of the feminine, Marla, onto the all-male enclave of “Remaining Men Together,” wrecking the oblivion and completeness that the narrator finds in Bob’s arms. The narrator may well try to convince himself that he relapses into insomnia because Marla knows him to be a self-help group “tourist,” but the fact that Tyler emerges shortly after Marla’s appearance is indicative of the narrator's anxieties about homoerotic desire and sexual difference, with its attendant threat of castration. Marla astutely observes that technically she has more right to be at “Remaining Men Together” than the narrator since he still has his balls. This is more than a throwaway gag in a film that flirts with male castration on more than one occasion. Indeed, Tyler explicitly articulates the narrator’s dread of the castrating woman in a telling non-sequitor, a flippant reference to the Bobbit case that gripped America in the early 90s: “It could be worse. A woman could cut off your penis while you’re sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car.”32

If the film suggests, albeit facetiously, that the narrator’s assumption of an alter ego is the

32 In a televised trial in 1994, Lorena Bobbit was tried for cutting off the penis of her husband, who, she alleged, subjected her to ongoing abuse. She drove away from their home and flung his penis out of her car window. It was later found by police and stitched back on. Her husband, Jack, has since become a porn star. 110 only way he can overcome fear of the feminine and sleep with Marla (and why, even then, Tyler wears protective rubber gloves!), it seems equally aware that the double in literature has acted as a defence against repressed homosexuality (Rank 74). Otto Rank notes that the double tends to be “the rival of [the hero’s] prototype in anything and everything, but primarily in the love for a woman” (75). In Fight Club’s erotic triangle, however, the narrator worries about competing for

Tyler’s, not Marla’s attention.33 Marla’s marginal role would seem to be that of confirming

Tyler’s heterosexuality (though not the narrator’s) and cementing homoerotic desire, a point explicitly made when the narrator is discovered spying on Tyler and Marla having sex, and Tyler asks, “Do you want to finish her off?” This desire is foregrounded throughout the film. Having moved in together to the dilapidated gothic house on Paper Street, the narrator even refers to himself and Tyler as “Ozzie and Harriet”34: they use the bathroom at the same time, the narrator straightens Tyler’s tie before he goes to work, and Tyler wanders around the house in a pink fluffy bathrobe embroidered with teapots.35 In a later scene, the narrator pulverises the face of the gay-coded blond recruit (called Angel Face in the novel) who captures Tyler’s attention, while his voiceover mournfully states, “I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection.” This is first seen to stem from pathological jealousy intent on disfiguring the object of Tyler’s affection but, retrospectively, can be interpreted as the narrator’s anger at the recruit for arousing his own repressed homosexuality. As a repository of the narrator’s unconscious desires (the unconscious, as Freud taught us, knows no contradictions), Tyler is thus offered up as an unstable vision of masculinity, at times durably phallic and heterosexual, and at others the object of homoerotic desire. Even when same-sex desire is retrospectively displaced onto narcissistic self-love when

Tyler is revealed to be the narrator’s alter ego, a surplus remains that Paul Smith, in his

33 The narrator’s desire for Tyler is more directly stated in Palahniuk’s novel: “We have a sort of triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me” (14). 34 The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is a 1950s American sit-com in which the actors were a real-life family. 35 While one might expect Tyler to be feminised by this attire, it rather bolsters his coolness, his sexual security and his flagrant rejection of male consumerism.

111 discussion of the “unresolved or unconfined representation of the [male] body” in the action genre, has termed “a residual, barely avowed male hysteria” (91). In many ways, therefore, Fight

Club is exemplary of what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has termed a hysterical text - one in which the repressed sexual content of a film results in narrative incoherencies, where the resolution fails to accommodate the excess (73-4), though it is an excess that this postmodern film par excellence knowingly foregrounds, unlike the realist melodramatic texts to which Nowell-Smith refers.

2.7. Absent Fathers

While Tyler is posited as the narrator’s ego-ideal, the traditional model for this figure has been the father. However, Fight Club joins the escalating number of films obsessed with the wounds inflicted on the male psyche by paternal abandonment. In a scene charged with homoerotic potential, Tyler scrubs himself in the grimy bath and asks the narrator, slumped up against the wall next to him, whom he imagines beating during their fistfights. The narrator replies that he envisages his boss, while Tyler claims that he fights his father, leading to Tyler’s story of how his father left home when he was a child to set up a new “franchise” with another family. Whenever Tyler went to his father for some advice, his father was unable to offer constructive guidance, just telling him to go to college and get married, causing the narrator to interject, “I can’t get married. I’m a thirty year-old boy!” As with 50s male melodramas, therefore, the father represents “an empty centre where the authority of the law fails” (Rodowick,

“Madness, Authority and Ideology” 278). Tyler concludes with the film’s key line: “We are a generation of men raised by women and I’m beginning to wonder whether another woman is really the answer to what we need.”

The blame that Tyler places on mothers for unmanning their sons most obviously invites interpretation though Kristeva’s theory of the abject, the abject being “what disturbs identity, 112 system, order” and threatens the subject’s bodily and psychic boundaries (Powers of Horror 4).

According to Kristeva, the maternal body represents ultimate abjection for the male subject because he always fears “his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother” (64).

Kristeva posits the father as the necessary third term that breaks the mother-child dyad of the

Imaginary, saves the child from psychosis, and propels the child into the Symbolic Order. In

Kristeva’s formulation, as Tania Modleski points out, the more abject the male subject feels, the more he desires paternal law to rescue him (68). While the narrator’s desire for the absent father is rarely overtly articulated in the film, figuring more prominently in Palahniuk’s novel, the father haunts the film through his structuring absence, acting as explanation for his double’s phallic posturings that function as the narrator’s unconscious psychic defence, much the same as

Frank’s masculine histrionics in Magnolia.

However, there is nothing particularly new about the absent father claiming centre stage, particularly in psychoanalytic theories. As Joseph Pleck has observed, whereas in Freud and

Jung the father was the “towering figure” in the child’s psychic development, in post-war years

“he became a dominating figure, not by his presence, but by his absence” (qtd in Faludi, Stiffed

376). As early as 1938, for instance, Lacan posited the contemporary social decline in the paternal imago as the cause of current psychopathological symptoms (D. Evans 61). Victor

Seidler, among others, has also charted the Frankfurt school’s laments that changing patterns in capitalism - such as the deskilling and increased bureaucratisation of work, along with “the growing powerlessness of individuals within monopoly capitalism” - fostered a change in prevalent masculinities, and led, in turn, to a transformation in patterns of paternal identification

(278). In the 80s and 90s, fears about how absent fathers were damaging their sons were also endlessly articulated in the popular media as well as the neo-conservative and neo-liberal political rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic, with the supposition being that only a restoration of paternal authority would heal male pain and, by extension, the ailing social body. 113

On first viewing, Fight Club dramatises, however facetiously, the oft-articulated fears that paternal absence will render the male subject incapable of identifying with an acceptable form of Symbolic Law. For instance, Tyler explicitly attributes his ambivalent relationship with all authority figures to paternal abandonment, yoking together the individual father with his

Christian incarnation: “Our fathers are our models for God. If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God? You have to consider the possibility that God doesn’t like you, never wanted you, in all probability hates you. This is not the worst thing that could happen.” With Tyler established as the group ego-ideal, the film seems to make manifest concerns recently articulated by certain Lacanian theorists that the alleged decline in paternal authority has resulted in a dissolution of the Symbolic Order and a reversal of Freud’s primal horde myth. In Freud’s account, in anger at the primal father’s claim over all the women of the tribe, the horde of brothers banded together to kill and then devour the father, an act of identification which caused their repressed affection to emerge “in the form of remorse” (“Totem and Taboo” 203-04).36 The fact that “[t]he dead father became stronger than the living one had been” (204) reveals for Lacan that “the sole function of the father is to be a myth, to be always only the Name-of-the-Father”

(Seminar 309). Lacan was little interested in individual fathers and turned his attention to the

Symbolic Father who occupies a structuring position that imposes the Law and “regulates desire in the Oedipus complex” (D. Evans 62). The Symbolic Father is thus “an impossible ideal of masculine authority that none of the sons individually could ever hope to achieve” (DiPiero,

White Men Aren’t 212), which underscores the instabilities and incoherencies of both patriarchy and male subjectivity.37

36 As Thomas DiPiero notes, Freud’s attempt to explain the establishment of patriarchy assumes that male domination and a coalition of bothers existed before the murder of the primal father (White Men Aren’t 213). 37 Kaja Silverman also comments on this instability by referring to Freud’s statement in “The Ego and the Id” that the male subject is issued two mutually exclusive imperatives: “You ought to be like this (like your father)” and “You may not be like this (like your father) - that is, you may not do all that he does; some thing are his prerogative” (Freud 374; qtd. in Silverman, Male Subjectivity 193). The first command comes from the ego-ideal (positive notions of the individual father) and the second from the super-ego formed by “the internalisation of the father as Law” (194). Thus, the only way the male child can overcome his libidinal desire for his father is to transform it into 114

However, certain Lacanian theorists have argued that Symbolic authority is currently being dissolved. Slavoj Žižek and Paul Verhaeghe, for instance, both claim that the Oedipal father is now being replaced by the primal father, who is not subordinated by the Law and is only on the look out for his own jouissance (Metastases 206; 135-38). As far as Fight Club is concerned, it is certainly possible to see Tyler, a group ego-ideal erected in the Symbolic

Father’s place, as the sadistic, narcissistic primal father who bonds the members of “fight club” through their shared transgression of the Law.38 However, when it becomes evident that Tyler is the narrator’s alter ego, the film would seem to screen concerns that the decline in paternal authority is responsible for not only the erection of unacceptable father substitutes, but also a male subject that is psychically split, alarmingly self-punitive, and verging on psychosis. For instance, Fight Club almost directly replicates the restless, self-obsessed, feminised, pathologically narcissistic subject that Christopher Lasch profiles in The Culture of Narcissism:

American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979). Lasch argues that the decline of institutionalised authority does not lead to a decline of the superego in individuals as many had feared but “encourages instead the development of a harsh, punitive superego that derives most of its psychic energy, in the absence of authoritative social prohibitions, from the destructive, aggressive impulses within the id” (11-12).39 Lasch’s account, which as Savran points out,

identification and become the Symbolic Father, but this is prohibited by the superego (Silverman 194). As a result, “[t]he prototypical male subject oscillates endlessly between the mutually exclusive commands of the (male) ego- ideal and the super-ego, wanting both to love the father and to be the father, but prevented from doing either” - a “cruel drama” that the feminine (male) masochist literalises and plays out on the body (195). 38 Of course, for Freud, all group formations were modelled on the myth of the primal horde (“Group Psychology” 154-55), a point Adorno picked up on in his account of the fascist demagogue. For Adorno, the fascist leader reanimates the idea of the all-powerful primal father (119), the only possible explanation for the fascist demagogue’s ability to promulgate the “passive-masochistic” attitude required of fascist followers (119-20). Verhaeghe follows suit in expressing the fear that the reestablishment of the primal father will mean the re-emergence of the fascist father (145). Of course, both of these accounts underplay the huge economic underpinnings of the rise of neo- fascism, but it is interesting, in this respect, that Fight Club was accused, by some, of screening a fascist fantasy. 39 Žižek argues that “[a]ll the babble about the ‘decline of paternal authority’ merely conceals the resurgence of [a] incomparably more oppressive agency” - the “maternal” superego (Looking Awry 103). Both Žižek and Lasch illustrate their arguments through the example of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a precursor to Falling Down and Fight Club in its screening of the psychic damage that can be inflicted on the male subject when the father is absent and the mother holds sway. It is surely some measure of both Žižek’s and Lasch’s masculinist perspective that they both view Psycho as representing a psychic truth rather than being a misogynistic representation of male fears of the feminine and the maternal, unlike Barbara Creed in her Kristeva-inspired The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, 115

“almost exactly replicates Freud’s analysis of moral masochism” (168), could equally be a description of Fight Club’s narrator, not only as regards his pathological and masochistic self- preoccupation, but also his development of an asocial, sadistic superego - Tyler Durden.40

2.8. Fight Club and Male Masochism: Taking It Like a Man41

As a punishing superego, Tyler encourages his followers to embrace abjection, informing them that they are not “a beautiful, unique snowflake” but “the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”42 Whereas Nietzsche’s (male) subject of ressentiment exteriorised the wound and deadened its pain by seeking an external other, “a guilty agent” on whom he could “vent his effects” (127), the members of fight club vent their ressentiment on themselves. Yet this is no less empowering: virility is proved by endurance whilst pain not only literalises their sense of disenfranchisement, but also allows a recapturing of a lost primal masculinity as they beat themselves out of the unbearable banality of virtualised society and commodity culture.43

Although women, people of colour and homosexuals are not overtly scapegoated, since the drama of beleaguered white manhood is viscerally inscribed across and through the battered,

Psychoanalysis (1993). For Kristeva’s disagreement with Žižek’s and Lasch’s position see footnote 17 of this chapter. 40At the same time, it is interesting that both Lasch and Verhaeghe regard postmodern aesthetics as evidence of the collapse of the paternal symbolic function (Lasch 20; Verhaeghe 135). Presumably, then, for Lasch and Verhaeghe, Fight Club would be considered symptomatic of the dissolution of the Symbolic, since its postmodern cynicism and self-referentiality suggest that it is unable to take phallic masculinity at face value. But the film also shares Lasch’s and Verhaeghe’s structuring principles: the conflation of the paternal with the social; the desire for the reestablishment of patriarchal authority; fears that, with fathers absent, mothers will inevitably suffocate and psychically damage their sons; concerns that absent fathers produce a psychically-split, masochistic male subject who enjoys the berating of his punitive superego, or his victimisation at the hands of women or primal father figures; the prioritising of the suffering of the white male subject; the elision of race, class, and sexual orientation from their accounts of male suffering; the assumption that challenges to white patriarchal privilege are lamentable. 41 I am indebted to David Savran’s Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (1988) for this apt subtitle. 42 Whereas his namesake, Watt Tyler, was the leader of the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt, Tyler espouses the belief that such master narratives are no longer possible in the postmodern moment: “We are the middle children of history, man, no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression, no Great War. Our Great War is spiritual. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised by television to believe that we’ll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars - but we won’t… And we’re very, very pissed off.” 43 The film thus follows Freud’s observation that “[t]he turning back of sadism against the self regularly occurs where a cultural suppression of the instincts holds back a large part of the subject's destructive instinctual components from being exercised in life” (“The Economic Problem of Masochism” 425).

116 masochistic bodies of the overwhelmingly WASP males that populate fight club, Tyler’s followers are no less “angry white males” than D-FENS, though the film’s slippery postmodern aesthetics render it harder to pin down. Fight Club may well advertise its radical chic by rehearsing anarchist discourses, but, as Henry A. Giroux and Imre Szeman note, the film simultaneously shores up the individualistic ideologies of neo-liberal capitalism, inviting identification with an authoritarian, hyper-individualistic white male, whose exceptionality enables him to overcome the alleged penetration of commodity culture into every aspect of contemporary life (97). For Giroux and Szeman, when fight club spirals into Project Mayhem, a terrorist campaign against corporate America, it “simply reinforces our sense of defeat in the face of contemporary capitalism by making a regressive, vicious, and obscene politics seem like the only possible alternative” (97). Certainly, at this point, the film flirts not only with images of the patriot movement but also fascism: Tyler funds campaigns by selling soap made out of human liposuction waste and asks his anonymous, mindless, blindly obedient skinhead recruits to arrive fitted out in black shirts. At the same time, the film never allows us to take Project

Mayhem that seriously: one operation involves altering the drawings on aeroplane safety information cards, so that passengers in the throes of mid-collision no longer radiate “the serenity of Hindu cows” but clutch their heads in panic. More disturbing is the fact that while the film does express some of the genuine suffering of white men in postindustrial, economically- downsized America, “[i]t is never imagined that a whole culture could or should change how it organises the lives of members” (Giroux and Szeman 97). Taking the logic of identity politics to an absurd limit and presenting the battered white male body as proof of white male pain, the film follows the same dynamics that Sharon Willis locates in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985): social conflict is staged as spectacle, so that “political and social antagonisms can be evacuated, exhausted,” and even if the aggression is played out primarily between straight white men, “it is always some straight white male who focuses the scene, who commands the space” (“Disputed 117

Territories” 279). Women are evacuated from this “wound culture,” to use Mark Seltzer’s term, wherein the violated body “function[s] as a way of imagining and situating our notions of public, social, and collective identity” (21); indeed, women are posited as part of the problem.

Moreover, although it could be suggested that the homosociality of fight club is actually figured as a means of securing racial rapprochement due to the token presence of a few men of colour,

Robyn Wiegman has pointed out that far from suspending the significance of non-gendered formations of power, narratives of interracial homosocial bonding played out in scenarios devoid of women more often than not facilitate the reinforcement of hierarchical arrangements between men (“Fielder and Sons” 63). Indeed, in one of the few bi-racial fights we witness, Tyler defeats his black opponent, while the narrator is beaten to a pulp but smiles and shakes his adversary’s hand. Within the sadomasochistic economy of the film, therefore, the narrator can occupy both poles of sadomasochistic desire: as Tyler, the “angry white male” in extremis, he pummels an

African-American to the point of collapse, but as himself, he assumes the victim function of being pounded by his black other.44

Of course, this reading is only available on the disclosure of Tyler’s true identity, which forces a reconstruction of the entire film, casting the narrator as both victim and aggressor, masochist and sadist, powerless and phallic, fragmented and unified - the apotheosis of Nick

Mansfield’s understanding of the masochistic male subject, who completely disregards, annihilates or assimilates difference in an attempt to assume the position of total subject (10).

Rather than its more traditional psychoanalytic usage to designate a sexual perversion, Mansfield understands masochism as a cultural and political discourse and practice, an effective postmodern mode of power that consolidates itself through disavowal (xi) and provides “a way for masculine hegemonic systems to confirm their own power, and annihilate the other, while

44 Tyler also traumatises an Asian male at gunpoint, threatening to kill him if he does not realise his ambitions to become a vet. Stereotypically, this trembling, weeping Asian is feminised in this scene, while Tyler’s assertion of power is unavoidably racialised, though in the novel, this character is white. 118 performing a loud, even self-mutilating, powerlessness” (51). However, while Mansfield believes that the male masochist subject’s flaying of binary oppositions facilitates patriarchal hegemony, certain psychoanalytic theorists have viewed masochism to be subversive of phallic masculinity for precisely the same reason.

Most of these studies take Freud’s study of male beating fantasies in “A Child Is Being

Beaten” as their starting point.45 The first stage of the fantasy begins with an inverted Oedipal attitude: “I am loved by my father” (186). In the second stage, the male subject transforms his desire for the father into punishment: “I am being beaten by my father” (185-86). This stage is unconscious and reconstructed by Freud (170-71).46 Homosexuality, therefore, is obviously less culturally sanctioned than masochism, which remains conscious.47 In the third stage, the male subject evades his homosexuality by replacing his father with his mother or another woman, who, nonetheless, is endowed with masculine attributes (186-87). For Freud, this stage is

45 The boy’s beating fantasy was later termed “feminine masochism” by Freud (“The Economic Problem of Masochism” 415) because of the boy’s passive and homosexual attitude towards the father, which suggests that for Freud, masochism was only a perversion in men. While not directly relevant to the arguments of this chapter, the female beating fantasy that Freud outlines in “A Child Is Being Beaten” is extremely interesting. The three stages of the female fantasy are represented by the following phrases: “My father is beating the child whom I hate”; “I am being beaten by my father”; some boys are being beaten and “I am probably looking on” (170-71). For Freud, the first stage is neither purely sexual nor sadistic, but reinforces “the child’s egoistic interests,” since it translates as “[m]y father does not love the other child, he loves only me” (172). The second unconscious stage of the fantasy is “accompanied by a high degree of pleasure” and is “of an unmistakably masochistic character” (170). Here, “[t]he Freudian syntax shuffles cause and effect” (Savran 29) as the prohibited desire for the father is transformed into a wish for punishment by the father, which substitutes “the forbidden genital relation” (Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten” 175). In the final stage of the fantasy, Freud points out that “only the form of this phantasy is sadistic; the satisfaction which is derived from it is masochistic” (177); in fact, for Freud, the female subject makes a double appearance in this fantasy since she is not only presented as voyeur but also identifies with the whipping boys. While Freud insists that this fantasy reveals the female’s desire to be a boy (177), as David Savran points out, the boys in the fantasy are defined by their repressed homosexual desires since they are being punished by the father for their love for him (30). Thus, through identifying with the whipping boys, the girl is refigured as a male homosexual, and even “the girl’s spectatorial position” is aligned with “‘unmanly’ masculinity,” according to Kaja Silverman, as she gains masochistic not sadistic pleasure (Male Subjectivity 204). As Savran concludes, normative constructions of both gender and sexuality are disrupted in this scenario: “The female subject is rendered both homosexual and heterosexual, masculinised and feminised, her passivity at once affirmed and contradicted by its projection onto a male homosexual subject” (31). This fantasy is of great interest to film theory since it suggests the potential not only for cross-gender and multiple identifications but also the masochistic dimension of spectatorship, thus disrupting the configuration of the sadistic, controlling male gaze that dominated film theory in the 1970s. See Elizabeth Cowie’s “Fantasia.” 46 Mansfield considers this to demonstrate the incompatibility of male masochism and Oedipal theory (13-14). 47 As David Savran notes, this “scandalous eroticisation of patriarchal relationships” means that “[m]asochism functions, in short, as a mode of cultural production that simultaneously reveals and conceals (through the mechanism of disavowal) the homoeroticism that undergrids patriarchy and male homosocial relations” (32).

119 remarkable since “it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice”

(187), a phrase which, for Silverman, “wreaks havoc with sexual difference” (Male Subjectivity

212).

For Silverman, the male subject “cannot avow feminine masochism without calling into question his identification with the masculine position” (Male Subjectivity 190); the male masochist thus “[substitutes] perversion for the père-version of exemplary male subjectivity”

(213), and, in so doing, “radiates a negativity inimical to the social order” (206). Gilles Deleuze regards male masochism as equally subversive but rejects Freud’s construction of the second unconscious phase of the fantasy, locating masochism in the pre-Oedipal phase,48 arguing that the masochist requires punishment from the oral, sadistic mother for his resemblance to the father, whose place he does not want to take; in fact, “the father is not so much the beater as the beaten” (60-61). In Fight Club, however, recalling that Tyler imagines fighting and being beaten by his father, the father may well be beaten but only ultimately to be replaced not by a woman but by a more ideal substitute - Tyler himself. The film thus falls in with Paul Smith's understanding of masochism as crucial to the conservation of normative male sexuality within the discourses of popular culture since “it represents a way of structuring into the full subjectivity of the egoistic hero a resistance, a way of beating the father to within an inch of his life before replacing him or allowing him to be resurrected, and finally doing things just as well as he can” (95).

As Smith’s reading shows, masochism has more recently been seen as a specific mode of power that works to bolster phallic male subjectivity, particularly by theorists who do not limit their study to the domain of the Oedipal family. For instance, in response to Silverman’s analysis, Judith Butler has stated that if masochism is culturally and historically situated,

48 Leo Bersani has also critiqued Freud for reducing the destabilising energy of masochism by retaining an Oedipal framework. In Bersani’s account, all sexuality is seen as masochistic and subversive because it brings about the subject’s undoing (41). 120

“[phallic] ‘divestiture’ could be a strategy of phallic self-aggrandisement” (qtd. in Kotz 88).

Similarly, in his comprehensive and insightful study Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity,

Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (1998), David Savran argues that psychoanalytic accounts such as Silverman’s do not fully examine the material forces that have foregrounded the masochistic male subject (205-6). He regards the bifurcation of the male subject not as a radical challenge to hegemonic masculinity, but as a strategy of self-restoration

(205). He explores how current representations of American white heterosexual masculinity are entrenched in a discourse of victimhood but notes that “cultural texts constructing masochistic masculinities characteristically conclude with an almost magical restitution of phallic power”

(37). Indeed, the prevalence of the mutilated male body in cinema, especially action films such as First Blood (the first Rambo film), Die Hard and Lethal Weapon (whose numerous sequels reflect that compulsion for repetition that Freud located in masochism) suggests that it can consolidate images of phallic masculinity since “the place of the exhibitionist/masochist is already accounted for, and already pulled by narrativisation into a plot designed to eventually explode the negativity of masochism” (P. Smith 90). In other words, although the hypermasculine bodies of stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Van

Damme are often tied up or held down while they are beaten to a bloody pulp, often deploying the (masochistic) Christian iconography of crucifixion (and eventual resurrection),49 such scenarios prove the action hero’s ability to “take it like a man,” and the audience is well aware that he will soon emerge triumphant to deliver his own violent form of retribution (see figures

2.11 and 2.12). Moreover, the pulverising of the male body may also mitigate any homoerotic pleasure gained from the display of the male body (see chapter three), a use to which it is undoubtedly put in Fight Club, since, as Tyler instructs, there must only be two men to a fight,

49 Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Cyborg (1982) literally crucify their stars, Schwarzenegger and Van Damme respectively. Leon Hunt analyses how crucifixion scenes offer “passivity offset by control, humiliation offset by nobility of sacrifice, eroticism offset by religious connotations of transcendence” (73). 121 one fight at a time, and all participants have to remove their shirts and shoes; in other words, one of the pleasures of fight club, both intra- and extradiegetically, is watching bare-chested men wrestling with each other, a pleasure with a potential homoerotic as well as sadomasochistic investment (see figure 2.13) - hence “the hysterical shouting in tongues like a Pentecostal

Church” that emanates from the intradiegetic male spectators.50

Certainly, Tyler and the narrator, whose ideas should not be confused with “the politics of the film” (Grønstad 3), posit masochism as a means of achieving self-mastery. The narrator informs us, “A guy came to fight club for the first time, his arse was a wad of cookie dough.

After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” Here, the soft, amorphous, feminised body gives way to a hard body with stable boundaries, suggesting the male fear of the feminine body that both Kristeva and Klaus Theweleit, in their accounts of abjection and male fascism respectively, have traced back to the pre-Oedipal mother-child dyad before the construction of a bounded ego

(Powers of Horror; Male Fantasies). The image of a soft, penetrable arse is also an overt reference to the homosexual body that is soon rephallicised by enduring a little pain. Even when

Tyler orders the narrator’s (that is his own!) castration as punishment for wanting to close fight club, staging a lynching fantasy that again allows the narrator to inhabit the suffering black male body, the “space monkeys” (his followers) do not see his desire for castration as feminising but as an act of courage and self-sacrifice that demands the greatest respect.

At this point, of course, unlike the film’s spectator, the space monkeys know that the narrator and Tyler are one and the same. In fact, many scenes which screen the sadomasochistic play between the narrator and Tyler demand a different interpretation on a second viewing. For example, the scene where Tyler sears an imprint of his kiss onto the narrator’s hand with lye (the violence barely dislodging the homoerotic implications), informing him that “without pain,

50 Fight Club would seem to confirm Theodor Reik’s observation that masochism, the most exhibitionist of perversions, “can’t do without a public” and demands a spectator (77).

122 without sacrifice we have nothing,” depicts a sadistic Tyler leading the narrator to self-realisation and rephallicisation (see figure 2.14). However, the reworked flashback of this scene screens self-abuse or what Freud termed “reflexive masochism,” where the subject enjoys pain “without an attitude of passivity” (“Instincts and their Vicissitudes” 125). It is this refusal of passivity that leads Silverman to argue that reflexive masochism “is ideally suited for negotiating the contradictions inherent in masculinity. The male subject can indulge his appetite for pain without at the same time calling into question either his virility, or his paternal lineage” (Male

Subjectivity 326). Historicising this insight, David Savran regards reflexive masochism as an ideal mechanism for white males living in a postfeminist, post-civil rights America: “No longer having others on whom to inflict his power and his pain with impunity, the male subject began to turn against himself and to prove his mettle by gritting his teeth and taking his punishment like a man” (176). For example, in his analysis of First Blood (1982), Savran argues that Rambo’s suturing of his own wounds “must be seen as being self-willed, as being the product of his need to prove his masculinity the only way he can, by allowing his sadistic, masculinised half to kick his masochistic, feminised flesh ‘to shit’” (201). If the same logic is applied to the scene where

Tyler administers pain to the narrator to help him “hit bottom” and find freedom, what the scene retrospectively reveals is the narrator actively subjugating and punishing the feminine part of his own psyche. However, whereas the Rambo series took itself seriously, Fight Club draws attention to the ludicrousness of its sadomasochistic protagonist, most obviously when he beats himself up in front of his boss, a scene which still suggests the empowering function of masochism since the boss, panicked that he would be accused of abusing his staff, gives the narrator the paid leave he demanded.51 Moreover, the visual conflicts with the discursive since, as Edward Norton explains, while Brad Pitt “bulked up” for the role, he, on the other hand,

51 Compare, for instance, the castration scene in Fight Club with the deadly serious, protracted mutilation and castration scene in Braveheart (1985), which confirms Mel Gibson’s virility.

123 purposefully lost weight and “became Gollum,” his body becoming increasingly “bruised and shattered” (qtd. in O’Connor), thereby undermining his character’s assertions that mutilation is masculinising. Thus, as Asbjørn Grønstad argues, the film challenges, but also, I would add, simultaneously deploys “the narrative paradigm of ‘destructibility-and-recuperability’ that has traditionally allayed Hollywood’s portrayals of masculinity and violence” (16).

The final showdown between the two sides of the narrator’s psyche also foregrounds its own absurdity. By literally shooting himself in the head and expelling Tyler, the narrator gains psychic unity and heterosexuality in one fell swoop. As bloods spurts out of the hole in the side of his head, the narrator turns to Marla and explains, “You met me at a very strange time in my life.” With the two figures hand-in-hand, turning to each other in a deliberately stylised manner, the soundtrack then blares out The Pixies track “Where is my Mind?” This patently contrived ending is then interrupted by a self-reflexive joke: while the narrator and Marla hold hands to watch Project Mayhem’s destruction of the skyscraper offices of nine credit card companies

(which, viewed today, inevitably recalls the 9/11 attacks), two frames of a semi-erect penis flicker on the screen, another reference to Tyler’s habit of splicing genitalia into family movies.

On the one hand, while the subsiding skyscrapers unavoidably connote phallic collapse, the flickering penis gestures at the restoration of the narrator’s masculinity. On the other hand, it could also signify the irruption of the repressed homosexual content of the text, as well as suggesting the provisional nature of the narrator’s psychic healing, implying, as Fincher notes, that “the spirit of Tyler Durden is kinda still out there” (qtd. in Wise, “Menace II Society” 105).52

In other words, Tyler is still triumphant at the moment of narrative closure, despite the

52 Indeed, David Fincher himself puns that the spliced-in penis shot was “a bone of contention” since many felt that it tried to make light of everything that happened before. Fincher himself disagrees with this point since, although he believes that Tyler sometimes goes too far, his ideas should be “if not embraced, at least well thought of” (qtd. in Wise, “Menace II Society” 106). In fact, Fincher was so enamoured of Tyler that he changed the ending of Palahniuk’s novel, which has the narrator confined to a psychiatric hospital, because he never felt “the mental institution thing with Tyler worked. I always felt . . . that the book, to me seemed like the film: totally in love with Tyler Durden. It couldn’t stand to let him go. I wanted people to love Tyler, but I also wanted them to be OK with his vanquishing” (105). 124 contrasting image of the narrator standing bedraggled in an ill-fitting, baggy overcoat and boxer shorts, his trousers lost to the castrating space monkeys. In the light of the film’s ironic mode and self-knowingness, it is thus difficult to agree with Susan Faludi, who takes the film at face value in arguing that it “ends up as a quasi-feminist tale, seen through masculine eyes” where “the man and the woman clasp hands in what could be a mutual redemption” (“It’s Thelma and Louise for

Guys” 89). Rather, to borrow Eve Sedgwick’s phrase, this is a story very much “between men.”

What interests me most about Fight Club is the ideological work that this parodic mode performs, since as Terry Eagleton notes, a “text does not merely ‘take’ ideological conflicts in order to ‘resolve’ them aesthetically, for the character of those conflicts is itself overdetermined by the textual modes in which they are produced” (Criticism and Ideology 88). If “[p]arody and irony spring from not being able to inhabit old forms of behaviours without some distance”

(Coward 93), Fight Club’s success seems to suggest the difficulties of a youth audience taking seriously the melodramatic excesses of the men’s movement’s discourse on wounded males and its cinematic incarnation in “disability films” by the decade’s end.53 However, this in itself is not a cause for celebration, since parody, which I regard as an increasingly popular mode through which white straight masculinity is articulated, is a double-coded discourse, which “manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions that it appears to challenge” (Hutcheon 1-2). The film thus succeeds in screening white male wounds and marginalising the minoritised bodies that have historically secured moneyed white male privilege through its postmodern, auto-deconstructive strategies and ludic impulses towards literalisation, both articulating and then undercutting its representation of beleaguered white masculinity. Therefore, just as masochism is dependent on a disavowal of not only the pleasures but also the power that it involves, Fight Club is structured around a similar masochistic mode,

53 Even the animation Finding Nemo (2003) satirises the men’s movement, when a group of sharks are shown in a workshop, trying to get in touch with their sensitive side.

125 not only on the discursive level in its designation of the (white) male as victim and its deployment of the same organising principle as Freud’s writings on masochism (the female masochist, Marla, is only interesting insofar as she illuminates male masochism, the father is retained as an object of desire, and any homosexual content is ultimately repressed), but also in terms of the film’s textual practices, screening but then deconstructing a “wounded masculinity” through a postmodern aesthetic that refuses its own seriousness and ideological implications.54

Whereas Regarding Henry’s and Forrest Gump’s ingenuity lay in their reconstruction of white masculinity through the figure of an intellectually-challenged, childlike but innocent protagonist,

Fight Club’s ingenuity lies in its postmodern treatment of the double, screening a vision of white masculinity that is both “all,” embodied by Tyler, and “nothing,” embodied by the narrator.

Consequently, Fight Club can be read not only as a hysterical text but also a masochistic text, one that orchestrates a fantasy of rephallicisation in the very act of performing “white masculinity in crisis.”

54 In In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (1998), Gaylyn Studlar has argued for a cinematic masochistic aesthetic, one formulated in relation to Deleuze’s pre-Oedipal account of masochism. More pertinent for Fight Club is Studlar’s argument that Sternberg’s films not only screen male masochism in the narrative, but also employ the formal elements of masochism - fantasy, fetishism, suspension and disavowal (97). However, Studlar regards this aesthetic to be subversive, whereas I am arguing that the masochistic aesthetic screened in Fight Club enables the film to screen a fantasy of phallic triumph that it then disavows. 126

PART TWO

COMING APART AT THE SEAMS?

WHITE HETEROSEXUAL MASCULINITY

AND THE BODY

IN POPULAR CINEMA 127

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

Unveiling the Unmarked Body

In this section, I wish to explore how anxieties regarding shifting conceptions of normative white masculinity are inscribed in and through the body in popular cinematic texts. In that bodies are always enmeshed in discourses of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, nation, age and ability, I will focus not only on whiteness and masculinity but also on other intersecting categories. Moreover, since identity is always constructed through its relation to the

Other - “the relations to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside” (Hall, “Introduction” 4) - I will also discuss those opposing categories that form white heterosexual masculinity’s unstable borders. At the same time, I wish to complicate the very identity categories that I will be using, in particular “whiteness” and “masculinity,” in order to free them up from appeals to an ontological body, since “the excesses of the body always threaten whatever restrictions from the discursive practices may be placed on it” (Fuery

72). Although I will be arguing that identities attached to the body are discursively produced, this is not an attempt to minimise individual investment in those identities; nor is it an attempt to deny the very real material effects that the embodiment of a particular identity can bring; rather, as Ruth Frankenberg puts it, it is to insist that the social and political reality of these identities is

“precisely social and political rather than inherent or static” (White Women 11).

As Rosi Braidotti has observed, “[t]he body emerges at the centre of the theoretical and political debate at exactly the time in history when there is no more single-minded certainty or consensus about what the body actually is. [...] The body has turned into many, multiple bodies”

(Nomadic Subjects 60). Far from appealing to an abstracted universal body, postmodernism shifts attention to multiplicity and difference. Terry Eagleton thus comments that “[t]he postmodern subject, unlike its Cartesian ancestor, is one whose body is integral to its identity. 128

Indeed, from Bakhtin to the Body Shop, Lyotard to leotards, the body has become one of the most recurrent preoccupations of postmodern thought” (Illusions 69). However, while Eagleton is right to pick up on the importance afforded to embodied subjectivity (Braidotti’s term) in the postmodern era, his suggestion that the body of the Cartesian subject was somehow irrelevant is itself open to a postmodern critique, since the Cartesian subject was, by default, most often

“embodied” by a moneyed white male, whose disembodiment was only rendered possible by the universal status his body awarded him in a visual economy in which only those attributes associated with the particular are rendered visible. Women and people of colour, by contrast, have often been caught up in discourses of hyper-embodiment. In other words, normative white masculinity has been historically dependent on the enfleshed, corporeal body, which it simultaneously attempts to transcend, producing a subjectivity that represents itself as both “all”

(universal) and “nothing” (disembodied, anxiously empty). It is precisely this asymmetrical arrangement that lends political urgency to interrogating Western economies of visibility in order to unveil “the unmarked and invisible, but no less specific, corporeality that hides beneath the abstraction of universality” (Wiegman, American Anatomies 6).

As Robyn Wiegman notes, in the US at least, “nearly every political movement’s confrontation with the privileged body has been built on contradictory (re)investments in the minoritised body, figured newly as a positive identity, to ground the struggle for liberation”

(American Anatomies 50). In this process, identity politics have helped to reveal the unmarked white male body, to the extent that, as we have seen, in the 90s, American middle-class white heterosexual men began demanding an identity politics of their own. Identity politics have proven to be a particularly successful formula in feminist and antiracist struggles, largely because the categories of “sex” and “race” are commonly believed to be written indelibly on the body; however, identity politics also risk homogenising those identities (especially white males, not all of whom are particularly privileged), as well as eliding those traversing identities that are 129 less obviously corporeally inscribed, such as class (the labouring or malnourished body, for instance). Moreover, poststructuralist theorists have argued that the linking of the body and identity is inseparable from the logic of modernity whereby the visual offers a guarantee of epistemological certainty; in other words, the notion of identity being anchored in a “naturally” sexed and raced body is a historically-contingent, discursive construction.

For instance, in American Anatomies: Theorising Race and Gender (1995), Wiegman attempts to tease out the history of visible corporealities through a race-inflected reading of

Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), a study in which Foucault charts the transition from

“classical” organisations of knowledge (the Enlightenment) to the birth of human sciences in the early nineteenth century, when “man” emerged as an object as well as subject of knowledge

(Wiegman 22). The reorganisation of knowledge that accompanied this transition meant that “the human being acquires for the first time in history an organic body and an interior psychic depth, becoming the primary object of investigation and making possible a host of new technologies, institutions, and disciplines” (22). While any substantial discussion of the raced and gendered body is noticeably lacking from Foucault’s work as a whole, Wiegman inserts race into

Foucault’s analysis in order to trace how the shift from natural history to human sciences brought about a new visual economy in which “race” was no longer deemed an external matter of skin tone attributed to climatic conditions but became “a constituted ‘fact’ of the body” (23). In this visual regime, “race” was thus understood as a truth that “must be pursued beyond the realm of visible similarities and differences,” and was productively deployed to proliferate elaborate discourses on the natural inferiority of certain peoples (23). Any reliance on visible corporealities is problematic, therefore, since it has its roots in “the disciplinary fragmentation of human beings that attends modernity, demonstrating how deeply overburdened the incremental anatomisation of the body is from within” (50). In a similar vein to Wiegman, Judith Butler has famously deployed a Foucauldian-inflected theoretical framework in order to analyse how both sex and 130 gender are believed to constitute a visible “truth” of a naturally sexed and gendered body, even though the “truth” and designated interiority of that “pre-discursive” body can only be articulated in discourse; thus for Butler, identity categories can never be merely descriptive but are also always performative (Gender Trouble 8; Bodies 10).

For this reason, identity politics have also been critiqued by poststructuralist theorists such as Butler for reinscribing the ontological logic, exclusionary operations, and foundationalist premises of the system they hope to overthrow.1 Even appeals to plural and hyphenated subjectivities have not escaped this charge, since they still territorialise the subject, and ignore the psychoanalytic insight that identifications are always a missed encounter. In short, as

Wiegman puts it, in the process of ignoring the slippages between identity categories and

“equating either subjectivity with identity or identity with subject position, the political is waged within and not finally against the corporeal visibilities established by modern epistemologies”

(193). At the same time, poststructuralist critiques of identity politics and its appeals to the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment tradition have been greeted with considerable suspicion; in the often-cited lament of Nancy Harstock: “Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?” (163).2 Indeed, while contesting the terms under which identity is formed is

1 For lucid accounts of the poststructuralist critique see Wiegman, American Anatomies intro. and ch. 5; Butler, “Contingent Foundations” and Flax. 2 Similar concerns have been raised by other feminist theorists. Modleski states that “[i]t is not altogether clear to me why women, much more so than any other oppressed groups of people, have been so willing to yield the ground on which to make a stand against their oppression” (15). For many postmodernist feminists, on the other hand, Harstock’s inclusive “many of us” is equally epistemologically suspect, since it erases race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and other differences from feminist enquiry, while poststructuralists would also consider Harstock’s homogenising gesture to be complicit with the universalising foundationalism that deconstructive approaches attempt to dismantle. Judith Butler, for instance, a staunch defender of the poststructuralist deconstruction of the subject, takes issue with those who claim not only that politics requires a stable, essentialist subject but also that “there can be no political opposition to that claim” (“Contingent Foundations” 4). For Butler, relieving identity categories of their foundationalist and ontological weight is in itself a profoundly political act, since it renders identity the site of permanent political contest: “To deconstruct is not to negate or to dismiss, but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorised” (“Contingent Foundations” 15). 131 undoubtedly an inherently political undertaking, deconstruction alone does not suffice in an age when women, people of colour, lesbians and gays, and other minorities are oppressed because of the particular bodies or identity they bear/assume. Thus, as Stuart Hall argues, deconstructive and poststructuralist critiques may well have put identities “under erasure,” but “since [these identities] have not been superseded dialectically, and there are no other, entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is nothing to do but to continue to think with them - albeit in their detotalised or deconstructed forms, and no longer operating within the paradigm in which they were originally generated” (“Introduction” 1). Moreover, even if we recognise that the body is not a “stable and true referent for self-understanding,” the fact that “the body has served to function as the signifier of the condensation of subjectivities in the individual” renders any dismissal of this function difficult (11). In this respect, “strategic essentialism” (Spivak’s term)3 may well be a “risk” worth taking (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 177), since, as Diana Fuss puts it, there is a world of difference between “‘deploying’ or ‘activating’ essentialism and

‘falling into’ or ‘lapsing into’ essentialism” (Essentially Speaking 20). In other words, while it is imperative to recognise that identities are ontologically empty and open to constant renegotiations and resignifications, the fact that identities are fictions does not render them any less powerful, and the political challenge lies in rethinking and discussing identity without bolstering biological essentialism. Further, while identity politics and the postmodern attention to the multiplicity of bodies might well be complicit in reterritorialising categories that have been used to oppress and exclude, they have been politically successful in forcing attention on those previously barred from humanist constructions of a universal subject, and in so doing, have rendered the universal, disembodied status of the white male subject increasingly untenable.4

3 Spivak agues for “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (205). 4 This is why many feminists greet the proclamation of the death of the subject by white male elite postmodernists with understandable suspicion. Elisabeth Fox-Genovese, for instance, states, “[s]urely it is no coincidence … that the Western white male elite proclaimed the death of the subject at precisely the moment at which it might have had to share that status with the women and peoples of other races and classes who were beginning to challenge its supremacy” (qtd. in Shohat and Stam 345). Similarly, Debra P. Ampry laments, “[d]oesn’t it seem funny that at the 132

Indeed, it is my contention that the recent proliferation of crisis discourses about “the body” can be attributed, at least in part, to the unveiling of the corporeality of the traditionally unmarked white male body. Obviously, medical and technological advances also have a significant role to play in debates about the limits of embodied subjectivity; however, post- millennium concerns about the contested nature of the flesh in an age of genetics (the prioritising of non-visible difference), sex-change operations, transgendered subjects, cosmetic surgery, organ transplants, prosthetics, steroids, cybernetics, cyberculture and virtual reality - just some of the challenges to the notion of a body which begins and ends at the skin, to paraphrase Donna

Harraway (97) - are also indissociable from the current challenges posed to discourses of white male disembodiment, discourses that, I hope to show, have been a source of both historical privilege and anxiety. For example, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker have argued that we have entered an era dominated by “panic bodies,” a term they use to refer to the medically scrutinised, discursively saturated, media-invaded, exhausted, depthless bodies of postmodernity (22). For the Krokers, millennium panic over the body demonstrates that “the (natural) body in the postmodern condition has already disappeared, and what we experience as the body is only a fantastic simulacra [sic] of body rhetorics” (21-22). Leaving aside the problematic positing of a pre-postmodern “natural body” and the barely-suppressed apocalyptic incantations of this

Western-centric account, what is of most interest here is the fact that it soon becomes apparent that the “panic bodies” they refer to are, in fact, specifically gendered since they go on to assert that “women’s bodies have always been forced to dwell in the dark infinity of the limit and transgression as serial signs” and have always been “an inscribed text” saturated by patriarchal discourse (24). Thus, as Anne Balsamo asks, “if women’s bodies have always been invaded by various rhetorics of power, how then is the disappearance of the body (the invaded body) a new condition endemic to postmodernity? The only possible response is that the disappearing body

very point when women and people of colour are ready to sit down at the bargaining table with the white boys, that the table disappears?” (qtd. in Shohat and Stam 345). 133 actually marks the historically specific identity of the male body as it experiences this corporeal invasion for the first time” (219).

In this section, I wish to explore how the paradox of the "simultaneous overexposure and disappearance of the body” (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects 60), a paradox that is inseparable from discourses of gender and race, has impacted on representations of “white masculinity” in contemporary popular cinema. Cinema itself, of course, is highly complicit in this paradox, offering up for visual consumption the bodies of actors and actresses that are inescapably marked by identity categories - the “mise-en scène of flesh,” to use Patrick Fuery’s phrase (71) - while simultaneously circulating those bodies as commodities in a visual culture that seems to be fast accelerating into Baudrillard’s order of the hyperreal.

Chapter three traces the increased eroticisation of the white male body in popular cinema of the last two decades. The placing of the male body as erotic spectacle disrupts the traditional economy of the gaze, but for stars such as Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, their sexualised bodies have become an indispensable part of their star personas. The genesis of this new trend can be located in the attempts made by retailers in the mid-80s to target women, as well as a new consumer group, moneyed men - a trend I explore in order to uncover the transaction between advertising and cinematic discourses. While cinema also presents male stars as commodities of the flesh, numerous 90s films also narrativise the damage that this process inflicts on normative

(white) masculinity, in particular in alienating the white male from a productive body by violating the traditional gendering of the production/consumption binary. However, at the same time that stars like Brad Pitt were revealing their rippling six-pack stomachs to the fetishising caresses of the camera, the white hypermasculine bodies of stars such as Sylvester Stallone and

Arnold Schwarzeneggger that were showcased in 80s action cinema were accompanied by heavy doses of self-reflexive parody in the 90s, which suggests that the physical values of (white) hypermasculinity can no longer be offered up unproblematically in increasingly high-tech, post- 134 industrial, postfeminist, virtualised (Western) societies.

The crisis caused to white heterosexual masculinity by virtual culture is dealt with more literally (somewhat ironically) in the science fiction fantasies of the 90s, in which predominantly white male bodies “disappeared” into the disembodied realm of cyberspace. In chapter four, I attempt to unpack the associations between historical discourses of white masculine disembodiment and the virtual bodies of 90s science fiction cinema. Virtual bodies potentially offer the fantasy of an identity freed up from the flesh, though their representations in popular cinema are unable to escape a visual regime in which bodies are always raced and gendered.

Importantly, therefore, the depthlessness of cyberculture and virtual disembodiment are primarily represented by the white male protagonist, while women and people of colour often stand in for the Baudrillardian “real” - a reworking of the legacy of the Cartesian and Christian mind/body opposition. Electronic technology itself, however, is coded feminine, often in monstrous corporeal imagery, which no doubt accounts for the white male hero’s ultimate transcendence over the technological in narrative closure, but which also articulates anxieties about the ramifications of a virtual, digital age for normative white masculinity.

I then turn my attention to the paradox that while, in the current moment, boundaries between identities have never seemed so fluid and permeable, never have they seemed so constitutive of material power relations. In other words, although corporealised identity is being challenged not only within academia but also by various cultural and social practices such as transvestism or racial passing, escaping embodied identities has proven difficult, if not impossible, not least because the kind of body one happens to have (however socially constructed it may be) entails concrete, material effects (from access to education or housing to the likelihood of getting raped or stopped by the police). By looking at cinematic representations of identity as a performative construct, I wish to interrogate its ramifications for “white heterosexual masculinity,” which has secured its privileged position as structuring norm through 135 appeals to ontological difference. In so doing, I hope to engage with some of the exciting political potential as well as problematics opened up by constructivist and poststructuralist accounts of the discursively constructed body and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorisations of the radically relational and unstable nature of all identifications.

In chapter five, I analyse the cross-dressing film, giving most attention to “passing” narratives screened within a queer context. In so doing, I wish to explore whether these films render visible the performative structures of normative white masculinity and destabilise the terms by which its invisibility has been traditionally secured, or whether they renaturalise ontologically grounded accounts of gender. I will also analyse the ramifications for hegemonic white male privilege when “white masculinity” is posited as transferable, reiterable or even undesirable.

In chapter six, I will focus on current understandings of “race” as a social and cultural construct on the terrain of both popular culture and critical race studies. What particularly interests me is cinematic representations of white male attractions to African-American culture.

On the one hand, such racial crossovers point to anxieties about the sterility of whiteness, in particular white masculinity; on the other hand, these racial crossovers often reiterate crude stereotypes of black masculinity, much like the minstrel tradition they inevitably rehearse.

Moreover, while white male appropriations of black culture might gesture towards deeper racial understanding, this does not in itself constitute a challenge to racism, which is often elided in any understanding of “race” as a purely cultural marker. In short, white heterosexual masculinity might well be underpinned by concerns of its inner-emptiness, but can also always appeal to a total, universal subjectivity, though one which is always intersected by categories of class and nation, producing an “all and nothing” subjectivity that articulates both privilege and anxiety. 136

CHAPTER 3

Fleshing Out White Heterosexual Masculinity: The Commodification of the

White Male Body

3.1. The White Male Body on Display

In a brief but telling scene in Fight Club (1999), the narrator’s attention is caught by a

Gucci underwear advertisement which displays the torso of a white male cut off at the neck and thighs, offering up the spectacle of a sculptured washboard stomach and amply-filled briefs. The narrator turns to Tyler and indignantly asks, “Is that what a man looks like?” With a grin, Tyler replies, “Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction…” His sentence is left unfinished, though in Palahniuk’s novel Tyler actually states, “[m]aybe self-destruction is the answer” (49). Nonetheless, the implication is the same: that masochism and pain offer the modern male a means of reclaiming ownership over the body and breaking out of an increasingly virtualised culture in which masculinity circulates as image. Indeed, as I argued in chapter two, throughout the film, with a big dose of postmodern irony, male consumerism and sexual objectification, both culturally coded as feminine, are held responsible for the beleaguered state of the male sex, most obviously through the figure of Bob who is castrated and given “bitch tits” seemingly as a punishment for bodybuilding, an activity coded as feminine due to its narcissistic and exhibitionist ends. Yet, at the same time, the fact that it is Brad Pitt who stars as the narrator’s ego-ideal playfully undercuts the narrator’s lament - casting that would suggest that in fact, at least as regards the current mediascape of Hollywood film production and advertising, a

Gucci model is precisely what a man should look like. As if to make this very point, the next scene features a shirtless Tyler wrestling with an opponent, mediated through the narrator’s approving gaze. Tyler eventually wins the fight, stands up triumphantly, allowing the camera to showcase his bare-chested, bronzed body, his trousers dangling loosely around his hips, 137 revealing the developed peps and rippling abdominal and pelvic muscles that launched Pitt’s career in Thelma and Louise (1991). This conflict of discursive and visual content, which characterises the film as a whole, is highly indicative of the instabilities and contradictions of contemporary white heterosexual masculinity, which is increasingly eroticised in the visual culture of late capitalism, despite the obvious anxieties that it causes, especially to the majority of individual men who fail to measure up to the masculine ideal.

Much, then, seems to have changed since Laura Mulvey declared in her seminal article

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (20). Writing in 1975, Mulvey introduced sexual difference into the apparatus theory of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz. Her primary tenet was that “[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (19). Mulvey thus designated the cinematic spectator male, since she believed that mainstream cinema engineered spectatorial identifications structured around male pleasure.

Within her rigid binary schema, the woman connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness” (19) and the narrative invariably freezes to enable her to act as the passive eroticised object of the controlling male gaze, both for the male protagonist and the spectator, who “projects his look on to that of his like, the 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” (20). However, Mulvey argues that while this male gaze is pleasurable, the female figure also poses the threat of castration (21). To allay anxiety, either the original trauma is re- enacted (whereby the woman is demystified and punished or seduced) or the woman is perfected, turned into a fetish object so that she becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (21). Mulvey revisits her claims in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by

King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” published in 1981, and considers films that have a female protagonist “torn between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive 138 masculinity” (30). She also addresses the issue of female pleasure that she had previously overlooked by pursuing the ways in which the female spectator can masculinise herself and identify with the male hero. Nonetheless, her binary schema is still retained.

Mulvey’s essay performed an important critical function in inserting gender into apparatus theory, in addressing how unconscious desires and patriarchal ideology are encoded into the grammar of film, and in moving feminist film theory beyond the impasse of stereotypes and “positive images.” Nonetheless, her rigid formulation has been much criticised for its theoretical stumbling blocks. For instance, Jackie Stacey points out that in Mulvey-inspired feminist film theory, “the female spectator is offered only the three rather frustrating options of masculinisation, masochism or marginality” (247). Mulvey has also been taken to task for ignoring other identity categories that inform cinematic spectatorship. Her heterosexist separation of identification and desire, for instance, overlooks the fact that a homosexual or lesbian spectator might want both to be and to have a screen character.1 bell hooks has also elaborated on how black women have long learnt to formulate “an oppositional gaze” by

“creat[ing] a critical space where the binary opposition Mulvey posits of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ was continually deconstructed” (Black Looks 122-23).2 Mulvey’s model cannot explain such resistant readings. Her formulation of a controlling male gaze also fails to fully take on board psychoanalytic insights about the fluid nature of gendered identifications, not to mention the potential masochistic as well as sadistic pleasures of spectatorship.3 After all, the

1 For example, see Stacey. 2 For a critique of 70s and 80s film theory’s failure to engage with race, see Gaines. 3 In their analysis of Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten,” Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bernard Pontalis argue that identification is not limited to roles but also inclusive of verbs and actions (23). Feminist psychoanalytic theorists such as Elizabeth Cowie have used this insight to argue for highly mobile identifications in cinematic spectatorship (“Fantasia”). Lacanian psychoanalysis also argues that no subject has access to the gaze but only the look (much like the phallus/penis distinction), and Lacan situated the gaze “outside the voyeuristic transaction” (Silverman, Male Subjectivity 130). D.N. Rodowick has also argued that Mulvey ignored the masochistic potential of that fetishism: “Mulvey defines fetishitic scopophilia as an overvaluation of the object, a point which Freud would support. But he would also add that this phenomenon is one of the fundamental sources of authority defined as passive submission to the object: in sum, masochism” (“The Difficulty of Difference” 7). Similarly, Carol Clover argues that viewing pleasure is always sadomasochistic (Men, Women and Chainsaws) (see chapter 8). Gaylyn Studlar has also argued for a cinematic masochistic aesthetic, one formulated in relation to Deleuze’s account of the masochistic aesthetic. 139 objects of psychoanalysis, an explanatory discourse which Mulvey claimed to use as a “political weapon” against patriarchy (14), are precisely fantasy and the unconscious. More importantly for the aims of this chapter, Mulvey’s text, which referred to Classical Hollywood of the Studio Era, now seems rather outdated, particularly with the development of the action heroine and the heightened visibility of the commodified male body. However, this is not to say that the male body has previously been kept under wraps, as Mulvey’s essay suggests: the careers of Rudolph

Valentino, Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brandon and James Dean soon put this idea to rest (see figures

3.1-3.4). The point is surely that male bodies have always been on display, but the cinematic codes through which they are conveyed are historically contingent. For instance, as William

Luhr argues, action stars of earlier generations often displayed their torsos (John Wayne, James

Cagney, Clark Gable, for instance), but they did not have to possess the sculptured, pumped-up look of contemporary Hollywood stars, and while “[t]he representation of masculinity has always been inextricably tied up with issues of power, […] that power has not always been represented in bodily terms” (231).

Steve Neale took up the issue of male objectification in his influential Screen essay

“Masculinity as Spectacle” (1983), in which he argued that any gaze at the male body must be motivated in such a way as to disavow homoerotic desire (281). One such way has been through combat scenes, which permit the pleasurable display of the male form but allay potential homoerotic anxiety by providing the mutilation of the male body as narrative justification for both intra- and extradiegetic gazes (284).4 However, while Neale’s analysis is useful, it retains

She argues that the visual pleasures of cinema include passive submission to the image, as well as the fluidity of identifications, which has its origins in the pre-Oedipal phase of development (29-30). For Studlar, the masochistic aesthetic is a way of theorising cinematic pleasure without recourse to film theory’s preoccupation with Oedipal notions such as castration anxiety and sexual difference “defined exclusively as feminine lack” (29). 4 Neale was building on Paul Willemen’s discussion of the films of Anthony Mann. Willemen argues that Mann’s films are built around the spectacle of the male body: “The viewer’s experience is predicated on the pleasure of seeing the male ‘exist’ (that is walk, move, ride, fight) in or though cityscapes, landscapes or, more abstractly, history. And on the unquiet pleasure of seeing the male mutilated (often quite graphically in Mann) and restored through violent brutality” (16).

140

Mulvey’s binary schema and all its attendant problems (Tasker, Spectacular Bodies 115).

Moreover, Neale, like Mulvey, also seems to consider cinematic signification to be a sealed, hegemonic system within which homoerotic pleasures are wholly abnegated via disavowal.

Indeed, even if the mutilation of male bodies might go some way towards justifying male objectification, that does not mean that those bodies are not consumed as erotic objects, as the huge female and gay following of Hollywood stars such as Jean-Claude Van Damme and Brad

Pitt reveals. Moreover, by assuming, along with Mulvey, that the cinematic apparatus is structured around a heterosexual male gaze, Neale slips into the circular logic of assuming that any display of the male body must necessarily be feminising (Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle”

286; Tasker, Spectacular 115; P. Smith 82). Paul Smith, on the other hand, argues that the male body is frequently eroticised without being feminised, since visual media deploy specific representational strategies for the male body, such as low camera angles, aggressive gazes, the fetishisation of muscles and the use of phallic symbols (82-83). Neale’s agreement with Mulvey that the cinematic apparatus is orchestrated around male pleasure also emphasises the homoerotic gaze at the expense of the active desiring female gaze, which is absent in Neale’s account.

Reading “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Masculinity as Spectacle” for the first time in 1994, I found the dismissal of overt male sexual objectification at odds with my own experience. Most vividly, I recalled, as a teenager, going to see Staying Alive (1983), a film which captured media attention due to the transformation of John Travolta’s body, forged under director Sylvester Stallone’s guidance. The popular media fetishised Travolta’s newly expanded physique, and obsessively scrutinised how many inches he had added to his chest, arms and thighs (see figure 3.5). Although the musical-dance genre partially (though never fully) legitimates the display of the male body, the camera lingered intently over Travolta’s oiled pecs and the skimpy loin cloth he donned for one of the dance performances. Most distinctly, I recall the empowering sense of transgression when, during a scene in which John Travolta takes a 141 shower, I joined in with the wolf whistles and screams from the teenage girls who made up the majority of the audience. John Travolta, of course, is an interesting case in point since he was one of the first male stars to appear on the big screen wearing nothing but his briefs in Saturday

Night Fever (1977). For Steve Neale, Saturday Night Fever is “[a] particularly clear and interesting example” of male “feminisation” common to the musical (“Masculinity as Spectacle”

286); however, I think that the film is best understood as representative of the emergence of new visual codes of representing the male body at a time when alternative models of masculinity, culturally understood as more androgynous, were emerging in the post-counter-cultural disco age. Travolta also caused a stir more recently when he stripped out of his clothes in Pulp Fiction

(1994), revealing a body that was pasty-white and overweight, particularly in comparison with the slim, toned, black body of co-star Samuel Jackson. Reactions to Travolta's weight gain are a sharp reminder that male bodies, just like female ones, are also caught up in discourses that legitimise certain bodies and delegitimise others in accordance with the historically contingent ideals perpetuated by visual culture, particularly popular cinema and the advertising industry

(see figure 3.6).

In this respect, the world of advertising and popular cinema are inextricably linked. They are also connected in other ways. The current generation of directors were not only “weaned on advertising” (M. Smith 13), but often started out directing advertisements (Fight Club’s David

Fincher is a case in point), while numerous actors take advantage of their star personas to endorse products in a range of advertising media. Hollywood’s increased reliance on product placement has also rendered many films themselves a new showground for advertising, such as

Top Gun (1986), which made Rayban Aviator sunglasses and flying jackets instantly desirable products (P. Gibson 178). While television advertisements and magazine fashion stills employ many different visual codes from cinematic representations, primarily due to the kinetic and narrative thrust of cinema, which can help alleviate anxieties over the passive, objectified male 142 body, these different media undoubtedly also interact and inform each other. Consequently, in the following section I wish to summarise the innovations in representations of the male body in the arena of advertising, paying particular attention to the underwear advertisement stills that flourished in the mid- to late-80s, before analysing the impact of the increased erotic commodification of the white male body in popular cinema on both a visual level - how popular cinema screens white male bodies - and a discursive level - how that commodification is offered up as one of the definitive causes of white heterosexual male angst.

3.2. Sex, Flies and Underpants: The White Male Body as Commodity

The first television advertisement to conjure up male sexuality “through the commodity”

(Mort 201) is widely considered to be the 1985 Levi advertisement, “Launderette,” which instantly made Nick Kaman a household name (see figure 3.7). Kaman nonchalantly strolls into the laundrette, undresses down to his boxer shorts, and, to the astonishment of the admiring female audience he has acquired, proceeds to put his jeans in the washing machine. For Steve

Nixon, the fragmentation of Kaman’s body, coupled with the fetishisation of the belt buckle and flies, “undercuts the more established codes of aggression and power associated with masculine display,” resulting in a tension between hardness, softness and sensuality that characterises the

New Man (2).5 Throughout, our look at Kaman’s white male body is mediated through the gaze of giggling women, a technique shared by the 1994 Diet Coke advertisement “Eleven O’Clock

Appointment” that more explicitly foregrounds active female desire: a group of office women excitedly await the sight of a beefy, white, working-class construction worker stripping off his shirt and knocking back a coke outside their window, passive but for the gulping of his Adam’s apple. Both advertisements mobilise female and homosexual desire, yet they are also obviously

5 Numerous 80s advertisements employed new images of a softer, more sensitive masculinity to advertise their products for a female market. See Rutherford, “Who’s That Man” and Nixon.

143 directed at heterosexual male consumers, reassuring them that taking pride in one’s appearance

(wearing tight jeans, consuming diet products) does not make them any less of a man.6

While both advertisements use the mediating female gaze to allow the straight male audience to take pleasure in looking at these desirable male physiques without homoerotic anxiety, the still photography of advertising posters in the late 80s and early 90s, such as the

Gucci advertisement that outrages Fight Club’s narrator, tended to offer a more autoerotic or even homoerotic version of masculinity. Many magazine and billboard advertisements heterosexualised their imagery by employing the New Man motif of fatherhood or placing a female model on the scene, but one of the marked shifts in the mid-80s was the use of the solitary, nude, male torso. In most cases, it was cut off at the hips, teasing with the promise of what remains off-frame: as with the majority of visual representations of the male body, the penis was hidden from view since, in the words of Richard Dyer, “the penis isn’t a patch on the phallus” (“Don’t Look Now” 274).7 As well as being cut off below the waist, many nude male bodies were also cut off above the shoulders, which not only directed attention towards bulging peps or rippling stomach muscles, but also, in Mark Simpson’s queer reading, allowed the male viewer to identify with the model more freely, as well as securing that body as an object rather than desiring subject (106).

The majority, though not all of these advertisements, used white models. Black models were occasionally used, though often placed in what Susan Bordo terms aggressive “face-off” stances (186) (see figure 3.8), while for this style of advertisement, Asian male models were

6 Pepsi took a very different stance in its attempts at product differentiation, targeting Pepsi Max (sugar-free but without “diet” in the title and with extra caffeine) at men through the kinetic imagery of extreme sports. 7 However, a recent controversy-courting Yves Saint Laurent advertisement for M7 aftershave features (at least for a European audience - America being offered only the censored version) the spectacle of a reclining, full-frontal nude, white male model who offers both himself and his flaccid penis up to the gaze. However, since the model looks away from the camera, as if photographed off-guard, suggesting that full frontal nudity combined with a returned gaze would render him too self-aware a sex object even for this audacious campaign. Nonetheless, this does not detract from the fact that it would seem that at this stage of capitalism, anything can be commodified in the name of profit, even the most revered of organs.

144 rarely used, an exclusion which rehearses racist discourses that feminise and/or desexualise

Asian men, though the recent phenomenon of actor Chow Yun-Fat as sex object hopefully points to shifts in discourses of Asian masculinity.8 Steve Maynard has analysed how Bruce Weber’s black and white photographs for Calvin Klein underwear - which show white men, in white underwear, set against black backgrounds - emphasise the models’ whiteness (qtd. in Dyer,

White 76). This allows these images to play into the classical imagery of Greek sculptures: these artefacts of the male body are made by male hands for males, and like the Greek ideal, offer white, smooth boyishness (Simpson 110). This reminds us that despite the Christian and

Cartesian discourses of white men transcending their bodies, a point I discuss more fully below, there is a substantial history of white male bodies acting as objects of the gaze.9 However, when in colour, a bronzed or olive skin tone is preferred, not only to offset the white underwear, but also because of the cultural allusions of exoticism - the lure of what bell hooks terms a “bit of the other” (Black Looks 22). In other words, while white models are preferred, they should not be

“too white,” a fact that reveals that whiteness is always underwritten by fears of ordinariness.

These flesh tone dynamics are evident in Bruce Weber’s huge, traffic-stopping Times Square billboard advertisement of pole-vaulter Tom Hinthaus (see figure 3.9), which inaugurated Calvin

Klein’s now legendary and hugely successful male underwear campaign in 1983 - advertisements that were so popular that poster versions on bus shelters in Manhattan literally

8 These discourses can be historically grounded. Anti-Asian immigration control in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century restricted the entry of Asian women into America. This produced bachelor communities of Asian men, who were then labelled effeminate (Frankenberg, “Introduction” 14). Asians were also barred from many jobs in the 19th century, and were forced to work in areas that were deemed feminine, such as in laundries or as house-servants. These restrictions inevitably produced ideologies that feminised Asian- American masculinity. For instance, Asian actor Marc Hayashi has stated that Asian-American men “are the eunuchs of America” (qtd. in Bordo 51). Cultural theorist Richard Fung points out that in cinematic representations even samurai warriors and martial arts masters are “characterised by a desexualised Zen asceticism” (qtd. in Bordo 51). Susan Bordo cites the “affably asexual” Jackie Chan as a case in point (51), noting the amazement of Western critics” at Chow Yun-Fat’s sex appeal in his American debut The Replacement Killers (1998): “The (rather Western- looking) Fat was arguably the first Asian actor permitted to be sexy, to be ‘manly,’ in a Hollywood movie” (52). 9 It also reminds us that notions of “ideal bodies” are always historically bound. For instance, Susan Bordo notes that although Ancient Greece was “a highly masculinist culture,” it was “also one that placed great emphasis on male self-control in matters of sexuality” and “favoured ‘small’ and ‘taut’ genitals” (75).

145 disappeared overnight (Bordo 181). Hinthaus is every inch the Olympic ideal, shot against a white wall reminiscent of Greek island architecture that shows off his tanned, athletic body to perfection, from a low camera angle which amplifies his towering stature. Although his arm and leg muscles are taut, this image does not readily fall into Richard Dyer’s analysis of earlier male pin-ups, where in order to allay anxieties over the violation of visual gender codes, “[e]ven when not actually caught in an act, the male image still promises activity by the way the body is posed” (“Don’t Look Now” 270). Rather, Hinthaus leans languorously back, with his eyes closed, seemingly unaware of the gaze he is courting, as if lost in a moment of narcissistic self- absorption.

As years progressed, Calvin Klein’s advertisements became more daring, such as the jeans advertisement featuring Marcus Schenkenberg, whose flexed muscular arm clasps the fetishised button fly of his jeans to his genitals, eroticising him through the product, while the headless version, without the face to distract us, causes the eye to home immediately in on the crotch (see figures 3.10 and 3.11). With the 1993 campaign, Calvin Klein used the white rap singer Marky Mark, exploiting his huge gay following, caused in part by his penchant for grabbing his crotch on stage.10 Marky Mark’s extraordinary whiteness, referenced through his appropriation of a traditionally black cultural form, allowed him to tap into visual and fashion codes associated with “hip-hop” masculinity (crotch grabbing, baggy loose-fitting trousers, aggressive facial expressions), and in many advertisements, potential feminisation or homoeroticism is offset through the promotion of an image of a “reluctantly used-and-abused body” (MacKinnon 97) (see figures 3.12 and 3.13). Other versions, though, deliver up Marky

Mark’s narcissistic enjoyment at being objectified, as he grins unabashed at the camera (see figure 3.14). Moreover, the cupping of the genitals foregrounds the fact that these advertisements

10 Marky Mark was soon dropped by Calvin Klein when a scandal irrupted concerning his alleged homophobia and racism.

146 do little to undermine the “size matters” supposition. It is fitting, then, that Marky Mark (or Mark

Wahlberg, as he is now known) went on to play Dirk Diggler, a porn-star with a thirteen inch penis, in Boogie Nights (1997).

However, it is also important to note that advertising images of men are not monolithic.

Later, Calvin Klein also led the way in exhibiting more androgynous masculinities, such as in its

2001-02 campaign using Travis Flimmel, whose strong jaw-line, flexed arms and tilted pelvis are counter-balanced by his tousled blonde hair and necklace (see figures 3.15 and 3.16). Calvin

Klein was also the first to promote a unisex fragrance, CK One, marketed through younger, slimmer, more waif-like models than the inaugural Greek torso look. The CK One campaign also used more Asian male models than its underwear advertisements, presumably because stereotypical notions of Asian feminisation seemed suited to the fragrance’s unisex appeal - a fact that underscores the importance of race in any consideration of the commodified male body

(see figures 3.17 and 3.18).

For Mark Simpson, these advertisements are subversive of normative white masculinity since they “passively invite a gaze that is undifferentiated: it might be female or male, hetero or homo. Traditional male heterosexuality, which insists that it is always active, sadistic and desiring, is now inundated with images of men’s bodies as passive, masochistic and desired” (4).

He argues that traditional masculinity cannot survive the positioning of men as passive, narcissistic objects since “it brings masculinity into perilously close contact with that which must always be disavowed: homosexuality” (4). At the same time, while these images certainly attest to the increased visibility of gay culture, at least in urban Britain and North America, it must be remembered that “the willingness to consume homoerotic and/or homosexual images does not correspond to a cultural willingness to stand against homophobia or challenge heterosexism”

(hooks, Outlaw Culture 14). Frank Mort regards the trend of encouraging men to view themselves and other men as objects of consumer desires to be suggestive of “a space for some 147 new visual codes of masculinity” (198), and contends that these developments are not just purely in “the service of capital” (214) but also a response to social change since “[t]he cultures of consumption are the point where the market meets popular experience and lifestyles on the ground” (215). Nonetheless, the creation of a new male market for products, which can only work to strengthen the ever-tightening grip of corporate capitalism, need not work to destabilise gender power relations, as Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrates in The Hearts of Men (1983), her analysis of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, which taught men that hedonism, rampant consumption and narcissism could function as a rebellion against 50s ideologies of the domesticated male-as- breadwinner.

Nonetheless, as far as popular cinema is concerned, it is certainly the case that an alternative space for the representation of (white) male bodies does seem to have been opened up in recent years, with some of the codes of filming the male body in advertisements having been imported into popular cinematic texts - admittedly, primarily those with an implicit female address. While most often the fetishisation of the white male body is still accompanied by violence, mutilation and the kinetic drive of narrative, there are examples of moments when the white male body is offered up as pure sex object in a manner that is in obvious dialogue with the jeans and underwear advertisements of the late 80s. The example that springs most readily to mind is Thelma and Louise (1991), Ridley Scott’s feminist road movie cum western, which features Brad Pitt, who, in the same year, found fame for his appearance in a Levi jeans advertisement, “Camera” (see figures 3.19 - 3.21). Brad Pitt’s character, J.D., is first introduced through Thelma’s (Geena Davies) active desiring gaze (“Did you see his butt?”). In the celebrated sex scene, in which J.D. gives Thelma her first orgasm, the film joins American

Gigolo (1980) in being one of the few films to posit the function of the male body as being to give pleasure to women (De Lauretis 83; Lehman, Running Scared 20). Counter to Mulvey’s schema, it is J.D.’s body that initially freezes the narrative: in a three-quarter shot, the camera 148 lingers over his bare chest and unbuttoned jean flies, much like the Levi advertisements to which the film intertextually refers, before slowly panning upward, caressing the undulations of his sculptured physique, which is noticeably slimmer than the pumped-up bodies showcased in the male-addressed action movies of the period (see figure 3.22). J.D. does not return the gaze of the camera but stares off-screen at what later turns out to be Thelma lying down before him. As he pulls her towards him, the camera then focuses on Thelma’s taut stomach muscles, a parallel shot that draws attention to the similarities rather than differences with which the male and female body are fragmented in this scene. Nonetheless, the camera’s gaze at J.D. is objective, preventing

Pitt’s body from being relayed through Thelma’s point of view. In this respect, the film is remarkably similar to its predecessor, American Gigolo, which “profoundly equivocates as it offers up Gere’s body” (Lehman, Running Scared 17). The famed nude scene is initially filmed through his female lover’s point of view but cuts to an objective long shot when Gere stands up to look outside the window, which “denies the woman’s point of view and de-emphasises the man’s genitals” (17). Thus, even those scenes which are unusual in foregrounding male to-be- looked-at-ness are still less audacious than their underwear advertisement equivalents, which, unlike Hollywood’s attempt to court as large an audience as possible, often target a specifically female and gay market.11 Indeed, despite cinema’s complicity in commodifying the male body

(invariably through a multi-layered process of disavowal), popular films have recently addressed this tendency as a social problem in its ongoing narrativisation of “(white) masculinity in crisis.”

3.3. Anxieties of the Flesh: The Commodified White Male Body as a Social Problem

The anxieties provoked by the objectification of the white male body are inextricable from the fact that it has been the traditional right of moneyed white heterosexual masculinity to

11 In fact, the designer underwear company 2(x)ist originally distributed its products solely to gay speciality stores in large cities, though it has recently attempted to heterosexualise its imagery (Walton). But these advertisements also court an active female gaze, since more than 50% of male designer underwear is bought by women (Walton). 149 represent itself as disembodied. Feminist philosophy and Derridean Deconstruction have traced the ways in which the mind/body dualism of Western metaphysical thought has been gendered so as to privilege male rationality over female embodiment. While physical strength has been a determining characteristic of modern, capitalist, Western masculinity, especially working-class masculinity, the focus has often been on production and activity, along with a stoical transcendence of pain and bodily needs, which is rooted in the Christian separation of spirit and flesh.12 Nonetheless, working-class white masculinity has a history of being inscribed through discourses of sexuality, as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) illustrates, which is no doubt why the Levi and Diet coke advertisements I discussed earlier feature working-class characters, and another reason why the fashion advertisements directed at middle-class males able to afford designer labels cause such anxiety. Furthermore, as Richard Dyer analyses, whiteness has also been historically associated with disembodiment, partly through the Christian privileging of spirit over flesh, despite the contradiction that the white male body stretched out on the crucifix is the basis of Christian imagery (White 15-16). This is not to suggest that

Christianity is essentially white but to posit it as one of the prime discourses of white superiority deployed by colonialist and imperialist Europe (17).13 Women and people of colour, conversely, have commonly been represented as being at the mercy of their bodies. In the case of African-

Americans, this notion of hyperembodiment has its roots in slavery, where blacks were literal commodities, exploited for their labour (both in the physical and child-bearing sense), and even today, the commonly held assumption is that blacks are more “physical” than whites, not only in terms of their mythical hyperbolic sexuality but also their alleged “natural” superior athleticism -

12 Obviously, this is historically contingent, as Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) demonstrates so beautifully, screening the foppish upper-class masculinity of the 17th and 18th century, which is now understood as effeminate. 13 As Dyer is quick to point out, “Christianity developed initially within Judaism, […] one of its foundational thinkers was the North African Augustine, and […] it is now most alive in Africa, South America and the black churches of Europe and North America” (17). But Christianity has significantly marked Western-European consciousness, and its Manichean dualisms were mapped onto racial difference, reinforcing the doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism (17).

150 a belief that conveniently forgets both the hard work that goes into producing such disciplined bodies and the historical reasons that might account for black sporting successes (such as assumptions embedded in the education system about black abilities, black exclusion from more cerebral professions, sport being the only ticket out of the ghettoes for young blacks), as well as reinforcing racist notions of black primitivism.14

The very fact that appeals to disembodiment have been a source of historical representational strength for normative white masculinity, allowing it to lay claim to the universal identity, suggests that its “corporealisation” would necessarily provoke certain anxieties - not only through the inevitable marking of the universal body as a gendered and raced category, but also because of the fact that it would bring that body perilously close to the side of the binary historically reserved for its others, as well as unsettling those binary operations, and by extension, white patriarchal hegemonic norms, in the process. For this reason, male re- embodiment has been suggested as a political praxis by certain theorists. Feminist theorist Rosi

Braidotti, for instance, joins Luce Irigaray in calling “for the melt-down of the male symbolic in order to provide for the radical re-enfleshing of both men and women” (“Feminism” 54).15 As

Calvin Thomas notes, Braidotti does not discuss “what a radical reenfleshing of men would look like or how it might proceed” (71), but the fact that the history of male disembodiment has impinged so fully on women lends the political project of male reenfleshment “a certain feminist urgency” (71). From a different theoretical perspective, sociologist Robert Connell makes a similar argument: “A politics of social justice needs to change body-reflexive practice, not by

14 For a rejection of the assumption that blacks are naturally superior athletes, see Cashmore 97-116. 15 Irigaray famously celebrates the specificity of the female body in order to subvert the mind/body hierarchy. In an opposite move, certain male post-structuralists, such as Derrida and Deleuze, have suggested that men attempt to “become woman” in order to displace the rational, humanist, Cartesian subject. However, this version of male feminisation forgets about the real flesh and blood female subject (S. Moore 170), and as Rosi Braidotti states, “one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted; one cannot diffuse a sexuality that has historically been defined as dark and mysterious. In order to announce the death of the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one; in order to demystify metadiscourse one must first gain access to a place of enunciation” (Nomadic Subjects 141).

151 losing agency but by extending it, working through the agency of the body […] Rather than disembodiment involved in role reform, this requires re-embodiment for men, a search for different ways of using, feeling and showing male bodies” (233). Both Braidotti and Connell could be taken to task for failing to consider the import of race in their notions of re-embodiment

(what would it mean for an African-American male, already saturated by discourses of physicality and hypersexuality, to “re-embody” himself, for instance?). Moreover, certainly

Braidotti and Connell did not have Calvin Klein underwear advertisements in mind as a form of

“radical reenfleshing.” Nonetheless, it would appear that contemporary “ornamental culture,” to use Susan Faludi’s term, which propagates the notion “that masculinity is something to drape over the body, […] that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated” (Stiffed 35),16 is certainly disruptive of conventional notions of white normative masculinity since it forces white men to experience themselves as embodied erotic objects as well as desiring subjects. I am not for a moment suggesting that the commodification of the male body will help achieve the goals of feminism, despite its transgression of the established visual economy (a transgression that I, as a heterosexual female subject, must admit to finding liberating and pleasurable on many levels) since it demonstrates the permeation of commodity culture into our lived experiences, and subjects men to the same alienations from their bodies that women have historically endured.

Moreover, in 90s popular cinema, these concerns are often expressed through a discourse of white male victimisation where women are implicitly blamed for the perceived feminisation of culture, while the representational strategies used to screen the male body in such films are equally recuperative.

16 In Stiffed, Faludi argues that we now live in an “ornamental culture” which “encourages people to play almost no functional public roles, only decorative or consumer ones” (35). Men are no longer encouraged to be part of a larger social system (35). Instead, they are “losing the very society they were once essential to” and “‘gaining’ the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanising” (39). For Faludi, “ornamental culture” is more damaging to men than to women since, however degrading, women’s sexual objectification did not threaten their sexual identity (451) - a comment that takes femininity as a given rather than exploring how it is produced through discursive practices.

152

A key example is The Full Monty (1997), the comic scenarios of which work to both evoke and deny anxieties centred on the white male body. For instance, as the unemployed steel workers exercise in Gerald’s gym in order to get fit for their planned strip, whilst flipping through a pornographic magazine, Lomper comments that a model’s “tits are too big,” a comment that results in the following amusing dialogue:

Dave: Well, I just pray they’re a bit more understanding about us, that’s all.

Horse: You what?

Dave: Well, they’re gonna be looking at us like that, aren’t they, eh? I mean, what if next

Friday, 400 women turn around and say, he’s too fat, he’s too old, and he’s a

pigeon-chested little tosser? What then?

Horse: They wouldn’t say that, would they?

Dave: Why not? He said her tits are too big.

Lomper: That’s different. We’re blokes.

Of course, it turns out that things are not that different, and the thought of parading their bodies before a female audience causes Gary and his friends to experience self-consciousness about their bodies for the first time, with Dave even shutting himself up in the shed and wrapping himself up in clingfilm in a vain bid to lose weight, whilst munching miserably on a Mars bar.

The film’s narration of “the emergence of the working-class male body as an eroticised object” is largely represented “as a social problem” (Tincknell and Chambers 152), and inextricable from the gloomy backdrop of deindustrialisation. Whereas these men’s bodies had been essential to their identities as working-class men - most of them were skilled manual labourers - they are now called upon to fulfil a purely decorative function, a fact further symbolised by Dave’s impotence, which, the film suggests, is rooted in his feelings of emasculation in a social order that denies him the right to work. The film would thus seem to concur with Jean Baudrillard, who proclaims that “[p]ostmodernity then is no longer an age in which bodies produce 153 commodities, but where commodities produce bodies” (qtd. in Faurschou 82). Hence the paradox of the "simultaneous overexposure and disappearance of the body” (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

60): the more the body circulates and proliferates as image in visual culture, the more it also seems to disappear into the realm of the virtual, profoundly alienating subjects from their enfleshed selves.

Stripping, the ultimate form of eroticised display (along with pornography), is designated as emasculating from the outset: when Gary sees a poster advertising the Chippendale male strippers, he immediately classes them as “poofs,” ridicules the size of their penises (“There’s nowt at the gym that’ll help you there, mate”) and later protests, “You call them Chippendales men? Degrading, that’s what it were.” Here Gary invokes feminist rhetoric, though what the film’s humour makes clear is that the male and female body have very different histories of representation. Indeed, it is hard to envisage a hit comedy about a group of average-looking, unemployed women obsessing about their imperfect bodies and eventually stripping to the howls of good-natured laughter from the audience, including among its members one of their husbands.

(Demi Moore’s Striptease [1996], which provided many titillating shots of Moore’s, or, rather, her body double’s exploits, comes more readily to mind.) In fact, despite its discursive suggestion that male bodies are now treated in the same ways as female ones, the representational strategies of The Full Monty tell a different story. The camera does not eroticise the bodies of its male characters, in part attributable to the legacy of British “New Wave” social realism, which casts ordinary-looking actors in its attempt to distinguish itself from Hollywood.

Indeed, most humour in the film stems from the fact that Gary’s crew are the unlikeliest bunch of strippers imaginable, except for Guy, who later turns out to be gay. Gary and Lomper are scrawny and pasty-white, Gerald and Horse are middle-aged, while Dave is overweight. As a consequence, there is none of the lingering, fetishistic camerawork deployed in Thelma and

Louise. Rather, during the auditions, when a panel of Gary, Gerald, Dave and Nathan determine 154 whether those auditioning have good enough bodies or stripping potential, the gazes of the panel are filmed through medium-long and long shots that do not belong to any individual character, thereby defusing a scene with great potential homoerotic anxiety. Similar objective medium-long and long shots are deployed when the men first strip down to their underpants in front of each other. Comedy also cancels out the possibility of same-sex desire as Dave mutters, “No looking and no laughing, you bastards,” Gerald laments, “I used to ‘ave a proper job, me,” and the men ridicule each other’s physique. Only Guy stands up proud, exhibiting his toned, muscular torso.

Nonetheless, the film does engage with the question of homoerotic desire. The group of bailiffs who arrive to take away Gerald’s possessions scuttle away in homophobic panic when they encounter the sight of a group of half-naked men in the living room. Moreover, the scene where

Guy and Lomper escape from the police and clamber clumsily through Lomper’s bedroom window wearing nothing but their miniscule red leather thongs unexpectedly results in a meaningful embrace, though physical sexual acts, including kissing, remain safely off-screen.

The implied female audience of the strip scene itself, as Kate Domaille notes, does allow more close-ups and bodily fragmentation (28), though despite the fetishistic police uniforms and leather thongs (see figures 3.23 and 3.24), this scene, which concludes with a freeze frame revealing a line of naked male buttocks filmed from a long shot, is played for its comic value, as the intercutting shots of the laughing audience ensure.

The men’s lack of concern about their appearance, with the exception of Guy, works to render them authentic in an increasingly inauthentic world. The film is thus infused with melodramatic nostalgia for a time when male bodies were more than pure surface. Fight Club, as we have seen, harbours a similar lament, albeit laced with tongue-in-cheek satire. The yuppie serial killer narrator of American Psycho (2000), Patrick Bateman, also regards violence as being the way in which men can experience the Real of the male body in hyperreal culture. Bateman himself is pure simulacrum, an assembly of male images taken from the visual culture that 155 surrounds him (see figure 3.25). Even when he has sexual intercourse, he is obsessed with his own reflection in the mirror, flexing his muscles to show off his toned body to perfection.

Moreover, while Bateman and his friends rampantly consume, they are never shown producing; rather their working day consists of an endless round of compliments on appearance and attempts to make reservations at exclusive restaurants. As Bateman gets ready for work, his voiceover lists the beauty products he uses, a device also deployed in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel to communicate the total penetration of consumerism into every facet of 80s yuppie culture.

Moreover, as Nick James points out, this “super-feminine level of interest in beauty care as he prepares for the intensely masculine world of Wall Street” is represented as if he were “putting on an armour” (23-24). Bateman’s narcissistic pleasure at his own “hard body,” represented visually in the film through the use of hard-lighting, which bounces off Bateman’s face as if he were as plastic as a shop mannequin (aided by Christina Bale’s chillingly affectless performance), suggests the same need to shore up the boundaries of the ego (which Freud notes is “first and foremost a bodily ego” [“The Ego and the Id” 364]) in order to protect it from leaky, fluid, abject female bodies that Theweleit traced in fascist soldiers. As we have seen, for

Theweleit, the desire for “armoured egos” can be traced to a simultaneous fear of and desire for the pre-Oedipal phase, when the male subject experiences a lack of bodily boundaries and an incoherent ego. Discussing male fantasies of violence against women, he thus rhetorically asks,

“[c]ould it be that the fear of dissolution through union with a woman actually causes desire to fall from its object, then transform itself into a representation of violence?” (1: 45).17 This could certainly act as an interpretation of Bateman’s serial killing, yet his monstrous need to penetrate

17 As Lynn Segal argues, there are several shortcomings to Theweleit’s explanation of fascism (119). Firstly, Theweleit asserts, “I don’t want to make any categorical distinction between the types of men who are the subjects of this book and all other men. Our subjects are equivalent to the tip of the patriarchal iceberg, but it’s what lies beneath the surface that really makes the water cold” (2: 17). However, as Segal notes, not all the Freikorps soldiers that Theweleit records became Nazis, while his analysis also lacks biographical accounts of the suffocating mothering Theweleit claims these men endured (119). His analysis also lacks substantial analysis of historical events that might have shaped “warrior men” (119). There is also no mention of actual women in his account, and female fascists do not receive “even a passing mention” (119-20). 156 and mutilate the bodies of his victims also seems to function as a means of puncturing the tyranny of the image and laying claim to a lost, primal masculinity.18 His grizzly dismemberment of his predominantly female victims can thus be read as “producing the torn and leaking and opened body” as “proof” of sexual difference (Seltzer 144). This need for self-distinction, as I argue in chapter eight, is inextricable from his status as moneyed white heterosexual male - the one identity that can lay claim to no obvious particularity - grounds both for privilege but also the nagging fear that it is a fundamentally sterile, depleted, depthless subjectivity.

The Real Blonde (1998), a satirical, parodic examination of the American glamour industry, is also concerned with authenticity, or the lack thereof, particularly as regards the male body. The film pivots around the relationship between a struggling actor, Jo (Mathew Modine), an archetypal “angry young man,” and Mary (Catherine Keener), a make-up artist, though the battle of sexes narrative screens other concerns about white heterosexual masculinity, which, as with The Full Monty, focus relentlessly on the male body. This angst comes to the fore when the only part Jo is offered is that of an extra in a Madonna video, where even Madonna proves to be a stand-in who, not coincidentally, is not a real blonde. Jo may be one of hundreds of men to appear in the video, but he is the only one to turn up pasty-white in striped boxer shorts: all the other men are tanned, toned and decked out in tight briefs. Jo, whose body is never eroticised by the camera, is soon sent to the back of the stage because he doesn’t have the “right kind of arse.”

The central role allotted the to-be-looked-at-ness of the male body in this superficial world

(where the female model who claims to be “a spiritual person” quotes from Disney’s The Little

Mermaid!) is furthered in the photo-shoots that Mary attends. Here, male models elicit more attention than female ones, and the female photographer frequently reminds them that what she

18 The notion of pain enabling physical contact with the body is also played out in J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (1985), where the narrator notes that a car crash “was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopaedia of pains and discharges” (39).

157 wants is “beautiful tight abs.” The artificiality of these bodies is underscored when a make-up artist sprays them with paint to highlight muscle tone, a scene not unlike the need to boost the bulge in a male model’s pants in the Greek comedy Safe Sex (1999). The link between a well- built physique and normative masculinity is further debunked when a camp Italian model farts during a photo-shoot, promptly bursts into tears, and then rushes off into the arms of his gay partner for consolation, mortified that he has passed wind before a lady. Like The Full Monty, then, The Real Blonde suggests that normative white masculinity does not sit comfortably with the commodified male body. However, although both films articulate concerns about male sexuality in a manner which debunks myths about phallic male subjectivity, they do so in narratives that ridicule the objectified male body, in part through designating it homosexual, while offering a comic, feel-good factor through the ultimate triumph of the straight white male protagonists. In the case of The Real Blonde, only Jo’s white, normative masculinity is authentic: he is the film’s only “real blonde.”19

It is not coincidental, therefore, that the actors who end up dancing with Madonna in the video are not only coded as gay, but are also black. Like The Full Monty - where Dave asks his wife if she would ever consider going out with a black man because of their great bodies - The

Real Blonde rehearses anxieties that the white male body is unable to measure up (literally) to its black other, an anxiety that is always undergridded by the mythology of the black male penis. As

Kaja Silverman puts it:

The differentiation of the white man from the black man on the basis of the black

man’s hyperbolic penis consequently reverberates in disturbing ways within the

domain of gender. It places the white man on the side of “less” rather than

19 As well as being played off against the narcissistic masculinity of the models, Jo is also coded as authentic through comparison with his soap-star friend, Bob (Maxwell Caulfield), whose search for a “real blonde” (verified by a quick glance at women’s pubic hair) gives the film its Aryan title. Ironically, though, when Bob really does find the genuine article in fellow soap-star, Kelly (Daryl Hannah), he is unable to perform.

158

“more,” and so, threatens to erase the distinction between him and the white

woman. This is the primary reason, I would argue, why the body of the black man

disrupts the unity of the white male corporeal ego. (Threshold 31)

In the case of The Full Monty, one can only speculate how the film would have been different had the original idea of an all-black cast been adhered to. As it is, the sole black male character,

Horse, so-named, the men speculate, because of his “big wanger,” buys a penis pump because of his fears of inadequacy. Indeed, while his presumably self-chosen nick-name attests to his own ideological investment in prevalent notions of black hypersexuality, the film in fact demystifies the stereotype, though in a way that might well complicate representations of black masculinity, but also risks emasculating him and thereby allaying white male paranoia.

Once Gary announces they will be going “full monty,” the penis and its discontents concern all the male characters except for Guy, who can’t sing or dance but promptly lands the job of stripper when he drops his pants to reveal his wares (off-screen, of course), the size of which can be gauged by the gaping astonishment of the auditioning panel and Gary’s quip:

“Gentlemen, the lunchbox has landed!” When Gerald first overhears Gary’s money-making scheme, he jokes that the audience will have to bring their own microscopes. Later, though,

Gerald panics about having an erection on stage, and Lomper worries that women will come armed with scissors. On the one hand, such anxieties disrupt the phantasmatic penis-phallus equation, and reveal how profoundly this slippage alienates men from their own bodies (Lehman,

Running Scared 36), though at the same time, it might offer male spectators masochistic pleasures or even a means of containing castration anxiety, as Peter Lehman argues with regard to the role of penis size jokes in popular cinema (Running Sacred 125). Yet, on the other hand, the fact that the entire narrative thrust of the film builds up to the pseudo-revelation of the male genitals works to reaffirm the hegemony of the penis, allotting it the quintessential role in defining male subjectivity and sexuality. In this sense, The Full Monty illustrates Peter Lehman’s 159 argument that images of the male body are trapped by the dichotomy of spectacular phallic power or its collapse in the same way that the representation of woman is shaped by the mother/whore dichotomy (Running Scared 31). In later work, though, Lehman suggests a third category, which challenges conventional representations: the melodramatic penis, which is neither phallic spectacle nor its comic collapse (“Crying” 26). A key example is Neil Jordan’s

The Crying Game (1992), where the revelation of the penis of the male-to-female transvestite,

Dil (Jaye Davidson), is screened in a melodramatic mode (see chapter five). As Lehman contends, “[p]enises, it seems, must elicit an extremely strong response from us, and if awe and laughter do not define the full range of such responses, melodrama is standing by” (26-7).20

In “The Signification of the Phallus” Lacan noted that the phallus “can play its role only when veiled” (319).21 For Dyer, then, “[t]he limp penis can never match up to the [phallic] mystique that has kept it hidden from view for the last couple of centuries” (“Don’t Look Now”

275). Peter Lehman similarly argues that the revelation of the male genitals always risks upsetting the penis-phallus equation upon which patriarchy is founded (Running Scared 109). It is thus important that despite The Full Monty’s willingness to screen the men’s failure to measure up to the phallic fantasy, visually the penis is still kept under wraps: in the climactic performance, as the men strip down from their police uniforms (that in the world of the male sex industry have always worked to eroticise state power and institutionalised male authority), police helmets shield the penis from view, and once the helmets are flung aside, we, unlike the intradiegetic spectators, are only offered a view from behind.22 In this respect, The Full Monty joins countless other popular films, such as Basic Instinct (1992) and The Piano (1993), in

20 Nonetheless, it is important that this melodramatic penis is both black and transsexual, and therefore a threat to the white heterosexual male, Fergus (Stephen Rea), who discovers it on his “girlfriend.” See chapter 5. 21 Here Lacan is referring to the phallus as signifier of lack, noting that it is “a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier” (319). 22 Peter Cattaneo explains his choice through stating, “I think a freeze-frame of six-guy’s genitals would have taken it from the magical to the medical, very quickly. I really wanted it to be ‘Wow they did it!’ not ‘How big are their dicks?’” (qtd. in Domaille 15). 160 displaying their stars through rear nudity but shying away from frontal shots.23 Obviously, a lot of these choices are also informed through censorship laws - the display of the male sexual organ normally immediately pushes the film into a NC-17 ratings category (admittance prohibited to under 17s), thereby reducing its ticket sales - a fact that in itself is some indication of the taboo that still surrounds the male genitalia.24 When Hollywood does occasionally reveal a brief glimpse of male members, they are normally on the large side, and, as Lehman notes, Hollywood now even has a company called Nude Male Casting that specialises in providing men sufficiently endowed and willing to appear in full frontal nudity whilst flaccid (“They Look So

Uncomplicated” 203). Moreover, unlike art and independent cinema, if Hollywood cinema does expose the male genitals, that revelation is most often designed to shock and, in order to by-pass censorship, the penis is often a prosthetic, as in the case of Fight Club and Boogie Nights. As Lee

Parpart puts it,

Hollywood and its semi-independent outskirts may think they are ready to

embrace new scripts of masculinity by exposing the penis in ways that signal a

rejection or distancing from patriarchal concepts of phallic power, but often the

organ in question turns out to be a safe, plastic, or barely visible substitute - a

fleeting copy of a copy, rather than an image carrying any kind of potentially de-

phallicising, indexical relation to a bodily real. (187)

In the case of Boogie Nights, the penis of porn star Dirk Diggler is only revealed in the final minute of the film, though its size is connoted throughout through reaction shots that imply its phallic mystique. However, while the prosthetic itself confirms the “size matters” mantra of the pornography industry, I would like to qualify Parpart’s reading; while the exposure scene does

23 In fact, there is a glimpse of a flaccid penis in Basic Instinct, belonging to the first murder victim. For an analysis of dead penises in film, see Lehman, “They Look So Uncomplicated.” 24 For example, in the case of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the MPAA (Movie Pictures Association of America) objected to instances of frontal male nudity but not frontal female nudity.

161 not dephallicise the bodily organ, neither does it phallicise it. Indeed, I would join Susan Bordo in noting that “despite its dimensions, Diggler's penis is no masterful tool. It points downwards, weighted with expectation, with shame, looking tired and used” (34). Moreover, earlier the film had screened Dirk’s inability to get an erection, caused by anxiety at increased competition from upcoming stars, joining a host of other contemporary films, such as The Full Monty, Human

Traffic (1999), How to Kill Your Neighbour’s Dog (2000), Alfie (2004) and The Real Blonde that deal with the issue of (white) male impotence, albeit in comic scenarios.25

What these films attest to is the increased medicalisation of male sexuality, “analogous to the nineteenth-century medicalisation of female sexuality” (Segal 219). As Judith Halberstam puts it, “[i]n the age of viagra and penile enlargements, we might argue, male sexuality and male masculinity in general tends to be a medicated affair in all kinds of situations, and the apparent fragility of erectile function might stand as a symbol for other kinds of masculine vulnerabilities that move far beyond the psychoanalytic formulation of castration anxiety” (“The Good” 353-

54). These anxieties are intimately tied to the new discourses and medical practices that contest the notion of a natural body in the postmodern era. As the sheer number of spam emails advertising viagra, penile implants, penile pumps, ejaculation aids and phalloplasty suggest, the status of the “natural” penis is becoming a marked site of concern. Fight Club even addresses this question directly when Tyler spies a dildo in Marla’s room, and she disingenuously comments, “Don’t worry. It’s not a threat to you,” thereby articulating, in the very act of denial, that the male fleshy organ is inferior to its plastic equivalent.

All of these body anxiety films, I have attempted to show, engage with the threat of “the society of the spectacle,” to use Guy Debord’s now famous phrase, on normative white masculinity. Nonetheless, the signification practices of most of these films also work against

25 Steven Soderbergh's surprise independent hit Sex, Lies and Videotapes (1989), in which James Spader played an impotent, voyeuristic filmmaker, revealed that male vulnerability could fare well at the box office.

162 their narrative concerns, often refusing to deploy the fetishitic camerawork that is still used for female stars as a matter of course. Moreover, most of the films I discussed above, with the exception of the female-addressed Thelma and Louise, unfold in nostalgic narratives of white male disenfranchisement, suggesting that “mourn[ing] the phallus may be a way to maintain its centrality” (Schiesari 265). I now wish to turn my attention to action films, the primary genre

(after pornography) for showcasing the white male body, albeit through complex and multi- faceted processes of disavowal. These films were, of course, highly complicit in the circulation of white male bodies as images for visual consumption. By the 90s, however, the parodic strategies deployed in the genre suggest an inability to take representations of pumped-up, hypermasculinity seriously. Taking Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron 1991) as an example, I wish to explore the recourse to parody in terms of redefinitions of masculinity caused through the impact of gym culture entering the mainstream, shifts in gender relations

(represented through a muscular action heroine, who underscores that muscularity is not an exclusively male preserve), and an increasingly deindustrialised, high-tech culture in which physical strength is increasingly rendered obsolete.

3.4. White Male Bodies in Action

The 80s was the decade of the action movie, as Hollywood lavished huge budgets on expensive spectacles and notched up box-office successes on an unprecedented scale (Tasker,

Spectacular Bodies 2). The “high concept” action movie was disparaged by many theorists because of its popular appeal, its prioritising of box-office takings over artistic integrity, and its alleged abandonment of narrative and reliance on special effects - accounts which overlook not only the visual, aural, haptic and corporeal pleasures of cinematic spectatorship, but also the fact that “[i]n action films, the plot advances through spectacle; the spectacular elements are, generally speaking, as ‘narrativised’ as are the less ostentatious spaces of other genres” (M. 163

Smith 13).26 In conjunction with explosive special effects, one of the major spectacles, of course, is that of the male body as it penetrates the space of the screen, often at breakneck speeds, in chase scenes or intricately choreographed fight scenes, performing nigh-impossible feats, inflicting or enduring pain, capturing the spectator up in a sadomasochistic visual economy. The star body thus functions as text, narrativising the discipline and effort that went into its creation, as well as forming sites across and through which discourses of gender, race, class, age and nation are inscribed.

The overt display of the muscular bodies of key 80s stars such as Sylvester Stallone,

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Bruce Willis must be understood in the context of the increased commodification of the white male body. Not only do these bodies function as the prime attraction of the films, but they are also screened using some of the same codes as the 80s and 90s advertisements that I have analysed above, in conjunction with other representational practices that work to disavow their erotic objectification. The sheer physicality of the genre means that action heroes inevitably glisten with sweat and soon strip to the waist or a vest T-Shirt, revealing their immaculate torsos and sculptured biceps. The narrative justification for this might be quite tenuous, such as the hyperbolic example from Lethal Weapon

(1987) when Riggs (Mel Gibson) rips his shirt off for no apparent reason before grappling with his adversary, Joshua (Gary Busey), in wet mud, under a jet of water spurting out from a broken hydrant in a scene that cannot escape homoerotic implications. This example is also interesting in view of the fact that Murtaugh (Danny Glover), Riggs’s older, paternalistic African-American partner, merely spectates at a distance. As Yvonne Tasker puts it, “[t]he scene offers an image of the sexual-power relations of the inter-racial buddie pairing in microcosm. Whilst the white male hero shows off his body, his black buddie stands back, a protective figure who watches from the

26 For a discussion of “high concept” films, see Wyatt, High Concept. 164 sidelines” (Spectacular Bodies 46).27 Indeed, even though Danny Glover is more powerfully built than Mel Gibson, his body is never eroticised through fragmentary shots or phallic imagery.28 This scene also reveals how action movies “[write] female desire as cipher and [offer] male bodies to the gaze of other men” (Boose 588), which, nonetheless, is a considerable cause of anxiety, as the homophobic humour of such films illustrates.29

As with male models, the action hero body is marked by its hardness, rendered through the tautening of muscles required for the handling of guns, the punching of fists, or demonstration of physical prowess that the narratives demand. The camera also tends to fragment male bodies, albeit in a different way to the conventional representation of the female form, lingering over flexed muscles or fetishising the phallic weaponry. (Indeed, if fetishisation of the female body wards off castration anxiety in Mulvey’s account, fetishisation of the male would seem to disavow the male spectator’s knowledge that no one possesses the phallus). These are also bodies in motion, pulled along by frenetic, fast-cut action sequences with thunderous soundtracks, a sensation-overload that works to justify the display of the male body in a genre primarily aimed at a teenage male audience. As Tasker notes in her influential Spectacular

Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (1993), “it is perhaps inevitable that it is the action cinema which provides a showcase for the display of the muscular male body” (118).

Without doubt, the most famous action heroes of the 80s were Sylvester Stallone and

Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose iconic bodies must be among the most widely reproduced and consumed images of the last two decades. Ironically, therefore, the very bodies which reaffirm the physical values of white heterosexual masculinity within the films’ narratives are also implicated in its commodification and virtualisation. As Tasker notes, these pumped-up bodies

27 This scene also supports Sharon Willis’s observation that in the bi-racial buddy movie, “black-and-white bonding takes place across and through the spectacle of the battered white male body” (High Contrast 32). 28 It is important to note, however, that black bodies were on display in later action movies, with the likes of Wesley Snipes or Will Smith, who function as action heroes in their own right rather than mere sidekicks. See footnote 35. 29 For a discussion of homophobic humour in the buddy film, see Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic” 202-3.

165 must be understood in a context in which “bodybuilding as a practice and competitive sport have

[…] shifted from freakish marginality to the mainstream of western health culture” (2).

Nonetheless, male bodybuilding still straddles contradictory terrain as regards traditional understandings of gendered bodies, since it connotes both masculine activity due to the strenuous

(if masochistic) regime that sculpting the body demands, but also passivity and narcissism

(culturally aligned with the feminine) since those bodies are constructed primarily to be displayed (often in rather skimpy posing pouches). This instability is evident in the way that female bodybuilders are often considered masculine, while male bodybuilders are equally as likely to be designated feminine. For instance, Tasker quotes an article from the Guardian on

Rambo, which claims that Stallone’s “enormous breasts loom over the screen like Jane Russell in

The Outlaw” (qtd. in Spectacular Bodies 80). The fact that bodybuilding can be perceived as masculinising women and feminising men points to the way in which conceptions of the body are steeped in a binary logic of active/masculine, passive/feminine that has served the patriarchal order, but one which is being increasingly challenged. As Tasker notes, “[w]ith critics caught between breasts and biceps, it is clear that both active and passive, both feminine and masculine terms, inform the imagery of the male body in the action cinema” (80). Moreover, bodybuilding obviously points to the constructedness of the body, carrying the signs of labour required for its formation. For this reason, the bodies of white action stars have aroused and continue to arouse sustained, often conflicting critical responses.

This is most evident in the divergent critical readings that Stallone and Schwarzenegger have provoked. The popularity of both stars have been understood as an assertion of a reactionary, patriarchal, military, nationalistic masculinity, and as a hysterical parody of masculinity (109). In Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), for instance, Susan Jeffords traces the correlation between the “hard bodies” that dominated 80s action cinema and the era that witnessed a resurgence of national and masculine power, both of 166 which were embodied by the president Ronald Reagan, who self-consciously distinguished himself from the “soft” Jimmy Carter (21, 13). Within this framework, the whiteness of these

“hard bodies” is inextricable from the narratives of American imperialism in which they appear.

For instance, Stallone’s two most famous roles have him triumph over ethnic and/or racial others

- Vietnamese and Russian soldiers in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988), and black and Russian opponents in the Rocky series.30 Stallone’s tendency to play working-class characters also serves to render him authentic in the face of his to-be-looked-at-ness. As Tasker notes, along with black bodies, white working-class bodies are always “perceived though an accumulated history of sexual myths and stereotypes” and thus “tell powerful stories of subjection and resistance, so that muscles function both to give the action hero the power to resist, at the same time as they confirm him in a position that defines him almost exclusively through the body” (Spectacular Bodies 79). Against the Vietnamese and Russian armies, equipped with the latest technology, Rambo, as lone warrior, relies on his body and the weaponry attached to it (see figure 3.26). At the end of Rambo, he even blasts away the high-tech equipment of the American army, which represents a bureaucratic, corrupt and feminised

America from which he, as Vietnam veteran, is alienated. In the Rocky series, Stallone is also invariably matched against an opponent with more financial resources than himself, allowing him to triumph in the old-fashioned way - through blood, sweat and hard graft.31 I argued in chapter two that the battered masochistic white male body perfectly narrativises the “white male as victim” figure in postindustrial, postfeminist, post-Vietnam American culture (Savran 176). In this respect, it is interesting that as a famous Italian-American, Stallone’s whiteness is always

30 The Rambo series, however, included rhetorical outbursts about an America that did not accept its Vietnam veterans, though this detracts little from the films’ patriotic discourses, since they mourn a wounded and corrupt nation that Rambo helps rejuvenate. See chapter two. 31 Similar dynamics can be found in Die Hard’s John McClane (Bruce Willis), whose mutilated body both confirms symbolic castration and virility, as well as expressing nostalgia for a primal physical masculinity (embodied by a working-class cop) lost in a world in which his wife works for a high-tech Japanese firm, whose postmodern skyscraper office houses the action. He is also impeded by the impractical and inactive FBI agents, who thwart his plans by doing everything by the book. 167 ethnically inflected but in his 80s films he still functioned as synecdoche for the American national body, a fact that reveals how capacious a racial category whiteness is.

Schwarzenegger’s whiteness is also intrinsic to his star persona, and he has also functioned as representative of the US in many of his films despite his Austrian roots (a fact his appointment as Governor of California only reinforces). For Lynda Boose, “the Schwarzenegger accent, physique, and even the mechanisation of the characters he plays are indissociable from the Nazi dream of domination that America’s wars in the Third World covertly play out,” an association that Schwarzenenegger’s right-wing politics do little to offset (589). Boose’s comments here are interesting, in that she associates fascism with a mechanical and emptied-out subjectivity, epitomised in Schwarzenegger’s iconic role as the cyborg terminator, an association that reminds us that concerns about white heterosexual masculinity being a depleted, vacuous category must be set against the fact that, for many, it is also a category brimming with terror. Of course, bodybuilding inevitably conjures up the Nazi idealisation of the white male body (see figure 3.27). According to Dyer, it also articulates a number of traditions associated with whiteness: classical sculptures (bodybuilding jargon talks of the body being cut to stone); a

Californian leisure and consumer-driven lifestyle; Christian imagery of masculinity expressed through a discourse of suffering and pain, the apotheosis of which is the representation of the crucifixion, one of the most widely reproduced images of the white male body on display (148-

150).

Other critics, however, have argued that these hypermasculine bodies are indicative of the contemporary crisis in masculinity in the postmodern era. In “The Signification of the Phallus”

Lacan observed that “virile display in the human being itself seem[s] feminine” (322), as well as stressing that the male subject only postures at possessing the phallus (320-21), an assertion that has been used in cultural studies to extend Joan Riviere’s famed theorisation of femininity as masquerade (38) to masculinity. Barbara Creed thus argues that Stallone and Schwarzenegger, 168 both of whom resemble “an anthropomorphised phallus,” “are simulacra of an exaggerated masculinity, the original completely lost to sight, a causality of the failure of the paternal signifier and the current crisis in master narratives” (“From Here to Modernity” 65). Queer theorist Mark Simpson also notes that “exaggerated ‘masculine’ signification” often verges on camp (25). The apparent paradox - the more prevalent images of phallic masculinity are, the more they highlight a crisis in masculinity - is inextricable from the central contradiction at the heart of masculinity: as Lynn Segal puts it, “the more it asserts itself, the more it calls itself into question” (123).

As Yvonne Tasker suggests, rather than an “either/or” approach, which chooses between these two seemingly non-commensurate readings, it is more useful to “examine the ways in which [the muscular action hero] represents both [readings], as well as being produced by the ongoing and unsteady relationship between these, and other, images of masculinity”

(Spectacular Bodies 109).32 This framework is particularly useful for an analysis of the 90s action hero, not merely because displays of the white male body seemed to require extensive use of self-reflexive jokes or parody, but also because the white male bodies were increasingly played off against competing images of masculinity, including action heroes of colour and muscular action heroines, who staked a place in the genre in the 90s. Terminator 2 offers a prime example of this shift in representational practices.

3.5. Re-Determining White Masculinity: Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The opening scene of Terminator 2 features the terminator arriving naked in the foetal position after travelling back to the film’s present (time travel, we are told in the first film, “is like being born again”). The flimsy narrative justification for this showcasing of a nude

32 In Spectacular Bodies, Tasker contends that “the cinema offers one of the few social spaces in which we can make seemingly perverse identifications, structured by a utopian both/and rather than a repressive gendered binary” (117).

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Schwarzenegger’s iconic physique is that time travel technology is not yet up to the demands of transporting inanimate objects. The terminator then enters a bikers’ bar in order to demand clothes, boots and a motorcycle from a butch Hell’s Angel - costume and props that define his masculinity throughout the remainder of the film. From the moment the terminator enters the bar, his naked body, filmed in a medium shot so that his expansive peps fill the screen, is subjected to relentless scrutiny; while the male bikers look on with aggressive incredulity, the women respond with more appreciative stares, most notably the waitress who looks down to the place the camera never exposes with an approving smile, suggesting that his cybernetically produced body is substantially more generously endowed than the average human one, though it is a look that the undesiring cyborg can never return. The bikers in the bar are quick to prove their manhood, though their macho posturing only betrays the phallic lack which fetishistic paraphernalia (guns, knives, leather, bikes, cigars) attempt to bolster, a performance which the young John Connor (Edward Furlong) is in the process of learning. Predictably, the bikers come off the worse in the fight scene that ensues, a scene that confirms that Schwarzenegger’s muscles perform a more than ornamental function, and displaces any anxiety of witnessing a naked

Schwarzenegger wrestling with leather-clad bikers onto violent spectacle in the manner Richard

Dyer and Steve Neale have theorised (“Don’t Look Now” 270; “Masculinity as Spectacle” 281).

But immediately following this sequence, the scene swiftly reverts to parody. As the terminator leaves, the extradiegetic soundtrack blares out the blues classic “Bad to the Bones,” while the camera lingers first on his motorcycle boots before tilting up his leather-clad body, a pastiche of the camerawork employed in the western in order to emphasise the hero’s stature. When ordered to stop by a huge, bearded biker brandishing a gun, the terminator walks over and, in

Eastwoodesque silence, swipes the weapon, and then seizes the biker’s sunglasses, donning them with incongruous satisfaction, the suggestion being that this terminator, unlike his predecessor, takes narcissistic pride in his appearance. The western allusions then continue as Shwarzenegger 170 straddles his motorbike and rides off towards the horizon.

Dyer has argued that such tongue-in-cheek humour in action cinema suggests that “the values of masculine physicality are harder to maintain straightfacedly and unproblematically” in an age “of microchips and the large scale growth (in the USA) of women in traditionally male occupations” (Heavenly Bodies 12). While I think this to be the case, I would also join Tasker in arguing that self-reflexive jokes perform a double function; they work both to deconstruct the filmic text but also to pre-empt and thus deflect criticism (Spectacular Bodies 91). Indeed, such facetious or parodic moments tend to last only for a few minutes, allowing film texts to “[cite their] own macho excessiveness, [joke] about it, and then [enact] it with a clearer conscience”

(Mizejewski 167).33 Indeed, the dismal box office performance of The Last Action Hero (1993), the film that has Schwarzenegger relentlessly parody his own star image, suggests that total parody did not sit well with Schwarzenegger fans.34 Nonetheless, while Terminator 2’s self- reflexive catch-phrases (“I’ll be back,” “Hasta la vista, baby”) or pastiching of the western might work to legitimate its screening of the semi-naked male body and ritualistic violence, the fact that legitimisation is deemed necessary is itself suggestive of the instabilities of contemporary white heterosexual corporeal masculinity. Parody, as I argued in my discussion of Fight Club, is a double-coded discourse suitable for addressing these instabilities, and in the case of Terminator

2, facilitates the simultaneous articulation of the pumped-up white male body as both “all”

(phallic, universal, indestructible) and “nothing” (ontologically empty, simulacrum, performative).

While Dyer is right to attribute the action movie’s recourse to parody to changing definitions of (white) masculinity provoked by technological developments and shifts in gender

33 Mizejewski is actually referring specifically to Demolition Man (1993) here. 34 While both Stallone and Schwarzenegger made forays into comedy in films whose humour was dependent on being cast against type (Oscar; Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot; Junior; Twins), both actors soon reverted back to the traditional action format (Cliffhanger; Daylight; End of Days; Collateral Damage).

171 relations, the inability to take hyperphallic white male bodies seriously must also be seen in a context of generic revisions, which, of course, are themselves rooted in social change. The 90s witnessed new action formats in which the white hero not only shared the stage with women and people of colour, but, in some cases, was also supplanted by them.35 Terminator 2 offers an interesting example of the action heroine, who, since the phenomenal success of Ripley

(Sigourney Weaver) in Alien (1979), is now as common as her male counterpart, even if she often plays second fiddle to the male lead. As with the male hero, the action heroine’s body is inscribed in and through both action and display, and often escapes the more traditional fetishisation that Mulvey located in mainstream cinema, though films such as Charlie’s Angels

(2000) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) cast their heroines as active narrative agents but in parodic scenarios that insistently eroticise the heroine through tight, fetishistic leather outfits and

35As Davies and Smith point out, “numerous recent Hollywood movies court ambiguous and incomplete identifications, so as to appeal to several audiences simultaneously and to engage with multiple audience members in multiple ways” (5). While black women have not made great in-roads into popular cinema (with the notable exceptions of Angela Bassett, Whoppi Goldberg and Hale Berry), one significant shift in recent years has been the heightened visibility of African-American men starring in action roles (Danny Glover, Wesley Snipes, Denzil Washington, Samuel. L. Jackson, Will Smith) - the action genre no doubt providing a point of entry since African- American males were already defined through their bodies in the arena of sports and entertainment (Tasker, Spectacular Bodies 35). This development has enabled Hollywood to attract African-American audiences as it had done earlier with its Blaxploitation movies. Unlike the buddy movies of the 80s, though, such as Lethal Weapon (1987) or Die Hard (1988), where race was displaced onto other differences, in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), for instance, Samuel L. Jackson draws attention to his blackness, and in consequence, his buddy’s whiteness. In the characteristic antagonistic banter of the genre, McClane (Bruce Willis) dismisses the question of race, arguing that the villain of the film doesn’t care about skin colour even if Zeus (Jackson) does. However, while Zeus carries the burden of race that the white man can ignore (it is even suggested that Zeus is a reverse racist), all of Zeus’s encounters are racially charged so that “the visual aspects of the narrative sometimes directly contradict the discursive level” (Willis, High Contrast 52). Similarly, in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), when Charly (Geena Davies) makes a pass at Mitch (Jackson), he immediately pulls back, commenting that there is something wrong with the scenario of a white woman attempting to seduce him. His observation is immediately endorsed when it turns out that Charly is only seducing him to distance herself from her feminine alter ego, Samantha. The possibility of romance is evoked only to be dismissed, pointing to the difficulty that Hollywood still has with bi-racial romance. These examples signify the reworking of the racial dynamics of the bi-racial buddy movie, also seen in Seven (1995), where Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is not the desexualised, protective sidekick of the Lethal Weapon series, and Training Day (2001), featuring Denzil Washginton’s corrupt cop, a film which has no truck with “positive images.” Moreover, the 90s also saw the black-black pairing of Bad Boys (1995) and black-Asian pairing of Rush Hour (1998). Asian men were also given lead roles, not only Jackie Chan, but also macho roles for Chow Yun-Fen, as martial arts cinema penetrated the mainstream in the wake of the successes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and its Hollywood imitations. Gender dynamics were also reworked with the female buddy-cum-road movie Thelma and Louise. Moreover, the sequels that Alien (1979), The Terminator (1984) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) have engendered are some measure of the box-office appeal of action heroines, though, as Tasker notes, these action heroines have their antecedents in the 70s independent women’s films and TV series such as Cagney and Lacey, Charlie’s Angels, as well as the rape revenge films of the pornography market, or Blaxploitation and martial arts films that starred female protagonists (Spectacular Bodies 14-34). 172 plunging, cleavage-displaying necklines (see figure 3.28). The non-sexualised (at least in the

Mulveyan sense, since these action heroines attracted huge lesbian followings) muscular action heroine, however, evident in films such as the Alien series, Strange Days (1995) and G.I. Jane

(1997), does much to trouble conventional representations of sexed and gendered bodies.

Terminator 2, in particular, seems to me to mark a decisive break, since Sarah Connor’s (Linda

Hamilton) body is insistently masculinised in the film, not merely through the display of Sarah’s pumped-up muscles but more insistently through the deployment of visual codes conventionally reserved for male heroes (see figures 3.29 and 3.30). As I hope to illustrate, the masculinisation of the action heroine destabilises ontological discourses of the body in a way that cannot but impact on the screening of the body of the male hero.

The first glimpse of Sarah Connor is set in the psychiatric hospital to which she has been committed for suffering from paranoid delusions that a nuclear blast, initiated by the machines, will destroy most of humanity in the year 1997. From a long shot of the hospital building, the voyeuristic camera zooms in through Sarah’s cell window, closes in on her developed shoulder and arm muscles, and then pulls back to view her in the process of doing chin-ups against her upturned bed frame. Sarah is also subjected to the scrutinising intradiegetic medical gazes of junior doctors, as the criminal psychologist, Dr. Silberman (Earl Boen), explains Sarah’s

“delusional architecture.” However, it is a gaze that the dishevelled Sarah returns with hostility as she snarls, “Good morning, Dr. Silberman. How’s the knee?” An embarrassed Dr. Silberman is then forced to acknowledge that Sarah had recently stabbed him in the kneecap with his pen. A few scenes later, Sarah is shown watching one of her counselling sessions on video as she describes the repeated dream she experiences about the War of Judgement Day. Dr. Silberman then pauses the video, leaving a frozen image of Sarah’s aggressive expression captured while she insisted on how “fucking real” her dream would be for anyone not wearing “two million factor sun block,” an image that lingers whilst Dr. Silberman interviews her to decide whether 173 her improved behaviour will allow her to be moved into a minimum security wing of the hospital and receive visits from her son, John. The self-reflexivity of this scene is not confined to us watching Sarah watching herself on video, however, but multi-layered: as the camera pulls back, it becomes evident that Sarah is again filmed by the hospital staff, and some of our access to this scene begins to be mediated through this secondary video screen. When Sarah’s request to see her son is refused, she lunges at Dr. Silberman, her face deliberately juxtaposed with the aggressive image left frozen on the video. Her attack causes chaos, which is also filmed intradiegetically, as she wrestles with the staff who rush to save the ineffectual doctor from her grasp. What interests me here is the inability of the intradiegetic cinematic apparatus to subject

Sarah to its gaze, providing a self-reflexive comment on the difficulties caused to traditional codes of cinematic representation when the binaries of active/passive are no longer yoked to a male/female matrix.

Unlike The Terminator (1984), in which Sarah first appears as a dizzy, clumsy waitress who unwillingly takes on her role of “mother of the future,”36 by the time of the second film, released seven years later (and earning over $500 million at the box office), Sarah has transformed into a muscular, military expert who smokes, swears, orders men around, has no truck with sexual encounters, and is persistently masculinised throughout the film, even referred to as a “son of a bitch” by a female nurse. As J. P. Telotte puts it, she has “technologised herself, shaped herself into the best human cyborg possible in order to cope with the menace posed by

36 In the first film, Sarah is targeted for destruction by the terminator, who has been sent back in time by the machines to carry out what Dr. Silberman terms a “retroactive abortion,” so as to prevent her giving birth to John Connor, the future leader of the resistance in the war against the machines. As well as the obvious apocalyptic narrative, the film also exploits other biblical references. Sarah is designated the mother of the future, and, like the Virgin Mary, initially refuses to believe that she is the mother of the as yet unborn saviour of mankind. Not coincidentally, John Connor shares his initials with Jesus Christ (and James Cameron!). In the film’s logic-defying time loop, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is also sent back in time by John Connor, and sacrifices himself to protect Sarah, but not until he has fulfilled his narrative function of impregnating her. This huge investment of ethics in the father-son relationship, along with the collapsing of the father and son roles that the time-loop narrative allows (John Connor is a father figure to Reese in the future, but then Reese paradoxically becomes John’s biological father), mirror the Christian belief that God is both the Father and the Son. Thus, despite the reversal of traditional action gender roles, with Sarah defeating the terminator to the tune of “you’re terminated, fucker,” religious configurations of paternity and maternity work to secure the terms of sexual difference. 174 the future’s real cyborgs” (“The Terminator” 31). It is the radical muscularisation of Sarah’s body that is the most significant development, however, a transformation that gave Linda

Hamilton immediate iconic status: newspapers reported on the huge number of women going to gyms in America asking for arm muscles like Sarah Connor, while the press were also fascinated by how Hamilton could have refigured her body so soon after having given birth (Radner, “New

Hollywood’s New Women” 250-251).

What is most striking about the film is that it deploys the same visual codes normally reserved for the action hero’s body. For instance, when Sarah cleans a gun in a sleeveless T-

Shirt, the camera lingers over the curves of her rigid, sinewy, veiny arm and shoulder muscles rather than her breasts and legs. Sarah’s body is also progressively mutilated in the male hero tradition, proving her ability to “take it like a man.” A more humorous and self-conscious example of this process can be found in The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996): refusing to give in to the men that torture her for information, Charly (Geena Davies) responds with the insult “suck my dick,” also uttered by Demi Moore’s female soldier in G.I. Jane (1997), a term that, delivered by a male, insults through its homosexual slur, but whose patent misapplication in

Charly’s case points to her self-styled masculine performance. Indeed, unlike Mulvey’s female star, who presents the threat of castration, the action heroine seems to present the threat of female phallicisation.

Certain critics have advanced the notion that action heroines like Sarah Connor or Ripley in the Aliens series are actually “figurative males” and object to the fact that for a heroine to perform effectively in the action genre she must be masculinised.37 Certainly, by referring to muscular heroines as “masculinised,” we risk reinforcing traditional dualisms. To avoid such binarisms, Yvonne Tasker coins the term “musculinity” to refer to the qualities associated with masculinity that are written over the female body, stating that “‘[m]usculinity’ indicates the way

37 For a summary and rejection of this position, see Hills. 175 in which the signifiers of strength are not limited to the male characters” (Spectacular Bodies

149). However, as certain queer theorists have pointed out, “female masculinity” (Judith

Halberstam’s term, which deliberately yokes together a biological and social category in order to destablise the two) does not make the masculinised woman a man; rather, the dissonance between sex and gender can queer ontological discourses by underscoring the performativity of gender (see chapter five). However, as Judith Halberstam claims, sexuality determines the subversive potential of these representations, noting that the buffed Ripley and Sarah Connor offer approved versions of female masculinity that are rendered tame by their heterosexuality, and only in Alien Resurrection (1997), in which Ripley flirts with co-star Wynona Ryder, does

Ripley's masculinity become threatening or “alien” (Female Masculinity 28). Nonetheless, the fact that both these action heroines became immediate lesbian icons attests to the oppositional readings available in mainstream texts. In particular, Hamilton’s “butch” performance, lack of heterosexual encounters and one man-hating line acquired her a huge lesbian following.38 In other words, once femininity and masculinity are understood as performative categories, the meanings that can be assigned to bodies become unstable and disruptive of the heterosexual hegemony. For instance, in his queer reading of Terminator 2, Jonathan Goldberg notes that

Schwarzenegger’s fetishistic biker gear feeds into images of a butch gay S&M leatherman (190-

91). The film thus unleashed certain images that it was unable to contain.

For this reason, cinematic representations of “female masculinity” have profound ramifications for the bodies and masculinities of the male characters, as a now famous scene in

Aliens (1986) makes clear: when Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), a butch female soldier

38 When Sarah, John and the terminator inform Miles Dyson that his work will lead to a nuclear holocaust, chain- smoking in the background, Sarah responds to Dyson’s question “how were we supposed to know?” with the following indictment: “Yeah, right, how were you supposed to know. Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something, to create a life and feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction.” This contemptuous outburst is immediately interrupted by her son’s appeal for a more constructive reaction, but here Sarah suggests that technological creation acts as compensation for a male envy of women’s procreative power, so that in her speech the womb replaces the penis as the primary signifier of sexual difference. 176 with cropped hair, is asked by a male colleague if she has ever been mistaken for a man, she dryly responds, “No, have you?” As Jonathan Goldberg argues, pumped-up female bodies not only disrupt patriarchal definitions of femininity but also point to the fact that “hypermasculinity always transgresses, refuses, and exceeds the phallic measure” (179). This is precisely the case in

Terminator 2. Sarah’s “musculinised” body accounts for the film’s inability to take the terminator’s hyperbolic body seriously since it foregrounds its unnaturalness, even while that hypermasculinity is necessary to secure sexual difference precisely because of Sarah’s

“musculinity.” That said, it is important to join Chris Holmund in noting that the designation of masculinity as masquerade does not necessarily rob it of its force, as the adolescent male idolisation of Stallone and Schwarzenegger indicate, and can express nostalgia for a lost

“original” identity (224-25). Indeed, just as Sarah is about to blast the T1000 away, she runs out of bullets, and is promptly rescued by the terminator.39 The film’s discourse on paternity and maternity also works to both reinscribe and destabilise sexual difference. Sarah Connor regards the terminator to be the perfect father for her child, an ironic turn of events in the light of Barbara

Creed’s assertion that displays of excessive masculinity evidence the “crisis of the paternal signifier” (“From Here to Modernity” 65; Tasker, Spectacular Bodies 128).40 This remarkable reversal of the terminator from killer of unborn child to idealised father figure is regarded by

Susan Jeffords as indicative of a general trend in action movies: whereas masculinity in the 80s was transcribed through the spectacle of physical toughness, the 90s gave way to a more internalised masculine dimension that focused on ethical dilemmas and emotional traumas (Hard

Bodies 140-77). For Jeffords, Terminator 2 offers the politically safe solution of “individualism

39 In The Terminator, however, Sarah eventually destroys the terminator single-handedly, though by this point the terminator is a metallic skeleton, suggesting that the cinematic audience would be unable to cope with a woman defeating the iconic figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger (Goscilo 49). 40 In one of her voiceovers, Sarah states, “Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The machine would never stop, never leave him, never hurt him, shout, get drunk and hit him or say it was too bust to spend time with us. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this machine, this thing, was the only one who measured up.”

177 as fathering” as “an alternative to the declining workplace and national structures as sources of masculine authority and power” (170).41 The current fusion of the action movie with melodrama common to films such as Die Hard (1988), True Lies (1994) and Face/Off (1997), whose plots revolve around the “threats to the family and domesticity” (Gallagher 203), are thus suggestive of the difficulty of taking the spectacle of the hyperphallic body as proof of masculinity (see figures 3.31 and 3.32).42 Sarah’s desire to protect her son also works to “explain” her militarised

“masculinity” and thereby reaffirm sexual difference, though Sarah does not represent an image of motherhood that sits comfortably with conservative domestic ideologies.

Of course, the opposition between the terminator and Sarah is displaced onto the human/non-human distinction, although extra-textual knowledge of Schwarzenegger’s humanness plays out this opposition in gendered terms. Anxieties of non-phallic masculinity are thus displaced either onto the human bodies of Sarah, the young John Connor, or Dr. Miles

Dyson (Joe Morton), the black computer technician, who shakes with fear when Sarah threatens to kill him and cries out in anguished horror when the cyborg cuts off the flesh from his forearm to reveal the metal skeleton beneath - scenes that neutralise any threat posed by black masculinity through a process of feminisation. The other non-human character is also embodied by a white male: the shape-shifting T1000 terminator (Robert Patrick), whose slimmer, permeable, malleable body is played off against the solid, impervious body of Schwarzenegger’s

T101 model. In Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in a Post-Industrial Age (1996), Claudia

41 Jeffords notes that the motif of fatherhood also links the terminator with Dyson, the African-American scientist. Dyson enters the narrative when Sarah targets him for assassination; she only stops herself from pulling the trigger when her maternal instinct kicks in as Dyson’s son clings to his petrified father. While Dyson’s blackness fails to elicit any comment in the film, the sight of a white woman aiming a gun at a cowering black man cannot but be racially charged, playing into the recurring stereotype of the feminised black male, a stereotype that bolsters the hardness of both Sarah’s and the terminator’s white bodies. Yet, as Jeffords points out, the fact that Dyson and the terminator are linked through the motif of fatherhood and sacrifice (like the terminator, Dyson sacrifices himself in order to save the human race) suggests that “masculinity transcends racial difference” while “fatherhood erases the difference between all ‘new’ men, whether machine or human” (Hard Bodies 166). 42 As I argued in the previous chapter, this often results in a marginalisation of the mother. As Jeffords notes, “[b]y ‘giving’ John Connor his life, the Terminator takes, in effect, Sarah Connor’s place as his mother. In one of the film’s most astounding inversions, the Terminator can now be said to have given birth to the future of the human race” (Hard Bodies 160). 178

Springer has argued that iron-clad cyborgs in films like The Terminator series and Robocop

(1987) “perpetuate and even exaggerate the anachronistic industrial-age metaphor of externally forceful masculine machinery, expressing nostalgia for a time when masculine superiority was taken for granted and an insecure man needed only to look at technology for the power of phallic strength” (111) (see figure 3.33). Springer, who reads the cyborg through Theweleit’s analysis of

“the protofascist fantasy of armoured invincibility [which] signifies a desire to ward off external threats of ego absorption and, simultaneously, ego dissolution from within” (111), regards the recycling of phallic imagery from Western society’s industrial past as an attempt to cling onto outdated sex roles and disavow the feminisation of the techno-erotic imagery associated with electronic and virtual culture, which is culturally coded feminine due to its minuteness, passivity, internalisation and fluidity (10, 111-12). Terminator 2 enacts a showdown between industrial/mechanic and electronic/cyber technologies played out over the white male bodies of the terminators (112). Schwarzenegger's cyborg is an older model but ultimately defeats the liquid-metal T1000. The T1000 is also played by a much slimmer, mercurial Robert Patrick, whom Cameron reportedly chose because of “his catlike qualities” (Tasker, Spectacular Bodies

83). The T1000’s body, which is coded as monstrous precisely because of its formlessness, instability and leakiness, thus seems to air anxieties about the challenges to normative masculinity posed by a postmodern, technologised and, cyberfeminists would claim, feminised world (see figures 3.34 - 3.36). On an extra-textual level, the fact that Schwarzenegger’s solid, muscular body is known to be flesh and blood (however “constructed” it may be), while the

T1000’s is a product of the latest special effects technology, further posits Schwarzenegger’s cyborg in a discourse of authenticity, an authenticity bolstered by Schwarzenegger’s biker gear, which contrasts starkly with the T1000’s LAPD police uniform.43 The liquid-metal T1000 is

43 Despite his shape-shifting abilities, the T1000 is consistently figured as a LAPD cop in a film that shows the police protecting only property and persistently thwarting the Connors’ and terminator’s attempts to save the world (Jeffords, Hard Bodies 167-169), further reinforcing the benevolent paternalism of the terminator. The film also 179 further feminised by a brief but significant moment when he looks inquisitively at a metal mannequin in a shop window, a moment that doubles the threat posed by electronic culture with that represented by the commodification of the male body. The fact that the evil, technologically- superior terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) is embodied by a woman only lends more credence to this interpretation, articulating the fear that a future in which muscles are rendered obsolete might also render men themselves unnecessary.

Concerns about technology are thus inscribed across the adult white male cyborg body, leaving Sarah and Dyson to represent the limitations of the flesh. In the following chapter, I will further tease out these Cartesian discourses by analysing representations of white male disembodiment in virtual reality fantasies of the mid- to late-90s. Unlike the solid cyborg bodies of the 80s, cinematic virtual male bodies are as flexible as the T1000 model. Nonetheless, these films still contain the threats that this might pose normative white masculinity, primarily through appeals to white male transcendence of the flesh, though not without concomitant fears that the universal subjectivity is profoundly problematised by a gnawing sense of its terminal emptiness.

persists in marking institutionalised masculinity as abusive, not only through its presentation of the LAPD, but also the behaviour of the male psychiatric hospital staff (a male nurse even licks Sarah’s face after binding her to the bed). 180

CHAPTER 4

Terminal Bodies and Cartesian Trips: White Heterosexual Masculinity in

Virtual Reality Fantasy Cinema

4.1. From Cyborgs to Virtual Bodies

Due to its fusion of flesh and metal, the organic and the technological, the cyborg has become a key image for both fascinations with and anxieties about the shifting relationship between humans and machines in the high-tech age. Most influentially, in her ironic “A

Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), Donna Harraway posits the cyborg, which blurs traditional metaphysical dualisms such as self/other, mind/body, male/female, culture/nature, as a model of postmodern, postgendered, non-essentialist subjectivity, one inclusive of difference and diversity

(96). As with Deleuze and Guatarri’s “bodies without organs” and “desiring machines,” and Rosi

Braidotti’s “nomadic consciousness” (a Deleuzian term), Harraway’s cyborg has offered a powerful metaphor for a non-unified, non-fixed, non-humanist, non-dualistic subjectivity.1

Harraway also posits the cyborg as a powerful image for redefinitions of the human body now that it is enmeshed in technology. Her seminal text has been criticised for its technological determinism, its generality of political analysis, and its uncritical celebration of postmodernism

(Wolmark 5); yet its utopianism and forceful insistence that feminism address both the impact of technology and the postmodern critique of the subject has made it the foundational work of cyberfeminism, “an accolade tinged with postmodern irony, given the essay’s negation of origins and ‘original myths’ of identity formation” (M. Kennedy 285).

1 Deleuze and Guattari define “bodies without organs” as “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities,” an assembly of forces which deconstructs the myth of a static subject and organic, totalised body (“November” 161). “Desiring machines” refer to the process that yokes human and machine together, rendering the human/machine distinction obsolete (Anti-Oedipus 2). Braidotti defines “nomadic consciousness” as “a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity” (Nomadic Subjects 23). However, it is worth noting that, while Braidotti agrees with Harraway’s formulation of non-unified, non-humanist subjectivity, she finds Harraway’s “beyond gender” position problematic (170). 181

Claudia Springer joins Harraway in regarding the cyborg as the epitome of the postmodern, arguing that, while “the cyborg appears to rest on a dichotomy between mind and body, […] it actually supersedes the dichotomy and makes it anachronistic in a new vision of fusion and symbiosis with electronic technology” (Electronic Eros 19). However, as the previous chapter illustrated, most representations of cyborgs in popular cinematic texts are a far cry from

Harraway’s postgendered ideal; rather, they bear out Mary Anne Doane’s observation that

“[w]hen technology intersects with the body in the realm of representation, the question of sexual difference is inevitably involved” (“Technophilia” 163). As we have seen, Springer interprets the hyperphallic cyborg as a response to the challenges posed to normative masculinity by electronic technology. Samantha Holland argues along similar lines, suggesting that the hypergendered cyborg provides a means of “[countering] the threat that cyborgs indicate the loss of human bodies, where such a loss implies the loss of the gendered distinctions that are essential to maintaining the patriarchal order” (159).

If Holland is right, what can be made of the virtual bodies that dominated popular science fiction cinema in the 90s? As Springer notes, “rampaging muscle-bound cyborgs were replaced by slim young men and women who jacked into cyberspace, inspired by ‘console cowboys’ in cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s” (“Psycho-Cybernetics” 204). As with cyborgs, virtual bodies are hybrid entities, which “[displace] the binary opposition between wired corporeality and organic corporeality” (Cavallaro 28-29). They are also theoretically freed from identities imprinted on the flesh. However, as Anne Balsamo has pointed out, “when seemingly stable boundaries are displaced by technological innovation (human/artificial, nature/culture), other boundaries are more vigilantly guarded” (216-17). For Balsamo, “the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologised ways to rewrite the physical body in the flesh” (217). Moreover, as I hope to show, representations of virtual technology are also necessarily implicated in historical discourses of race. As far as white 182 heterosexual masculinity is concerned, despite the challenges that virtual culture poses to ontological discourses that secure normative white masculinity as the originator of meanings, popular cinema often taps into pre-existing discourses of white male disembodiment, though not without the concomitant anxieties of depthlessness and vacuity that plague the universal subjectivity.

4.2. The Virtual Reality Debate

As Jonathan Bignell points out, virtual reality is “a virtual object of discourse, in the sense that its conceptualisation runs ahead of its material forms” (15). This might go some way to explaining why speculative theorisations of its impact on embodied subjectivity and human identity tend to divide rigidly along utopian and dystopian lines. Many cybertheorists wax lyrical about the radical potential of cyber- and virtual culture to unshackle us from the confines of the material body, celebrating the death of the humanist, psychoanalytic subject and “the birth of the posthuman subject who is without interiority or fixed subject position” (Fernbach 245).2

Prominent in this debate has been the cyberphile Harold Rheingold, who questions whether relationships as we know them are even possible in the fluid realm of cyberspace, where identities have become words on a screen that are decoded and unpacked by other users (qtd. in

Foster, “Postmodern Virtualities” 90). Rheingold speculates about the sexual uses of interfaces

(for which he coined the phrase “teledildonics”), envisaging the future possibility of refiguring the body by means of body suits and sensors (282).3 Invoking Rheingold’s speculations about the disappearance of the expressive relations between the body and gender identity, Thomas Foster suggests that virtual interfaces literalise Judith Butler’s notion of the performativity of gender, since gender becomes unhinged from any fixed location: “In effect, virtual systems spatialise the

2 For example, posthumanist performance artist Stelarc has declared the “inferior,” “vulnerable” human body obsolete, arguing that we have reached “the end of philosophy and human physiology” (562). 3 Rheingold predicts genital effectors being mapped onto manual sensors, and asks, “[w]hat will happen to social touching when nobody knows where anybody else’s erogenous zones are located?” (282). 183 repeated performance of gender norms over time and thereby reveal the gap between embodiment and the performance of it, which allows for subversion, intervention, and the critical rearticulation of that relationship” (“Trapped by the Body” 447). Cyberfeminist Sadie Plant argues for the benefits of cyberculture to women, invoking Irigaray’s work on the specificity of the female body in order to assert that the matrix, Latin for womb, is representative of the general feminisation of culture and the social (“On the Matrix” 334-335).4 She contends that women, “who know all about disguise,” are better versed than men in “off-the-shelf identity” since “they have been role-playing for millennia” (“Beyond the Screens” 16). Plant thus reverses traditional discourses to argue that it is in fact women who have been historically disembodied because of the masquerade they are forced to adopt in patriarchal culture. In short, as Scott

Bukatman puts it, “[v]irtual reality has become the very embodiment of postmodern disembodiment” (Terminal Identity 188), and has produced a proliferation of utopian discourses of identity free-play, according to which gender, race, age, ability and class can be put on and taken off at will in what Sherry Turkle terms “a consequence free zone” (22).

However, such heady celebrations of freedom from the flesh, dubbed “cyberdrool” by

Bukatman (Terminal Identity 189), all too easily side-step material considerations. As E. Ann

Kaplan observes, “[h]umans will carry with them into cyberspace formations ongoing now”

(293). Allucquère Rosanne Stone also argues that while virtual culture can make important interventions in social, economic and cultural relations, there is always a body attached to the subject: “No refigured virtual body, no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS. Even in the age of the technosocial subject, life is lived through bodies” (525). In any case, virtual reality requires “intimate connections” with the body in the form of virtual reality suits, gloves, goggles and sensors (Bignell 17), so that the material body is not so much lost as refigured. Lisa Nakamura also expresses concern that cybersubjects become “tourists,”

4 For a critique of Sadie Plant, see Squires 184 appropriating minority identities without recognising the disadvantages that people embodying those identities confront in the material world (714). Furthermore, while the World Wide Web has certainly provided a much-needed virtual community for numerous minorities, it is both “a colonising and deterritorialising space” (Case 48), allowing the formation of subcultures in a censorship-free zone, but also supporting the interests of transnational corporate capitalism.

Indeed, Ziauddin Sardar goes as far as viewing the Internet as the newest manifestation of cultural imperialism - “the ‘American dream’ writ large” (735). Certainly, one must bear in mind that over half of the world’s population has yet to make a phone call. Thus while the assumption of multiple fluid identities might be regarded as a reflection of decentred postmodern subjectivity, the question that must be asked is who possesses the means to refigure their identities in this way when, in Sardar’s sardonic turn of phrase, much of humanity is still left “at the mercy of real reality” (739).5

As theorists as diverse as Vivian Sobchack, Rosi Braidotti, Slavoj Žižek and Anne

Balsamo have pointed out, it is no coincidence that virtual reality has emerged at a time when the human body is seen as increasingly vulnerable to disease, surveillance and identity critiques (The

Address of the Eye 300; Nomadic Subjects 60; “Cyberspace” 104; 229). Virtual reality can pander to the Cartesian fantasy of doing away with the body altogether, best expressed by the cyberpunk motif of leaving “the meat” behind6 - a fantasy in which the body is little more than

“excess baggage for the cyberspace traveller” (Balsamo 229). This “contempt for the flesh,” as

William Gibson puts it in Neuromancer (6), deeply concerns materialist theorists such as Vivien

Sobchack, who argues that the technophilic fantasy of “beating the meat” is merely “‘false’

5 However, while earlier demographic researches into the Internet showed it to be an overwhelmingly Western, young, white, male, upper/middle class, urban/suburban preserve (Barwell and Boyles 710; San Juan and Pratt 170; Sardar 740), access in Asia is rapidly expanding, and it is believed that more people in China have access to Internet facilities than to a flushing toilet. 6 In Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer (1984), the narrator writes of Case, the console cowboy protagonist: “In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat” (6). Case himself regards his flesh as “a prison” (6). But, while making love, he realises that physical desire is something he could never fully understand: “it was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intimacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read” (239). 185 consciousness - for it has ‘lost touch’ with the very materiality and mortal body that grounds its imagination and imagery of transcendence” (“Beating the Meat” 211).7 Moreover, as Allucquère

Rosanne Stone notes, “[f]orgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick, one that has unpleasant consequences for those bodies whose speech is silenced by the act of our forgetting; that is to say, those upon whose labour the act of forgetting the body is founded - usually women and minorities” (525).

In the previous chapter, I explored the ways in which white masculinity has historically represented itself as disembodied in Christian and Cartesian discourses, despite the paradox that it was precisely the body that white men possess, culturally coded as unmarked, which affords them that questionable privilege. However, I argued that this disembodiment also provokes concerns that white heterosexual masculinity is also a terminal, vacuous subjectivity. Bearing this in mind, it is surely no coincidence that in popular cinematic representations, it is a white male that is most often called upon not only to stand in for humanity but also figure the disembodied virtual subject. Moreover, the fact that virtual reality offers the fantasy of the ultimate Cartesian trip at a time when the body is a site of identity critiques may signal a white male “desire to return to the ‘neutrality’ of the body” at a historical juncture when its universal status is being challenged (Balsamo 229, 233); yet, at the same time, the potential fluidity of gender, race and sexual identities in the virtual realm, a fluidity which deconstructs any recourse to the “natural,” has obvious ramifications for normative white masculinity, which has secured its traditional privileges through ontological discourses of sexual and racial difference anchored in the body.

7 Sobchack critiqued Baudrillard for his review of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, which he praised for its representation of the loss of the human body. Sobchack notes that Baudrillard ignored the fact that Ballard’s intention in writing the novel was to comment on “the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect” (Ballard qtd. in “Beating the Meat” 206). Sobchack’s poignantly personal account notes that, at the time of criticising Ballard, she was recovering from major cancer surgery on her thigh, and she scathingly admits, “I wished the man a car crash or two, and a little pain to bring him (back) to his senses” (“Beating the Meat” 207). Having become “cyborg” since her leg was amputated, Sobchack insists that her prosthetic limb has not incorporated her; rather, all her energies have been focused on incorporating it (208). For Baudrillard, on the other hand, the body “is no longer a metaphor for anything at all, merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organisation or overarching purpose” (The Transparency of Evil 7). 186

For that very reason, in popular cinematic cyberfantasies, identity is rarely that malleable.

Despite the female and/or buddy of colour sidekick common both to cyberpunk and its

Hollywood adaptations, raced and gendered hierarchies tend to be kept intact. In part, this is attributable to the nature of the cinematic medium. Many theorists have commented on the similarity between cinematic and virtual culture, in that both simulate experience, dislocate us from “real” presence, and enable us to make identifications at odds with our everyday understanding of our own embodied subjectivity.8 However, in cinema, as yet a non-interactive visual cultural form, fantasies and identifications revolve around (though are not limited to) the action and display of actors (or their representatives, in the wake of computer-generated characters in films such as The Final Fantasy [2001]), whose bodies are unavoidably marked by social categories. Indeed, as science fiction cinema responds to what Scott Bukatman terms “a cultural crisis of visibility and control over a new electronically defined reality” (Terminal

Identity 2), as part of “an ongoing attempt to explore and cognitively map the new terminal spaces, to establish a cartography within the paradigms of the simulated and the spectacular”

(117), cinema can only represent virtual bodies by spatialising them - that is, visualising the invisible. In this respect, the bodies on screen are always enmeshed in the prevailing scopic regime that inscribes race, gender, age and ability indelibly on the flesh.

The majority of cinematic cyberfantasies also invoke the mind/body split (The Thirteenth

Floor [1999] even opens with Descartes’s founding declaration “I think therefore I am”), a split

8 For instance, Rosie Marie San Juan and Geraldine Pratt have stated, “[w]hile there are crucial differences, cinema and cyberspace produce comparable effects of dislocation and disembodiment, arguably privileging the visual as a way to simulate proximity without physical presence, and thus transforming the relationship between subject and object of viewing in particular ways” (251). Timothy Leary has claimed that “most Americans have been living in Virtual Reality since the proliferation of television. All cyberspace will do is make the experience interactive instead of passive” (qtd. in Friedberg 144). Bukatman also notes that virtual reality recalls André Bazin’s ruminations on “the myth of total cinema” and “a total and complete representation of reality” (Terminal Identity 191). Other theorists have used Lacan’s mirror stage as a model for virtual reality experience, in much the same way as apparatus theorists discussed cinematic spectatorship; for instance, Batchen claims that for Lacan we are brought face to face with our virtual other in the mirror phase, and to become a subject, the child must “invent a cyberspace of which it becomes the convulsive possession. Thus, in Lacan’s schema, a never-resolved assemblage of virtual and real makes up the very fabric of human subjectivity” (278). Other theorists, though, have drawn attention to the differences between cinema and virtual reality. For instance, using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological model, Sobchack argues that while cinematic space embodies, “electronic space dis-embodies” (Address of the Eye 302). 187 firmly embedded in discursive formations of race and gender. Theoretically, as Bukatman points out, in cyberspace “the duality between mind and body is superseded in a new formation that presents the mind as itself embodied,” “construct[ing] a body at once material and immaterial - a fundamental oxymoron, perhaps, of postmodernity” (Terminal Identity 208). According to Dani

Cavallaro, therefore, cyberpunk fiction often “dissolves conventional notions of corporeality”

(xv), requiring the physical body “to reassess the meaning of its concreteness by negotiating with its immaterial counterparts” (83). Certainly, in most cyberfantasies, the jacked-in material body responds physically to experiences that befall the virtual body, as we see in The Matrix (1999), where after plunging to the ground in the virtual training programme, Neo (Keanu Reeves) is unplugged to find that his mouth is bleeding. Indeed, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) informs him that death in the Matrix means death in “real life” since “the body cannot live without the mind.” For Peter X. Feng, this aspect of the film provides a “welcome corrective to Baudrillard’s celebration of cyberpunk as a means to transcend bodily materiality and deny mortality” (154).9

However, as I argue below, The Matrix still invokes the mind/body dualism in its screening of its white male messiah hero who manages to triumph over both the flesh and the machines. In fact, in most cyberfantasies, it is overwhelmingly white men who seem better able to leave the body behind, while women and people of colour are often called upon to represent embodied presence.

Such recycling of Christian and Cartesian discourses would thus seem to confirm Amanda

Fernbach’s observation that in the absence of narratives with which to describe masculinity in a high-tech world, older, more familiar ones are deployed (248).

A quick glance at some titles of virtual reality fantasies offers some indication of the way in which cyberspace is often represented as a (white) male terrain: The Lawnmower Man (1992),

Digital Man (1995) and Hologram Man (1995). The none-too-subtle The Lawnmower Man,

9 However, cyberpunk fiction is very much concerned with the flesh, particularly its modifications in high-tech culture. For instance, as Cavallaro notes of Gibson’s fiction, the body is often altered by technology but not transcended, and flesh still plays an important role, even if characters despise “the meat” (75). 188 loosely based on a Stephen King story, tells the story of the virtual reality experiments of Dr.

Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan), which enabled him to increase the brain capacity of the intellectually-challenged Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey) by 400%. In a renowned scene, Jobe convinces his reluctant girlfriend (the town’s sex-obsessed widow) to experiment with virtual sex: while their material bodies, kitted out in virtual reality suits and goggles, are plugged into the computer mainframe, a (then) state of the art special effects sequence using computer-generated images evokes the pleasures of cybersexuality. Yet despite the use of fluctuating images to depict the fluidity of subjectivity in the virtual realm, not only is the woman represented by the colour pink and Jobe by blue, but also the images representing Jobe eventually morph into a beast who crushes the woman in an embrace that resembles more a virtual rape than consensual sex, leaving the woman brain-dead in “real life” (see figure 4.1) On the one hand, therefore, the mind and body prove to be inseparable. On the other hand, not only is sexual difference rigorously policed, but also, as Anneke Smelik points out, it is the woman who “has to pay the price” for the male desire to transcend the flesh. Eventually, Jobe’s ego becomes uncontrollable, and perceiving himself to be the new Jesus Christ, he ultimately succeeds in downloading his consciousness onto cyberspace, fulfilling his desires for omnipotence and immortality. The supposed disembodiment of cyberspace is thus self-consciously articulated through the Christian separation of spirit and flesh. This, combined with Jobe’s Aryan looks, maps out virtuality as a white male space. In terms of the film’s sexual and racial politics, then, it is tempting to concur with Angelo’s wife, who leaves Angelo (whose name also connotes non-corporeality) because of his obsession with virtuality, scathingly retorting, “It may be the future to you, Larry, but it’s just the same old shit to me!”10

10 The Lawnmower Man is obviously an extreme example; yet similar patterns can be traced in films with less obviously conservative representational strategies. For instance, while the cyberthriller Hackers (1995) screens a group of mixed raced teenage hackers (which works to render hacking a criminal but also authentic, street-wise activity), the narrative focus is the heterosexual romance between the white couple. Furthermore, the sole female hacker, Kate (Angelina Jolie) is the only one repeatedly shown in sexual encounters as if she were unable to escape her body (San Juan and Pratt 262). Similarly, in The Net (1995), Angela (Sandra Bullock), a freelance hacker, 189

In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow 1995) and The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999), fin-de-millennium cyberfantasies which screen an apocalyptic vision of cyberculture,11 articulating anxieties about simulation, hyperreality and fragmented postmodern subjectivity through the white male protagonist, who is played off against the more grounded subjectivities of his gendered and raced others. Both films screen women and people of colour in substantial roles, as the voice of ethics and/or spirituality, while white masculinity is posited as a blank, depthless subjectivity - though one waiting to be redeemed. Nevertheless, the representation of simulation technology is articulated through the

Cartesian tradition in the case of Strange Days and the Christian tradition in the case of The

Matrix. In both texts, this works to stabilise sexual and racial difference in a virtual realm where, theoretically at least, such differences are rendered obsolete.

4.3. Strange Days: Recycling the Cartesian Legacy

The opening shot of Strange Days - an extreme close-up of a startled human eye - immediately places the film in self-conscious intertextual relation with two films that begin identically: Peeping Tom (1960), a metacinematic interrogation of the voyeuristic pleasures of horror spectatorship, which Bigelow acknowledged as a major influence (Fuller 44), and Blade

Runner (1982), a techno-noir exploration of what it means to be human in an age of simulacra, from whose mise-en-scène Bigelow borrows significantly in her dystopian portrayal of fin-de- millennium Los Angeles.12

Set on the eve of the millennium, the film’s apocalyptic anxieties are initially articulated through racial tension and the image of “white masculinity in crisis.” Los Angeles has degenerated into run-down ghettoes, most evidently when an impervious Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) eventually turns her back on the virtual life she had been living in order to return to “reality” and look after her sick mother, seemingly all the happier for having done so (259). 11 For an analysis of the relationship between cinema and apocalyptic postmodern theory, see Sharrett’s introduction to Crisis Cinema. 12 Strange Days also pays homage to a variety of other films as diverse as Psycho and Terminator 2. 190 drives through the city at night in a video-clip sequence: as images of violence and urban decay flash past the car window, a radio discussion about the end of the world blares out the polemical words of a black male speaker who welcomes the coming of the apocalypse, since it marks the demise of white power. Race is thus forcefully inserted into eschatological discourse, making it apparent that one man’s apocalypse is another man’s emancipation, and that the apocalyptic mode common not only to America’s religious right wing, but also to so much postmodern critical theory, is often filtered through a white male perspective.13

Concerns about a beleaguered white masculinity are also articulated through the film’s representation of simulation technology. The in-the-near-future (at least at the time of release) narrative revolves around SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) technology, otherwise known as playback. Originally invented by the FBI, SQUID is a wireless device which, when attached to the skull, can download neural impulses in the brain onto disc format, which can then simulate the original wearer’s visual, aural, tactile and psychosensual experiences for another user. While this technology is not strictly speaking virtual, in that a surrogate actually undergoes the original experience, the simulation of the nervous system allows the users to jack-

13 As Christina Lane has noted, a key script change to James Cameron’s original screenplay by Bigelow and co- writer Jay Cocks performs a similar function. The original screenplay had African-American Mace arrive on the scene after Lenny and Max watch the TV address of Jeriko One, in which he states, “The day of reckoning is upon us. History ends and begins. Right here. Right now.” In the film version, Mace arrives before, so that she is present when Max offers his own apocalyptic view of the postmodern condition, stating that we know it’s the end of the world since “every kind of music’s been tried. Every government’s been tried. I mean, fuckin’ hairstyle. Fuckin’ bubblegum. You know breakfast cereal. Every fuckin’ peanut. What the fuck we gonna do? How we gonna make another thousand years, for Christ sake?” As Lane notes, Max’s rant is interrupted by intercuts of Mace's reactions, which recontextualise his totalising view of history “not simply from Mace’s perspective but from a broader ideological understanding of racialised histories, memories and futures” (“Strange Days” 192). White male postmodern theorists espouse equally as apocalyptic visions as Max about the death of history, the loss of metanarratives, and the futility of political struggle in an age of global capitalism and media domination, though they have proved unwilling to incorporate categories such as gender, race and sexuality into their paradigms. Thus when Baudrillard, Lyotard, Fukuyama and even Jameson claim that “we” have lost our sense of history, as Jonathan Bignell argues, this “we” claims a universality which rests on the exclusion of women (66), and I would add, all those involved in political struggle (from gay activists to Third World social revolutionaries), suggesting that the “crisis in history” is in fact a crisis of the historical privilege of the middle/upper-class, heterosexual, Western male subject. Indeed, while many postmodern theorists have suggested that the postmodern “incredulity towards master narratives” (Lyotard xxiv) has rendered the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment project impossible, those involved in the politics of class, race, gender, sexuality and religion have reacted suspiciously to the news that narratives of liberation are no longer viable due to the current crisis in legitimation. Moreover, as Peter Osborne points out, “the narrative of the death of metanarrative is itself grander than most of the narratives it would consign to oblivion” (qtd. in Eagleton, Illusions 34). 191 in and embody the phenomenological sensations of the surrogate wearer. SQUID has since gone black market and is traded on the streets like X-rated films with a difference; in short, in true postmodern style, the last bastion of human individuality - embodied subjectivity - has been commodified. Lenny, an ex-cop and seller of black-market SQUID clips, becomes embroiled in the thriller narrative when he is given a clip by Iris (Brigitte Bako), a prostitute who records on playback the assassination of revolutionary black rap singer Jeriko One (Glenn Plumber) by two cops as punishment for being a black male who has the gall to insult the LAPD. This self- conscious reference to the explosive Rodney King affair underscores that even in the near future, racial identity is still indelibly written on the flesh.

Although playback eventually helps incriminate Jeriko One’s killers, and is also shown to have other beneficial functions, such as allowing an amputee to experience running again, as a cyberthriller, Strange Days is more interested in the seedier, psychosexual uses to which it is put by the central white male characters. The only women to jack in during the film - Mace (Angela

Bassett) and Iris - do so not for pleasure, but at male bequest and to enable the techno-noir plot to unfold. All Lenny’s clients are men and, except for one stereotypical Japanese businessman

(whose state of the art hardware articulates anxieties about the technological superiority of the

Pacific Rim), white. The decentred, fragmented, postmodern subject is thus rendered white and male, while women and people of colour, who tend to feature on the other side of the SQUID apparatus, seem less able and willing to escape their enfleshed selves. Lenny defends his sleazy profession to Mace by arguing that playback facilitates an exploration of our “dark side”

(seemingly with no awareness of the racial connotations), protecting the body in a world where even sex can kill you. This association between electronic technology and fantasy is further elaborated when Lenny tells a potential white, middle-class, male client that he could sleep with the exotic Philippino girl dancing in the corner of the bar, or get tied up and whipped by nuns - all without tarnishing his wedding ring. Eventually the client is seen in a state of rapturous 192 ecstasy as he tests out a clip of a teenage girl having a shower. The film thus points to the potential challenge that virtual culture offers ontological embodied subjectivity, as well as hinting at a male desire to be liberated from the constraints of normative masculinity. At the same time, it is clear that the user of SQUID still retains his (or her) own subjectivity since they respond to the clips as “themselves,” so that “[a]lthough this technology promises to abduct the spectator, it only does so in relation to his or her prior psychic formation” (Carr 204). On the one hand, therefore, playback does not allow white male clients totally to disembody themselves.14

On the other, as a commercial enterprise, where surrogate wearers are paid like porn stars for their performances, it enables users to colonise the bodies of their others whilst retaining awareness of the power that inheres in that position, and more importantly, all without putting their own material bodies at risk from injury, infection or social disadvantage.

The film thus suggests that new media devices will be traversed by pre-existing networks of power, and the playback scenes, which use seamless point of view camerawork, allow

Bigelow to engage in a self-reflexive critique of (white) male voyeurism15 - though, of course,

“voyeurism” is not quite the right term since playback is not purely visual and is actually “post- cinematic” (Braidotti, Metamorphoses 253), offering, as Lenny puts it, “a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut. Straight from the cerebral cortex.”16 Bigelow’s critique of the (white) male gaze is most obviously played out in the controversial playback clip of the rape and murder of the aptly named Iris. The film’s spectator is forced into complicity with the rapist/killer, later revealed to be Lenny’s friend, Max (Tom Sizemore), who records his attack onto playback. Even more disturbingly, the killer also jacks Iris into a SQUID device, so that she not only witnesses her own rape and strangulation, but also simultaneously experiences the killer’s sadistic

14 In this respect, SQUID is like “simstim” technology in Neuromancer, which Case refers to as “a meat toy” (W. Gibson 55). 15 To the fullest extent possible in the cinematic medium, Bigelow attempts to simulate the visceral thrills of playback. As Steven Shaviro writes of Bigelow’s earlier film, Blue Steel (1990), “Bigelow affirms and celebrates visceral immediacy as an effect of simulation” (5). 16 For Brian Carr, SQUID overcomes the limits that Christian Metz regarded as intrinsic to the cinematic experience: the fact that the objects of the cinematic gaze are always absent, “lost to another time and space” (191). 193 titillation, which in turn heightens her fear, which in turn fuels the killer’s warped excitement.

Thus object/subject, human/technological and male/female oppositions are blurred, though playback is a far cry from the utopian fusion that Harraway envisages.17 Bigelow also critiques this chilling spectacle of violence (that she nonetheless exploits) by intercutting it with Lenny’s horrified reaction; indeed, Lenny vomits on the pavement - a fully physical response to a simulated experience. While Max literalises the Mulveyan sadistic male gaze, Lenny’s victim- identified response points to the fluidity of gendered identifications and the potentially masochistic dimensions of spectatorship. However, as Christina Lane points out, Lenny’s pain is emphasised at the expense of Iris’s, allowing Lenny to “[battle] the threat of the female subject- position by territorialising it” (Feminist Hollywood 123), and his positioning as a victim figure paves the way for his future redemption.

In true noir fashion, Lenny is persistently doubled with Max, Iris’s killer: both white men are obsessed with playback and the exhibitionist but inauthentic femme fatale, Faith (Juliet

Lewis), who sings at the equally aptly named nightclub “Retinal Fetish.” This doubling is made manifest when Lenny jacks into a clip which he thinks shows Faith’s rape and murder, but in fact screens a sadomasochistic sex romp with Max. Filmed through a subjective camera, the only means of informing Lenny (and the spectator) as to the identity of the wearer is when “Lenny” turns towards a mirror to be greeted by the image of Max. This uncanny moment thus reverses the dynamics of the Lacanian mirror stage, since it is first an image of misrecognition (the self as other), but then a moment of recognition (the other as self), since Lenny is forced to acknowledge his complicity in Max’s gaze. Christian Lane also invokes Lacan in her reading of

17 Bigelow was vehemently criticised for this scene, which she defended by arguing that it was “unflinching” and non-sensationalised, since all camera shots and angles were dictated by the intradiegetic SQUID apparatus (qtd. in G. Smith, “Momentum and Design” 49). Bigelow also argued that she had deconstructed the scene’s potentially exploitative nature by putting the film viewer in a position of culpability, as Peeping Tom had done over three decades earlier (qtd. in Fuller 44). For instance, the masked face of the killer, whose perspective we share, is reflected in Iris’s lifeless eyes (a citing of an equally infamous bathroom scene - the extreme close-up of the murdered Marian’s eye in Psycho). The killer then stretches out his hands and, like a director searching for the best composition, frames Iris’s face, foregrounding the aestheticisation of violence that undergrids so much cinematic production. For a discussion of Peeping Tom and Psycho, see chapter 8. 194 this scene, noting that Lenny “realises that he has been deluded to think that he could not only control what he looks at, but also the way in which the world returns his look in the form of a

‘gaze’” (“Strange Days” 185).

The film’s inscription of “an utter absorption in technologies of reflection, reduplication, and simulation” (Seltzer 20) as a straight white male fixation certainly underscores the power that inheres in the dominant subjectivity as it embodies its others (though Lenny’s obsession with clips of Faith also takes the masochistic impulses of the traditional noir hero to extremes [see figure 4.2]); however, it also articulates a lack of interiority and authenticity in the white male

SQUID junkies. The readiness and ease with which they colonise the body of the surrogate wearer is suggestive of both the privileges but also the anxieties that plague an unmarked body: inhabiting the universal subjectivity, whose very lack of particularity promotes the illusion of disembodiment, has, as a flip-side, the fear that white masculinity lacks specific content - hence the need to live vicariously through the other.18 This anxiety is emphasised in the manner in which the film self-consciously plays Lenny off against Mace, who represents embodied presence.

Lenny’s loser status is partly depicted through his futile obsession with both Faith and his parasitical dependence on playback, but is also inscribed through his pasty white, non-muscular, acutely vulnerable body - an example of Bigelow’s trademark subversion of gender and genre.19

18 A similar motif of white male sterility and parasitical desire to live other people’s experiences is also evident in two recent films featuring Robin Williams. In One-Hour Photo (2002), Williams plays a photo-lab developer who lives vicariously through the lives of those whose photographs he develops. In the SF fantasy Final Cut (2004), Williams plays a “cutter” who edits people’s experiences, recorded on implants, after they have died in order to make their lives into a film for future screenings. Again, he has no personal life and lives through the experiences of other people. 19 Bigelow stated that she would not have been interested in the script had the gender roles been generic (qtd. in Fuller 44). As Yvonne Tasker notes, Bigelow “seems to revel in genres conventionally understood as both ‘masculine’ and artless” (“Kathryn Bigelow” 59). While her films have been labelled exploitative, fetishistic and visually excessive, these criticisms seem primarily to stem from gender-specific expectations from a female director. For instance, Ally Acker argues that Bigelow adopts “the patriarchal values of fun-through-bloodshed and a relishing of violence” creating “nothing more than male clones” (qtd. in Lane, Feminist Hollywood 99). Other critics have contended that she inverts both genre and gender from within the mainstream. Bigelow herself has claimed that she aims to deconstruct the notion of a “male” or “female” subject and genre, claiming that such “notions tend to ghettoise men and women, and ghettoisation is unproductive” (qtd. in Fuller 44). 195

The suggestion is that Lenny’s passive immersion in cyberculture has resulted in a loss of physicality, which, in the action genre, connotes a loss of masculinity. Lenny repeatedly attempts to worm himself out of physical confrontation with fast-talking and bribes. In one scene, Lenny is punched in the stomach by a pumped-up, white woman as a male assailant taunts, “We tried to find a smaller girl to beat the shit out of you, but it was short notice.” Bigelow even has Lenny faint in the final scene. Lenny’s narcissism is also persistently overdetermined. He insists on removing his expensive Armani jacket before being hit, and then begs, “Just don’t hurt the eyes.”

His ties also attract an inordinate amount of comments throughout the film. Consequently, the film doubles the commodification of the male body with simulation technology, both of which threaten to reduce masculinity to simulacrum. Thus it would seem that discourses of white male disembodiment only maintain hegemonic norms when they are deployed to safeguard white male transcendence of the body, not the loss of its physical values.

Lenny’s physical vulnerability is highlighted by being played off against the resilient, muscular Mace, who is as tough as her name suggests. Whereas Terminator 2 partially assimilated the threat that Sarah Connor posed to gender norms through the hyperphallicisation of Schwarzenegger’s cyborg, Mace is consistently figured as more conventionally masculine than Lenny. While Lenny decks himself out in flamboyant attire, Mace dons trouser suits and leather gear, except for the final scene when she borrows a sexy black number from her sister and receives her first compliment from Lenny; but even then, the gun she pokes in her suspender belt make this a contradictory image of femininity. As a bodyguard-chauffeur, Mace is well versed in physical combat, and repeatedly rescues Lenny throughout the film (see figure 4.3).

According to generic conventions, Mace’s physicality connotes authenticity and is therefore inextricable from her vehement opposition to playback, which she considers “porn for wire-heads.” Accusing Lenny of being a social parasite (nonetheless one she is in love with), at one point Mace furiously stamps on Lenny’s clips of Faith, flings Lenny against a wall, and 196 lectures: “This is your life. Right here, right now. It’s real time, you hear me? Real time, time to get real. Not playback. ... These are used emotions. It’s time to trade them in. Memories were meant to fade, Lenny. They’re designed that way for a reason.” This appeal to the “real” of corporal presence might position Mace as “the moral centre of the film,” as Bigelow herself intended (qtd. in Fuller 44), but it simultaneously yokes her to historical discourses of black female hyperembodiment. Her unwillingness to divest herself of her enfleshed identity is also linked to her investment in the black body as a site of politicised identity. Unlike Mace, Lenny, as a white male, has no embodied political identity to appeal to; nor is he concerned by racial and social injustice, and only after a sudden change of heart does he hand over to Mace the clip that indicts Jeriko One’s killers.

On his path to redemption, Lenny recognises his desire for Mace and, it is suggested, will turn his back on playback, which offers “a progressive theme about the reformation of aggressive masculinity” since Lenny can begin to respond to difference in ways that do not involve mastery and colonisation (Lane, “Strange Days” 186). At the same time, the ending repeats the prevalent motif in fictional cyberpunk texts that present people of colour as “more grounded and able to heal white people careening out of control” (Springer, “Psycho-Cybernetics” 215) - a motif that, as we saw in chapter two, is also common to contemporary Hollywood productions. The final highly romanticised image of a bi-racial kiss, despite being unusual for a Hollywood that still shies away from bi-racial romance, deftly displaces the political onto the personal and shifts attention to a beleaguered white male and his transformation.20 Talking of the ending of his original screenplay, James Cameron explained (with a neo-Evangelicalism characteristic of recent Hollywood production), “I wanted to do a kind of redemption motif. I always had in mind the fate of this one guy, Lenny Nero, and his ability to find what’s right, and what’s wrong. If

20 For many critics the ending indicated “the shortcomings of both Bigelow and Cameron in the attempt to articulate a political sensibility within a generic context” (Tasker, “Kathryn Bigelow” 64). Jeriko One’s assassins turn out to be two rogue cops rather than members of a white death squad, Mace is rescued by the principled, white, male police commissioner (a disturbing validation of the LAPD in view of the film’s reference to the Rodney King affair), and racial tension is defused by bi-racial heterosexual coupling. 197 one person can elevate themselves or redeem themselves then, by extrapolation we all can” (qtd. in “Strange Days”). As white male, then, Lenny has the privilege of standing for all of humanity.

However, his redemption is dependent upon the love of a good black woman, who enables him to re-embody himself but in a way that risks positing African-Americans and women as exterior to the technological, and reinforcing discourses that posit black women as unable to escape the confines of the flesh.21

4.4. Transcending the Flesh: Race, Gender and Christian Discourse in The Matrix

The Matrix (1999), a neo-gothic cyberfantasy famed for its much-imitated special effect and wirework sequences, offers a spectacular trip into the vagaries of the hyperreal, joining other fin de millennium films such as Pleasantville (1998), Dark City (1998), The Truman Show (1998) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) in questioning the status of “reality.” The Matrix screens the dystopian fantasy of humans having been enslaved by machines that feed off the energy produced by human bodies plugged into fields of womb-like energy extracting devices; in an ironic twist of fate, humans have been reduced to mere batteries. In order to thwart resistance, human consciousness has been wired into the Matrix - an interactive computer programme that simulates reality and externalises the human nervous system, making humans oblivious to their subjugation.22 Neo, a computer technician and hacker, is emancipated from the Matrix by

Morpheus, the leader of the human resistance, who along with Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and the rest of his crew, free the few minds capable of accepting the truth - that their lives have been

21 This association of people of colour as a repository of a lost authenticity is also evident in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), which has rap star Ice-T convince Keanu Reeves’s information spy to save humanity - casting which, as David Crane notes, trades on Ice-T’s reputation for speaking from the streets and “telling it like it is” (94). 22 For Žižek, the Matrix is “[s]imply the Lacanian ‘big Other,’ the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us” (“The Matrix” 244). Žižek argues that “[t]he film is not wrong in insisting that there is a Real beneath the Virtual Reality Simulation […] however, the Real is not the ‘true reality’ behind the virtual simulation, but the void which makes reality incomplete or inconsistent” (246). 198 nothing more than a computer-generated illusion.23 As Morpheus had hoped, Neo turns out to be the “chosen one” - the only human capable of triumphing over the Matrix and saving humankind.

The Matrix borrows extensively from the Terminator films in its fusion of science fiction dystopia with Christian discourse, as well as recycling elements from Vertigo (1958), Superman

(1978), Blade Runner (1982), Men in Black (1997), and John Woo films, to name but a few.

Moreover, as Pat Mellencamp points out, “The Matrix eclectically blends Asian and American film genres (particularly action adventure, sci-fi, Kung Fu/Hong Kong martial arts), live action and animation (Japanese anime, Warner Brothers Cartoons), and other media (comic books, TV, and computer/video games, in the latter, particularly architectural form and visual style)” (84).

As with Strange Days, then, for a film that ostensibly screens anxieties about the loss of the

Baudrillardian “real,” The Matrix is nonetheless a veritable exercise in postmodern citation. In addition to self-conscious allusions to filmic intertexts, it is also peppered with literary references from sources as diverse as the Bible and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Neo also hides his illegal discs in a hollowed out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981),24 while

Morpheus directly quotes Baudrillard when he shows Neo the devastation that has been wrought upon the world, ironically proclaiming, “welcome to the desert of the real.”25

For Baudrillard, the order of the hyperreal substitutes the signs of the real for the real itself (Simulacra and Simulations 2); in our media-saturated, image-dominated, cyber-immersed culture, Baudrillard pessimistically declares the impossibility of recovering the real, a vacuum that is being filled by simulacra (19). He argues that the “real” has become our true utopia but one “no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a

23 The film’s questioning of the status of “reality” has already spawned three anthologies addressing the film in relation to such philosophical subjects as Plato’s cave, world religions, scepticism, the “real” (Baudrillardian and Lacanian), fate versus freedom, Descartes, Kant, existentialism and Marxism. See Haber, Irwin and Yeffeth. 24 Lavery suggests this is a joke implying that Baudrillard's own text is hollowed out of meaning (155). 25 See Baudrillard 1. The fact that Baudrillard is quoted in such a popular film text is some indication of his huge influence. At the same time, he has been considerably critiqued for his nihilism, western-bias, dismissal of categories such as class, state power, race, gender domination, and his technological determinism that posits all subjects as dupes at the mercy of the media-controlled capitalist order, which can only be overturned by the system’s eventual implosion (Bertens 156-7). 199 lost object” (123). The Matrix screens the fantasy of reclaiming this “lost object,” a fantasy that is packaged up in a postmodern recycling of Christian discourse; it is thus exemplary of popular cinema’s penchant for postmodernism at the level of aesthetics but good, old-fashioned humanism and individualism at the level of theme. 26

The Christian allusions are numerous: indeed, entire web sites have been dedicated to their decoding. Most obviously, the name Neo, which suggests the ushering in of a new era as well as a “New Man” action hero, is also an anagram of “One.” Neo is confirmed as “the one” when he is killed in the Matrix and therefore in the material world but is resurrected by a kiss from Trinity. In The Matrix Reloaded (2003), he also brings Trinity back from the dead, while in

The Matrix Revolutions (2003) he sacrifices himself in a crucifixion-like scene in order to save humanity. Despite the associations of her name, Trinity fills the function of Mary of Magdalene in a typically irreverent postmodern reworking of master narratives. Other Christian allusions include Morpheus’s multicultural crew as the Disciples, especially the aptly named Cypher (Joe

Pantoliano), who, Judas-like, betrays Neo to the authorities - in this case the agents that patrol the Matrix, seeking out those freed humans that infiltrate the system. Moreover, the name of

Morpheus’s craft, Nebuchadnezzer, refers to the Biblical King who suffered from bad dreams and eventually became a believer, while the name of the last city of mankind located beneath the

Earth’s surface is Zion, a reference to the Biblical city of heaven on Earth.

These Christian references are also mixed with references to Ancient Greek mythology, as well as Eastern philosophies. Despite this hybridity, it is striking that in the first film all the main characters with Christian allegorical functions are white (Neo, Trinity, Cypher), while the two central African-American characters bear Ancient Greek names (though the sequels also

26 Bukatman suggests that such humanist narratives no doubt function as compensation for “the loss of the human in the labyrinth of telematic culture by simply transforming it into an arena susceptible to human control,” though human (or posthuman) identity is also often redefined in the process (Terminal Identity 118). For example, both the Terminator and Matrix trilogies screen apocalyptic wars against the machines, which have gained artificial intelligence. However, humans are also dependent on technology in their struggle for survival. Unlike machines, though, humans are flexible, spontaneous and unpredictable, values which enable them to master the technology that they are nonetheless dependent on. 200 give Hellenic names to white characters): Morpheus is named after the Greek God of dreams, while Neo’s coming has been predicted by the Oracle (Gloria Foster),27 a homely, cookie-baking, supremely wise black woman, who, like so many African-Americans in cinematic representations (Morpheus the believer included), acts as the guardian of a lost spirituality and authenticity. Despite her spiritual dimension and down-to-earth-ness (encoded through her run- down, inner-city abode), which would seem to posit her as the antithesis to technology, in The

Matrix Reloaded the oracle turns out to be a computer programme. However, importantly, she is one designed to make the Matrix seem more real by offering humans the variable of choice. Her own choice is to help the human resistance and bring about peace by teaching Neo to “know thyself.” Along with Morpheus, therefore, she fulfils the role of magical black helper that I discussed in chapter two, not only in helping Neo to recognise “the secrets” of his identity

(DiPiero, “White Men Aren’t” 126), but also in bringing the white couple, Neo and Trinity, together (Gabbard 68).

Despite the trilogy’s obvious effort to include a multicultural cast, particularly in the sequels, certain racial norms are reinscribed in the association of Christianity with whiteness

(though destabilised in the association of Hellenism with blackness) and the assignation of the messiah as a “white” male, blindly followed by Morpheus and worshipped by many of the multicultural inhabitants of Zion. I place “white” in inverted commas because the complexities of racial identity are particularly apparent in the case of Keanu Reeves. Although in interviews he self-identifies as white, in actual fact his father is Hawaiian-Chinese (his mother is white

British). For that reason, according to Feng, “Asian American spectators frequently label Reeves as Asian Pacific passing as white” (155). In most of his films, he is also invariably positioned as white, his casting as the Victorian Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) being a key case in point. In The Matrix, despite the deployment of his Asian roots in the martial arts

27 After Gloria Foster’s death, the oracle was played by Mary Alice in The Matrix Revolutions. 201 sequences,28 similar to Bernado Bertolucci’s use of Reeves in Little Buddha (1993), he is significantly “whitened,” given the Anglo Saxon name Thomas A. Anderson - and, as if to hammer this fact home, he is even told at one point by his friend Choi (Marc Gray) that he is looking “even whiter than usual.” Yet, most importantly, Reeves is significantly “whitened” by his narrative function of messiah. While Neo’s “whiteness” and maleness are offered up as contingent, within the film’s citation of Christian discourse, they are both essential to his ability to triumph over the limitations of the flesh.

At the same time, however, within the logic of the virtual reality narrative, differences that are written on the body, notably gender and race, theoretically become immaterial in the

Matrix. Unlike Strange Days, people of colour frequently disembody themselves in order to enter the Matrix, though none, of course, are capable of the flesh-defying feats that Neo performs. The Matrix also flirts with gender instability in its screening of Trinity, the cyberpunk sidekick turned action heroine, whom Neo had first assumed to be male because of her exceptional hacking skills. In the realm of virtual reality, of course, muscles and physical strength are rendered obsolete, which also works to give Trinity’s toughness and combative skills narrative justification. Neo and Trinity also look remarkably similar in the Matrix: both have short black hair, both wear black suits, sunglasses, black leather boots, and both handle phallic weaponry (however virtual) with ease - a marker of masculinity in the Hollywood tradition (see figure 4.4). In other words, the “residual self images” (the mental projection of their digital selves) that Neo and Trinity assume in the Matrix are both culturally understood as masculine, no doubt functioning much like the armoured body of the cyborg - to ward off the threat of potentially feminising electronic technology. Nonetheless, Neo’s flexible, slimmer body is a welcome change from the stiff, robotic, hypermasculine cyborg bodies of earlier science fiction

28 Feng notes that the Wachowksi brothers enlisted Yuen Wo Ping - the action director and fight choreographer of Fist of Legend (1994) and one of many directors to leave Hong Kong after the 1997 handover - to train actors, choreograph scenes and supervise the wirework. For Feng, “Keanu Reeves becomes the primary conduit for The Matrix’s assimilation of Hong Kong action film-making” (156). 202 cinema. Virtual bodies are freed from gravity and physical limitations, as witnessed in the breathtaking, fast-cut, video-clip and computer game-style action sequences that paradoxically offer up cinema at its most visceral. In fact, Neo’s superiority is played out through his speed, malleability and grace in balletic combat sequences that have more in common with the skilfully choreographed Martial Arts cinema than 80s Hollywood’s hard-hitting, explosive action tradition

(see figure 4.5). While Sarah Connor is played off against the solidity of Schwarzenegger’s terminator, Trinity is played off against Neo’s greater fluidity; whereas fluidity marked the

T1000 a menacingly feminised figure in Terminator 2 (1991), it marks Neo’s triumph over the agents in the Matrix, particularly in the final scene when Neo enters the body of Agent Smith

(Hugo Weaving), destroying him through implosion. When The Matrix Revolutions reverses this dynamic as Agent Smith colonises Neo’s body in order to make him into a copy of himself, Neo ultimately resists his body being penetrated, and explodes from within, annihilating Smith and his clones in the process in order to emerge whole again with his bodily boundaries intact. Thus, while Neo is not hypermasculinised, nor is he feminised, since while female masculinisation is now a staple of the action genre, male feminisation is not as culturally palatable, as the box- office failure of Strange Days indicates (Jermyn and Redmond 10). Neo’s normative “white” masculinity is also depicted through the film’s parodic recycling of the generic conventions of the western, such as the shoot-outs, fetishist shots of guns, leather and hands ready to draw, and newspaper blowing across the ground like tumbleweed - Neo is, after all, in cyberpunk jargon, a console cowboy (see figure 4.6).

At the same time, the fact that these bodies are virtual externalisations of the human nervous system allows for a reading that underscores the performativity of gender; as with

Terminator 2, once gender is seen as performative, it is freed up from the heterosexual matrix, and Neo’s fetishitic leather gear and cowboyism, combined with Keanu Reeves’s gay icon status, certainly lends the film to a queer reading. In an analysis of Reeves’s star persona, R.L. Rutsky 203 argues that Reeves’s refined beauty subjects him to the same treatment that befalls female stars, accounting for his depiction as dumb in the mainstream press as well as “the persistent rumours that he is gay” (189).29 Keanu Reeves has also taken on homoerotic roles in films like My Own

Private Idaho (1991) and Point Break (1991), and remarkably passive action roles in films such as Speed (1994), where the feisty heroine played by Sandra Bullock holds the wheel of the bus wired with explosives, literally relegating Reeves to the back seat, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where he plays the reticent Jonathan Harker to the more sexually curious Mina (Winona Ryder) and the emasculating female vampires. Likewise, in The Matrix, Neo is resurrected by a kiss from Trinity in an interesting generic reversal of fairy tales conventions. Thus, as Jenny

Wolmark has written of the novels of cyberpunk founder William Gibson, “leaving the ‘meat’ behind does not serve to obliterate all the contradictions inherent in cultural constructed masculinity, nor does it enable a less compromised virtual masculinity to be enacted in cyberspace” (8). Ultimately, though, despite this contradictory representation of “white” heterosexual masculinity, hegemonic norms are reinscribed not only through the conventions of the action genre (both Morpheus and Trinity are finally rescued by Neo) but also through recourse to an older, transcendental discourse of disembodiment that marks Neo as hero:

Christianity. Even though these Christian allusions are articulated in the realm of fantasy, they are no less powerful; as Sharon Willis points out, “[w]hether we are speaking of race, of gender, or of sexuality, fictive constructions and fantasies lend historical and material force to the matter of difference” (High Contrast 2).

No doubt Baudrillard, who has declared that “there is no longer a God to recognise his own, no longer a Last Judgement to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection” (Simulacra and Simulations 6), would interpret The Matrix’s assimilation of

29 Michael DeAngelis notes that unlike fellow cross-over icon Mel Gibson, Reeves has never shown any hostility for his gay following (204). After a rumour circulated that he was gay, Reeves stated, “Well, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being gay, so to deny it is to make a judgement. And why make a big deal of it? (qtd. in DeAngelis 205). 204

Christian discourse as a nostalgic desire for transcendence in a post-religious era (a reading that would vastly underplay the resurgence of neo-evangelicalism in contemporary America, which the film, if certain web sites are anything to go by, certainly tapped into). However, I would suggest that it also fulfils another function: offering Neo, who is played off against the enigmatic

Black Morpheus and equally intriguing Trinity, a particularised identity that otherwise he, a

“white” male, cannot lay claim to. As plain Thomas A. Anderson, a computer programmer, encased in a white, plastic cubicle in the uniform world of corporate America, Neo looked little different from the agents, who are represented by an overdetermined image of straight white masculinity: they all have the commonest Anglo-Saxon names imaginable - Mr. Smith, Mr.

Brown, Mr. Jones - and they all share a blank expression, identical suits, ties, tie-pins and sunglasses. At one point, Morpheus even tells Agent Smith, in a reversal of racist discourse,

“You all look the same to me.” This comparison is much aided not only by Reeves’s infamous wooden delivery of lines but also his vacuous star persona, with Reeves often described “as a kind of pure, blank surface, lacking all depth” (Rutsky 187) - all of which render him the apotheosis of the two-dimensional cybersubject.

J.P. Telotte has observed that images of an “empty human nature” in science fiction cinema are generally masculine (“The Tremulous Public Body” 16). Richard Dyer has also noted an association of whiteness with sterility, meaninglessness and death in the cinematic representation of cyborgs, citing Blade Runner and the Alien series as examples (White 207-223).

A more recent instance can be found in I, Robot (2004): all the robots look identical, all are white, and the leading robot has English Received Pronunciation (much like the 3-CPO robot in

Star Wars), a marked contrast to the streetwise hero, Will Smith, and his distinctive African-

American cadences.30 Electronic space in general is coded as white in films such as THX-1138

(1971) and The Matrix, presumably because whiteness connotes emptiness. The Western city

30 Nonetheless, one robot, as the title suggests, gains a sense of individuality and becomes humanised in the process. 205 that Neo enters in the training programme is also populated solely by whites (Gabbard 168), all dressed in black suits, except for the blond woman in red who is designed to distract Neo.

Moreover, on a closer inspection, all these city-dwellers are twins, another image that suggests a lack of white self-distinction. This contrasts starkly with the highly multi-cultural city of Zion, particularly in the sequels. Racial difference thus becomes a signifier of humanity.

Therefore, it is highly significant that it is normative white masculinity that is called upon in The Matrix to represent both electronic space, which, according to Vivien Sobchack, is depthless and two-dimensional (Address of the Eye 302), as well as the excess of surface and the

“waning of affect” that Fredric Jameson argues is a characteristic of postmodernism (9-10). The

Matrix is not the first film to make this association, of course. In the influential Tron (1982) and more recent Virtuosity (1995), computer programmes are also represented by white heterosexual men. In the latter film, the chillingly indifferent computer programme (Russell Crowe), comprised of the profile of over 200 serial killers, is played off against his grounded, passionate, black adversary (Denzil Washington).31 Such a dynamic, also evident in Strange Days, is similarly deployed in The Matrix Reloaded: the architect of the Matrix (Helmut Bakaitis), who informs Neo that he is the sixth version of the messiah, an anomaly of the system, built in to function as a Foucauldian form of control (though Neo eventually proves him wrong, of course), is a white man with a white beard, dressed in white. The architect, who espouses the doctrine of fate and inevitability, is played off against the oracle, who introduces choice into the system.

Thus, while the oracle as computer programme complicates the association of cyberspace with normative white masculinity, she is also intimately tied to the human, becoming Agent Smith’s enemy in The Matrix Revolutions. In The Matrix Morpheus is also beaten at Agent Smith’s bidding in a scene that evokes the Rodney King affair. Smith delivers his speech about hating

31 The fact that the recent reworking of H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man is called Hollow Man (2002), offers another interesting association between white masculinity, technology and emptiness. The mad scientist, played by Kevin Bacon, uses his invisibility to rape women, so that the title also refers to his moral bankruptcy. 206 humanity whilst Morpheus is bound, gagged and interrogated, a speech which recalls all the bitterness of white supremacist discourse (see figure 4.7). Moreover, while the oracle enjoys physical pleasures such as smoking and eating cookies (albeit within the Matrix), Agent Smith has nothing but contempt for the flesh, and in The Matrix Revolutions, when he enters the material body of a human resistance fighter, he utters with total revulsion, “It’s difficult even to think encased in this rotting piece of meat. The stink of it filling every breath, a suffocating cloud you can’t escape. Disgusting.” In The Matrix, Mouse (Matt Doran) tells Neo that “to deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human,” yet the enfleshed self is exactly what Neo attempts to transcend.

The doubling of Neo with Agent Smith thus plays out anxieties about white masculinity, in particular its potential sterility and lack of self-distinction. In The Matrix Reloaded, Agent

Smith even learns to self-replicate, producing endless images of white masculinity as simulacra

(see figure 4.8).32 In The Matrix Revolutions, Smith also tries to make Neo into one of his clones

(see figure 4.9), explaining he has become Neo’s “negative” - though, of course, in Lacanian terms, the double is always also “the other within.” Neo’s transcendence of the flesh thus allows him to become messiah, while his lack of investment in a corporealised, embodied identity also enables him to function as a universal signifier of humanity; at the same time, the doubling motif allows the flip-side anxieties that this disembodiment provokes to be displaced onto the agents.

Despite this attempt to polarise these antithetical representations of normative white masculinity as both “all and nothing” into two characters, as double figures, they persistently slide into each other throughout the film.

32 This is similar to Being John Malkovitch (1999), which screens multiple images of John Malkovitch in a wonderful evocation of white masculinity as “a copy of a copy of a copy” - so much so that John Malkovitch himself cannot be John Malkovitch as convincingly as his replicas. 207

4.5. Fusing with the Matrix: Pre-Oedipal Imagery and the Monstrous Feminine

The fact that the figure of white heterosexual masculinity is repeatedly called upon to represent not only anxieties about the depthless, postmodern cybersubject but also human transcendence over the technological is some indication of the threat that cyber- and virtual culture poses to traditional configurations of male mastery. Indeed, The Matrix’s representation of the agents (and therefore the Matrix interface itself) as normative white masculinity works much like the last-ditch attempt to masculinise techno-imagery in the 80s cyborg films. At the same time, the film’s use of grotesque womb imagery to represent fusion with the Matrix enacts the violent return of both the repressed body and the feminine that this masculinisation and disembodiment involves.

As Claudia Springer and Deborah Lupton have argued, electronic technology shares many characteristics with the female body - it is miniature, mysterious, dark, leaky, vulnerable to contamination, a site of intense emotional security but also terrifying engulfment (Electronic

Eros 59; 487). Many theorists have also pointed out that the etymological root of the word

“matrix” is the Latin “mater” meaning both “mother” and “womb.” For Rosi Braidotti, who invokes Irigaray’s argument that the flight from materiality is always a flight from the mother, the desire to jack into cyberspace signifies “escape from the maternal site of reproduction of the enfleshed self, in favour of integration in the abstract circuit of a collectively managed electronic matrix linked to a central point of consciousness” (Metamorphoses 251). Nonetheless, as Anneke

Smelik argues, the “flight from the flesh” is often paradoxically a flight back into the womb, since fusion with the matrix is frequently represented through pre-Oedipal imagery. For example, in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), based on a William Gibson short story, Johnny (played again by a wooden and vacuous Keanu Reeves) has had his long term memory erased so that he can download illegal information into his cybernetically modified neural cortex; despite having erased memories of his mother to free up more space for information, whenever he jacks in, he is 208 flooded by memories of her calling out his name, though in cyberspace he eventually embraces her image, no longer fearing being engulfed by her voice (Springer, “Psycho-Cybernetics” 213-

14). However, as Amanda Fernbach points out, it is important to stress that it is not so much that submersion into the matrix replicates the pre-Oedipal symbiotic relationship between mother and child, but rather, due to the absence of narratives with which to describe masculinity in a new postmodern high-tech world, familiar narratives are put into play (248). Thus pre-Oedipal space is often invoked in cyberpunk fiction in order both to acknowledge and to disavow anxieties that dog contemporary masculinity as it imagines the future (248).

Pre-Oedipal imagery is used in many films that figure the matrix, like the womb, as an uncanny site of pleasurable plenitude and abject self-annihilation, particularly for the male subject. In her influential The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), Barbara Creed analyses such imagery in horror cinema through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. As we saw in chapter two,

Kristeva argues that all individuals experience abjection when they attempt to break away from the mother, and for the male subject in particular, who within patriarchal culture always fears his own identity “sinking irretrievably into the mother,” the maternal body becomes a site of conflicting fears and desires (64). Notably, films with active heroines encode cybertechnology through grotesque images of the feminine and/or maternal body, inscribing at the level of mise- en-scène the sexual difference binary that tough action heroines and technological advances destabilise. With self-conscious intertextual allusions to Alien (1979), one of Creed’s key film texts, The Matrix screens abject images of the maternal body in order to convey fears about male passivity and the annihilation of subjectivity in virtual culture. A bald, naked Neo awakens to find himself in a womb-shaped sac, submerged in viscous fluid, his fetus-like body penetrated by wires resembling umbilical cords, which, far from nurturing him, drain off his energy (see figure

4.10). Neo’s liberation from the Matrix is then figured as a birth; he shoots through a labyrinth of dark, slippery, vaginal passages, landing in a pool of water from which he is rescued by 209

Morpheus’s ship. Earlier, in the Matrix, before his liberation, his body had also been infiltrated by a bug that Agent Smith injected into his naval (the place from which children often think babies emerge); Trinity again penetrates his naval to remove the bug in a monstrous image of male pregnancy and labour that cites the famed scene in Alien in which Kane (John Hurt) gives birth to the alien gestating inside him. Entering the Matrix from Morpheus’s ship also requires penetration through a bioport in the back of the neck, though the film also suggests the pleasures of passively submitting to technology when Neo, lying inert, strapped into his chair, gasps orgasmically when he is jacked in. However, as Cynthia Freeland points out, this is an example of “good penetration” since it is clean and unmessy - a stark contrast to the womb-like human fields (208).33 For Freeland, this forms part of the film’s fantasy of overcoming the flesh, evident in the black leather, latex costumes of the characters’ “residual images,” and Neo’s eventual ability to dodge bullets and vanquish death (206, 209).

For this reason, Freeland compares the film unfavourably with another 1999 virtual reality fantasy, eXistenZ, directed by David Cronenberg, the king of the monstrous feminine.

What interests Freeland about this film is that far from denying the flesh, it “revels in the goo of flesh, gore, and blood - of wetware [the cyberpunk term for the human body]” (206). This difference is evident from the opening credit sequence of each films: The Matrix opens with lines of neon-green computer code, while eXistenZ screens swirling pink, cream and gold fluid which

“cellular structures seen under a microscope” (206).34 She also notes that the film’s organic gun, made up of bone covered in the gelatinous remains of flesh, which shoots teeth for bullets, could not be further from the clean, hard, shiny guns that Neo handles (212). Moreover, unlike the phallic-like trode that penetrates Neo’s bioport, in eXistenZ the characters fuse with the virtual reality game by massaging breast-shaped pods called “umbycords” that are plugged directly into

33 This recalls the sterile, clinical images at the beginning of Alien, when the crew are awoken by Mother, the ship’s computer. The alien has been regarded as the violent return of the repressed maternal body by many critics. 34Another major difference between the two films, which has caused many critics to regard eXistenZ as more radical, is the fact that at the end of eXistenZ, the entire film we have watched turns out to have been a VR game. Even the status of “reality” at the end of the film is questioned, when one character asks if the game is still being played. 210 the nervous system (see figure 4.11). Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the female game designer, gains great pleasure from caressing these pods, evoking the sexualised “pleasures of the interface,” to use Claudia Springer’s phrase (Electronic Eros 58). The film is also unusual in that

Allegra is decidedly more at ease in virtual space than her squeamish male counterpart Ted (Jude

Law), who expresses concern about what is happening to his “real” body. He is also reluctant to have his bioport fitted: once he has it done, he is left with a vaginal-like hole at the base of his spine which requires stimulation when not in use. Bioports in eXistenZ are also susceptible to infection from other users, an obvious references to the AIDS virus - AIDS being a fear that underwrites many discourses about the benefits of cyber-disembodiment. While I agree with

Freeland that eXistenZ screens the impossibility of leaving the meat or the feminine behind, and that perhaps for that very reason, in many ways Allegra is a more progressive female figure than

Trinity, whose toughness is soon replaced by more nurturing qualities (209), Freeland does not fully engage with the fact that, far from celebrating the flesh, eXistenZ depicts the organic as revolting and grotesque, primarily because we experience it through Ted’s point of view.

Nevertheless, the fact that such abject images are primarily inscribed across the male body certainly articulates anxieties about contemporary masculinity. Indeed, eXistenZ would seem to echo Sadie Plant’s assertion that “[t]here is no escape from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing transcendent. These are simply the disguises which pander to man’s projections of his own rear-view illusions […] Entering the matrix is no assertion of masculinity, but a loss of humanity; to jack into cyberspace is not to penetrate, but to be invaded” (“The Future Looms”

59). For this reason, she states that “the matrix is neither heaven, nor even a comforting return to the womb” (“On the Matrix” 335); rather, “cyberspace is out of man’s control: virtual reality destroys his identity, digitalisation is mapping his soul and, at the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machinic erections, man confronts the system he built for his own protection and finds it is female and dangerous” (335). 211

Plant’s work, while playful and parodic in the tradition of Luce Irigaray, often verges on essentialism in her monolithic discussion of “man” and “woman”;35 moreover, her utopian and fetishistic accounts of technology fail to place technology within a specific socio-economic context - particularly as regards the fact that technology is still overwhelmingly controlled by multinational corporations, which are themselves overwhelmingly controlled by white men, despite substantial challenges from the economies of the Pacific Rim.36 Rather than declaring the future female, it is more productive to explore how anxieties about gender relations in the age of technology are articulated through images of male feminisation on the terrain of popular representation. Indeed, as we have scene, a far cry from Plant’s celebratory rhetoric, most contemporary films screen concerns about a feminised future in a backlash mode, as I analysed in chapter one in my discussion of the virtual reality sequence in Disclosure (1994), a film which bears out Springer’s observation that feminine images of the technological “are not necessarily feminist” (Electronic Eros 104).

Disclosure, along with all the films I have discussed in this chapter, bears weight to Anne

Balsamo’s observation that “[t]here is plenty of evidence to suggest that a reconstructed body does not guarantee a reconstructed cultural identity. Nor does ‘freedom from a body’ imply that people exercise the ‘freedom to be’ any kind of body than the one they already enjoy or desire”

(229). Whatever the utopian claims about cyber- and virtual culture, popular cinema still finds ways of inscribing difference and maintaining hegemonic gender and race norms. Despite the screening of anxieties about male feminisation and straight white male emptiness and sterility in

35 For instance, Plant states, “[t]here is no such thing as being a real woman. To be truly human is to be a man” (“Beyond the Screens” 16) - a phrase that invokes Luce Irigaray’s dual-meaning assertion that woman is “the sex which is not one.” Differences of class, race, sexuality, age and ability are thus lost in Plant’s account, which shares all the problematics common to certain strands of French Feminism. For an excellent discussion of French Feminism, itself no monolithic school of thought, see Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics. 36 For example, Plant states that the globalisation of capital is undermining “both the pale male world and the patriarchal structures of the south and east, bringing unprecedented economic power to women workers and multiplying the possibilities of communication, learning and access to information” (“On the Matrix” 334). Such a statement underestimates the horrific working-conditions and poor pay that many female workers in non-Western (and often Western) countries are forced to endure - often housed in exploitative work camps and forced to undergo pregnancy tests and abortions on a regular basis. Moreover, the majority of these companies are western-controlled, and plunge profits back into the hands of the already rich. For a discussion of such work camps, see Klein 195-229. 212 cinematic cyberfantasies, the repeated motif of human transcendence over technology and the flesh, figured by the white male protagonist, suggests that white masculinity may well be represented as terminal in both senses of the word (technologised and in crisis) but it can still find ways of redeeming itself. 213

CHAPTER FIVE

Queering White Heterosexual Masculinity: Cross Dressing and Transgender

Cinema

5.1. Border Crossings

In a discussion of the “representational problem” caused by Michael Jackson’s mutable body, Cynthia Fuchs quotes a joke about Michael Jackson’s marriage to Lise Marie Presley which appeared in a “Kudzu” comic strip (25th August 1994): as one character remarks, “If I heard it once I heard it a thousand times. That skinny white girl doesn’t know what she’s doing,” another replies, “And you should hear what they say about Lise Marie!” (“Michael Jackson’s

Penis” 15). A cheap shot, no doubt, but one characteristic of the ridicule commonly directed at a star “whose image is a spectacle of racial and sexual indeterminacy” (Mercer, “Monster

Metaphors” 302), an indeterminacy evoked by Jackson’s distinctive appearance (make-up, tousled gelled hair, famed gold-plated codpiece), performance style (high-pitched breathy vocals, on-stage crotch-grabbing) and surgical/medical alterations (the “whitening” of his facial features and skin tone).1 The cultural anxiety caused by a body that violates the boundaries between man/woman, black/white, youth/age (Garber 185) might also go some way to explaining the relish with which Jackson’s disintegrating face has been greeted by the media (even before the charges of paedophilia, which, for many, merely confirmed Jackson’s “abnormality”), rendering visible the “field of discourse and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as ‘the human’” (Butler, Bodies 8). His somatic indeterminacy also reveals the mutual imbrications of all identity categories. For instance, Jackson’s sexual ambiguity is inseparable

1 While Michael Jackson claims that he suffers from vitiligo, a skin disease that causes an irregular depigmentation of the skin, most African-American sufferers choose to repigment lighter splotches and retain their original skin tone rather than depigment them to match affected areas.

214 from his occupation of both poles of the binary opposition of sexual difference that is commonly mapped onto black masculinity - the feminised and hypermasculinised black male. Reactions to

Jackson’s “inbetweeness” also point to the hierarchical arrangements of difference. For instance,

Madonna’s self-styled phallic posturing (even imitating Jackson’s famous crotch-grabbing routine with postmodern self-knowingness) is treated with none of the derision of Jackson’s high-pitched voice, for instance, primarily because female masculinisation is a cultural upgrading. Likewise, whereas Jackson’s skin lightening is denounced for constituting a rejection of his African-American heritage, a white person who darkens him/herself through tanning loses no prestige and most likely gains it through demonstrating wealth and a privileged lifestyle

(Dyer, White 49). It would seem, therefore, that the erotic lure of consuming “a bit of the other”

(hooks, Black Looks 22) is inextricably marked by power relations that define the cultural acceptability of border crossing and retain whiteness and masculinity as privileged terms.

In the following two chapters, it is my contention that “in-between” figures such as

Jackson have most to tell us about the constructed nature of gender and race, since they reveal the exclusionary discourses by which certain bodies are posited as “natural” and others

“unnatural” or even “non-human.” By destabilising ontological notions of the body, border- crossing renders identity a contested site open to potential resignification. At the same time, the hostility that is often levelled at those who disturb our sense of a naturally sexed or raced body reveals not only the hegemonic force of essentialist discourses, but also some of the difficulties of escaping the bodily inscriptions of identity in a sociocultural order in which epistemological primacy is awarded to the visual. In this respect, while border-crossing might reveal identities to be fictions, these are fictions which exert a powerful force. In this chapter, I will focus on the impact that gender border-crossing has on filmic representations of white (male and female) masculinity, and in the following chapter, I will focus on screenings of white male appropriations of black culture. Since border-crossing also demonstrates the extent to which identity is always a 215 multifaceted affair, I will also explore how crossing over from one identity category to another affects the other identities that a given body inhabits (however incompletely), and always impacts on normative white masculinity, which discursively positions itself as the universal structuring norm and locus of origins.

5.2. Contesting the Natural

In that appeals to the ontology of the body have historically been mobilised to naturalise moneyed white heterosexual male privilege, the proliferation of discourses that contest the notion of a natural body in the postmodern era has particular ramifications for representations of the universal subjectivity. Nowhere is the “natural” body more contested than by transsexuality, however, where these ramifications centre on the possession of the penis (which all too easily slides into possession of the phallus within patriarchal culture): male-to-female transsexuals present the horror of a male subject willingly disowning the penis, while female-to-male transsexuals present the horror of a biologically sexed woman appropriating “the absolute insignia of maleness,” to use Robert Stoller’s term (86).2 Although many transsexuals decide not to have the final surgery, preferring to retain both male and female attributes induced by hormone treatment, their “core gender identity” is considered by doctors to be the gender to which they are crossing (Garber 101). Likewise, transgendered subjects, who identify with a gender at odds with their anatomical sex but do not embark on hormonal or surgical alterations, also demonstrate “the persistence of gender and the mutability of sex,” to use Judith Shapiro’s phrase, since their gender identity proves to be more unyielding than the physical body (248-51).

Ironically, post-op transsexuals also unsettle the very binary that they so heavily invest in by literalising the “anatomy is destiny” dictum, while, at the same time, rendering problematic

2 There is very little attention given to female-to-male transsexuality in medical literature and medical research (Garber 101). The literature itself attributes this to the surgical difficulties of building a penis, though Garber suspects this neglect is more of a political than medical fact - “a sneaking feeling that it should not be so easy to ‘construct’ a ‘man’ - which is to say, a male body” (102). 216 appeals to the anatomical body as constituting the “truth” of gender;3 hence the shift from anatomy to invisible genetic differences in medical determinations of “sex” (Garber 108). For example, the British Anglican Church is currently discussing whether vicars should perform the marriage ceremony for transsexuals, with debates raging over whether the pre- or post-op anatomical body designates their “true” sex. Interest in intersexed subjects, evidenced in the recent wave of documentaries on the topic and the success of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex

(2003), also reveals current anxieties and fascination with bodies that refuse or fail to line up neatly on one side of the sexual difference binary: is “sex” a matter of anatomy, socialisation, experience, identification, interiority, exteriority, or are those very categories thrown into crisis?4

Popular cinema has shown little interest in transsexuality (by which I mean subjects who have embarked on hormonal treatment or have begun or completed surgery);5 it has, however, demonstrated a great deal of interest in cross-dressing, transvestism and drag, which are less threatening to ontological notions of sex, but unsettle the terms of gender nonetheless. This chapter will deal briefly with cross-dressing comedies, which unleash temporary transgression but tend to reaffirm boys as boys and girls as girls in narrative closure, before dealing with the more interesting 90s development of “new queer cinema.”6 In particular, I will focus on two surprise cross-over box-office successes: The Crying Game (Neil Jordan 1992) and Boys Don’t

Cry (Kimberly Peirce 1999), both of which screen transgendered subjectivity in passing

3 As Garber puts it, “[t]he phenomenon of transsexualism is both a confirmation of the constructedness of gender and a secondary recourse to essentialism […], transsexualism demonstrates that essentialism is cultural construction” (109). 4 Many intersexed subjects refuse to align themselves unambiguously with either sex. In “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (1992), Sandy Stone argues the political imperative of transsexuals refusing to “pass” as one sex or the other, asserting the importance of “political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body” (298-99). 5 There are exceptions, of course. The recent Neil Jordan film, The Good Thief (2002), uses a male-to-female transsexual for comic relief (and to reaffirm stereotypes about femininity!). The queer road movie Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) also features Terence Stamp as a ladylike transsexual. HBO’s independent cable TV movie Normal (2003) also deals with transsexuality compellingly, charting the path of a male-to-female transsexual and the effect it has on his, and later her, marriage. 6 “New Queer Cinema,” coined by B. Ruby Rich, was a term given to a body of films in the early 90s that won critical acclaim in festival circuits, and no longer felt obliged to screen positive images (Aaron, “New Queer Cinema” 3).

217 narratives. I will follow Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber in arguing that those who trouble the binary of sexual difference have most to tell us about that binary and the gender categories it produces (Gender Trouble 137; 110). My focus will be on the implications for white masculinity when gender is freed up from the biologically sexed body and posited as a performative construct. In order to lay the theoretical groundwork of the chapter, I will begin by charting

Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on the performativity of gender, which dominated gender theory in the 90s, the same decade in which these films were produced. Butler's highly influential account restaged the stale debates over essentialism, social constructivism and sexual difference, and also represented a more general inclusion in gender studies of those transgressive bodies

(from drag queens to sadomasochists) that were once rejected by feminism. Her work is not unproblematic, as I hope to show, but nonetheless provides a useful vocabulary and theoretical framework for analysing “gender trouble.” Thus, I will deploy Butler to help me examine the extent to which white heterosexual masculinity is queered in these films, whether it maintains its position as the universal norm (all), whether it is posited as ontologically empty (nothing), and whether these positions need be mutually exclusive (all and nothing).

5.3. Queering Sexual Difference: Gender Trouble and the Trouble with Gender Trouble

Social constructivist accounts of gender have tended to assume the existence of a prior sexual division upon which social processes act, which has the advantage of rendering gender relations mutable and historically specific but also posits a passive subject and fails to theorise the psyche. Psychoanalytic accounts, conversely, concern themselves with sexual difference -

“the enigmatic domain which lies in between, no longer biology and not yet the space of socio- symbolic construction” (Žižek, Ticklish Subject 275). Unlike sociological accounts that take as given the internalisation of social norms, psychoanalysis recognises that “there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life” (J. Rose 91). This recognition has been crucial in 218 pointing to perpetual dissonances between the anatomical body and psychic representations of sexual difference. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic discussions of sexual difference have often been accused of essentialism, particularly because of the well-documented penis/phallus slippage.7

Judith Butler’s influential Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) takes a rather different point of departure, however; not only does Butler take psychoanalysis to task for its heterosexism but she also attempts to reveal how it is the ideological structure of sexual difference itself that produces sexed bodies rather than constituting their effect.

Butler argues that the language of presumptive heterosexuality assumes continuity between sex, gender and desire (Gender Trouble ix).8 When this continuity is broken, however,

“gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (6). If gender is no longer tied to sex, it “can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the apparent binary of sex” (112). More contentiously, she argues that “sex” is as culturally contestable as gender. Following Foucault's premise in The

History of Sexuality (1976) that “sex” is an effect of regulatory practices, Butler argues that

7 Freud, who famously remarked that “Anatomy is Destiny” (“Dissolution” 320), frequently lapsed into biologism despite his belief in an inherent bisexual disposition and his assertion that “pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content” (“Some Psychical Consequences” 342). Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has been careful to distinguish between the penis and the phallus (the privileged signifier of lack, that is the penis plus lack) and to regard sexual difference as a structural position rather than biological given. Castration, for Lacan, is therefore “a symbolic process that involves the cutting off, not of one’s penis, but of one’s jouissance and the recognition of lack” (Homer 95). Both male and female subjects are castrated therefore; the difference lies in how they respond to this lack: male subjects posture at having the phallus while women masquerade that they are the phallus (Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus” 320-21). Feminist Lacanian theorists seize on this point in order to emphasise that the male subject is always marked by lack. Nonetheless, while the penis/phallus distinction points to the mutability of patriarchal power, Lacan pays rather scanty attention to other differences, such as class or race, that, presumably, would also determine one’s structural relations to the phallus. However, since the phallus is inextricably related to the penis, for many theorists the penis/phallus (non)distinction is symptomatic of the limit point of Lacanian theory (Heath 60). The penis/phallus slippage has also led certain feminist theorists to attempt to displace Lacan’s phallus as the symbol of the privileged signifier. For instance, Luce Irigaray has famously set up an alternative metaphor (or better, metonymy) of “two lips” in her classic This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) in an attempt to establish a female Imaginary and assert the specificity of the female body. In a different mode, the materialist theorist Monique Wittig has argued that lesbians are outside of phallic exchange and the categories of sex within a system of compulsory heterosexuality (53). Unlike Irigaray and Wittig, however, Judith Butler argues that there is no position of freedom outside of discourse (Gender Trouble 30). Instead she attempts to resignify Lacan’s phallus in her discussion of “the lesbian phallus.” See pp. 255-56. 8 Here Butler was influenced by Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,” in which Rubin argued for the necessity of separating sex and sexuality (33), opening up space between bodies, acts and identities (Wiegman, “Unmaking” 45). 219

“[g]ender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex” but also “designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established” (7). Thus, “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’” (7).

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Butler addresses charges that she had ignored the materiality of the body in Gender Trouble by stating that social norms constitute the materiality of sex by materialising sexual difference in the service of the heterosexual hegemony (2).9 To support this claim, Butler elaborates on her notion of the performative by referring directly to J.L. Austin’s speech act theory. In How To Do Things with

Words (1955) Austin distinguishes between constative/perlocutionary utterances that describe or report something, and performative/illocutionary utterances that actually perform an action, such as the “I do” uttered in the wedding ceremony (5). Butler argues that the moment when an infant’s sex is declared with the classic phrase “it’s a boy/girl!” is also a performative statement since this medical interpellation propels the infant into “the domain of language and kinship”: the

“it” must shift to a “she” or “he” if the infant is to qualify as human, suggesting that the matrix of sexual difference is “prior to the emergence of the ‘human’” (Bodies 7). Thus Butler is not denying biological differences but questions “under what discursive and institutional conditions

[…] certain biological differences […] become the salient characteristics of sex” (“Gender as

Performance” 113). Nor is she claiming that discourse “originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes” but that “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (Bodies 10).

Predictably, Butler has been considerably critiqued for this anti-intuitive argument. For

9 Butler uses “heterosexual hegemony” instead of Gender Trouble’s “heterosexual matrix” because the latter term was too totalising and she wanted to suggest that it is open to rearticulation (“Gender as Performance” 119).

220 instance, Toril Moi argues, “[i]f gays, lesbians, transvestites, transsexuals, and intersexed people suffer discrimination in contemporary society, this is the fault of our social norms and ideologies concerning human sex and sexuality, not of the assumption that biologically speaking, there are only two sexes” (“What is a Woman?” 40). However, Butler is not arguing that unintelligible bodies threaten the terms “man” or “woman” with their utter undoing: indeed, this would be far too teleological a project for Butler; rather, she questions what exclusionary operations these terms perpetuate in an attempt to problematise their ontological grounding. Indeed, Butler is also forced to use these terms out of linguistic necessity - a fact which demonstrates her point.

Nonetheless, she often seems to assume that we will fail to invest in what we know to be inauthentic, which is not necessarily the case (N. Evans 203). Moreover, disappointingly, despite the promise held out in the title, Butler doesn’t really deal with the biological body at all in

Bodies that Matter, an omission which is hardly likely to help the ongoing feminist struggle against biological determinism, particularly when so many people are oppressed or exploited precisely because of the ideological meanings attached to the bodies they happen to have.10

Moreover, I would argue that the body often returns as the repressed of Butler’s text, such as in her discussion of drag (see below) or her brief foray into cell biology research in the aptly entitled “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” to Gender Trouble.11 In the words of Diana Fuss,

“[b]iology will not simply go away, much as we might wish it to” (Essentially Speaking 51).

10 For instance, in a 1993 interview with Butler, Lynn Segal and Peter Osbourne ask, “[w]hy is it that male bodies don’t get produced as child-bearing?” Butler replies that to define biological sex by reference to testicles or ovaries is to impose the norm that only mothers are “real women” (“Gender as Performance” 112). While Butler is right to critique the ideologies that posit women who do not have children as failures, the question of biology is conflated with the question of social ideology (Moi, “What is a Woman?” 41). 11 In her scantily substantiated reference to cell biology research, Butler argues that “a good ten per cent of the population has chromosomal variations that do not fit neatly into the XX-female and XY-male set of categories” (107). This “fact” would suggest that the current binary of sex is inadequate to categorise indeterminate bodies; nevertheless, most researches refuse “from the outset to consider that these individuals implicitly challenge the descriptive force of the available categories of sex” (109). Butler’s point, then, is not to argue that “valid and demonstrable claims cannot be made about sex-determination, but rather that cultural assumptions regarding the relative status of men and women and the binary relations of gender itself frame and focus the research into sex determination” (109). Yet, there is obviously something profoundly ironic about Butler’s use of scientific findings in order to critique scientific claims to objectivity - a case of wanting to have her proverbial cake and eat it.

221

Butler’s positing of sexual difference as a performative construct has also been challenged by Lacanian theorists such as Joan Copjec, who argues that sex is reducible neither to a natural fact nor discursive construction but is rather an interaction between the two (204).12

Žižek also takes Butler to task for her conceptualisation of sexual difference as “an already established symbolic difference (heterosexual normativity)” since, within a Lacanian framework, sexual difference is “precisely […] that which forever eludes the grasp of normative symbolisation” (Ticklish Subject 271). In other words, she fails to engage with the “fundamental deadlock” of the Lacanian Real - the Real being “merely the inherent inconsistency of the symbolic order itself” (“Postscript” 41).13 For Žižek, we do not have “homosexuals, fetishists, and other perverts in spite of the normative fact of sexual difference” but “on account of the gap that forever persists between the real of sexual difference and the determinate forms of heterosexual symbolic norms” (Ticklish Subject 273); in this respect, sexual difference is

“precisely not binary but, again, that because of which every ‘binary’ account of it […] always fails” (273-4). Here Butler would no doubt concur, since she states that “the construction of a coherent sexual identity along the disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to fail”

(Gender Trouble 28); unlike Žižek, though, her concern is with the exclusion faced by those who more obviously fail to confirm to the sex/gender/sexuality continuum. Her queering of sexual difference has thus opened up a fruitful space in which to question the heterosexism of psychoanalysis.14 Particularly relevant for this chapter is the fact that she reverses the playing

12 Most genetic research has reached similar conclusions, albeit via a different path, arguing that genes adapt according to environmental factors, rendering the nature/nurture binary obsolete. See Solms and Turnball ch. 7. 13 In an interview, Butler states of Žižek’s assertion, “[t]hat’s where I get scared. He wants to make it permanent, and we’re the permanent outside. It’s as if we’ve got girls. We’ve got boys, and then we have the permanent outside. No way! We’ve got lots of people rolling around the streets who are the ‘outside’ to girls and boys who Žižek is naming as the impossible real. It’s a hell of a thing to live in the world being called the impossible real - being called the traumatic, the unthinkable, the psychotic - being cast outside the social, and getting named as the unlovable and the unspeakable” (“Gender as Performance” 119-20). Žižek regards this as a misreading of the Lacanian Real (“Postscript” 41). 14 One could, of course, read Žižek’s listing of homosexuals with “other perverts” as evidence of heterosexism, even though Žižek scrupulously states a few pages above that homosexuality should not qualify directly as a perversion (Ticklish Subject 249). The fact remains, though, that heterosexuality still remains the norm against which other practices and sexualities are defined. 222 field by arguing that heterosexuality is dependent on primary homosexual desires and contingent upon its abjected other, homosexuality.15 This, in itself, is not without problems. She does not fully support why one desire is produced and repressed before another (Salih 55). Jonathan

Dollimore also rightly notes that Butler’s representation of heterosexuality is “at once universalised, essentialised and reductive, far removed from the diversity of what most people are, and what they might do” (“Bisexuality” 534). Moreover, Dollimore also expresses concern that “reading Butler one occasionally gets the impression that gay desire is not complete unless it is somehow installed subversively inside heterosexuality” (“Bisexuality” 535). However, while

Butler’s politics in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter often seems to have a role only for marginal bodies that are put in the service of disrupting social norms - a role which comes at a high cost if we consider the daily realities faced by those who act out gender trouble, often out of psychic need rather than a desire to subvert the heterosexual matrix - her most recent book,

Undoing Gender (2004), directly engages with the ongoing tension between queer political agency and social survival, such as exploring the difficult issue of gay marriages, where gay couples seek to legitimate their relationships according to heterosexual norms and kinship structures, or subjects desiring sex-change operations who, in order to receive treatment, are forced to subscribe to the pathologising medical discourse of GID (gender identity disorder).16

Butler’s Nietzschean critique of the subject, which informs her notion of the performative, has also been a bone of contention.17 Unlike social role theory, which posits the

15 In her re-reading of Freud’s account of melancholic identifications, Butler argues that to identify as heterosexual, the child must renounce its homosexual object, normally the parent of the same sex. This love object is thus installed in the ego as a lost object with whom the subject identifies (Gender Trouble 57-65). She also asserts that the taboo on homosexuality is prior to the incest taboo since the child must give up its love for the parent of the same sex (64). 16 See Butler, Undoing Gender ch. 4 and 5. 17 Butler reformulates Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed” to argue that “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender” (Gender Trouble 25). In this respect, Butler develops Joan Riviere’s famed assertion that “genuine womanliness” and masquerade “are the same thing” (38) to a discussion of all gender identifications. For her discussion of Riviere, see Gender Trouble 50-54. 223 existence of an already sexed subject who acts out prescribed gender roles,18 Butler argues that gender is pure simulacrum, “a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself” (“Imitation” 21). Since Butler believes that gender is not volitional and is always

“the practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (Undoing Gender 1), in Gender

Trouble, she also rejects “the impossible fantasy” of “full-scale transcendence,” arguing that the focus of political practice “ought to be on the subversive and parodic redeployment of power”

(124).19 However, while this assertion has angered many political activists, who interpret performative displacements as an individualistic, negative mode of politics unlikely to bring us any closer to solving political problems as diverse as gay-bashing, reproductive rights or the

AIDS epidemic,20 in Undoing Gender, Butler directly addresses the need to create political communities capable of articulating new social norms which can then generate political praxis

(3).21 For Butler, action is enabled not by pure individual will but by drawing upon conventions which have gained their power “precisely though a sedimented iterability” (“For a Careful

Reading” 134). Butler is thus interested in the historical conditions under which agency becomes possible (136): “if I have any agency, it is opened up by a social world I never chose. That my

18 Butler’s overuse of theatrical metaphors meant that Gender Trouble was received as social role theory by many readers. Butler attempted to correct this misperception in Bodies That Matter. 19 Butler believes that outright resistance is produced by repressive disciplinary mechanisms and can therefore be co-opted; thus she advocates the Derridean strategy of re-articulation, re-signification and re-citation. Here I would agree with Žižek, who argues that Butler’s Foucauldianism renders her both too optimistic about the subversive potential of “the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement” and too pessimistic about the possibility of “the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic order in its totality” by risking the “momentary ‘suspension of the big Other’” (Ticklish Subject 263-64). 20 A key example is Seyla Benhabib, who, in a philosophical exchange with Butler, asks, “[i]f we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and let it rise only if one can have a say in the production of the play itself?” (21). In response, Butler accuses Benhabib of conflating performativity with performance and ignoring her assertion that “gender performativity involves the difficult labour of deriving agency from the very power regimes which constitute us” (“For a Careful Reading” 136). Martha Nussbaum has also launched a scathing attack on Butler, accusing her of “political quietism” and “collaborating with evil,” stating, “parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university” but in the case of “women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating and rape. Such women prefer food and the integrity of their bodies.” 21 Butler writes, “to live is to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future” (Undoing Gender 39). 224 agency is riven with paradox does not mean that it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (Undoing Gender 3). Nonetheless, the bodies, oppression and resistance she refers to in Bodies That Matter are largely abstracted from any specific historical, social, cultural or economic context, though this is again redressed by Undoing Gender, where

Butler’s focus is actual transgressive bodies existing in contemporary America, and in which she refers to the economic exigencies, under capitalism, of subjects accepting that they suffer from

GID in order to undergo surgery. Butler’s body of work, then, is highly controversial, but for the arguments of this thesis, is useful in highlighting the instabilities and anxieties of white, heterosexual and masculine identifications by unmasking their imitative structures.

5.4. The Subversive Potential of Drag

Butler suggests that drag constitutes a suitable parodic redeployment of power for lesbian and gay politics, since it reveals the performativity of all gender, including heterosexual identities, and mocks the notion of an original or core gender:

The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the

performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the

presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical

sex, gender identity, and gender performance. If the anatomy of the performer is

already distinct from the gender of the performer, and both of those are distinct

from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance

not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and

performance. […] In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative

structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency. (Gender Trouble 137)

In Bodies That Matter, Butler develops the politics of drag by deploying Derrida’s notion of 225 citation,22 arguing that if gender is a “forcible citation of a norm” (232), drag is a possible arena in which gender can be re-cited in order to reveal the “understated, taken-for-granted quality of heterosexual performativity” (237). Obviously, then, Butler is not denying the existence of anatomy but attempts to separate out anatomy, gender identity and gender performance. For example, a biologically male drag queen may identify as a homosexual but perform heterosexual femininity. Thus, despite her rejection of the sex/gender distinction, the anatomically sexed body is indispensable to Butler’s account (Moi 53). Not realising that a male drag queen has an anatomically male body, for example, would severely qualify the subversive potential of the performance, particularly when male drag queens often impersonate the most stereotypical aspects of femininity.23

However, as many critics have pointed out, even if there is a dissonance between the anatomical body and gender performance and/or identity, drag need not be subversive. Mark

Simpson, for instance, has drawn attention to male drag’s potential for misogyny since the humorous improbability of a man dressed as a woman can also suggest the “the ‘improbability’ of the female body itself” (179). Carol-Anne Tyler also expresses concern that male drag might reaffirm patriarchal conceptions of femininity through crude stereotyping, as well as confirming ontological accounts of gender through typical performance rituals such as dropping the voice, rearranging falsies, or even exposing the penis, all of which ground the “truth” of gender in the body and attempt to secure a relationship between the male body and possessing the phallus

(“Boys” 42-3). Butler deflects these criticisms by pointing out that the reading of drag as misogyny suggests that drag is solely a male homosexual practice, and also “diagnoses male

22 In “Signature, Event, Context” Derrida takes issue with Austin’s claim that the felicity of speech acts is dependent on context and authorial intention, since the possibility of failure or resignification is intrinsic to all linguistics signs: “Every sign […] can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion” (320). 23 Even in multi-layered examples of gender-bending, such as when in the hit NBC sitcom Friends, Chandler’s (Matthew Perry) gay drag queen father is in fact played by Kathleen Turner, the fact that we know Kathleen Turner to be a biological woman is essential to the comedy (which is not to say that references to Turner’s androgynous appeal are not made at the same time). 226 homosexuality as rooted in misogyny” (Bodies 127).24 However, Butler is also guilty of focusing on male drag, with scant attention paid to the lesbian femme or butch gay man (Holmund 218), whose biological bodies correspond to their gender identity. Moreover, her focus on male drag does little to counteract the prevalent notion that femininity is a masquerade whereas masculinity is somehow more authentic.25 Nonetheless, her work has opened up crucial new pathways for the studies of masculinity, such as Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), an important ethnographic work exploring the history of biologically sexed women with queer masculine identifications. Halberstam’s term “female masculinity” functions like Butler’s drag in articulating a biological term through a cultural one, unsettling the distinction in the process.26 It thus enacts “an embodied assault upon compulsory heterosexuality, and it offers one powerful model of what inauthentic masculinity can look like, how it produces and deploys desires, and what new social, sexual and political relations it can foster” (Halberstam, “The Good” 345).

Other detractors have rightly critiqued Butler for sidelining race in her discussion of drag in Gender Trouble. Tania Modleski, for instance, notes that drag might illustrate Homi Bhabha’s observation that a woman of colour is often “‘not quite’ a woman,” referring to Jumpin’ Jack

Flash (1986) in which Whoppi Goldberg is mistaken for a male transvestite by a taxi-driver when she dons a sexy dress and high heels and walks with the awkwardness usually reserved for the male cross-dresser (132). In Bodies that Matter, Butler attempts to redress this omission,

24 For instance, following Robert Stoller, Tyler argues that the male transvestite masquerades as the phallic woman in an attempt to resolve his castration anxiety in the Imaginary (“Boys” 42). Tyler’s account thus verges on the pathologising, especially when she claims that “[m]ixing object-love and identification, the transvestite is narcissistic; he loves only (his fantasy of) himself” (“Supreme Sacrifice” 166). Tyler also asserts that “the butch lesbian could also deploy the signifiers of masculinity to constitute herself as phallic woman, though she could not appeal to her body as ground of her difference from lack” (“Boys” 43), an argument that reaffirms the “woman as lack” argument of the Lacanian schema that Butler herself attempts to unsettle. Moreover, missing from Tyler’s account is the woman in drag who does not constitute herself as the phallic woman, but (more threateningly) as a (phallic) man, not so much copying men as resignifying the masculine outside of a heterosexual economy. 25 Mary Anne Doane, for example, invoking Lacan, argues that while men can use their bodies as masquerade, they don’t have to (Femmes Fatales 26). 26 Halberstam’s work has been critcised by Susan Fraiman for “debiologis[ing] masculinity while leaving its content more or less intact” (138). This points to the difficulty of escaping binary thinking that I outlined in chapter 3. Nonetheless, certainly normative notions of masculinity are destabilised in Halberstam’s account.

227 adhering to recent arguments that race is produced as an effect of racism and asserting that the boundaries of race are constantly reconstructed both for racist and antiracist usages (18). She also resists the notions that racism, homophobia and misogyny are “analogical relations” (18), and is scrupulous in emphasising that the symbolic is also “a racialising set of norms” and that sexual difference is not prior to racial difference (130).27 However laudable these abstracted assertions might be, though, Butler does not fully integrate the notion of race (or class or ethnicity) into her analysis of identity formation (Salih 76). Neither does she explain how the notion of performativity might work specifically with race, which is caught up in a very different economy than “sex,” or how re-citation might translate into effective racial politics.

Nevertheless, importantly for this chapter, she does explore how race intersects with sex and gender in representations of drag when she analyses Jennie Livingstone’s docu-film Paris Is

Burning (1991) about multi-racial drag balls in New York City. Butler focuses on Venus

Xtravaganza, a pre-op transsexual who “passes” as a light-skinned woman and who expresses the desire to become a “whole” (post-op) woman, marry a good man, and live in the suburbs in a house with a washing machine; as Butler notes, Venus’s desire for gender transformation also becomes a vehicle for phantasmatic transformations to do with race and class (130-33).

In discussing Venus’s ambitions, Butler concedes that drag can work to reidealise heterosexual and patriarchal norms (125) and can be “caught in an irresolvable tension” between appropriation and subversion (128). Butler also makes one of Bodies That Matter’s few references to the price that can be paid by those who enact (however unwittingly) her subversive politics of gender trouble, noting that Venus’s murder before filming had finished reveals that there are “cruel and fatal social constraints on denaturalisation” (133). “At best,” she contends,

“drag is a site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being

27 Here Butler departs company with Lacanians such as Copjec, who argues that sexual difference is Real, unlike differences such as race or class (207).

228 implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (125). She does, however, suggest that the more heterosexual the context, the less subversive the drag will be when she argues that films such as

Some Like it Hot (1959) and Tootsie (1982), which she dubs “drag as high het entertainment,” reveal “that there are domains in which heterosexuality can concede its lack of originality and naturalness” without relinquishing its power (126). Margaret Thompson Drewal makes a similar point, asking what happens when gay signifying practices “are severed from their gay signifier and put into the service of the very patriarchal and heterosexist ideology of capitalism that camp politics seeks to disrupt and contest?” (149) - an apt framework for discussing popular cross- dressing comedies, which may well engage in camp practices, but are also marketed as good clean family fun.

5.5. White Masculinity in Cross-Dressing Comedies

As Chris Straayer has noted, the “temporary transvestite film” unleashes provisional transgression while constantly reminding the film’s audience of the character’s “original” gender, either through extended transformation scenes, gender-coded behaviour or gestures, or reminders of the biological body beneath the disguise (Deviant Eyes 46-50). Point of view is essential, since the spectator is invariably in the know about the cross-dresser’s true biological sex, unlike the diegetic characters whose cases of mistaken identity form the basis of the films’ humour. In short, these films might well show gender as performance but they certainly do not show gender to be performative, since the notion of an original gender and the inside/outside distinction are retained. Moreover, the presence of heterosexual partners throughout “reinforce[s] society’s heterosexual hegemony and the absolute alignment of gender, sex, and heterosexual preference” (51), allowing what Butler terms a “ritualistic release for a heterosexual economy that must constantly police its own boundaries against the invasion of queerness” (Bodies 126). 229

This does not mean that there are not moments of subversion, such as the “paradoxical kiss” between two characters we know to be of the same biological sex, a kiss that can be experienced as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual depending on cinematic point of view, mise-en-scène, star personas, or the spectator’s own appropriation of the text (Straayer, Deviant Eyes 54). But invariably, the possibility of same-sex desire is raised only to be deflected and confirm that the male cross-dresser remains steadfastly heterosexual.

Marjorie Garber, on the other hand, gives more weight to the subversive potential of these films. Using Tootsie (1982) as an example, Garber claims that Dorothy’s (Dustin Hoffman)

“power inheres in her blurred gender” (6). She also suggests that Michael/Dorothy’s roommate

“reads the complexity of Michael’s interest in cross-dressing better than the critics” when he gingerly enquires, “it’s just for the money, isn’t it? It’s not just so that you can wear these little outfits?” (8).28 For Garber, the transvestite occupies a “third term,” which is not fixed, but rather

“a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility” which destabilises the binarity of sexual difference (11), though, as Judith Halberstam argues, it may also be the case that a third term stabilises the other two (Female Masculinity 26). Moreover, Garber seems to suggest that cross-dressing is subversive whatever the context, which, as I will argue, is not necessarily the case.

One of the pleasures of cross-dressing comedies is that of witnessing the dramatic transformation of the star body in a visual medium. Unlike the novel, for instance, where characters can remain disembodied, such as with the sexually indeterminate narrator of Jeanette

Winterson’s Written on the Body (1993), film, like theatre, depends on the material bodies of actors whose gender is visually inscribed.29 The star bodies that are transformed are

28 Similarly, Garber refers to the celebrated final scene of Some Like it Hot, when Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon) admits to Osgood (Joe E. Lewis) that she cannot marry him because she is a man, to which Osgood replies, “Well, nobody’s perfect” (7). Straayer also concedes that this ending constitutes a queer alternative to generic conventions (Deviant Eyes 63-64). 29 Sally Potter’s art-house adaptation of Orlando (1992) is an interesting case in point, since Potter decided to use actress Tilda Swinton throughout so as to preserve “that sense of seamless individuality across genders” that exists 230 overwhelmingly male in the comedies. Watching Dustin Hoffman (Tootsie) or Robin Williams

(Mrs. Doubtfire 1993) learning to apply make-up, walk in high heels, negotiate the mysteries of women’s underwear, as well as cope with the sexist behaviour of men, provide plenty of opportunities for viewing pleasures which can either reaffirm or unsettle hegemonic norms. For instance, these scenes might confirm that gender is an imitative structure, but may also confirm male viewers’ notions of the artifice of the feminine, while providing female spectators with an enjoyable sense of superiority (how difficult can walking in high heels be?) and revenge (now you know what it’s like!). Older women tend to be imitated, partly because a young femininity would be hard for many men to approximate and partly because it provides plenty of opportunities to desexualise and ridicule the older women’s body, as we see with the slapstick, gross-out humour when Mrs. Doubtfire’s breasts catch fire. Female drag, of course, points to the fact that masculinity has its own performative structures. Most female-to-male cross-dressing films screen a female adoption of a boyish masculinity that is easier for women to act out (Yentl,

Victor/Victoria, The Ballad of Little Jo), and since female masculinity is more culturally acceptable, it rarely produces the same comic subversion as male drag, unless entire body suits and masks are used, as in the case of The Associate (1996) or the sketches of British comediennes Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in The French and Saunders Show, which present maleness in a less than complimentary light.

The reason for cross-dressing also differs between the sexes and has much to say about gender, racial and class hierarchies. In films such as Yentl (1983) and The Associate, women cross-dress to obtain male privilege, a privilege marked by discourses of race and class. For instance, in The Associate, Laurel (Whoppi Goldberg), a black female broker, disguises herself as a rich white man to gain recognition in the cut-throat world of Wall Street. While the film

in Woolf’s novel (qtd. in Dowell 17); hence the fact that we only see Orlando naked as a woman. Potter also decided to emphasise Orlando’s androgyny, preferring “a state of suspended disbelief” rather than adding male characteristics to Swinton, since viewers would spend their time “looking for the glue, the joins between the skin and the moustache” rather than entering “a state of suspended disbelief” (Potter qtd. in Donahue 10). 231 makes liberal points about institutionalised sexism and racism, the fact that Whoppi Goldberg is frequently desexualised or masculinised as a black woman in other performances (Jumpin’ Jack

Flash, The Player, Fatal Beauty and Ghost, in which she actually mutates into Patrick Swayze) renders her easy assumption of the masculine less subversive than may first appear, revealing that sexual norms are always caught up in ideologies of race and class as well.30

The recent trend of white men cross-dressing to access the “privileges” of (white bourgeois) femininity reveals how these comedies feed into narratives of white male victimisation: Michael in Tootsie can only get a job as a female actor but then goes on to become

America’s most popular “female” soap star, while Daniel (Robin Williams) in Mrs. Doubtfire dresses up as a nanny in order to spend time with his children and then does a “better” job of raising them than his career-orientated ex-wife (Sally Fields), a suggestion that must be seen in the context of the host of 80s and 90s films that I discussed in chapters two and three which screen charismatic fathers and marginalised or inadequate mothers (see figures 5.1 and 5.2). In other words, these films might well suggest that men become better people as woman, and, in so doing, gesture at popular feminist discourses, but they can also be read through discourses of appropriation and nostalgia for an old-fashioned, pre-feminist femininity.

Even the 90s emergence of queer drag movies for mainstream consumption repeat many of the motifs of the heterosexual comedies. For instance, while Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) complicates usual characterisations of the drag queen - along with Bernadette

(Terence Stamp), a ladylike transsexual, the film also screens Tick (Hugo Weaving), a straight drag queen who attempts to forge a relationship with his estranged son - one male character considers Bernadette a better woman than his Filipino wife, Cynthia (Julia Cortez) (see figure

5.3). Moreover, the fact that Cynthia decided to upstage the drag queens by catapulting ping-

30 For a reading of Goldberg’s star persona, see Modleski (131-33). Another interesting example is The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), where Josephine’s (Suzy Amis) Chinese lover Tinman (David Chung) is denied the privileges of white masculinity that she has adopted.

232 pong balls from her vagina not only rearticulates stereotypes about sexually licentious Asian women, but also “offers her body as a site of potential disgust” (Tincknell and Chambers 153-

54). Like Priscilla, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newman (1995) also deploys macho star personas to interesting effect - Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes both play transvestites31 - but dramatic transformation scenes are screened, ensuring that we see the star body as recognisably “male” beneath the artifice (see figure 5.4). To Wong Foo also reproduces the racial hierarchies of the buddy movie, with Swayze’s maternal Vida playing lead role among multi-racial drag queens (Tasker, Working Girls 31). Moreover, while the drag queens are positioned as mediating “angels” who teach the women of a small, white, American town to stand up against their husbands (Hammond 107), much like Tootsie, when Dorothy defends herself from lecherous men, the suggestion is that men can do feminism better than biological women. Thus Priscilla, To Wong Foo, along with The Birdcage (1996) critique homophobia, suggest that whiteness, heterosexuality and maleness are more attractive when combined with non-dominant identities (Newitz and Wray 175), and posit the drag queen as a liberating figure in repressive environments. They also, however, reveal how “under the cover of drag’s new transgressive status, some very old-fashioned notions about race and gender are being smuggled back into popular culture” (N. Evans 199). Nonetheless, less recoupable into heterosexual norms than their straight cross-dressing counterparts, these films also demonstrate the current marketability of queer themes for mainstream consumption.32

More surprise hits were the Oscar-winning films The Crying Game (1992) and Boys

Don’t Cry (1999), which screen cross-dressing as neither a stage performance nor a temporary

31 Snipes is famed for his action roles and muscular frame. Swayze’s star persona is more fluid, due to his role as erotic spectacle in Dirty Dancing (1987) and sensitive New Man in Ghost (1990), though he has also played action roles and is equally well-built. Priscilla’s Terence Stamp was a 60s “kitchen sink” drama macho star, while Guy Pearce found fame as teenage pin-up Mike in the Australian soap Neighbours and later in L.A. Confidential (1997). 32 Aaron notes that this is also true of the body-swapping film. In films such as All of Me (1984) or Switch (1991), body-swapping helps heterosexual relationships to develop; however, body-swapping in the independent Being John Malkovitch (1999) enables a homosexual relationship between Lotte (Cameron Diaz) and Maxine (Catherine Keener) by allowing Lotte to enter Malkovitch’s body and sleep with Maxine (“New Queer Spectator” 193). 233 disguise, but rather as a psychic need. The Crying Game screens the fictional story of a white, ex-IRA volunteer, Fergus (Stephen Rea), who falls in love with a mixed race transgender woman, Dil (Jaye Davidson), while Boys Don’t Cry is a bio-pic of Brandon Teena, a transgendered male, who was brutally raped and murdered. In both films, I am interested in the ramifications for normative white masculinity when a subject refuses his “boying” or her

“girling,” to use Butler’s terms. In the case of The Crying Game, I look at how Fergus’s self- identification as a white heterosexual male is queered by his attraction to Dil. I also explore how it is Dil’s citation of patriarchal definitions of black femininity which renders her a desirable object, primarily because it allows Fergus to adopt a paternalistic, chivalric mode of white masculinity. With Boys Don’t Cry, I analyse the threat posed to the film’s biological white males by Brandon’s (Hilary Swank) successful passing. Moreover, I am interested in the extent to which Brandon’s queer masculinity offers a less aggressive model of white masculinity, though one which is inextricable from the film’s discourse on class. In my analysis of both films, I also tease out the extent to which the anatomical body is posited as the truth of “sex” and the binaries of sexual difference and homosexuality/heterosexuality are undermined. In so doing, I address how sexual passing affects other identity categories, including class, race and ethnicity, what these films reveal about the hierarchical arrangements of differences, and how identity categories work through each other to articulate or subvert hegemonic norms.

5.6. The Crying Game: Queering White Male Heterosexual Identifications

Despite its controversial political and sexual content, The Crying Game was a critical and commercial success, and a popular date movie among heterosexual audiences (Naemore qtd. in

N. Evans 199). Screened through the point of view of Fergus, an IRA volunteer, the film begins as a political thriller. Nonetheless, the opening scene in a fairground suggests carnivalesque subversion, while the accompanying soundtrack of the classic Motown track “When a Man 234

Loves a Woman” - a track that assumes a retrospective irony since its “very title sets up traditional gender distinctions that the film will proceed to break down” (Chumo, “The Crying

Game” 248) - hints at the future displacement of the political onto the personal. The first segment of the film focuses on Fergus’s relationship with Jody (Forest Whitaker), a black British soldier taken hostage. Jody asks Fergus to look up his “special friend,” Dil, if anything should happen to him; unable to kill Jody, who, is inadvertently killed by the British troops sent to rescue him, Fergus escapes to England (a literal border crossing, which divides the film’s two narrative segments) and makes good on his promise to Jody. Fergus falls in love with Dil, though a Hitchcockian reversal of audience expectations reveals that Dil is a biological man.33 Not surprisingly, then, the film was deemed radical in initial reviews for its sympathetic portrayal of an IRA volunteer and its sexual content. Nevertheless, Dil’s body constitutes the site of some conservative white male fantasies about gender and race, fantasies that the transgressive status of

Dil’s sexuality works to veil in one of the film’s many masquerades.

As Sharon Willis notes, “The Crying Game displays a powerful fascination with a body whose racial and sexual ambiguities trouble conventional categories” (High Contrast 9). Jaye

Davidson, who is also mixed race, was scrutinised as an exotic “in-between” figure who functioned, both in and outside of the text, as a fetishised object (12). As Stuart Hall has remarked, “there’s nothing that global postmodernism loves better than a certain kind of difference” (“What Is This ‘Black’?” 23). This “difference” proved to be very “bankable,” to use

Sharon Willis’s term (High Contrast 9): while the film was originally advertised as a neo-noir political thriller, Miramax, the distributor, decided to shift attention away from the political, changing the advertising tag line from “Play it at your own risk. Sex. Murder. Betrayal” to “The movie everyone is talking about but no one is giving away its secrets” (Wyatt, “Formation” 80).

Miramax also enlisted the help of reviewers not to disclose the twist: thus its “secret” became

33 For a reading of The Crying Game’s Hitchcockian heritage, see Chumo, The Crying Game. 235 instrumental in the film’s marketing strategy, facilitating not only a displacement of the IRA plot but also its queer content, no doubt a fact which enabled it to break beyond the art house circuit

(81).

Point of view is crucial to the film’s dramatic disclosure: all events are filtered through

Fergus’s white male gaze in typical noir fashion. Crucially, then, the film is yet another story of white heterosexual masculinity thrown into crisis through a confrontation with difference, though one dressed up in art-house chic.34 Unlike the cross-dressing comedies, the spectator is given no privileged knowledge; there are no comic slips of disguise or transformation scenes, unless we include the scene where Fergus “disguises” Dil as a man to protect her from the IRA, though she still fails to look and act like a convincing man. Thus, much like Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the epistemological authority usually attributed to the controlling white male gaze in mainstream cinema is evoked only to be found wanting, since in both cases the male protagonist’s masochistic submission to a fetish object means that he only sees what he wants to see.

The fact that most film spectators were as shocked as Fergus to discover Dil’s biological sex can be attributed to the film’s mobilisation of cinematic conventions that posit Dil as an eroticised object of heterosexual male desire. The first glimpse of Dil is the photograph that Jody shows Fergus, which immediately frames Dil through Fergus’s desiring gaze in an act of homosocial bonding (though the slightly oblique camera angle that films this exchange might well suggest that something else is askew). The next shots of Dil are established through

Fergus’s voyeuristic gaze and connote Dil’s “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Dil is first filmed when

Fergus watches her through the window of the hairdresser’s where she works. When Fergus enters the shop, filmed in a long shot from an objective camera, Dil remains partially obscured, positioned at the extreme edge of the frame. Then the scene cuts to a close-up of Dil’s hands and

34 For an interesting discussion of the similarities and differences between the ways in which The Crying Game and Falling Down manage difference, see Willis, High Contrast 9-19.

236 painted nails as she runs her hands through Fergus’s hair, before she features in her first frontal medium shot. Dil, then, is filmed in the traditional manner of a femme fatale, though the fetishisation of body parts, which in Mulvey’s schema is deployed to ward off the threat of castration, is rather ironic in this case, since the threat Dil poses is not lack but presence. The first notable departure from traditional Hollywood codes comes in their first sexual encounter, where after kissing, as the camera tilts down to show Fergus reaching for her crotch, Dil abruptly pushes Fergus’s hand away before unzipping Fergus’s flies and lowering her head to perform oral sex while both remain fully clothed. The scene then cuts to Fergus’s face as he gasps in orgasmic pleasure, a cut that keeps Fergus’s penis off-screen (Willis, High Contrast 11).

Conversely, in the exposure scene, Dil’s penis is treated as “some sort of ‘special’ effect,” as Willis puts it, while Fergus’s penis is again obscured, “as if there were nothing to be learned from Fergus’s organ and everything to be learned from Dil’s” (11). This scene also begins conventionally. As Fergus and Dil kiss, an objective camera films the scene from behind the red transparent veil that encircles Dil’s bed, the symbolism only apparent retrospectively. Dil disappears off to slip into something more comfortable (Dil’s femininity is modelled on cliché), before returning in a satin robe. While the dramatic music swirls to its climax, the camera is then aligned with Fergus’s white male gaze; when he slips the robe slowly off Dil’s shoulders and pulls back, Dil’s body is revealed to both Fergus and the film’s spectator, as the camera tilts down Dil’s body in a continuous shot that reveals a flat-chest and flaccid penis.

The melodramatic mode in which this disclosure unfolds suggests that the film posits the anatomical body as the guarantee of Dil’s “original” sex, thus attesting to the difficulty of dislodging the body as a signifier of epistemological certainty in a visual medium.35 At the same time, Dil’s body still comprises conflicting signifiers (penis, make-up, painted nails). Indeed,

35 Such melodrama forms a stark contrast to the transformation scene in the art-house Orlando (1992), where Orlando blithely accepts his/her sex change, stating, “no difference, no difference at all - just a different sex.”

237 whereas Lola Young argues that this penis captures three kinds of otherness in one - homosexuality, transsexuality and blackness (278-79) - I would argue that Dil throws categories such as “homosexuality” and “transsexuality” into crisis: terming Dil a homosexual is problematic because it renders Dil male, while Dil’s confident disclosure of her penis is more suggestive of the erotic dissonance of anatomical sex and gender identity associated with transvestism. Nonetheless, the film later mobilises prevalent discourses of transsexuality when

Dil tells Fergus that she cannot help what she is, a statement that suggests that she wants to “be” rather than “do” her gender. This contradiction underscores the two-dimensional quality of Dil, whose role is to reflect Fergus’s personal and sexual crisis, much like the typical femme fatale of the noir genre. However, Young is one of the few critics to refer to the import of Dil’s blackness in this scene. If the phallus can only play its role as veiled, in its “‘deflated’ capacity,” as Kaja

Silverman puts it, “the penis constitutes a preeminent signifier of lack” (“Lacanian Phallus” 93).

While this “deflation” is no doubt partly due to film regulations that censor the sight of the erect penis, it is the black penis that is flaccid, while Fergus’s presumably erect white penis remains, once again, off-screen. As Shantanu DuttaAhmed points out, this allows Fergus’s veiled white penis to stand in for the phallus, revealing “how issues of race complicate the symbolic investment in the phallus, despite the imbrication between the two” (68).

For DuttaAhmed, Dil’s possession of a penis renders Fergus heroic through his innocence

(67). However, Fergus feels spectacularly stupid rather than innocent, and the duped spectator along with him. The Crying Game thus joins other contemporary films such as M. Butterfly

(1992), The Last Seduction (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) in screening white men being taken in by a passing biological male - a trend which can only point to the anxieties that gender- bending provokes in normative white masculinity, in particular the fragility of heterosexual identifications. This new-found knowledge forces a re-reading of the film so far, be it Dil’s body

(her large hands or wide neck), her camp lip-synching routine (see figure 5.5), Col’s (Jim 238

Broadbent) interrupted attempt to warn Fergus, or Jody’s assertion that Dil was not Fergus’s type. Even after the disclosure scene, the joke continues to be on the straight white men in the film, such as when Dil visits Fergus at work and, dressed provocatively in black tights, denim shorts and high heels, is greeted by wolf whistles from the other builders, unaware that the object cementing homosocial desire is biologically male. Likewise, when Fergus’s bourgeois, racist boss, Deveroux (Tony Slattery), with ironic disdain, calls Dil a “lady,” Fergus replies, “No, she’s not that either.” Of course, Deveroux used the term not as a biological marker but as a signifier of white bourgeois femininity, revealing that while Dil can perform femininity, it will always be racially marked, while the provocative style she adopts is also coded as working-class.

If Fergus is rendered heroic through Dil’s penis, this stems from his remorse for hitting her in a moment of homophobic panic and his continued treatment of her as a woman in need of his protection (see figures 5.6. and 5.7). Although he cannot bring himself to have sex with her, he continues to see her, and kisses her on the lips once before the IRA plot resurfaces, allowing the film to avoid fully exploring the ramifications this might have for Fergus’s sexual identity.

Fergus’s chivalric treatment of Dil is a major reason for the film’s most remarkable feat: that Dil continues to be considered a woman by most film spectator’s despite the visual certainty offered by the revelation scene. This is where I must disagree with Žižek, who states, “[f]rom a capricious and ironic sovereign Lady, [Dil] changes into the pathetic figure of a delicate, sensitive boy who is desperately in love” (Metastases 103). Certainly, Dil becomes tragic and defenceless, but she still commands the pronoun “she” even when Fergus dresses her as a man to protect her from fellow-IRA volunteer Jude (Miranda Richardson).36

Part of the reason why Dil continues to signify “woman” is not only her skilled

36 Most of my students have insisted on using the pronoun “she” to refer to Dil, except for a few cases of hostile male responses, with several male students insisting on referring to Dil as “it” in an attempt to deny Dil’s humanity. One student also informed the class that if he were Fergus he would kill Dil, an assertion that constitutes a horrible reminder of the death of Venus Xtravagnza in Paris Is Burning, a reaction that I suspect is bound up in homophobic panic caused by his original attraction towards Dil.

239 approximation of feminine gestures, body language, voice and sartorial codes, but also the discursive strategies that she deploys. Dil refers to herself as a “girl” to Fergus, even after the disclosure scene, but now this reference achieves a camp distancing effect, invoking “the deconstructive nature of the transvestite performance, always undoing itself as part of its process of self-enactment” (Garber 149). For instance, when she states, “a girl has her feelings,” Fergus replies, “the thing is that you’re not a girl,” to which Dil replies, “details, baby, details.”

Likewise, when Col tells Fergus, “when a girl runs out like that she generally wants to be followed,” Fergus replies, “she’s not a girl,” to which Col responds, “whatever you say.” In a sense, though, gender is posited as “whatever you say,” which is not to ignore the importance awarded the biological body in the revelation scene, but rather to confirm it, since what is disruptive in the film is the fact that despite Dil’s anatomically male body, she remains female in terms of identification and performance. In that sense, Dil causes what Garber terms “a category crisis” (16), disrupting the notion of sexual difference even as the signifier of that difference, the penis, is awarded epistemological primacy.

Crucially, then, the subversive status of drag/transvestism is dependent on the performance being discovered. This is especially the case with Dil, who, as Mark Simpson notes,

“[embodies] a femininity that would be laughed out of the cinema if played by a woman, even by the audience that rooted for the saccharine-sweet Good Girl wife of Michael Douglas in Fatal

Attraction” (167). Dil performs unreciprocated oral sex on Fergus, brings Fergus his lunch and a cup of tea to work dressed to the nines, faints from nervous blood condition like a swooning nineteenth century lady (N. Evans 208) and informs Fergus that she will do anything for him as long as he doesn’t leave her. Dil’s performance parodies the notion of an original gender by embodying a more excessive femininity than that of a biological woman. Thus when Dil tells

Fergus, “I was always best looking after someone. Must be something in the genes,” biological determinism is evoked only to be denied. 240

Dil’s convincing performance of the damsel in distress allows the white male, Fergus, to assume the role of chivalric gentleman. While this certainly demonstrates the citationality of

Fergus’s own masculinity, both Fergus and the film seem to be suffering from a romantic yearning for an obsolete romance plot, which represents itself as new and radical through generic subversion. Even if, as Jack Boozer Jr. suggests, when Dil ties Fergus to her bed, she “snares

Fergus […] into a masculinity that abjures phallic demonstrations of superiority” (174), this is almost immediately offset by his final gallant sacrifice in taking the blame for Jude’s murder. In fact, Fergus assumes the role of knight in shining armour from the outset when he protects Dil from her ex-boyfriend Dave (Ralph Brown)37 and later from his boss, making Dil exclaim, with camp self-consciousness, “My oh my, Jimmy. How gallant! It made me feel all funny inside!”

Irony or no irony, though, Dil allows Fergus to act out an old-fashioned masculinity that he cannot assume around aggressive, independent women like Jude. For Žižek, who reads the film through the discourse of courtly love, The Crying Game demonstrates that “the sexual relationship is condemned to remain an asymmetrical non-relationship” (Metastases 108); thus women like Jude, who oppose patriarchal domination, “simultaneously undermine the fantasy- support of their own ‘feminine’ identity,” and Fergus’s relationship with Dil can “realise the notion of heterosexual love far more ‘authentically’ than a ‘normal’ relationship with a woman”

(108). While I disagree with Žižek’s Lacanian theorisation of “the sexual non-relation,” which leaves little future for (heterosexual) female equality, as well as his tendency to extract “truths” about that relation from film texts rather than analysing those texts in terms of the ideologies they carry, his characterisation of the film’s own sexual politics is insightful. Indeed, Fergus is

37 Dave’s contrasting ungentlemanly behaviour (verbal and physical abuse) must first be read in terms of class (Dave is the recognisable stereotype of an “Essex wide boy,” a ridiculed figure of working-class crudeness in British culture), but retrospectively also intimates at homosexual misogyny (Dave refers to Dil as a “lesbian” and “dyke” - terms that also invoke the category crisis that Dil engenders). Dave’s hysteria and the fact that he still sleeps with a teddy bear also reinscribes stereotypes of gay men, though this reading can only be applied in retrospect, thereby insulating the film against accusations of stereotyping, though admittedly, Jody offers a more complex image of queer masculinity.

241 another example of the sensitive white men that populated 80s and 90s films in transformation narratives whose overriding concern is how to be a straight white man in a postfeminist age: rather than becoming woman (Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire), a father who replaces the mother (Three

Men and a Baby, Mrs. Doubtfire, Terminator 2) or a brain-damaged child (Regarding Henry,

Forrest Gump), Fergus assumes the role of gentleman to a lady, but can only do so to a biological male who perfectly embodies patriarchal, pre-feminist notions of the feminine.38

One of the rather disturbing suggestions that emerges from the film, therefore, is the suggestion that Dil does femininity “better” (in patriarchal terms) than biological women, a trendier take on the premises of Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire. Indeed, Jody directly informs

Fergus of that fact, even though this interpretation is only available on second viewing: after informing Fergus that “women are trouble,” he qualifies his statement to “some kinds of women are,” adding, “Dil, she was no trouble, no trouble at all.” Mark Simpson, who contends that the film is misogynistic, argues that if contextualised, The Crying Game screens the Good Girl/Bad

Girl opposition that dominated Hollywood in the late 80s and 90s (Fatal Attraction being the prime example) (165), which Judith Williamson has identified as pivoting around anxieties about the “single working woman” (qtd. in M. Simpson 165). While Simpson overlooks the effect of

Dil’s ironic and auto-deconstructive citation of femininity, it is certainly the case that the film plays Dil favourably off against the callous Jude, whose disguise in London is also that of phallic career woman. Much like the neo-noir femme fatale, such as Meredith (Disclosure) or Bridget

(The Last Seduction), Jude’s threat is also one of aggressive sexuality, such as when she places a

“taloned hand” on Fergus’s crotch, and points a gun at him whilst demanding “a fuck” - her sexuality encoded as castration and death (M. Simpson 169) (see figure 5.8). Simpson even goes as far as to argue that “the transvestite has come to represent sympathetically the fantasy of doing

38 Stephen Rea also observed, “the men on the film crew were attracted to Jay because he looked like their notion of a woman. They would say ‘What a pity she’s not a woman’” (qtd. in Corliss 57).

242 away with woman altogether” (170). He also expresses concern at the fact that Dil kills Jude out of jealously for her biological femaleness (“You used your those tits and that cute little arse to get him [Jody], didn’t you”), thereby repeating the Hollywood trend of representing transvestites/would-be transsexuals as “homicidal women killers” (169) (see chapter 8), not to mention the film’s rearticulation of the psychologically unstable, tragic drag queen.

Dil’s femininity and Fergus’s response to it must also be examined through the lens of racial dynamics. Garber suggests that the presence of a transvestite in a text often indicates “a category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilises comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin” (17). In The Crying Game, that category crisis concerns both race and ethnicity. Dil’s race is only referred to once in the film, when Jude calls her a “wee black chick,” but it is also highlighted through her connection with Jody, “the absent site, perhaps even the fantasmatic site, where race is spoken” (Willis, High Contrast 13). In one of his first conversations with Fergus, Jody informs him (erroneously) that Ireland is “the only place where they call you nigger to your face.” Fergus’s flippant reply that Jody shouldn’t take it personally underscores the privilege of whiteness to refuse to acknowledge the power that race and racism wield. Likewise, as bell hooks points out, initial reviews of the film either failed to mention race, or if they did, did so only to state that the film’s theme was that race and gender do not really matter, and overlooked the fact that it is those with black bodies that are subordinated (Outlaw

Culture 59). hooks inserts the racial dynamics that reviewers, along with the film, displaced onto sexual transgression, arguing that Dil “embodies the ‘tragic mulatto’ persona that has always been the slot for sexually desirable black female characters of mixed race in Hollywood” (56).

Thus, Fergus’s failure to properly “read” Dil might be attributed not only to her convincing performance of patriarchal notions of femininity, but also to a femininity that is racially marked

(Dil is both sexually available and a subservient “mammy”), in turn inscribing Fergus’s 243 attraction to a paternalistic white male role. In this respect, The Crying Game also parallels

Jordan’s earlier film Mona Lisa (1986), featuring Bob Hoskins as a white male desperately attempting to rescue a black prostitute, Simone (Cathy Tyson), in a similar narrative of white male redemption. Like Dil, Simone harbours a secret that George (Bob Hoskins) is unaware of - she is a lesbian - a secret which similarly renders the white male’s investment in the role of the gallant courtly lover pathetically futile. The Crying Game is also remarkably similar to M.

Butterfly (1992), based on David Henry Hwang’s play, which Žižek jokingly refers to as “The

Crying Game Goes to China” (Metastases 105). M. Butterfly dramatises the real-life story of a

French diplomat who fell in love with a Chinese opera singer and ended up spying for China, unaware for years that his lover was a biological man. The film, like the play, suggests that this deception was possible because of western patriarchal notions of Asian femininity, since the diplomat Gallimard (Jeremony Irons) attributes the fact that he has never seen his lover naked or the fact that she remains fully clothed during sex (which, of course, was really anal sex, which

Gallimard claims never to have realised, an assertion that smacks of disavowal) to Chinese women’s sense of modesty.39 It becomes evident that Gallimard has fallen in love with an idea of exotic, demure Asian womanhood, mainly because it bolsters his role as dominant Western patriarch. Thus Song Liling’s (John Lone) transgressive body, like Dil’s, becomes a repository for regressive white male fantasies about gender, race and ethnicity.

In the same way that Jody’s body enables the referencing of Dil’s blackness, Dil’s body references Jody’s homosexuality, which in turn necessitates a retrospective re-reading of his intimate relationship with Fergus and how this impacts on Fergus’s sexual identification (see figure 5.9). For instance, the dialogue when Jody first tells Fergus that he was “the handsome one” might first be regarded as similar to the homoerotophobic banter common to buddy movies

39 The film beautifully illustrates Edward Said’s point that Orientalism has less to do with the Orient than the Occident (12), and sustains Occidental ideologies and theoretical exigencies (153).

244 such as Lethal Weapon (1987) or Tango and Cash (1989) that police the irruption of homoerotic desire into male relationships.40 On second viewing, though, this flirtatious exchange acquires homoerotic connotations. Likewise, the homosocial desire that Jody solicits by showing Fergus

Dil’s photograph retrospectively foregrounds the homoerotic desire that Eve Sedgwick has located in all Western patriarchal homosocial ties. The fact that Fergus’s approval of Dil expresses an unconscious desire for women with penises (M. Simpson 172) also gives a retrospective queer reading to the fact that Fergus and Jody bond over Jody’s penis: because

Jody’s hands are fastened, Fergus has to help him to urinate by unzipping his pants and getting

“the fucker” out (Jody’s double-edged term). This comic scene, one of the many which posits

Jody as child-like, thereby neutralising the threat of the black male’s alleged hypermasculinity, hints at homoerotic desire even on first viewing through its obvious parallel with the opening scene, where Jody urinates while holding Jude’s hand. Moreover, Fergus’s homophobic fear of physical intimacy with Jody suggests that for Fergus Jody’s penis is a lot more than “a piece of meat,” as Jody protests; indeed, as Mark Simpson puts it, it is the “meat” on Dil that causes

Fergus to vomit (171). The laughter that ensues between the men as Jody jokingly states, “I know that wasn’t very easy for you,” and Fergus replies, “the pleasure was all mine,” functions as a release of homoerotic tension. Fergus’s heterosexual identification is thus marked as precariously unstable, resting on a violent rejection of homosexuality, which nonetheless returns as the repressed; in other words, heterosexuality is shown to be dependent on an abjected other which always troubles its borders (Butler, Gender Trouble 35-65). The film, then, does offer, as

Kristin Handler argues, “a genuine, if limited, challenge to homophobia,” even as “it provides for the comfort of the ideologically normative spectator” through its reconstruction and redemption of white heterosexual masculinity (40).

This queer reading of the film posits Fergus’s obsession with Jody as being rooted in

40 For a discussion of this banter in buddy movies, see Holmund 221 and Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic” 202-03. 245 more than his guilty conscience. Indeed, in his introduction to the screenplay, Neil Jordan explains how he was inspired by two Irish authors, Frank O’Connor and Brendan Behan, both of whom have written of an IRA hostage plot undergridded by “an erotic possibility” between men which “remained subdued” (vii). In The Crying Game, he continues, “I brought the erotic thread to the surface. Instead of two, there were now three. A hostage, a captor, and an absent lover.

The lover becomes the focus for the erotic subtext, loved by both men in a way they couldn’t love each other” (vii). Dil’s function as an erotic stand-in for Jody is played out when Fergus dresses Dil like Jody, ostensibly to protect her from Jude. Mark Simpson suggests that whereas

“on a conscious level, Dil was, like any man’s ‘girl,’ ‘the phallus’ for Jody,” on a subconscious level, “Dil has literally come to be Jody’s phallus for Fergus” (173). Jordan makes a similar point, stating that Fergus’s obsession with Jody “leads him to reshape [Dil] in the image of the guy he’s lost” (xiii), a queer reworking of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. bell hooks inserts a racial dimension into Jordan’s comments: “Black bodies are like clay - there to be shaped so that they become anything that the white man wants them to be” (Outlaw Culture 59). For hooks, then, the film should also be read through colonial discourse, since Fergus, the colonised Irishman, “eats the other” by cannibalising Jody’s life story (59). Dil’s body thus constitutes “the location, the playing field, where white men work out their conflicts around freedom, their longing for transcendence” (59). In this respect, Dil thus combines the tendency prevalent in Hollywood to assign drag queens (To Wong Foo, The Birdcage, Flawless) and black characters (Beverly Hills

Cop, Bulworth, Bringing Down the House) the role of liberating repressed white men. Rather than the traditional motif of white male redemption through violence, therefore, The Crying

Game screens a narrative of white male redemption through his successful negotiation of difference.

246

5.7. Boys Don’t Cry: Performing White Masculinity

Boys Don’t Cry attempted to rescue Teena Brandon’s story from sensationalised media coverage (Peirce qtd. in Leigh 18), and earned over $11.5 million at the US box-office in the process. Ironically, though predictably for a Hollywood-financed film about a transgendered male, the film provoked its own media frenzy, not least because of the lawsuits it unleashed, most famously by Lana Tisdel, Brandon’s ex-girlfriend.41 To some extent, this is symptomatic of the bio-doc genre, in which knowledge that events are based on “real-life” inevitably negotiates interpretation. For example, the popular press also expressed astonishment at Hilary Swank’s convincing performance of boyish masculinity (see figure 5.10), fascinated by the fact that

Peirce gave Swank the part on condition that she live as a man for four weeks before shooting. In interviews, Swank explained how she lost touch with her gender identity, calling her husband out to join her after the first few weeks of filming because “[h]e was the only one who could see past my physical appearance and be there for me mentally and emotionally. […] Without him I don’t know if I would have made it through the rest of it” (qtd. in Straayer, “Masculinity”). As

Straayer suggests, “[i]t was as if Brandon's ‘identity crisis’ (male identity, female body) had been transferred to Swank (female identity, male performance), which can only imply that the performed body is as powerful as the anatomical body” (“Masculinity”). The press also delighted in commenting on Swank’s glamorous appearance at award ceremonies when “the boyish

Brandon transmutes back again into sexy babe as Swank shows up in form-hugging dresses, batting her eyes and thanking her husband” (Rich, “Queer and Present Dangers” 25). Her appearance thus reassured audiences of an original female identity behind the masquerade, but nonetheless still pointed to “the breadth and ease of gender performativity” (Aaron, “Pass/Fail”

41 Lana Tisdel sued Fox Searchlight, angered at her presentation as “lazy, white trash,” and the film’s suggestion that she was present at Brandon’s murder (“Boys Don’t Cry: Questioning the Story”). She also stated that the film “destroys the memory of Brandon as badly as the two killers destroyed his body. It is the second murder of Brandon Teena” (qtd. in Farache). Brandon’s mother also expressed outrage at the exploitation of her “daughter’s” life, and the film’s failure to mention that Brandon had been sexually molested by a man as a young girl, and dressed as a man out of a defence strategy (“Boys Don’t Cry: Questioning the Story”). 247

93).

Like The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry attracted sustained, critical interest (most notably an ongoing debate in Screen), much of which focused the film’s crossover address, with critics soon dubbing it an example of “New Queer Cinema.”42 Rendering Brandon accessible to straight audiences was precisely Kimberly Peirce’s intention. In an article in the lesbian and gay magazine The Advocate, Peirce recalls the thrill she experienced as a child watching Howard

Hawk’s To Have and Have Not (1944) and identifying with Humphrey Bogart and his desire for

Lauren Bacall, stating that Boys Don’t Cry enables straight audiences to participate in the transvestism that has been central to queer identity and experience.43 Peirce suggests that this

“erotic leap” was possible because of the fact that “Brandon actually embodied many traits of the traditional Hollywood hero. He had the innocence and tenderness of Montgomery Cliff in Red

River or a young Henry Fonda, the naïve determination of Jimmy Stuart. He was a rebellious outsider like James Dean, a shy, courtly gentleman around women like Gary Cooper.” Fox

Searchlight’s official website also focuses on the film’s portrayal of “the contradictions of

American youth and identity,” failing to mention transgendered sexuality even once in its plot synopsis (Boys Don’t Cry). Critical reviews, as well as Peirce herself (qtd. in Leigh 20), also universalised the queer subject matter by homing in on the film’s Romeo and Juliet love story.

Unlike the documentary, The Brandon Teena Story (1998), which paints a reportedly more faithful picture of Brandon seducing a string of young sexually inexperienced girls (from whom he frequently stole, even if it was to buy them presents), Peirce makes Brandon’s relationship

42 B. Ruby Rich, who coined the phrase, argues that the term is now problematic because queer movies have been commodified (“Queer and Present Dangers” 23-24). She also argues that Boys Don’t Cry does not fit into the ordinary New Queer Cinema canon because it is not a lesbian or gay film, but a transgendered one (25), an assertion that would seem to go against the very tenets of queer theory. 43 Similarly Michele Aaron opens her essay “New Queer Spectator” asking, “[h]asn’t there always been something fundamentally, if obliquely, ‘queer’ about spectatorship?” (187). Aaron notes that from Mulvey’s notion of the female spectator’s “transvestism” to psychoanalytic film theory’s (and not only) assertion that the spectator can “cross-identify,” fluid and transgressive viewing positions have often been assigned to “the otherwise conventional (and conventionally gendered) viewer” (187). Nonetheless, she continues, “[w]hat is queer about spectatorship […] has always been contained […] and therefore, perhaps, not queer at all” (187).

248 with Lana Tisdel (Chloë Sevigny) the narrative focus of her film, mainly because of her self- confessed fascination with Lana’s “absolute spiritual love” (qtd. in J. Allen). In this respect,

Peirce has been severely criticised for failing to document Brandon’s life accurately (Siegel;

Farache). However, rather than demanding authenticity in a narrative feature film, a more productive line of enquiry would be to examine what ideological work her deployment of the

Romeo and Juliet narrative carries out. For instance, the editing out of Brandon’s promiscuity certainly renders a film about transgendered subjectivity more palatable to straight viewers, as does the fated “star-crossed lovers” motif - it is hard to imagine mainstream audiences embracing a film that screens a successful relationship involving a well-adjusted transgendered subject, hence Dil’s tragic status in The Crying Game.44 Chris Straayer also notes that, while the film succeeds in capturing for Lana the charming masculinity that all of Brandon’s girlfriends apparently found irresistible (many of Brandon’s ex-girlfriends appeared on talk shows to attest that he was the best boyfriend they had ever had), it “misses the sustaining function that serial seductions likely served his masculinity” (“Masculinity”). Nonetheless, Boys Don’t Cry does resignify romance conventions outside of heterosexuality. More importantly, as Patricia White points out, the film’s romance strategy and marked female address also “makes Lana’s desire and way of seeing count” (218).

Lana’s way of seeing is not made available until the first sex scene, however; up until that point, events are screened through Brandon’s perspective. As with most cross-dressing films, the spectator is made aware at the outset that Brandon is a biological woman. Unlike the comedies, though, or even realist representations of passing, such as Maggie Greenwald’s superb revisionist western The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), which narrativises the real life story of Jo

Monaghan (Suzy Amis), who dressed as a man to protect herself in the wild west, Brandon does

44 The tragic mode also helps absolve audiences of their own transphobia by establishing a distance between themselves and Brandon’s killers and tapping into liberal discourses, much like Lana’s mother, who states after Brandon’s rape, “I don’t care what you are, nobody has the right to do this to you.” 249 not cross-dress as a means to an end, but as an end in itself (Aaron “Pass/Fail” 94). The film opens as Brandon’s gay cousin, Lonny (Matt McGarth) finishes cutting Brandon’s hair into a boyish crop, though crucially, this transformation scene offers no “pre-passing” image - the only glimpse of a more feminine Brandon throughout the film is a teasingly fleeting shot of his early police records. Instead of offering an original gender identity, then, the opening scene presents us solely with the performance, as Brandon postures before a mirror, stuffs a sock down his jeans crotch, leading Lonny to joke, “If you was a guy, I might even want to fuck you,” to which

Brandon grinningly replies, “You mean if you was a guy, you might even want to fuck me!”

Brandon’s reply, of course, underlines not only the performative structures underpinning

Lonny’s own masculinity, but also the femininity attributed to gay masculinity in heterosexist culture. For Brandon, it becomes clear that possession of the penis is no guarantee of manliness.

Lonny, conversely, reinforces the cultural conflation of genitals and gender, and attempts to

“reason” with Brandon after he narrowly escapes a beating from a group of men enraged that

Brandon had dated one of their sisters:

Brandon: I don’t know what went wrong

Lonny: You are not a boy, that’s what went wrong. That is what went wrong.

Brandon: Don’t get mad. They all say I’m the best boyfriend they’ve ever had. […]

Lonny: Why don’t you just admit you’re a dyke?

Brandon: Because I’m not a dyke.

For Lonny, Brandon’s male identification is part of his general inability to face up to reality, a suggestion that frames the remainder of the film, particularly every time Brandon lies about his past. Nonetheless, Brandon vehemently refuses either lesbian or female identification, because for Brandon, unlike Lonny, the truth of gender resides in what Lacan terms the look of the Other

- which is precisely why the gradual incorporation of Lana’s point of view is so crucial to the film’s project. 250

Nonetheless, the film takes pains to stress Brandon’s female body beneath his masculine appearance. Not only do other characters remark on his small hands or smooth face, but particular narrative space is devoted to the arrival of Brandon’s period. For Jennifer Esposito, these reminders underscore Brandon’s failures and the return of the repressed female body, functioning to reaffirm an original gender, much like the slips of disguise that Straayer locates in

“the temporary transvestite” film (239). Thus, she argues, Brandon’s performance is posited as pure masquerade, while the masculinity of John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom (Brendan Sexton III) is reinscribed as natural, since they possess penises, “signifiers in absentia” (Straayer’s term)

(239). Certainly, these overdetermined reminders of Brandon’s female anatomy are open to voyeuristic and sensationalist appeal, and, in accordance with the film’s overall tragic structure, point to Brandon’s inevitable exposure. Yet, they could also be seen to “avow queerness,” as

Michele Aaron argues, and “extend spectatorial implication within the sexual (and social) workings of the diegesis rather than seal it off” (“Pass/Fail” 94). For instance, when we see

Brandon leaving the shower, inserting a tampon, binding his breasts, stuffing his pants, and posturing in front of the mirror, Brandon’s face suddenly breaks into a smile as he states, “you’re an asshole” - a moment of ironising self-awareness, which also points to the imitative structures of all macho masculinity. Moreover, it is precisely the dissonance between biological sex and gender identity that refuses rather than resecures the authentication of masculinity through recourse to the male body. In this case, Brandon’s masculinity disrupts accounts in which

“masculinity always boils down to the social, cultural and political effects of male embodiment and male privilege” (Halberstam, “The Good” 345). It is also crucial that Brandon’s performance fails not because his “original” gender “betrays” him, but because a court summons arrives at

Candace’s (Alicia Goranson) house, pointing to the discursive formations of a legal system that demands conformity between biology and gender identity. Esposito also underestimates the power of the film’s “transgender gaze,” as Judith Halberstam terms it, established through 251

Lana’s refusal “to privilege the literal over the figurative,” even if this gaze is abandoned in the final love scene, a point I will return to (“Transgender Gaze” 295).

The first incorporation of Lana’s gaze occurs during the film’s first sex scene (see figure

5.11). Lana mutters, “I’m in a trance,” a statement that privileges the realm of fantasy, just before Brandon performs oral sex on her (off-screen so that the film could gain a NC-17 rating).

The camera lingers on a close-up of Lana’s face as she sighs with increasing intensity. The remainder of the scene is then delayed, interrupted by a fleeting shot of Brandon partying in a car with Lana, Candace and Kate (Alison Folland), whose function would seem to be to reveal

Brandon as “one of the girls,” as White suggests, not so much to castrate him but to portray him

“as a crucial link in a discursive circuit of [female] pleasure and belief” (220). Another cut transports us to the all-female space of Lana’s bedroom, as Lana’s relates a version of her sexual encounter to her friends, an account which diverges considerably from the intercutting flashbacks narrated through Lana’s memory. As Lana throws herself back on the bed, covering her eyes and telling her friends that it was “too intense,” the camera again lingers on her face in close-up, before cutting to a side-on medium shot of Brandon penetrating her. This is followed by a close-up of Lana’s expression as it changes to one of bewilderment, immediately followed by a matching subjective shot which shows a glimpse of Brandon’s bound cleavage through his open shirt. A further flashback shows an obviously shaken Lana interrupting their love-making, cautiously feeling Brandon’s crotch and inspecting his smooth, hairless face, before she mutters

“you’re so handsome.” Back in the film’s narrative present, Lana, smiling with self-satisfaction, tells her disbelieving friends that they took off their clothes and went swimming, while a final flashback shows Lana telling Brandon not to be scared before pushing him gently to the ground and kissing him. When asked by her friends whether they did it, Lana replies, “What do you think?” - positioning the film spectator as one of the girls (White 220), and leaving the rest of the sexual encounter unscreened. 252

The film suggests that Lana disavows her knowledge of Brandon’s biological sex.

Indeed, the above scene is paradigmatic of how cinematic signification - with its lingering close- ups and subjective shots, and use of parallel editing, which allows the viewer to move in time and space, in this case revealing Lana’s reconstructed account of what she had earlier seen - can construct a fetishistic gaze. At the same time, it reverses the Freudian paradigm in which fetishism is solely a male preserve. Rather than the Freudian scenario of fetishism in which the boy postulates a maternal penis where in fact there is none in order to “triumph over the threat of castration” and “save” the fetishist from homosexuality (“On Fetishism” 353-54), this scene constructs a female fetishitic gaze that posits a penis where there is none, a gaze that might well attempt to maintain heterosexual identifications, but one which queers Lana’s heterosexuality in the process. Lana thus installs a temporal distance between the moment of vision and retrospective interpretation, which, as Mary Anne Doane notes, for Freud was solely a male prerogative (Femmes Fatales 23).45 Lana’s disavowal of Brandon’s biological sex continues throughout the film. When Lana finds Brandon in the female section of the prison, and Brandon informs her that he is a hermaphrodite who is more “she” than “he,” Lana tenderly tells him, “I don’t care if you’re half monkey or half ape, I’m getting you out of here.” Lana also informs

Brandon that she doesn’t need to see him naked since, “Think about it. I know you’re a guy.” It is precisely Lana’s refusal to accept Brandon’s femaleness that so infuriates John and Tom, who attempt to reinscribe a system of gender and genital equivalence when they strip Brandon naked and expose his vagina. As Halberstam notes, their brutal action “is clearly identified as a violent mode of looking, and the film identifies the male gaze with that form of knowledge which resides in the literal” (“Transgender Gaze” 295). “All I need’s the truth little buddy,” John states, before holding a struggling Brandon down while Tom forces down his pants, opens his legs, and

45 Freud notes that on seeing the mother’s genitals, unlike the boy, the girl “makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (“Some Psychical Consequences” 336).

253 declares, “It don’t look like no sexual identity crisis to me!” However, as John drags Lana into the bathroom and pushes her face towards Brandon’s crotch, Lana keeps her eyes closed, screaming out “Leave him alone!” Lana’s refusal to look would seem to give Brandon back his male identity: as the soundtrack cuts to silence, a shot of Brandon from Lana’s point of view is quickly followed by an eye-line match showing the figure of Brandon, fully-dressed in masculine garb, standing with Lana’s mother and friends, singled out by a bright light in the now darkened hallway. This lingering shot is then returned, as for a few seconds Brandon sees a frozen image of his naked self strung up by Tom and John, before this brief respite returns us to the visual and audio frenzy of the attack. This shot/reverse shot, divided between Brandon as subject and object of his own gaze, underscores Brandon’s horror at being publicly exposed (a stark contrast to

Dil’s erotic disclosure) as well as revealing the importance of the look of the Other to his male subjectivity; but it also constitutes a refusal of Tom and John’s literal gaze, since Brandon’s self- representation remains male identified. In other words, as Halberstam puts it, the shot/reverse shot “serves both to destabilise the spectator’s sense of gender stability and also to confirm

Brandon’s manhood at the very moment that he has been exposed as female/castrated”

(“Transgender Gaze” 296).

Nonetheless, after the rape scene, Lana’s way of seeing changes, and along with it the film’s representation of Brandon’s maleness. Many critics have expressed their irritation with the fact that the final love scene is assimilated into the terms of lesbianism, as if Brandon’s rape forced both Brandon and Lana to accept Brandon’s “original” gender identity (Esposito 236;

Straayer “Masculinity”; Hird 435; Halberstam “Transgender Gaze” 297; Henderson 300; Butler qtd. in Swan 50). As Lana holds Brandon maternally in a tightly framed pietà-like shot, she now tells Brandon that he’s “pretty” rather than “handsome.” She also asks Brandon whether “before all this” he was like her - “a girl-girl” - to which Brandon replies, “yes, a long time ago,” before adding he was then “just like a boy-girl, and then I was just like a jerk.” This is also the moment 254 that Brandon confesses to lying about his past, framing this sex scene with an arrival at self- knowledge. Despite their previous sexual encounter, Lana also tells Brandon, “I don’t know if

I’m going to know how to do it,” before a shot of her removing Brandon’s top dissolves into tender post-sex pillow talk. The sex thus remains off-screen, presumably because it has little to tell us, unlike the first encounter involving a dildo, and with Brandon’s breast binds cut away by the hospital nurse, it taps into the cliché of “idealistic lesbian reciprocity” (Straayer,

“Masculinity”). When asked about the lesbianisation of Brandon in this scene, Pierce stated that this happened the way Lana described it to her, an odd claim for a film that pays scant regard to authenticity elsewhere (Halberstam, “Transgender Gaze” 297).46 Peirce also defended her choice in humanist terms, arguing that after being raped, “Brandon could be neither Brandon Teena nor

Teena Brandon, and thus truly becomes ‘himself’ and ‘receives love’ for the first time as a human being” (qtd. in Halberstam “Transgender Gaze” 297). What is disturbing about this assertion is that it attributes to rape the transformative power that John and Tom intended for it, as well as the unfortunate suggestion that as a transgendered male Brandon was denied full access to the range of human emotions. Nevertheless, Peirce, along with Lana, continues to attribute the pronoun “he” to Brandon (a stark contrast to John, Tom and Lana’s mother’s “it”), unlike several journalists, who, writing both of Brandon Teena and Boys Don’t Cry, insisted on his femaleness and reclaimed Brandon as a confused butch lesbian, provoking anger and activism from the transgendered community.47 The various claims made on the real-life and filmic Brandon as a woman, man, lesbian, transvestite, transgendered subject, and transsexual thus point not only to the “category crisis” that Brandon presents but the leakiness of all identity categories. In a generous reading, then, even if the final sex scene does inscribe Brandon with the

46 In interviews, Peirce stated that her intentions were to remain faithful to emotional rather than factual reality, to make Brandon accessible, and propel the narrative forward. See Leigh 20. 47 Donna Minkowitz became a particular focus of anger after her Village Voice article, “Love Hurts,” in which she accepted that Brandon identified as male but still used female pronouns throughout, as well as insisting that Brandon was a lesbian. See “Transgender Picket Village Voice.”

255 more socially legible identity of lesbian, this might also drive a wedge between gender identity and sexual practices, as well as gender identity and biological sex, creating a queer space in which sexuality is fluid enough to “escape being an either-or proposition” (Cooper 57).

Brandon’s convincing performance of masculinity succeeds in foregrounding the performative structures of John and Tom’s normative masculinity, underscoring Lacan’s insight that, in the words of Butler, “[t]he masculine only appears to originate meanings” (Gender

Trouble 45). For instance, when Lana asks Brandon why he allowed John and Tom to tie him to the back of a truck and drag him around like a dog (a virility-testing ritual known as “bumper- skiing”), Brandon replies, “I just thought that’s what guys do around here.” Likewise, Tom challenges Brandon to prove his mettle by mutilating himself with a knife, a challenge Brandon skilfully deflects by accepting that he’s “just a big pussy” compared to Tom (misogynistic language is part of the turf, it would seem). Brandon’s approximation of white working-class masculinity thus highlights not only its underlying masochistic investments (the film’s original title was Take It Like a Man), but also the constant verification that masculinity requires, even when acted out by a biological male.

Thus if possession of the penis does not guarantee possession of the phallus, the phallus, as Butler argues in Bodies that Matter, might be considered transferable property (62). In her discussion of “the lesbian phallus,” a theoretical tour de force which Butler later claimed was intended as parody, Butler returns to the well-trodden path of highlighting Lacan’s penis-phallus slippage.48 Butler follows Lacan in arguing that since the phallus symbolises the penis, it cannot be the penis, but she goes on to conclude that it could therefore equally stand for any other body part (84). If the phallus is indeed “an imaginary effect,” part of an imagined morphology, then

“its naturalised link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive

48 In an interview, Judith Butler stated, “Of course there’s also a joke in the ‘The Lesbian Phallus’ because to have the phallus in Lacan is also to control the signifier. It is to write and to name, to authorise and to designate. So in some sense I’m wielding the lesbian phallus in offering my critique of the Lacanian framework. It’s a certain mode for lesbian authorship. It’s parody” (“Gender as Performance” 121). 256 reterritorialisation” (86) and its structural place no longer determined by the heterosexist version of sexual difference where men “have” and women “are” the phallus (for men) (88). Butler thus argues for the possibility of a “lesbian phallus,” which “offers the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege” (90). While Butler might be accused of ignoring the import of visual difference symbolised by the penis and of collapsing Lacan’s Imaginary and

Symbolic Order by conflating Lacan’s Imaginary body of the mirror stage with his notion of the phallus as the privileged signifier of lack in the Symbolic, she certainly reveals the extent by which the penis and phallus are “bound to each by an essential relation in which that difference is contained” (90).49 Of course, Butler is here referring to a specifically lesbian phallus by inserting the butch lesbian body into the Lacanian schema (Halberstam, “The Good” 357); nonetheless, while Brandon identifies as male, not lesbian, Butler’s arguments about the possible recitation of the phallus still apply, since Brandon reveals that the phallus is as “plastic,” to use

Butler’s pun, meaning counterfeit and replicable, as Brandon’s prosthesis. Moreover, the penis is equally transferable in the age of sex-alteration surgery, and it is surely significant that John’s enraged frenzy reaches its peak when he finds Brandon’s leaflet on transsexuality which contains a section on skin-grafted penises.

Rape is clearly screened as John and Tom’s punishment of Brandon for usurping male privilege, as well as their violent re-imposition of the sexual difference binary. At the same time, this points not only to the insecurities and instabilities of normative masculinity when its exclusive claims to masculinity are challenged, but also the undergridding homoerotic structures that support homosocial identifications. The rape scene itself is shot in flashback while Brandon is being interviewed by a sheriff, who is more interested in Brandon’s sexual identity than the

49 Sean Homer also argues that by focusing on the imaginary body of the mirror stage, Butler fails to explore how the body and the phallus function differently in each of Lacan’s three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real (51, 120). For a brief but lucid account of how Lacan’s conception of the body changed throughout his work, see Homer (120-21). 257 crime itself (the film uses the real-life police tapes for this scene). As the off-screen sheriff crudely asks, “When he poked you, where’d he try to pop it in first at?” the camera trains relentlessly on a traumatised Brandon, who hesitates before tearfully muttering “my vagina.”

While this is obviously the sheriff’s attempt to impose femaleness on Brandon, his question leaves the possibility of anal rape hovering as the unsaid, before a further cut back to the rapes themselves. Peirce delimits any potential titillation by avoiding long shots and using oppressively tight framing. John’s swift rape in the back seat of the car also deploys a series of dislocating, rapid jump cuts, which Peirce describes as “four frame flashes viscerally knocking into you, like memory knocking on consciousness” (qtd. in Leigh 20), while Tom’s rape is filmed in medium shots that alternate from his contorted facial expressions to side-on shots of

Brandon’s upper body and face sprawled out on the bonnet of the car against which his frail body is violently rammed. Brandon is not fully stripped and his breasts are still bound, though I think that Julianne Pidduck is right to note that for most viewers “it is the violation of Swank's lithe, recognisably female body that commands a much more ‘universal pathos’” (101). Like The

Accused (1988), this scene focuses on the homoerotic as well as homosocial function rape performs, as John and Tom cheer and whoop, and clutch each other excitedly between turns. The fact that the possibility of anal rape is evoked also suggests that the rape of Brandon might stage homoerotic fantasies projected onto the transgendered body, particularly due to the fact that after the rape, Tom and John continue to refer to Brandon as “little buddy” or “little dude.”50 As with

The Crying Game, then, the transgendered subject queers heterosexual identifications, and, to paraphrase Butler out of context, resignifies and destabilises the hegemonic categories by which more internally dissonant, transgressive categories are enabled (Gender Trouble 123).

Whilst revealing the imitative structures of normative white masculinity, Brandon

50 Moreover, this queer reading also suggests that the earlier lingering shots of John when Lana’s mother praises Brandon’s good looks could be explained through repressed desire as well as suspicion.

258 embodies a more sensitive, reciprocal mode of masculinity (walking his girlfriends home, putting their sexual pleasure first, listening to their dreams). Consequently, although it is important to note that Brandon does not identify as female, he still presents the possibilities that Halberstam imagines for “female masculinity” by uncoupling misogyny from maleness and masculinity from social power (“The Good” 345). Whereas in The Crying Game the suggestion that Dil does her gender “better” than biological women rearticulates and valorises patriarchal notions of femininity, Brandon’s performance of masculinity is decidedly non-patriarchal and reworks the power dynamics of the sexual relation by responding to feminist demands for a more nurturing masculinity, a rather different response to a postfeminist context than that offered by Jordan’s film. Nonetheless, Brandon’s citation of masculinity is also inextricable from discourses of class.

Indeed, the persona that Brandon creates as part of his gender performance is one that is decidedly more upwardly mobile (a sister modelling in Hollywood and a father in the oil business), suggesting that his performance of a more chivalric masculinity is imbued with a class transformation fantasy.51 For instance, in an early scene, a girlfriend tells him that he doesn’t seem to be from “around here” but from “some place beautiful.” Brandon also creates for himself and Lana a fantasmatic “elsewhere” that transcends the limitations of white working-class life, represented in the film not merely through their shared fantasies of escape, but also projected onto the film’s recurring shots of the barren Nebraska landscape traversed by powerlines and one-lane roads, a deployment of the conventions of the road movie whereby the road offers a liberating space freed up from the restraints of identity.52 For John and Tom, however, there is no such escape. As Lisa Henderson puts it, Brandon “is a different kind of man - radiant, beautiful,

51 In interviews Peirce explains that her attraction to the story was in part the fact that Brandon was “a girl living in a trailer park” who had the courage and creativity to create a fantasy and keep it alive (qtd. in J. Allen). 52 For a reading of the film’s usage of road move conventions see Pidduck. Timothy Corrigan notes that the contemporary road movie “responds specifically to the recent historical fracturing of the male subject” (138). It is thus interesting that in the 90s, the road movie commonly featured women and/or non-heterosexual protagonists (Thelma and Louise, Boys on the Side, My Own Private Idaho, Too Wong Foo, Priscilla). For a discussion of the recent spate of queer road movies, see Lang.

259 clear-skinned and clean, the promise of masculinity beside Tom and John, who stand instead as its scarred and mottled failures” (302).

Consequently, while the film’s valorisation of Brandon’s transgendered masculinity might be progressive in terms of feminist or transgendered politics, it has more conservative class implications, reiterating the commonplace association of working class men and hyperaggression. This is not to say that Boys Don’t Cry does not screen John and Tom’s masculine rage in a socio-economic context of a dead-end Middle American town, where career prospects run to a canning factory, and social recreation is limited to bumper-skiing, car chases, graffiti, drug taking and drinking. In particular, John’s swaggering, macho bravado is constructed by the film as a defensive strategy and proof of the only power that he wields. Tom explains that the doctors say that John has “no impulse control” while Tom himself is a self-confessed pyromaniac who mutilates himself in order to feel. Nevertheless, despite these moments of sympathetic portrayal, the film also taps into a 90s representational trend of linking innately violent pathologies with “white trash” masculinity (see chapter eight). In part, this can be interpreted as Peirce’s strategy to de-mystify the American heartlands - the mythical signifier of national values - which were idealised in many media representations of Brandon Teena’s murder through idyllic images of rolling hills, hardworking, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens, whose American way of life was threatened by a sexually deviant outsider (Sloop qtd. in Cooper

50). As Anna Wilson explains, as with the murder of homosexual Matthew Shepherd,53 the popular media attempted to deal with “the discursive crisis” caused by the “scandal of queers in the heartlands” by producing “a narrative of an unruly but vigorously normal national body, in need of policing but with its vitality reiterated” (205). Peirce certainly counterbalances this representation (see figure 5.12).54 However, along with Lisa Henderson, I am disturbed about the

53 In 1998, Matthew Shepherd was tied to a fence, beaten and left for dead. His murder was dramatised in a play, also adapted into a film - The Laramie Project (2002). 54 Peirce omits certain details that might have put John and Tom’s actions into a different context. For instance, by all accounts, John Lotter had a mental capacity of a ten year old (Siegel par. 17) and, according to a fellow-inmate, 260 film’s discourse on class. My intention is not a “liberal recuperation” of John and Tom

(Henderson 302), nor a demand for documentary style authenticity, nor an insistence on positive images, which, as Robert Stam and Louise Spence note (writing of race), often “[provide] a bourgeois façade for paternalism” (3); rather, my concern is that the film’s cross-over success might in part be explained through its negative representation of “white trash” masculinity “for an audience of cultural consumers perhaps too primed for such a judgement and too attracted by

[the film’s] gritty and exotic brand of realism” (Henderson 302).

Peirce has also been criticised for her exclusion of Philip DeVine, a black disabled male murdered by John and Tom along with Brandon Teena and Lisa Lambert (called Candace in the film for legal purposes) - criticism that underscores the inevitable mediation of “real life” events in interpreting bio-pics. In interviews, Peirce explained this decision by referring to Aristotle’s notion of “tragic unity” (qtd. in Brody 94), stating that DeVine was “a subplot” she had no room for (qtd. in Henderson 301), a comment that, predictably, outraged numerous commentators.

Jennifer Brody, for instance, comes to the conclusion that “the radical erasure of blackness makes queer stories queerer” (91), adding, “[w]here Peirce has an opportunity, if not an obligation, to record the real confluence of racism, classism, misogyny, transgender discrimination and homophobia, she chose instead to ignore the racist issues at stake in this story” (93). Halberstam makes a similar point, arguing that Peirce missed the opportunity to explore how DeVine, who was dating Lana’s sister, represented “a similarly outrageous threat to the supremacy and privilege of white manhood” (“Transgender Gaze” 298). While it is important to resist the temptation to conflate transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and racism, reference to

DeVine would have allowed an exploration of how “these vectors of power require and deploy each other for the purpose of their own articulation” (Butler, Bodies 18), how “whiteness” might

was repeatedly sexually assaulted in prison before he met Brandon and left wanting to “even up the odds” (Siegel par. 14). While the objective status of this interview is questionable, it is apparent that Peirce’s self-confessed determination to make the film into a love story (qtd. in Leigh 20) left her little room for such elaboration. 261 function as the only property that working-class whites possess, and how Brandon’s masculinity interacts with the privilege of exercising “whiteness.” DeVine’s presence would also have complicated the film’s homogenising image of the American heartlands as “white trash” country, while his blackness and disability would also have demanded a more complex representation of heterosexual male masculinity than the film’s reinscription of well-worn stereotypes of white working-class hypermasculinity that the validation of Brandon’s “inauthentic” masculinity would seem to require.

By inserting identity categories other than gender and sexuality into The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry, I have attempted to show that queer subject matter is not necessarily transgressive on all counts. Moreover, however subversive of gender norms transgendered or queer subjectivity might be, it is important to remember the tragic status awarded both to Dil and

Brandon, reinforced by both film’s melodramatic titles (Brandon, of course, does cry).55 As well as suggesting that mainstream audiences are willing to crossover as long as queerness and sexual deviance are dressed up in narratives of fated love and tears, it is also a reminder of the cost all too often paid by those marginal bodies who transgress conventional gender identities, a cost that is all too easy to overlook in the rush to install subversive bodies into theoretical frameworks of gender trouble. Boys Don’t Cry renders white masculinity ontologically empty, and thereby problematises its position as originator of meanings, hence the violent punishment meted out to

Brandon by the film’s biological males. The Crying Game reveals how heterosexual white masculinity is bereft of positive content and radically dependent on its others for self-definition, with the transgendered subject pointing to the fragility of heterosexual identifications. At the same time, its structuring white male perspective, along with its narrative that feeds into prevalent discourses of white male victimisation and white male redemption, reinscribes

55 For Esposito the fact that Brandon cries, unlike John and Tom, undermines his masculine performance (238), though equally, it could work, as the expression does in normal contexts, to point to the emotional blockage that is constitutive of normative masculinity, which Brandon resignifies. 262 heterosexual masculinity as the universal identity, and one that, despite the challenges posed by confrontations with difference, can always be healed. In short, then, both films reveal, to quote

Judith Butler out of context, that white heterosexual masculinity “can concede its lack of originality and naturalness but still hold onto its power” (Bodies 126). 263

CHAPTER SIX

White Skin, Black Masks? “Wiggers” in Contemporary Popular Cinema

6.1. Racial Cross-Overs

In a recent Channel Four documentary (2003), Black Like Beckham,1 journalist Paul

McKenzie argued that football icon David Beckham is Britain’s most famous black man, citing as evidence Beckham’s penchant for “dressing black,” his love of rap music (he has named his dogs Snoop and Puffy after Black rap artists), and “bling bling” lifestyle2 (see figure 6.1). One black interviewee also suggested that when Beckham was vilified by tabloids as Britain’s “most hated man” after being sent off in a match against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, he “knew what it was like to be a black man.” Despite its overall ironic, light-hearted tone, in a more serious mode McKenzie argues that Beckham is Britain’s most famous crossover icon and indicative of the massive influence of black urban culture on the British white mainstream. Not surprisingly, though, the programme created sustained debate over the meaning of race, with many members of the black community expressing concern about the propagation of narrow conceptions of blackness and black culture largely based on white notions of (male) rap stars’ lifestyles, as well as the programme’s failure to engage with the pernicious effects of racism because of its understanding of race as a purely cultural marker (Snow).3

The notion of race as a floating signifier freed from ontology is certainly gaining currency in both the popular and academic terrain. A group of white rappers call themselves

“Young Black Teenagers” because they identify so closely with black culture, Quentin Tarantino

1 The title of the documentary is obviously playing on Howard Griffin’s best-seller Black Like Me. See pp. 272-72. 2 “Bling bling” is gangsta rap slang for an ostentatious display of wealth, in particular jewellery. The term has gained such currency that it has recently been approved for entry into the Oxford English Dictionary. 3 Tony Snow, for instance, notes that Beckham has been subject to none of the racism experienced by his black team-mates, such as in the qualifying rounds for the EURO 2004 in Slovakia in October 2003, when Emile Heskey and Ashley Cole were victims of a torrent of racist abuse. 264 states that one of the people inside him is black (qtd. in Woods 201-2), while Michael Moore cites Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (!) as examples of the “stupid white men” currently running America in his homonymous book. Scientists are currently debating the dubious biological basis of race (Bamshad and Olson), informing us that there is often less genetic variation between an average black person and an average white person than the variability within each racial group (Delgado and Stefancic xvii), while critical race theorists argue that race is a historically contingent social construct. Nonetheless, as I have argued throughout this thesis, while race might well be a discursive fiction, it “translates into discernible material effects”

(Giroux, Impure 102) and continues to impact hugely on social reality.

In this chapter, I will focus on cinematic representations of male “wiggers” (white emulators of black culture),4 in order to problematise American white heterosexual masculinity as a coherent, stable category, revealing how it is often undergridded by a homoerotic repulsion and attraction to black masculinity, upon which it is dependent for self-definition. White (male) borrowings from black culture have their roots in 19th-century minstrel shows. The first minstrel is believed to be Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, who, in 1830, performed an extravagant dance to the tune of “Jump Jim Crow” (see figure 6.2), dressed in shabby attire and wearing blackface. Hugely popular, Jim Crow, a happy-go-lucky, ignorant country-bumpkin, was joined by other stock characters such as Zip Coon (a flamboyantly dressed, urban black male, ridiculed for trying to rise above his station), Mr. Tambo (a merry musician who played the tambourine),

Sambo (a dim-witted, lazy, infantile slave), Uncle Tom (a long-suffering, downtrodden, spineless black male) and the “wench” (men in drag), all played by white (particularly Irish) male performers, who appropriated black songs and dances whilst caricaturing black people, representing them as child-like buffoons (see figures 6.3 - 6.5). By the 1860s, black performers

4 David Roediger traces early usages of the term “wigger” to Detroit, where it referred to whites that were “overly” influenced by black culture (“Guineas” 659). The term also functioned as a classist slur from white suburban kids to white working-class Detroiters (659). Yet “wigger” has also become a term of affection from blacks towards whites who seriously embrace black culture rather than being mere wannabees (660). 265 also performed in minstrel shows, often in blackface, revitalising and modifying the form (see figure 6.6). As I will argue in more detail below, the minstrel legacy continues to be felt in contemporary popular cultural production. What is new, however, is the fact that disaffected white youths in the 90s increasingly proclaimed not only their affinities with black culture, but also their dissatisfaction with whiteness, with some going so far as claiming blackness as a badge of identity. The fact that this occurs at a time when African-Americans, males in particular, are deemed by many to be an endangered species is some measure of the successes of the civil rights movement’s critique of whiteness and its positive investment in minoritised subjectivity.5

However, male wiggers might also constitute a strategy of particularising normative masculinity in response to contemporary identity critiques, marking male wiggers as exceptionally white and thus insulated against the charges of being both an evil and a boring white male. In some respects, then, white borrowings from black cultural forms are part of an ongoing hybridisation of culture that could feasibly lead to racial rapprochement; but equally they can deflect discussions of the material effects of racism, since however “black” one might act, a white subject can always return to the advantages of possessing white skin. Consequently, as with permeating the boundaries of sexual difference, racial crossovers might well render visible the discursive nature of ontological categories, evacuating them of their essentialist force, but can simultaneously resecure the categories and stereotypes upon which any transgression depends. It is also important to think through the differences within white masculinity played out along the axes of other identity categories such as class, sexuality and ethnicity, in order to tease out what varying functions approximations of black masculinity might fulfil. Thus, after a theoretical

5 In 1997, Gubar noted that “[a]t the present moment, sociologists cite harrowing statistics documenting this society’s fatal effects on its black citizens: Blacks, who make up about 12 percent of the US population, are overrepresented in prisons (some 45 percent of inmates) and as victims of crime (approximately 50 percent of murder victims), but underrepresented in colleges (receiving only about 5 percent of awarded bachelor’s degrees); three times as likely to be unemployed as whites, African-Americans are nearly four times as likely to live in poverty” (xiv). More recent statistics collect by Loïc Wacquant in The New Left Review (March 2002) suggest little has changed: 50% of Blacks live under or close to the poverty line, 23% of all blacks will find themselves in prison at some point in their lives (compared to 5% of whites and 14% of Latinos/as) (qtd. in Kane). 266 discussion of contemporary race theory, racial cross-overs and the minstrel legacy, I will analyse the representations of male “black wannabees” in the films of Tarantino, contemporary cinema’s wigger par excellence. I will then turn to his most vocal critic, Spike Lee, and his bleak satire on modern minstrelsy, Bamboozled (2000), before moving to the parodic Ali G Indahouse (Mark

Mylod 2002), which maps minstrelsy onto a British terrain. I will close by considering the white rapping phenomenon Eminem and his vehicle piece 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson 2002) in order to explore the interactions between white masculinity, black masculinity and class, in particular

Eminem’s “white trash” roots that authenticate his rap career both intra- and extra-textually.

6.2. Visual Matters: The Performativity of Race

In 1982, Susie Guillory Phillips brought a lawsuit against the state of Louisiana in order to change her racial classification from black to white. Her lawsuit not only failed but also effected the replacement of the existing state law - which declared anyone with more than one thirty-second African ancestry black - with the former “one-drop rule,” according to which any proportion of African ancestry is sufficient to identify an individual as legally black (Piper 427).

Like the phenomenon of passing, the Phillips case “illustrates the inadequacy of claims that race is a mere matter of variations in human physiognomy, that it is simply a matter of skin colour”

(Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 54). By representing “whiteness” as an absence of race, the

“one-drop rule” has perpetuated the myth of white racial purity, along with the notion that

African-Americans, to whom the rule exclusively applies, have “most race” (Wald 13-14).6

Whereas other races have at various historical junctures fallen under the rubric of whiteness, blackness has always formed the polar opposite of whiteness in a rigidly Manichean schema,

6 For instance, an individual must be at least one-eight Native American to qualify legally as Native American (Piper 427). The reasons for this are primarily economic: Native Americans, unlike African-Americans, are entitled to various government financial benefits (427); further, under slavery, the “one-drop” convention enabled all American slave holders to enslave mixed race children, also rending possible the myth that miscegenation had not occurred (Davis qtd. in Piper 427-8).

267 locking whiteness into a relationship of dependence on blackness for self-definition. The “one- drop rule” thus underscores not only the discursive nature of racial formation, but also the fragilities of whiteness, which can be blackened with alarming ease in a strictly one-way racial economy. The legacy of the one-drop rule was highlighted with the changes to the US census in

2000 in response to lobbying pushing for a multiracial option that citizens could select as a descriptor of their racial identity, as opposed to forcing multiracial citizens to choose one of the existing five racial categories. The new census attempted to unify racial classifications; for instance, before 2000, someone could change race merely by travelling from one state to another

(M. Hill, After Whiteness 38). In 2000, citizens were asked to self-select their racial identification by ticking all categories that applied, expanding racial categories from five to sixty three.

However, ironically, this change re-enforced the one-drop rule, since those who selected white in addition to a minority classification were registered as a minority. Consequently, despite campaigning that attempted to problematise racial categorisation, American citizens were subject to the regulatory practices of racial discourse more than ever, while the proliferation of racial classifications effectively threatens to dismantle civil rights legislation to the point where “all differences count equally, while none do” (39). Moreover, the suggestion that race is a volitional identity precludes discussion of how institutions regulate racial identifications and the practice of racism. Indeed, despite the increasing recognition that North America is highly multiracial, with certain geneticists arguing that “95 percent of ‘white’ Americans have varying degrees of black heritage and 75 percent of all ‘African’ Americans have at least one white ancestor” (Gubar 32), the fear of miscegenation continues to haunt the American white imaginary, dramatised explicitly in social problem films such as the Oscar-winning Monster’s Ball (2001) or in a displaced form in fantasy cinema, such as the neo-gothic Underworld (2003).7

7 Monster’s Ball dramatises the relationship between white racist prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) and the wife of a black prisoner he executes (Hale Berry) in yet another narrative of white male redemption, which, unlike Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), suggests that mixed race relationships need not be catastrophic (Gilroy, “Ali G”). The intertextual, neo-gothic Underworld screens a long-running war between vampires and werewolves, initiated by the 268

However, as attention shifts to non-visible genetic differences in the determining of racial identity, and certain race theorists quote scientific research into the questionable biological grounding of race in order to refute fixed, essentialist racial categories, it is important to remember that science is not a racially neutral discourse; indeed, historically there have been scientific discourses that have offered as fact the “natural” inferiority of people of colour through such apparently “objective” practices as craniology. It is equally imperative to resist the notion that race does not exist since it continues to exert incontrovertible material effects. It is thus little surprise that in the US it is the neo-conservatives who effectively declare “race” to be obsolete in their clamour for colour-blind social policies as part of their reactionary attack on affirmative action and multiculturalism.8 Utopian calls by white anti-racist activists to abolish whiteness (a school of thought known as New Abolitionism9) are also problematic for assuming one can volitionally opt out of one aspect of one’s identity, particularly in a hegemonic visual regime that

“is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful” (Butler,

“Endangered/Endangering” 17), as are assertions that race is “a state of mind” by the likes of

Young Black Teenagers (qtd. in Shohat and Stam 238) and Tarantino (qtd. in Woods 201-2).

Likewise, the suggestion of Warren Beatty’s Senator in Bulworth (1998) that white people, and by extension race, should be abolished by “a voluntary free-spirited, open-ended programme of procreative racial deconstruction” - that is, “everbody’s just got to keep fucking everybody until we’re all the same colour” - while illustrative of the racial hierarchies enabled by the ideology of white purity, also suggests that the only possible means to promote racial harmony is a numbing

head vampire when his daughter fell in love with a werewolf. Because she was carrying a hybrid child, he had her killed. The most dramatic transformation of human to werewolf is that of a black male, whose bestiality plays uncomfortably into racist discourses of black masculinity. Moreover, the human who eventually becomes hybrid is a white male, whose skin considerably darkens during his metamorphosis. 8 For instance, in July 1995, The University of California ended its policies of affirmative action, resulting in a massive drop in African-American and Latino students (L. Williams 291). 9 See the Introduction, footnote 11. 269 erasure of race itself rather than respect for difference and heterogeneity.10

This is not to underestimate the political importance of highlighting the fact that race is a social construct, and therefore a site of constant struggle and contestation for both racist and anti- racist meanings, as a brief look at the contradictions of American race designation crystallises: at certain historical moments, Asian-Indians and Mexican-Americans were deemed white by virtue of their non-blackness (Roediger, Towards 181-2) while newly arrived Greeks, Italians,

Sicilians, Slavs, Irish and Jews have all been termed non-white at varying moments in American history (184-87). Moreover, just as Africans did not think of themselves as black before colonisation, so whites identified according to their ethnicity before the “invention of whiteness,” when they joined an imaginary community in order to define themselves against black slaves

(Shohat and Stam 19; Roediger, Wages; T. Allen; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White).

However, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. dryly notes, “it’s important to remember that ‘race’ is only a sociopolitical category, nothing more. At the same time - in terms of its practical performative force - that doesn’t help me when I’m trying to get a taxi on the corner of 125th and Lenox

Avenue. (‘Please sir, it’s only a metaphor.’)” (37-8). Thus, even as we accept that the selection of certain visible markers with the purpose of highlighting group formation “is always and necessarily a social and historical process” (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation 55), that does little to rob the visual inscription of race of its hegemonic force in the scopic regime of

10 I am reminded here of the Fall 1993 special edition of Time Magazine, entitled “The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society,” which features a cover picture of an imaginary woman, “New Eve,” created through morphing features of Anglo-Saxons (15%), Middle-Easterners (17.5%), Africans (17.5%), Asians (7.5%), Southern Europeans (34%) and Hispanics (7.5%). This article suggests that crossing the race line would eventually lead to a rather glamorous version of ethnic diversity (Gubar 33), even though the issue is about immigration and citizenship - a repolicing of racial borders. The article fetishises racial hybridity in a female form, rehearsing discourses of the eroticised mulatto that Bulworth also deploys with Hale Berry’s character, who acts as a bridge between the two races (Vera and Gordon 146). New Eve can also be likened to Dil in The Crying Game - the impossibly perfect biracial woman: one journalist even stated that it breaks his heart that she doesn’t exist (“New Face” 2), which Hammonds interprets as a continuation of the white, male denial of citizenship to their mixed-race offspring in order to retain the right to define whiteness (315). Leaving aside the apparently random ethnic mix (no reasons are given for the chosen percentages) that secures this Western-centric image of exotic beauty, Donna Harraway also objects to the desire for a deadening homogeneity which enacts an “evacuation of histories of domination and resistance,” “[ensuring] the difference of no difference in the human family” (qtd. in Gubar 46). 270 modernity, which posits race as “a constituted ‘fact’ of the body” that denotes interior as well as exterior attributes (Wiegman, American Anatomy 23). Thus Time magazine (June 27th 1994) felt it fitting to darken the skin tones of O.J. Simpson in its cover photograph when it seemed inevitable that he would be convicted of murder (L. Williams 358 n.10; Rogin 7). Moreover, despite the video footage showing LAPD cops viciously beating and kicking a defenceless

Rodney King, they were acquitted precisely because a “racially saturated field of visibility” produced black masculinity as a site of brutal, primitive, meaningless violence (Butler,

“Endangered/Endangering” 15). As Kaplana Seshadri-Crooks notes in her Lacanian reading of whiteness, “[w]hile the visible references of race can realign visibility according to need, the fact of visibility itself remains constant” (19).

Popular cinema is particularly pertinent to discussions of whether the “truth” of race resides in the body, since the (star) body in any visual medium is unavoidably racially marked. It is this fact that renders Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s experimental art-house thriller Suture

(1993) such a disturbing viewing experience. The film rehearses a typical noir plot of lost memory and mistaken identity: the rich Vincent Towers (Michael Harris) attempts to murder and frame his working-class half-brother, Clay Arlington (Dennis Haysbert), with whom he is said to share a disarming physical similarity. Clay survives but suffers from amnesia, and along with everyone else around him, believes that he is Vincent. Nonetheless, Vincent is white while Clay is black, a fact that no one seems to notice. This difference is emphasised visually through the usage of black and white film stock and a clinically white mise-en-scène that foregrounds Clay’s blackness (Burns 71). The conflict between the visual and discursive is perhaps most effectively deployed when the ironically named Renée Descartes (Mel Harris),11 Clay’s plastic surgeon and eventual lover, analyses Clay’s physiognomy, with a description that bears no resemblance

11 Despite Renée’s non-Cartesian profession, she nonetheless literally overlooks Clay’s (black) body in this scene, much like her namesake.

271 whatsoever to Clay/Haysbert’s features, screened in close-up: “… your fine straight hair, almost always a sign of good mental temperament, not to mention digestion. And your mouth: thin, smooth lips, slightly open, lips that are a sign of an affectionate, kind-hearted and generous person” (see figure 6.7). Renée’s description is obviously racially inflected, since features aligned with whiteness invoke positive ethical attributes, pointing to the processes whereby people of colour have been condemned to “the prisonhouse of epidermal inferiority” (Wiegman,

American Anatomies 11); but such racist discourses are also subverted, since the physical profile fits the white Vincent, but the character assessment suits Clay.12 Thus while the film “teases its audience with a ‘vision’ of colourblind society” (Burns 71), Clay’s class status and symbolic name (he is modelled according to white desires) express the fear that such a utopian society would in fact “suture over all awareness of its own racisms” (71). Moreover, the very fact that conventions dictate that Clay’s blackness rather than Vincent’s whiteness should be emphasised underscores that the apparently neutral cinematic gaze is white by default. As Seshadri-Crooks notes, then, Suture “literally utilises the visual medium against the visual regime of race” (131).

Race also inhabits a very different racial economy to gender, as filmic representations of passing illuminate. For instance, while The Crying Game queered the notion of an original gender through the discrepancy of gender performance and the anatomically sexed body, in films of successful racial passing such as The Human Stain (2003), subversion occurs through the

12 Importantly, Renée is removing stitches from Clay’s face at this moment, linking the film’s title to racial discourses into which all subjects in the Symbolic are inserted. While “suture” is most obviously a medical term, it also names a psychoanalytic concept briefly mentioned by Lacan in Seminar XI and developed by Jacques-Alain Miller to refer to “the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse […] [figuring] there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in” (25-6). In the words of Seshadri-Crooks, “suture names the process by which the subject comes to find a place for itself in a signifying chain by inserting itself in what is perceived as a gap, a place- holder for it” (105). While the subject can only enter the signifying chain as a symbol of lack, the subject embraces the fantasy of unity and suppresses those elements of the Real that have no meaning in the social and cultural discourses and narratives that the subject now inhabits (Burns 72). Likewise, Clay is sutured into discourses and representations assigned to him by others, his name alone suggesting the malleability of the subject. In film terminology, suture also names the manner in which the spectator is “stitched” or sewn into the film’s enunciating apparatus through identification with the camera. As Linda Kauffman notes, the camera denies its own existence in mainstream cinema, allowing the spectator to experience the shot as an imaginary plenitude, until s/he becomes aware of an absent field and therefore lack (94). The film itself refuses the normal comforts of suture, enacting an uneasy conflict between the visual and the discursive that prevents easy identification. 272 congruence between racial performance and the visibly raced body. Both films withhold information about the passer’s “original” identity in order to undermine epistemological certainty in the body as the site of truth, but whereas in The Crying Game the biological male passing as female was played by a biologically male actor, in The Human Stain, the light-skinned African-

American passing as white is played by Anthony Hopkins, whose whiteness, reinforced by extra- textual “knowledge” of Hopkins’s “real” race and ethnicity, is essential to the film’s project (see figure 6.8).

As The Human Stain reveals, passing for African-Americans has been a means of escaping the horrors of systematic racism or even a matter of life or death in times of slavery.

Moreover, black integration into white culture, while often disparaged by both black and white communities, has been a matter of enforced assimilation rather than volitional mimicry, albeit one that demands that blacks be “almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 86).13 Nonetheless, blacks who have passed have been accused of complicity in structures of racial domination, while white passing is often deemed subversive, liberating, even ennobling (Wald 16). A key example is white journalist John Howard Griffin, who blackened his skin through medication and ultra-violent light so as to pass as African-American in the American south, in order to write his best-seller Black Like Me (1960), a controversial attempt to document racism at first hand

(from the authoritative white perspective). That Griffin was hung in effigy in a mock lynching by whites in his hometown (Gubar 28) reveals the disruption to racial hierarchies that violating the heavily policed borders of race can enact.14 Eric Lott has suggested that the white desire to inhabit a black body as a form of interracial bonding occurs “when the lines of ‘race’ appear both intractable and obstructive, when there emerges a collective desire (conscious or not) to bridge a

13 Here I am quoting Homi Bhabha’s notion of racial mimicry, which, he argues, must always be ambivalent to secure racial hierarchies: “mimicry must continually produce its slippages, its excesses, its difference” (86). While Bhabha is referring to a colonial context, his arguments can be translated into US racial politics (Modleski 116). 14 As well as being socially vilified, it is also possible that the disintegration of his bones that he later suffered was caused by the doses of trimethyl psoralen and exposure to ultraviolet rays he used to blacken his skin (Gubar 29).

273 gulf that is, however, perceived to separate the race absolutely” (“White Like Me” 475).

However, Lott still places Griffin in a tradition of minstrelsy (Love and Theft 5), indicating the uneven power dynamics that will always haunt racial crossovers, since whites can “get a bit of the other” secure in the knowledge that the privileges of whiteness, however unevenly allotted across the axes of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity, are still theirs for the taking.

In popular cinema, the medium in which blackface was reinvented once the minstrel shows lost their appeal, the majority of blackface performances have recycled racist norms. The prime example is The Birth of a Nation (1915), whose bestial black male rapist of white women is played by Walter Long in blackface, as if blackness were “so monstrous it can only be signified but not directly represented” (Modleski 118) (see figure 6.9). But certain films have attempted to deploy blackface against its racist usages, often through narratives of bi-racial identification, such as the melodramatic film version of Black Like Me (1964) and comedies such as Finian’s Rainbow (1968) or Watermelon Man (1970), both of which screen white racists waking up to find they have turned black. The much-maligned Soul Man (1986) uses a similar motif, having its blacked-up middle-class protagonist experience racism during his attempt to beat affirmative action university quotas, though the film’s post-Bakke theme feeds uncomfortably into backlash discourses. However, even the high comedy of Richard Pryor coaching Gene Wilder to act black in Silver Streak (1976), a Senator’s adoption of black street cool that frees him from a stultifying life of corrupt politics in Bulworth, or Steve Martin’s antics as a white rapper in Bringing Down the House (2003), in which Martin’s character learns to overcome his fastidious middle-class whiteness through his contact with female rap artist Queen

Latifah (see figure 6.10), all inevitably rehearse the power dynamics of minstrelsy that commodify white men in blackface for predominately white audiences, as well as perpetuating the common trope that contact with black people will liberate white men from the sterility and repression that haunts white masculinity. Scott Bukatman has read The Mask (1994) similarly: 274 the awkwardly shy Stanley, “played by the extraordinarily white Jim Carrey,” transforms into “a green-skinned, zoot-suited parody of African-American performer Cab Calloway” the minute he dons a primitive African mask, though the cartoonish morphing “downplay[s] the film’s evident racial subtext” (Matters of Gravity 153). Since the mask seems to bring out repressed aspects of the personalities of its wearers, allowing the id to run riot, the film implicitly suggests that inside every boring white male is a colourful, energising, uninhibited black man struggling to get out.

On the other hand, Eddie Murphy’s superb Saturday Night Live skit “White Like Me”

(1984), a spoof on Griffin’s novel in which Eddie Murphy dons whiteface, reverses the codes of minstrelsy by presenting whiteness from an African-American perspective. In the process, he highlights the massive racial inequalities that permeate every facet of US life, as well as gently ironising African-American expectations of white entitlements, such as the sketch showing “Mr.

White” (Murphy) being given copious amounts of cash from a loan officer (Wald 2). By displaying how “whiteness is symbolised through an array of seemingly embodied signs from skin colour to ways of walking and talking” (Wald 2-3), Murphy renders visible the performative structures of whiteness, which can be annexed with ease in all aspects except racially inscribed physical features, which, in any case, are always in excess of their visible (non)significance.15

That Eddie Murphy’s white face “only signals a kind of antic clownishness” (Gubar 37), but Ted Danson’s infamous 1993 appearance in blackface at the Friar’s Club Roast for his then partner Whoppi Goldberg provoked national outrage (38) demonstrates not only the force that

America’s minstrel past continues to exert, but also a more general asymmetry. White performances of blackness can be accused of theft and racism, an impossible accusation to level at blacks performing whiteness since they lack the institutionalised force that the practice of

15 Whoppi Goldberg’s performances of whiteness also functions in a similar way, be it her stand-up impersonations of Valley Girls or her racial mimicry in The Associate. Chris Rock also mimics whites and does “white jokes,” often satirising the vacuity of “white culture.” 275 racism requires.16 Gubar also attributes this asymmetry to Fanon’s observation that “not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man;” the reverse, he adds, can never be true since “[t]he black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110; qtd. in Gubar 38).17 Fanon’s exclusive reference to masculinity here is certainly indicative of the androcentricism that pervades his pioneering study Black Skin, White

Masks (1952).18 Nevertheless, his reference to white masculinity’s dependence on black masculinity is telling, and although Fanon focuses on a colonial context, his observation is equally pertinent, I would argue, to the North American racial imaginary. Indeed, while it would be fair to say that much of American popular culture is undeniably Afrocentric, historically the appropriation of blackness has largely been a male affair, attributable both to the fact that whiteness is butressed by patriarchy (women embody the risk of miscegenation) and the fact that black masculinity presents white masculinity with the threat of a disturbing sameness as well as otherness, a threat which can be neutralised through fetishistic appropriation, which both installs and disavows difference. Labour historians have also argued that whiteness was invented when newly arrived male ethno-European immigrants attempted to distance themselves from black slaves as they experienced wage labour and capitalist working conditions for the first time.19

While this argument has its problematic lacunas, most importantly the elision of the role of women in white racial formation, labour historians’ analysis of the role played by minstrelsy in the construction of white masculinity illuminates the historical processes by which North

16 Similar power dynamics mark other crossovers. For instance, male-to-female drag is often deemed sexist, unlike female-to-male drag. Likewise, straight impersonations of gayness will always be dogged by charges of homophobia, whereas the reverse can work to highlight the performative structures of heterosexuality, such as The Bird Cage (1996), when Robin William teaches Nathan Lane to act straight and walk like John Wayne. 17 Fanon also refuses white ontology, however, noting that “the Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (231). 18 As well as overlooking how black women might experience racism differently, Fanon also ignores how discourses of the purity of white femininity were mobilised for racist purposes without the consent of white women themselves. This is not to suggest that white women are somehow exempt from racism, but to underscore that racism and patriarchy are mutually reinforcing systems. Women in Fanon, though, are viewed in isolation from white patriarchy and criticised on the basis of their sexuality per se. For example, discussing the white female fear of being raped by a black man, Fanon writes, “[b]asically, does this fear of rape not itself cry out for rape? Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?” (156). 19 For example, see Du Bois; Baldwin; Roediger, Wages; T.Allen; Ingatiev. Also see the introduction of this thesis. 276

American white masculinity has been locked in a love-hate relationship with back masculinity, upon which it is dependent for self-definition.

6.3. From Minstrels to Wiggers

Eric Lott’s groundbreaking but controversial study Love and Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) explores the mutually reinforcing dialectic of envy and repulsion of African-Americans that underwrites not merely minstrelsy but the structures of

North American white masculinity. Lott begins by rehearsing conventional views that read minstrelsy through the lens of white supremacy and the material relations of slavery (3). But Lott then complicates this view by delving into “the social unconscious of blackface” through a psychoanalytically informed historical analysis that argues that it was “less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure” (6), “based on small but significant crimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation” (4), and “a nearly insupportable fascination” with the culture whites were plundering (6, 8).

Lott traces how minstrelsy appealed to working-class men precisely because it helped forge a shared notion of whiteness (and, by extension, Americanness) “capacious enough to allow entry to almost any non-black worker” (156). Minstrelsy was also “resilient enough to mask class tensions that were worked out in the modality of race” (156). Along with fellow labour historian David Roediger, Lott argues that minstrelsy also gave white workers access to a preindustrial permissiveness that was lost in the stultifying effects of capitalism (Lott 149;

Roediger, Wages 107), though any envy of black bodies was disavowed through racism and ridicule, such as the oversized clothes and shoes that minstrels wore, which had “the infantilising effect of arresting ‘black’ people in the early stages of childhood development” (Lott 143). Lott suggests that this bodily denigration indicates the ambivalent and nostalgic attitude towards physical pleasures that industrial morality fostered, an argument he develops through reference 277 to Žižek’s Lacanian discussion of the theft of enjoyment by the racial other (148-9). Žižek analyses how subjects often fantasise that the racial other “wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our ‘way of life’) and/or […] has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment” (exotic food, songs and dances, insatiable sexual appetite) - fantasies that support contradictory ideologies, such as accusations that the racial other is both “a workaholic stealing our jobs” and

“an idler living on our labour” (Looking Awry 165). Lott is particularly interested in the fantasy that the racial other has access to a forbidden jouissance, a fantasy that allows subjects to experience that jouissance vicariously (148). However, “because the Other personifies their inner divisions, hatred of their own excess of enjoyment necessitates hatred of the Other” (Lott 148).

Lott thereby complicates the notion that minstrel characters were simply the projection of white racist fantasies onto black bodies that could be enjoyed at a safe distance;20 rather, they represented the other within - repressed and repellent aspects of white consciousness (149).

Minstrel representations of black masculinity thus allowed white men to adopt certain kinds of masculinity that were repressed under capitalism: “To wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood” (52). While the fetishisation of black male bodies undoubtedly forged homosocial bonds among white males, it also overlapped with appropriations of a highly sexualised masculinity, suggesting that minstrelsy fulfilled a homoerotic as well as homosocial function (53-54).21 Lott’s work thus provides an illuminating framework with which to analyse contemporary white male attractions to blackness, which might no longer require burnt cork, but unfold through similar dynamics. Indeed, as Lott

20 Lott’s study has been criticised for this reason. Michael Rogin, for instance, argues that “postmodern” accounts like Lott’s are so eager “to find points of identification across racial lines that, protests notwithstanding, they dwell insufficiently both on the exclusion of actual African Americans from their own representations and on the grotesque, demeaning, animalistic blackface mask” (37). 21 Cross-dressing performances of the black wench, which certainly offered the pleasures of transgressing multiple boundaries, are an interesting case. While, as Lott notes, it would be inaccurate to read homosexuality into any performance of effeminacy or transvestism, an analysis of song lyrics and reviews suggests that “same-sex desire does seem to have been registered by these [sexually ambivalent] performers” (Love and Theft 54). 278 argues “the special achievement of minstrel performers was to have initiated and formalised the white male fascination with the turn to black,” which he regards as “so much a part of most

American white men’s equipment for living that they remain entirely unaware of their participation in it” (53).22

Popular music is a key arena wherein minstrel dynamics are still played out, be it R & B, jazz, swing, soul or rap. In many cases a process of cross-pollination resulted in some white performers, most notably Elvis, borrowing heavily from black music, but in the process creating a new hybridised form, though the absorptions of black traditions enabled those black roots to stay unacknowledged. For instance, Fred Pfeil has traced how rock, an overwhelmingly white male affair, defines itself “in diacritical distinction from Blackness” (White Guys 79), enabling a construction of a transgressive “youth” white masculinity, “one that comes with access to the musical-libidinal resources of Blackness, but unlike Mailer’s fantasised hipster-ideal, with no additional risk or requirement to become a ‘white Negro’ oneself” (75).23 That so, the fact that many white performers can follow in the minstrel tradition without blacking up “simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost full absorption of a black tradition into white culture” (Szwed qtd. in Lott, Love and Theft 7).

While rock does not acknowledge its indebtedness to African-American culture, the

22 Leslie Fielder’s has made a similar point with his famous assertion in Waiting for the End: “Born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more” (134). Despite Fielder’s insistence on the ontology of whiteness here, white maleness is only arrived at after a cannibalisation of non-white (male) identities (women’s whiteness would seem to be a less complex, hybrid affair), rendering white masculinity rather leaky in the process. Fielder is unusual in reflecting on the constitutive elements of Native Americans in the formation of white masculinity (which continues to inform certain American masculinities, as the cowboyisms of recent American presidents has shown). But it is blackness that is associated with “the onset of pubescent sexuality” (Lott, Love and Theft 53). 23 In his now infamous essay, “The White Negro,” Normal Mailer “squarely premised an admiration for black culture based on that culture’s capacity to produce orgasms in white males” (Roediger, “Guineas” 662). Mailer claims that the white hipster was born from a “ménage-à-trois” between the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent and the Negro, a “wedding” to which the Negro brought “the cultural dowry” (293). Mailer’s metaphors, of course, betray his own mythologisation black sexual potency that he supposedly attributes to the hipster. Like blackface performers, he attributes to the Negro bodily pleasures unavailable to white males, stating that the horrors of racial subjugation caused the Negro to “[relinquish] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm” (294). 279 majority of white fans and performers of rap openly embrace its black roots. On the whole, rap remains less diluted than jazz, blues, R & B and soul, though time will tell if this will continue to be the case in the light of the commercial successes of white rap stars such as Eminem and

MTV’s careful selection of rap that is palatable to the white mainstream. Partly, this has to do with material conditions that produced hip hop - the African-American and Hispanic cultural movement of break-dancing and graffiti out of which rap emerged (T. Rose 2). Born in the mid-

70s in the South Bronx, out of the massive public spending cutbacks, the crisis in affordable housing and a rapidly shrinking job market, African-Americans and their Hispanic neighbours created their own forms of communal entertainment, with laid-off electricians using their skill to tap into power lines for spontaneous street parties, youths reinventing turn-tables as musical instruments and warehouses, and trains and street walls as canvasses (T. Rose 27; Kane). Even as white-owned profit-orientated record companies have stepped in, rap resists easy co-option since it generally refuses “to practice the subterfuge usually necessary to sidestep sanctions when bringing lower class vernacular into the public domain” (Jennings). What is thus surprising is that rap, considered by many to be the black underclass’s complex response to the failures of the civil right’s movement (Kane) and a form of “black cultural expression that prioritises black voices from the margins of urban America” (T. Rose 2), is hugely popular all over the globe, from countries as diverse as Canada to Cambodia. Moreover, at least officially, the biggest buyers of rap are white teenage males from the American suburbs.24

Recalling Lott’s assertion that minstrelsy allowed class anxieties to be worked through in the modality of race (Love and Theft 156), no doubt it is rap’s railings against social alienation and poverty that speak to white working-class hip hop fans, who are excluded from many of the so-called privileges of whiteness. But how can the white, suburban, teenage male embracing of

24 Tricia Rose notes that the percentage of white consumers might be overrepresented, because of the absence of chain music stores and prevalence of bootleg products in poor communities, as well as the “higher pass-along rate” of products among poor consumers of colour (7). 280 rap be explained? Partly, I would argue, rap mediates concerns about their economic future in a downsized economy, whose adverse knock-on effects are now being felt by the middle-classes.

The illumination of the sterile and parasitical nature of American whiteness by the political and cultural struggle of activists of colour has also inevitably affected straight white males the most, since they have no gender or sexual particularity to fall back on. Male wiggers, on the other hand, are thus able to mark their whiteness as exceptional, while identification with black (male) rage can also facilitate a shared sense of disenfranchisement, though one that enables a disavowal of the advantages that still inhere in whiteness. Lott’s Žižekian reading of minstrelsy is also pertinent here, since it is my sense that undergridding white male attractions to rap, especially “gangsta rap” - which, despite its damning critiques of institutionalised racism, also perpetuates stereotypes of black masculinity as irredeemably criminalised, violent, misogynistic and homophobic - is the assumption that black males have licence to flout the demands of political correctness because of their minoritised status, an assumption which ignores objections to sexist and anti-gay lyrics that emanate from within the black community itself. Nevertheless, most black theorists are careful to contextualise incendiary rap lyrics in order to avoid re- circulating thinly veiled racist discourses that scapegoat rap, and, by extension, black urban males, for all number of social ills. Many commentators have regarded misogynistic and homophobic lyrics as a self-defensive strategy against the emasculation caused by economic disenfranchisement. Others, such as Tricia Rose, note that aggressive male posturing was around long before rap (15-16); likewise, bell hooks argues that misogyny and homophobia in rap should be understood as “a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” for the purposes of its own maintenance

(Outlaw Culture 116). Indeed, it should be remembered that the sexual violence of rap not only responds to the institutional demands of the music industry, but also sells well to its official biggest buyers - white adolescent males (Kelley qtd. in Roediger, “Guineas” 661). 281

For Roediger, as well as offering “the spontaneity, experimentation, humour, danger, sexuality, physical movement and rebellion absent from what passes as white culture,” hip hop also provides disaffected white youths with “an explicit, often harsh, critique of whiteness” from a black perspective (Roediger, Towards 15-16). Many black rap artists are well aware of this potential, such as controversial rap star Ice-T, who writes in the liner notes of his album Home

Invasion that “[t]he injection of black rage into the American white youth is the last stage of preparation for the revolution’ (qtd. in Rubio 159).25 However, it is essential to note that not

“every white hip hop fan is finding a way out of whiteness, let alone racism,” and that the impulses that lead a white person to the attractions of black culture do not necessitate racial tolerance (Roediger, Towards 16).26 Mason Stokes, for instance, suggests that “these white kids aren’t critiquing whiteness so much as they are keeping it relevant, making it new, making it marketable” (185). Indeed, as Roediger himself notes, while stand-up comics reflect on the vacuity of white culture, whiteness as a political colour continues to exercise hegemonic force, resulting in “a mad and maddening situation in which the appeals of whiteness are at their most pitifully meagre and the effectiveness of appeals to whiteness - from Howard Beach to Simi

Valley to the ballot boxes - are at a terrible height” (Towards 6).27 Moreover, because these cross-identifications tend to be mapped onto commodities rather than political struggle, race is conceptualised in purely cultural terms, perpetuating the superficial notion “that blackness could

25 The album features the lyrics: “I’m taking your kids’ brains and you ain't gettin’ them back. [...] Start changing the way they walk, they talk, they act. Now whose mother fuckin’ fault it that?” (qtd. in Rubio 159). These lyrics are undoubtedly directed at those who vilified him for his track “Cop Killer,” which even provoked the intervention of the FBI, leading to the eventual removal of the track from Ice-T’s speed metal band’s debut album. Although “Cop Killer” was not a rap track, those who attacked the song consistently referred to it in those terms, aware of the threat that rap was seen to pose to white America (T. Rose 130). 26 Roediger quotes Ralph Ellison’s observation 25 years earlier: “What, by the way, is one to make of a white youngster who, with a transistor radio, screaming a Steve Wonder tune glued to his ear, shouts racial epithets at black youngsters trying to swim at a public beach?” (qtd. in Roediger, “Guineas” 658). 27 Howard Beach here refers to the case of Michael Griffith, who was fatally hit by a car after being chased by a white mob in Howard Beach, New York, purely for being in pizza parlour in a predominately white area. Simi Valley, a predominately white community which is home to a large proportion of LAPD police officers, was the place to which the Rodney King trial was moved, enabling prosecutors to put King on charge rather than the four white police officers (Oliver, Johnson and Farrell 119).

282 be put on and taken off at will” (Roediger, “Guineas” 662), divorcing the category of race from issues relating to racism, property and political power, and sidelining the pressing need to translate individual acts of racial solidarity into structural and institutional change. It is also the case that wiggers tend to essentialise black culture as “male, hard, sexual, and violent” in a more extreme form than R & B and soul (Roediger, “Guineas 663), erasing black women from black cultural production in the process. For Kobena Mercer (albeit with reference to a colonial context), “negrophilia” inhabits “the shared space of colonial fantasy” of negrophobia, merely

“invert[ing] and revers[ing] the binary axis of the repressed fears and anxieties that are projected onto the Other” (qtd. in McDowell 366). Nonetheless, as Tania Modleski notes of blackface, fetishisation might well “restore the wholeness and unity threatened by the sight of difference, yet because it enters into the game of mimicry it is condemned to keep alive the possibility that there may be ‘no presence or identity behind the mask’” (119).28 The price that white males pay for the fetishisation of black masculinity, then, is a reinforcement of the emptiness of white masculinity, even if it is that very emptiness that guarantees the privileges of the default subject position - racial dynamics that are also prominently played out in the cinema of Quentin

Tarantino.

6.4. Quentin Tarantino: White Cool, Black Masks

While wiggers are most commonly found on the terrain of popular music, in the 90s

Quentin Tarantino emerged as popular cinema’s wigger in extremis. In interviews, Tarantino waxes lyrical about his close affinity to black culture: “I kind of grew up surrounded by black culture. […] It is the culture I identify with. […] Don’t let this pigmentation fool you; it’s a state of mind” (qtd. in Woods 201-2). Tarantino borrows heavily from various black cultural forms in his filmmaking, such as the burnt-out urban scenes of rap videos, 90s black gangster films and

28 Modleski quotes from Bhabha here. See Bhabha’s essay “Of Mimicry and Man.” 283 black soundtracks, though Kill Bill Vol. I (2003) showed him borrowing from other cultures too, in this case Hong Kong Kung Fu films and Japanese anime. The quintessential example is Jackie

Brown (1997), designated as “a black film” by Tarantino (qtd. in Woods 205), which puts a

Blaxploitation spin on Elmore Leonard’s heist novel Rum Punch (1992), changing the white heroine into a black woman played by the iconic Blaxploitation star Pam Grier, complete with a

R&B and soul soundtrack. It is thus significant that Blaxploitaiton films were predominately white-controlled, and exploited new racial stereotypes of black women as sexy but castrating, and black manhood as violent, criminalised, hypersexualised but always incredibly cool.

Numerous commentators have been angered by Tarantino’s use of black culture to create his hip cinema of “white cool,” partly because of suspicions that he merely wishes to demonstrate his familiarity with black culture in order to reference his extraordinary whiteness, and partly because he promotes images of blackness that have been formed in the white popular imaginary. In the homosocial world of Tarantino’s gangster chic, black masculinity is the ultimate in cool; white masculinity, by contrast, becomes a blank screen onto which blackness can be projected. This lays bare the nexus of anxieties surrounding the emptiness of white masculinity, even as it reveals how whiteness can colonise blackness without relinquishing hold of its privileges, neutralising the threat of difference into a safe (white male) fantasy.

The coolness attributed to black masculinity is made abundantly clear in Reservoir Dogs

(1992) when the various codenames are distributed to the all-white gangsters, and Mr. Pink and

Mr. Brown express dissatisfaction with their allotted colour (Willis, High Contrast 210): Mr.

Pink (Steve Buscemi) worries that his name is the equivalent of Mr. Pussy, and Mr. Brown

(Quentin Tarantino) that his is too close to shit. When they ask whether they could choose their own names, their boss replies, “It doesn’t work out. Put four guys in a room and let them pick their own colours, everybody wants to be Mr. Black.” Even though one of the men is assigned the name Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), which is also an ethnic maker, it has none of the lexical 284 coolness of its binary opposite.

But it is True Romance (1993), based on a Tarantino screenplay, which screens a white male desire to embody black masculinity with Tarantinoesque self-consciousness. As director

Tony Scott explained to actor Gary Oldman, his character Drexl is “a white guy who thinks he’s black” (qtd. in Dawson 113-14), and with his dread-locked hair, gold-capped teeth, ostentatious display of jewellery, and a half-Rasta half-Queens accent (Dawson 114), Oldman might as well have been in blackface (see figure 6.11). The swaggering masculinity that Drexl approximates is nothing more than a crude stereotype of black masculinity as irredeemably violent, misogynistic and criminalised: not only is Drexl a pimp who beats his “girls,” but he is also introduced in mid- conversation with a group of black friends discussing whether “niggers” “eat pussy” - sexist dialogue that would seem to be locked in competition with gangsta rap, as if the mediation of blackness somehow legitimises transgression. Despite Drexl’s white looks, he discursively constructs himself as black through his constant highlighting of Clarence’s (Christian Slater) whiteness, securing a phantasmatic identification with blackness as his prerogative.29 As Sharon

Willis argues, then, “Drexl’s posturing ventriloquises his fantasy - a white male fantasy - of black masculinity, where racial difference is reduced to a cultural icon for the dominant culture”

(High Contrast 210). At the same time, his black wannabee posturing is ridiculed, raising the possibility that he might be read as a parodic self-reflexive comment on Tarantino’s own cinema.

While discussions of “eating pussy” in this scene would primarily seem to fulfil a bi- racial bonding function, as Eve Sedgwick has taught us, homosociality is always undergridded by repressed homoerotic desire. Notably, a fantasy of bi-racial anal sex between men violently erupts in the all-male universe of both of Tarantino’s gangster films. In Reservoir Dogs, this fantasy emerges when the borders of whiteness are transgressed by white men acting black: Nice

29 Perhaps rather ironically since Clarence’s hero is none other than the biggest appropriator of black culture of all time - Elvis.

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Guy Eddie (Chris Penn) takes the Mr. Blonde’s (Michael Madsen) use of black slang on his release from prison to mean that “all that black semen been poke up your ass backed up so far in your brain it’s comin’ out your mouth.” In Pulp Fiction, white red-neck racists choose Marsellus

(Ving Rhames), the black mafia boss, as their first rape victim, a move that suggests the ease with which aversion and attraction can slide into each other. As Sharon Will notes, writing of this scene in Village Voice, Lisa Kennedy “takes the risk” of quoting the reactions of a black friend, who stated of Tarantino, “[w]hat he wants is a big black man to fuck him up the arse”

(Lisa Kennedy 32; Willis, High Contrast 2000). While this remark “seems to depend on the fundamental reversibility that structures the film’s staging of the fantasy of anal sex with a black man” (Willis, High Contrast 200), it also points to Tarantino’s self-conscious screening of what would normally remain repressed in other film texts - in this case, the fact that white male attractions to black masculinity are always enmeshed in a circuit of homoerotic desire, which is often rerouted, but not cancelled out, by the blatantly homophobic hate speech of his characters.

Nowhere is Tarantino’s appropriation of blackness more controversial, however, than in the compulsive repetition of the word “nigger” in his screenplays. With his finger ever on the cultural pulse, Tarantino was well aware of the huge political force the word wielded in the 90s, with some African-Americans attempting to resignify its meaning and other arguing that it was impossible to unyoke such an abusive term from prior usages. Tarantino himself claims that he attempts to strip “the most taboo word in the English language” of its power (qtd. in Dawson

116). In this respect, his self-proclaimed project falls in with Judith Butler’s arguments about hate speech set out in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997). Butler accepts that all injurious names have acquired a “sedimentation” of usages, and inflict their blows by invoking that historicity and accompanying trauma (36). However, for Butler, “[k]eeping such terms unsaid and unsayable can also work to lock them in place, preserving their power to 286 injure” (38).30 Instead, because signs are unstable and always exceed the purposes for which they were intended, Butler proposes a Derridean strategy of resignification which “uses that word, but also displays it, points to it, outlines it as the arbitrary material instance of language that is exploited to produce certain kinds of effects” (99). As an example, Butler cites Richard Delgado, a defender of hate speech prosecution, who has stated that “[w]ords such as ‘nigger’ and ‘spick’ are badges of degradation, even when used between friends: these words have no other connotation” (qtd. in Butler, Excitable Speech 100). Butler points out that he has just used these words in a significantly different way, even if we concede that “the injurious connotation” remains in his usage (100). However, as Sara Salih notes, this is the only reference that Butler makes to “nigger,” preferring to illustrate her point with words such as “lesbian” and “queer” which have been reappropriated with more success (116).31 Butler also offers no clear strategy as to how interpellatives might be redeployed or recontextualised; nor does she engage with the crucial issue of “semantic consensus,” since while a single speaker might unmoor a term from its prior meaning, it is less certain that the resignification will be recognised as such (114-15).

Similar problems are raised by Tarantino’s alleged attempts to point to the semantic arbitrariness of “nigger” and “[purify] language of its traumatic residue” (Butler, Excitable

Speech 38). Importantly, it is Tarantino's African-American characters who use the epithet most extensively, such as Pulp Fiction’s Marsellus’s affectionate addresses to Vincent (John Travolta) as “my nigger,” which arguably frees the word from its racial and racist referent, rendering

“race” a performative signifier. However, when “nigger” is used as a descriptor by a non-black character, or worse as hate speech, far from sanitising the word, these usages consolidate its power to injure. While it would be a simplification to regard these speeches as instances of

30 In Butler’s view, state censorship is not the answer to hate speech, since the state all too often follows a conservative agenda (for example circumscribing African-American and lesbian and gay cultural production) and censorship proliferates the terms it attempts to ban (a Foucauldian understanding of power as a productive rather than prohibitive force) (101-2). 31 Indeed, elsewhere, Butler has also stated, “I cannot see within this political clime a way for such words [nigger and kike] to signify in any way other than the most derogatory one” (Discussion 133). 287 racism, rather than racist dialogue from racist characters, these examples merely confirm that efforts to “highlight the instability of ‘race’ as a category […] cannot escape capture in a circuit of cultural meanings that strive to stabilise race” (Willis, High Contrast 213). Moreover, even if

Tarantino does attempt to empty out the term, he seems rather more interested in the residue that remains, a residue that translates into either discomfort or pleasure in scenes designed to offer adolescent delight precisely because of the transgressiveness that racist usages have historically accrued.

Tarantino’s whiteness also inevitably influences the reception of these scenes, and many critics have harboured the suspicion that the obsessive repetition of “nigger” in his screenplays allows him to maintain a certain “hipness quotient,” proving that he is “conversant in the nuances of black culture in the most sophisticated way” (Boyd qtd. in Willis, High Contrast 211). As

Devon Jackson comments, “[a]in’t nothin’ cooler than niggas, ‘cept maybe a white guy who knows the whole nigga scene and how to mingle with them” (qtd. in Polan 59). The most obvious example is Tarantino’s own cameo role as Jimmy in Pulp Fiction, a role that is impossible to divorce from Tarantino’s persona as white auteur. Incredulous that Jules and

Vincent brought Marvin’s (Phil LaMarr) body to his suburban house, Jimmy rants in speech that mirrors the prosodic features of African-American speech patterns, “When you came pulling in here did you notice a sign on the front of my house saying ‘dead nigger storage’? […] No, because storin' dead niggers ain’t my fuckin’ business” (see figure 6.12). While Jimmy’s infantile repetition of “nigger” could arguably function as a defamiliarisation strategy, the very fact that the scene is designed to shock renders Tarantino’s self-stated aim of eliminating its power to wound dubious, especially when the stylisation of this overtly-coded performance piece seems to function as an inbuilt defensive strategy that allows audiences to take pleasure in

Jimmy’s sheer outrageousness. As Willis argues, Tarantino’s dialogue depends “on imagining that some of us - individually or collectively - must be working to censor such speech. It 288 imagines, in other words, something like a cultural id that functions on an analogy with individual unconscious processes” (High Contrast 205). Jimmy’s tirade is also sanctioned by the fact that Jules is unruffled, and Bonnie, Jimmy’s wife, is posited as African-American (but only through an imaginary sequence assigned to Marsellus’s knowledge or fantasy [205]). Thus, as

Willis observes, “[e]verything proceeds as if, by figuring Jimmy’s wife as African American, the film could insulate the director’s own image from the racist edge of his discourse. Bonnie functions, then, as his alibi; she is supposed to exempt him from cultural rules, from ordinary whiteness” (207).

6.5. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled: Minstrelsy in the 21st Century

For black radical filmmaker Spike Lee, famously angered by Ordell’s (Samuel Jackson) use of “nigger” 38 times in Jackie Brown, Tarantino is not exempt: “I want Quentin to know that all African-Americans do not think that word is trendy or slick. […] Quentin is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made - an honorary black man?” (qtd. in Woods 200). Spike

Lee’s own screening of a stunning series of monologues in Do The Right Thing (1989), each one featuring a male member of a different ethnic group delivering a stream of racial abuse about an ethnic/racial other, discourages identification through direct address, oblique camera angles, and the absence of any narrative function. The historical weight of these abusive racial epithets is thus foregrounded, though the fact that all monologues are delivered by men perpetuates the film’s overall premise that “racism, as well as the struggle against it, is something that happens exclusively between men” (Fraiman 27). Lee also explores how a love of black culture does not rule out racist attitudes in an exchange between Mookie (played by Lee himself) and Pino (John

Turturro), a racist Italian-American. Mookie asks Pino who his favourite basketball player, film star and rock star are, to which Pino unhesitantly replies Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy and

Prince respectively, quickly changing his last answer to Bruce (Bruce Springstein, a white 289 working-class male icon) once he cottons onto Mookie’s game. In defence, Pino argues that

“Magic, Eddie, Prince, they’re not niggers. I mean, they’re not black” - an argument that underscores how absorption into the cultural mainstream “whitens” black stars, ridding them of their threatening blackness. In response, Mookie replies, “Deep down inside I think you wish you were black. Laugh if you want to. You know, your hair is kinkier than mine. What does that mean? Now, you know what they say about dark Italians.” Mookie thus deconstructs race by pointing to the discursive nature of the selection of racially significant visible markers, as well as pointing to Italian-American fears about the fragility of their ethnically inflected whiteness – indeed, racist slurs in the film such as “wop” and “guinea” show that historically Italians have not always been “white enough.” Lee thus understands race to be a cultural and social construction, but one that unfolds against a backdrop of white supremacy, a historical fact that will never render race the level playing field that Tarantino suggests it to be.

Spike Lee’s biting satire Bamboozled (2000)32 self-consciously refers to his public spat with Tarantino, upon whom the film’s wigger par excellence, Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport), is rumoured to be based. Dunwitty, a white TV producer, brazenly informs the only African-

American writer in the network, the embittered, Harvard-educated, “buppy” Pierre Delacroix,

“You know I grew up around black people all my whole life. I mean, if the truth be told, I probably know niggers better than you. And don’t go getting offended by my use of the quote unquote N-word. I’ve a black wife with two bi-racial kids so I feel I have a right. And I don’t give a goddamn what that prick Spike Lee says. Tarantino was right. Nigger is just a word.”

Dunwitty then repeats “nigger” with childish relish, much like Pulp Fiction’s Jimmy, behaviour that is branded offensive through an intercut fantasy scenario of Delacroix repeatedly pounding him. Dunwitty continues to flaunt his wigger credentials, demonstrating his knowledge about the

32 The title is taking from a speech by Malcolm X: “You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray. You’ve been bamboozled.” The speech is directly invoked through a clip of Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992) when Denzil Washington utters these very words. 290 black sport icons that adorn his office (all-male, suggestive of an undergridding homoerotic dialogue with black masculinity) and asserting, “I’m blacker than you. I’m keeping it real. I

‘bout it ‘bout. I got the roll. You’re just frontin’ trying to be white” (see figure 6.13). For

Dunwitty, blackness is merely a matter of style, unrelated to issues of power or racism. He also evacuates blackness of its diversity by accusing Delacroix of acting white, though the film also takes pains to stress that Delacroix is uncomfortable in his black skin.33

Intent on showing that white-controlled TV is only interested in black people on screen if they are “coons” or “buffoons,” Delacroix pitches a new show to Dunwitty entitled “Mantan:

The New Millennium Minstrel Show,” which merely recycles old stereotypes of two “lazy, ignorant, uneducated and unlucky” coons called Mantan (Savion Glover) and Sleep ’N Eat

(Tommy Davidson), both based on real-life black minstrel stars (see figure 6.14). Delacroix’s experiment takes an unexpected turn, though, when the show becomes a runaway success, even spawning spin-off blackface products. Despite initial unease, members of the multi-racial audience eventually black up for the show, gleefully declaring themselves “niggers.” As one white male puts it,

I’m a Sicilian nigger, which means I more nigger than any nigger here. Because

you know what they say about Sicilians. We’re darker than most niggers. We’re

bigger than most niggers. And we rap better than most niggers. [he raps] I’m

white, not black / but not all the time / I’m in blackface / and I’m feelin’ fine / No

matter what colour / no matter what race / You know you cool chillin’ / when

you’re in blackface.

Throughout the movie, Lee critiques the fetishism involved in this white (and implicitly

33 Delacroix has changed his name from Peerless Dothan and adopted a pretentious accent. His new name also translates as Peter of the Cross, Christ’s betrayer, suggesting that he is a race traitor. Nonetheless, Lee resents the prevailing narrow conception of blackness: “if you’re a young black kid today in urban America and you speak correct English and you get great grades, you’re not black. But if you’re fucking around getting high, standing on a corner, drinking a 40, saying ‘Know’m sayin’? Know’m sayin’?’, then you’re black” (qtd. in Fuchs, “Interview”).

291 male) desire to be black. As Delacroix’s stand-up comedian father makes clear, whites want to pick and choose what aspects of blackness they will adopt: “I hope they start hanging niggers again. I’m going to find out who’s black.” A similar point about the indelibility of black skin is made when the police shoot at The Mau Maus, an Afrocentric rap group that Lee suggests are modern day black minstrels, killing all the rappers but 1/16th Blak (M.C. Serch), who, as his name suggests, has one-sixteenth African ancestry but was recognised as white by the police.

With the exception of 1/16th Blak, whose adoption of blackness is politically motivated, the film’s underlying suggestion is that white men act black not as a form of anti-racist struggle, but because they have fallen victim to corporate capitalism’s redeployment of identity politics as a niche marketing strategy which circulates black masculinity as a commodity fetish - commodification which has its roots in slavery. This is apparent in Lee’s superb parody of a

Tommy Hilfiger advertisement. Tommy Hilfiger, a white designer who employs glamorised notions of black ’hood masculinity to render consumption a hip masculinising activity to its male market (black and white), is transformed into Timmi Hillnigger, a middle-aged white male, surrounded by women gyrating orgasmically around him in a parody of rap videos (which, Lee implies, have become assimilated into advertising culture) and iconic black males who verify the street-cool of his high-street products. Peddling his over-hyped, overpriced designer wear through use of black slang, Hillnigger addresses the camera: “If you want to keep it real, never get out of the gheeto [mispronounced], stay broke, and continue to add to my multi-billion dollar corporation, keep buying my gear. The Timmi Hillnigger corporation. We keep it so real, we give you the bullet hole.” Hyperbolic it may be, but Lee makes his point about the commodification of racial injustice and social deprivation, as well as critiquing the

“internalisation of self-commodification among African Americans as a consequence of capitalist desire” (Barlowe 9).34

34 Nonetheless, it is highly ironic that Spike Lee has also created his own retail company, Spike Joint, using his 292

Lee’s project throughout Bamboozled is to show that minstrelsy never disappeared, a point he underscores in the final scene’s disturbing extra-narrative montage that charts the progress of cinema and television versions of blackface once its stage incarnations disappeared, from Al Johnson to racist cartoons. While it may no longer require blackface, Lee suggests it still exists, not only embodied by wiggers like Dunwitty but also in black sitcoms and gangsta rap

(Lee’s most contentious point),35 in which blacks imitate white conceptions of blacks.36 To make his point, Lee restages minstrelsy in order to recontextualise it, even running the risk of making his new millennium minstrels amusing at times. Nonetheless, whereas the intra-diegetic show was a huge success, Bamboozled itself did not fare well at the box office, an indication of the success of his resignification, but also sadly proving Delacroix’s point. Ali G Indahouse, on the other hand, a joint British-American production, deploys minstrel codes in a less obviously political context, with critics still undecided as to whether it satirises the posturings of British wiggers or, as comedian Felix Dennis’s suspects, “allows the liberal middle-class to laugh at black street culture in a context where they can retain their political correctness” (qtd. in Kane).

6.6. Ali G Indahouse: British Wiggers, American Minstrelsy?

In 1999, ex-Cambridge footlight comedian Sacha Baron Cohen gave birth to his comic creation, Ali G, during a five-minute slot of the satirical Channel Four series The 11 O’clock

Show, amassing a large enough cult following to be given his own programme, Da Ali G Show.

persona as radical black filmmaker as a brand name. 35 In interviews, Lee has given support to rap as a political form, as his own use of Public Enemy in Do the Right Thing indicates. Moreover, many rap artists pay their own homages to Spike Lee, such as Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn,” which praises Lee’s film, or Ice Cube’s use of Do the Right Thing’s litany against blacks on one of his songs in order to remind backs what whites really think of them (Kellner 181). However, Lee is less supportive of gangsta rap, accusing it of being minstrelsy and criticising its ostentatious display of overconsumption (qtd. in Crowdus and Georgakas 5). Tom Jennings, on the other hand, regards gangsta rap as symptomatic of capitalism, arguing that it even offers “an oblique critique of capitalism as crime” - “an underclass corrective to the moral sophistry inherent in a philosophy of uplift through the success of the few - but which absolutely requires the continuing failure of the many.” 36 Blacks entered the minstrel show after the Civil War. Throughout the film Lee stresses that this was one of the few choices African-Americans had, suggesting that today, many African-Americans are merely “bamboozled.”

293

Part of the fascination of Ali G was his racial indeterminacy, with audiences unsure of how to respond, aware that by laughing they might well be crossing the lines of political correctness, a line that Cohen knows how to tread. Dressed in garish yellow shell suits, yellow-tinted shades, a

Tommy Hilfiger skullcap, sporting copious bling and a thin goatee, with constant allusions to the ghetto and his homies, Ali G dressed, acted and referenced himself as black. But comments about his uncle Jamal, who owns a local curry house, along with his Asian-sounding first name also made him a possible Asian or at least an Asian wannabee black. His accent was equally ambivalent, an artful mixture of Asian and black slang, delivered in a West Indian cum Asian cum Estuary English accent. Yet, his physical features are neither Afro-Caribbean nor Asian, though his hair and complexion are dark enough to render his ostensible whiteness questionable.

Indeed, when Ali G was still a little-known cult figure, the white authority figures he ridiculed through asking wonderfully inane questions that they often took at face value certainly suspected that Ali G might well be black, unsure of how to respond to Cohen’s catchphrase: “is it ‘cos I is black?” With Sacha Baron Cohen remaining silent on the intentions behind his creation, Ali G was inscrutable, leading to communities as diverse as Greeks, Sikhs, Jews, Welsh, Indians and

Scots claiming him as one of their own (Friedman, “Genuine” 3). Once Cohen’s white middle- class Jewish background was confirmed, this extra-textual knowledge paradoxically rendered Ali

G more unstable, with discussions ranging from whether Ali G was white wannabee black, a white acting like an Asian wannabee black, a Jew acting like an Asian wannabee black, or a Jew acting like a white wannabee black - the latter question not only raising the question of the precarious nature of Jewish whiteness, but also rehearing similar dynamics to The Jazz Singer

(1927), which screens the Jewish Al Johnson gaining full access to whiteness, and by extension

Americanness, by putting on blackface (Gilman 238; Rogin 95).

The fact that surveys show that the majority of blacks and Asians in Britain find Ali G funny rather than offensive (Kane) underscores the differences between the British and American 294 racial terrain. Obviously the black community in Britain has a very different history from that of

African-Americans. The majority of Afro-Caribbean and Asian blacks in Britain voluntarily immigrated in the 1950s after the break-up of the British Empire in response to the British government’s calls for (menial, poorly paid) labour, though many whites soon panicked about the potential loss of British homogeneity, with Enoch Powell famously leading the call for repatriation. This wave of immigration “produc[ed] a specific set of urgencies that are not translatable to the violent origin in slavery of many African-Americans, nor to the patterns of ethnic immigration in the US” (Tinkcom and Vallarejo 24). Blacks in Britain have faced poverty, social exclusion, alienation and racism, but unlike the US, Britain does not have 400 years of slavery or segregation on its soil to deal with, despite its shameful colonial history. Thus whereas racial boundaries in the US often seem to be impenetrable, in Britain they are seen by many to be more fluid or “up for grabs” (Friedman, “Genuine” 4), with notions of “cultural ownership and experiential copyright” having less of the force they wield in the US (Gilroy, “Ali G”).

Moreover, the signifier “black” in Britain has at times been adopted by both Afro-Carribeans and black Asians, functioning much like the American umbrella term “people of colour.” As Kobena

Mercer notes, this was an achievement “specific and unique to British conditions” (Mercer,

Welcome 28), though it is a tendency that is now in decline (Gilroy, There Ain’t no Black xiv), particularly with the reterritorialisation of identities along ethnic and religious lines in the wake of post-9/11 Islamophobia.37 As I argued in chapter one, none of this is to make light of the painful and bloody history of British racism and colonialism or the colonial-inspired inbuilt sense of superiority that infuses British forms of whiteness. Nor is it to overlook the history of

British fascism, which is on the increase with the immigration panic currently sweeping Britain,

37 British Afro-Caribbeans and Asians obviously experiences blackness differently. Afro-Caribbeans are insistently criminalised in many discourses while Asians are often seen to be better integrated in terms of educational and economic success, though recent tides of post-9/11 Islamophobia have rendered Muslim Blacks the increasing target of racial attacks. Moreover, many Asians do not recognise themselves in the “master-signifier ‘black,’” while many newly emergent ethno-political communities are “understandingly ambivalent about locating themselves inside the discourse of raciality” ( Gilroy, There Ain't no Black xvi). 295 a panic often disguised through a rhetoric of patriotism, cultural uniformity and “Euro- scepticism.” However, it is certainly the case that white British masculinity is not in dialogue with black masculinities in the same way as its American counterpart; rather British whiteness is always informed by imperialist discourses of nation that are further traversed by entrenched discourses of class. Nevertheless, Ali G reveals how American popular culture, in this case hip hop, impacts significantly on British culture, with hip hop adopted by British blacks and whites alike.

According to Paul Gilroy, part of the attraction of youth audiences to Ali G was their ability to understand the postmodern ironies and verbal codes of which the straight white authority figures that Ali G interviewed were so painfully unaware, with Ali G even tricking

Labour Minister Roy Hattersley into inadvertently calling Tony Blair a “dong,” slang for penis

(Gilroy, “Ali G”).38 Thus, as Tony Blair’s government was rearticulating out-dated, right-wing notions of Britishness in an era marked by what Gilroy terms “post-colonial melancholia”

(“Joined-Up Politics” 15),39 Ali G was moving across cultural and linguistic codes, inviting the viewer “to become literate, if not exactly fluent, in an updated British Culture” (Gilroy, “Ali G”).

However, with Ali G’s Hollywood vehicle, Ali G Indahouse (2003), Cohen was less able to sustain his racially indeterminate persona and wily exposure of the values of the British white establishment that his mock talk-show format allowed, despite a plot which dramatises Ali G’s culture clash with uptight (white) British MPs when he is elected to Parliament. Rather, the feature film format lapsed into the scatological humour of the British Carry On tradition (see

38 The DVD of Ali G Indahouse has a section translating Ali G speak “for those who don’t speak English” - “like the Scots” (“Talking the Talk”) 39 Most famously, of course, Blair christened Britain “Cool Britannia” attempting to market Britain under New Labour to youth voters by re-branding it. Moreover, as Gilroy points out, new Labour also peddled some rather right wing notions of nation: former home Secretary Jack Straw called on Britons to be more patriotic; David Blunkett, his successor, argued that distinctly British “norms of acceptability” can be applied to incoming aliens; Blair has also made several passing references to Britain being an “island race” (There Ain’t no Black xxxii). 296 figures 6.15 and 6.16).40 While Cohen’s transgression of the boundaries of both race and “good taste” might have been popular with cult youth British audiences, his entry into the mainstream led to a scrutinising of his political intentions (about which he still maintained a resolute silence).

The film’s gala opening was picketed by protesters angered at the pimping of black culture for white profit, while The Daily Mail, one of Britain’s more right-wing tabloids, accused Cohen of being the new Al Johnson (Gilroy, “Ali G”). That this anti-immigration tabloid should suddenly see fit to be the vanguard of anti-racism would seem to suggest that Gilroy is right to suspect that some of these responses have more to do with anxieties about “a larger process of dilution and mongrelisation in which the protective purity of largely racial cultures is being lost, leaving them vulnerable to unprotected encounters with difference that can only involve risk, fear and jeopardy” (“Ali G”). However, in the light of the country’s minstrel past, it is not surprising that many reviewers in the US were outraged by the perceived denigration of black culture.41

Analysing the function that racial mimicry serves white masculinity in Ali G Indahouse will always be dogged by the unanswerable question of whose white masculinity we are referring to - Ali G’s or Cohen’s? - and the extent to which Cohen is believed to be satirising British white male desires to approximate a gangsta rap persona that does not translate into a British reality or hip hop itself. Rather than come down on either side of the debate, though, I would argue that the film’s postmodern aesthetics allow it to retain an elusive, slippery both/and. In a similar way to

Tarantino’s cinema, Ali’s antics are always heavily coded as performance, thereby deflecting criticism through constant reminders of the film’s artificiality and lack of serious intent.

40 The Carry On film cycle began with Carry on, Sergeant (1958). Famed for their double-entendre toilet humour, each film more risqué than the last, the films are now cult viewing. 41 Interestingly, many of these responses focused on Cohen’s extra-textual Jewishness, rhetorically asking how Cohen would like it if a black male imitated a Jew to mock Jewish culture, a response which oversimplified the multi-layered nature of Cohen’s performance, but also points to the power imbalance of racial impersonation. Firstly, there is no such phenomenon of wannabee Jews, and Jewishness has no history of being circulated as commodity. Cohen was also seen to be repeating a history of Jewish blackface performers, who used blackface as a vehicle to express Jewish sorrow but nonetheless could always “pass” as the normative ethnicity, with Jews also wielding enough power in Hollywood to prevent anti-Semitic imagery (Shohat and Stam 229-30).

297

This strategy of self-legitimising auto-deconstruction is apparent from the first scene, which opens with a montage sequences of South Central Los Angeles, accompanied by the prototypical track of gangsta rap “Straight Outta Compton” by the NWAs (Niggas With

Attitude), known for its incendiary lyrics about violence against cops. Ali arrives on the scene in his garish yellow wigger attire, representing a white adolescent male’s fantasy of black manhood, able to deflect bullets with his gold ring and endowed with a penis that reaches his knees. Nonetheless, Ali’s attempts to emulate ’hood masculinity are pathetically eroded, particularly through codes of infantilisation, such as when he runs out of bullets and childishly imitates the sound of a machine gun. This scene undergoes a further level of undercutting when it is revealed that this sequence was just a dream, marking the white stereotypes of black masculinity as just that - stereotypes - but positing them nonetheless. The unbridgeable gap between Ali G the homeboy and the less generously endowed Alistair Leslie Graham (an obligatory penis exposure scene makes it clear he fails to measure up) who lives in suburban

Staines with his white grandmother (a confirmation of Ali’s whiteness that the TV series never granted) is a constant source of the film’s humour. As Ali jumps into his Renault 5, carefully obeying the speed limit, his ’hood, screened in slowly cut crane shots that contrast starkly with the rapidly-cut montage of South Central, turns out to be a leafy, spacious suburb made up of identical semi-detached houses, with the turf of his gang, Westside Massive, marked out by mini-roundabouts and nurseries. Ali’s adoption of African-American gang codes also comes in for derision, such as when one of his “homies” turns up in green rather than the gang yellow because his mother had washed his top in with his brother’s football socks, leading Ali to observe that “in the ghetto, washing non-colour-fast synthetics at 60° could cost your life.” Ali G thus functions as a typical buffoon, with the wigger device allowing a new take on the Benny

Hill/Carry On style of British toilet humour, whose jokes revolve around men who refuse to grow up. But whereas minstrelsy can be accused of featuring infantile characters because of 298 racist impulses to ridicule black masculinity, Cohen’s “hyper-minstrelsy” has the dubious inbuilt defence that he is not ridiculing gangsta posturing but British suburban white wannabees.

The same is true of the film’s parodies of R&B and raps videos. Parody, as we have seen, deploys the codes of the object it parodies in order to communicate a second level of meaning

(Hutcheon 101). While reception can never be controlled, it can be influenced through specific modes of address. Spike Lee’s parody in Bamboozled, a fake advertisement for a soft-drink, “Da

Boom,” is a case in point. Encircled by half-naked black women, dancing provocatively to a groovy soundtrack, the show’s host, Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), directly addresses the camera to sell the product through niche marketing: “Clinical testing has shown that Viagra doesn’t work on black Johnsons. That’s why our scientist has developed Da Bomb for you. It makes you feel like a man, yo! And it makes them bitches feel like natural women, I mean hos!”

Here, Lee restages the codes of gangsta rap videos in order to lambaste their sexism and pandering to corporate capitalism. The sequence is inserted as an extra-narrative segment, thus averting easy identification. It is also framed by a critique of minstrelsy - indeed the film opens with a dictionary definition of satire and Stevie Wonder’s track “Never Be a Misrepresented

People.” Thus Lee, whose racial politics are well-known, addresses a spectator “capable of resisting ideological systems built on the damaging discourse of stereotypes” (Epp 20). Ali G

Indahouse, on the other hand, parodies hip hop videos in order to ridicule Ali’s sexual desires for unobtainable women. Interrupting the narrative and coded as pure fantasy, these videos feature

Ali surrounded by variously raced women, clad in skimpy bikinis, gyrating for his pleasure, one scene screening the white boy fantasy of being dominated by a phallic Naomi Campbell (playing herself). Followed immediately by the diegetic Ali clumsily playing with his nipples or uncouthly grinding his pelvis, these segments obviously deflate his painful attempts to approximate a mythical hypersexualised black masculinity. But, at the same time, Cohen’s whiteness cannot be divorced from these parodic scenes, which, devoid of any obvious political 299 import, can also work to render ridiculous the phallic posturing of many black rap artists, as well as allowing the film to circumvent charges of sexism by deflecting it onto black cultural forms.

Whereas Lee addresses a non-racist spectator able to unpack the political message, Ali G

Indahouse constructs an adolescent (white) male spectator who will enjoy Ali’s sexist gags and objectification of women as well as Cohen’s self-legitimising parody - with neither pleasure necessarily cancelling the other out.42 Recalling Žižek’s arguments about the theft of enjoyment by the racial other, it would seem that Ali attributes to black males the pleasures of sexism that are denied to white men under the “tyranny” of political correctness.

In a generous reading, then, Gilroy argues that the underlying joke of Ali G is expressive of an “antipathy towards the stultifying US styles and habits that have all but crushed local forms of the black vernacular in the UK and replaced them with the standardised and uniform global products of hip hop consumer culture” (“Ali G”), though Gilroy does not discuss whether Cohen should be leading this defence of British blackness, despite the fact that his reading suggests a problematic white paternalism. For many other theorists, who stress the political roots of hip hop, “white English boys taking the mickey out of black American culture seems at best gratuitous and at worst offensive” (Kane). With Ali G’s cutting edge status dependent precisely on his instability, it is no surprise that Cohen is keeping quiet about his intentions.

6.7. 8 Mile: Eminem, “White Trash” Masculinity and Rap Authenticity

Unlike the white suburban Ali G, Eminem has largely been insulated against accusations

42 Other intertextual, parodic devices function similarly. For instance, after the introduction of “Me Julie” (Kellie Bright), who reprimands Ali for calling her “bitch” or “ho,” the screen splits in two to feature Ali-G, whose meta- commentary informs viewers that his real-life girlfriend is much “fitter” but producers wanted to make him more accessible, “which means that you girls out there will think I will knob yer even if you was a minger.” Likewise, the DVD commentary option has Ali G and his homie Ricky C (Martin Freeman) comment in character throughout the film, adding another layer of self-conscious irony to the text. When Ali G pretends to perform oral sex on a crisp bread canapé, Ricky C reprimands Ali for being sexist and puerile: “This for me, right, is where you lost the audience that you had gained in your first rather innovative series on Channel Four” (“Audio Commentary,” Ali G). These extra-textual comments function as another distancing device from the offensive aspects of the film, allowing audiences to enjoy them safe in the knowledge that it is all “just” parody.

300 that he is a mere black wannabee, gaining an authentic status through his working-class Detroit roots, his backing from Dr. Dre of NWA fame, and his decision to “‘address’ his whiteness in relation to appropriated culture, rather than just presuming it” (Fuchs, “With or Without You”).

For instance, in “Without Me,” Eminem raps, “Though I’m not the first king of controversy /I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley / To do black music so selfishly / And use it to get myself wealthy.” The Source magazine, the self-proclaimed bible of hip hop, has oscillated between praising Eminem's verbal wizardry and accusing him of plundering and diluting black culture.

Such judgements constitute “a static and closed conception of both Black culture and hip hop”

(Jennings), overlooking hip hop’s initial ethos of hybridity and experimentation; nevertheless, the Eminem phenomenon has legitimised fears that white participation in rap would limit opportunities for black artists. Consequently, while Eminem refers to his whiteness as an initial disability in lines that rehearse white male victimology (“Some people only see I’m white, ignorin’ skill” [“Role Model”]), other lyrics acknowledge that his white skin soon became his greatest asset: “Look at my sales / Let's do the math. If I was black, I would’ve sold half”

(“White America”). With a shrewd and strategic knack of analysing himself before the critics, he also recognises that it is his whiteness which renders him such a threat: “I could be one of your kids” (“White America”). Whereas rap has been attacked on an unprecedented scale as “part of a long-standing sociologically-based discourse that considers black influences a cultural threat to

American society” (T. Rose 130), Eminem’s incendiary lyrics in conjunction with his “baby blue eyes” and “dimples” (“White America”) disrupt the racially saturated discourses that pathologise black urban masculinity.43

43 This is not to say that white artists, especially heavy metal bands, have not also been targeted by family groups and pro-censorship campaigners, though as Tricia Rose notes, whereas listeners of heavy metal are posted as victims of violent lyrics, (black) rap fans are considered to be an internal threat - they victimise America (130). Effigies of Marilyn Manson were also burnt after the Columbine shootings when it emerged that the teenage killers were avid fans, but as Bozza points out, there is a crucial difference: Manson’s image as a freak, with his gothic make-up and silver teeth, enable his threat to be neutralised since he did not provide a figure of easy identification, while Eminem’s “neatly cropped blonde hair, blue eyes, cute earrings, and boy-band good looks were too normal to ignore” (67). 301

Eminem’s provocative tracks have resulted in some rather unholy alliances between the likes of the neo-conservative Lynne Cheyney and GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against

Defamation), with GLAAD making an unprecedented appeal for censorship. Most notably, feminist and gay rights groups protested outside the 43rd Grammy awards (2001), in which

Eminem was awarded three Grammies, and performed on stage with Elton John in a public relations exercise that attempted to drive a wedge between Eminem the artist and his lyrics, which include fantasies of holding up “fags” at knifepoint. Nonetheless, Eminem has done little to placate the feminist community, and women in his tracks are invariably deceitful, emasculating “bitches” who threaten his “unprotected dick” with sexually transmitted diseases

(“Drips”). Eminem himself defends the visceral violence of his lyrics by ridiculing his detractors for failing to understand the distinction between violence and its representation,44 though he also recognises the power of words to wound: “My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge / that’ll stab you in the head / whether you’re a fag or lez” (“Criminal”).45 It is thus instructive that despite his litanies of abuse directed at women and homosexuals, he has never uttered a racist lyric, no doubt aware that it would damage his standing in the hip hop community. If contextualised, his tracks are symptomatic of prevalent levels of anti-female and anti-gay feeling that exist in the mainstream where they sell so well, as well as rap’s generic conventions that demand that MCs “battle” each other by robbing their opponents of their manhood. It is also the case that the same fears of emasculation haunt economically franchised urban white as well as black males, while his homophobic lyrics might also fulfil the function of deflecting homoerotic

44 As well as stating that the violence is the violence of his persona’s and not his own, Eminem propels his stage persona further into the realm of hyperreality by referring to himself as Jason from the slasher classic Halloween (1978), appearing in concert in a hockey mask, brandishing a chainsaw. He has also argued that his songs “merely” represent what he happens to feel that moment, and should not be taken literally, a rather lame justification since, as Keathley notes, misogyny “is not an accessory, like a hat that you can put on or take off depending on your mood; rather, it is a world view that informs choices and interpretations” (par. 21). 45 He is also well aware that unbridled homophobia and misogyny wrap his songs up in an attractive transgressiveness, as rock groups like the Rolling Stones had realised before him, even thanking his detractors for boosting his record sales (“The Way I am”).

302 tension caused by his unreserved emulation of black masculinity.

While his use of an originally black (though increasingly hybridised) cultural form enables him to express his own experiences of social alienation, poverty and job security, revealing a lack of existing white working-class models at his disposal, Eminem’s rap differs in several respects. Firstly, whereas black gangsta rap is renowned for its visceral revenge fantasies of cop-killing that unfold against a backdrop of police racism and brutality, revenge fantasies in

Eminem are staged primarily in the domestic sphere, as he spits out first-person, present tense, visceral tales of white-on-white violence against his (or his rap persona’s?) mother and wife, most famously with the tracks “97 Bonnie and Clyde” and “Kim,” both of which dramatise the murder of his now ex-wife.46 At the same time, Eminem raps lyrical about his daughter, her purity played off against adult womanhood, with his self-styled presentation as a devoted father working to soften his rap persona, with fatherhood, as it is in so many Hollywood films, providing the trope to manage white masculinity in a postindustrial, postfeminist, post-civil rights age. Secondly, he references his whiteness by foregrounding his “white trash” roots, which have been crucial to his authentic status, unlike middle-class white rappers before him, such as

Vanilla Ice, whose career plummeted when it transpired that stories of his ghetto roots and gangsta past were mere marketing strategies. The Marshall Mathers LP, which bears Eminem’s real name, also features working-class imagery on its cover, providing his star persona with the same “white trash chic” that Kurt Cobain had exploited a few years earlier (Newitz and Wray

179). Eminem's feuds with his wife and mother, publicised in his own lyrics, have also been

46 “97 Bonnie and Clyde” is told through his alter ego “Slim Shady,” a common trend in rap. It opens with the father’s tender endearments towards his daughter, which are rendered chilling when it becomes apparent that the father is taking his daughter with him to dispose of her mother’s body. In “Kim” Eminem loses his “Slim Shady” gangsta person and entitles the track after his real-life ex-wife. This time the murder itself is dramatised, with Eminem spewing forth his rage at being rejected, as well as ventriloquising Kim’s desperate pleas for life, in effect silencing the woman’s voice. The track ends with sounds of Kim choking to death, gurgling on her own blood after having her throat slit, as Eminem chants “Bleed! Bitch Bleed,” rendering the track “the sonic equivalent of a slasher film” (Keathley par. 16). Perhaps more disturbing are the chants of “Kill Kim” chants at Eminem concerts or the number of death threats to Kim posted by young women on Eminem’s official web site.

303 treated in the media like a “white trash” soap opera, with black rap artist Ice-T describing him as the “Jerry Springer of rap” (qtd. in Jennings). Along with the generic self-aggrandisements,

Eminem’s lyrics also wallow in a self-debasement that is rarely found in black rap. Noting a similar strategy of self-deprecation in the work of white artists, such as Beck’s “I’m a Loser

Baby” or Radiohead’s “Creep,” Annalee Newitz suggests that the contemporary critique of whiteness (which rap has amplified), along with the failure that is built into the very structure of whiteness, can result in expressions of self-loathing and nihilism, which nonetheless render “the speaker both hip and impervious to criticism” through a strategy of pre-emption (“White

Savagery” 146). Whereas black rap is often infused with black pride, Eminem recycles the notion that whiteness is a meaningless, evacuated identity: “how the fuck can I be white / I don’t even exist” (“Role Model”). His lyrics often slide into masochism, with The Slim Shady LP littered with references to self-immolation: “You see this bullet hole in my neck? It’s self- inflicted […] Cause my split personality is having an identity crisis / I’m Dr. Hyde and Mr.

Jekyll” (“Low, Down, Dirty”). Recalling Fight Club’s direct reference to Jekyll and Hyde,

Eminem, particularly with his Slim Shady persona, would seem to join the ranks of the “angry white males” (one of his world tours was aptly entitled “Anger Management Tour”) in popular films who rail against their perceived disenfranchisement (though women and gays are his scapegoats of choice, not affirmative action) but defend themselves against criticism through self-denigration. For Richard Goldstein, far from being subversive, Eminem's lyrics represent

“[a] paranoid male personality with an intense sense of aggrievement that is out of proportion to reality,” and thus feed well into the post 9/11 paranoia that George Bush has “sublimated into militarism” (qtd. in Bozza 136). In this light Eminem has much in common with the paranoid, angry white male protagonist of Falling Down, sharing not only his masochistic subjectivity but also his appropriation of black discourses, suggesting that perhaps the “angry white male” is the 304 latest development in a long line of minstrels.47

In that “the angry white man” has proved a popular figure on the big screen, it is interesting to explore how 8 Mile (2002), a fictionalised account of Eminem's early career, translates his persona to the big screen. Most notably, the “angry white male” of Slim Shady fame is massively toned down, diluted by that other great Hollywood 90s icon, “the sensitive white male,” with an American dream narrative thrown into the mix for good measure. The

Oscar-winning signature anthem “Lose Yourself” became Eminem’s first number one hit, with the wife-beating, mother-raping, gay-bashing lyrics replaced by an individualistic Anglo-Saxon, capitalist work ethic: “You can do anything you put your mind to, man.” Not surprisingly, reviews of the film prompted numerous comparisons with Rocky (1976). Despite its evident commercialism, 8 Mile is the first Hollywood film to depict the underground hip hop scene, though white mainstream interest in the most heavily policed musical form to date would seem to require the mediating figure of a hard-grafting white boy succeeding in a black man’s world.

The slight differences between the lives of Eminem and his character, Jimmy, who raps under the persona B. Rabbit, 48 enable a recuperation of Eminem for the mainstream by having him play the part of a vulnerable, damaged white male. All the women in Jimmy’s life disappoint him (his ex-girlfriend fakes pregnancy, his new lover cheats on him, his irresponsible mother refuses to work and drinks herself into oblivion, leaving her daughter to fend for herself) except for his baby sister, enabling the film to cash in on Eminem's devoted father persona. He even becomes a defender of a gay colleague (see figure 6.17), dissing a homophobic rapper to the tune

47 I am indebted to David Wellman’s essay “Minstrel Shows” for this point. Wellman argues that white men are currently engaging in “affirmative action minstrelsy” in positing themselves as victims (324). 48 With the final song on the soundtrack entitled “Run Rabbit Run,” the literary reference of Jimmy’s persona is obviously to John Updike’s 1960 novel, Rabbit, Run, the first of Updike’s rabbit books that chronicle Harry “Rabbit Angstrom,” the American Everyman (Jennings). As Sally Robinson has illustrated, Updike’s Rabbit novels chart the gradual unmooring of white masculinity from its position as “synecdoche for American identity tout court” (25). While this nom de guerre perfectly fits Eminem’s “angry white male” persona, it equally suits his success in a medium of black origins since B. Rabbit also recalls Brer Rabbit, the children’s literature hero, who originated from the oral narratives of enslaved blacks that were published by Joel Chandler Harris, now commonly cited as an example of a white who profited from selling African-American culture (Jennings).

305 that he “may be gay, but you’re a faggot,” a distinction that Eminem himself made in an interview with MTV’s Kurt Loder: “The lowest degrading thing that you can say to a man when you’re battling him is to call him a faggot and try to take away his manhood. Call him a sissy, call him a punk. ‘Faggot’ to me doesn’t necessarily mean gay people” (qtd. in Kim). While

Eminem participates in the devaluation of the feminine here that is common to much male rap, 8

Mile provides a class context for this discourse. As Jimmy puts it, “we’re still as broke as fuck and live with our moms.” Jimmy’s Oedipal dramas with his mother - such as when she wants to discuss her sex life, causing him to slam the door in her face in horror - also imply that male rap’s misogyny might be explained through Kristeva’s notion of the abject, a fear that economic disenfranchisement and absent fathers exacerbate (see figure 6.18).

Poverty, therefore, unites all male characters, regardless of race. Their desperation is reflected in Rodrigo Prieto’s social realist cinematography, which deploys a “palette of washed- out blues and somber grays that capture the emptiness and coldness of inner-city Detroit”

(Kelly), lingering on abandoned, decaying buildings, boarded-up businesses, and desolate neighborhoods (see figure 6.19). The film’s title is taken from the symbolic road that divides the overwhelmingly white suburbs from the city of Detroit, which is 76% African-American, according to the 2000 census (Bozza 254). With Jimmy being a minority white, and exposed to critiques of whiteness from within the hip hop community, it is suggested that he lives his whiteness differently from middle-class whites, undermining discourses that posit whiteness as a hegemonic locus of automatic social privilege.

8 Mile’s mediating black subject matter has ironically led to it being one of the few sympathetic representations of the white urban poor in a Hollywood feature film, although it also taps uncomfortably into the prevalent “angry white male” accusations of reverse racism in post- affirmative action America. Jimmy’s black friend, the politicised DJ Iz (De’Angelo Wilson), states of white rappers, “it’s always easier for a white man to make it in a black man’s medium. 306

Right B?” - but his question remains unanswered, since conveniently, at this exact same moment,

Jimmy rushes in to attack his adversary Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie).49 The film, though, would suggest the exact opposite. Most of the invectives hurled at Jimmy in the battles insult his whiteness, accusing him of being a tourist, Elvis, Vanilla Ice, a hill-billy, Hitler and trailer trash.

However, his mentor, Future (Mekhi Phifer), never stops believing in him, reversing conventional racial dynamics by stating, “Once they hear you, it won’t matter what colour you are.” In this respect, 8 Mile follows White Men Can’t Jump (1992), which also screens a white male in a black environment in which the odds are uncharacteristically stacked against him, in positing a black male “as possessing a profound and intimate knowledge of the white men’s fears and desires” (DiPiero, “White Men Aren’t” 126).

The final battle scene screens the triumph of class over race, as Jimmy wins over the hostile crowd by exposing that self-styled gangsta Papa Doc went to a private school and lives at home with his happily married parents (see figure 6.20). Jimmy also pre-empts all of Papa Doc’s insults, aware that they would merely rehash stereotypes about white rappers: “I’m a piece of white trash, I say it proudly / […] / Here, tell these people something they don’t know about me.” His silencing of Pap Doc underscores just how effective a strategy (white male) masochistic self-loathing is in deflecting criticism, though wearing “white trash” as a badge of pride could be read as another act of minstrelsy, aping the African-American resignification of

“nigger.” Ultimately, the film suggests that hip hop authenticity resides not in skin colour but

“power, class, and privilege” (Friedman, “Ringleader” 4). On the one hand, 8 Mile is interesting for insisting that economic class is the overwhelming divider of society (though requires racial discourse to do so) and that a working-class cultural form like hip hop might constitute a means

49 DJ Iz is the only character to utter any politicised racial discourse, also castigating his black friends for failing to respect the sisters. Consequently, criticism of sexism is articulated, but importantly not by Eminem's character, which would smack of just too much hypocrisy. 307 of bridging racial demarcations.50 In the process, it also problematises white masculinity as a monolithic category. On the other, race is reduced to class, thereby sidelining issues such as institutionalised racism and displacing white racisms onto the black racisms of the hip hop community. It is thus fitting that the film ends with Jimmy going back to finish his factory shift, which ostensibly mitigates against a Hollywood ending (though our extra-textual knowledge of

Eminem assures us Jimmy will ultimately make the big time), but also means that the advantages that Eminem's whiteness brought him once he had broken into the hip hop world remain unexplored.

Of course, Jimmy is not Hollywood’s first white male to adopt another culture and then do it better. Nor need this culture necessarily be African-American, as demonstrated in films such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Last Samourai (2003), both of which screen the white male protagonist’s embrace of an exotic other on the path to white male (and American) redemption. The current thrust of the “Asianisation” of the action movie also points to new potential borrowings. However, despite the variety of manifestations of white masculinity granting its racial others “the simultaneous privilege and responsibility […] of defining what it is” (DiPiero, “White Men Aren’t” 133), the indelible history of slavery and minstrelsy has meant that the “dominant codes of masculinity in the US [are still] partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor” (Lott, Love and Theft 53). Accompanying annexations of black masculinity, therefore, is always the underlying fear that white masculinity is a vacant, barren subjectivity, forced to borrow to fill the gaping void.

50 Eminem himself has stated, “if there’s one music that could break down racist barriers, it’s hip hop. When I do shows, I look out into the crowd and see black, white, Chinese, Korean people - I see all these nationalities there for one thing. You don’t see that shit at a country show, you don’t see it at a rock show. It’s hip hop that’s doin’ it” (qtd. in Bozza 239). 308

PART THREE

MARKING WHITE MALE VIOLENCE: THE

GANGSTER AND THE SERIAL KILLER 309

INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE

White Male Violence in Postmodern Media

In 1995, presidential candidate Bob Dole expressed outrage at the “nightmare of depravity” in violent Hollywood movies (qtd. in Caputi, “Small Ceremonies” 147), packaging up his concerns in fin-de-millennium rhetoric about the state of the nation. Indeed, such an election issue did screen violence become that Scream 2 (1998), Wes Craven’s parodic take on the slasher genre, even has its serial killer state, “I’ve got my whole defence planned out. I’m going to blame the movies. […] I’ll get Cochran1 to represent me. Bob Dole on the witness stand in my defence. Hell, the Christian Coalition’ll pay my legal fees!” Nevertheless, a decade earlier, the neo-conservatives had enthusiastically embraced the violence of Rambo: First Blood Part II, with Reagan even joking at a press conference after the release of the hostages in Lebanon

(1985): “Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do the next time this happens” (qtd. in Jeffords, Hard Bodies 28). While Bob Dole reviled Natural Born Killers (1994), which screens serial killing as constituting part of a continuum of white American violence, he embraced Forrest Gump (1994), declaring that his presidential campaign would be based “on the message that has made Forrest Gump one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest box office hits: no matter how great the adversity, the American Dream is within everybody’s reach” (qtd. in

Boyle). As we saw in chapter two, “Forrest Gump represents not only a metaphorically violent revision of history but a reconceptualisation of white masculinity in and through iconographic scenes of violence” (Boyle). White male violence is represented as individual failings in the case of Jenny’s abusive father and boyfriend, rendered comic in the case of the Ku Klux Klan, and heroic in the case of Vietnam through the representation of Forrest as “the emblem of American innocence” (Caputi, “Small Ceremonies” 157). The aggression of the Black Panther who

1 Johnny Cochran became a household name when he became O.J. Simpson’s lawyer. 310 harangues Forrest, on the other hand, is racially charged, foregrounding the fact that non-white violence is inextricably enmeshed in discourses that indict people of colour as an entire social group (Giroux, “Pulp Fiction” 306).

Both Dole’s scapegoating of filmic violence and his advocacy of a film that suffers from a heavy dose of historical amnesia are symptomatic of US media culture, whose nightly newscasts dedicate “42% of their airtime to crime, violence, terrorism and disaster” (Moore qtd. in Rappping 249), and where the state-inflicted violence of welfare cuts, economic downsizing, police brutality, institutionalised racism, the death penalty and illegal wars are sidelined for sensationalised talk shows that present violence as acts of individual depravity. Indeed, as

Christopher Sharrett points out, “while Bush [Senior] pummelled Iraq with a devastating air

Armada, the talk shows were filled with hand-wringing about the popularity of serial killer movies” (Introduction, Mythologies 13). Forrest Gump’s sanitisation of the violence underpinning American history should also come as no surprise in the light of the legacy left by the First Gulf War,2 where heavy censorship and Pentagon controlled PR exercises replaced investigative journalism, nice-speak euphemisms dominated military discourse (the bomb that can inflict damage second only to an atomic explosion was termed a “daisy cutter”), and a new warfare of “surgical strikes” had American pilots returning back to base describing the terror they had unleashed as being akin to a firework display or a computer game. Worn colonialist discourses of race and gender were also deployed in media representations of the war, with

Sadam Hussein cast as the villain, George Bush Sr. as hero, and Kuwait as the damsel in distress being raped by the dark, beastly, foreign male (Shohat and Stam 128). Baudrillard’s famed assertion that the Gulf War had not taken place also gained currency in the Second Gulf War, where directors and camera crews accompanied troops, and shaped their Pentagon-approved

2 “The First Gulf War” is itself a euphemism since right up till the so-called “Second Gulf War” American and British Allied Forces had never stopped bombing Iraq. 311 footage into a palatable format for the American public.3 At the same time, as Ella Shohat and

Robert Stam note, “if the Gulf War revealed the descriptive aptness of the Baudrillardian account of postmodernism, it also signalled that paradigm’s political vacuousness” and the “fundamental asymmetries in how the depthless surfaces of postmodernity are lived” (131): “Some groups watched the war from an antisceptic [sic] distance, while others lived it in the company of death, dismemberment, disease, and famine” (131).

It is within this media climate, wonderfully parodied in Wag the Dog (1997), that the

“new brutalism” film cycle needs to be contextualised. “New brutalism” was a media catchphrase that designated a body of Hollywood and independent films whose graphic violence had unleashed controversy on their release, including Man Bites Dog (1991), Reservoir Dogs

(1992), Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Natural Born Killers. These films all shared a preoccupation with violence perpetuated by individuals against individuals (Boyle; Hallam and Marshment

224-25). In terms of style, their graphic representations of violence were considered more

“realistic” than their Hollywood counterparts, often due to a cinema verité style and loose narrative structures which refused to offer satisfactory motivations, social or psychological, for the violent acts committed (Hallam and Marshment 225). As Julia Hallam and Margaret

Marshment put it:

Unlike conventional Hollywood action films, where the omniscient camera can

align viewer empathy with a Manichean hero who commits violent acts in the name

of a ‘greater good,’ the use of expositional strategies creates an ethical vacuum

which can only be filled by the viewer’s own assessment of the moral issues. This

more neutral moral coding proved to be part of the attraction for audiences bored

with Hollywood’s predictable action movies, their larger-than-life hero figures and

crude moral pieties. (225)

3 See Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. 312

“New brutalism” films soon became controversial for their alleged off-screen effects, and

“the extensive press coverage given to these cases increased the films’ notoriety and perceived threat to the social order” (Boyle). Natural Born Killers was singled out for particular attack and blamed for several real-life couple killers.4 Of course, such controversies are nothing new, as accusations of copycat violence directed at such films as The Wild Bunch (1969), A Clockwork

Orange (1971), Taxi Driver (1976) and Rambo (1985), along with the British controversy over

“video nasties” in the 1980s testify.5 Nonetheless, the readiness with which the term “new” prefaced the various neologisms coined for these 90s films (not only “new brutalism” but also

“new violence” or “new ultraviolence”) signals a distinct shift in representational practices, which disturbed those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Those on the right expressed concern that these films cause real-life violence and represent a decline in American values. Those on the left were disturbed by the aestheticisation of violence in a cynical, “zero- degree” mode that detached violence from any social, political or economic context. These films were seen as symptomatic of a postmodern moment when everything can be packaged up as spectacle, when the only viewing responses available are detached irony or cynicism, when far from eliciting any political critique of violence, these films bear out filmmaker Wim Wenders’s observation that “[v]iolence appears in so many contexts where you cannot reflect on it anymore, where you cannot experience it any other way than consuming” (qtd. in Prince 33). Others praised the films for similar reasons: for foregrounding the postmodern condition and raising

4 In March 1998, a teenage couple, Dan Darras and Sarah Edmondson, shot two people as they drove across America. Six months earlier, Florence Rey and Audry Maupin committed four fatal shootings in a similar gun battle in Paris. In both cases, Natural Born Killers was blamed (Fulwood 84). 5 A Clockwork Orange was deemed responsible for the rape of a Dutch woman holidaying in Britain by a gang of youths who chorused “Singing in the Rain” during the attack. Kubrick eventually imposed a ban on the screening of the film (Fulwood 89-90). Scorcese was also attacked after John Hinckley, who was obsessed with Jodie Foster and Taxi Driver, attempted to assassinate Reagan. Hinkely’s associations with the Bush family were largely ignored by a media all too ready to scapegoat cinema (Sharrett, Introduction Mythologies 13). The British tabloid press also led a crusade to vilify Rambo after the 1987 Hungerford killings by Michael Ryan, when it emerged that he owned a VCR and the most popular film at the local video club was Rambo, ignoring as potential cause the fact that Ryan’s prime interests were guns, survivalism and combat gear (Fulwood 83). Likewise, the James Bulgar case, the killing of a two-year-old boy by two ten-year-olds in 1993, a crime which understandably rocked the nation, was linked to “video nasties,” despite the flimsiest of evidence (86-87). 313 questions about the nature of violence in individuals and society that are suppressed in more conventional fictional narratives (Hallam and Marshment 225).

Certainly, most “new brutalism” films do not engage in a materialist analysis of the etiology of violence, though that alone does not preclude critical intervention on the part of the spectator. At the same time, to argue that violence in these films is severed from any social or political context is rather misleading since many “new brutalism” films engage directly with the debates centred on identity that raged in the 90s, albeit an engagement which is often articulated through white male characters who are overtly racist, misogynistic and homophobic, whose violence erupts in response to perceived threats to their hegemony. In other words, these texts are overtly political; it is just that their textual politics are often disturbing and unpalatable, and do little to fracture existing stereotypes and/or meditate on the external causes of violence and prejudice. The question that runs throughout most criticism is whether these films endorse racism, misogyny, homophobia and classism or cite and perform them, or whether, in fact, there is a difference. For the purposes of this chapter, however, what renders these films of interest is their symptomatic thematic concern with white male violence and their recognition of the increased difficulty of normative white masculinity occupying a universal, unmarked position in the hybridised landscape of contemporary America.

In a cultural milieu in which violence is seen in individualised terms, it is always marked by discourses of race, gender, sexuality and class. The outrage that Thelma and Louise (1991) unleashed in the mainstream press - the film’s critique of institutionalised violence against women being sidelined for debates over the film’s negative portrayal of men and valorisation of female aggression - is some indication of the extent to which maleness and violence are yoked together in the popular imaginary.6 Race also plays a role since despite the white male violence

6 Even in films like Terminator 2 (1991), True Romance (1993), Baise-Moi (2000), or the “psychofemme” film cycle, violent women have either suffered abuse at the hands of men or respond to the insanity of male violence or are motivated by personal factors such as jealousy or revenge. 314 that populates the big screen in the face of mythologised American figures such as the cowboy and the gangster, popular media representations of people of colour, in particular, African-

Americans and Latinos/as are still entrenched in discourses of aggression and criminality; in other words, white violence can be seen to stem from individual pathology or even heroism, while each negative image of an underrepresented group acquires what Michael Rogin refers to as the “surplus symbolic value” of minoritised people (qtd. in Shohat and Stam 183). Black screen violence, in particular, tends to legitimise stereotypes about black communities as the site of crime and immorality that fuel a racist imagination (Giroux, “Pulp Fiction” 306). Class is also key to this debate: although the urban poor tend to be signified by people of colour in the

American popular imaginary, poor whites, along with urban and rural poor of all colours, are also insistently criminalised in many mainstream films as well as docudrama/reality TV, such as the long-running show Cops. This point is made compellingly in Michael Moore’s Oscar- winning documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002), when Moore asks the producer of Cops why they never screen corporate crime, the answer predictably being that it wouldn’t make good television. Bowling for Columbine documents the white male violence that America was forced to confront with the high-school shootings in Columbine (1999) and the 1995 Oklahoma bombing of a federal building by a member of the Patriot Movement, the now executed Timothy

McVeigh, whose apparent ordinariness (read white male) shocked the nation.7 Moore’s documentary comprises not only a powerful critique of gun culture but also links that culture to

US interventionist foreign policy and the US media, which whips up audiences into a racially- charged, hysterical frenzy by insistently demonising black males and deploying “race” as the explanatory discourse for a host of social ills. Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) also links US foreign policy to the history of white male violence upon which America is founded through parodic use of the theme tune and opening credits of Bonanza, the popular cowboy TV drama,

7 Arlington Road (1999) responds to the McVeigh case, screening Tim Robbins as the “man next door” terrorist. 315 this time re-named Afghanistan, starring George Bush Jr., Donald Rumsfield, Dick Cheyney and

Tony Blair. A montage sequence of Bush’s famed speeches about “smoking out” Al Qaeda terrorists ensues, revealing how Bush scripted the war as a western, just as his father had done with the First Gulf War.

It is in this context that I wish to insert the whiteness and maleness of two archetypal figures of white male violence that dominated 90s ultraviolent cinema: the gangster and the serial killer.8 In the first section, I will focus my attention on Quentin Tarantino, whose name soon became synonymous with “new brutalism.” Tarantino is regarded as the epitome of the postmodern, peppering his films with textual and cultural allusions, and troubling conventional modes of consumption by mixing horrific spectacles of violence with uneasy humour. Of particular interest is his deconstruction of the gangster, his foregrounding of the performative structures of masculinity, and his highlighting of the importance of black masculinity to white heterosexual male identifications, with parody forming the mode which allows him to represent white masculinity as simultaneously “all” (universal, phallic) and “nothing” (ontological empty, deconstructed, lacking). What is also distinctive about Tarantino’s films is that his white male characters are always marked by identity categories of gender, race and sexuality. This is most apparent in the racist, misogynistic and homophobic dialogue of his white male gangsters, often legitimised through their utterance in a highly stylised mode. Tellingly, white male hate speech erupts when the borders of white heterosexual masculinity are posited as unstable or violated.

In the second section, I will focus on the serial killer movie, primarily in Hollywood productions. The serial killer, both on and off screen, is statistically most likely to be a white male. As an insistently pathologised figure, the serial killer ostensibly has little to tell us about

8 The cowboy proved less popular in contemporary cinema, though he has been assimilated into other genres, such as the rampage film (Rambo, Falling Down), action adventure (Terminator 2) or science fiction (The Matrix). One exception, along with Dances with Wolves (1990), is Clint Eastwood’s revisionist western Unforgiven (1992), which includes a critique of white male violence, particularly in the face of the male who cuts up a prostitute’s face after she ridicules his penis size, thus setting the revenge plot in motion, even as it screens Eastwood’s character resuming his violent ways, though without the usual dose of redemption. 316 normative white masculinity; however, the ways in which the screen serial killer is othered through discourses of sexual deviance or class is suggestive of attempts to distance serial violence from normative white masculinity. Nonetheless, the Law in these films is often represented by a woman or man of colour rather than a white male. At the same time, a competing tendency in contemporary serial killer films has been to code the serial killer as uncannily normal through representations of white masculinity as an empty, sterile subjectivity, with serial killing providing the means of attaining a specific identity that remains ever elusive.

While this has an explanation within psychoanalytic literature, with the absence of affect in the serial killer understood as a psychic defence against trauma through a refusal to feel at all, I am not concerned with the etiology of real-life killers, but with the ways in which concerns about white masculinity and postmodernity in general are worked out through this pathological figure in contemporary popular cinema. 317

CHAPTER SEVEN

White Male Violence in the Gangster Films of Quentin Tarantino

7.1. Quentin Tarantino and his Cinema of Postmodern Cool

By 1994, the adjective “tarantino-esque” had been firmly established in film critical vocabulary, despite the fact that Tarantino had only written and directed Reservoir Dogs (1992), a surprise critical and commercial success which provoked a media storm, and Pulp Fiction

(1994), which cost $8 million to make but took $213 million at the box office, though Tarantino had also written the original screenplays for True Romance (Tony Scott 1993) and Natural Born

Killers (Oliver Stone 1994), and later went on to write and direct a segment of Four Rooms

(1995), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), as well as write and star in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).1 The readiness with which Tarantino became a genre is partly due to his status as auteur in its Cahiers du Cinéma sense (writer, director and actor), and his sheer ubiquity has rendered it difficult to separate his film texts from his director persona.

But it also suggests that he succeeded in putting something new on the cinematic map. Reservoir

Dogs and Pulp Fiction spawned numerous imitations, such as the laddish “Cool Britannia” films of Guy Ritchie, Lock, Stock and Two-Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000), which translated Tarantino’s gangster chic onto a British terrain,2 and films like Things to do in Denver

1 Tarantino himself has stated, “I never really understood what tarantino-esque meant. When I hear it applied, it never sounds like a flattering thing because it’s so broken down to black suits, hipper-then-thou dialogue and people talking about TV shows. That’s not me. I feel there’s a lot more to my work than that” (qtd. in Woods 154). 2 As with Reservoir Dogs, in Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch women are almost non- existent, Ritchie himself describing Snatch as being “really about having a romp with a load of fellas” (“Making Of”). Ritchie’s parody of gangster masculinity is a direct imitation of Tarantino, such as the incompetent, obese black small-time crook in Snatch who, for a getaway car, steals a Mini that he can’t even get out of, let alone park. Ritchie’s fusion of humour and violence shares Tarantino’s cartoon-like style, most obviously in the depiction of Boris the Blade (Rade Serbedzija), who, no matter how many bullets are pumped into him, still springs back to life. Like Tarantino, Ritchie assumes that verbal violence has as little effect as the bullets do on Boris, and disturbing racist epithets circulate in dialogue. Moreover, Ritchie’s imitates Tarantino’s screening of ethnically and racially marked masculinities that vie for ascendancy. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrel’s Nick the Greek is termed “Nick the greasy Greek bastard” while Snatch reverberates with the line “I fuckin’ hate pikies.” When asked whether “pikie,” a derogatory British term for gypsy, was perhaps offensive, Ritchie’s reply was “it’s only a film, innit?” (“Making Of”). 318

When You’re Dead (1995), Two Days in the Valley (1996) and Gross Pointe Blank (1997), films which employed Tarantino’s iconography and penchant for small-time crooks but failed to pull off his distinctive hip dialogue and unnerving mix of violence and humour.

Tarantino quickly acquired cult status with young audiences, partly because of his film- geek-made-good persona.3 Tarantino’s fan-boy mentality is ever present in his work, most obviously in his penchant for intertextual allusions, ranging from Blaxploitation films to Hong

Kong Kung Fu cinema.4 Yet it is French New Wave cinema that his gangster films cite stylistically, in particular Francois Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960) and Jean-Pierre

Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), which, in turn, paid homage to American gangster movies of the

30s and 40s.5 Like French New Wave directors, Tarantino employs non-linear narratives, which often seem designed to seduce the spectator with their cleverness. Plots also take unexpected twists, with characters themselves often startled by the turn of events (Polan 30). As with French

New Wave, Tarantino’s camera is often static and meditative, and his preference for long takes refuse the MTV-style rapid cutting that dominates contemporary Hollywood production, though at other times, his camera roves disembodied in a Hitchcockian manner, unhinged from a characters’ point of view, a technique that precludes easy identification. Tarantino also follows the avant-garde tradition in his use of oblique, disorientating camera angles, his novelistic style of storytelling complete with chapter title cards, and his metacinematic foregrounding of his films’ fictional status.

In terms of content, however, Tarantino's films are quintessentially American, populated with two-dimensional characters plucked straight from the pages of 1950s crime pulp fiction and flung into a 1990s context, along with constant allusions to the popular culture of the 1970s he

3 Tarantino, who never went to film school, learnt about films through working in a video club. He states, “I think my biggest appeal amongst young fans is they look at me as the fan boy who made it” (qtd. in Woods 145). 4 He freely admits, “I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homages” (qtd. in Woods 44). 5 Tarantino even named his production company, A Band Apart, after Jean-Luc Godard’s film Bande À Part (1964). The extreme close-up of Mr. Wolf’s finger on Jimmy’s doorbell in Pulp Fiction is an exact copy of a shot in Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste. The incongruous dialogue of Pulp Fiction also owes much to the same film. 319 grew up in. Tarantino also takes delight in resurrecting the flagging careers of 70s American stars, capitalising on their star personas often for comic effect: John Travolta’s famous boogie in

Pulp Fiction cannot fail to provoke memories of his dance-floor reign in Saturday Night Fever

(1977), while his use of the iconic Pam Grier imports Blaxploitation cool into Jackie Brown. His characters also talk of all things American from TV programmes to McDonald’s.

Despite this wealth of allusions, Tarantino was heralded for producing something new: the ultimate 90s aesthetic - a ludic postmodern fascination with surface, intertextuality and parody, with no ostensible message or political point, much like the pulp fiction his stories were based on, which, as Tarantino himself has stated, were designed to be read compulsively and then given or thrown away (qtd. in Polan 24). He was immediately loved or hated for the same reasons. His fans loved his cinema of guilt-free spectacle, hip dialogue and generic hybridity, along with the viewing pleasure afforded simply by getting the reference; with references ranging from popular culture to avant-garde cinema, his films could be consumed as cult culture or as an academic treatise on postmodernism, with Pulp Fiction, in particular, on the syllabus of almost every university course on cinema and postmodernism. His detractors regarded him as a product of the vacuous, amoral, cynical postmodern age, and accused his films of exhibiting a loss of affect, history and social reference. Others claimed that his films hide real political issues about gender, race and sexuality that his film’s “seductive veneer of spectacle” work to mask

(Polan 7). All agreed that his films were nothing if not symptomatic of the postmodern era.

7.2. “Are you going to bark all day little doggie … or are you going to bite?”

Deconstructing the Gangster Ideal

In the light of Tarantino’s love of both French New Wave and American popular culture, it is little wonder that it was the gangster genre that Tarantino chose first to reinvent. The gangster, along with the cowboy, is the most iconic image of violent white masculinity in 320

American film history. Hollywood gangsters from the 1930s-70s were almost exclusively white ethnic characters, normally Italian- or Irish-American, in pursuit of “individual enterprise and immigrant acculturation” (Liam Kennedy 129). Later, the Italian-American gangster was mythologised in the nostalgic cinema of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin de Scorcese, Brian de

Palma and Sergio Leone. Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) opens with the lines “I believe in

America,” and in so doing, “rekindled the notion of the gangster as the definitive American, one whose life was based on a violence at once rational and irrational, public and private, and native to the national character” (Dargis, “Dark Side” 16); in other words, violence is posited as a means by which working-class, urban, white but ethnically-inflected males can have their stab at the American dream.

The contemporary gangster film, however, is often populated with all number of ethnicities. In particular, the 90s witnessed the commercial successes of black gangsta cinema with films such as New Jack City (1991), Boyz ‘N the Hood (1991) and Menace II Society

(1993), which cited 70s blaxploitation and black gangster films but placed African-American gangs in a 90s social and cultural postindustrial urban landscape (Mason 141).6 Tarantino has been accused of appropriating these films by black theorists, who draw attention to his burnt-out setting in Reservoir Dogs, his black soundtracks, and his representation of black masculinity as irredeemably violent but always the epitome of cool.7 Indeed, unusually for a white director,

Tarantino self-consciously racialises the power struggle between aggressive rival masculinities,

6 These films have been accused of reinforcing white paranoia about a criminalised black masculinity, but as Liam Kennedy claims, they “offer very self-conscious intertextual treatments of the gangster narrative situated in postindustrial ghetto spaces of New York City and Los Angeles. These films reinscribe the transgressive nature of the conventional gangster figure to accentuate the ways in which race mediates issues of crime, violence, and justice in the black ghetto and positions its underclass inhabitants outside normative notions of what constitutes citizenship” (130-31). 7 In an interview with Lisa Kennedy, Tarantino states, “[s]omeone said to me at Sundance when Reservoir Dogs was there, ‘You know what you’ve done, you’ve given white boys the kind of movies black kids get.’ […] Blacks have always had those movies […] Being bad, looking cool being bad, with a fuck-you attitude. The only time white guys could ever duke it out with black culture when it comes to being big and the coolness of being big is in the 50s, in the rockabilly days, when guys would walk around with big ole houndstooth coats and big ole hair. That was as big as black culture in the 70s, and its all based on looking cool, looking like a badass” (qtd. in Lisa Kennedy 32).

321 though his gangsters tend to be either African-American or white, offering up a rather

Manichean vision of American race relations. Unlike the black gangsta films, however, violence is given no obvious rationale or social context in Tarantino’s gangster universe; indeed, as Fran

Mason asserts, Tarantino seems more concerned with “articulating the semiotic codes of the gangster genre to map identity and lifestyle as a form of cultural expression as opposed to using them to explore the psychology of the gangster and the social reality he inhabits” (161). Unlike

The Godfather trilogy, Tarantino’s gangsters are coded as members of an urban underclass (he is more interested in hit men or small-time crooks than mafia bosses), a trend repeated in 90s gangster films such as The Usual Suspects (1995), Gross Pointe Blank (1997) and Snatch (2000).

Moreover, in a far cry from Coppola’s tragic mode, Tarantino follows the French New Wave impulse to deconstruct the gangster ideal, starting a trend of parodying the white gangster that would be prevalent throughout the 90s, most obviously in the films of Guy Ritchie, but also in comedies such as Analyse This (1999), a film which deploys Robert de Niro’s star persona to comic effect when he plays a Mafioso who hires therapist Billy Crystal to help him to overcome panic attacks and a sudden aversion to killing. Similarly, the hit TV series The Sopranos has the mafia-head Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) go into therapy to deal with his mother complex.

The Sopranos is also indebted to Tarantino’s postmodern self-consciousness, with characters often comparing themselves to the screen gangsters that they fail to live up to or complaining about the stereotyping of Italian-Americans in the cinema. Tarantino’s gangsters are not deconstructed through existential angst, however (they have little interiority), but through generic subversion, with Tarantino finding humour in taking genre characters and putting them in non-generic situations.

In part, his ironic destabilisation of the gangster is inscribed through costume. As Stella

Bruzzi has argued in Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (1997), the gangster has always been a contradictory figure of masculinity: “The trait that distinguishes the screen 322 gangster from the majority of other masculine archetypes is his overt narcissism, manifested by a preoccupation with the appearance of others and a self-conscious regard for his own” (67).

Screen gangsters “have both cultivated an aggressively masculine image and are immensely vain” but their “sartorial flamboyance, far from intimating femininity or effeminacy, is the most important sign of their masculine social and material success” (70). For Bruzzi, the screen gangster’s obsessive concern with his appearance (evident in the number of scenes of gangsters having suits fitted) foregrounds his need to define and redefine himself against a gangster ideal that he is invariably unable to approximate (xviii; 70). In both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, this failure is deployed for comic effect. Gangsters begin both films decked out in chic black suits that allude to 1950s film noir, French New Wave gangster movies, rat pack movies such as

Ocean’s Eleven (1960), as well as John Woo’s Hong Kong “bulletfests” (Dawson 78). Indeed,

Tarantino himself recognises that clothes maketh the gangster: “You can’t put a guy in a black suit without him looking a little cooler than he already looks” (qtd. in Bruzzi 89). This coolness soon collapses, though, as Tarantino delights in smearing these black and white suits with dirt, sweat and blood, thus exposing the fragility of the body that the sharp, conventionalised masculine suits mask (Bruzzi 89) (see figure 7.1). In particular, in Pulp Fiction’s “The Bonnie

Situation” segment, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent’s (John Travolta) macho assurance is established only to be pathetically eroded when Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel) orders the humiliated pair to strip out of their blood-stained suits before hosing them down and dressing them in the geek T-shirts and Bermuda shorts belonging to Jimmy (played by Tarantino himself), who relishes in telling them “you look like dorks,” even though, as Jules reminds him, they are dressed in his clothes. The film’s closing image of Jules and Vincent simultaneously tucking their guns into the waistband of their Bermuda shorts before strutting away is wonderfully incongruous; as Tarantino (always the biggest fan of his own films) analyses, “[w]hat’s interesting is how they get reconstructed … their suits get more and more fucked up until they’re 323 stripped off and the two are dressed in the exact antithesis” (qtd. in Bruzzi 91) (see figures 7.2 and 7.3). Bruzzi thus concludes, “[t]he immaculate attire spied only briefly at the beginning of

Tarantino films fulfils a similar function to Lacan’s elusive phallus, persuading the characters to go in search of an ideal that they think they once embodied, but which was never theirs for the taking” (91).

Tarantino’s gangsters do not just mess up their suits; they spectacularly mess up in all number of ways. Reservoir Dogs is structured around a failed heist, and those not killed by cops are killed by each other in the closing Mexican standoff, when three gangsters point guns at each other in a stylised triangular formation, and, refusing to stand down, shoot simultaneously (a homage to Kubrick’s The Killing [1956]). However cohesive and “cool” these “dogs” first appear, they are soon rendered completely dysfunctional (Bruzzi 89). In Pulp Fiction, most humour is derived from Vincent’s un-gangster-like behaviour: he boogies unforgettably on the dance floor (see figure 7.4) and then spends the rest of the evening coping (badly) with Mia’s

(Uma Thurman) heroin overdose, he accidentally kills Marvin (Phil LaMarr), an informant, and is then killed himself when he takes an ill-timed visit to the bathroom, leaving his machine gun on the side ready for Butch (Bruce Willis) to use.

The distance between the gangster ideal and Tarantino’s male characters is also inscribed in the banal conversation that his characters engage in during the lengthy interstices that punctuate action, the kind of idle, narrative-delaying banter that most films steer well clear of but that Tarantino makes the epicentre of his films. At odds with the laconic model of virile masculinity epitomised by Jeff (Alain Delon) in Le Samourai and more akin to the talkative gangsters of Trauffaut’s parodic Tirez sur le Pianiste, Tarantino’s gangsters are positively garrulous, with humour derived from the incongruous topics that clutter their dialogues, from the ethics of tipping waitresses (Reservoir Dogs) to Jules and Vincent’s famous dialogue

(immortalised in the film’s top-selling soundtrack) about the differences between European and 324

American McDonald’s. Another particularly memorable example is the opening scene of

Reservoir Dogs, which screens the gangsters in mid-conversation (French New Wave style), but rather than discussing the upcoming heist, they are deconstructing the lyrics of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” debating whether the song is about a girl whose “pussy should be Bubble-Yam by now” experiencing “a big dick” for the first time, or whether it is about a vulnerable girl who eventually meets the sensitive guy of her dreams (see figure 7.5). Obviously, political correctness is not Tarantino’s intention, and as spectators we are directed towards wholesale delight in

Tarantino’s verbal wizardry, misogyny and all. Whether offended or amused, the spectator is offered no stable viewing position, since the camera slowly circles behind the men seated around a table, their backs often obscuring the face of the current speaker, a distancing device that renders identification difficult. In a similar mode, on their way to perform a hit, Pulp Fiction’s

Jules and Vincent argue over whether, in terms of marital infidelity, a foot massage is on a par with cunnilingus, which Jules terms “stickin’ your tongue in her holiest of holies.” While the preceding dialogue is screened in a backward tracking shot as Jules and Vincent walk along the apartment corridor, both men and camera stop still for this discussion, rendering the matter incongruously important (see figure 7.6).8

In a generous reading, the verbal incontinence of Tarantino's gangsters can be interpreted as his recognition that phallic posturing screens the lack that traverses masculine subjectivity.

Indeed, in Reservoir Dogs, the menacing Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) responds to Mr. White’s

(Harvey Keitel) blustering tirade by asking, “are you going to bark all day little doggie…. or are you going to bite?” - a quote which acts a title card after the film’s opening credit sequence and alludes to the film’s deliberately esoteric title (a possible homage to Peckinpah's ultraviolent

Straw Dogs [1971]) (see figures 7.7 and 7.8). Similarly, in Pulp Fiction the unflappable Mr.

Wolf (Harvey Keitel), who embodies the gangster cool that Vincent’s affectations fall

8 The matter is finally settled when a smirking Vincent asks Jules whether he would give a man a foot massage. 325 pathetically short of, orders Vincent to keep his “spurs from jingling and dangling.” Tarantino himself has characterised Reservoir Dogs as “a total talk fest, a bunch of guys yakking at each other” (qtd. in Woods 46). Indeed, the ingenuity of the film is the fact that it takes place after the failed heist that is never actually screened, though events leading up to and preceding it are shown in a complex pattern of flashbacks that accompany each gangster’s narrative of events; in other words, the heist only exists as a series of rhetorical performances that often end up being testosterone-charged, hysterical rants. The film’s narrative is structured around whether undercover cop Mr. Orange’s (Tim Roth) performance of gangster masculinity will be sufficiently convincing. A series of flashbacks screen Mr. Orange’s rehearsals of an imaginary narrative that his black police chief (Randy Brooks) has deemed necessary for a persuasive performance. In other words, a black male is given the job of assessing whether Mr. Orange's rendition of gangster masculinity is authentic, a scene, which, as Sharon Willis notes, is indicative of “the [racial] address of the masculine posturings that emerge as the central subject of Tarantino’s films” (High Contrast 203). His final rendition in front of Joe Cabot (Lawrence

Tierney), Nice-Guy Eddie (Christopher Penn) and Mr. White then unfolds on screen, made

“real” by Mr. Orange’s theatrical skills that convince his audience of his authenticity. His anecdote tells the story of him walking into the men’s room, carrying large quantities of marijuana, encountering a group of cops, one of whom is telling his own macho story about a recent arrest. As Mr. Orange stands still in the imaginary bathroom, encircled by a roving, objective camera, he then begins to narrate the self-same story he is telling, this time to the audience of cops, a Brechtian distancing device that reminds us that his story is pure fabrication.

Theatricality is not limited to this particular performance but characterises the film’s mise-en- scène and mode of enunciation. The narrative present unfolds in one setting, the abandoned warehouse the gang meet in after the heist. Most warehouse scenes use long shots with a fairly static camera, while rapid cutting and shot-reverse shots are eschewed for long takes, and the 326 sound is almost exclusively diegetic, rendering the viewing experience akin to watching a play unfold on stage. Performativity is also highlighted in Pulp Fiction when Mr. Wolf terms those involved in “The Bonnie Situation” “the principals,” whom he then proceeds to direct, or when after the “foot massage” dialogue, Jules tells Vincent “let’s get into character” before they appropriate their hit-men personas, which Jules acts out with particular thespian aplomb, ominously spouting a passage from the book of Ezekiel that he hadn’t really much thought about but which he considered “a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass.”

The extent to which Tarantino’s deconstruction of the gangster is subversive of phallic masculinity by revealing its performative structures is much contended. For Bruzzi, “the image of masculinity is destroyed in the most spectacular way” which, she argues, negates the view that what we witness is “paranoid masculinity’s flight from the return of its silent Other” (90). On the other hand, Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith assert that while Tarantino’s macho mode is only achieved “by virtue of ironies and self-reflexivity at the level of form,” this works to

“[renaturalise] white masculinity rather than drawing attention to its performance” (19). But perhaps rather than an either/or, what Tarantino’s films achieve is the postmodern both/and.

Parody, as we saw in chapters two and three, is a double-coded discourse, a doubleness that must be noticed for the text to be read specifically as parody (Harries 24). Film parody functions precisely by “inscribing both similarity to and difference from its target texts and [constructing] an incongruity that evokes both ironic and pluralistic meanings” (24). For Linda Hutcheon, this double address means that parody both legitimises and subverts what it parodies, making it an ideal vehicle for the political contradictions of postmodernism at large (101). This is precisely the reason that Tarantino’s films elicit such conflicting responses, often in the same spectator.

Certainly, Tarantino’s fragmentation of the gangster ideal has none of the poignancy of

Melville’s Le Samourai, for instance, which gradually strips Jeff of his cool suit to expose a 327 fragile wounded body, not for comic effect, but in order to screen Jeff as an existential hero of his times, whose alienation and inability to live up to the phallic ideal are given tragic dimensions. However, Tarantino’s films do underscore the imitative structures and fragility of masculine subjectivity. Tarantino’s self-referential cinema also draws attention to past cinematic representations of gangster masculinity, since it is only by recognising how his gangsters depart from this model that parody is generated, thereby “signal[ling] how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference”

(Hutcheon 93). Further, by raiding what Jameson terms the “imaginary museum of a now global culture” (Postmodernism 18), Tarantino simultaneously breathes new life into older models

(Brooker and Brooker 96), creating a more self-conscious screen gangster that was immediately seized on for imitation. Parody thus allows both a deconstruction of macho masculinity and a simultaneous reassertion of the phallic model that Tarantino’s incompetent gangsters can only aspire to. While this phallic model has become increasingly untenable on screen in the wake of identity critiques (though possibly making a come-back in the wake of 9/11), Tarantino’s self- reflexive, parodic and ironising mode, a mode which “spring[s] from not being able to inhabit old forms of behaviours without some distance” (Coward 93), works to sanction its articulation

(and the concomitant sexism, racism and homophobia, a point I will return to) precisely by means of a self-legitimising auto-deconstructive aesthetic. As I argued in my discussion of Fight

Club, this is a trend which allows a screening of the pivotal contradictions of white masculinity as both all and nothing - a contradiction that is itself quintessentially postmodern.

7.3. White Heterosexual Masculinity in Tarantino’s Cinema of Hyperreal Violence

In accordance with generic conventions, Tarantino’s gangster films present masculinity, 328 however raced, to be capable of sudden, unpredictable acts of violence.9 However, Tarantino's ultraviolent aesthetic self-consciously distinguishes itself from the ritualised violence of

Hollywood action formats or the glamorised violence of the traditional gangster movie.

Interestingly, since his films have been accused of screening hyperreal, cartoonish violence,

Tarantino defends his films by recourse to appeals to “real life,” stating that they reflect exactly the way that gangsters behave and that the duration of his screen violence - either uncomfortably protracted or else shockingly brief - “[stops] movie time and [plays] the violence out in real time.

Letting nothing get in the way of it and letting it happen the way real violence does” (qtd. in

Giroux, “Pulp Fiction” 308). As Manohla Dargis notes of Reservoir Dogs, “[w]hat makes the violence hurt isn’t some outrageous, literally deadening body count but the way Tarantino decelerates pain, squeezing it out drop by anguished drop” (“Who’s Afraid” 11). Indeed,

Reservoir Dogs seems to be structured around the time it takes a writhing Mr. Orange to bleed to death from a gun-shot wound to the stomach (Willis, High Contrast 191), his contorted face becoming whiter and whiter as his shirt gets redder and redder from the volumes of blood that soak his once chic suit (see figures 7.9 and 7.10). This is not the virility-affirming masochism that I outlined in my discussion of Hollywood films in chapter two; quite the opposite, since Mr.

Orange does not transcend physical pain or re-emerge triumphant.

In interviews, Tarantino refuses any causal link between real and reel violence.10 For

9 An interesting exception in Tarantino’s representation of masculinity is the world-weary but gentle and principled Max Cherry (Robert Forster) in Jackie Brown, a film where Tarantino shows himself capable of presenting rounded, three-dimensional characters. It is also important to stress that in his non-gangster films, women are equally violent, though often motivated by external factors or the desire for revenge. In True Romance, Alabama (Patricia Arquette), who has suffered physical abuse at the hands of her pimp, kills a hit man in self-defence in a particularly gruesome scene which shocked audiences precisely because it upset gender norms. Likewise in Natural Born Killers, in which Oliver Stone attempts to politicise a Tarantino script (resulting in a very public falling out with Tarantino, who even wanted his name removed from the credits), Mallory (Juliet Lewis) shares a lust for violence with Mickey (Woody Harrelson), though she is not the film’s “natural born killer” (see chapter 8). Both Kill Bill films are also structured around “The Bride’s” (Uma Thurman) revenge on her former lover after he killed her fiancé and shoots her in the head on her wedding day, stealing her unborn daughter in the process (!) – though she kills men and women indiscriminately, and women warriors in the film are often equally as dangerous (if not more) as men. 10 Tarantino has stated, “[i]t’s the easiest thing in the world to take a stand against violence, because it’s a horrible thing in real-life. But in literature or drama I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all. If you don’t like it, then don’t go to see it. Saying you don’t like violence in movies is like saying you don’t like dance sequences. It’s just one of the many things you can do in film” (qtd. in Bouzereau 233). 329 instance, in an interview with Dennis Hopper, Tarantino expresses approval of the fact that original Italian audiences used to laugh at the violence of Spaghetti westerns, adding, “[n]ow actually, the only people in America that take that attitude are black people. They don’t let violence affect them at all” (qtd. in Willis, High Contrast 212). Here, Tarantino homogenises and fetishises black spectators in a white-authored notion of black cool. Moreover, Willis notes that

Tarantino’s comment also links his admiration for black masculinity with the violence and brutality that dominate his films (High Contrast 212). Reflecting on this point, she further observes, “[i]nterestingly enough, dominant critical accounts of violence in productions authored by African Americans seem to find in it an excess of social meaning, where violence in

Tarantino's films is understood to function in a deficit of meaning, as a formal issue, rather than a content” (212). Indeed, Tarantino himself has asserted, “violence is a purely aesthetic thing. It has nothing political. There’s no morality involved. It’s purely aesthetic” (“Quentin Tarantino’s

Profile”). Comments such as these have not surprisingly angered those on the left, particularly feminist and gay critics and critics of colour, who (rightly) vehemently refute the notion that screen violence can unfold in a social vacuum and somehow free itself from associations that accrue around identity categories in the material world. Indeed, white heterosexual masculinity could be called the only identity category that escapes the “surplus symbolic value” of oppressed groups (Rogin qtd. in Shohat and Stam 183), though it may also be caught up in discourses of class that criminalise the urban or rural poor.

Black cultural theorist Henry A. Giroux, for example, is highly critical of what he terms

Tarantino’s “hyperreal violence,” a term which, I would contend, is more useful than the commonly applied “postmodern violence,” which fails to distinguish between what Hal Foster terms “postmodernism of resistance” and “postmodernism of reaction” (xii).11 “Hyperreal

11 For Foster, “postmodernism of reaction” is complicit with the neo-conservative ideology of late capitalism, whereas “postmodernism of resistance” uses a postmodern aesthetic to make significant political interventions (xii). An example of “postmodernism of resistance” would be Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1991), which employs 330 violence,” as Giroux defines it, is characterised by its gritty, guilt-free dialogue, its exploitation of seamy controversial issues, its self-legitimising parodic, intertextual, formalist strategies, its

“hard dose of cruelty and cynicism,” and its “endless streams of characters who thrive in a moral limbo and define themselves by embracing senseless acts of violence as a defining principle of life” (“Pulp Fiction” 304). By isolating violence from its wider social and political contexts,

Giroux argues, hyperreal violence allows audiences to “gaze at celluloid blood and gore and comfortably refuse any complicity or involvement for engaging the relationship between symbolic and real violence” (304).12

Giroux’s point is not the simplistic one that watching violence causes violence, a claim that would risk deflecting an analysis of poverty, institutionalised racism and sexism, alienation and other material causes of violence that neo-conservatives so easily sidestep by scapegoating screen violence and gangsta rap. Rather, for Giroux, such films are part and parcel of a rising culture of violence that has tangible social effects, in particular, fuelling the panic over and fear of minorities, the urban poor and immigrants that has consumed contemporary America (“Pulp

Fiction” 305; Impure Acts 84). Giroux thus follows Lawrence Grossberg’s Foucauldian understanding of culture as a crucial “site of production and struggle over power - where power is understood not necessarily in the form of domination” (qtd. in Giroux, Impure Acts 72) but as

“a productive and mediating force for the making and remaking of the diverse and interconnected social, political, and economic contexts that make up daily life” (Giroux, Impure

Acts 72). Agreeing with Stuart Hall, Giroux argues that to say that everything is within the

certain postmodern representational strategies in order to screen a damning indictment of police brutality and race relations in contemporary America. 12 Giroux distinguishes between three specific categories of cinematic violence in his article “Pulp Fiction and the Culture of Violence” (1995). As well as hyperreal violence, he refers to “ritualistic violence,” which he defines as the repetitious, formulaic, stereotypically white male, “campy, self-indulgent, and masturbatory” violence prevalent in 1980s action movies such as Die Hard (1988), in which Bruce Willis’s character kills 264 people (“Pulp Fiction” 301). Such violence requires only programmed responses, and is offered up as pure entertainment despite its alarming representational politics (302). Giroux uses the term “symbolic violence” for films that “combine the visceral and the reflective” and scrutinise the implications of violence (303). Giroux lists films such as Platoon (1986), Schindler's List (1993) and Unforgiven (1992) in this category.

331 discursive does not mean that everything is only discursive; rather, Foucault’s notion of the discursive not only problematises how meaning is given but also explores how such meaning

“translates into discernible material effects” that are “fully concretised in the structures of daily life” (102). As regards cinematic violence, such material effects might be the perpetuation of racial stereotypes that in turn support harsh discriminatory crime policies and increased incidents of police brutality (84). Giroux thus argues for politically responsible representations that rupture existing stereotypes and examine the political, social and economic conditions that foster violence in the first place. His framework is thus a useful one for analysing the ways in which representations of violence are always caught up in a circuit of discursive practices that revolve around the axis of identity categories. However, at the same time, his rigid demands for cinema do not allow for the force of potential oppositional readings or the workings of fantasy in film consumption.

The racial asymmetries of representations of violence are apparent in the white on white male violence of Reservoir Dogs. Not surprisingly, its overwhelmingly white male cast has meant that the film has received less critical commentary in terms of racialised violence than

Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown. Nevertheless, it would be a simplification to argue that white heterosexual masculinity is unmarked in this film, since, as I will argue below, it is represented as raced, gendered, classed and always constituted in relation to its others. Indeed, as Amy

Taubin notes of the film’s masochistic violence, “[i]t’s the privilege of white male culture to destroy itself, rather than to be destroyed by the other. Violence is the only privilege these underclass men have. It’s what allows them to believe that they’re the oppressor and not the oppressed (not female, not black, not homosexual)” (“Men’s Room” 5). The most controversial scene involves the inexplicably psychotic Mr. Blonde torturing a white cop. Mr. Blonde’s whiteness (emphasised by his name) prevents his twisted lust for violence being attributed to any racialised pathology, unlike the equally malicious Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) in Jackie Brown, 332 whose brutality could fuel pernicious racist stereotypes, though Mr. Blonde’s delight in torture could also be read as confirming classist stereotypes of working-class hyperbrutality, stereotypes

I discuss more fully in the following chapter. Mr. Blonde is given no psychological motivation; indeed, the flashback entitled “Mr. Blonde” is rather a red herring that teases with the promise of explanation that it refuses to deliver. Informing the cop that he will torture him not so much to get information but simply because he enjoys it (see figure 7.11), Mr. Blonde switches on the radio and breaks into a spontaneous dance to the 70s hit “Stuck in the Middle With You” - a self- conscious performance designed to chill both the cop and the film’s spectator precisely because of its ominous incongruity. With cold-blooded poise, Mr. Blonde then proceeds to mutilate the cop, though the camera slowly averts its eye in a Hitchcockian mode, refusing the tie-in shot of the mutilation itself, panning to the top corner of the warehouse, focusing on a painted warning that reads “watch your head,” a knowingness that implicates the spectator in his/her voyeurism as well as encouraging identification with the victim function. We are thus left to guess what fate has befallen the screaming cop until we are shown Mr. Blonde toying with and talking into a bloody severed ear. Mr. Blonde then jokes with mock concern, inserting homoerotic aggression into the scenario: “was that as good for you as it was for me?” The inappropriate, up-beat, diegetic music plays throughout this ordeal, until Mr. Blonde walks outside into an eerie silence, his steps tracked by an objective camera.13 As he fetches petrol from the boot of his car, and walks inside, the song again blares out, with Mr. Blonde shuffling a few dance steps before dousing the cop in petrol (see figure 7.12). Only then are we finally given the sight of the cop’s disfigured face. Surprisingly little gore is shown in the scene, its affective power residing in its departure from cinematic conventions. Like Hitchcock, Tarantino recognises the power of that which remains off-screen, which the imagination can make more macabre and chilling than those

13 As Jeff Dawson notes, “[n]ot since a rape was juxtaposed with ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ in Clockwork Orange has a piece of music been put to such a disturbing effect” (81).

333 events that unfold mimetically. Also like Hitchcock, Tarantino understands the masochistic as well as sadistic dimensions of spectatorship and has stated of the scene, “you’ve enjoyed the song, you’ve enjoyed the dance. Now you’ve got to take the hard stuff” (“Quentin Tarantino’s

Profile”). He has further suggested that the scene unsettles not because of the violence per se but because it makes the viewer a co-conspirator and leaves him/her unsure of how to react (qtd. in

Woods 47).14 As Sharon Willis writes of Tarantino’s films,

[t]weaking our internal social censorship mechanisms as they do by the

mismatches that they effect between the funny and the horrifying, the abject, or

the frightening, these films leave us to manage that affective excess, which we

may do by turning shock into embarrassment, or by taking satisfaction in the alibi

they provide, so we can feel that we are getting away with laughing when we

should not. (High Contrast 190)

This “affective excess” translates into rather different affects when the violence is no longer among white men, however. For instance, in Jackie Brown comic pleasure in seeing the incompetent Louis (Robert de Niro) being mercilessly taunted by Melanie (Bridget Fonda) for forgetting where he had parked the getaway car is unexpectedly ruptured when Louis shoots at her off-screen. The shock-factor of this scene often translates into embarrassed laughter that stems from viewing discomfort and Tarantino’s break with the worn-out formulaic conventions of mainstream Hollywood violence. What is perhaps most disturbing about this scene is its refusal to offer a tie-in shot of Melanie’s body or any identification with the victim function (her death is lent none of the tragic dimensions of Mr. Orange’s in Reservoir Dogs, for instance). This

14 Tarantino states, “[t]he thing I’m really proud of in the torture scene in Dogs […] is the fact that it’s truly funny until the point that he cuts the cop’s ear off. While he’s up there doing that little dance to “Stuck in the Middle With You,” I pretty much defy anybody to watch and not enjoy it. [….] And then when he starts cutting the ear off, that’s not played for laughs. The cop’s pain is not played like a big joke, it’s played for real. And then after that when he [Mr. Blonde] makes a joke, when he starts talking into the ear and the cop’s pain, they’re all tied together. And that’s why I think the scene caused such a sensation, because you don’t know how you’re supposed to feel when you see it” (qtd. in Woods 47).

334 punitive murder at the hands of a man who offers our only point of identification cannot escape gender implications. On the one hand, it feeds into regressive male fantasies of silencing emasculating women. At the same time, it underscores the fragility of Louis’s male ego, allowing the film to have its proverbial cake and eat it too: the shock factor and self-legitimising critique. The scene would also have had very different ideological implications if Ordell, a black male, had killed Melanie. Yet while Louis’s aggression escapes racial encodings, though is enmeshed in discourses of class, it is worth noting that the affectless, bland, laconic Louis is the apotheosis of the vacuous, depthless white male, and Robert de Niro’s understated performance is played off against Samuel Jackson’s dynamism and colourful phraseology. Recalling that

Melanie, with whom Louis had been having an affair, is Ordell’s “blond-haired surfer girl,” whose whiteness, Ordell believes, affords him status as a black male (that is, access to some of the privileges of whiteness), it becomes difficult to separate Louis’s uncontrollable anger from insecurities about the erosion of the authority and privileges that are supposed to inhere in both his gender and race. Indeed, as Susan Fraiman notes, in Tarantino’s films, coolness, to which most characters aspire, “involves a distinctly masculine desire for mastery, in which domination of the feminine is tied up with white male anxiety about, among other things, black masculinity”

(3).

White male violence against black men is also insistently racialised throughout Pulp

Fiction. A key example is when Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin. This scene, played for its shock value, provoked uncomfortable laughter in most cinematic screenings, sanctioned by Jules and Vincent’s lack of concern about Marvin but panic over the car that has been splattered with blood and fragments of flesh, brains and bone (see figures 7.13 and 7.14). For Tarantino, this scene is all part and parcel of his delight in generic subversion: “Sure you don’t expect someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger to be sitting in a car and all of a sudden to accidentally let off a few rounds from his Uzi chiga-chigga-chugga killing five people at a bus stop, but it happens in my 335 movies because I like taking genre characters and putting them in real-life situations for comic effect” (qtd. in Shone 51). While Marvin’s racial identity might have been read as coincidental up until this point, when they drive to Jimmy’s (Quentin Tarantino) house to embark on the clean-up campaign, Jimmy foregrounds Marvin’s blackness in controversy-courting dialogue, objecting to his house being used for “dead nigger storage.” I have already discussed Tarantino’s use of the word “nigger” in the previous chapter. Here, I am concerned with the accentuation of

Marvin’s blackness by a white character, and one played by Tarantino himself no less. What is of course outrageous in this scene is that its transgression is dependent on the suggestion that the death of a black male is insignificant. Nonetheless, it might also cause an uncomfortable affective overload at the ease with which Marvin’s death at the hands of a white man had provoked uneasy laughter a few scenes earlier, inserting the possibility that Marvin’s blackness is not in fact beside the point. Unlike the Hollywood action tradition, race in Tarantino’s films is never swiftly displaced onto other differences (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) and/or officially ignored. Tarantino thus offers a marked departure from the neo-conservative demands for colour-blindness, demands which want to sweep the existence of racial difference and therefore racism under the assimilationist carpet. Yet, however symptomatic Tarantino’s films might be of an America in which race is an ongoing drama that also preoccupies white males, this recognition comes at a heavy price, since race tends to be referenced in moments of physical and verbal aggression, most often in abusive hate speech (a point I will return to).

Similar strategies of foregrounding race are at work in the scene where Butch and the ultra cool mafia boss, Marsellus Wallace, whom he has attempted to swindle, are captured by the two white racist sadist hill-billy rapists (a stereotype of “white trash” masculinity if ever there was one). This scene of white male violence is racially encoded from the outset, when the rednecks, one of whom is a cop, are coded as racist, deliberately choosing Marsellus as their first victim through a fixed rendition of “eeny meeny miney moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” As 336

Butch manages to struggle free, Marsellus’s agonising cries coming through the door of an adjacent room prompt Butch to rescue the man that he had previously attempted to run down with his car. Humour is then derived from Butch’s slow but deliberate choice of weapon and his final selection of the least appropriate, a samurai sword (Willis, High Contrast 200), all of which is accompanied by an up-beat rockabilly soundtrack. This pleasure is then rudely interrupted when Butch opens the door, with suspenseful slowness, revealing the sight of Marsellus being raped (a reference to Boorman’s Deliverance [1972]). In the words of Sharon Willis, “[w]e get caught laughing at an anal rape - caught, figuratively, with our pants down - and at the very moment when Marsellus is literally caught with his pants down” (High Contrast 200) (see figure

7.15). While Bruce Willis, who imports his tough wise guy persona from Die Hard films, gets to ride off into the sunset on one of the rednecks’ motorbike (the ultimate horror of anal rape being enough to heal the rift between the two men), it is the black stud stereotype (whose castration had been hinted at on his first appearance by a shot of a plaster stuck on the back of his shaved head [see figure 7.16]) that is ritually humiliated by a white cop - the representative of white supremacist state power. For bell hooks, whose views sum up the feeling of a significant number of black critics,

in case viewers haven’t figured out that Marsellus ain’t got what it takes, the film

turns him into a welfare case - another needy victim who must ultimately rely on

the kindness of strangers (i.e. Butch, the neoprimitive white coloniser, another

modern day Tarzan) to rescue him from the rape-in-progress that is his symbolic

castration, his return to the jungle, to a lower rung on the food chain (Reel to Real

48-49).

For better or for worse, Tarantino does not steer clear of these racial implications, however. In revenge Marcellus shoots his rapist in the crotch to the tune of “I’ll get a couple of hard pipe fitting niggers to go to work on Mr. Rapist here with a blowtorch and pliers” (see 337 figure 7.17). As Willis notes, “[i]f the film had any ambition to sanitise the anal rape of its racial overcodings,” Marsellus’s threat “certainly reinstates the racialised edge of this homoerotic attack” (High Contrast 200). Indeed, with quintessential postmodern self-consciousness,

Tarantino’s films knowingly deconstruct themselves, pointing to potential interpretations that in a Hollywood text might remain repressed, a strategy which pre-empts critical readings and then screens them as surface. Dana Polan is right to note that the scene certainly does not endorse

Marsellus's humiliation and “is not handled with the jokey and gleeful relish that other acts of violence receive in the film,” and rather than regard the scene as easy racism, it is perhaps more appropriate to view it through the lens of classism and homophobia (62). Certainly we are positioned to identify with Butch, the white rescuing hero, who slices the stomach of the sexually aroused, lip-licking redneck watching the rape, a scene that smacks of gay-bashing. Indeed, the representation of the hill-billies reveals that white masculinity is always also marked by discourses of class and sexuality, not just gender and race. Arguments over whether the scene itself is an enactment or performance of racism and/or homophobia and/or classism revolve around whether Tarantino's formal strategies of distance and irony are sufficient to insulate the scene from such charges. Certainly, the laughter that accompanied the close-up of Marsellus’s gagged face as he was being violently assaulted in the screening I attended (and subsequent screenings with students, the majority of whom were white males), while partly caused by sheer embarrassment, is difficult to divorce from its racial and sexual dynamics of a black male being ritually humiliated by a white male; in other words, there is more than a sneaking suspicion that

Tarantino’s cult appeal is in part due to his packaging up of racism and homophobia as

“marketable concepts” for a “hip” audience (G. Foster 64). Nonetheless, as Polan points out,

Marsellus soon regains his manly poise, illustrating Tarantino’s unequivocal admiration for all things black (62): “The last image we see of him is not that different from the first time he appeared in the film: viewed from behind, Marsellus is a massive figure of power who signals 338 goodbye to Butch with a calculated flick of the hand that indicates he is still a figure of cool control and resolve” (63).

7.4. The Violence of Hate Speech: The Instabilities of White Masculinity

Pulp Fiction’s rape scene screens the homoerotophobic racial violence which runs throughout Tarantino’s films, though usually only at the level of dialogue. In chapter six, I discussed this in relation to Tarantino's tendency to screen what lies repressed in Hollywood films texts - that the white male emulation of black masculinity is always caught up in a circuit of homoerotic desire that is often rerouted as racism and/or homophobia. In the case of

Marsellus’s rape, it is important that the rapists are also racists who would seemingly have most to lose from any “contamination” of whiteness. In chapter one, I noted similar structures in

Falling Down, where Nick the neo-fascist imagines himself to be a black inmate raping D-FENS, and in American History X, where white neo-fascists punish Derek for race treason by raping him in the shower to make him into a “nigger.” What these screenings of bi-racial anal rape by white racists suggest is how intimately connected we are to those we hate, even if it is by virtue of their function of constituting what we are not; as Jonathan Dollimore puts it, “[t]o be against

(opposed to) is also to be against (close-up, in proximity to) or, in other words, up against”

(Sexual Dissidence 229). In this section, I would like to explore how verbal violence erupts in

Tarantino’s films when the borders of white heterosexual male identity are rendered unstable by a polluting proximity to its others.

The positing of a white male body whose boundaries are permeable and susceptible to contamination is most evident in the homophobic hate speech, often with racist and misogynistic overcodings, which surfaces in Tarantino’s white male characters’ fascination with and aversion to anal sex between men, thus indicating the extent to which white masculinity in his films is not only locked in competition with femininity and black masculinity, but also homosexuality. To 339 date, Tarantino’s only obviously homosexual characters are the rapists of Pulp Fiction, both of whom are violently dispatched (gay men would seem to have none of the “cool” of black masculinity to import into his films). But homosexuality figures obsessively in dialogue. As with the racist or misogynistic charges, whether the films themselves are homophobic or performances of homophobia, is a hotly debated issue, though I would argue that Tarantino’s

“hip” dialogue offered up as sheer performance, the lack of space inscribed for critical intervention, as well as the fact that his only homosexual characters in the homosocial gangster world are rapists, certainly means that his films risk being consumed homophobically, whatever

Tarantino’s authorial intentions might be (Tarantino is uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of homosexuality). As might be expected, homophobic hate speech works to strengthen homosocial bonds and heterosexual identifications; indeed, in Pulp Fiction, the horror of anal penetration by a man is sufficient to secure bi-racial bonding between two sworn enemies, Butch and Marsellus. Thus it would seem that the more homosocial the ties, the more homophobia is required to police them, demonstrating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s insight that homosociality and homosexuality are mutually imbricated, often “assum[ing] interlocking or mirroring shapes”

(20).15 Sedgwick’s comment can help illuminate Tarantino’s gangsters’ obsession with bi-racial male-on-male anal sex. For example, in Pulp Fiction, Jules asks one of the white students who has attempted to swindle Marsellus out of drug money, “Does Marsellus look like a bitch? …

Then why you tryin' to fuck him like a bitch?” The irony, of course, is that it is indeed Marsellus who ends up being “fucked like a bitch,” while white male anxieties about anal penetration

15 Only in Reservoir Dogs does Tarantino engage in a more poignant representation of homoeroticism, via the relationship between Mr. White and Mr. Orange, a vehicle for the film’s theme of loyalty and betrayal. Mr. White tends to the dying Mr. Orange with touching affection, tenderly brushing his hair and cradling him in his arms in tightly framed shots that connote intimacy (see figure 7.10). The final shot of the film is a lingering close-up of the distraught Mr. White, who, upon learning that Mr. Orange is an undercover cop, shoots him in the stomach with a cry of anguish, before being blown away himself by police. 340 remain at the level of homoerotophobic fantasy.16 Reservoir Dogs includes a telling example of a white-authored fantasy of bi-racial anal sex between men. When Vic Vega/Mr. Blonde, newly released from prison, meets up with Nice-Guy-Eddie, the two men’s verbal posturing in front of

Nice-Guy-Eddie’s father, Joe Cabot, soon transforms into a physical tussle, whose aggression is coded with a frenzy of homoerotic desire, not only implicitly through Mantegna’s painting of St.

Sebastian on the office wall (Bruzzi 89) or through the sudden shift from long shot to close-up as the men wrestle on the floor, but also with explicit postmodern knowingness:

Eddie: Daddy, he tried to fuck me. […] You’ve been fuckin’ punks up the ass, I’d

think you’d appreciate a nice prime rib when you see it. […]

Vic: If I was a butt cowboy, I wouldn’t even throw you to my posse. I might

break you in, but I’d make you my dog’s bitch.

Eddie: All that black semen been poke up your ass backed up so far in your brain

it’s comin’ out your mouth. It’s a sad sight, Daddy, a man walkin’ into

prison white and comin’ out talking like a fuckin’ nigger.

In this dialogue, homoerotic desire is abnegated by being transformed into homophobic and racist abuse. But what again is articulated in this exchange is anxiety over the fragile borders of white masculinity. The abject image of semen underscores that whiteness, like all categories, is leaky; it can be contaminated just by its mere proximity to blackness (even if, or perhaps because “race” is posited as a performative category). This recalls Fanon’s famed account of a child expressing fear upon seeing a Negro before him (111-12), a fear with its roots in the notion that “the virgin sanctity of whiteness will be endangered by that proximity” (Butler,

“Endangered/Endangering” 18). In fact, in this dialogue, being anally penetrated is posited as the equivalent of being blackened, though, as Pulp Fiction’s bi-racial male rape makes clear, this is a

16 True Romance’s Clarence asks a similar question to a potential male business partner, where the notion that sex between men is feminising is made abundantly clear: “Do I look like a beautiful blonde with big tits and an arse tastes like French vanilla ice-cream? […] So why you telling me all this bullshit? You wanna fuck me?”

341 one-way process; as with the “one-drop rule,” whiteness can be blackened with alarming ease, while blackness can never be fully whitened. The precariousness of the myth of white racial purity is precisely why Mr. Blonde’s alleged crime of “speaking black” is so threatening.

Bearing in mind that in Lacanian terms, aggressivity directed towards the other is always rooted in aggressivity against the self, it is certainly possible to read this homophobic and racist diatribe to be expressive of insecurities pivoting around the instabilities of heterosexual and racial identifications. Interestingly, these anxieties are all expressed in corporeal terms. One reason is no doubt the fact that “[w]hite supremacy is a fleshy ideology; it’s very much about bodies”

(Stokes 133). In the above scene, this is represented in discourse that designates the undesirable permeable and amorphous body as black, feminine and homosexual, thereby shoring up a solid, impenetrable white heterosexual male body in opposition. This inevitably recalls Theweleit’s arguments that the fascist male desire for a hard body is rooted in the male subject’s fear of the unbounded pre-Oedipal body, fear which often translates into violence against those who threaten the ego’s sense of a masterful, unified self (1: 45).

Reservoir Dogs is a particularly interesting filmic example of this process since, as Amy

Taubin notes, it is an insularly white male film: women get no more than thirty seconds of screen time and the only person of colour is Mr. Orange’s police chief; nonetheless, not a minute goes by without references to either “niggers,” “jungle bunnies,” male rape, and castrating women

(“Men’s Room” 4). Presumably a conscious strategy, this screens Tarantino’s understanding of white heterosexual masculinity as always marked by the categories of gender, race and sexuality, though this recognition is achieved through abusive hate speech, making it, in bell hooks’s words, “multiculturalism with a chic neofascist twist” (Reel to Real 49). Mr. Pink, for example, defines his notion of professionalism (coded white) against an image of black male posturing; angered by Mr. Blonde and Mr. White’s bickering, he states, “You guys act like a bunch of fuckin’ niggers. You ever work a job with a bunch of niggers? They're just like you two, always 342 fightin’, always sayin’ they're gonna kill one another.” At the same time, this outburst suggests that an underlying fear is that as members of an urban underclass, these “dogs” also suffer from the anxiety that they are not quite white enough.

Similar verbal aggression erupts over the fears concerning the ease with which white masculinity can be contaminated in True Romance when Worley (Dennis Hopper) embarks on a controversy-courting, suicidal rant that aims at insulting Mafioso Don Vincenzo’s (Christopher

Walken) Sicilian ethnicity. Remarking to the unnervingly unruffled Don Vincenzio that

“Sicilians were spawned by niggers,” Worley continues,

You see, way back then, Sicilians were like the wops from Northern Italy. They

all had blonde hair and blue eyes. But then the Moors moved in there, they

changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin’ with Sicilian women that

they changed the whole bloodline forever. That’s why blond hair and blue eyes

became black hair and dark skin. You know it’s absolutely amazing to me to

think that, to this day, hundreds of years later, Sicilians still carry that nigger

gene. I’m quotin’ history. It’s a fact. It’s written. Your ancestors are niggers.

Your great, great, great grandmother fucked a nigger and she had a half nigger

kid. Now, if that’s a fact, tell me, am I lyin’? ‘Cause you, you are part eggplant.

Like Jimmy’s tirade, this rant is offered up as sheer performance, which gestures at sanctioning any pleasure that its very transgressiveness unleashes. Whereas Jules seemed to use “nigger” as pure descriptor, Worley uses it as racist abuse, qualifying the efficacy of any such distancing devices (see figure 7.18).17 Indeed, Worley’s rant bears an uncomfortable resemblance to white supremacist discourses, whose major locus of anxiety is miscegenation, anxiety which revolves around control over the white woman’s body.18 This ethnic/racial slur thus functions by playing

17 Tarantino defended this speech by claiming that the story was “funny” and in any case, told to him by a black man, as if that allowed him to escape the implications of this mix of ethnic insult and racist abuse (qtd. in Dawson 117). 18 For an overview of white supremacist literature, especially the topic of miscegenation, see Ferber. 343 on white male anxieties that the regulation of whiteness is in the hands of women, not men.

Thus, as Richard Dyer has noted, heterosexuality is the site in which whiteness is reproduced but also the site where it can be contaminated (White 20). This insult to Sicilian ethnicity functions precisely through the suggestion that as dark-skinned Europeans, Sicilians do not have access to fully-fledged whiteness, a point that the film later seems to confirm when the Sicilians are dubbed “wops” or “guineas” by Anglo-American cops. At the same time, Worley is coded as

“white trash” and is also exempt from the privileges that whiteness is supposed to bring. As

David Roediger points out, whiteness and property are yoked together in the popular imaginary, which might help explain why many poor whites hang onto whiteness as the only property they own (Colored 24, 240).

7.5. Phallic Women, Infantilism and Aggression in Tarantino’s Gangster Chic

Much like homosexuals and people of colour, women circulate only at the level of dialogue in Reservoir Dogs, and their function is primarily to cement white homosocial ties in what is often misogynistic discourse.19 For instance, when the all-white gangsters discuss the differences between white and black women, Mr. Pink authoritatively states, “What a white bitch’ll put up with a black bitch wouldn’t put up with for a minute. They’ve got a line and if you cross it they fuck you up,” to which Mr. White replies, “If this is such a truism, then how come every nigger I know treats his woman like a piece of shit.” Thus two stereotypes of African-

19 When asked why there were no women in Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino replied, “it would be like women turning up on the submarine in Das Boot. There’s no place for them” (qtd. in Taylor 21). It is important to stress that in Tarantino’s non-gangster films women are certainly not marginalised. Indeed, both Jackie Brown and Kill Bill unfold largely through the point of view of resourceful, sassy women. In Pulp Fiction, though, according to generic conventions, women are secondary characters. For instance, Marsellus's white wife, Mia, whom Vincent takes out for dinner at Marsellus’s behest, is used as a test of Vincent’s loyalty rather than as a character in her own right, as the title of the segment - “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife” - makes abundantly clear. Mia, of course, reveals that women can sever as well as cement homosocial bonds. The other role of women in Pulp Fiction, as Willis points out, would seem to be to create comic situations that the men have to deal with (High Contrast 205). For example, Fabienne forgets to pack Butch’s watch, setting the Butch-Marsellus confrontation in action, while Mia’s heroin overdose creates comedy out of Vincent’s frantic attempts to save her, more because of his worries about Marsellus's wrath than concern for Mia herself.

344

Americans are immediately posited - black masculinity as abusive and black femininity as emasculating. The image of the sexualised, castrating black woman continues when Nice-Guy

Eddie tells an anecdote about a black “man-eater-upper” cocktail waitress named Elois, who stuck a man’s penis to his stomach with crazy glue. That no man can resist Elois, though, articulates a white male masochistic desire to be dominated by an authoritative black woman.20

The black phallic woman reappears in Pulp Fiction’s “The Bonnie Situation,” in which

Jules and Vincent desperately attempt to clean up the bloody mess made by the remains of

Marvin’s body before Bonnie gets home from work. Humour stems from the fear instilled in these toughened gangsters at the idea of incurring a black woman’s wrath, with Jules ringing up

Marcellus insisting, “you’ve got to understand how explosive a factor this Bonnie situation is.”

Marsellus agrees and sends in an expert, the anal Mr. Wolf (possibly a reference to Freud’s

Wolfman case [Orgeron 38]), to supervise the clean-up job. As Tarantino himself explains (in an unfortunate, but no doubt knowing analogy between a dead black male and shit), Jules and

Vincent are like boys who have messed up the house and are afraid of their mother’s impending fury: “You spilled shit on the carpet - clean up the mess you made from screwing around before your mom gets home” (qtd. in Gavin Smith, “You Know” 101). For Sharon Willis, this “central address to absent feminine authority might explain some of the pleasures of Tarantino’s films for the young white males who largely constitute his fan audience” since it both addresses but also wards off the pre-Oedipal figure of the phallic mother (High Contrast 207). What interests Willis about the scene is that this parodic address to mommy shows “the father to be deficient,” even though throughout the film it is Marsellus who acts as the film’s figure of authority, and Mr.

Wolf as his substitute (205).

In Willis’s psychoanalytic reading, Tarantino’s films obsessively rehearse Oedipal

20 Tarantino, then, does not avoid mixed-raced desire, though it is only the romance between Jackie and Max Cherry in Jackie Brown that screens bi-racial relationships (indeed any relationship) as genuine affection.

345 structures, in particular through appeals to paternal authority (Joe Cabot, Mr. Orange’s boss,

Elvis, Mr. Wolf, Marsellus), but at the same time are often interrupted by ferocious pre-Oedipal desires (202). For instance, Willis observes that both Tarantino’s films and characters take pleasure in the abject, with defiling and cleaning acting as “central organising processes for the these films - at the literal and the figurative levels” (192). Examples include Jules and Vincent’s white shirts and white leather car upholstery smeared with garish blood, the abject bodily fluids of Mia’s overdose, or the sheer number of bathroom scenes, the bathroom being a site where blood and violence are connected to anal eroticism and smearing (189-92). Regressive anal and oral desires are particularly evident in Pulp Fiction. Anal eroticism is played out not only through the homoerotophobic obsession with male anal sex, but also in “The Gold Watch” sequence, where a young Butch is visited by Captain Koons, played by Christopher Walken, who imports his 70s persona of “ruined masculinity in search of rehabilitation” (Willis 195), particularly his role in The Deer Hunter (1978). Koons gives Butch his paternal legacy of a gold watch to the accompaniment of his Vietnam narrative, which begins in all earnestness and then veers off unexpectedly as he elaborates on how long, as a prisoner of war, he “hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up [his] arse.” Polan and Willis also note that bathrooms function as structuring devices in Tarantino’s films; for example, in Pulp Fiction, every time that Vincent emerges from the toilet he finds the scene he left radically changed (30; High Contrast 192).21

Likewise, Devin Orgeron suggests that Pulp Fiction is structured scatologically, not only as regards Tarantino’s “uncontrollable, diarrheic ‘flow’ of words” (33) but also his postmodern practice of “[giving] back, in digested form, the culture that he has consumed” (31). As regards oral desires, Tarantino’s films are littered with fetishising discussions of food (Polan 49), such as

Jules waxing lyrical about hamburgers or Vincent’s admiration of a seven-dollar milkshake.22

21 Orgeron even argues that the film’s narrative is structured around Vincent’s bowel movements (37). 22 It is thus perhaps little wonder that numerous critics of Pulp Fiction have compared watching the film with the indulgent pleasures of gorging on fast food (Hirsch 271; Orgeron 33). 346

The infantilism of Tarantino’s male characters provides a useful framework for viewing his films, in particular the unpredictable eruptions of verbal and physical violence. While his

Pulp Fiction characters often wander around with a “wide-eyed innocence” (for instance,

Butch’s witnessing of a primal scene with Marsellus’s rape) or engage in babyish romantic banter (Butch and Fabienne [Maria de Medeiros], Pumpkin [Tim Roth] and Honey Bunny

[Amanda Plumber]), the flipside of this is often a sadistic cruelty (Polan 47-51). Tarantino himself has stated that his macho gangsters are “a cross between criminals and actors and children playing roles … little boys with real guns”: “If you ever saw kids playing - three little kids playing Starsky and Hutch interrogating a prisoner - you’ll probably see more real, honest moments happening than you would ever see on that show, because those kids would be so into it” (qtd. in Gavin Smith, “You Know” 101). Tarantino foregrounds this infantilism, as a condescending Mr. Blonde interrupts the testosterone tussle between Mr. Pink and Mr. White stating, “You kids shouldn’t play so rough” (see figure 7.19). Likewise, Joe Cabot informs the dogs that they are like “a bunch of broads in a schoolyard,” an insult that also works through designating them female. Outpourings of obscenities can also be understood through the lens of infantilism, with Tarantino’s characters like kids taking relish in “defying the rules of propriety”

(Polan 57) and uttering what parents wouldn’t want to hear.

Willis suggests that Tarantino’s infantile male characters might well account for the appeal of his films to female spectators:

If the absence of women [...] does not put off female spectators, it may be because

Tarantino’s films offer a masculinity whose worst enemy is itself. Or, it may be

because the film interpellates women spectators into the reassuring posture of

judge, adjudicator, or evaluator. In this case, self-deconstructing adolescent white

masculinity is on parade before the discerning, and perhaps satisfied feminine

gaze, a gaze that can take its distance from a transgressive eruption designed 347

precisely to provoke her. (High Contrast 207)

The fact that infantilism is associated with white masculinity, while black masculinity is figured as the epitome of cool and black femininity aligned with phallic womanhood (Elois, Christy

Love, Pam Griers, Jackie Brown, Bonnie) might also help explain Tarantino’s appeal to certain black audiences. Yet, at the same time, it undoubtedly undergrids the pleasures of Tarantino’s film for his largely young white male fan base. I am not only referring to Willis’s argument that

Tarantino’s films both address and ward off the phallic mother (207). I would add that despite gesturing at a fragmented, fragile masculinity, infantilism can paradoxically function to create a vision of (white) masculine “cool.” Susan Fraiman makes a similar point, grounding “cool” masculinity in the transgression of maternal authority: “in Tarantino, the flight from mother love and intimacy generally is unmitigated by even pro-formal appeals to feminism” so that he

“dramatises quite starkly the male developmental logic underlying the cool person” (xvii).

Fraiman argues that cool masculinity is best represented by the teenage boy’s anxious and histrionic desire to separate from his mother, who is posited as the personification of uncool

(xii). She further suggests that violence in Pulp Fiction is in part driven by a desire to explore white male need and vulnerability, but also by a desire to return men to “a state of cool imperviousness” (3).

I would also locate this representation of adolescent white heterosexual masculinity elsewhere. At a time when America is embroiled in culture wars over politicised notions of identity, Tarantino’s self-conscious strategy of flouting political correctness, often in the mouths of white male members of the urban working-class, no doubt accounts for his popularity with certain young white males (among others), who are thrilled at being allowed to get away with laughing at or enjoying things that are normally prohibited. One potential viewing position constructed by Tarantino, therefore, is that of child or adolescent, a position that allows guilt-free pleasures in physical and verbal violence and potentially offensive humour. Tarantino’s films 348 disregard such restrictions and attempt, through stylistic innovation, actively to elicit the uneasy residue and excesses that prohibition usually leaves behind. This recalls Freud’s theorising of jokes as a means of voicing aggression that is inhibited by social interdiction. Using racism and sexism as dominant paradigms, Freud states that “the joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible” (Jokes 147). In view of the infantilism of

Tarantino’s white male characters, it is also interesting to note that Freud regarded jokes as a means of accessing pleasures from “the mood of our childhood […] when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life” (302) - that is, a time before social prohibition, and, in the case of Tarantino, a time before the demands of political correctness, which would now seem to act as the dominant discourse that regulates the “sayable” and “unsayable.” A similar trend can be found in the whiter-than-white gross-out film cycle, such as There’s Something about

Mary (1998) or American Pie (1998). Gwendolyn Foster notes that white bodies are often a source of humour because of their abject leakiness and instability (22). I would add that these bodies tend to be figured as white adolescent male bodies. For example, American Pie is replete with examples of male characters masturbating, ejaculating (often prematurely), vomiting or accidentally drinking semen. The scene that gives the film its title has its virgin hero masturbate into a fresh-out-of-the-oven apple pie because he’s been told that it is like “third base” (vaginal penetration), only to be interrupted by his father, causing them both to panic about mom returning home to find her pie looking rather the worse for wear (Merck, “Mom’s Apple Pie”).

These gross-out films lack the sophistication of Tarantino’s cinema, but function similarly by encouraging us to laugh at the white male characters’ sexism and homophobia, with their immaturity acting as a self-legitimising defence. What this trend of violating the codes of political correctedness and good taste would seem to bear out, therefore, is Butler’s observation that prohibition is what “fantasy loves most,” and that restrictions often only displace and reroute the violence they attempt to control (“Force of Fantasy” 111, 119). 349

Sharon Willis rightly states that “Tarantino’s films are nothing if not symptomatic” (High

Contrast 207). He has white phallic masculinity auto-deconstruct before our eyes, though parody and intertextuality prevent this fragility or infantilism being treated too seriously. He problematises traditional modes of consumption, but his films are also prime examples of a cynical postmodern ennui; as bell hooks puts it, Tarantino “would have everyone see racism, sexism, homophobia but behave as if none of that shit really matters” (Reel to Real 47). His screening of aggressive racialised masculinities, however violent, misogynistic and homophobic, is also symptomatic of the fact that gender and race are never irrelevant in the hybrid terrain of the US, even for white males. What thus makes Tarantino interesting is his understanding of white heterosexual masculinity as inextricably enmeshed in discourses of gender, race, sexuality and class. Aggression in his films most often erupts when white heterosexual masculinity is seen as unstable (racially impure, emasculated, deconstructed, threatened by the homoerotic desire which underpins the homosocial gangster universe), undesirable (inferior to black masculinity, vacuous, sterile), or dependent on its others for self-definition, with violence being the only means these white heterosexual male characters have of policing and regulating the always precarious borders of their identity.

350

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hollow Men: White Masculinity in Contemporary Serial Killer Movies

8.1. Gendering and Racing the Serial Killer

Copycat (Jon Amiel 1995) opens with renowned criminal psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson

(Sigourney Weaver) giving her stock lecture on serial killers in which she explains that serial killers murder for recognition and power, usually over women, who constitute the majority of victims; with each killing leaving them unfulfilled, they kill again, driven by the hope that next time might be perfect. To highlight the group that poses most risk, Helen asks all male members of the audience to stand, and then invites all of those under 20 or over 35 and those of Asian and

African-American descent to sit down, an exercise designed to highlight that 90% of serial killers are youngish white males. Noting that most women in the audience would probably date the men still standing, Helen adds that the majority of serial killers appear to be totally “normal” on the surface. What interests me here is not only the unusual foregrounding of the whiteness and maleness of serial killing but also the suggestion that there is something about white masculinity that makes it fertile terrain for the spawning of this horrendous crime. Helen implicitly links the apparent “normality” of the serial killer with the invisibility afforded by white masculinity. At the same time, she suggests that this very anonymity is intrinsic to the pathology, since serial killers kill precisely to gain recognition. In other words, undergridding her lecture is the suggestion that white masculinity is a hollow, depleted identity, which, in the serial killer, produces a violent chain of acts intent on attaining a form of subjectivity that always eludes him.

Helen’s speech follows official statistics on serial killing. As Richard Dyer notes, while exact statistics are contested, most revisions are only able to demonstrate small increases in 351 female and non-white serial killers (Seven 38).1 Filmic incarnations of the serial killer follow suit, with a few obvious exceptions, such as the erotic thrillers Basic Instinct (1992) and Body of

Evidence (1993), which seem intent on screening the monstrous threat posed by sexually active women in worn-out narratives of white male victimhood, and the recent Monster (2003), based on real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, which, unlike the erotic thrillers, places her murders in a context of patriarchal abuse and class injustice. Nonetheless, the fact that normative white masculinity is the universal subjectivity allows the maleness and whiteness of serial killing, both on and off screen, to remain obscured in discourses of individual pathology or more generalised discussions about the violence endemic to American society.

I would like to insert the whiteness as well as the maleness of serial killing into my analysis of the serial killer movie in order to explore how the genre articulates anxieties about white heterosexual masculinity at the turn of the millennium. It is my contention that these films, which self-consciously interrogate our voyeuristic fascination with the serial killer in narratives wherein private fantasies erupt onto the public arena, have much to tell us about sites of collective desires and fears, not only to do with violence, but also gender, sexuality, race and class. To be more specific, however reactionary or exploitative these films might be, if a mainstream film like Copycat can foreground the whiteness and maleness of serial killers, serial killer films might well explore, however implicitly, some of the anxieties about white masculinity that circulate in the contemporary US imaginary. On the surface, these killers have little to tell us about normative white masculinity, since they occupy a position of monstrous pathology. At the same time, they point to what must be excluded for the constitution of normative white masculinity, thus mapping out its potential leakiness as well as underscoring its dependence on its others to shore up its borders. Thus, while on the one hand, those films

1 Nonetheless, some researchers have argued that female serial killing is more prevalent than once thought, but that its modus operandi differ from male serial killing (such as the use of poison), and it is thus excluded from most statistics. See Skaprec. 352 working within the generic conventions of the inaugural slasher film demonise their white male serial killer through discourses of sexual deviance or “white trash,” thus insulating middle-class white heterosexual masculinity (and, by extension, the patriarchal state) from complicity in serial violence, it is nonetheless interesting that positive representations of white heterosexual males are rather thin on the ground in these films, even among representatives of the Law. Moreover, alongside representations of the serial killer as other, the 90s witnessed a competing trend of screening the serial killer through overdetermined images of normative white masculinity, often to express concerns about the technologised, mass-mediated, affectless, depthless postmodern subject, who, in popular cinematic representations, tends to be epitomised by a middle-class white heterosexual male.

8.2. Sexually Deviant Serial Killers

The common trend of marking the screen serial killer monstrous through representations of non-phallic sexuality has its roots in Peeping Tom (Michael Powell 1960) and Psycho (Alfred

Hitchcock 1960), whose legacies are evident in the slasher film and its upmarket relation, the 90s serial killer movie, which was made respectable with the critical and commercial successes of the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme 1991). Psychosexual killers are invariably posited as products of a sick family, ensnared in Oedipal dramas that prevent them from achieving phallic subjectivity, as we see with Peter Foley (Michael McNamara) in Copycat,

Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes) in Red Dragon (2002), and Carl (Vincent D’Onoforio) in The Cell

(2000), to name but a few. As Carol Clover has argued, in both low and high slasher, the masculinity of the serial killer is “severely qualified”: however phallically encoded the stabbing and slashing of female victims might be, it always belies the fact that for these killers phallic subjectivity is ever elusive (Men, Women and Chainsaws 47). While this implicitly celebrates the values of phallic masculinity that the killers can never approximate, and is often accompanied by 353 an othering of sexual deviance, it nonetheless problematises the commonsense assumption that male viewers enjoy these films solely because they identify with the sadistic killer. Psycho’s

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) kills women that sexually arouse him because he has psychically introjected the persona of the castrating mother he killed (see figure 8.1), a motif of transvestism and transsexuality that would be repeated in numerous films, most obviously Brian

De Palma’s blatant imitation Dressed to Kill (1980). In Peeping Tom, Mark (Carl Boehm) aims at capturing the perfect image of fear on camera. Attaching a specially fashioned phallic blade to the camera’s tripod leg, Mark films his victim as he plunges the blade into their necks, and more chillingly, forces them to watch their own deaths in a distorting mirror fixed to the top of his camera (see figure 8.2). His fragile masculinity is thus predicated on his fetishised camera as well as his need to force his female victims to regard themselves as monstrous. Carl in The Cell attempts to turn his female victims into dolls that he can control. In Copycat, in front of his domineering bed-ridden wife/girlfriend, Foley is as awkward and childlike as Norman Bates.

Helen also momentarily disarms him by taunting him with accusations of impotence, while, in the final chase sequence, her weapon is her hysterical but derisive laughter, which unnerves him long enough for Detective Monahan (Holly Hunter) to shoot. In The Silence of the Lambs, a generic mix of the slasher with the police procedural and psychological thriller, Buffalo Bill

(Ted Levine) kills size 14 women in order to make himself a bodysuit out of female skin (see figure 8.3). In a renowned scene, dancing before his own video camera (pointing out the importance of the look of the Other to his gender identity), he fumbles below screen, and then, as he dances backwards, reveals that he has tucked his penis between his legs; raising his colourful shawl like outstretched wings, he then completes his fantasmatic identification both with femininity and his symbol of transformation - the signature death-head moth that he leaves in victims’ mouths. As Judith Halberstam notes, while Buffalo Bill’s skinning of women is repellent, this particular scene would seem more designed to scare men than women, screening 354 the image of “a fragmented and fragile masculinity, a male body disowning the penis” (Skin

Shows 168).2

Consequently, while the genre’s need for a steady supply of terrorised female victims killed in erotically-charged scenes of punitive violence has laid the serial killer film open to charges of sadism and misogyny,3 the fact that these films feature not only killers who are marked by phallic lack but also tough female heroines considerably complicates the rigid

Mulveyan schema whereby the cinematic apparatus engineers identification with the sadistic, masterful male gaze. Indeed, in her highly influential Men, Women and Chainsaws (1992), Carol

Clover argues that horror spectatorship is more victim-identified than most critics have allowed, suggesting that it is precisely this masochistic investment that explains a contemporary shift in the slasher genre: “[w]hile abject terror may still be gendered feminine,” increasingly the male rescuer/survivor function has been rendered “marginal or dispensed with altogether,” resulting in a female victim-hero figure that Clover dubs “the final girl” (60). Most films with their roots in the slasher genre, therefore, install a sadomasochistic visual economy, engineered through point of view shots that oscillate between the killer and the final girl. Thus even when The Silence of the Lambs forces us into complicity with the sadistic gaze of Buffalo Bill, his point of view is still intercut with Clarice’s investigative gaze, alerting us to the danger posed to the heroine that we are encouraged to root for. Likewise, Copycat feeds into the slasher tradition by giving the spectator foreknowledge that Helen Hudson, an impressive figure of female authority, is marked as a woman in peril, targeted for revenge by Daryll Lee Cullum (Henry Connick Jr.), the serial killer she helped put in prison. After giving her lecture, as Helen goes to the bathroom (a space rendered ominous ever since Psycho), the camerawork signifies imminent threat: positioned low enough to reveal Helen’s feet through the gap at the bottom of the cubicle door, the objective

2 In this respect, Buffalo Bill is prey to the heterosexist notion that “anatomy is destiny” even as he challenges it (Halberstam, Skin Shows 167). 3 For a traditional feminist approach to serial killing, both on and off screen, see Caputi’s The Age of Sex Crime. 355 camera pans across to a cubicle which is seemingly occupied by a woman until a hairy, muscular, obviously male hand reaches down to remove stiletto shoes. Helen’s fastidious placing of toilet paper on the seat is intercut with Cullum’s preparations of a wire noose, and the moment

Helen sits down is violently interrupted by a close-up of Cullum lunging at the camera while he loops the noose around her neck (see figure 8.4). Helen survives but is left psychologically scarred and acutely agoraphobic. Nonetheless, the copycat killer, Peter Foley, is defeated by an alliance of Helen and the gutsy Detective Monahan, played by Holly Hunter, whose small frame, much like Jodie Foster’s in The Silence of the Lambs, renders her character ostensibly vulnerable but tough and determined nonetheless (see figure 8.5). According to Clover, the “final girl” of the slasher genre - who is invariably boyish, “not fully masculine” and “not fully feminine” and

“sexually reluctant” to boot (40) - acts as a homoerotic stand-in through which the predominately young male audience can experience but disavow the pleasures of masochism (18). For this reason, Clover does not applaud the prevalence of the “final girl” as a feminist development, but rather regards her as “an agreed-upon fiction” that the male viewer can use “as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies in an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty” (53).

Personally, I would credit the “final girl” with more subversive potential than Clover, particularly as regards female viewing pleasure, which remains rather secondary in Clover’s account. But it is also important to remember that Clover’s primary focus is the slasher film, out of which the contemporary sleek serial killer movie emerged, and in which the boyish, desexualised “final girl” has transmuted into a professional woman, usually occupying a position of patriarchal authority, who is sexually attractive, often obliged to field sexual advances, though is rarely seen engaging in heterosexual relationships. It is important to stress that the white female heroines of these films are not necessarily desexualised (many have become lesbian icons, for instance) nor masculinised, an argument that would result in a rather circular logic

(they are “figurative males” because of their narrative positioning and function), and 356 underestimates the importance of these characters being embodied by a female; however, it is also significant that they are often placed (not unproblematically) to represent the Law, as we see in films such as The Silence of the Lambs, Copycat, Blue Steel (1990) and The Bone Collector

(1999). At the same time, white male authority figures or victims are often coded as at best ineffectual and at worst abusive. This is particularly evident in The Silence of the Lambs, where the repellent Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald) and paternal FBI chief Agent Crawford (Scott Glenn) are doubled with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) due to their obvious interest in Clarice.

Moreover, while Chilton betrays Clarice for spurning his swarmy advances, Crawford uses her as bait to capture Buffalo Bill, making her the sacrificial lamb of the title. African-American men also occupy positions of symbolic and moral authority in serial killer films such as Seven (1995) and The Bone Collector, the latter screening an alliance between Denzil Washington’s forensic expert and Angelina Jolie’s cop. Undoubtedly, these trends are indicative of some of the gains made by white women and African-American men (though not women) on the terrain of popular representations, but equally, I think, they can be attributed to a desire to separate normative white masculinity from the iconic figure of the serial killer. This is not to underestimate that uncanny resemblances between detective and killer are a staple of the thriller genre; however, the doublings between Clarice and Buffalo Bill,4 William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and John

Doe (Kevin Spacey) in Seven, and even Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) and Catherine Trammell

(Sharon Stone) in Basic Instinct, for instance, have rather different ramifications than the doubling between the white male FBI profiler Will Graham (Edward Norton) and white male

Dolaryhde in Red Dragon, where Will’s ability to enter the psyche of serial killers renders his own subjectivity and sense of innocence a rather fragile affair. Other films with white male detectives, such as Resurrection (1999), The Watcher (2000) and Blood Work (2002), often rehearse narratives of a highly personal and homoerotic game of cat and mouse between serial

4 For a discussion of the analogy between Clarice and Buffalo Bill, see Tasker, Working Girls 106. 357 killer and detective, who become locked in a relationship of mutual dependence for self- definition, rearticulating the precarious nature of white male self-distinction, which is only partially offset in the redemption and transcendence that characterise narrative closure.

In suggesting that the psychosexual serial killer and female or black cop might also act as a screen that veils latent concerns about normative white masculinity, I do not wish to detract from the demonisation of sexual deviance endemic to the genre. Indeed, with the serial killer film being one of the few arenas where queer sexualities are commonly represented, primarily through insistent discourses of pathologisation that are given an a priori force, it is little wonder that The Silence of the Lambs, while embraced by many feminists, was picketed by lesbian and gay activists, angered at the film’s suggestive analogies between transgressive sexuality and serial killers at a time of rampant paranoia over the AIDS epidemic (Staiger 142).5

Most information about Buffalo Bill is conveyed by the charismatic Hannibal Lecter, whose status as both psychoanalyst and serial killer makes him an authority on the subject.

Lecter informs Clarice, “Billy is not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is; he tries to be. He’s tried a lot of things I expect.” As Halberstam notes, Lecter suggests that if Buffalo Bill were a

“real” transsexual, he would be confused about his genitals, whereas in fact he fetishises skin as the signifier of gender identity (Skin Shows 168). In other words, the horror of Buffalo Bill lies in the “category crisis” he presents (Garber 16). Indeed, the film conjures up Buffalo Bill’s monstrosity through images of polymorphous perversity, male effeminacy, homosexuality, transvestism, transsexuality and narcissism. This is most obvious in the much-maligned scene featuring a series of extreme close-ups of Buffalo Bill erotically twisting his nipple ring, putting on jewellery, and applying lipstick whilst asking his mirror reflection, “Will you fuck me? … I’d

5 As Tasker notes, while there are other images of Bill’s deviance, such as the Swastika in his basement, most fall back on gender deviance, unlike Thomas Harris’s novel; for Tasker, then, this is a crucial issue of vision, “of the supposed intricacy of words versus the supposed simplicity of images” (Silence 37). For Halberstam, the film “emphasises 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, between, then, homophobia and representations of homophobia” (Skin Shows 167). 358 fuck me.” As Diana Fuss notes, these shots dismember his body in the same way as the corpse in the earlier autopsy scene, forging a link between male effeminacy and pathology, perversion and death (Identification Papers 95).

As Halberstam wittily puns, “Hannibal is dressed to kill” while Buffalo Bill “kills to dress and only one costume will do” (Skin Shows 171). However, while most viewers root for

Lecter’s escape from the authorities, his crimes are remarkably similar to Buffalo Bill’s. Both evade classification (Clarice states of Lecter, “There’s no word for what he is”), both consume and incorporate their victims, while Lecter also “tears a leaf out of Buffalo Bill’s casebook” when he escapes from captivity by “wearing” the face of a security guard he has skinned

(Halberstam, Skin Shows 175). Moreover, just as Buffalo Bill wants to inhabit the feminine,

Lecter requires intimate knowledge of Clarice’s deepest traumas. This is wonderfully represented through one of their many skilfully crafted exchanges when the ghostly reflection of Lecter’s face is projected onto the protective glass barrier as we gaze at Clarice from his perspective, a scene in which he seems to have got inside her head, both literally and figuratively (see figure

8.6). As Diana Fuss suggests, this scene also posits Lecter as the psychoanalyst positioned behind the patient on a couch (Identification Papers 92) in an exchange that renders the psychoanalytic experience akin to that of a psychic rape. However, Buffalo Bill’s monstrosity is articulated through other oppositions that the film installs between him and Lecter, cinema’s first serial killer hero (vampires aside). Lecter’s iconic status owes much to Hopkins’s compelling performance, in particular his emphatic, rasped, rather camp delivery and his unnerving self- restraint punctuated by sudden bursts of horrific violence. Even the gruesome murder of his prison guards in Memphis is carried out in style, performed to the accompaniment of Bach, while the photograph of the nurse’s face that he cannibalised remains safely off screen. More importantly, unlike Buffalo Bill, Lecter is posited as a fascinating figure of identification, engineered through the use of controlled, tightly framed close-ups during his tense exchanges 359 with Clarice (Tasker, Silence 10). Most notably, during their final exchange in Memphis, overhead lighting is used to highlight his forehead but shroud the remainder of his face in eerie shadows, rendering it uncannily skull-like, while extreme close-ups of his mesmerising, piercing blue eyes, which blink with reptilian deliberation, mark him as both charismatic and demonic

(see figure 8.7). This meeting, which opens with Lecter ironically informing Clarice that “people will say we are in love,” is particularly erotically-charged, and on handing her a file to help her with the case, a close-up cut-away shot focuses on him caressing Clarice’s fingers. Thus Lecter

“occupies the place of the charming but mysterious and potentially violent gothic male” to

Clarice’s gothic heroine (Tasker, Silence 69). Lecter’s eloquence, immortalised in vicious but witty lines, his intellectual genius, refined taste, and perverse acts of heterosexual gallantry (he talks fellow-inmate Miggs into killing himself as punishment for throwing freshly ejaculated semen into Clarice’s face) are all played off against the would-be transsexual, charmless, inarticulate, working-class Buffalo Bill. The otherness of Buffalo Bill, then, is not only inscribed in terms of non-phallic sexuality, but also his portrayal as “white trash,” a characterisation in which other 1990s serial killer films follow suit.

8.3. “White Trash” Serial Killers

The derogatory descriptor “white trash” has recently received academic attention, most notably from Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, who argue that “[y]oking a classist epithet to a racist one, as white trash does, reminds us how often racism is in fact directly related to economic differences” (169). They argue that whiteness is rarely connected to poverty in the US imaginary (for instance, there is no such equivalent as “black trash” since blackness in itself implies poverty) (169; Wray and Newitz, Introduction 8); consequently, “[b]ecause the US has an extremely impoverished political language of class, certain racial representations are used as allegories for it” (Wray and Newitz, Introduction 8). While their assertion that “white trash” is a 360 racialised and racist category is controversial (2-3),6 it is certainly the case that “white trash” is a non-hegemonic form of whiteness that not only renders whiteness visible, but also destabilises essentialist notions of white identity as “the primary locus of social privilege and power”

(Newitz and Wray 169). Nevertheless, this function would seem to come at a high cost in 90s films such as Copycat, Kalifornia (Dominic Sena 1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), where the serial killer is othered through the deployment of crude stereotypes of white, working-class rural masculinity. Played off against the unremarkable whiteness of the middle-class whites whose lives they threaten, simply being “white trash” would seem to give sufficient narrative justification for their murderous impulses.7

Copycat’s Cullum, whose threat to the white middle-class Helen is explicitly sexual, is an unshaven, swaggering, redneck lout, with bad teeth and a crude vocabulary, who even screams out “yee ha!” after shooting a cop and spitting on his body. Kalifornia makes no bones about the class of its serial killer: as Brian (David Duchovny) and his girlfriend Carrie (Michelle Forbes) meet Early Grayce (Brad Pitt) (whose name alone renders him a pre-cultural throw-back) and

Adele (Juliet Lewis), Brian’s voiceover informs us, “If you looked in the dictionary under ‘poor white trash,’ a picture of Early and Adele would have been there.” Indeed, Carrie’s suspicions about Early are alerted solely because he offends her middle-class sensibilities: he has unkempt, greasy hair, scruffy clothes, spits, swears, burps, grunts, drinks beer for breakfast and plays with his sweaty socks at the dinner table (see figure 8.8). Early kills primarily out of financial need, but any discourse on class conflict is soon displaced onto the sexual threat he poses to the white bourgeois Carrie (his long-term abuse and murder of Adele are dealt with more perfunctorily).

While Brian had argued against the death penalty with his bourgeois friends, refusing the

6 For a critique of this assertion, see Wiegman, “My Name Is Forrest Gump” 248. 7 As Barry Keith Grant notes, both Copycat and Kalifornia are concerned with the failure of traditional discourses to deal with serial killers: Copycat’s Helen and Kalifornia’s Brian both share an intellectual fascination with the mind of the serial killer but their complacency in believing themselves authorities on serial killers is shattered when they are “personally confronted by real ones whose actions they can neither comprehend nor contain” (38).

361 existence of innate evil, he soon jettisons his liberal beliefs, shooting Early at close range, guiltlessly dispensing the punishment that reaffirms class hierarchies.

Oliver Stone’s heavy-handed Natural Born Killers, on the other hand, does attempt some kind of social explanation for serial killing, though it places the blame not on social inequality but on a media culture of violence. However, once again, the film represents primitive, pre- cultural aggression through the deployment of an instantly recognisable iconic figure of “white trash” masculinity. While Stone violates gender norms by screening Mallory (Juliet Lewis) relishing in the killing spree in the Bonnie and Clyde tradition (1967), her aggression is contextualised against a continuum of male abuse, not only at the hands of her father (Rodney

Dangerfield), but also the prison warden (Tommy Lee Jones) and the killer cop Scagnetti (Tom

Sizemore), thereby nullifying the opposition between institutionalised patriarchal violence and the violence of the serial killer. While Mickey (Woody Harrelson) is also given a context of familial abuse, he is endowed with satanic dimensions, even morphing into the figure of a bald, blood-drenched devilish figure surrounded by engulfing flames in several points of the film (see figure 8.9). Indeed, the Native American that Mickey kills - thus forging a link between the white violence on which America was founded and the whiteness of serial killing - sees “demon” written across Mickey’s chest but “too much TV” on Mallory’s, the woman conventionally posited as more vulnerable to the contagions of the image.8 Mickey, who, unlike most “white trash” serial killers, is compellingly eloquent, justifies his violence as an attempt to rise above the banality of a defiling image culture (implicitly coded as feminising), proudly declaring himself a “natural born killer” in a scene that encapsulates the film’s pivotal discursive contradiction: blaming violence both on the contaminations of the media and an innate, primal aggression (see figure 8.10). As Philip Simpson argues, then, there is “the slight but intriguing

8 Stone has been criticised for positing the Native American as the repository of lost spiritual values and exterior to media culture. See P. Simpson, Psycho Paths 180.

362 possibility” that “Early and Mickey, as extreme examples of the return of the repressed rural poor of America, do unsettle a mainstream audience’s comfortable bourgeois assumptions”

(“Politics” 123); however, the apocalyptic project of both films reduces politics to an individual quest for social transcendence and shifts attention away from “mass ideological culpability” and onto “individual deviancy” (“Politics” 123, 120; Psycho Paths 174).9

The 90s trend of “white trash” serial killers can in part be attributed to their white-on- white, straight-on-straight violence and gender-indiscriminate killings (though women are subjected to sexual violence, with Early and Mickey both raping female captives), which largely escape the identity critiques that have pivoted around the categories of gender, race and sexuality; economic class, on the other hand, is rarely addressed in debates over the politics of representation. In her discussion of rednecks in the horror genre, Carol Clover argues that “the displacement of ethnic otherness onto a class of whites” is “the most significant ‘ethnic’ development in popular culture of the last decade [the 80s]” (Men, Women and Chainsaws 135 n.21). However, it would be reductive to read these “white trash” killers solely as symbolic stand-ins for racial others. Firstly, this reading would overlook entrenched histories of prejudice against rural and urban white working-class people, who are often held responsible for their poverty. Moreover, the embodiment of serial killers by specifically “white trash” men also serves an ideological function for normative white masculinity, which is insulated from the inexplicable violence of the serial killer, which, in turn, is displaced onto the classed “other within.” These classed others might well comprise “both an internal and external threat to whiteness” and the stability of its borders (Newitz and Wray 169), but in a manner that confirms classist assumptions about the abusive hypermasculinity of white working-class males, and, in the case of Copycat and Kalifornia, legitimises a violent resurgence of punitive power that purifies

9 Through a psychoanalytic framework, Žižek makes a similar point, arguing that, since “in our unconscious, in the real of our desire, we are all murderers,” the figure of the murderer in literary or filmic representations allows a “hallucinatory projection of guilt onto a scapegoat” so that “our desire is realised and we do not even have to pay the price for it” (Looking Awry 16, 59). 363 middle-class whiteness of any contamination.10

A more complex rendering of a blue-collar serial killer can be found in the independent production Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton 1986), which is loosely based on the confessions of prolific serial killer Henry Lucas Lee (see figure 8.11). The film generated as much controversy as Natural Born Killers, with detractors accusing it of being lurid and exploitative, and supporters lauding it for its harrowing aesthetics and non-glamorised violence

(Hallam and Marshment 236). The camera is sutured to Henry (Michael Rooker) “without relief”

(Hirsch 279), refusing the spectator any position of moral authority or any promise of narrative closure.11 At the same time, identification with Henry is largely precluded through Rooker’s understated performance and the clinical distance enforced by the cinema verité style achieved by the desaturated colour and grainy images of cheap film stock and the use of a hand-held, meditative camera. The most gruesome scenes of murder are unsensationalised and drained of affect, and few murders are actually shown; even Henry’s bundling up of his flatmate Ottis’s

(Tom Towles) severed head is screened with undramatic matter-of-factness in a medium long shot. While we know Henry is a killer from the outset, at times he can be charmingly unassuming and softly spoken, even gallant, killing his partner in crime, Ottis, for raping and attempting to strangle his own sister, Helen (Tracy Arnold). However, the final sequence shows

Henry leaving the motel he had shared with Helen, dumping a suitcase that presumably contains her mutilated body. A comprehensive explanation is thus refused. Even when Henry rehearses typical explanatory discourses by telling Helen that he killed his mother because she was a whore who made him wear a dress, inconsistencies in his narrative, particularly concerning his methods of killing her, render his version of events questionable. The closest the film comes to

10 For a discussion of white-on-white violence, see Newitz, “White Savagery.” Newitz argues that films in which middle-class whites are abused by “white trash” villains free privileged whites from the guilt of exercising white power whilst allowing them to prove their superiority and innocence (139-44). 11 As Dyer notes, Henry denies us the satisfying patterns and sense of narrative closure that make serial killer films like Copycat and Seven so satisfying, “[opening] up the spectre of endlessness, forever trapped by the compulsions of serial watching, engulfed in repetition without end or point” (“Kill and Kill Again” 148). 364 providing a motivation is when Henry tells Ottis “it’s either you or them,” positing the murder of strangers as a matter of self-survival in a dog eat dog world, an explanation that still fails to satisfy.

Implicitly, however, the film could be read as an indictment of the alienations of blue- collar life, with killings being the only actions that punctuate an otherwise tedious narrative of

Henry and Ottis sitting around the kitchen with nothing but a future of badly-paid menial jobs to look forward to. Moreover, one of the few on-screen murders is that of a family in their suburban home, an obvious desecration of the bourgeois sanctuary. The fact that Henry prevents Ottis from sexually molesting the dead female victim suggests that his killings are not solely about gender violence but also class warfare. Annalee Newitz thus reads the film through a Marxist framework, arguing that serial killers “kill after reaching a point where they begin to confuse living people with the inanimate objects they produce and consume as workers” (“Serial Killers”

71). As Marx famously theorised, workers are alienated both from the means of production and the products of their labour. He thus referred to capital as “dead labour,” since while labour might afford workers power, the price they pay is the “death” of their subjectivity, or parts of it over time (73). When this contradiction becomes unbearable, the future (male) serial killer “may develop a psychopathology which compels him to literalise Marx’s metaphoric notion of ‘dead labour’ by killing people who represent it” (73). Murder, in this way, becomes a means of

“projecting onto others the destructive feelings inspired in the workplace” without rejecting the system of work itself (73). As examples, Newitz lists real-life killers such as John Wayne Gacy, who killed all his employees (converting dead labour into dead people), or Henry Lee Lucas and

Jeffery Dahmer who consumed their victims as if they were commodities (73). In interviews,

Ted Bundy also referred to his serial rapes and murders as his “professional job,” suggesting that his sense of masculinity was profoundly dependent on being a productive worker (69). Similarly,

British serial killer Dennis Nilsen posited his serial killing as a “career,” imagining his arrest at 365 retirement age: “If I had been arrested at sixty-five years of age there might have been thousands of bodies behind me” (qtd. in Seltzer 18-19).

While the film’s suggestion that serial killing mimics the repetitive nature of deskilled work whilst compensating for its sheer monotony remains implicit, American Psycho (Mary

Harron 2000), based on Bret Easton Ellis’s bitingly satirical novel, explicitly relates serial killing to the evils of capitalism and the crisis caused to traditional notions of masculinity when men are positioned as consumers rather than producers. Set in 1980s America, and comprising an acerbic critique of yuppie culture, the book and film draw on analogies between serial consumerism and serial killing (Seltzer 65). Indeed, the protagonist, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is the diametrical opposite of “white trash;” he is a monstrous incarnation of a yuppie, and serial killing the trope through which the sterility and horrors of patriarchal capitalist culture are explored (see figures 8.12 and 8.13).

As with the novel, Bateman is the narrator of the film, repeating the motif of making the serial killer uncannily familiar that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer deployed, though his dully delivered voiceover works more to portray his inner sterility and chilling postmodern ennui than render him psychologically complex. For instance, when Bateman is getting ready for work, his voiceover lists his beauty routine, complete with an inventory of brand products, a distancing device that is deployed throughout Ellis’s novel. As he applies a facemask that, combined with hard lighting, renders his face eerily plastic-like, he informs us, “There is an idea of Patrick

Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. Only an identity. Something illusory

[…] I am simply not there.” This depletion of self is attributed to the superficiality of commodity culture, as I argued in chapter three, but it is also indissociable from his embodiment of the universal subjectivity, which has no obvious claim on particularity.

Bateman’s choice of predominately female victims suggests complicity between patriarchy and capitalism, with his wealth allowing him to “buy” victims, such as the prostitute 366 he lures into his apartment (Grant 27). The men he kills are either what he desperately fears becoming - his classed and raced inferiors - or those he fears might supplant his fragile hold on power, such as business rivals. The book narrates the murders of women in passages filled with sickening anatomical detail that seem intent on confirming sexual difference, starting as graphic pornographic discourses that suddenly give way to grizzly, surgical accounts of dismemberment.

While these passages would seem to equate heterosexual male sexuality with sadism and misogyny, the first-person account of serial killing refuses any critical voice in this narrative of excess.12 Hannon, however, delimits on-screen acts of gender violence: the only female murder we actually witness is shot from a distance, as Bateman hurls a chainsaw at his victim as she desperately attempts to escape down a staircase. This scene deploys all the codes of the slasher - from its camerawork, which oscillates between identification with the aggressor and the victim function, to the dramatic soundtrack - and is such an obvious pastiche that it propels the violence into the realm of the hyperreal. The murder of his rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) (for having a better business card!) is also screened in an ultra-stylised mode that prevents easy identification and foregrounds its status as pure performance. As Allen sits on the sofa, Bateman dons a plastic raincoat and dances around the room to the 80s pop hit “It’s Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News, whose banal lyrics Bateman deconstructs as an insightful comment on the pleasures of conformity. With this upbeat pop song as soundtrack, the film deploys a Tarantino- influenced, unnerving mixing of humour and violence, though the actual murder is performed off-screen, shifting attention to Bateman’s sterility and the culture that produced him. At the same time, parody, as I have argued throughout this thesis, both subverts and rearticulates what it parodies (Hutcheon 101). Harron’s parodic strategies, therefore, might also function as an act of self-legitimisation, allowing audiences to enjoy consuming celluloid violence in a guilt-free

12 Brett Easton Ellis himself has claimed, “American Psycho is partly about excess - just when readers think they can’t take any more violence, or another description of superficial behaviour, more is presented - and their response towards this is what intrigues me” (qtd. in P. Simpson, Psycho Paths 149). 367 mode, even as they simultaneously communicate the “waning of affect” that Frederic Jameson has argued is intrinsic to postmodern culture (10) and that the film suggests is intrinsic to white yuppie masculinity.

In keeping with the novel, the film suggests that Bateman’s murders are merely a figment of his warped imagination. As with Fight Club (1999), therefore, it is implied that we have been anchored into the perverse fantasy life of an unreliable narrator, with both narrators viewing violence as the only means available for men to break the chains of an oppressive commodity culture that reduces masculinity to a decorative image. Whether the murders that unfold as real on screen actually happened or not, then, is a moot point, as the film questions our ability to separate violence from its representation and people from things. Indeed, Bateman is pure simulacrum, a cliché of the serial killer whose very name (a play on Norman Bates) makes him nothing but a copy of a copy. In this respect, he is the apotheosis of the depthless, vacuous postmodern subject that in 90s popular cinema is indexed through images of a sterile, bourgeois, white heterosexual masculinity, a trend that is particularly noticeable with what Mark Seltzer has termed the “abnormally normal” serial killer (9).

8.4. The “Abnormally Normal” Serial Killer

In Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998), Mark Seltzer argues that the profile of the serial killer emerges as the very icon of “the mass in person” - “the species of person proper to a mass-mediated public culture” (7). As he notes, it is commonplace for coverage of real-life serial killers to comment on his dead average (read white male) looks, such as the court psychiatrists of Jeffrey Dahmer, who commented, “[d]ress him in a suit and he looks like 10 other men” (10). Likewise, in many films, the serial killer is “the man next door,” literally in Blood Work, in which the serial killer resides in the boat next to Clint Eastwood’s FBI profiler. In The Stepfather (1987), the serial killer is even closer to home; he is a stepfather who 368 moves from family to family, killing his new wife and stepchildren when they disappoint him.

Blue Steel’s female cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) unwittingly dates the film’s psychokiller while in Resurrection the killer masquerades as a profiler in whom Detective

Prudhomme (Christopher Lambert) confides intimate details of the case. In The Bone Collector, the serial killer is a seemingly inconsequential medical technician, just one of the many faces that come and go in the apartment of paralysed forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme (Denzil Washington).

In all these cases, the killer’s unremarkable appearance is afforded through the anonymous status allotted to white middle-class masculinity.

For Seltzer, serial killing must be understood within the framework of a “machine culture,” characterised by mass-mediated societies, economic modes of mass production, the seriality of consumption, and an intimate “identification with technology that seems to empty out the very category of the subject” (20). Implicit here is the suggestion that new modes of work, the demands of consumerism and technologies of simulation impinge particularly on the male subject, since the association of masculinity with productivity is violated. Seltzer contends that in such a culture, attempts at self-origination, of which serial killing is a part, will always be marked by failure since self-invention has now been routinised and the self-made man has been absorbed into the indiscriminate mass (219). Serialised violence against women is understood by

Seltzer as a channelling of “the withering self-distinction” in the direction of a distinctively gendered violence to reaffirm self-difference through a violent assertion of sexual difference,

“producing the torn and leaking and opened body - the un-male body - as its proof” (144).

Seltzer’s analysis - which could just as well be a description of American Psycho’s

Patrick Bateman - does not fully take on board the issue of the whiteness of the serial killer profile, with whiteness assuming its privileged position of representing the norm rather than particular; nonetheless, his account of a machine culture that simultaneously demands conformity and self-origination is an interesting framework within which to analyse 369 representations of white masculinity in key 90s serial killer films, since these films posit a gaping emptiness at the heart of their white male killers, which serial killing fills by furnishing them with an instant public identity. In this respect, these films feed into popular cinematic representations of normative white masculinity as a depleted, terminal identity, such as the most recent rendition of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, Hollow Man (2000), which gave this chapter its title. As I argued in chapter four, this tendency is particularly evident in representations of the depthless, disembodied cybersubject. Virtuosity (1995) combines this tendency with a serial killer narrative: its killer (Russell Crowe) is a computer programme made up of an identikit of the personalities of 200 serial killers, his sterile whiteness played off against Denzil

Washington’s particularised blackness.

Another key example of this trend can be found in David Fincher’s apocalyptic Seven.

John Doe, a neo-conservative religious zealot, carries out a series of elaborately staged murders, each one punishing a representative of one of the seven deadly sins, and each sin forming the means of the murder. The name John Doe, a signifier of an Everyman character, immediately presents the film’s serial killer as “the mass in person” (Seltzer 7). John Doe’s appearance is normative par excellence and, as Richard Dyer notes, until Doe gives himself up, skilful camerawork, lighting, and editing render him faceless, “a silhouette of a pork pie hat and three- quarter length mac” (Seven 41). On handing himself in, he even has to shout several times before detectives Somerset and Mills (Brad Pitt) take notice, and even then his face is lost in the crowd.

Kevin Spacey’s performance is also the epitome of deadpan, his face expressionless except for the odd ironic smile, and his lines delivered with monotone, colourless precision (see figure

8.14). While it is never clear whether his name John Doe is self-chosen, Somerset acutely observes that Doe has become “John Doe” by choice. Officially he does not exist: he has no bank records, no social security number, no employment records, and even cuts off the skin on his fingertips to avoid leaving fingerprints. He is both Everyman and no man. Thus, as Dyer argues, 370 on the one hand, Doe does not fit into commonplace serial killer profiles (victim of child abuse, mentally disturbed, sexually “perverted”) and even mobilises these discourses to throw police when he leaves behind the fingertips of his next victim, who perfectly fits the FBI identikit profile (35). Yet, on the other hand, he articulates other aspects of the profile purely by being an anonymous white male, even if little is made of his masculinity (he does not kill out of sexual inadequacy/deviance or hatred of women) and even less of his whiteness (38-9). But if it is the privilege of white masculinity to be unremarkable, the casting of Morgan Freeman as Somerset certainly works to make Doe’s whiteness, and by extension the whiteness of serial killing, more visible (39), much like Denzil Washington’s blackness in The Bone Collector. In other words, the anonymity of the serial killer is dependent on the burden of surplus signification carried by those bodies that are marked.

Somerset is the film’s “site of wisdom” (9) and he tracks Doe down by sheer erudition, using the public library system to learn which people have borrowed books on the seven deadly sins. Despite the film’s pairing of an about-to-retire black cop and younger white counterpart, the film avoids the popular Lethal Weapon dynamics, with its protective but ridiculed black buddy and explosive but dynamic white hero; rather, Mills is arrogant, impulsive and non-intellectual, while Somerset is an enigmatic, mellow, world-weary, resigned figure who shares Doe’s disgust at the world around him. The film’s lugubrious noir lighting also plays Somerset off against

Mills, particularly in the few hundred copies of the films in distribution that Fincher processed through silver retention, “a seldom-used method where the silver that’s leeched out during normal processing is rebounded,” which “produces more luminosity in the light tones and more density in the darks” (Taubin, “Allure” 152). As Amy Taubin notes, “Freeman would become the invisible man if not for the hints of light off his cheekbones, while Pitt’s face is as chalky as a corpse’s” (152) (see figure 8.15).

Of course, John Doe’s very ordinariness is the means by which he can escape suspicion 371 on the route to becoming utterly extraordinary, immortalised by his intricately staged murders that have to enter the public realm if his religious crusade is to have its desired results. In this respect, the film plays into popular understandings of serial killing as “a symptom of a society in which worth is measured in terms of fame” (Dyer, “Kill and Kill Again” 146). This is underscored in the film’s opening credit montage sequence, which features close-ups of John

Doe compiling his hundreds of journals which include not only his own lashings out at an immoral world, but also extracts from books and photographs, many of which document his own crimes. Killing for Doe, then, is inextricably bound up in the public sphere, even understood as a profession: “I am not special. I’ve never been exceptional. This is though. What I’m doing …

My work.” Here, Doe actively separates himself (unexceptional) from his work (exceptional), which bestows on him an identity that he lacks but desperately craves.

Doe’s attempts to literalise the seven deadly sins is indicative of the same failure of distance from representation that marks many other 90s screen serial killers, in films that screen what Seltzer terms “the contagious relation of the subject to imitation, simulation, or identification, such that identification brings the subject, and the subject’s desires, into being, and not the other way round” (65). For instance, whereas Norman Bates killed because he had become m/other, Buffalo Bill kills in order to become other: it is his desperate need for female identity that drives him to kill, so that the killing would seem to act in the service of the fantasy rather than vice versa. In Taking Lives (2004), the white male serial killer also kills in order to adopt the identity of his victims, a response to the trauma of being the twin brother his mother loved least, the suggestion being not only that he internalised his mother’s antipathy, but also that being a twin rendered self-distinction a difficult affair. In the prequels to The Silence of the

Lambs, Manhunter (1986) and its re-make Red Dragon, the serial killer Dolarhyde is equally bereft of a sense of self, killing in an act of identification with Blake’s empowering image of

“The Great Red Dragon,” which forms a punishing superego, goading him to kill. Indeed, 372

Dolarhyde identifies with “mass reproduction generally,” choosing his victims from the photo- lab where he works (Seltzer 114).13 In all these cases, the serial killers murder to gain a coherent identity in response to the depletion of self they suffered at the hands of a feminising postindustrial culture of reproduction and simulation, as well as a dominating mother.

Copycat’s Peter Foley also kills solely to gain an identity, copycatting the modus operanti, the victims and crimes scenes of famous serial killers to the minutest detail. Foley’s

“yielding of identity to identification proceeds by way of an utter absorption in technologies of reflection, reduplication, and simulation” (Seltzer 20); not only does he copy the identities of killers he learnt about through the popular media but he also painstakingly records reports of his own crimes and uses the Internet to stalk Helen, a confined agoraphobic, invading the only public space to which she has access. In other words, Foley has fully identified with technologies of reproduction, sharing their modes of seriality and simulation, even as the film intimates that it is those very processes that stripped him of identity in the first place. As with Seven, Copycat takes pains to empty out his identity through his dead average appearance (see figure 8.16), though in this case, Helen’s framing lecture works to make his maleness and whiteness visible.

Our first glimpses of Foley render him inconsequential: he is one of the men asked to stand up during Helen’s lecture, and he later greets a cop at the police station - in both cases his image is lost in a sea of bodies and his identity is only apparent on second viewing. His first appearance coded as the killer is faceless - just a brief close-up of his glasses that reflect back the image of his computer screen. Moreover, Foley is utterly chameleon-like. Before his dominant, invalid

13 Seltzer here is writing of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon. Similar iconography and thematic concerns to Red Dragon can be traced in One Hour Photo (2002). While the protagonist, Sy Parrish (Robin Williams), is a stalker rather than serial killer, the film airs similar concerns about the sterility of mass-mediated, hyperreal culture, articulated again through an overdetermined image of normative white masculinity. Sy, a developer in the photo-lab of a huge department store, has invested his entire identity in his job and lives vicariously through other people’s photographs. Identifying so fully with the technologies of reproduction, unable to separate photographs from reality, he is bereft of any sense of a coherent self and believes himself to be the uncle of a family whose photographs he develops. While he never poses a physical threat, the film mobilises the iconography of the serial killer to render his depthless anonymity chilling. Robin Williams (playing against type) is literally drained of colour for this part, his hair bleached and his face a greyish white; in the sterile, brightly lit, uniform, hyperreal universe of the department store, populated by catatonic shoppers, he literally disappears into the film’s mise-en-scène. 373 wife/girlfriend, he is an awkward, sexually repressed, boyish figure. Then, when she gives him permission to return to his computer, his expression immediately changes into a smirk as he skips Norman Bates-like down the stairs. As he enters his gothic basement, the mobile camera lingers on the photographs and newspapers clippings of his crimes plastered on the wall. Then, an oddly low-positioned camera trains on Foley donning a lab or doctor’s coat, before panning right to reveal the shocking sight of a woman’s legs and then her body strapped to a bed, with a plastic bag taped to her head, slowly asphyxiating her. As Foley punctures a hole in the bag to enable the woman a few panicked gasps of breath, he assumes the identity of a doctor, and just as he is about to inject her, with an eerily tender bedside manner informs her “this is going to hurt a little bit, I’m afraid.” Like the white male who falsely confesses to the first murder in a desperate bid for recognition, Foley lacks a sense of self, and is the figure through which anxieties about a hyperreal culture of simulacra and simulation are rehearsed. Despite these thematic concerns, though, the film knowingly cannibalises previous films (most obviously The Silence of the

Lambs) as well as citing real-life serial murders as part of its copycat narrative. Indeed, as if to advertise its complicity, the film’s title shot is a computer-generated image of a rubber stamp repeatedly imprinting the title of the film across the screen, a serialised repetition of a signifier divorced from any referent.14

The prevalent trend of linking serial killing with technologies of reproduction and mass media, particularly in the visual field, screens the Foucauldian observation that “[t]he fascination with scenes of a spectacularised bodily violence is inseparable from the binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation; not merely spectacles of sex and violence in public but a sexual violence inseparable from its reproduction and mechanical reduplication” (Seltzer 129). It

14 The mutually reinforcing relationship between cinema and serial killing is even inscribed in the term “serial killer” itself, which was coined by Robert Ressler, from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, in reference to the serial adventure films that he used to watch on Saturdays: “Each week you’d be lured back to see another episode, because at the end of each one was a cliff-hanger. In dramatic terms, this wasn’t a satisfactory ending because it increased, not lessened the tension. The same dissatisfaction occurs in the mind of serial killers” (qtd. in Seltzer 64).

374 is commonplace for serial killer films to interrogate the spectator’s complicity in this process.

For instance, the chilling Belgian mock documentary about a serial killer Man Bites Dog (1991) even renders the line between watching and doing obsolete when the (white) male camera crew eventually participate in the killer’s brutal acts. Other films, such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial

Killer, American Psycho, Copycat, The Cell, and Natural Born Killers all screen serial killers videotaping their murders, building on Peeping Tom’s metacinematic exploration of the pleasures of horror spectatorship. It is not enough for these white male killers simply to kill; killing must be performed, witnessed, reproduced, and made spectacle for an imagined external other who, in turn, validates their identity.

In this discussion, far from engaging with the etiology of real-life serial killing, I have attempted to trace some of the transactional uses to which representations of white masculinity are put in the contemporary serial killer movie. The trend of marking the serial killer as other through signifiers of sexual deviancy/inadequacy or “white trash” obviously inserts a wedge between white heterosexual masculinity and serial violence, as well as stabilising normative bourgeois values. While the demonisation of individual deviancy in the face of an external other renders these films profoundly reactionary, these texts are highly symptomatic, and signpost crucial sites of anxieties at the turn of the millennium, not only in relation to increasing levels of violence in contemporary postmodern culture, but also the categories of gender, sexuality, race and class. More subversive potential, I would argue, can be found in those films which play on contemporary understandings of white masculinity as a vacuous, sterile identity, using the white male serial killer as a figure through which to explore contemporary Western anxieties about mass-mediated, postindustrial, commodity-driven, hyperreal culture. At the same time, it is important to remember that it is precisely because white masculinity can stand as a default subjectivity that these killers can represent general anxieties; that is, at the very moment that the whiteness and maleness of serial killing are being highlighted, the gendered and raced specificity 375 of serial killing can then be subsumed by broader concerns about postmodern culture, revealing the ultimate privilege of white masculinity to act as a universal term even in the act of proclaiming its own emptiness. 376

AFTERWORD

Popular Cinematic Representations of White Heterosexual Masculinity in a

Post-9/11 America

It was left to Spike Lee to provide a corrective to the paranoid white male of Falling

Down (1993) with 25th Hour (2004), which stars Edward Norton, who, as we have seen, soon replaced Michael Douglas as the archetypal “angry white male” in films such as American

History X (1998) and Fight Club (1999). Based on a novel by David Benioff, 25th Hour unfolds during the last day of freedom for Montgomery Brogan, an Irish-American, before he begins a prison sentence for dealing heroin. In the most memorable scene, as Montgomery stares at himself in a mirror, his reflection begins a litany of abuse at New York (which is painted as being equally as fragmented and overrun by otherness as Falling Down’s Los Angeles) and everyone in it.1 The sequence deploys parallel editing, switching from shots of Montgomery’s reflection in medium close-up, set against a dark backdrop which isolates him from any social context, to intercutting shots of diverse New Yorkers that are the recipients of his abuse, including squeegee men, Sikhs and Pakistanis (“terrorists in fuckin’ training”), “Chelsea boys,” overcharging Korean grocers, Russian gangsters, Wall Street brokers, Puerto Ricans (“twenty to a car”), uptown Brothers (“Slavery ended 137 years ago. Move the fuck on”), rich East Side wives, corrupt cops, child-molesting priests, and, finally, Osama Bin Laden (“You towel-headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal Irish ass!”). Initially, then, like D-FENS, Montgomery blames everyone else for his plight, making no attempt to disguise the racist, sexist and homophobic edge of his discourse. However, his rant is abruptly undercut when his reflection suddenly states,

“No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and you threw it away, you dumb fuck!”

1 This scene is in obvious intertextual dialogue with Lee’s famed series of monologues in Do The Right Thing (1989), each featuring a character directing a stream of racial abuse at a racial other. 377

This scene thus wonderfully demonstrates the logic of Lacan’s mirror stage that I have referred to throughout this thesis, highlighting that the aggression felt for the other has its roots in aggression against the self. The final reference to Osama Bin Laden, in one of the first films to deal directly with the trauma of 9/11 (even featuring poignant shots of Ground Zero), also reveals how the “angry white male” figure dovetails with the paranoia that characterises post-

9/11 mainstream America.

In an America characterised by The Patriot Act and daily broadcasts of terror alerts, the tragic events of 11th September 2001 and its ensuing wars will obviously impact hugely on representations of white heterosexual masculinity, which is most often given the job of standing in for another equally unstable sign - that of nation. However, that said, it is worth noting that there have been trends for black heterosexual males to stand in for the national body in recent years, revealing the gains made by black masculinity (though not black femininity and other masculinities of colour) on the terrain of popular representations. One such example is Denzil

Washington playing the head of the FBI/NYPD Terrorism Task Force in The Siege (1998), a film that predicted 9/11 with uncanny foresight, screening Muslim Fundamentalists, themselves trained by the CIA, who target America for terrorist attacks in response to the US military’s abduction of an Islamic religious leader. On release, The Siege came in for heavy criticism for its representation of Muslims. However, interestingly, “evil” is also embodied by the hawkish,

WASP Major General William Devereux (Bruce Willis), who rounds up American Muslim citizens in camps, and uses the attacks as an excuse to impose martial law. It is thus Denzil

Washington who stands for moral authority in this film. Moreover, in the recent remake of The

Manchurian Candidate (2004), which maps the original post-Korean War narrative onto a post-

9/11 context, with constant references to “the war on terror” and national security, Washington plays a victimised war veteran, a role that, as we have seen, has most often been allotted to a 378 white male.2 Washington’s character is a colonel who, along with his soldiers, has been subjected to a military experiment that implanted false memories of an ambush that allegedly took place in Kuwait during The First Gulf War in order to fake the war heroism of the son of a white female senator (Meryl Streep), who has presidential ambitions for her son. The Sum of All

Fears (2002) also screens Morgan Freeman as a CIA boss, who, with his canny white assistant

(Ben Affleck), averts full-out nuclear war when a conspiracy stages a Russian nuclear attack on

American soil. Samuel L. Jackson also plays a National Security Agent in XXX (2002) who recruits Van Diesel’s super-agent XXX, though by XXX: State of the Union (2005), the invincible, rampaging hero role is played by African-American former rap artist Ice Cube, who saves the president (Peter Strauss) from a conspiracy hatched by the Secretary of Defense

(Willem Dafoe), another hawkish white male, who, this time, objects to the liberal president’s wish to make former enemies into allies.

The popular TV series 24 also screens America’s first African-American president, David

Palmer (Dennis Haysbert). However, the real hero of the series is Jack Bauer (Keifer

Sutherland), head of the LA Counter-Terrorist Unit, who repeatedly saves Palmer from threats to both his person and his presidency. 9/11 occurred during the filming of the first series, whose terrorists are Serbs with a personal grudge against Bauer. However, by the second series,

America is threatened by a nuclear attack, seemingly from Islamic fundamentalists. In many ways, 24, which responded to 9/11 more quickly than slow-moving, low-risk-taking Hollywood, recycles the racial dynamics of Lethal Weapon (1987). One of the key scenes of Lethal Weapon depicts Riggs (Mel Gibson) being hung up and electrocuted by a malicious Asian torturer, but miraculously managing to escape by strangling his adversary between his thighs before he rushes to save Murtaugh (Danny Glover), his African-American partner. With Riggs a Vietnam veteran, the film thus stages the defeat of the Asian enemy to whom America had previously lost

2 In the 1962 original film, Washington’s role was played by Frank Sinatra. 379

(Modleski 145). The racial politics of Lethal Weapon, which established the formula for the bi- racial buddy movie, are aptly summed up by the film’s tagline: “Two Cops. Glover carries a weapon ... Gibson is one.” Jack Bauer in 24 is also America’s “lethal weapon.” In an almost identical scene, his white body is strung up and repeatedly inflicted with electric shocks, but still

Bauer refuses to cave in to his torturers. In a format that screens 24 hours in real screen time

(advertising slots excepted), thus allowing for plenty more hyperbolic action scenes than a two- hour Hollywood movie, Bauer nearly dies three times protecting his president. 24 thus returns to the 80s action film tradition, where the battered, mutilated body of the white male Bauer represents the national body that may have been attacked but which will emerge rejuvenated in the process. Nonetheless, like The Siege, the series is also highly critical of the white male hawks who try to convince Palmer, a Democrat, to perform surgical strikes in the Middle-East, which must be read as an implicit indictment of the Bush administration, despite the general political conservatism of the series. Palmer withstands this pressure, and is ultimately vindicated when the conspiracy is seen to originate in white male capitalists, similar to the evil white men that Riggs and Murtaugh battle with in Lethal Weapon. Consequently, normative white masculinity can also represent threats to America, though it is a threat that escapes being articulated through discourses of race, gender or religion, allowing these men to represent individual failings, and, importantly, it is still an exceptional white heterosexual male who saves the nation, almost single-handedly, in a typically individualistic, Hollywood-influenced narrative.

It is my sense that 24 has much to tell us about how the Hollywood action genre in particular will respond to 9/11 in its representation of normative masculinity, foreshadowing a return to older representational practices. Of course, the white male action hero never disappeared from the screen, though, in the 90s, as I have argued, there was a trend to deconstruct and parody his heroic excesses, a self-legitimising strategy that 24 feels no need to enact. Moreover, as The Siege demonstrates, fears of Islamic terrorist attacks also existed before 380

9/11, with terrorists most often played off against a solid, dependable white male hero. One such example is Executive Decision (1996), starring Kurt Russell, who along with his buddies of colour, in what must be seen as a deliberate attempt to respond to multiculturalism, thwarts terrorist attempts to blow up Washington. James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), which has Arnold

Schwarzenegger parody his star persona once again, also screens stupid, sexist, inexplicably violent, Islamic terrorists (whose deaths we are encouraged to laugh at) played off against

Schwarzenegger’s unflinching heroism and America’s superior military might.3 Collateral

Damage (2002) also stars Schwarzenegger, this time in a non-parodic action role, saving

America from Columbian terrorists. The film’s scheduled release just after 9/11 was postponed to avoid unleashing controversy and amplifying national trauma. The release of Black Hawk

Down (2001), on the other hand, was brought forward to cash in on post-9/11 patriotism. The film is a fictionalised account of the botched 1993 military mission to capture two lieutenants of a Somali warlord in which American troops sustained heavy losses. As Aneta Karagiannidou has argued, the film attempts to construct a mythical American unity by showing the bravery and solidarity of American soldiers in a film whose tagline is “leave no man behind.” The majority of these soldiers are, of course, white males, who stand in for a nation under attack, while the devastation unleashed on Somalians, as well as any questioning of the ethics of an American invasion of another sovereign state, is conspicuously absent. As Karagiannidou observes, a similar attempt at forging American unity is evident with We Were Soldiers (2002), a return to the trauma of Vietnam, where the white male hero, played by Mel Gibson, informs his troops that they may be of many creeds and colours but they are all American, promising them that “I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come back together.” Nonetheless, We Were

Soldiers does devote brief screen space to Vietnamese suffering, as well as addressing American

3 The sexual politics of the film are equally unpalatable (and hugely disappointing in the wake of Cameron’s Terminator 2), with a hysterical and scantily-clad Jamie Lee Curtis being traumatised as well as repeatedly rescued by her husband (Schwarzenegger), and only killing her adversaries by accident when she drops a machine gun down some stairs. 381 racism. In this respect, it is joined by Hart’s War (2002), set during The Second World War.

Colonel McNamara (Bruce Willis) is prepared to sacrifice the lives of two black soldiers, unjustly accused of murder, in order to stage an escape from their prison camp. In narrative closure, Willis gallantly sacrifices himself for his men, including one of the black soldiers, thus redeeming himself and white America in the process.4

The imperative to screen acts of American bravery obviously became more ideologically urgent in films produced in the wake of 9/11. For instance, Ladder 49 (2004), whose tagline is “a bond forged by fire is never broken,” is an overt tribute to firefighters, whose heroism and sacrifices were central to media representations of the attacks. Once again, the film is structured around the life of a young white male, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who gives up his life to save others. 9/11 is never mentioned in the film; however, its portrait of mainly white firefighters, in a film which lacks a typical action-packed Hollywood narrative and even the hint of a bad guy

(unlike Backdraft [1991], for instance, the action movie cum thriller about firefighters), indubitably plays into national mythologies of courage and unity which grew up around 9/11.5

I would also argue that the return to the epic genre in the wake of the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) is, in part, a response to a world profoundly destabilised by 9/11. The first film of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the

Ring (2001), was made before the attacks, revealing that a desire for a morally legible world existed pre-9/11. The second film, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), was released soon after, amidst much discussion about whether its title should be changed to avoid reinflicting trauma on the American people. With their polarised universes, clearly demarcated along the

4 Both of these films are adaptations from earlier novels, which underscores that the discursive fiction of national unity is always being constructed and reconstructed. 5 Ladder 49 is very different from the independent production The Guys (2002), based on a play by Anne Nelson. The film is structured around the relationship between a fire chief, Nick (Anthony LaPaglia), and Joan (Sigourney Weaver), a journalist who helps him write the many eulogies he must deliver for his men. Nick categorically states that he cannot recognise the men he knew and lost in the media’s representations of heroic firefighters. The film is also restrained yet poignant in its representation of the trauma of 9/11, even for those who did not lose a loved one, and far from screening heroic actions, is mainly composed of sedentary dialogues as Nick remembers the dead. 382 binaries of good and evil, The Lord of the Rings films certainly played well into post-9/11 neo- conservative rhetoric, exemplified by George W. Bush’s famous declaration that “you’re either with us, or against us in the fight against terror.”6 Indeed, Bush scripted the war as a national epic, most often deploying a western narrative in which he was cast as chief cowboy, and according to which America would be regenerated through violence in the manner Richard

Slotkin has traced in 17-19th-century American frontier literature. The narratives of recent epics such as Troy (2004) and Alexander (2004), which followed close on the heels of The Lord of the

Rings box-office success, also mediate imperialistic narratives through older stories, thereby defusing their political implications and potentially divisive effects. However, I would argue that these epic films also negotiate another set of desires, namely the nostalgic desire to return to a white masculinity unchallenged by its others. These epic narratives are played out almost exclusively between white men in a time long before the dramas of gender and race that now characterise an America divided by culture wars and identity critiques. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, differences of gender and race are displaced onto differences between humans and other fantastical species, though the humans and other anthropomorphic species such as the elves or hobbits are not only overwhelmingly male, but also exclusively white, featuring not a single character of colour.

Writing a thesis on such a contemporary topic is always fraught with the anxiety of there being insufficient temporal distance from the object of study to make periodising generalisations.

I have often felt that I am lagging behind a popular cinema that is quick to respond to contemporary cultural anxieties and desires. Despite this caveat, I would like to suggest some trends that I think will be borne out in future popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity. My sense is that popular American film will continue the forging of

6 These words were delivered in a joint news conference with French president Jacques Chirac on 6 Nov. 2001, when Bush attempted to drum up support for the Northern Alliance’s “liberation” of Afghanistan, already in progress, and future missions in Iraq. 383

American unity articulated largely through the figure of a white male hero, though that role might occasionally be given to his others, particularly African-American males, in market-driven concessions to multiculturalism and identity critiques, as well as in response to the commercial imperatives for generic revision. I predict that the “white male as victim” figure will continue to make his presence felt, particularly in narratives that fuse white male paranoia with the more general paranoia that marks a post-9/11 American political imaginary. Domestic narratives of white male victimisation will no doubt still emphasise the white male protagonist’s gender and race (but not racial and gender privileges) in order to underscore his disenfranchisement, while class will remain sidelined. I also envisage that white heterosexual males will continue to represent concerns about a superficial, sterile, mass-mediated, technologised, capitalist, postmodern culture - underscoring anxieties about the emptiness of the dominant identity, but also confirming the ability of that identity to represent “ordinary” humanity. In an age of identity critiques, parody will remain a model for representing a white heterosexual masculinity that is both phallic and deconstructed. However, I predict that imperialistic action films, which are certain to flourish,7 will largely be devoid of parodic impulses. Such films are likely to recycle the masochistic logic of the Vietnam-influenced 80s action film, with 9/11 acting as the new national trauma (though concerns may well be mediated through older narratives such as The

Second World War and Vietnam), where the vulnerable national body is remasculinised though the attacked but ultimately triumphant body of the white male hero. Such films will no doubt represent their white male hero’s gender, race and sexuality (but not nationality) as beside the point in the interests of national unity, though current trends suggest that WASP military hawks will join Islamic terrorists as the new source of evil, though no doubt they will be offset by

“ordinary” but also exceptional white American heroes who save the day.

7 Indeed, a film screening American bravery in contemporary Iraq, The Battle for Fallujah, is already in production. 384

As Eric Lott notes, “[t]he domination of international others has depended on mastering the other at home - and in oneself: an internal colonisation whose achievement is fragile at best and which is often exceeded or threatened by the gender and racial arrangements on which it depends” (“White Like Me” 476). Since white heterosexual masculinity is as volatile a signifier as nation, both are in constant need of reconsolidation through infinitely adaptable discursive practices, often through a process of mutual-articulation with the purpose of reaffirming hegemonic norms. Whatever the form that this reconsolidation might take, it is important to remember that even if American middle-class white heterosexual masculinity is represented as vacuous, lacking, invisible, ontologically empty, victimised and/or deconstructed, it is often resecured in the very act of screening its own insecurities, and, as the universal, structuring norm, remains, and will continue to remain, the only subjectivity that can discursively construct itself as both “all and nothing.”

385

WORKS CITED

Films and Television Programmes1

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American Pie. Dir. Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz. Universal Pictures, 1999.

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1 In film entries, I have cited the US theatrical distributor. 386

Analyze This. Dir. Harold Ramis. Warner Bros., 1999.

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Associate, The. Dir. Donald Petrie. Buena Vista Pictures, 1996.

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Bad Lieutenant. Dir. Abel Ferrara. Aries Film, 1992.

Baise-Moi. Dir. Virginie Despentes. FilmFixx, 2000.

Ballad of Little Jo, The. Dir. Maggie Greenwald. Fine Line Features, 1993.

Bamboozled. Dir. Spike Lee. New Line Cinema, 2000.

Bande À Part. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Pathé Contemporary Films, 1964.

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Fig. i. Newsweek (29 March 1993), featuring Michael Douglas in his role as Falling Down’s (1993) “angry white male,” in a cover story which is exemplary of the space that the popular media devoted to “(white) masculinity in crisis” in the early 90s

Fig. 1. Finding the sensitive and wild man within: the rituals of the men’s movement

Fig. 1.1. Michael Douglas as D-FENS, the iconic “angry white man” in Falling Down (1993), whose shattered glasses represent the violence he projects out onto society, as well as the cracks in his sense of male entitlement

Fig. 1.2. D-FENS and Latino gang-members involved in a territorial dispute in the burnt-out gangland of LA Central

Fig. 1.3. Prendergast (Robert Duvall) is remasculinised through violence in Falling Down’s final showdown

Fig. 1.4. Nick (Frederic Forrest) as D-FENS’s neo-fascist double

Fig.1.5. Derek (Edward Norton) as a repentant neo-Nazi in American History X (1998)

Fig. 1.6. D-FENS exchanges his suit, spectacles and briefcase for army fatigues, sunglasses and a bag of guns, evoking the iconography of the rampage film

Fig. 1.7. A provocative poster for Disclosure (1994), which spatially encodes Meredith (Demi Moore) as “on top,” both in bed and at work

Fig. 1.8. Meredith, the threatening femme fatale, whose stiletto shoes and tailored suit signify the entry of female sexuality and power into the traditionally male workplace

Fig. 1.9. The fully embodied Tom (Michael Douglas) encountering a disembodied Meredith in virtual reality - a scene that conflates the threat posed to the average white male by electronic technology with the threat posed by the femme fatale

Fig. 1.10. The Fully Monty (1997): Gary’s crew rehearsing their stripping routine in their former workplace

Fig. 1.11. Playing football against the backdrop of Sheffield - a scene that places this anti-heritage film securely in a regional context, as well as demonstrating the pleasures of the re-establishment of homosocial ties

Fig. 2.1. Harrison Ford as the transformed white male in Regarding Henry (1991)

Fig 2.2. The re-united bourgeois family: a publicity shot for Regarding Henry

Fig. 2.3. Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) telling the story of his wounds to an African-American nurse, reconstructing American history and white American masculinity in the process

Fig. 2.4. The young disabled Forrest with Jenny Fig. 2.5. Forrest triumphs over his wounds

Fig. 2.6. Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) as Vietnam veteran

Fig. 2.7. Forrest rescuing Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), who eventually dies of his wounds

Fig. 2.8. Jenny (Robyn Wright) as peace activist, punished for her counter-cultural lifestyle

Fig. 2.9. The narrator of Fight Club (Edward Norton) finding oblivion in the arms of Bob (Meatloaf) at Remaining Men Together

Fig. 2.10.Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) as the narrator’s more daring, freer, sexier alter ego, signified through his trendy red leather jacket and spiky hair, which are played off against the narrator’s boring, conventional grey suit

Fig. 2.11. A strung up Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) “taking it like a man” in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

Fig. 2.12. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a crucifixion pose in Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Fig. 2.13. Brad Pitt revealing his famed chiselled physique in the homosocial and homoerotic space of fight club

Fig. 2.14. Tyler about to burn an imprint of his kiss onto the narrator’s hand - a scene that must later be read as self-reflexive masochism

Fig. 3.1. Rudolph Valentino on Fig. 3.2. Kirk Douglas exhibiting his pecs in Spartacus display in Young Rajah (1922) (1960), though in a scene with narrative justification

Figs. 3.3 & 3.4. Marlon Brandon and James Dean in publicity photographs that emphasise their “to-be-looked-at-ness”

Fig. 3.5. A tanned and toned John Travolta on the cover of Rolling Stone, advertising Staying Alive (1983)

Fig. 3.6. John Travolta (middle) in Pulp Fiction (1994), his clutched towel revealing the contours of his generous midriff

Fig. 3.7. Nick Kamen stripping off in Levi’s advertisement “Launderette” (1985), filmed from the point of view of the intradiegetic female gaze

Fig. 3.8. A black model in what Susan Bordo terms a “face off” stance

Fig. 3.9. The trend-setting Calvin Klein advertisement featuring pole-vaulter Tom Hinthaus, which uses iconography that conjures up Classical Greek sculptures and the Olympic ideal

Figs. 3.10 & 3.11. Two versions of a Calvin Klein jeans advertisement featuring Marcus Schenkenberg

Figs. 3.12 & 3.13. Marky Mark deploying his rap persona to advertise Calvin Klein’s underwear and loose fitting jeans

Fig. 3.14. Marky Mark narcissistically offering himself up to the gaze

Figs. 3.15 & 3.16. Travis Flimmel, whose feminine-coded, shoulder-length hair and necklace create erotic tension with his masculine and muscular physique

Figs. 3.17 & 3.18. Advertisements for Calvin Klein’s unisex fragrance CK One use thinner, slighter, younger men, as well as Asian male models to connote androgyny

Figs. 3.19, 3.20 & 3.21. Brad Pitt in Levi jeans advertisement “Camera” (1991)

Fig. 3.22. Brad Pitt as a slim but chiselled J.D. in Thelma and Louise (1991)

Fig. 3.23 & 3.24. Gary (Robert Carlyle), and Lomper (Steve Huison), Guy (Hugo Speer) and Dave (Mark Addy) as unlikely strippers in The Full Monty (1997)

Fig. 3.25. The narcissistic serial killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) in American Psycho (2000)

Fig. 3.26. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): Sylvester Stallone as a Vietnam veteran whose hard muscularity reinvigorates the ailing national body

Fig. 3.27. The Aryan Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fascistic pose

Fig. 3.28. Parodying the phallic weaponry of the action genre: Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels (2000), a film with action heroines and fetishistic cleavage shots, allowing Hollywood to have its proverbial cake and eat it

Figs. 3.29 & 3.30. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) handling phallic weaponry in traditionally male poses in Terminator 2 (1991)

Figs. 3.31 & 3.32. From terminator to ideal father: Arnold Schwarzenneger in Terminator 2

Fig. 3.33. The impenetrable, armoured body of the cyborg in Robocop (1987)

Figs. 3.34. 3.35 & 3.36. The fluid, malleable body of the T1000 in Terminator 2

Fig. 4.1. Jobe (Jeff Fahey) morphing into a threatening beast in Lawnmower Man’s (1992) infamous virtual reality sequence

Fig. 4.2. Strange Days (1995): Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) lost in contemplation, staring masochistically at Faith during her act in the nightclub Retinal Fetish

Fig. 4.3. The physically weak Lenny being protected by muscular action heroine Mace (Angela Bassett)

Fig. 4.4. The uncannily similar “residual self images” of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix (1999), here underscored by their symmetrical poses

Fig. 4.5. The flexible virtual body of Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix

Fig. 4.6. Neo and Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) in a reworking of the western showdown in The Matrix

Fig. 4.7. Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) being interrogated by the white male agents in a scene with inevitable racial overcodings

Fig. 4.8. Neo fighting off Agent Smith, who has learned to self-proliferate in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) N

Fig. 4.9. Agent Smith and his army of clones in The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Fig. 4.10. Neo awakening to find himself plugged into the Matrix, in a scene that plays into monstrous images of the maternal body

Fig. 4.11. Ted (Jude Law) and Amanda (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) jacked into a breast-like umbycord in eXistenZ (1999) - the dominating colour red evoking the warmth of the maternal body

Figs. 5.1. & 5.2. Robin Williams as the old-fashioned nanny who reunites the family in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

Fig. 5.3. Hugo Weaving as Mitzi and Terence Stamp as Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

Fig. 5.4. Wesley Snipes, John Leguizamo and Patrick Swayze as drag queens in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newman (1995)

Fig. 5.5. Dil (Jaye Davidson) performing a lip-synching routine in The Crying Game (1992)

Figs. 5.6 & 5.7. Fergus (Stephen Rea) continues to see Dil after the disclosure of her biological sex

Fig.5.8. Jude (Miranda Richardson) as The Crying Game’s castrating biological female

Fig. 5.9. Jody (Forest Whitaker), the IRA hostage that Fergus is ultimately unable to kill

Fig. 5.10. Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry (1999)

Fig. 5.11. The first sex scene between Brandon and Lana (Chloë Sevigny) in Boys Don’t Cry, filmed in romantic, warm, soft lighting

Fig. 5.12. John (Peter Sarsgaard) about to kill Brandon at the end of Boys Don’t Cry as punishment for successfully imitating white heterosexual masculinity

Fig. 6.1. David Beckham dressed in hip hop fashion

Fig. 6.2. An illustration of Thomas Dartmouth Rice dressed up as his minstrel character Jim Crow

Fig. 6.3. Illustrations of three of the stock characters of minstrel shows

Fig. 6.4. A typical skit from a minstrel show

Fig. 6.5. Lew Dockstader’s troupe, formed in the early 1900s, just before minstrel shows went out of fashion, though blackface proved to be popular on the big screen

Fig. 6.6. Bert Williams, the first black minstrel to perform with whites, albeit in blackface

Fig. 6.7. Renée Descartes (Mel Harris) removing Clay’s (Dennis Haysbert) stitches in Suture (1993) whilst commenting on his “white” features - a scene which exemplifies the film’s jarring clash between its visual and thematic content

Fig. 6.8. Anthony Hopkins as a legally black man passing as white in The Human Stain (2003), with co-star Nicole Kidman

Fig. 6.9. Walter Long in blackface playing a rapist in The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Fig. 6.10. Steve Martin being liberated from whiteness by the ebullient Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House (2003)

Fig. 6.11. Gary Oldman as Drexl, a wannabee black, in True Romance (1993), whose dreadlocks and clothes imitate West Indian blackness, whose language copies African-American discourse, and whose scars are suggestive of potential violence

Fig. 6.12. Quentin Tarantino in his cameo role as Jimmy, objecting to his house being used for “dead nigger storage” in Pulp Fiction (1994)

Fig. 6.13. Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport), “wigger” par excellence, surrounded by black male sporting icons in Bamboozled (2000)

Fig. 6.14. Mantan (Savion Glover) and Sleep ’N Eat (Tommy Davidson) in Bamboozled’s minstrel show

Fig. 6.15. Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) in his trademark yellow shell suit outside of the Houses of Parliament in Ali G Indahouse (2003)

Fig. 6.16. A publicity poster for Ali G Indahouse, exemplary of the film’s infantile humour and representation of women

Fig. 6.17. Jimmy (Eminem) disses a black rapper for being homophobic in 8 Mile (2002)

Fig. 6.18. Jimmy is forced to move back in with his mother (Kim Basinger) when he breaks up with his girlfriend

Fig. 6.19. Jimmy on the bus to his factory job, a journey which allows plenty of shots of desolate, decaying, inner-city Detroit filmed in desaturated colour

Fig. 6.20. Jimmy in his moment of triumph, winning the battle against Papa Doc (Anthony Mackie) by claiming “white trash” as a badge of identity

Figs. 7.1, 7.2 & 7.3. Pulp Fiction (1994): the sartorial deconstruction of Jules (Samuel Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta), whose suits are soon soiled and replaced by “dork” clothes, resulting in the parodic excess of the final scene, in which guns are tucked in the waistbands of their shorts

Fig. 7.4. Vincent boogies on the dance floor with Mia (Uma Thurman) in a scene that parodies John Travolta’s famous role as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977)

Fig. 7.5. The opening of Reservoir Dogs (1992), which screens the “dogs” in heated debate about the meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and the ethics of tipping waitresses

Fig. 7.6. Jules and Vincent argue out the ethics of giving another man’s wife a foot massage - the previous tracking shot replaced by a static, meditative camera in a medium shot (as opposed to usual Hollywood close-ups and shot-reverse shots for dialogues), which renders the matter absurdly serious, as well as foregrounding the scene’s artificiality and precluding easy identification with these two-dimensional characters

Figs. 7.7 & 7.8. Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) looks on as Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) rants hysterically in Reservoir Dogs

Fig. 7.9. Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) spends most of Reservoir Dogs bleeding to death in agonising pain in the corner of the rendezvous warehouse

Fig. 7.10. Mr. Orange being cared for by Mr. White in a tightly framed close-up that connotes homoerotic as well as homosocial desire

Fig. 7.11. Marvin the cop (Kirk Baltz) about to be mutilated in Reservoir Dog’s infamous torture scene.

Fig. 7.12. The inexplicably psychotic Mr. White plans to set light to Marvin

Fig. 7.13. Vincent and Jules show more concern for their messed up car than the death of Marvin, whose death remains off-screen, thereby focusing reaction not on the violence itself but on Vincent and Jules’s heartless reaction

Fig. 7.14. Vincent and Jules arguing over who gets to pick up fragments of brain and bones as they clean their car under Mr. Wolf’s supervision - a scene where the volume of red blood on white car upholstery and white shirts is indicative of Tarantino's relish in visually deconstructing the gangster ideal

Fig. 7.15. The unexpected shot of Marsellus (Ving Rhames) being raped by hill-billies

Fig. 7.16. The first shot of Marsellus hints at his castration, with the plaster signifying the cracks in his phallic posturing

Fig. 7.17. Butch (Bruce Willis) looking on as Marsellus regains his cool and informs his rapist, “I’m gonna get medieval on your arse!”

Fig. 7.18. Don Vincenzo (Christopher Walken) about to kill Worley (Dennis Hopper) for his racist tirade about Sicilian ethnicity in True Romance (1993)

Fig. 7.19. The playground-like tussle between Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) and Mr. White in Reservoir Dogs

Fig. 8.1. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) dressed as his mother in Psycho (1960), lit from behind to conceal his identity until the end of the film

Fig. 8.2. Mark (Carl Boehm) and his lethal camera in Peeping Tom (1960)

Fig. 8.3. Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) sewing his bodysuit made out of the skin of his female victims in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Fig. 8.4. Copycat’s Cullum (Henry Connick Jr.) looping a noose around Helen’s neck in a scene that forces identification with the victim through point of view shots

Fig. 8.5. Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) and Detective Monahan (Holly Hunter) defeat the serial killer together in Copycat (1995)

Fig. 8.6. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) reflected in the protective the glass above Clarice’s (Jodie Foster) head - a visual inscription of his penetration of her psyche

Fig. 8.7. Overhead lighting emphasises shadows under Lecter’s eyes and highlights the top of his bald head, making his face resemble the skull that appears on Buffalo Bill’s signature death-head moth

Fig. 8.8. Brad Pitt playing against type as Kalifornia’s (1993) “white trash” serial killer

Fig. 8.9. Mickey (Woody Harrelson) morphing into a demon in Natural Born Killers (1994)

Fig. 8.10. Mickey proving himself to be a “natural born killer” in a scene that associates “white trash” masculinity with innate, primal aggression

Fig. 8.11. Henry: The Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986): Henry (Michael Rooker) in a self-reflexive shot that literally offers up a “portrait” of the film’s killer

Figs. 8.12 & 8.13. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) as American Psycho’s (2000) sterile, affectless, yuppie, serial killer, with make-up and hard-lighting combining to render his face impenetrable and uncannily plastic-like

Fig. 8.14. John Doe (Kevin Spacey) as Seven’s (1995) “abnormally normal” serial killer

Fig. 8.15. Mills (Brad Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) in Seven, which uses emphatic noir lighting to emphasise the racial identity of its protagonists

Fig. 8.16. A publicity poster for Copycat, revealing Helen and Monahan reflected in the glasses of serial killer Peter Foley, underscoring his lack of depth and interiority