MONSTERS, MEN AND MACHINES: GENDER IN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1942 - 1962 Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this dissertation is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This dissertation does not include proprietary or classified information. ___________________________ Angela C. Farmer Certificate of Approval: ___________________________ ___________________________ Michelle A. Sidler Patrick D. Morrow, Chair Associate Professor Professor Emeritus English English ___________________________ ___________________________ Sunny Stalter Joe F. Pittman Assistant Professor Interim Dean English Graduate School MONSTERS, MEN AND MACHINES: GENDER IN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1942 - 1962 Angela Farmer A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama May 10, 2008 MONSTERS, MEN, AND MACHINES: GENDER IN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1960 - 1964 Angela Farmer Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this dissertation at its discretion, upon request of individuals or institutions and at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. ______________________________ Signature of Author ______________________________ Date of Graduation iii VITA Angela Carol Farmer, daughter of William and Martha (McDougal) Farmer, was born December 11, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Claude Reavis High School in 1988. She married Timothy Alroth, son of James and Mary (Bahrs) Alroth, on October 12, 1991; together they have three children: Emily, Liam and Evelyn. She attended Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1996; she minored in Philosophy. She remained at Saint Xavier University to earn her Master of Arts degree in English and Certification from The Pastoral Ministries Institute and Saint Xavier University in 1999. After teaching English composition and literature at several Chicago-area colleges and universities, she returned to graduate school at Auburn University in September, 2002. iv DISSERTATION ABSTRACT MONSTERS, MEN, AND MACHINES: GENDER IN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1942 - 1962 Angela Carol Farmer Doctor of Philosophy, May 10, 2008 (M.S., Saint Xavier University, 1998) (B.S., Saint Xavier University, 1996) 242 Typed Pages Directed by Patrick D. Morrow In the construction of the ideologically abject we see the creation of its manifestation: monstrosity. Just as the Kristevian abject, which is neither subject nor object, is my starting point, the Deleuzian ?Desiring Machine? is my concluding position (Powers of Horror; Anti-Oedipus). I show that, in fictional texts, it is through an ever- reproducing collective of desiring machines that ideology is spread. The scripted language of film creates the allusion of subjectivity, a mise-en-scene which repudiates the stability of the Oedipal triad: mother-child-father. Such refutation of presumed systems eschews normalization; however, due to the very performative nature of film, Hollywood is able to call attention to the manufacture of normalization while simultaneously appropriating the appearance of accepted Oedipal desire. In other words, fiction, by nature, pretends to be reality; because it is through language that subjectivity is negotiated and all possibility of an existential reality is removed from the subject. And v because the language of fiction is a scripted appropriation of fantasy, fiction (especially visual fiction) is able to represent fantasmatic desire as real. In the chapters that follow, I will discuss the breakdown between fictive truth and epistemological truth. The appearance of masculinity which conforms to hegemonic expectations (or ?hegemonic masculinity?) in fiction can be seen as just that -- fiction. Fiction represents the fantastic desires of the culture from which it arises. In the texts that follow, hegemonic masculinity is often performed in a way that betrays itself as a fiction; when cast in the light of satire, parody, and ironic representation, masculinity can be seen as nothing more than a correspondent to Lacan?s feminine masquerade or the fa?ade of phallic femininity. vi Style manual used: Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Computer software and font used: Microsoft Office Word 2007, Times New Roman, 12 Point vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: Monsters, Mommies, and Pinko Commies: The Monstrosity of Domesticity and the Red Scare Generation ................................................................................................................21 CHAPTER 3: ?The Perfect Type for the Job?: Gender Trouble in Notorious and Psycho ......................68 CHAPTER 4: ?You Can?t Fight in Here, This is the War Room?: Dark Humor and Political Masculinity in Dr. Strangelove ............................................................................................................111 CHAPTER 5: Discipline and Surveillance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest .................................145 NOTES .............................................................................................................................179 WORKS CONSULTED ..................................................................................................209 iix 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: MASCULINITY AND THE RED SCARE It was a war about saving face. A foreign enemy power had breached America?s borders and used air power to destroy a major stronghold and America was compelled into a war that we were reluctant to engage.1 Called to war by a rousing speech for vindication by our President, Americans outwardly fought the war over natural resources; Americans outwardly fought the war to maintain our way of life; Americans outwardly fought the war to prevent the spread of an ideology contrary to our ideas of liberty and democracy. Inwardly, Americans fought the war because they were afraid. Americans were afraid of being perceived as violable and therefore feminized. In the end, we won the war only to be plagued by years of fear and intimidation. After all, our enemies had flown planes over our soil and had killed our citizens in Pear Harbor; and later, after the war, the ideology of Communism threatened to stunt the sovereignty and the spread of democracy. Though World War II had ended, the Cold War had just begun. The social narrative of the Cold War Era is particularly revealing of American narratives in general. The same story can be retold in part when discussing the American War on Terror and the re-emergence of hegemonic imperatives of masculine power. Because societies are developed according to the narratives they accept as true and valuable, my major premise is to state that various masculinities interrogate the ?dominant fiction? of the existence of a unified masculinity represented by the ?phallic 2 male.? This dissertation offers a study of the advancement of one particularly influential narrative that Americans apprehended as both true and significant at the end of the Second World War through the Reagan Administration, often referred to as the ?end? of the Cold War.2 The purpose of this great American narrative was to construct and legitimate an imagination of the best possible man, one that evolved from the foundations of the American ideal: from The Revolution to The New Deal. This dissertation requires the recognition that manhood, like womanhood, is not an ahistorical ?given.? We must assume that just as one is not born a woman, one is not born a man but rather one becomes a man; gender is recognized as the consequence of a historical and ideological evolutionary process. In the American narrative of The Cold War Era, the ideal ?best man? was white. Of course, not everyone bought into this fiction. From the beginning, African- American?s resisted it, women resisted it, and eventually men began resisting it too. In a crucial move, faced simultaneously with the Women?s Liberation Movement, The Civil Rights Movement, The Gay Pride Movement, and the Red Scare, white men in America shifted in their unquestioning apprehension of the ?ideal American male? and began to question the foundations of the grand narrative of masculinity. It is this historical moment, when one faction of society chooses to hold on to the fiction and one faction chooses to reject it, which defines the evolution of masculinity after the Cold War Era. For this reason, the representations of Cold War Masculinity, particularly as it relates to politics and ?National Security,? remains important today. 3 To establish my theoretical standpoint I will draw from two major terms: monster and abjection. In Chapter Three of Nomadic Subjects, ?Mothers. Monsters, and Machines,? Rosi Braidotti defines monsters as representing that which is between boundaries, conglomerate, or undetermined. While Braidotti?s primary goal is to discuss new reproductive technologies in regard to women?s bodies. Gilles Deleuze, whose theoretical framework Braidotti takes as her starting point, defines machines (loosely) as any point at which flows of energy either enters or leaves a structure and connects it with another structure. The machine is not the structure itself but the boundary between structures. In their famous example, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the nursing mother and infant as an example of the machine; neither the breast nor the mouth is alone capable of creating a nourished child. It is solely in the connection between the mouth and the breast that creates the ?nursing machine.? The boundary between the infant and the mother?s breast, no matter how infinitesimal, creates the machine. By ?mothers?, Braidotti refers to the maternal role of women, both as ?biocultural entities? as well as political subjects who are represented in feminist theory (77). By machines, Braidotti refers to ?the scientific, political, and discursive field of technology? (77). By monsters, Braidotti means a discourse around difference and deviance as well as a representation of ?the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent? both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration? (77). According to Kristeva in the Powers of Horror, the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. Kristeva?s 4 understanding of the ?abject? provides a helpful term to contrast to Lacan?s ?object of desire? or the ?objet petit a.? Whereas the objet petit a allows a subject to coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of meaning and intersubjective community to persist, the abject ?is radically excluded and,? as Kristeva explains, ?draws me toward the place where meaning collapses? (Powers 2). It is neither object nor subject; the abject is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic order. As Kristeva puts it, ?Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be? (Powers 10). More specifically, Kristeva associates the abject with the eruption of the Real into our lives. In particular, she associates such a response with our rejection of death?s insistent materiality. Our reaction to such abject material re-charges what is essentially a pre-lingual response. The abject must also be disguised from desire.3 It is associated, rather, with both fear and jouissance: ?One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion? (Powers 9). To experience the abject in literature carries with it a certain pleasure but one that is quite different from the dynamics of desire. Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject, rather, with poetic catharsis: ?an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it? (Powers 29). I will therefore use the voided ?lacking? space of the fantasy, which Lacan formulates as $< >a (the valuation of subjectivity ($) is defined by (<) lack of the object (>a), to discuss the ways desire negates the expected cultural trajectory and refutes power by accepting a reconciliation with systemic collapse. That is to say, the existence of 5 ?non-phallic? masculinities in literature and film represents a masculinity which encroaches on femininity within political matrices thereby creating abject or monstrous masculine subjects. I argue that the space between subject and object, the space of abjection, the space provided by the split subject, is the space of revolution. In the place of abjection, the location of boundarylessness and of fascinated dread, subjects can reinvent the self. Without the limitations of boundaries and the Law of the Father, the subject can ?become,? as Deleuze and Guattari would put it. This argument works particularly well in the literature and film of the mid- twentieth century where the ?historical trauma? of World War II intersects with the ?crisis of masculinity,? a phenomenon which occurred in the mid-century resulting from a shift in the assumption of white-male superiority. Much of the work on theorizing masculinity and whiteness takes as its starting point the notion that invisibility is a necessary condition for the perpetuation of white and male dominance. I?m talking about the notion of ?unmarkedness? as defined by Deborah Tannen.4 Masculinity and whiteness retain their powers as signifiers and as social practices because they are opaque to analysis (or so the argument goes); one cannot question, let alone dismantle, what remains hidden from view. And indeed, white male power has benefited from keeping whiteness and masculinity invisible since that which is invisible evades surveillance, regulation, and critique. The downside is that in evading cultural markings, invisibility distances the subject from diverse constructions of identity and narratives of experience, accepting instead a universal, even monolithic, sense of self. This limits the possibilities available to a subject who wants to identify himself as ?masculine.? 6 It is with the assumption that there is a benefit to an invisibility that evades surveillance, regulation, and critique that Donna Haraway speaks of the privilege of inhabiting an unmarked body, the patrimony of white Western man, and the marking of the bodies of others: From the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the great historical constructions of gender, race, and class were embedded in the organically marked bodies of woman, the colonized or enslaved, and the worker. Those inhabiting these marked bodies have been symbolically other to the fictive rational self or universal, and so unmarked, species man, a coherent subject (210) Implicit in Haraway?s claim is her connection between ?the unmarked? and the ?disembodied,? the ?marked? and the ?embodied.? However, I posit that making the normative visible as a category embodied in gendered and radicalized terms can call into question the privileges of unmarkedness. Further, visibility can provide empowerment, as the history of movements for social equality in the United States has taught us. Because the subject position ?White Men? has historically been conflated with ?normativity? in the American social lexicon, white men have not been understood as practicing identity politics. Political power and the rights of citizenship have traditionally been bequeathed to those who are not ?encumbered? by racial and gender difference, and thus are not bound by ?special interests.? Late Cold War gender and racial struggles are most often conceptualized as a battle between ?feminists,? ?multiculturalists,? and the white male spokesman for unmarked normativity. But, it is historically accurate, or 7 theoretically useful, to frame whiteness and masculinity in this way? Are white men impervious to struggles over gender and race? Do whiteness and masculinity equate to the monolithic American ideal represented in the national narrative? Is such invisibility in an individual male subject?s best interest? Do we really imagine that all men are the same - or that such a thing is even desirable? The answer to all of these questions quite simply is ?no.? So clearly, the narrative does not apply to individual subjects. Invisibility does not really benefit individual men who are coerced into conforming to a single ideal masculinity; invisibility benefits the overall social system which dictates to men the ways in which they must demonstrate their masculinity. When white American men began to become aware of this dictum, coming into visibility by its contrast to the social movements of others, they too began to question its validity. However, at the same time came the recognition that the loss of invisibility meant the intensification of surveillance and critique. White American masculinity was in quite a conundrum indeed. On the one hand, single subjects stood to gain individuation; on the other hand, the subject group ?white male? risked the loss of its historically assumed privilege and power. It is this moment in history, like others before it, when the ?visible? are gaining influence, that the ?invisible? begin to feel a sense of ruin ? an occurrence typically referred to as ?White Masculinity in Crisis.? One of the critiques of the idea of white masculinity in crisis is that it is a notion based on a misunderstanding of gender that considers male and female separate constructs, rather than relational to one another; this is a relationship which Luce Irigaray?s An Ethics of Sexual Difference defines as something to be respected and 8 celebrated rather than imploded. Another critique, which Sally Robinson traces in the popular news-magazine, Time, is that the assumption that masculinity in crisis developed at a time when women and people of color were gaining advances that all men were resistant to social and political advances (5-8). Both the codifiers and critics of white masculinity in crisis are correct. American men did have an underlying desire to maintain an incontestable definition of masculinity and at the same time they were uncomfortable with the proliferation of static ideas about gendered and raced identities. Thus the crisis. As a testament to this, consider the social and political movements of the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of the crisis of masculinity that tried to define various possibilities for masculinity based on individuality rather than gender dichotomies and monolithic norms: The Million Man March, The Promise Keepers, and ?Wildmen,? the mythopoetic men?s movement which encouraged men to seek their masculine identities on ritualistic drum-beating retreats in the wilderness.5 In response to the critics who maintain that the idea of masculinity in crisis is based in a misunderstanding that masculine and feminine are relational, I would argue that the ?crisis? is concerning the negotiation of that very relationship. In response to critics who maintain that men?s groups are evidence of a lack of crisis, I would argue that the necessity of these various groups simply attests to the existence of an identity crisis. The problem remains, how does a single male subject gain the benefits of individuation while maintaining the assumed privilege and power of the subject group ?white male?? It is through a series of complex hegemonic negotiations that acceptable ?individual? masculinities are defined.6 The first of these negotiations sets out to 9 establish subjectivity. Just as with any arbitration, a middle ground must be decided upon. A set of core values must be established. For a society where patriarchy is a core value, acceptable masculinity plays a key role in the perpetuation of social order. What is not acceptable to that social order plays an equally important role in that what is rejected stands in relief to what is accepted.7 Here we have a second level of negotiation; by defining what is accepted, we have already decided what is rejected and from these rejected traits, we are further able to negotiate taboos - those traits which are abjected. Kristeva explains the formation of abjection by exploring divisions created by ?the sacred? based on fear of the ?invisible? aspect of taboo as either ?sacred? or ?defiled.?8 The abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. As I will discuss in some detail in Chapter Five, Kristeva?s understanding of the ?abject? provides a helpful term to contrast to Lacan?s ?object of desire.? Whereas the objet a allows a subject to coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing meaning to persist, the abject ?is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses? (Powers 2). Because the abject is neither object nor subject; the abject is has to do with, ?what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules? (Powers 4). So for a masculine identity in crisis, the abject lies in the limens of masculinity; the abject masculine trait is that which falls between acceptable and unacceptable, or outside acceptable and unacceptable. To paraphrase Kristeva, it is the trait which disturbs the system, the order, the identity; it does not respect borders. 10 In the construction of the ideologically abject we see the creation of its manifestation: monstrosity, which gender theorists use as a trope to discuss mutability, abjection, and ambiguity. In ?Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,? Braidotti writes, ?Monsters . . . represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent . . . both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration? (Nomadic Subjects. 107). Although Braidotti focuses her argument on monstrosities of the historical past versus the modern monstrosity of social order, her insistence on monstrosity as a site of simultaneous wonder and horror is an important intersection in my definition of monsters since the axis of wonder/horror is the site of ambiguity and abjection. For Braidotti, the primary level of monstrosity, the very first departure from the white integrated subject is the woman. Because of her physical mutability, she is a monster to begin with, and she has been for as long as can be historically traced. A body of difference, while being an object of fascination, is simultaneously that of disgust and therefore represents the abject. The monster?s mutability, its disregard for boundaries and its fascinating horror confirm that when we negotiate abjection, we are creating monsters. In the negotiation of accepted core values and taboos/abjection, it is the invisible negotiator, the representative, invisible, incorporated subject in power that has the ability to create monsters.9 In this negotiation, it is imperative to recognize the seat of power. Those who can create monsters - the subjects in power - cannot simultaneously be monsters. What?s more, those who are on capable of being monstrized have no power to create monsters; further, they cannot create themselves as not-monsters.10 In other words, the men who embody the accepted forms of masculinity - the materialization of 11 American manhood which is supported by the social order because it in turn supports the core value of patriarchy - are the subjects who have the power to create ?others? as abject and therefore monstrous. The ?other? has no power to create monstrous masculinities, nor can he redefine himself as not-a-monster.11 While this dissertation focuses on male subjectivity, it is primarily about the gendered self; when considering masculine subjectivity we must consider, by necessity, female subjectivity. It has been several generations since we have started earnestly investigating the position of female subjectivities in Western culture and, as part of that culture, literature. We have asked questions that lead us to understandings about representation, cultural construction, gender performance, and our assumptions concerning women?s gender, race, and sexuality. Feminist theoretical perspectives have maintained that among the primary faults with female subjectivity in a predominantly patriarchal society are essentialisms and binary oppositions which define our world by what is not, or as Freud and Lacan would say, what is ?lacking.? In this binary opposition female has been relegated to a definition of ?not male? or defined by biological lack. Criticism of such definitions have been in full swing since the mid twentieth century with determining texts such as Simone DeBeauvoir?s The Second Sex and Luce Irigaray?s critique of Freudian Theory, The Sex Which is Not One. Likewise, essentialisms have been questioned by writers as early as Margaret Fell and Mary Wollstonecraft in the Age of Reason; however, the iconoclastic images of femininity persist into the twentieth century despite the arguments of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers like Julia Kristeva, H?l?ne Cixous, and Monique Wittig. 12 One of the primary conundrums we face in gender theory is the cultural assumption of a criterion - a hegemonic standard by which all else is measured.12 For feminist theorists, the standard is perceived as maleness; all subjects which lack biological maleness fall short of the standard. But as we have seen in Judith Butler?s oeuvre as well as Anne Fausto-Sterling?s recent work, Sexing the Body (2000), the issue of biological gender is more complicated than our binary assumptions of ?possession? and ?lack.? Biological sex can be ambiguous or indeterminate according to an either/or paradigm; further, because gender is constructed, it can be performed. Queer Theory has called additional attention to our assumptions as a heteronormative culture. Elaine Showalter and Monique Wittig were among the first to question the ?heteronormative imperative? but they were far from the last.13 So if our cultural paradigm is the ?ideal American male? white, heterosexual, and middle-class, there should be little variation in a large component of our society. Nonetheless, we know this is untrue. There is a great deal of variety between men and their subject positions. Our culture recognizes that there is an entire spectrum of masculinities ranging from soft-spoken, artistic, nurturing men to stoic, logical, reserved men. But even the perception of this spectrum assumes that there is a center, a mean, a baseline, or a ?standard? for masculinity. Such a notion affects the materialization of masculinity; as I said previously, just as one is not born a woman, one is not born a man but rather becomes one. But there is more than one kind of man to become -- even within paradigmatic white heterosexual maleness there is variation. How far he ?deviates? from the assumed center determines his acceptability. Like a hawk on jesses, the center point 13 of an acceptable masculine subjectivity keeps him tethered to a culturally tolerable whorl. The boundaries of that whorl represent abjection in masculinity; beyond the boundaries lay the monsters. The forces that determine the sphere of culturally acceptable masculinities are not very different from the forces that create female subjectivity; as a matter of fact, they often create and recreate one another in a complicated dialectic, one Derrida would call a ?dance.?14 In the texts of the twentieth century, we can read the ways in which the political binary and the gender binary for the construction of the American male subject intertwine, intersect, and unite. Focusing on some of the most popular texts of the Cold War Era, I intend to illuminate and critique the treatments and representations of varying masculine identities. For the purposes of this argument, I will not address minority masculinities nor will I overtly address homosexual masculinities.15 Though race and sexuality enter into some of my arguments, I will focus on the masculinity perceived as ?normal? so as to debunk or demystify the validity of a monolithic heterosexual white masculinity.16 I will also interrogate the ways Western culture begins to sort out which men are manly and which men are not? More importantly, how does Western culture encourage ?proper? masculinities and discourage ?unmanlyness?? And, what happens to the men who do not measure up to our cultural expectations of masculine materialization? Judith Halberstam states: ?although we seem to have a difficult time defining masculinity, as a society we have little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust? (1). In our mediated culture, the images of 14 masculinity that characterize the expectations of the male body are significant. In a society where gendered individuals are, from a very early age, bombarded with images of ?proper? gender materialization in commercial advertising, action films, and music videos, men and women formulate ideas about who they should be, and what they should want; this, unfortunately, circumscribes the limits of their potential.17 The visual nature of how we come to understand, interpret, and perform gender is part of how our culture defines norms for masculinity and femininity. Western culture uses fiction, on the page or on the screen, to create gendered realities. In short, we identify manly-men when we observe them and recognize their endorsement by culture (often the only way we recognize endorsement is by a lack of punishment); likewise, we identify unmanly-men when we observe them and recognize their condemnation. This cultural dialectic of approval and disapproval is a dance, negotiating values and beliefs. To impersonate naturalness, the dialectic ?dance? must be subtle; in order for it to thrive it must remain a masked ideological struggle (and it must be kept under surveillance). Part of this endeavor, the dialectic of approval and disapproval, is based in the allocation of praise and assignment of blame. Epideictic rhetorical strategy plays an important role in cultivating cultural mores and understanding. Praise and blame are frequently used to classify acceptable and unacceptable ways of acting, speaking, or thinking within a culture. Epideictic discourse can also serve to reinforce an audience?s compliance to a selected ethics. The epidictic can also encourage the adoption of an altered opinion (which Kenneth Burke calls an ?incipient act?); it can increase an audience?s disposition to act in accordance with an 15 ethics that informs judgment and behavior within a culture. The assignment of praise and blame is further engaged in constructing both individual subjectivity and culturally articulated identities. At the same time, epidictic rhetoric strives to reduce the occasion for resistance or debate by veiling itself as customary praise or blame by presuming ?or simulating the assumption ? that the rhetor and the audience already assent to the same ethics. Epidictic rhetoric, therefore, is an effective forum for rigorous, although often opaque, ideological struggle; in the case of masculine identities, it is my argument that, epidictic rhetoric works toward constructing a persuasive image of accomplishment and evolution that solidifies patriarchy?s aspirations for masculinity. I begin with this argument: the Oedipal triad is undergoing modification during the years just after the Second World War. Beginning with a discussion of American visions of maternity up to and including Philip Wylie?s Generation of Vipers which posits a theory of ?momism,? reflecting the prevalent idea that mothers were detrimental to American masculinity due to their over-protectiveness, I then move to a discussion of Apocalyptic Science Fiction which argues that mothers contributed to national insecurity. Mothers in this fiction were portrayed as able to traverse boundaries, to mutate, and most importantly to successfully prevent military fortification. Indeed, these mothers were portrayed as the downfall of the nation. The film, Manchurian Candidate (1962), I argue, is not, as many critics say, in the same vein as these films. Mother Iselin is not the mom of Wylie?s nightmares. This film, falling at the end of the McCarthy Era when Americans were rethinking Communist threats, domesticity, and the role of mother, is commonly recognized as a satire of the McCarthy years. My argument is that it is also a 16 satire of the momism years. Imagining Wylie?s claims as ridiculous as McCarthy?s, America had disavowed the previous decade?s immediate vilification of mother. Indeed, Mother Iselin is the villain of Manchurian Candidate, but she is represented in parodic hyperbole rather than realistically. What does vilify her is not her position as mother but rather her possession of phallic-femininity. Here, I begin my investigation into that particularly influential narrative of American identity: white male invariability, the construction and legitimating of an imagination of the best possible man, and the recognition that gender is the consequence of a historical and ideological evolutionary process. Like all masculinities begin, I begin this chapter with boyhood. During and after World War II, American leaders sought to bolster and demonstrate American toughness in the face of fascist militarism and Soviet Communism boys were taught to conform to patriotic duties and ascribe to hegemonic imperatives for masculinity.18 For young men, those not yet of age to take on the role of husband and father, innocence, honesty, trustfulness, ineffectiveness, folly, and trepidation (to some degree) were expected and accepted attributes. These were boys; they had not yet become men. However, for a man past the age when he should have taken on the role of husband and father in perpetuation of the patriarchal heteronormative imperative to have these traits is quite another story. These men - ?sissies? and ?momma?s boys? - were the monstrous aberrations that illustrated visibly that white masculinity was not an a priori, stable identity that simply occurred due to biological being. 17 Because such men called attention to the boundaries of masculinity, the abject, they were perceived as a threat to the overarching culture which must be regulated. The most powerful form of regulation, of discipline, is the epidictic. Through a system of praise and blame, most citizenry is made compliant. However this system must at times be subtle to be effective. In literature we can see that male characters who subscribe to accepted norms are ?heroes.?19 What?s more, we have the characters who linger in the limens of masculine identity, monstrous versions of their opposite.20 On a basic rhetorical level, the words associated with these men affect our perception of their gendered identities; authors must mark their characters so that they can be meaningfully interpreted by readers. The methods by which authors achieve this understanding with their readership are through subtle or even overt rhetorical tropes; and the most fundamental of these rhetorical devices is character naming. Our interpretation of these tropes determines our sympathies and therefore our ability to relate to fictional characters; and it is imperative to our interpretive process that the reader and the writer assent to the same meaning. In consenting to interpret characteristics along harmonious lines, Western culture has cultivated a system of interpolation which, necessary to its function, excludes viable identities. We use these examples ?created? for us to define who we are as individuals; we use fiction to not only reflect, but also to formulate reality. Chapter three deals predominantly with the women of Hitchcock films, the argument is less that certain masculinities appear on the screen and in fiction, but that they are scripted on the screen and the page. Hitch films reveal that fiction appropriates the fantasies of desire which do not always follow expected cultural lines. In my 18 argument, I outline the common misconception that Hitch?s women are ?super-bitch prostitutes? (Price). Hitch film does not fit the dominant fiction which is largely predicated on the denial of a non-unified masculine subject (I intentionally use the double negative here and elsewhere); therefore, as I will show, they were force-read as homoerotic, anti-feminine, and anti-maternal texts. The most common thought process seems to be that if Hitchcock?s men are weak it is because his women are evil. I have never found this to be true of Hitchcock?s women and argue specifically that Alicia Huberman of Notorious and Marion Crane of Psycho are strong women who support their masculine counterparts to the point of self-destruction. (Upon reexamining very recent Hitchcock criticism, I have found a reconciled possibility of simultaneously good women and weak men.) In the forth chapter I extend the argument of parody and satire to discuss Dr. Strangelove. In this film, the variety of masculine possibilities interrogates the existence of a unified masculine identity. Because the object [petit] a is never attainable, because it is nothing real, it is said to stimulate castration anxiety in the masculine subject who then fills the space of the a with something that he identifies as himself. Beginning with a discussion of dark humor and it purposes, I segue into a discussion of split subjectivity as it relates to humor. My conclusion for this chapter is that the men of Strangelove, fill the space of the a (or the imago) with a fetishistic militaristic arsenal. The men begin to imagine themselves as (necessarily phallic) weapons and begin to relate to their weapons of war to their existential selves. 19 Finally, One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest (the novel version only) takes a serious look at the issues revealed in Chapter 2. While there is attendant humor, there is no sense of parody or satire in this text. This chapter also discusses the possession of the phallus in terms of non-phallic-masculinity as it encroaches on femininity. In this case, saying ?no? to power (or war as an expression of power) is the same as saying ?yes? to a reconciliation of the non-unified subject which would allow for systemic collapse and therefore change. I argue that, in order to prevent non-phallic-masculinity and those attendant changes, Nurse Ratched structures a system of discipline and surveillance which attempts to normalize masculine desire. I have chosen my texts carefully. Recognizing that there are other masculinities (which include non-white masculinity, homosexual masculinity and female masculinity to name a few) I focus on the representations of white, heterosexual masculinities which were created for American audiences. By maintaining this focus, I feel that I can address the manufacturedness of masculine performativity. By looking at film as well as literature, I can scrutinize the constructedness of gendered representations in Cold War Era texts. The scripted language of film creates the allusion of subjectivity, a mise-en- scene which repudiates the stability of the Oedipal triad: mother-child-father. Such refutation of presumed systems eschews normalization; however, due to the very performative nature of film, Hollywood is able to call attention to the manufacture of normalization while simultaneously appropriating the appearance of accepted Oedipal desire. In other words, fiction, by nature, pretends to be reality; because it is through 20 language that subjectivity is negotiated and all possibility of an existential reality is removed from the subject. And because the language of fiction is a scripted appropriation of fantasy, fiction (especially visual fiction) is able to represent fantasmatic desire as real. In the chapters that follow, I will discuss the breakdown between fictive truth and epistemological truth. The appearance of masculinity which conforms to hegemonic expectations (or ?hegemonic masculinity?) in fiction can be seen as just that -- fiction. Fiction represents the fantastic desires of the culture from which it arises. In the texts that follow, hegemonic masculinity is often performed in a way that betrays itself as a fiction; when cast in the light of satire, parody, and ironic representation, masculinity can be seen as nothing more than a correspondent to Lacan?s feminine masquerade or the fa?ade of phallic femininity. 21 CHAPTER 2 ?MONSTERS, MOMMIES, AND PINKO COMMIES: THE MONSTROSITY OF DOMESTICITY AND THE RED SCARE GENERATION? August 6, 1945. A B-29 Superfortress rumbled down the runway at Tinian in the Marianas, heavily laden with the world?s first operational atomic bomb; the pilot, Paul Tibbets, brought the B-29, previously known simply as #82, up to speed and within ten minutes they were over Saipan.21 Knowing that his mission was of great importance, Tibbits decided to rename #82; the name he chose was Enola Gay, in honor of his sustaining and devoted mother. In the belly of Enola Gay was ?Little Boy,? the ten foot, nearly four ton, brainchild of the Manhattan Project made of highly enriched uranium. When the Enola Gay delivered her Little Boy, the world was introduced to a horror it had never known. The fear that followed in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a weapon in and of itself. The simultaneous infatuation and dread of nuclear annihilation became the ultimate abject monstrosity of the Cold War Era. It is in this time, this generation of fear, that all things associated with the possibility of nuclear attack became the abject, became monstrous. I would like to recall the definition of ?abjection? from chapter one: ?The abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other? (Kristeva 2). After the possibility of nuclear annihilation was realized, mass society and national security became values to be 22 protected. In opposition to these values lay the Soviet Union and nuclear proliferation. The Communist Party came to represent an abjection to American Cold War ideology, because of its invisible nature. Americans could not tell by physical appearance who was and who was not a Communist. Unlike the Jews of Nazi Germany who were forced to brand themselves, their homes and their workplaces, ?Juden,? Capitalist Americans had no stamp from which to identify Communist-Americans. There was no hallmark to declare to the anti-Communist where to direct his ire. It is this level of invisibility that created the Communist -- and merely the fear of Communism -- as an abjection to Cold War dogma. It is also in its disregard for boundaries (political, national, and geographic), that the Communist Party becomes an abjection; not all Communists arrived on American soil from Russia or China. Many Communists were swayed by the failure of American labor unions and converted to Communism in American towns like Duluth (Ross 8). Because of the lack of ?home-base? from which all Communists emerge, Americans perceived Communism as infiltrative and insidious. The logic follows that only that which is violable can be penetrated; therefore invasive Communism posed a threat to American (hypothetically inviolable) masculinity. In this chapter, I explicate the ways in which Cold War ideology established a division between the American masculine subject and communism. I explore the ways in which, because of its perceived direct connection to Communist ideology, domesticity and motherhood fell squarely in the crossfire. Because Americans felt the need for a domestic space with hearth and home, but they also identified the ideology associated with such domesticity as linked to Communist ideologies, the line between the American 23 home and communism proved to be no Iron Curtain. This lack of border, this limenal, permutable, space, was perceived as abject; and by her association, the mother became perceived as a monster. This chapter will continue to look at the ways in which Cold War texts reflect a fear that Communist ideology would manifest itself in the domestic space of the American citizen. I will also give a cultural context for the relationship between domesticity, motherhood and communism as I discuss one of the foremost cultural critics and prolific fiction writers of the Cold War Era, Philip Wylie, and illustrate the ways in which the fear of mother (as Communist) manifested itself in popular texts. Before Freud, relationships between mothers and sons were typically perceived as benign at best.22 Mothers? ties to their sons have been both romanticized and criticized, depending on how Americans in various eras viewed the compatibility of this relationship with social and cultural ideas of manhood, but they were not always suspect.23 Beginning around 1830, perhaps as a precursor to the Temperance movement, an explosion of advice literature suggested that mothers would be ideal figures to foster sons in self- restraint, sobriety, and the virtue considered necessary to function properly in the nation?s market economy.24 The coincidence of this sentiment with the burgeoning American Suffrage movement is not to be overlooked either as it is a popular conception that a valorization of domesticity is the best suspension of women?s liberation; the effect is to re-inscribe women, should they try to achieve self-determination, back to the roles imaged for them. This method of gender government is relevant to the Cold War Era as well. After dogged patriarchal-capitalism had robbed men of their perceived value 24 during The Great Depression and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor when the men went off to war, women replaced male production workers (earning employment, indepen- dence, and autonomy). When Rosie the Riveter became an American icon of female aptitude and self-reliance, gender relations faced a crisis. 25 Eventually, for the patriarchy of the Cold War era, the mother turned out not to be a victim at all, rather she turned out to be all too powerful. Postwar domestic ideology began to attack women who wanted to retain their newfound independence. After the war ended, women were compelled back into domestic subordination, physical subordination (by way of ?disciplining? their bodies with the domestic applications of the inventions of war - nylon stockings, girdles, and ?torpedo? bras), and sexual repression in response to their husbands? return from the war and the nation?s need for definite boundaries. Mothers who wanted to remain employed were demonized (work was portrayed as child abandonment) and all forms of autonomy, especially sexual autonomy, was criticized as female ?aggression.? Many social movements have adhered to a pattern where a rise in female autonomy is followed by hyper-glorification of motherhood.26 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory has had an enormous impact on American understandings of gender and sexuality, influencing conceptions of masculinity in the United States by emphasizing male heterosexual identity as a social construction maintained through the control of repressed impulses of homosexual desires.27 Although Freud himself focused primarily on the significance of the role of the father, popular Freudianism in the United States became obsessed with the issue of motherhood. The breakdown of the boundary between domestic support and maternal influence became 25 unstable thereby creating a space for abjection. The mother role, now suspect, was becoming monstrous.28 During World War II and the Cold War, clinicians, scholars, popular commentators, and Hollywood films found Freudian theory very useful to the ends of the American core values (heterosexual patriarchy and capitalism) and employed Freudian concepts and terminology which emphasized the necessity of traditional gender roles. Social critics Philip Wylie and Edward Strecker warned against the pernicious effects of domineering or overprotective mothers on their sons, and they held mothers responsible for such diverse social phenomena as alcoholism and homosexuality. To critics like these, Freud?s concepts were useful to pathologize homosexuality as the result of psychosexual immaturity, to limit women to a supportive domestic sphere, and to diagnose a general ?crisis? of American masculinity: because of the dominating influence of American mothers, American men were becoming ?soft.? During the 1940s American participation in World War II and the subsequent onset of the Cold War raised concerns about American military strength and the toughness of American soldiers. It was in this atmosphere that mothers? relationships with their sons became a subject of great interest to psychiatry scholars, social commentators, and authors of fiction. The primary fear for American masculinity stemmed from the nation?s perceived need for a strong, disciplined military.29 What?s more, by this time men were encouraged to imagine ?mother? and ?military? as dichotomously separate; this polarity forced American men to choose, not between being a son and being a soldier, but between being a patriot and being a foe to the American way. Psychoanalysts, enlisted to aid in the military?s screening of young recruits, 26 intended to forestall an outbreak of mass ?male hysteria? similar to the ?shell shock? epidemic of World War I by weeding out young men deemed psychologically unfit for military service. At the same time, the implementation of psychological testing in the military promoted fears that over-mothering had made America?s young men into ?sissies? and emotional cripples who were ill equipped to serve and defend the nation. The increased absence of fathers during the Second World War and the simultaneous entrance of women into the work force intensified these concerns, provoking fears of expanding female power and accusations that American women were not adequately fulfilling their primary responsibility as mothers. Given the history of mother and son relationships cited above, it is my conclusion that while mothers had previously been seen as conduits of morality and virtue, they had become imagined as transmitters of neuroses and agents of emasculation; they became mothers who created a masculinity that defied prescribed boundaries and crossed into the feminine and by the same turn created the femininity of a powerful mother and domestic leader whose subjectivity threatened to cross into the masculine; both were seen as abject. This bond becomes abject because it breaks down barriers and because the dread that surrounded mother and her relationship with her sons was at once terrifying and alluring. The mother / child relationship, already established as theoretically reliable creates the mother as abject; theories concerning monstrosity also position the mother as monster.30 However, not only is mother a monster in her abjection, so is her son; the son who is over-mothered is also in a position of abjection and monstrosity.31 27 The belief that American mothers were emasculating their sons, referred to as the ?momism? critique, was put forth in Philip Wylie?s influential social critique, Generation of Vipers (1942). In the postwar period, psychiatrists and social scientists lent Wylie?s momism a degree of scientific legitimacy by employing it as a kind of diagnosis. In the 1946 bestseller, Their Mothers? Sons, Edward Strecker attributed the high incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders among U.S. draftees and servicemen to widespread maternal pathology. Expert?s studies such as David Levy?s Maternal Overprotection were especially anxious about the role that mothers played in fostering male homosexuality, which also became widely associated with communism during the Cold War. By the 1960s, American feminists like Betty Freidan (The Feminine Mystique) appropriated the derogatory stereotype of the neurotic suburban mother to argue that women?s energies should no longer be confined to the home and those women who defined themselves solely as mothers risked smothering their children, thereby making them incompetent adults. Let me now turn to the perceived interrelationship between mothers and communism in a more specific manner by offering an examination of the anti-maternal paradigm. In 1942, Philip Wylie, who found a large measure of success writing for women?s magazines, published his Generation of Vipers, a book of social criticism which pits mom squarely against the nation. The momism critique asserted that the nation?s young men lacked the rugged, independent character possessed by their forefathers and necessary to national strength. Popular writers and psychiatric experts blamed pathological moms who ?smother loved? their sons and viewed the phenomenon as 28 uniquely American, and largely confined to the middle class. Wylie coined the term momism after witnessing a Mother?s Day spectacle: a division of soldiers spelling, in formation, ?MOM.? He censures, ?I cannot think, offhand, of any civilization except ours in which an entire division of living men has been used, during wartime, or at any time, to spell out the word ?mom? on a drill field? (184). Historians, like Hans Sebald, Dana Heller, Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, have tended to view the momism critique as part of an antifeminist movement that sought to reestablish stable gender roles after World War II.32 Indeed, the critique was decidedly misogynistic, and it also served to fuel rampant homophobia in the postwar era. To Wylie, the soldiers? tribute suggested that American men were more skilled at sentimental gestures than heroic acts. Wylie argued that the decline of manly labor, the mawkish character of popular entertainment and the influence of women?s clubs all pointed to encroaching momism. Wylie, already a celebrity in science fiction circles, became a social criticism celebrity because of his timely and keenly felt attack on American momism; his critique resonated with those who worried that American men seemed too ?soft? to prevail against America?s fascist enemies. According to Michal Rogin, ?Mom, in Wylie?s depiction, was a self-righteous, hypocritical, sexually repressed, middle-aged woman. . . . [Generation of Vipers] uncovers the buried anxieties over boundary invasion, loss of autonomy, and maternal power generated by domesticity? (6-7). Mom, in Wylie?s depiction, had strayed from the household functions of ?traditional? women: she manipulated men into worshiping her and spending money on her, and she manipulated the sexual responses of her son who she encouraged to be dependent upon her for validation. He writes, ?She is Cinderella . . . 29 the shining-haired, the starry-eyed, the ruby-lipped virgo aeternis, of which there is presumably one, and only one, or a one-and-only for each male, whose dream is fixed upon her deflowerment and subsequent perpetual possession? (Generation Of Vipers 184). Mom demanded her son?s reverence in order to dominate and repress his sexuality, and she hijacked the desire that ought to go to another woman for herself. ?I give you mom. I give you the destroying mother,? Wylie concluded, ?I give you Medusa? (Generation Of Vipers 193). His fervent denunciation of mom and her ability to destroy her sons continues: The spectacle of the female devouring her young in the firm belief that it is for their own good is too old in man?s legends to be overlooked by any but the most flimsily constructed society. Freud has made a fierce and wondrous catalogue of examples of mother-love-in-action which traces its origin to an incestuous perversion of a normal instinct. . . . Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth, have been unable to benefit from Freud?s wisdom because they can prove that they do not, by and large, sleep with their mothers. . . . Meanwhile, Megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand. Our land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron strings crisscrossing it than railroads and telephone wires. Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U.S. (Generation of Vipers. 184 - 189). 30 Wylie?s representation of mom as both Medusa and Cinderella, shows this creature to be less virginal-princess and more shape-shifter. America, maintained Wylie, had become ?a matriarchy in fact if not in declaration,? in which ?the women of America raped the men? and, ?The adoration of motherhood has even been made the basis of a religious cult, but the mother so worshiped achieved maternity without change in her virgin status - - a distinction worthy of contemplation in itself -- and she thus in no way resembled mom? (Generation of Vipers. 193, 185). Mom?s transmogrifying powers, as portrayed by Wylie, allow her influence to become invisible; she is at one moment nurturer and at another moment controller. Compound this with her ability to maintain her virginal status (and its requisite power), and mom is a monster indeed. Not only does Wylie represent her as able to cross boundaries that should not be crossed, he represents her as able to maintain (virginal) integrity when she should be altered, a characteristic which Wylie calls ?worthy of contemplation.? Contemplating mom?s virginal status reveals less about mom than it does about dad. For a virgin to remain unaltered may suggest something about her partner?s effectiveness; in Wylie?s disposition this would give mom a more sinister capacity to un-man. At any rate, the image of a morphed Cinderella / Medusa / mother would be terrifying indeed for a culture already battling the mimic- Communist ideologue. For this reason, Wylie was like other social critics who were fearful of ?change? and opposed careers for women, instead advocating marriage. In political terms, momism stands for the nation?s anxieties over abjection caused by ?boundary invasions.? Because she is represented as a force which exceeds boundaries, mom is represented as abjection; momism is monstrosity. 31 In a turn of the conversation away from mom as her relationship is to her son, Wylie attacks American women in general, conflating all women with his version of ?mom,? when he states: ?In a preliminary test of strength, she also got herself the vote and, although politics never interested her . . . the damage she forthwith did to society was so enormous and so rapid that even the best men lost track of things (Generation Of Vipers 192). Wylie goes on to critique American mothers and draws some rhetorical parallels between mom, Hitler, and McCarthy: Mom also has patriotism. . . [which] is identical to commercialized vice . . . . [because] mom never meets competition. Like Hitler, she betrays the people who would give her a battle before she brings up her troops . . . The nation can no longer say it contains many great, free, dreaming men. We are deep in the predicted nightmare now and mom sits on its decaying throne . . . . ?McCarthyism,? the rule of unreason, is one with momism: a noble end aborted by sick-minded means, a righteous intent. . . . Mom is a human calamity. God pity her--and us all! (Generation of Vipers 193-196.) Through such rhetoric of fear, Wylie expanded already robust anxieties concerning the nation?s emasculation by mom. By connecting mom?s monomaniacal domination of the men in her life to Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism, Wylie creates the image of a tyrannical, anti-American, despot who is both fanatical and irrational. Wylie?s second obsession, the menace of communism, conflates with his distrust of mom and reifies in 32 his fiction (novels like Tomorrow!, The Disappearance, and When Worlds Collide) where moms are incompetent, selfish, and the cause of cultural ruination. Throughout his prolific writing career, Wylie continually attacked Communism as well as mom - often he did so simultaneously. Liberated women represent the Communist threat in Wylie?s earlier fiction.33 In 1930, Wylie wrote his most famous sci-fi novel of the earth?s destruction, When Worlds Collide, which was adapted for the big screen and filmed in 1951. That same year, Wylie published The Disappearance where he imagined a cataclysm that suddenly and unexplainably separated human existence into two dimensions, one reality with only men and one reality with only women. The male world is overcome by violence and civil destruction; the female world is thrown back to pre-industrial technologies. The consequences for the women are starvation and disease. One of the consequences in the male half of existence is nuclear war. After the success of the movie version of When Worlds Collide, Wylie began Tomorrow, and published it in 1954. In this novel, Wylie?s moms dis- empowered the men in their lives: their husbands and sons. Of the three moms in Tomorrow, two dominate their ineffectual husbands; the third mom, whose husband is dead, commands her son and manipulates the whole town. Tomorrow presents civil defense as a method not of deterring atomic war but of surviving it. Yet, all three of the moms, oppose civil defense; they discount the Soviet threat, and they resent the disruptions that safety drills cause their shopping and social schedules. When the nuclear attack comes, none of the moms take shelter, and each suffers the 33 consequence, the moms are punished for their subversions. Tomorrow blames moms for, and punishes them with, body destruction. But, though he may be exceptional in his detestation for mom, Wylie is not alone. Cold War fiction and films typically depict the Communist threat as an invasive, invisible, deceptive, enslaving conspiracy which is embodied by a maternal force. Most science fiction maternal embodiments tend to be coded rather than unambiguous, like Wylie?s appalling moms. By creating a threat which originates in reproductive ?pods? and swarms of female insects, the film industry perpetuates Wylie?s momism -- without overtly blaming mom. Such films construct a dualistic universe to protect American boundaries from invasion. But they register the breakdown of efforts to polarize not just American men against communism but conflate mothers with communism as well. For example, male ants promptly die after fertilizing queen ants in Them! (1954) where a single queen can generate to enough offspring to destroy all humanity. This queen ant never leaves her nest but instead controls an aggressive collectivist society and serves as a metaphor for communism. Likewise The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) where the mother, Helen Benson (Patricia Neil), is the only character able to communicate with the invader Klaatu; The War of the Worlds (1953),34 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) where egg-like pods ensnare and replicate humans. In Body Snatchers, the maternal traps the American citizen, causing him to be an unthinking machine which serves only to replicate and sustain the collective unconscious, a typical allegory for communism. 34 But by the early 1960s, these films began to winnow out and a new kind of film was being made: a film that portrayed the absurdity of the McCarthy era and its collaborator, momism. For instance, in 1964, Point of Order, a documentary expose on McCarthy?s belligerent pressuring of the US military, displayed McCarthy as a paranoid control monger; The Spy Who Came in From the Cold presents Alec Leamas, a British spy whose struggle back from dehumanization at the hands of the Communist regime becomes the focus of the plot; and by 1968, Planet of the Apes took a bizarre leap into the future and illustrated what could happen if the Cold War lead to nuclear annihilation of humankind. Among these films is also Manchurian Candidate (1962), a film, based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Richard Condon, which explicitly represents (in satirical hyperbole) the Communist threat and mother/son relationships a la Wylie?s momism as analogous. Condon?s novel has broadly been accepted as a satire of the political hysteria that gripped the nation in the 1960s. My argument is not that Manchurian Candidate is a satire (that is well established); my argument is that though most critics read Manchurian Candidate as an anti-McCarthyism satire or a parody of momism, I see the novel and the film as having a revolutionary power.35 It is my contention that it is a satirical allegory about redemption; the mother / son relationship had been under fire for a generation and in the two decades before Manchurian Candidate, Wylie?s ideas abounded. But by 1960, audiences were ready for a change. This is a story, not about redeeming mother and her role in the mother / son relationship -- after all, Mrs. Iselin is an irredeemable Communist infiltrator -- it a story about redeeming sons. American masculinity had fallen prey to Wylie?s theories and sons were 35 envisioned as emasculated by their mothers. Manchurian Candidate is a fable, a symbolic act of telling a story, about a son?s ability to reclaim his self and wrest his personal subjectivity from the grips of the most overbearing of mothers. This story sends the message that if Raymond Shaw can salvage his masculinity after being subjected to his mother?s corrosive influence then all American men could reclaim their masculine identities from the authority of momism. But here is the rub: such masculinity was regained at the cost of female political autonomy. Unlike most science fiction which tends toward liberation of the oppressed,36 this tale liberated the son enslaved by momism yet validated the nation?s fears about mom?s (woman?s) political influence.37 The family constellation in Manchurian Candidate consists of an intrusive, sexually unsatisfied mother (Angela Lansbury); a weak father (James Gregory); and a cold, isolated son (Laurence Harvey). Director Frankenheimer could not imagine a more perfect scenario for Wylie?s den of vipers. Manchurian Candidate capitalizes on Condon?s unlikely plot by mixing satire with science fiction, the genre in which Americans had grown used to seeing the Communist menace which was impossible to immediately differentiate from democratic Americans.38 Michael Rogin points to the source of failure in the family is as ?the loving mother? and her overly-close relationship to her son (Ronald Reagan, 252). However, it appears that by 1962, the real danger, the real fear, involves, not mother love, but the feminization of the American male and the coming to power of the American female. Either way, in Manchurian Candidate, momism and the invisible Communist threat come to the fore, hand in hand. 36 An exaggeration of political situation surrounding The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the McCarthy black list, Manchurian Candidate, has been discussed surprisingly little, though Cold War Era films themselves have been the subject of much consideration. In 1994, Stephen Vaughn wrote a volume limited to Cold War Era films (particularly anti-Communist films) starring Ronald Reagan and in ?The Making of an Anti-Communist? he discusses family dynamics like divorce and fidelity. Though Regan stared in adaptations of Philip Wylie?s Night Unto Night, Vaughn doesn?t address the impact Generation of Vipers had on Wylie?s characters; rather, he looks at several Hollywood productions (focusing, like Michael Rogin, on Ronald Reagan as a political actor). Rogin and Whitfield relate the film version of Manchurian Candidate to a psychological discussion of treason; their thesis seems to be that Hollywood was dedicated to portraying a situation where no ?normal? American citizen could defect to communism because of social conditions in the US, where no Hollywood character ever made a dispassionate and informed comparison of capitalism and communism and found communism superior. Whitfield?s argument seems to particularly be that there had to be another explanation for such an event: ?the appeal of communism could not be attributed to larger social conditions? (138). Manchurian Candidate was re-released in the 1980s and underwent rediscovery among film critics; unfortunately, though some critics have looked at the 2005 remake, their arguments reflect the changes in the context but do not treat the original with much seriousness. I will discuss a number of these, including Rogan and Whitfield, here. 37 Both Whitfield and Rogin argue that any successful attraction of communism portrayed in film had to arise from a psychological aberration in the individual involved; Rogin, in his look at communism and motherhood in Cold War films, writes that ?[p]sychological explanations for communism? especially in the post-Freudian, post-Dr. Spock era, focused on the family as the source of failure and specified the source of failure in the family as ?the loving mother? and her relationship to her son (Ronald Reagan, the Movie 252). Though Whitfield and Rogin show that all this was ironic, they accept it as a cultural given, as an essential part of the nation?s sense of itself, that ?the American family would triumph over communism? (Reagan, the Movie 253). What I find most fascinating is that Whitfield addresses the satirical representation of Senator Johnny Iselin (whose last name, he suggests, sounds like ?Iceland? to evoke images of Siberia, land of exile in the USSR), a blowhard who comes to the public?s attention by making declarations about the numbers of Communists in various government agencies. Whitfield concentrates on the hyperbolic representation of a nation brainwashed by the media. Because, he admits, the nation was obsessed with momism, I find it a deficiency that he never addresses the representation of Mother Iselin -- either as satire or otherwise. And while Rogin points to Wylie as a cause for Mom?s representation, and he suggests that such a representation was ironic, he never discusses the revolutionary aspect of such satirical representation. This lack of attention could be because Manchurian Candidate is a tough nut to crack; it neither falls squarely in the ?momism as monster? camp nor squarely out of it. This film falls somewhere in-between. By representing the mother, Mrs. Iselin, as 38 dangerous, the film takes a traditional tack. However, Mrs. Iselin is not represented as an American patriot who unwittingly supports Communist ideology; this is as Wylie would have us see American Mom. Rather, Mrs. Iselin is an actual Communist posing as a good American citizen. In her position of power, Mrs. Iselin is not only a terrifying possibility, Mrs. Iselin is a frontier character. My argument here is that Condon?s and Frankenheimer?s creation of Mrs. Iselin ushers in a new era of Cold War representation of ?Mother? as an assertive political powerhouse rather than Wylie?s passive-aggressive Cinderella. In replacing momism, this new era not only creates a new fear concerning the feminine (and her political influence) but it also relieves the son of some of the anxiety surrounding his designation as mother?s son. In the end, his act of matricide and subsequent suicide is a metaphor for America?s rejection of momism and reveals Raymond Shaw to be enacting an allegory of self-reclamation. In addition to the impending Intellectual Revolution and Women?s Liberation Movement, the consequences for American masculinity are that, while more options opened up for men (particularly the possibility of being nurturing39) masculinity became more difficult to navigate. My argument that Manchurian Candidate is a satire is not to say that Conden, Frankenheimer, and MGM were in anyway trying to promote Communist ideology or to allay American fears, but it is to say that the subtle metaphorical representation of a domestic and feminine threat (as was found in Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Wylie?s fiction like Tomorrow!, Disappearance and When Worlds Collide) no longer served to stimulate audiences. The blatant representation of a maternal rogue in 39 Manchurian Candidate simply heralded a new era of film making in the Cold War Era. Unlike the audience of Arthur Miller?s drama, The Crucible, in 1953, by the production of Manchurian Candidate, American audiences were in popular agreement that the McCarthy era was nothing more than a witch-hunt. We know that Iselin is clearly a stand-in for McCarthyism mentality; the implications of his behavior reek of McCarthyism. This is crucial since one key device for the satirist is innuendo; ambiguity and pun permit the implication of a target without the danger of a direct attack. This provides the satirist with a ?safety net? as it is then possible to disavow the insinuation. Using Iselin as a marker for McCarthy allows Manchurian Candidate to critique McCarthy blacklisting without becoming subject to it. To continue this parallel, Iselin?s first outburst is at a press conference where the Secretary of Defense is announcing naval defense cuts; but because this film is a satire, his ever fluctuating account of the number of Communists in the Department of Defense portrays Iselin as a drunken fool. This critique is well formulated by others, like Rogin and Whitfield, but my argument takes this connection a step further by arguing that Manchurian Candidate is an allegorical appraisal of momism.40 Just as McCarthyism was being disavowed (though the powerful female and mother would become linked to other vices) the links between maternity and communism were beginning to be broken. Manchurian Candidate presents an absurd pretext which imagines, rather than the typical ?us? versus ?them? mentality, an ?us? versus ?us? menace which takes Wylie?s version of mom and extends her to hyperbolic immorality. 40 By placing the Communist plot squarely in the home, in charge of domestic rule as well as in charge of the political sphere, Manchurian Candidate creates a distortion which serves to change the audience?s perspective thereby removing familiar acquiescence and allow criticism. Such threats as the man-eating insects and pod-people (which stood in for the maternal) in earlier films cannot be overlooked; one tends to notice a swarm of gargantuan ants. It is significant then, that the maternal threat of Manchurian Candidate comes in the form of an actual mother. Understatement, the reverse of exaggeration, is another useful tool for the satirist in instances where the vice is already so immense that it need not be exaggerated. Such understatement serves to shock the complacent American audience into realizing grim reality: they had vilified their mothers. Further, this mother?s threat is not carnivorous, instead she emasculates. Resorting to infantilizing her husband by, like Wylie?s mom, conflating him with her son, she keeps both men under her control. This is to say that a Cold War Era audience, who had been inundated by cinematic images of the Cold War Mother as a domestic threat, as a source of compromise and boundary rupture (in short, abject), and as a potential instrument for the enemy would be desensitized to such blatant representations. What?s more, Whitfield does hint at revolutionary content when he offhandedly suggests, ?The fiction that opens Manchurian Candidate has as much to do with the carnival of Mikhail Bakhtin . . . . As the confusion of hierarchically separated realms, carnival is the opposite of Cold War which imagines a radical separation of opposing orders? (3). But more telling is his observation (relegated to a note) that: 41 The carnival of the opening is reprised at the masquerade party with its American flag made of caviare [sic] and the two archconspirators as Bo Peep and Abraham Lincoln. The democratic [sic] convention is also carnivalesque: like the Mardi Gras celebration, it is dominated by large masculine images and shares imagery -- Abraham Lincoln, Indian feather headdresses -- with the earlier event. Costumed as a priest, Raymond is able to move through it unnoticed. (Note 22) It is this sense of carnival, satire, and revolution that I would like to address. First, in carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin insists that, by unsettling systems of decorum, parodies have the potential to create an apparatus of reform: ?the place for working out a new mode of interrelationship between individuals . . . People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar contact on the carnival square? (123). The ?carnival square? (which Bakhtin is quick to distinguish from contemporary holiday culture which pales in comparison to the unbridled atmosphere of the Early Modern carnival) is a great leveler. In carnival, all bets are off , the mighty are brought low while fools are exalted; in this space the censure of polity is not only accepted, but it is expected. Bakhtin?s notion of carnival is connected with the grotesque body, the body which changes through eating, evacuation, and procreation. Another of the primary elements of grotesque bodies is that the body itself ?is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. . . . One of the fundamental tendencies of the grotesque image of the body is to show two bodies in one (25).? The 42 grotesque body is compared to a hydra, with its many heads once severed regenerate in multiplicity, but it is also imagined as the birthing body of the mother where ?From one body a new body always emerges . . .? (25). Such multiplicity coincides with the notion of the abject as well; the loss of the distinction between self and other applies specifically to maternity. The connection between Raymond Shaw, Mother Iselin, and the Communist party is an ideal representation of both the carnivalesque and the abject. The carnival square, which refers to a ?body of the people? and supposes a non-hierarchical structure can easily be read as a metaphor for Communist ideology (keeping in mind that Bakhtin was anti-Stalinist and not necessarily anti-Marxist).41 Embedded in Bakhtin?s notion of the carnivalesque is a component where masquerade and disguise created an alternate reality. I have expounded on Whitfield?s suggestion of Bakhtinian carnivalesque because the fundamental nature of satire is similar to the nature of carnivalesque; both serve to criticize and to call attention to ironies or discrepancies and incongruities between perception and reality which typically involve a paradox or an element of the irrational. It also supports the notion that Manchurian Candidate, while certainly a creation of momism ideology, was simultaneously a reaction against it. As he outlined the trend of Hollywood films during the Cold War Era, Rogin noted that there was a pattern to the production of political films. Almost as if the Cold War itself necessitated a predetermined lapse between anti-Communist films, Rogin notes that at regular intervals one would crop up: as in ?it?s time for another anti-commie film? (Reagan 244 - 252). He also states that Manchurian Candidate was the last of the Cold War Era ?anti- 43 commie films? where directors attempted to evade HUAC and create films that did what national security wanted them to do. This is by and large because, as I?ve stated, McCarthyism was discredited as a mere fixation. Therefore, when we read Manchurian Candidate as a satire situated at the end of the ?anti-commie film? epoch, we must concede that it is not a straight anti-commie film or even a straight anti-mommy film but something of a hydraic hybrid. I argue that Manchurian Candidate is an anti- momism film, one I would argue is a transitional film which bridges the ideology from the early Cold War narrative to the narratives that would follow. Films of the mid-to-late Cold War Era, like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), Topaz (1969), and White Nights (1985), concentrate more on the idea of defection than infiltration; it may be said that the erection of the Berlin Wall initiated the shift in concern.42 Like Dr. Strangelove, which would follow in 1964, Manchurian Candidate rejects the simplistic American worldview that the democratic ideal and the Communist dread were isolated in binary opposition and that mom stood at the enemy?s pole. Manchurian Candidate opens in Korea, 1952. There is no music while Ben Marco accompanies Raymond Shaw to a brothel to retrieve his men. The narrative purpose of this scene is to illustrate from the beginning that Shaw is an unpleasant party- pooper and that the men are not very fond of him. When Raymond walks into the brothel, he walks past a prostitute and recoils at the cursory contact. The prostitutes think that Shaw is a Military Police Officer about to conduct a raid but the soldiers assure them that, ?Nah, it?s just our Raymond, our loveable Sergeant Shaw,? and, ?I?m afraid our Saint Raymond, he don?t approve.?43 We must understand the men?s contempt for Shaw 44 in order for the trancelike statement, ?Raymond Shaw is the bravest, kindest, warmest, most wonderful human being I?ve ever known,? to have its intended effect. However, the scene takes on an element of visual rhetoric which illustrates that though the plot is dark it remains a satire. We see the men carousing and then the camera turns to Shaw, standing erect under a framed portrait of MacArthur. In opposition to Shaw, young Bobby Lembeck stands with a carved wooden fish, grotesquely phallic, just over his head. This Asian symbol of male virility is contrasted with the sterile military image hanging above Raymond?s head. Again, domesticity (via reproductive sexuality) and militarism stand in opposition. Soon, Raymond will kill Bobby, the image of uncorrupted male sexuality, on the orders of what he takes ironically to be a matronly lady presiding over a garden party - resolving into an image of a maternal figure that uses asexual militaristic ?weaponry? to ruthlessly murder innocent youth and masculine lust. Rather than being opposed to the military, mom is all too tied up with it. Dressed for combat though no combat is going on, we make the connection between Raymond?s revulsion of the prostitute, and sexuality in general, as a parody of the military / domestic opposition. Even in this seemingly banal scene, the vilification of maternity is apparent. This first scene, jam packed with images and allusions, immediately conjures Hamlet?s queen mother; as the brothel?s madam tries swaying Raymond to stay; she says ?C?mon Sarge. Gertrude buy you beer.? Raymond shrugs her off, impervious to her motherly influence. Gertrude, not a Korean name, could have been Maude or June. We are to understand that she has intentionally Americanized her designation; therefore she selected Gertrude as 45 her name. The suggestion of Hamlet?s mother, Gertrude, harkens the audience?s mind back to Oedipus? mother, Jocasta, and thereby sets us up for the impending Oedipal tragedy. Without logical transition, the scene shifts to the men in a battle-field with Chunjin as their Korean guide; without more ado, the men are captured and Chunjin shakes the hand of a white man in a US military uniform. What is most intriguing about this scene is that the musical score is not dramatic or ominous, rather it is farcical. The score reinforces the concept that this film is a satire, in mood if not in intent, from the beginning (keeping in mind that satire need not always be hilariously funny to maintain its ironic tone); bright, droll, and unthreatening, the melody of the capture incident resolves into an ominous theme as the credits begin. The musical score here informs us, the audience, that we are about to witness something fearful, a plot that should make us more wary. Immediately following the ominous credit score, is a patriotic march. The rapid conversion of the sound track creates an unsettling and unbalancing effect. The audience is given an audible cue that this film is different. Along with the patriotic soundtrack, a voiceover informs us that: This nation jealously guards its highest award for valor: the Congressional Medal of Honor. In the Korean War with 5,750,000 personnel engaged, only seventy-seven men were so honored. Of these seventy-seven was Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw. Shaw was returned from combat and flown directly to Washington, to be decorated personally by the President 46 of the United States. This is why his presence or the presence of any Medal of Honor winner is sufficient to bring generals to their feet, saluting. While voice-over introductions can be used in a serious, even foreboding way (?Twilight Zone,? Citizen Kane, The Wrong Man) here, the voice of Lawrence Harvey is a caricature of melodrama, a popular genre of the 1960s; however, the speech is not artistically melodramatic, here his speech is almost farcical. The purpose of voice-over is not immediately ironic, but is typically to give the audience the impression that they are being told a story. This story, the myth of Raymond Shaw, is intended, like most stories, to teach a lesson and to extend moral judgments on the characters involved. Given that ?[t]he first significant use of the soundtrack for voice-over narration was in newsreels,? we can surmise that the military configuration of the scene and the use of voiceover is meant to evoke war-time newsreels; this story, then, is a war story and therefore we know already that the lesson and its morals will tell in the end (Kozloff). Further, the authority placed squarely on the shoulders of Staff Sergeant Shaw in these opening lines (ironically read by Harvey himself) is used to build the satire of the scene that will follow. We see that the military, moreover generals and the Commander in Chief himself, respects - even venerates - Shaw; but as we will see in a comic reversal, his own mother does not. What?s more, the obvious element of carnival in this opening scene (though antiseptic in comparison to Rabelaisian carnival) is further evidence that we are dealing with a revolution of thought. In carnival, the mighty are brought low and the lowly are venerated; when asked how he feels about receiving the award, Shaw, the most respected 47 man around, states that he feels like a comic-book ?Captain Idiot.?44 With the political atmosphere turning away from absolute trust in protection by mutually assured destruction, the audience would be open to revolutionary approaches to new safeguards and would be skeptical that military power trumps all (as will be evident in Dr. Strangelove). They would also accept the idea that the military was susceptible to encroachment. Manchurian Candidate sets up a situation where the military, once a source of dependence and control, has become infiltrated and abject, now the source of danger and duplicity. Showing a fear of communism and momism in hyperbole, Manchurian Candidate is the parodic case of what happens when a nation takes an ideology too far. In an ostentatious show, Mrs. Iselin bustles her husband, a photographer, and two men holding a banner reading ?JOHNNIE ISELIN?S BOY!? through the crowd and over the general and Raymond. Juxtaposing of Mrs. Iselin and the Generals creates not only an ironic opposition of mother / military, but it also creates the reversal necessary for satire. After decades of momism, the audience is not at all surprised to learn that Mother Iselin has arranged the parade, the band, and the photo op; neither will they be surprised when the learn that it was all a show for her own purposes (publicity for her husband, Johnnie Iselin). They may, however, be shocked to learn that she has arranged the Medal of Honor and that she wields control over the American military, a revelation which makes this satire dark. Almost immediately we learn that John Iselin is not calling the shots but is the front man for the real political powerhouse: Mrs. Iselin who systematically emasculates him. Through out the film, she bombards him with insults to 48 which his only counter is ?c?mon, babe.? Among our first impressions of Mrs. Iselin is when she is in the car with her son from a previous marriage, Raymond Shaw, and her husband Johnny Iselin; she says to Raymond, ?I?m your mother. How can you talk to me this way? I?ve never wanted anything for myself. My entire life is devoted to helping you and to helping Johnny. My boys, my two little boys.? This rhetoric is stereotypical, even hyperbolic, of the language used by mothers to elicit guilty devotion from children, an example of Wylie?s momism in action. Johnny?s name too points toward her infantilizing treatment; unlike the persona evoked by the comic and quasi-phallic stove hats worn by voters at the party convention that read ?BIG JOHN ISELIN,? Mrs. Iselin sees him as her ?little boy? Johnny. And later in the film, when Mrs. Iselin wants Johnny to leave her to talk to Senator Tom Jordan at their masquerade party, she mollycoddles Johnny (while adjusting his fake beard - indicative that he is an adolescent in costume facial hair) by instructing, ?All right dear, run along. The grownups have to talk.? Mrs. Iselin (who is never given a personalizing first name) belittles and insults her husband; for instance, in the scene where the couple finally decides to set a consistent number to represent the ?known Communists? in power, Mrs. Iselin plays on Johnny?s simpleminded devotion. He says: ?There?s just one thing, babe. I?d be a lot happier if we could just settle on the number of Communists I know there are in the Defense Department. I mean, the way you keep changing the numbers on me all the time - it makes me look like some kind of nut, like, like an idiot.? To this his wife retorts, ?Well, you?re going to look like an even bigger idiot if you don?t get in there and do exactly what you?re told. . . . So stop talking like an expert all of a sudden and get out there 49 and say what you?re supposed to say? and ?I keep telling you not to think. You are very, very good at a great many things but thinking, hon, simply isn?t one of them.? The distinction between plot and satirical subtext comes to the fore in this scene. As he slathers Heinz 57 Sauce? on his steak, Iselin asks his wife to decide on ?Just one real simple number that will be easy for me to remember.? In the next cut he stands before a crowd of reporters shouting, ?There are exactly fifty-seven card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time!? This is a stunt, of course and serves to incorporate absurdity into the script and enhances the effect of satire while spotlighting mother?s influence.45 The relationship between Mother Iselin and her son, Raymond, further complicates the ?mom versus military? dichotomy established by Wylie because Mother Iselin is, on the surface, the model citizen. We are told that the press believes ?[Raymond Shaw?s] stepfather is a United States senator,? and ?His mother is head of fifteen different patriotic organizations.? But because this mother is a double agent, all bets are off; Mother Iselin encourages Raymond to join the military where her plot is set in action. Her pro-military fa?ade is nothing more than a device to gain control of the U.S. Army. In accord with her plan, Raymond Shaw returns from the Korean War, winner of the Medal of Honor, having single-handedly saved all but two men in his company from death at the hands of the Koreans. However, we learn early on from nightmare sequences dreamed by two of Raymond?s fellow soldiers that the event in Korea did not happen the way the men remember it. Instead, the men had been captured and brainwashed to believe in Raymond?s heroism and their escape. Ironically, it is the 50 preceding theory concerning ?shell-shock? which made it possible for the military to overlook (or pretend to overlook) Major Ben Marco?s bona fide dreams. The scene where the Communist leaders gather to see the results of reconditioning -- brainwashing -- features the American soldiers as members of what at first appears to be a ladies? garden party. The cameras make a 360 degree pan from the women at the garden party to the brainwashing specialist in one shot. The effect of this maneuver is that the camera pans from the subjective to the objective in one continuous movement. The camera starts with what the brainwashed soldiers think they are listening to - garden party ladies, motherly and grand-motherly types, listening to a lecture on hydrangeas -- and the end of the pan shows what?s actually happening: an objective view of the same scene. The use of cameras in this way is a cinematographic illustration of the lack of boundaries in abjection. One movement of the camera encapsulates the real and the unreal, the good and the evil, the masculine and the feminine, the horror and the allure, paradoxically and simultaneously arranged. Through these dreams we learn that Raymond Shaw has been psychologically programmed to become a remote control killer who will work at the hands of the Communists in the US. The dream which is overtly about a Ladies Garden Party is also fraught with sexual undertones. The lecture in the dream-trance is about hydrangea hybridism. The hydrangea is predominantly a native of Asia but is heavily cultivated in the US. This too is a joke which lends itself to my reading of Manchurian Candidate as a dark satire. One of the operatives in the audience, at once a threatening foe and at the same time a motherly matron, fingers a phallic bayonet. Given social and legal prohibitions against interracial relationships, were it not 51 for the incursion of these sexual evocations there would be no need to change the garden party ladies into African-American women for Al Melvin?s dream.46 In other words, if it were ?just a garden party? it wouldn?t matter if the women were white or black; because there are multiple layers of sexual innuendo, the women had to be racially compatible to the dreamer. The almost ludicrously ruthless Communist leaders at the presentation of course require proof of the success of the brainwashing, so Raymond must placate them by killing a fellow soldier. The American soldiers are utterly in the power of the Communists; they cannot even think for themselves. When Raymond Shaw strangles him, Ed Mavole is utterly complacent, allowing himself to be strangled at the Communist?s command because of brainwashing.47 But the brainwashing backfires when a stateside bartender tells an amusing anecdote, accidentally sending Shaw on a fool?s errand: ?Do me a favor. Why don?t you go and take yourself a cab and go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake?? The extent of Shaw?s compliance is absurd. The combination of key phrases necessary to trigger his trance is so specific that only his operator could unlock his code. Raymond is first given directions to ?pass the time playing a little solitaire,? by its very nature and antisocial behavior. This signal is a playing card: the queen of diamonds. In this state, he will do whatever he is told and he becomes an unconscious participant in her conscious directions.48 This image metaphorically depicts mother Iselin, the ?Red Queen? evoking both communism (red) and maternity (queen). 52 In the narrative, however, this scene is crucial because it allows Ben Marco to discover Shaw?s programming. But this too is set in satiric relief; near the end of the film the Military Psychiatrist tells Marco that: Obviously the solitaire game serves as some kind of trigger mechanism. . . . Let?s discard the various number systems and concentrate on the face cards. . . Because of their symbolic identification with human beings. Based on Raymond?s psychiatric pattern, I think we can safely eliminate jacks and kings. . . Human fish swimming in the ocean of atmosphere develop psychic injuries as they collide with one another. Most mortal of all are those gotten from the parent fish. . . . Marco continues: ?I remember. I remember. . . . ?The queen of diamonds is reminiscent in many ways of Raymond?s dearly loved and hated mother. And is the second key to clear the mechanism for any other assignment.?? The overtly Freudian tone of this analysis is tongue-in-cheek. Frank Sinatra (who seems to be miscast) plays Ben Marco, the tortured intellectual soldier who hides his books from his fellow officers, who makes offhand literary allusions and who jokes about classical Greek mythology; Marco has established himself as broadly read (which created complications in an anti-intellectual atmosphere which I will discuss in a moment) and his knowledge of Freudian psychology is as anachronistic as his jokes about Orestes. Further, his total recall of the brainwashing speech, ?the queen of diamonds . . . . is the second key to clear the mechanism for any other assignment,? is fraught with Freudian allusion: the mother / son Oedipal dyad and the controlling ability of the mother?s (red queen?s) presence. 53 We learn near the end of the film that that same queen of diamonds, Mother Iselin, is not only involved in the Communist plot and using her own son; she turns out to be exploiting the Communists to obtain power for herself. Though she had previously worked for the Communist Party, by the time of the film?s events she is acting purely for her own interests.49 She simply wants power and in the end claims that when she gets power, she will ?crush? the Communists. Of the Cold War scholars who critique Manchurian Candidate (Rogin, Whitfield, and Henriksen), none notice the importance of this crucial change of motivation. As a result they fail to realize that in this film, in this instance, gender issues become even more important than political issues. In Mrs. Iselin, we find a woman to be not Wylie?s inept politician but the surest politician of all. In addition to the tyrannical and treacherous Mother Iselin, there are two other main female characters in this film: Rose Cheney and Jocelyn ?Josie? Jordan. We meet Josie in a flashback. It?s Christmas Eve and Shaw sits drinking Dom Perignon with Major Marco; the first thing Raymond says in the scene is, ?My mother, Ben, is a terrible woman. A terrible, terrible woman.? Setting the stage for what is to be a recollection of the love-story of his life, he wavers in and out of memories of Josie commingled with loathing of his mother. Here there is a bit of unnecessary dialogue about Shaw?s houseboy?s religion (of course, Chunjin is actually a Communist operative). This scene, like so many others, serves as comic relief: Shaw: I gave Chunjin the night off, because it was Christmas Eve, I told him. He was very reluctant to go. 54 Marco: That?s probably because he?s a Buddhist and he doesn?t celebrate Christmas. Shaw: I don?t think that Chunjin is a Buddhist. He smiles all the time. Marco: Oh, what a shame. I thought he was a Buddhist, or I would have sent him a Christmas card. But I figured that if I sent him a card at this time of the year that he would have to send me a card on the Buddha?s birthday. . . . That would have started a big megillah. After having briefly explored a discussion of world religions and social niceties, it seems either inevitable or compulsory to return to a discussion of ?mother.? Shaw says, ?What were we saying? Oh, yes. My mother. But you don?t want to sit there listening to me talking,? to which Marco interrupts, ?Of course I do. I?m interested. It?s rather like listening to Orestes gripe about Clytemnestra.? This statement, along with Marco?s many over-intellectual allusions, requires clarification, ?Greeks. A couple of Greeks in a play.? This recalls a telling scene when the Colonel arrives at Marco?s apartment and is looks with apparent distaste at the books strewn around Marco?s apartment. Playing on the connection between communism and intellectualism, the Colonel is suspicious, ?My God,? he asks, ?Where?d ya get all the books?? Marco replies: I. . . I got a guy picks ?em out for me at random. . . . He?s in, uh... San Francisco. A little bookstore out there. And, uh... he ships ?em to me, wherever I happen to be stationed. . . .They?d also make great insulation against an enemy attack. But the truth of the matter is that I?m just interested, you know, in principles of modern banking, the history of 55 piracy, the paintings of Orozco, modern French theatre, the jurisprudential factor of the Mafia administration, diseases of horses, the novels of Joyce Cary, and ethnic choices of the Arabs. Things like that. Almost as if it is a connection to Marco?s reading habits (better dead then ?read,? you might say), he?s told that he?s being put on indefinite sick leave. The solution, the Colonel thinks, is the careless playboy life. He instructs Marco, ?Go away, Ben. Find yourself a girl. Lie in the sun.? Though my discussion of Ben Marco?s intellectualism is an aside from my broader argument, it remains part and parcel to the overall allegory of masculine redemption. Trysh Travis writes in ?The Man of Letters and the Literary Business: Re- viewing Malcolm Cowley? that even before the Second World War, ?book men? -- publishers as well as book consumers -- were identified with Communism and effeminate comportment and that ?In 1929 . . . Malcolm Cowley wrote a brief ?Portrait of a Publisher? for the Communist party journal The New Masses? which ?impugned the genteel mannerisms that often obscured the economic reality of the book trade? (1). Up to this point in the Cold War Era, the early 1960s, ?bookish? men were considered dangerously identified as Communist sympathizers and unmasculine behavior.50 For Marco, this is a story about redeeming masculine intellectualism as much as it is a story about redeeming sons from momism. Sleep deprived and upset, Marco takes a train from D.C. to New York to visit Raymond and ask about the relentless nightmares Marco has been having. He is unable to light a cigarette and sits twitching his face. The telling aspect of this twitch is 56 discovered when we see Shaw awake from the trance when he sees Josie Jordan in a queen of hearts costume and again when Marco shows Shaw the loaded deck of queens; in those moments he twitches uncontrollably, just like Marco on the train. In the scene on the train, we see Eugenie Rose Cheney (Janet Leigh) sitting opposite the twitching Major. We do not know if they have been talking but Rose seems intently interested in Ben Marco. When he becomes frustrated at his inability to light a cigarette and leaves the cabin, Rosie follows. She lights a cigarette and places it in Marco?s mouth. In an odd conversation she introduces herself; avoiding eye-contact, the duo speak in non-sequiturs: Rosie: Maryland?s a beautiful state. Marco: [Looking away] This is Delaware. Rosie: I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter. . . . Are you Arabic? . . . Let me put it another way. Are you married? Marco: No. You? Rosie: No. Marco: What?s your last name? Rosie: Chaney. . . . I live on 54th Street, a few doors from the modern museum of art, of which I?m a tea-privileges member, no cream. I live at 53 West 54th Street, Apartment 3B. Can you remember that? Marco: Yes. Rosie: ELdorado 5-9970. Can you remember that? . . . 57 During their weird, oblique conversation (taken directly from Condon?s novel), it seems as if Rose is giving Marco subliminal messages. While Rogin imagines Rose as a ?good? girlfriend, Tim Dirks asks, ?are they speaking in cryptic code? [Is Marco also brainwashed as a Manchurian pawn - and is Chaney his controlling operative? And is the beguiling Rosie another agent?]? (filmsite.org). After all, this makes sense, since Rose is represented as a momism mommy too (in action if not through biology) when, in the car after picking Marco up from the police precinct, she lights another cigarette and puts it in his mouth then cleans his face with a handkerchief which she licks, like a mother with a schmuddlekinder. Placing the cigarette in his mouth precisely the way she did before could be his trigger, just as Shaw?s trigger is to ?pass the time with a little solitaire.? After all, no one else meets Rose Cheney; she appears without explanation (and without further necessity in the script) just after Marco?s commanding officer instructs him to ?Find yourself a girl.? What?s more, she claims that the military may know that Marco is a brave and strong ?solid type? but, she ominously adds, ?if they were the tiniest bit puzzled about you, they could have asked me. Oh, yes indeed, my darling Ben. They could have asked me and I would have told them.? This statement alone is revealing; the two have only known each other for a matter of hours, yet Cheney has broken up with her fianc? and has run to Marco?s side. This exchange reveals one of two things; if we read this a s a ?straight? meeting, if Rosie is just a potential girlfriend, then she is insinuative and calculating from the beginning of the relationship -- not to mention, she is fickle 58 about her engagements. If we are to read this scene as Dirks suggests, that Rosie is an undercover operative, then we are to understand that men are particularly susceptible to the influence of all women: mothers and lovers alike. Rosie is set in contrast to Jocelyn Jordan whom we first meet as she rescues Raymond who has been bitten by a snake and is lying in the grass unable to move. Fortunately, Josie happens by with her snakebite kit which she happens to have since her father, Thomas Jordan, is, in his daughter?s words, ?absolutely scared tiddly about snakes.? Josie giggles and continues, ?I know that sounds terribly Freudian, but in this case, I don?t think it is.? She explains that her father, Senator Jordan, is afraid of snakes, which is why Josie is encouraged to always have ?protection.? After removing her shirt to wrap Shaw?s leg, she innocently claims that ?Daddy is going to be just thrilled about this? as she trounces off topless. This scene too is a bit of a satire. With its overt Freudian commentary and its sexual subtexts, Josie?s innocence and her sexuality are diametrically incongruous - yet, we see that they are also paradoxically concomitant. While her daddy is indeed thrilled by Raymond?s presence in Josie?s life, Raymond?s mommy is not thrilled. Mrs. Iselin pulls Raymond aside and whispers threateningly: I want to talk to you about that Communist tart. . . . Raymond, if we were at war and you suddenly became infatuated with the daughter of a Russian agent wouldn?t you expect me to come to you and object and beg you to stop the entire thing before it was too late? Well we are at war. It?s a cold war but it will get worse and worse until every man, woman, and 59 child in this country will have to stand up and be counted to say whether they are on the side of right and freedom or on the side of the Thomas Jordans of this country. . . . Mother?s rhetoric sets Jordan and Josie on one pole and freedom and America at the other; this forces Raymond to see the two as dichotomously divided and he chooses her version of patriotism and enlists in the military. Later in life he realizes his mistake and embraces Josie as the ?love of his life? and Senator Jordan becomes, unlike John Iselin, a father-figure to Raymond. Also in opposition to John Iselin, Senator Thomas Jordan is not only a noble and right-thinking liberal senator, he is not afraid to stand up to Mrs. Iselin?s attacks. His complete reversal of Iselin?s character serves to satirically portray the perceived binary between democracy and communism. Our first impression of Jordan is Mrs. Iselin?s nearly doxological reaction, ?That Commie!? By this point in the film, however, we know to take what Mrs. Iselin says with a grain of salt; and for the audience, Mrs. Iselin?s insult is a term of endearment. That is to say, when Mother Iselin refers to someone a ?Commie,? we, the audience, understand that we should prefer them. However, in a flashback to earlier days, we see that in his youth Shaw had subscribed to his mother?s denunciations; in the flashback, Tom Jordan introduces himself and young Shaw exclaims, ?[You?re] The Communist?!? His childlike reaction to Senator Jordan draws a parallel to an immature nation whose ideology had drawn an immediate connection between communism and civil liberties and individual thought. We learn that Jordan is even-minded when he takes Shaw?s comment with a graceful grain of salt explaining to the young Raymond, ?One of 60 your mother?s more endearing traits is her tendency to refer to anyone who disagrees with her about anything as a Communist.? He then recalls that the last time Mrs. Iselin called him a Commie in public he sued her for ?Sixty-five thousand and court costs,? money Jordan then donated to the ACLU. Later in the film Jordan vows to do everything he can to stop the political progress of John Iselin, who is aiming for the White House. Jordan looks Mrs. Iselin in the eye and makes a barely hidden anti-McCarthy remark: ?There are people who think of Johnny as a clown and a buffoon. But I do not. I despise John Iselin and everything that Iselinism has come to stand for. I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent he could not do more harm to this country than he is doing now.? As a result of this remark, he and Josie are murdered. Though he maintains his composure in the face of Mrs. Iselin, in the end his assertiveness is not shield enough, and she destroys him. Like Jordan, another father-figure for Raymond is Holborn Gaines; also like Jordan, his strongest ties with Shaw stem from their shared hatred of the Iselins. In a fit of latent-adolescent rebellion, Shaw disobeys Mother Iselin by going off to work in New York for Gaines, ?the most respected political journalist in America,? a newspaper editor whom his mother calls, much like Tom Jordan, ?That Commie.? Gaines also becomes a stand-in for Mom and an ironic tool for anti-momism. Like a mother would, Gaines worries about Raymond when he believes that he has been in an auto accident; this auto accident is actually a cover for ?checkup? at the Pavlov Institute.51 During this two-year checkup, Raymond?s Communist controllers instruct Raymond to murder Gaines because they are always requiring proof that Raymond remains completely brainwashed. The 61 scene is peculiar and we should take it as Yen Lo recommends: ?With humor . . . always with a little humor.? Raymond has arrived unexpectedly at his employer?s home late at night, and Gaines is in bed in a fluffy peignoir. Gaines is a widower whose wife has been dead six years and his wearing so feminine a garment requires some explanation. Discomfited, he tells Raymond not to ?get any ideas about this ridiculous bed jacket, it?s my wife?s, the warmest thing I have.? Gaines calls Raymond ?my boy? and flippantly protests Raymond?s late arrival, assuming that Raymond has come by to get some fatherly advice about women. Upon finding Gaines reading in his wife?s bed-jacket, Shaw says that ?they? told him that Gaines would be asleep. Just as when he tells his new bride, ?Have you noticed that the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups? Those who walk into rooms and automatically turn televisions on and those who walk in and automatically turn them off,? Shaw sets up a parody of the us / them dichotomy; Gaines asks, ?Who. . .? to which Shaw only replies, ?They.? Gaines proceeds to ask, ?Who?s this mysterious ?they??? Raymond, however, is not at Gaines? house for chit-chat or for advise. Acting mechanically, he kills Gaines in all his frilly splendor. We can see that Gaines is an emasculated father figure, but he is also, more subtly, a stand-in maternal figure. In this satirical scene, Gaines throws the momism paradigm off-kilter thereby allowing it to be dismantled. Though in the 1990s, masculinity movements would encourage ?sensitive men? to nurture and emote, this era still discourages the monstrosity of masculine ?softness.? Soon after Gaines? murder, Josie and Raymond elope; Senator Jordan welcomes his new son-in-law warmly to the family. But Mrs. Iselin fears Jordan?s political power, 62 and she has already given Raymond the secret cue to kill Jordan. This scene too has its peculiarities. Again Ray arrives at the victim?s home in the middle of the night. Again, the victim is in a housecoat. He, too, refers to Raymond as ?my boy.? But this scene is in the kitchen, a different domestic space. Jordan is mechanically shot down with a ?silencer? while holding a carton of milk in front of his heart. In order to avoid gore, the director chose to have a stream of milk jets out of the carton rather than blood. However the effect is that of milk spilling out of Senator Jordan?s breast as he falls and proves to be a satire about the role of mothers and fathers. While Gaines? housecoat was described in the novel just as it appeared in the movie, the milk and the effect it has on the audience was constructed in Hollywood. Nevertheless, the message is consistent. At the moment of their death, both men were oddly feminized. This movie about a kind of war, and sexuality is on the line. Mothers have been darkly, but comically, represented and we have witnessed murder in a ladies? garden party, a bedroom, and a kitchen. Raymond has killed his two father figures at the behest of his Communist controller and mother. Another father-figure for Raymond, of course, is Johnny Iselin. Johnny is systematically feminized through out the film, and in the end Raymond will kill him as well. John Iselin is a parodically one-dimensional character. Representing the ?unmarked? straight masculinity of the Cold War Era, Iselin does not need multifaceted character development. His masculinity is assumed. Unfortunately, he is loathsome. He likes to drink, he bellows, he cannot think for himself. Mrs. Iselin, on the other hand, is subtle, complex, and malevolent. The reconciliation of mothers as sexual beings created a boundary breach: abject in its simultaneous horror and allure. A sexual mother-figure 63 becomes a monster. Mrs. Iselin?s monstrosity is made blatantly clear as her sexual strategy is starkly revealed at precisely the same moment we learn the extent of her depraved machinations. As she reveals the layers of her plot - to use her son as an assassin, to exact revenge on the Communist party for stealing her son?s soul, and to usurp power for herself while crushing the Communists - she kisses Raymond, her son, squarely on the mouth. Though Lansbury uses her well manicured hand to shield the kiss from the audience, the imagination of the unseen is more potent. Though this moment is shows Mother Iselin?s undeniable sexuality, her sexual dexterity has been subtly hinted at all along. One of the most telling scenes occurs in the second half of the film: the masquerade party. Through costuming and the anonymity of masquerade, characters reveal their true selves, their real desires, and their pitfalls. The costumes in this scene, while ridiculous, are significant and the film returns to the carnivalesque.52 The element of carnival is present to instigate a revolution of politics, to overturn ideology, as Bakhtin says that the carnival square is ?the place for working out a new mode of interrelationship between individuals? even mothers and sons. Johnny, who has been repeatedly and satirically juxtaposed with Abraham Lincoln throughout the film, is dressed in a parody of Honest Abe himself. Two of his cronies follow him from frame to frame and are dressed as court jesters. Senator Jordan arrives wearing a finely tailored tuxedo; he has refused to play dress-up. Raymond Shaw is dressed in an outfit that later makes him joke that he looks like ?Gaucho Marx.? He is dressed as a cowboy - but not with Stetson and snakeskin boots style. Raymond is dressed in a juvenile cowboy suit with short britches, 64 shimmering belt, and a hat and vest that are several sizes too small. Mrs. Iselin, in an unqualified reversal of her villainous self, shows up as Little Bo Peep. Not only is she dressed as a childlike character, Bo Peep is also the personification of innocent sexuality. (To further complicate the image, when Josie shows up as the queen of diamonds, the masquerade of Lacanian femininity.) But during the party, Mrs. Iselin remains cold and calculating. In one scene, Johnny has borrowed her shepherdess staff with which to play limbo. This staff is symbolic of the phallic power she nags and wheedles him with. Mrs. Iselin snatches the staff and the power it represents and immediately orders Johnny about. Taking his drink from him, she adjusts his beard, calling attention to his lack of real facial hair; she instructs him, ?go drink that somewhere quietly,? and ?run along now, the grown ups need to talk.? She is not Bo Peep; she is Wylie?s Medusa. This image of mom, with her emasculating sexuality, was the abject that could turn men to stone. And she could devour her children too. After learning that Thomas Jordan remains a political threat, she turns her sexual charisma on her son. ?Raymond,? she coos, ?why don?t we just sneak away for a few minutes and sit down somewhere quietly and have a drink?? More seductress than mother, she takes him into the study and locks the door behind her. Nearly sauntering in this scene, she is prepared to give Raymond his final orders. Whatever else we may say of Mrs. Iselin, she is interested in realms of power heretofore restricted to men. A politically powerful woman is much more dangerous to the American patriarchy than momism, McCarthy, or communism. At the end of this epic tragedy, the only family left is the Iselin?s. The final assignment for Raymond is to assassinate the presidential nominee. But at the very last 65 moment he shoots both his mother and her husband instead. Major Marco, who has been trying to save Raymond, bursts in at the last second. Just before killing himself, Raymond explains to Marco, ?Not you or the police or the army could stop them.? This final comment warns the audience that the threat cannot be mounted by military institutions. Even Major Marco, with a loaded deck of fifty-two red queens and the U.S. military behind him is unable to save Ray. Consistent with Kristevian concepts of matricide and filicide (and suggestive of suicide), this act of matricide is a sacrifice which reveals the entire story to be an allegory of patriarchal reclamation. In Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence, her reading of Kristeva?s Powers of Horror, Martha Rieneke elaborates on Kristeva?s theory of sacrifice in a culture of violence; she particularly examines speech as ultimately inadequate to express fear. Rieneke?s argument is that because we cannot express horror through language, acts of violence against human bodies becomes necessary. More often than not, she argues, female bodies are the objects of such violence; women, particularly mothers, become scapegoats that act as substitutes for the original object of fear and matricide is then read as an act of cultural self-defense. Rieneke reveals, ?that our linguistic and cultural codes are structured around the murder of the Mother? who acts as a substitute sacrifice; she explains, ?These substitutions keep at bay the threat [Women / Mother] represents, enabling society to persist without regular recourse to matricide? (97). She goes on to explain that, like the witch hunts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, symbolic murder of scapegoat women prevents the murder of all women and that: 66 When paroxysms of violence shatter the social order, explosions of terror reveal the abject threat experienced in the maternal matrix against menaces. Actions taken to suppress this threat confirm decisively that, when death-work is subject to the full force of the sign, under the dictates of the sacrificial economy, sacrifice is enacted as matricide. (100) Therefore, ?[Real] Women died when the Mother was made a sign, but [because of her sacrifice] the law and patriarchy survived? (158). Manchurian Candidate shows that with the sacrifice of Mother Iselin, American sons could have relationships with their mothers again because the sacrificial Medusa was dead; the deaths of both mother and son exorcize the demons of momism thus allowing patriarchy to survive. The citation which reads that Raymond Shaw ?gave his life to save his country,? reminds us that the only one who could undo the evil of maternal influence is the corrupted momma?s boy; allegorically only the nation can save itself. Showing the momma?s boy as hero is a certain turn for Cold War cinema. By this time in Cold War history, the injustice of blaming the feminine has turned back on itself. Rather than ?mom,? Manchurian Candidate imagines masculinized women and feminized men to be the ?real? source of cultural failure. The sacrifice of Mother Iselin, wife Josie, and effeminate fathers like Jordan, Iselin and Gaines is added to the suicide of the brainwashed son, Raymond, culminating in a ritualistic purgation of momism. In the allegorical sacrifice of the abject and defiled, Manchurian Candidate liberates American masculinity and American sons from the ?Mother as sign? of cultural destruction. Like the real witch-hunts of the past 67 and the imagined with-hunts of McCarthyism, the murder of Mother Iselin is a symbolic sacrifice to save the nation from momism. 68 CHAPTER 3 ?THE PERFECT TYPE FOR THE JOB?: GENDER TROUBLE IN NOTORIOUS AND PSYCHO I have established that theoretical monsters are primarily about fear and represent what we are horrifyingly fascinated with and have pointed out that one particular fear that has composed the very foundation of male selfhood is a fear of being feminized. In addition to the specter of feminized men, there is another terror that haunts the patriarchal unconscious: powerful (or masculine) women. One of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Alfred Hitchcock had a knack for representing female characters in a way that has had film critics, critical theorists, cultural critics, and feminists bound up with uncertain anxiety for nigh a half-century. Much maligned as a misogynist who tormented his blonde heroines out of some deep seated fear or hatred of his (admittedly quirky) mother, Hitchcock is said to objectify, disempower, and generally abuse his heroines. In 1999, Greg Garrett argued that: ?The final reputation of Alfred Hitchcock [is] haunted by the noisy ghosts of misogyny and cruelty. And yet, . . . Hitchcock continues to attract phenomenal popular and critical interest.? What?s more, Robin Wood, a leading Hitchcock critic, has argued in Hitchcock?s Films Revisited (1989) that the most important question about Alfred Hitchcock?s films is whether they are too misogynistic or if they can yet be ?saved for feminism.? One of the major obstacles seems to stem from primary biographical work on Hitchcock, Donald Spoto?s The Dark Side of Genius: 69 The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (1983) presents Hitchcock as an inwardly-tortured master manipulator who became a despot toward actresses like Tippi Hedren for whom he felt a simultaneous attraction and repulsion. But if we contextualize his torment of Hedren, we see that she too was openly antagonistic toward Hitchcock. Of the many scores of women that Hitchcock worked with, biographers seem to fixate on this singularly negative relationship.53 And again, Lawrence Russell presents and all too familiar argument that in Vertigo Hitchcock plays out an allegorical ?psychosexual obsession? as Scottie objectifies and manipulates Judy (?Vertigo?). But I see the relationship between Hitchcock and his heroines as much more complicated. And generally, the up and coming crop of Hitchcock critics are seeing it too; one of the best negations of this indictment comes from Camille Paglia: I don?t accept [that Hitchcock was nakedly misogynistic]. That is an absurd argument. We?re talking about a man who made films in which are some of the most beautiful and magnetic images of women that have ever been created. . . . I think you need far more complex terminology to deal with people who achieve at the level Hitchcock did. (Qtd in French 52) Further, Elizabeth Abele contests the firmly accepted censure that Hitchcock employs the scopic male gaze in Rear Window to dehumanize his female neighbors: Though the privileging of the male spectator and gaze may exist in Vertigo and Rear Window, Hitchcock?s use of the gaze is generally more complicated. Despite the presence of the male gaze perspective, the controlling gaze in several Hitchcock films is actually female. In these 70 films, Hitchcock?s female gaze may be as objectifying and controlling of the man as a male gaze is to a woman, while in other cases it exists as a knowing, patient and protective gaze. . . . Hitchcock?s use of the feminine gaze gives his female characters power, agency and depth - despite Hitchcock?s self-cultivated reputation as a misogynist (?The Feminine Gaze in Notorious and The Paradine Case?) Certainly, the imagination of Alfred Hitchcock is fecund with representations of femme fatales and a wildly aberrant matriarchy, but here I offer an exploration that pinions female wiles and the representation of control mongering not on anti-feminine sentiment but on an understanding of the complexities a woman of the Cold War Era faced in America. Mothers, according to the standard critical assertion, are typically powerful and sinister figures in Hitchcock?s movies where it is also commonly argued that women in general are manipulative and untrustworthy characters.54 While it is generally agreed that Hitchcock was heavily influenced by Freudianism and intentionally reflected this influence in his work, it is my contention that he applied Freudian allusion both ironically and satirically. That is to say that he knew and understood Freudianism, but that he did not ascribe to it, therefore the inclusion of psychoanalytic content in his films was meant to tease his audience?s sensibilities. Hitchcock, perhaps the most meticulous filmmaker of all time never went halves on any aspect of his oeuvre; it makes sense then to assume that every device in his films is not only deliberate but also calculated to elicit a particular audience reaction. This is particularly true for psychoanalytic matter. Hitchcock used 71 Freudianism because it was the cultural movement en vogue. His sardonic incorporation of dreams, repression, Oedipal relationships, and subconscious motivations in his plots was a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the consumer atmosphere which began to surround American applications of psychoanalysis. Though many critics have seen Freudianism as a driving force behind Hitchcock?s plots, I will argue that Freudianism is little more than a prank in Hitchcock films - not unlike his cameo appearances. This is not to say that we should not take psychoanalysis seriously in Hitchcock film, only to say that it is not as straightforward as many critics assume. Due to traditional critical treatment which steadfastly pegs Hitchcock as a misogynist, a chauvinist, an anti-maternal bigot, and a hard-line sexist, in the past most scholars were apprehensive about addressing gender in Hitchcock films along any other line. Thankfully, this tradition has waned and with the rise in gender and masculinity studies that support feminist theory, the automatic assumption that Hitchcock films represent women as weak and / or evil has started to soften by degrees. Because Hitchcock film does not fit the dominant fiction of its day (one that is largely predicated on the denial of a non-unified masculine subject), the characters in these texts were compelled into categories reduced to phallic male and phallic female. Limiting Hitchcock?s characters to subjectivity based in possession and lack limits our understanding of the scope of Hitchcock?s genius. This is not to suggest that Hitchcock was a campaigner for feminist theory; it is just to say that his plots are far more subtle and his characters are far more nuanced than the severe scholarly treatments we have tended to see his work subjected to in the past.55 Because he was conscientious with the 72 texts he chose to adapt and the screenwriters he chose to hire, Hitchcock?s women and Hitchcock?s men are able to reconcile goodness and weakness within the same character. This chapter will look at Hitchcock as a filmmaker navigating precarious waters; while not altogether dismissive about Hitchcock?s representation of ?cool blondes,? I intend to allow for the possibility that Hitchcock was more sympathetic than he was sexist, more comical than he was chauvinistic, and more interrogative about than he was indifferent to the plight of women in America during the Cold War Era (Taylor). Hitchcock?s representations of gender, I argue, reveals that cinematic fiction appropriates the fantasies of desire which no not always follow cultural trajectories. My examples, Marion Crane and Alicia Huberman, interrogate the dominant fiction that Hitchcock?s women are all ?super-bitch prostitutes? (Price). Further, because my major premise for this dissertation is to illustrate the ways in which American masculinity was influenced by and represented in Literature and Film of the Cold War Era, this chapter will also argue that Hollywood?s Hitchcock hero was fundamentally a parody of American masculinity - or at least a parody of ?desirable masculinity.? Whereas I argued earlier that Manchurian Candidate was a reaction against the anti-maternal sentiment reflected by Philip Wylie?s Generation of Vipers, here I will argue that Alfred Hitchcock created a different kind of artifact. Not an American by birth and not consumed by American culture from childhood, Hitchcock?s films comment on American culture through the lens of an ?outsider.? This is not to say that Hitchcock did not embrace American culture; he did. Hitchcock loved Hollywood and the Hollywood film industry, American actors, American screenwriters, 73 and, to some extent, American capitalism. However, it is because he does not have the epistemological presuppositions of an American filmmaker that Hitchcock is able to comment on American culture with deliberate critical satire. So, Freudianism, momism, assumptions concerning masculinity, and assumptions about human behavior in general come into focus in a very nuanced, generically identifiable, and brilliantly acute new form: the Hitchcock film. According to Judith Butler?s ?Bodies That Matter,? ?bodies that matter? are those bodies which materialize according to normative expectations (materialization is the cultural construction of sexual identity and normative expectations create an interiority and an exteriority -- the object and the abject -- which are both necessarily interior to the structuring matrix); she interrogates Aristotle, Foucault, Plato and Irigaray in order to ask whether the materiality of sex is indispensable to the assertion of an ?irreducible specificity? (29). Butler argues that this irreducible materiality is problematic because everything is bound up with signification (in a circumlocution she explains that the sign creates the body even as it is created as prior).56 It is in this disposition that I see Hitchcock?s film functioning as a commentary on his contemporary culture. Through the characterization of gender (always a little off-center from ?normal? gender identities -- for men as well as women), through hyper-protective mothers, and through the satirical validation of psychoanalysis, Hitchcock offers a parody of American culture. In the chapter that follows, I will take a three layered approach; first I will show that Hitchcock is not as anti-maternal as many critics would have viewers believe, secondly, I will show that psychoanalysis, rather than a ?truth? in Hitchcock film represents the ultimate 74 ?fiction.? Finally, by illustrating Hitchcock?s sympathetic treatment of the characters Alicia Huberman and Marion Crane, I will argue that Alfred Hitchcock is not a misogynist, rather he is a compassionate voice in a cacophony of the Cold War Era?s gender conformist refrain. Like Manchurian Candidate, Hitchcock framed his thrillers around the core fears of his Cold War Era American audience.57 Also like Manchurian Candidate, Hitchcock films have complicated mother/child relationships. The extraordinary connection between mothering and political peril, the anxiety surrounding mother?s influence produced by the application of Freudian Theory in America, and the menace of invisible Otherness - in this case mental illness - merge in Hitchcock?s landmark film evoking terror of the ultimate momma?s boy: Psycho. The ultimate irony of this film, however, is that Mother Bates is imagined as the homicidal villain of the story; we all know of course that Mother Bates is not a villain at all but is a victim of Norman?s psychopathic obsession. Unlike Manchurian Candidate where the son murders at the mother?s behest, Psycho gives an illusion. Hitchcock?s masterful fantasy allows the audience to presume the mother to be a killer when they see the silhouette on Marion?s shower curtain; if they are very wily viewers they might even predict that Norman is the killer but will suspect that, like Mrs. Iselin, there is a cold-blooded Mrs. Bates behind the weapon -- her son. But the illusion may be too effective.58 Even after we realize that Mother Bates is dead and has been dead for many years, even when we hear Sheriff Chambers say that Mother Bates?s death was mysterious, and even in the end when the court psychologist tells us that Norman committed matricide, the impression of ?mother-as-murderer? lingers in our 75 cultural imagination.59 The ?blame-the-mother-for-the-wicked-son? theme in Hitchcock film seems like a bit of a Freudian / Oedipal red herring, Hitchcock films are, after all, mysteries. So the sentiment that Hitchcock never portrays a middle-aged woman as anything but a potential monster is useful to throw us off track. Further, given Hollywood?s focus on psychoanalysis and given that the most prominent factor in psychoanalysis in America is the mother, Hitchcock?s focus on mom is not unexpected. However, the accepted truth that states that women, particularly mothers, are bad in Hitchcock film is more a reflection of cultural belief than what Hitchcock film actually portrays. More often than not, his films feature male characters struggling in their relationships with their mothers, but mother figures of different types appear throughout his work thereby resisting the monolithic mother motif typically ascribed.60 For instance, Tippi Hedren plays the title character in Marnie and offers a powerful portrait of a woman twisted by both hatred and fear of men. Marnie Edgar appears to be a model of propriety. The audience soon learns that Marnie lives with her aging mother whose puritanical diatribes gives insight into why the daughter fears and loathes men. When Marnie dyes her hair a light shade of blond, Mrs. Edgar sourly remonstrates, ?Too blond hair always looks like a woman?s trying to attract a man. Men and a good name don?t go together,? and later: ?Decent women don?t have need of any man. . . . [Marnie] is too smart to go getting herself mixed up with men, none of ?em.? But Marnie?s mother, Bernice, is not indiscriminately bigoted against men nor is she explicitly malicious. Bernice Edgar had special reasons for wanting to raise her daughter to be ?decent.? 76 We eventually learn that her mother is a former prostitute, a line of work which traumatized Marnie. Though she is a thief, we learn that Marnie?s fears which cause her to act out criminally are founded in a misguided yet violent murder committed by her mother. Thinking that a client was molesting her daughter, Marnie?s mother bludgeons the man to death. If it were not for a generation of critics like Theodore Price whose denunciation of Hitchcock?s female characters as either ?The Virgin Bitch? or ?The Whore Bitch,? I suspect that more scholars would take a more moderate view of Marnie and her prostitute mother (183). Like Murray Pomerance, we might see that ?Bernice is whoring because she is poor, not because she is morally lax? and that ?It is not . . . sexuality or masculinity that Marnie . . . [rejects]? but rather Marnie?s childhood trauma causes her to formulate a more complicated and nuanced rejection of physical contact; because she is afraid of being attacked, Marnie is resentful about her subject (object) position as an American woman under patriarchy as well as her lack of social space -- both physical and metaphorical (154, 157 - 58). Like Bernice Edgar, mothers are frequently interpreted as intrusive and domineering in Hitchcock; critics like Price typically explain that ?the ?truth? about . . . Mother [in Hitchcock films], which, according to classical psychoanalysis, can be summed up as that of the Virgin/Whore? (132).61 Unfortunately, such critics have had the loudest voice in Hitchcock scholarship and have convinced a great number of viewers that bad mothers and bad women are what they should expect to see when they sit down to watch Hitchcock. But when we disregard such vociferousness, we can see for 77 ourselves that Hitchcock, the brilliantly witty artist, is much more subtle than the heavy- handedness of such criticism. Probably his most sympathetic mother figure in Hitchcock film, is Manny Ballestrero?s mother in The Wrong Man. In this film, Manny (Henry Fonda) has been accused of a series of robberies. Through a torturous series of events, Manny and his wife Rose (Vera Miles) accumulate a pile of debt that Rose fears she may never crawl out from under. This throws her into a spiral of mental anguish. While Rose unravels, Mother Ballestrero?s unwavering faith in God and in her son seems to be the thing that saves Manny from his circumstances. The image of his mother who repeatedly pleads, ?My son, I beg you to pray,? the Virgin Mary (the quintessential mother figure), and his dutiful wife and mother of their two sons, Rose Ballestrero, become conflated via Manny?s rosary which he fidgets with and prays silently with throughout the film. In the end, Mother Ballestero?s prayers are answered and Manny is exonerated. It is, after all, the absent mother in Rope whose chronic phone calls are critiqued as being neurotic and clingy is the factor which leads to the discovery that David has gone astray at all. In Rope, David is dead and in the trunk on which his killers have served a buffet dinner. No one in the room realized that there was a dead body nearby, yet David?s mother, removed from attendance, intuits that there is something amiss. It seems that critics want it both ways. If a mother fails to search for her son -- or if she is drugged by her physician husband, as in The Man Who Knew Too Much, so that she is physically incapable of searching for her son -- she is deemed negligent.62 But if she 78 searches endlessly for her child she is interpreted as either a clingy overbearing mother or she has figured her son as a replacement husband (Price, 80 - 84). The one mother that I find most culpable in a Hitchcock film is Marian Lorne who gives a wild performance as Bruno Anthony?s mother in Strangers on a Train. She coddles and cajoles the patricidal son with comments like, ?Oh Bruno, you?re such a naughty boy!? When we first meet Bruno, he says of a garish tie clip, ?I suppose you think it?s corny, but my mother gave it to me and I have to wear it to please her.? In an interview for The Making of Strangers on a Train, Joseph Stephano, screenwriter for Psycho, says of Hitchcock?s psychotic male characters: [When we wonder where their lunacy comes from we think,] oh, I see where he?s getting it from; he?s getting it from his mom. . . . those crazy old ladies they all represent a sort of demented lust for order and they always have a Bruno around who?s disturbing the order. . . .I think that people who are like that ? psychopaths ? often do have a very strong relationship with their mother. And the reason mothers are so responsible for this, very often, is because they won?t let go. . . .And that?s the thing with mothers like that. The license that they give you. They convince you early in life that nobody can ever put you down to them.63 In Alfred Hitchcock?s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith?s novel, Bruno has a tempestuous relationship with his father and we learn that Bruno is a psychopathic killer with an equally nutty mother. However, if we read this film without prejudices against Hitchcock?s mothers, we may see that both Bruno and Mrs. Anthony are under the 79 influence of a crushing patriarch: Mr. Anthony. It is the father, then, that drives the family over a murderous edge and causes Mrs. Anthony to overlook Bruno?s homicidal behavior. This is especially telling when we consider that, in the Highsmith?s novel, Guy does kill Bruno?s father and the focus of the plot is on an irrational desire to commit crime rather than on Bruno?s crushing relationship with his father. This reading shows the potential that Hitchcock film is a rejection of the law of the father, a rejection of paternalistic control, and a rejection of oppressive forms of patriarchy. After all, Hitchcock is capable of portraying bad fathers as well; Mr. Cassidy (Frank Albertson), the wealthy oil-man in Psycho is an overbearing, sexually embarrassing, tactless father. However, this is no cause for chagrin to his eighteen-year- old daughter. Should a mother throw herself at a younger man, her son would be mortified, but a father who flirts ruthlessly with a young woman is virile, especially if the daughter reaps the benefits of her father?s wealth as Cassidy?s daughter does. After all, being a daddy?s girl is an opportunity to admire the father; it is not an attempt to be like him or to take his place in the world of male power and privilege; under patriarchy, such romanticized subordination to the father is seen as a rehearsal for later subordination to a husband (unless the mother interferes with wedding night traditions by doling out tranquilizers as we see in one of the first scenes in Psycho).64 Unlike the mamma?s boy whose behavior is perceived to stunt male development within patriarchy, the father / daughter relationship supports patriarchal order. Perhaps for this reason, we have very few father / daughter relationships in Hitchcock film. Anne Morton and Senator Morton in Strangers on a Train have a fairly egalitarian relationship which looks a little more like 80 a marriage than a parent / child relationship; Senator Morton?s relationship with younger daughter, Barbara, on the other hand, is paternalistic yet it remains peripheral. Alicia Huberman?s father in Notorious is a Communist spy; he is the underlying force behind Alicia?s alcoholic binges early in the film but he is convicted of treason and dead by the rise in action. It is just after his death that Alicia attaches herself romantically to T. R. Devlin and makes an attempt to ?turn over a new leaf.?65 For the most part, fathers are absent in Hitchcock?s films. The alternative parent is mother and in Psycho she is manifested, of course, as Mother Bates. The situation of Psycho in an era of Freudian influence is straightforward but part of Hitchcock?s genius was in knowing what his audience would respond to, knowing the culture. He read Robert Bloch?s novel, Psycho, and knew it could be a great film. He went through a number of talented and experienced screenwriters - rejecting them all because they couldn?t capture ?that thing? that Hitchcock needed to make his vision work. Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock?s personal assistant recalled, ?We were looking for a writer and someone suggested James Cavanaugh . . . but when we got the treatment, we read it, and it was very dull. . . . It just didn?t have anything. . . .? As it would turn out, that thing would be the reinvigoration of Mother Bates; she would be menace enough.66 Further, Psycho explores Freud?s central themes: the unresolved tension between ?material reality? (what actually happened) and ?psychical reality? (what our conscious mind allows us to believe happened). Add to that the menace of a homicidal not-quite- transvestite momma?s boy with a penchant for peeping, and Hitchcock had yet another psycho-thriller triumph. 81 Along with gender normalization in film, psychoanalysis was regularly used on the Cold War generations to normalize gender expectations. It seems no leap in logic then for Hitchcock to use psychoanalysis itself to critique the gender roles being thrust upon his audience. But he did not stop at psychosexual development; like Freud, he scrutinized dreams, word play (?Freudian slips?), and all other aspects of the hidden subconscious. Though psychoanalysis has been used as a plot device in suspense/thrillers since the 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock?s Spellbound (1945) holds the honor of being the first mystery where a psychiatrist (rather than a private detective) solves the crime.67 At the time of Spellbound, Freudian psychodynamic theories were current and all the rage. Freud?s basic ideas were generally known and even lay audiences understood that (at least in theory) neurotic symptoms are a reaction to a psychological shock that is so painful that it needs to be repressed from consciousness. In the second layer of my critique that follows, I make the assumption that Hitchcock, a brilliant and culturally informed man, was well aware that his films presented a fantasy representation of psychoanalysis and not actual psychoanalytic theory. The implications of this difference are twofold: first, Americans bought into Hollywood?s fantasy version of psychoanalysis; second, Hitchcock new the difference between medical psychoanalysis and Hollywood?s fantasy of psychoanalysis. This meant that Hitchcock could mold the Hollywood fantasy of psychoanalysis to his own purposes; it meant that the limits and rationale of medical psychiatry held no bounds for him and his imagination. To support this, consider the famous anecdote that says when David O. Selznick?s psychotherapist disputed a point of 82 accuracy with Alfred Hitchcock on how therapy works as opposed to the representation in Spellbound: David Selznick . . . really wanted the film to represent his own experience with psychoanalysis. . . .Selznick wanted his own shrink to come on set and help out. Hitchcock had to keep on saying, ?My dear, it?s only a movie. Don?t take it too seriously,? because the shrink would say, ?we don?t do this, we don?t do that,? and Hitchcock didn?t care. . . . Hitchcock very much knew how to work the system. (Colley) Consider that, at the very opening of Spellbound, we are told that the film is simply a story taking place in a ?Freudian world.? While this is not a very sophisticated account of psychoanalysis, we must admit that it wasn?t meant to be; after all, Hitchcock himself told Fran?ois Truffaut that Spellbound was really ?just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis? (165, Qtd in Boyd). Unfortunately, most of Hitchcock?s critics, seem to think that Spellbound (and indeed all of Hitchcock?s oeuvre) takes psychoanalysis, ?pseudo? or otherwise, very seriously. Thomas Leitch, for one, believes that that the downfall of the film is that, ?Hitchcock is so determined to penetrate the mysteries of his hero?s troubled mind that for the only time in his career he takes the McGuffin as seriously as his characters do? (130). I would argue that it is the downfall of such an analysis to take Hitchcock, the duplicitously playful prankster, at face value. Andrew Britton likewise claims that the problem with Spellbound?s treatment of psychoanalysis is not simply that it is too serious, but rather that it is so deeply and fundamentally confused; he argues however, that its ?interest lies in the nature of its 83 ?badness?: in the tension between the affirmation and justification of fundamental ideological assumptions, and a repressed meaning which is everywhere at odds with them? (80). But I would argue that the only repressed meaning in this film is that conjured in the mind of the audience member who is told: Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear . . . and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul. Psychoanalysis for Hitchcock was little more than scenery and the two go hand-in-hand in Spellbound where Hitchcock worked with surrealist Salvador Dali to create a dream montage. However, most of Spellbound?s critics do see the film as informed by some psychological tension; Robin Wood notes that this tension appears as a ?split in the thematic material,? caused by a ?switch? from a murder mystery to a romantic love-story as John Ballantine (Gregory Peck), who has been accused of killing his physician and assuming his identity, begins to fall in love with Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) while she assists him in searching for the real killer; and there is another twist when Dr. Peterson, a woman, solves the crime rather than the predictable plot where John Ballantine remains the heroic protagonist (44). But isn?t this to be expected of Hitchcock? Nothing in a Hitchcock thriller is ever as it seems, no one is ever straightforward, and everything is double. I would argue that this is part of Hitchcock?s grand plan. In 84 everything he did (though he was very serious about his work) he always added a touch of witty playfulness. While I would agree that most Hitchcock films explore unresolved tensions, it seems to be more likely that the ?split? is more important to Hitchcock than the psychoanalytic element. Is it not possible then, that Hitchcock?s use of psycho- dynamic theory was just a bit of play, a joke, and a cultural prank? I think it is.68 And Hitchcock scholars who begin recognize that Hitchcock film provides a grand-scale hoax of its own began to emerge in the late 1990s; for example, John Locke writes: Alfred Hitchcock took a certain prankster?s liberty with his films, delighting the audience and, no doubt, himself with his unpredictable and amusing cameo appearances. But would he have subverted an entire film?s dramatic structure to the requirements of a more elaborate joke, a joke intended solely for his private delight? . . . . If we revere Hitchcock for his mastery over the medium, the benefit of the doubt should accrue. It should be noted that [several Hitchcock films] have jokes similarly embedded in their structure. Such tricks are all too consistent with Hitchcock?s frequently perverse sense of humor and air of indifference. (?Last Laugh?) Where Locke sees ?indifference,? however, I see reserve. I don?t think that anyone would argue that Hitchcock was detached, perhaps aloof; however he was not indifferent. That would seem to suggest a lack of enthusiasm and a lack of concern. Hitchcock, in order to create his flawless projections, would have to be passionate if not demonstrative. Likewise, his sense of humor was uncommon; rather than eliciting chortles of glee from 85 the masses, Hitchcock projected the world around him in an ironic eye toward the truth. Uncovering the inconsistencies and shortcomings of humanity, Hitchcock commented on the contradictory nature of American gender conventions. It is with this ironic discrimination that Hitchcock comments on human weakness and he shows us our vulnerabilities in a way that terrifies us; this is his genius. Pivotal to Hitchcock?s exploration of the human psyche are his representations of the American obsession with masculinity and a fear of emasculation. The vehicles he most often uses to propel this fear are women: lovers as well as mothers. Because of this, Hitchcock?s biographers typically doom him to the portrayal as a as a woman-hating sadist. However, those who knew Hitchcock, those who worked with Hitchcock, tell us, ?[Hitchcock] emphatically did not identify with the heroes of his own films: . . . it occurred to me that it was actually his heroines that he identified with. Which makes him a masochist rather than the sadist of legend, doesn?t it?? (Taylor). After all, Mother Bates is quite possibly the most horrifying image of motherhood, on or off the screen. However we must remember that Hitchcock was playing a trick on his audience when he portrays Mother as evil. When imagining the horror of mother, we forget that she is, of course, already dead at Norman?s hands long before the film begins. I will now turn my attention to an exploration of Hitchcock?s portrayal of his female characters. Beginning with mothers, perhaps the most thrashed out subject in Hitchcock studies, I will show that Hitchcock?s mothers are ironic caricatures of the momism ideology blended with a satirical version of American psychoanalysis. Then I will turn my attention to Hitchcock?s heroines; concentrating on Alicia Huberman of 86 Notorious and Marion Crane of Psycho, I will discuss Hitchcock as an artist who understood the complexities facing women during the Cold War era; and far from denouncing them for their individual weaknesses, I argue, Hitchcock sympathized with the limitations placed on his female characters.69 In the previous chapter, I argued that, because of its perceived direct connection to Communist ideology, domesticity and motherhood were depicted as abjected monstrosities capable of emasculating American men and preventing them from protecting their country from its fascist enemies. I want to momentarily recall Philip Wylie, whose 1945 Generation of Vipers gave a scathing attack on American mother/son relationships so that I might connect the fear of Mother as Communist to Alfred Hitchcock?s infamous representations of motherhood. Here I want to clarify that while Wylie and others vilified the maternal, it was her influence on the masculine child - the son - that created the abjection. Mothers could overprotect daughters and be seen as unpleasant obstacles; however, her overprotection of a son, her coddling of a son, or her perceived incestuous relationship with a son was treacherous because of the effect it had on his masculine identity. The most crucial connection to the previous chapter is a recollection of Freudian influence which had an enormous impact on American understandings of gender and sexuality. During The Cold War, Hollywood films found Freudian theory very useful to the ends of the American values (heterosexual patriarchy and capitalism) and employed Freudian concepts and terminology to emphasize the necessity of traditional gender roles. For the most part, these films used Freudian theory as cultural epidictic; the male characters that manifested ?proper? masculine traits were 87 portrayed as the hero of the film where over-mothered, weak, or seemingly homosexual characters were portrayed negatively in order to perpetuate a desirable formation for American masculine identity.70 Hitchcock, one of the first directors to portray psychological processes in film narrative, famously remarked that television had done a favor for psychiatry by simultaneously distributing information about it and creating a need for it. I take this to mean that Hitchcock believed that topics covered by psychoanalysis in Hollywood productions sent American men flying into the arms of a Freudian therapist when he failed to live up to the depiction of masculinity he found on the screen. That is to say that much like our mediated culture has caused young men and women to believe that they need to be thin or thinner in order to conform to cultural expectations; a failure to achieve these supposed ideals has caused a generation to become weight obsessed, resorting to eating disorders in effort to maintain the cultural fantasy.71 Likewise, Cold War media taught men that they needed to be virile, violent, stoic, and unflinching.72 It taught women to balance bodily discipline with domestic ingenuity, consistent nurturing, and self denial. An inability to balance these paradoxes sent Americans to psychiatrists in droves. While the media sent patients to psychiatry, the need to affirm ?normalcy? sent audiences back to the media. Indeed, Hollywood and analysts worked as part of a well oiled capitalist machine by creating a market one for the other. Hitchcock understood this relationship and marketed it to audience hungry for more. It is his droll, prankster character which complicates the issue. 88 Though Hitchcock?s career, Freud?s ideas were dominant, mainstream, and accessible, yet biographers and critics alike tell us that Hitchcock remained skeptical about the real advantage of psychoanalysis (Boyd, Chandler, and Jenson). His inclusion of psychoanalysis served to paradoxically reinforce the importance of Freudianism in American culture and simultaneously critique it as a scam. As I mentioned above, most film critics unfortunately stop at the first half of that paradox, taking Hitchcock at face value: ?Hitchcock was a homosexual,? ?Hitchcock had an Oedipal complex,? ?Hitchcock was a misogynist.?73 I wonder if any of the critics who make such claims have any sense of humor at all. While other critics imagine Hitchcock sincerely or subconsciously devising his casts and scripts so that they produce a meanly misogynistic, homoerotic, or Freudian tome, I imagine instead a wry commentary on American culture: psychoanalysis as social parody and satire. Hitchcock has been criticized for the ?caricatures? of psychoanalysis presented in his films (Deflem and Price). But Hitchcock?s portrayals of psychoanalysis should be regarded as a criticism, rather than an endorsement, of the technique. After all Hitchcock had a profound understanding of the human psyche. He knew that the imagination was far more powerful than any image he could render on the screen, and this knowledge was the key to his remarkable ability to manipulate his audience. Graphic violence was rarely featured in Hitchcock?s films; the audience instead used their imagination to ?fill the gaps?. Take, for example, the shower scene in Psycho (1960), which remains the most famous murder scene in cinema history. Not once do we see the knife penetrate the flesh of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), yet the scene is considered to be one of the most disturbing ever filmed.74 Because of Hitchcock?s 89 legendary subtle and artistic sense of humor I must argue that while using Freudian content in his film, Hitchcock, a natural born wit, was being clever. One need only watch the first fifteen minutes of The Lady Vanishes, with its near rapid fire satire aimed squarely at Imperialism and manufactured gender norms, to see that Hitchcock was a very funny man. Based on the evidence I will show in regard to specific female characters, I argue that he was not misogynistic, not latent-homosexual, and not Oedipal; he was simply being clever. The implication of my assertion is not that scores of critics are wrong about Hitchcock, but that there is another layer to consider, a layer which many scholars are beginning to see as valid, a layer which demonstrates that Hitchcock very intentionally provided the fodder for those scores of critics. There are many valuable reading of Hitchcock?s oeuvre. Nevertheless they seem to fall prey to the assumption that if psychoanalysis appears in Hitchcock?s work, he must have literally meant what he was saying.75 I disagree. In my evaluation of Alfred Hitchcock, I see a quick witted, virtuoso prankster who would not shy away from poking fun at any establishment, particularly one that he thought was a farce: Freudian psychoanalysis. Murray Pomerance spends a great deal of time delineating Hitchcock?s use of psychoanalysis in An Eye for Hitchcock. According to Pomerance, Hitchcock made several comments which cast the writer / director as a musician and the audience as an instrument to be ?played? (65 -66). This seems to support my claim that Hitchcock was using Freudian theory, turning it to his own uses and setting it upon his audience, not as Freudian psychoanalysis but as ?Hitchcockian psychoanalysis?: a Hollywood version of genuine practice. Pomerance writes: 90 Hitchcock?s work, I think, bears more than casual affinity to psychoanalytic theory, notwithstanding his 1946 comment that psychoanalytic films could be ?dismissed as a passing phase.?. . . [P]sychoanalytic theory had . . . [an] affronting, even alienating effect when . . . it was first offered. . . . Freud . . . was like the Alfred Hitchcock who could say wisely to Francois Truffaut one day in August 1962, ?You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel like they know what?s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts.? (65) A brilliant filmmaker who knew how to play his audience to maximum effect, Hitchcock was also a brilliant capitalist. Given the evidence that shows he understood the tools of the box office trade (consider the well-known stunts he pulled while marketing Psycho76), we can deduce that he tailored the psychoanalytic content of his films to satisfy his audiences? desires. And his was an audience that had been recently subjected to momism; just as Manchurian Candidate proves to be a satire of Wylie?s social criticism, Hitchcock?s moms prove to be a parody or caricature. As I review Psycho and Notorious for the final portion of my argument, I will show that the heroines and the mothers of Hitchcock film deserve neither the scorn nor anxiety traditionally heaped upon them. Indeed, the female characters, Marion Crane and Alicia Hurberman, are victims of the primary male characters and not the mothers. Not only are they victims of a brutal stabbing and an 91 equally brutal poisoning, they are victims of a cultural system which drives them to desperate measures. With my critique, I hope to reveal that Hitchcock was more sympathetic to the plight of the American woman than he is typically credited with being. Lepoldine Konstantin plays Madam Sebastian, a woman Pomerance calls a ?domineering harridan,? in Notorious (78). She is widely considered to be the most ruthless of all Hitchcock mothers. Her son, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Raines) lives with her in their grand mansion in Rio. Their home is the headquarters for a major Communist operation. Son reunites with a former lover, the American daughter of a convicted Communist spy, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), and eventually marries her. What the audience knows that the Sebastians do not is that Alicia has been recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate the group of Germans who, like so many Nazi expatriates, have relocated to Brazil after World War II. During her training, Alicia and Devlin fall in love; however, he tempers his demonstrations of affection, withholding the warmth she desperately craves. When Devlin is ordered to convince Huberman to marry Sebastian in order to find out what he?s plotting, he coldly chooses duty over love. Bitter at his betrayal, Alicia weds Sebastian. During a lavish party, Alicia takes great risks to uncover the Communist plot, but in the process Devlin clumsily leaves a clue that her husband traces back to her. Upon discovering that his wife is a spy, he discusses the situation with his mother, who suggests that Alicia ?die slowly?, gradually by poisoning. Mme Sebastian is criticized as being cold and calculating as she calmly does needlework while poor unknowing Alicia suffers from the poison her mother-in-law is serving her. 92 My interpretation of Notorious, however, offers a reading that portrays Mme. Sebastian as a German patriot, protecting her country and her son against an American infiltrator. After all, Alicia is the one who is being deceitful. Were it not for Devlin?s withholding coolness, Huberman would never have married Sebastian. Can we consider a politically patriotic and protective mother more conniving than a politically patriotic CIA agent? I think Mme Sebastian presents a model of no-nonsense motherhood. After all, she knows that the Germans will kill her son if they find out that he has unwittingly allowed a spy in their midst. Given that one of their own, Emil Hupka, was executed for merely staring at a wine label during a dinner party, the Germans would have little reservation about disposing of Mme. Sebastian along with her son. She doesn?t seem to be acting out of cruelty, but out of protection and self-preservation. In the end, blame is placed on the mother by audiences and critics. Nevertheless, it is my contention that, though she may not be a completely sympathetic character, she is certainly not as villainous as Devlin, the man who forced his lover into the arms of another man and into the grasp of the enemy. Devlin arrives at Huberman?s deathbed at the close of the film, simultaneously exposing Sebastian and his mother to their German counterparts whose inevitable wrath will be the Sebastians? end; but for Alicia Huberman, the damage is done. We never know if Alicia arrives at the hospital in time to survive poisoning. Hitchcock is sympathetic to Alicia, representing her anguish over the death of her father and Devlin betrayal. Each time I watch the film, I am continually perplexed by the 93 charge that Hitchcock was a misogynist. As I will argue at length, the extraordinary love triangle in Notorious is far more important to the film than the uranium-filled bottles and Nazi conspiracy. Pascal Bonitzer agrees: What matters in Notorious is not the fact that there are some bottles of wine filled with sand (?ore?), but that the wine is in the cellar; that the cellar door is locked; that the key is in the husband?s possession; that the husband is in love with his wife; that she herself is in love with another, and that the third party wants to know what?s in the cellar. . . . Thus the action of Notorious revolves entirely around the vortex constituted by the act of ?going to look for wine in the cellar.? (151) When we realize that the emphasis of the film is not issues of national security, but instead on a situation where everyone is duplicitous, we can see that Hitchcock is forcing us to face the lies we tell ourselves. Bonitzer continues, ?What is interesting about Notorious is not espionage as such . . . but the hypocrisy, pretense, splitting and perversion that espionage implies (153). We are not, Hitchcock shows us, everything we pretend to be. This is particularly true of male characters that pretend to be stalwart. By revealing Hitchcock?s interpretation of women as ?other than what they appear to be? we can see that he has no set categories for gender -- including masculinity. In Notorious we can best examine Devlin?s masculine character by considering Alicia. After her father is put into prison, Alicia throws a party at which she becomes increasingly intoxicated. Devlin, an uninvited guest and CIA agent, latches onto her and recruits her for the CIA. Before they know what the assignment is the couple fall in love. 94 Immediately after her father commits suicide in prison, Alicia attests that she has ?turned over a new leaf? and expresses her feelings for Devlin. On their first day in Rio, the couple visits a restaurant where Alicia declines a second drink; ?I?m practically on the wagon,? she declares, ?That?s quite a change.? To which Devlin scoffs, ?It?s a phase.?77 Wounded, Alicia continues: ?Why won?t you believe in me, Dev? Just a little. Why won?t you?? While she repeatedly and volubly declares her love for Devlin, until the very end of the film the closest he comes to demonstrative affections is when he says, ?When I don?t love you, I?ll let you know. . . Actions speak louder than words.? The message he sends is duplicitous, should we believe that his actions demonstrate love, or that her actions (accepting the assignment she is given) demonstrate faithlessness? We see that Alicia is willing and able to be a sober, faithful woman, yet Devlin allows her to be insulted by the men in the CIA who claim that she is ?the perfect type for the job? indicating that her character is such that she can be bought into a sort of prostitution. Devlin does not attempt to dissuade her from taking on the task but rather passively pressures her into her patriotic duty. After cooking a chicken dinner (when she has already informed us that she despises cooking), Alicia plays homemaker for Devlin and says happily, ?Marriage must be wonderful with this sort of thing going on every day.? Though Alicia is trying to be light and cheerful with Devlin, he persists in dejection. She goads playfully, ?Come on, Mr. D., what is darkening your brow? Look, I?ll make it easy for you. The time has come... when you must tell me that you have a wife and two adorable children...and this madness between us can?t go on any longer.? Devlin?s cruelty knows no bounds and he 95 replies, ?I?ll bet you?ve heard that line often enough.? At this we see that Devlin is bent on tormenting Alicia; even though she has tried to win his affection and his trust by playing the part of a dutiful wife, preparing a complete chicken dinner though she detests cooking, Devlin makes constant pot-shots at her character. Despite her apparent injury at his callous comments, Alicia remains steadfast in her commitment to serve her country, urging Devlin to tell her what the ?job? is. After learning that she is to be ?Mata Hari? for her country, Alicia pleads, ?Did you say anything? I mean, that maybe I wasn?t the girl for such shenanigans?? Feeling the sting of personal insult she asks if Devlin made ?One little remark such as, ?How dare you gentlemen suggest that Alicia Huberman . . . be submitted to so ugly a fate??? She pleads, ?Oh, darling, what you didn?t tell them, tell me. . . that you believe I?m nice and that I love you and I?ll never change back. I?m waiting for your answer.? When the answer doesn?t come, we can see a wave of dejection wash over Alicia who laments, ?What a little pal you are. Never believing in me, hmm? Not a word of faith. Just down the drain with Alicia. That?s where she belongs.? The dramatic irony of this scene is that the audience has seen Devlin?s protestations that Alicia was not ?the right girl for the job? and that he didn?t believe that she would do it. It is his refusal to share this sentiment with Alicia that fuels the plot. During a confrontation with Mr. Beardsley who says, ?She?s had me worried for some time. A woman of that sort,? Devlin asks defensively, ?What sort is that, Mr. Beardsley?? Beardsley replies, ?Oh, I don?t think any of us have any illusions about her character, have we, Devlin?? Apparently affronted by his suggestion, Devlin rails at Beardsley in a biting tone: ?Not at all, not the slightest. Miss Huberman is first, last and 96 always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn?t hold a candle to your wife, sir, sitting in Washington playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.? Devlin defends her honor, but he never tells Alicia. It seems that the turning point for Devlin is when he learns that Sebastian was ?once in love with? Alicia, though she asserts that she ?wasn?t very responsive.? As a matter of fact, when they meet for the first time as spies, Alicia bitterly tells Devlin that he can ?add Alexander Sebastian to [her] list of playmates? indicating that he was not on the list previously and that she had told Devlin the truth. Nevertheless, he abuses her: ?I can?t help recalling some of your remarks about being a new woman. Daisies and buttercups, wasn?t it?? She reminds him that he knew the job description before she did and that he encouraged her to take it on, ?You could have stopped me with one word. But no, you wouldn?t. You threw me at him. . . . Didn?t you tell me to go ahead?? His abuse continues: A man doesn?t tell a woman what to do. She tells herself. You almost had me believing in that little hokey-pokey miracle of yours, that a woman like you could ever change her spots. . . . That?s why I didn?t stop you. The answer had to come from you. . . . Lucky for both of us I didn?t [believe in you]. It wouldn?t have been pretty if I?d believed in you. If I?d figured, ?She?d never be able to go through with this. She?s been made over by love.?. . . Listen. You chalked up another boyfriend, that?s all. No harm done. . . . Dry your eyes, baby. It?s out of character . . . snap out of it. Here comes dreamboat. 97 Apparently crushed, Alicia successfully completes the assignment; she marries Sebastian, finds the uranium ore in the wine cellar and the location of its mine. For her success, she nearly pays (or may pay, depending on how the ending is interpreted) with her life, poisoned slowly and painfully with tainted coffee served to her by her husband and mother-in-law. Hitchcock has represented Alicia as a woman between a rock and a hard place who is willing to lay her life on the line for Democracy and the man she loves. Devlin, on the other hand is cruelly dispassionate in his judgment of her actions. So, like Mme. Sebastian, who is often critiqued for her cold calculation, Alicia Huberman is one of Hitchcock?s female characters who remained heroic to the point of self-sacrifice. It is unfair and misinformed to say that Hitchcock represents women as corrupt; the culpability lies with an audience that interprets her actions as debauchery. What?s more, he illustrates the way in which the assumed tenets of masculinity can and do materially affect the lives of women. This is a most important aspect of Hitchcock film from a feminist perspective as masculinity studies works toward a version of masculinity which would prevent the oppression of women. Far from accepting the status quo interpretation of Hitchcock film that argues that he was a misogynist and that the women in his films are rightfully despicable, a masculinity studies reading of the text reveals the ways assumed male privilege and power are constituted and attempts to invalidate deep-rooted paradigms about entitled identity. Sally Robinson states, ?White men [in America] have . . . been marked, not as individuals but as a class, a category that, like other categories, completes the separation between the individual and the collective, the personal and the 98 political? (3). Such categorizing or ?classing? leads to an ontology of the visual. What?s more, if, in spite of everything we have learned about the construction of the feminine, we continue to ascribe to the foregone conclusion that white-heterosexual-masculinity as a monolith is a stable and opaque cultural location to which everything else falls to one side or another, we are engaging in more that an erasure of individuality. In ?Visual Modernity? Robyn Weidman, considers how corporeal appearance/anatomical composition resulted in identification based on an ?epistemology of the visual?; this methodology (though Weigman argues it was not initially intended to do so) prompted methods of racial subjugation based on physical/visual aspects.78 Ultimately, according to Weigman, the economy of the visible provided power to the visual, spectacular terrorism of groups like the Ku Klux Klan by creating white skin as the invisible location of power. In order to interrogate the application of visual assumptions, Weigman investigates how the body came to bear the identification of non- white men as ?another sort of [man]? (24). Just as we argue that an erasure of racial difference is undesirable we must recognize that the exclusion of sexual difference is equally unwelcome. Much like Luce Irigaray?s argument in An Ethics of Sexual Difference and Jacques Derrida?s suggestion in ?Choreographies,? that we move language toward an ontology that recognizes difference but without subordination of one term (feminine) in favor of the other (masculine): ?that is assuming that one know for certain what a feminine or masculine body is? (Derrida 37).79 Just as we learn from Weigman that our understanding of racial ?differences? is founded on the deceptions of the visible, our (mis)understanding of gender is based in the deception of the physical. 99 Judith Halberstam also explores the various manifestations of female masculinity, proving that physical and biological gender is not enough to categorize identity. Further, Anne Fausto-Sterling presents a scientific delineation of ?sex? as a category; it seems that even physicality is deceiving.80 After all, Donna Haraway tells is in her Manifesto for Cyborgs that ?There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ?being? female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices? (155). However, though she recognizes ?female? as a construction, women are still historically real. What?s more, Haraway adds that feminism in the US has been characterized by the ?natural? unity of all women, not taking into account, nor allowing room for, categories of race and class which risks ?lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection? (161). This parallels the crux of my claim, by assuming that white-heterosexual-masculinity is a singularity, we are removing agency from a sector of the population. In so doing, we are providing the safe-haven for patriarchy to maintain its opacity, its invisibility, and its power. In other words, if we do not hold white-heterosexual-masculinity responsible for the actions, choices, and judgments of white heterosexual men (and vise versa), then we are collaborating in the oppression of non-whites, non-homosexuals, and non-males. Therefore, we must see that Devlin is responsible for his part in Alicia?s, perhaps thwarted, murder - certainly for her sustained anguish. By suppressing his emotions, as a man was expected to do, he perpetuated a situation that he ?could have stopped . . . with one word.? 100 Like Alicia Huberman, Hitchcock is also sympathetic to Marion Crane of Psycho, a thief who meets her lover for extended lunches on company time. The movie opens in aerial view of Phoenix in mid afternoon a few weeks before Christmas. We see a couple in a seedy hotel room. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin), obviously in love but cannot marry, have met for an afternoon tryst for which Marion feels guilty. She tries in vain to break off the affair telling Sam, ?Oh, we can see each other. We can even have dinner. But respectably. In my house with my mother?s picture on the mantle and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.?81 It is as if the suggestion of mother?s presence would sap the sexual energy out of Sam, keeping him either virtuous or impotent. In response, Sam asks, ?And after the steak, do we send sister to the movies and turn Mama?s picture to the wall?? Sam acknowledges, even if flippantly, the power the image of mother (any one?s mother) has over his libido.82 We also learn that Marion wants to marry Sam. We are to assume that sexual attraction and mutual affection are not lacking from this relationship; the reason Sam won?t marry is financial. What we do get is the notion that poor finances are feminizing. Sam resents his ex-wife for taking alimony and traveling the world while he remains tethered to a hardware store in California; She maintains the power over his ability to remarry - though she can remarry (and will he hopes) at any time. Sam talks about the situation as if she were exacting a pound of flesh from him - and, not unlike Shylock, a particular pound at that. He says to Marion that if she marries him she would have to, ?live with me in a storeroom behind a hardware store in Fairvale? We?ll have lots of laughs. I?ll tell you what. When I send my ex-wife her alimony, you can lick the 101 stamps.? Desperate to be with him under any circumstances, she replies, ?I?ll lick the stamps.? Sam pulls away disgusted. This is a perplexing conundrum for the post World Wars American male subject. Having the absolute love of an attractive woman is not enough; as a husband it is his perceived obligation to maintain her financially. It?s no new news that men in a capitalistic society are measured, among other things, by their bankbooks. For Sam?s ex-wife to collect alimony that she doesn?t need for survival would have been read by Psycho?s audience as an emasculating blow to Sam?s self- appraisal. The connection between masculinity, sexual prowess, and financial measure is repeated with Mr. Cassidy, ?the oil-lease man.? After Marion has stolen Mr. Cassidy?s money to give to Sam we hear from Marion?s unconscious mind. She imagines that Mr. Cassidy, who had been explicitly flirting with Marion the day before, would exact the same pound of flesh for any money Marion doesn?t return: ?If any of it?s missin?, I?ll replace it with her fine soft flesh!? Though we are told that it is December the Eleventh, and in Phoenix the average December temperature is sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit (and the highest December temperature on NOAA?s record is eighty-eight degrees), Mr. Cassidy walks into Marion?s office with the exclamation, ?Wow. It?s as hot as fresh milk.? The maternal connotation is obvious. Mr. Cassidy goes on to explain his reason for visiting the office, ?Tomorrow?s the day, my sweet little girl. . . My daughter. A baby. And tomorrow she stands her sweet self up there and gets married away from me. I want you to take a look at my baby. Eighteen years old and she never had an unhappy day in any one of those years.? When the boss tries to lure him away, he stares intently and lasciviously at 102 Marion and asks her, ?Do you know what I do about unhappiness? I buy it off. . . . I?m buying this house for my baby?s wedding present. Forty-thousand dollars cash. Now that?s not buying happiness. That?s just buying off unhappiness. I never carry more than I can afford to lose.? After making a comment about evading income tax, Mr. Cassidy lays a thick wad of cash on Marion?s desk. The whole scene, laden with sexual innuendo and a garish public display of money, makes the characters and the audience uncomfortable. Beginning in a cheap Phoenix hotel room during a stolen lunch break with some stolen time, Marion Crane and Sam Loomis want to get married but have no money. Back at work, she seizes an easy opportunity to take $40,000 to solve Sam?s financial problems. Heading westward to join Sam, she stops at the Bates Motel. This is when things take a turn for Marion. If Sam had agreed to marry her despite his financial situation, she would never have been driven to such measures. It is in the attempt to maintain Sam?s sense of masculine worth that Marion steals Cassidy?s money and heads to Fairvale, California via the Bates Motel. I do not mean to suggest that Sam Loomis is as cruel as T.R. Devlin, but that cruelty lies in a culture that makes Sam believe that without the means to attractively support a wife he is emasculated. Their conversation in the hotel room reveals that Marion loves Sam, that she wants to marry him desperately, and that she is not materialistic. Further, she reveals that she does not feel respectable about meeting him on the sly. She says, ?Checking out time is three P.M. Hotels of this sort aren?t interested in you when you come in, but when your time is up-- Oh, Sam, I hate having to be with you in a place like this!? He tries to abate her indignity by telling 103 her that he has ?heard of married couples who deliberately spend an occasional night in a cheap hotel.? The irony, and Hitchcock?s joke on us, is that after she leaves one hotel, she ends up in another where she reveals more about her situation. Talking with the shy motel proprietor, Norman, she discovers that they both live in ?private traps? and that she has the opportunity to undo the lock on her own. Resolving to return to Phoenix to extract herself from her crime, Marion takes a baptismal shower. To demonstrate Marion?s faithfulness to Sam, consider the following scene in which she tells Norman that has no ?appetite.? Given the sexual overtones given the aspect of hunger in this scene, we can assume that Marion is declining an impending tryst with Norman. After arriving at the hotel, Norman asks her if there is anything else that she needs. She replies, ?I want to sleep more than anything else. Except maybe food.? Norman offers to share his humble dinner of ?sandwiches and milk? with her, an offer which drives Mother Bates into a tirade: No! I tell you no! I won?t have you bringing strange young girls in here for supper--by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap erotic fashion of young men with cheap erotic minds! . . . And then what, after supper? Music? Whispers? . . . As if men don?t desire strangers. Ah! I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because they disgust me! Do you understand, boy? Go on! Go tell her she?ll not be appeasing her ugly appetite with my food, or my son! Or do I have to tell her ?cause you don?t have the guts, boy? Huh, boy? You have the guts, boy? 104 Returning from the house with a tray of food, Norman is flustered but affable. He offers the apology, ?Uh--Mother-- m-my mother, uh--what is the phrase?--she isn?t quite herself today. . . . I wish you could apologize for other people.? To this Marion replies, ?You shouldn?t have bothered. I really don?t have that much of an appetite.? Marion has heard Mother?s remarks and understands the presumed connotation of the meal. From this point on, her attitude toward Norman is condescending; he is younger than she is, he is awkward, and he is unsophisticated. He cracks ungainly jokes like, ?Eating in an office is just -- just too officious.? Further, couched in a conversation about taxidermy, he comments that he believes Marion eats ?like a bird? then follows it with the disclaimer, ?No, not really. Anyway, I hear the expression ?eats like a bird? -- is really a fals- fals- falsity. Because birds really eat a tremendous lot. But I don?t really know anything about birds.? Knowing that the term ?bird? is also a colloquialism for ?woman,? Marion appropriately reads Norman?s naivet?. What follows is a revealing conversation about Norman?s life. Though he is apparently a grown man and an entrepreneur, he has a relationship with his mother which denies him a completely masculine identity. Marion responds to this shortcoming negatively which initiates her fatal meeting with Mother. Marion: A man should have a hobby. Norman: Well, it?s--it?s more than a hobby. A hobby?s supposed to pass the time--not fill it. Marion: Is your time so empty? 105 Norman: No, uh--well, I run the office, and uh, tend the cabins and grounds, and--and do little errands for my mother--the ones she allows I might be capable of doing. Marion: Do you go out with friends? Norman: Well, uh--a boy?s best friend is his mother. Marion?s expression at this point, though she attempts to hide it, is one of derision. A man of Norman?s age should not have such an over-close relationship with his mother, but he tells her, ?I don?t mind it anymore.? In a misguided attempt to encourage Norman to purchase his independence Marion advises: ?Oh, but you should. You should mind it. . . .You know, if anyone ever talked to me the way I heard--the way she spoke to you --? Norman: Sometimes--when she talks to me like that--I feel I?d like to go up there--and curse her--and-and-and leave her forever! Or at least defy her. But I know I can?t. She?s ill. Marion: She sounded strong. Norman: No, I mean--ill. She had to raise me all by herself, after my father died. I was only five and it must?ve been quite a strain for her. I mean, she didn?t have to go to work or anything like that. He left her a little money. Anyway, a few years ago Mother met this man, and he talked her into building this motel. He could?ve talked her into anything. And when he died too, it was just too great a shock for her. And--and the way he died. I guess it?s nothing to talk about while you?re eating. Anyway, it 106 was just too great a loss for her. She had nothing left. . . .[And] a son is a poor substitute for a lover. Again, the amalgamation of food and sexual innuendo (which is often considered a mark of Hitchcock?s auteur) reminds us that Norman is sexually aroused by Marion, yet Marion does not respond to his clumsy advances. Whether it is out of loyalty to Sam, derision for Norman?s relationship with his mother, or both, we see a woman who is capable of thievery but not of promiscuity. In an era when film serves as an epidictic, this is significant. Hitchcock, so often pegged as a misogynist, presents us with a character who remains sexually aloof; Marion may be desirable, she may be interpolated as a sexual predator by Mother (really, the part of Norman that speaks as Mother), but Hitchcock gives us no reason to believe that Marion is a wanton. What?s more, consider Marion?s undergarments. It has been widely remarked that her brassiere and slip are white when she is in the hotel with Sam, yet after stealing Cassidy?s money, Marion?s undergarments are black. This indicates that it is her thievery that has destroyed her innocence, not her affair with Sam. Much like Marnie?s mother, Beatrice, Marion?s sexuality is not her downfall; unlike other mid-century films, Hitchcock films do not represent sexually active women as inevitably evil. Hitchcock is much more sympathetic to the predicaments American culture presented to women. Like Alicia Huberman, Marion Crane is caught in a trap. Norman reflects, ?I think that we?re all in our private traps--clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out. We -- we scratch and claw, but only at the air -- only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch.? The camera angle changes and Norman tells about his mother and their 107 relationship. Offering that Norman could get out of his trap, Marion inspires Norman?s ire: ?I couldn?t [leave]. Who?d look after her? She?d be alone up there. The fire would go out. It?d be cold and damp like a grave. If you love someone, you don?t do that to them even if you hate them. You understand that I don?t hate her--I hate what she?s become. I hate the illness.? Marion: Wouldn?t it be better--if you put her--someplace--? Norman: You mean an institution? A madhouse! People always call a madhouse ?someplace,? don?t they. ?Put her in--someplace.? . . . .Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places? The laughing and the tears-- and the cruel eyes studying you. My mother there! But she?s harmless! Wh-- she?s as harmless as one of those stuffed birds! . . . People always mean well! They cluck their thick tongues and shake their heads and suggest, oh so very delicately--! Of course, I?ve suggested it myself. But I hate to even think about it. She needs me. It-it?s not as if she were a--a maniac--a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven?t you? At this point, Marion stands and crosses her arms, looking down on Norman quite as if her were a naughty child. Her body posture reads scorn for his youth and simplicity. Norman (who proceeds to eat candy like a child for the remainder of the film) asks her to stay ?Just for talk,? but she shakes her head and says in a schoolmistressly tone, ?I?m very tired. And I have a long drive tomorrow--all the way back to Phoenix. . . I stepped 108 into a private trap back there and I?d like to go back and try to pull myself out of it before it?s too late for me to.? Though it is indeed too late for Marion to realize that Norman is not only in his won personal trap, but that he is - like a Dorothy Parker inner-monologue - ?Trapped like a trap in a trap,?83 we do not get the impression that her murder is a direct result of her financial misdealing. She is portrayed as a (primarily) innocent woman. Much like the harbor town of Bodega Bay in The Birds, Miriam Haines (Bruno Anthony?s murder victim in Strangers on a Train), and Manny Balestrero, Marion Crane is simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. What?s more, we are not completely without sympathy for Norman. We feel affronted when Detective Arbogast impugns Norman?s masculinity by saying, ?Let?s just say for the sake of argument that she wanted you to gallantly protect her, you?d know that you were being used. You wouldn?t be made a fool of. . . .This is not a slur on your manhood.? To which Norman replies, ?But I?m not a fool. And I?m not capable of being fooled, not even by a woman. . . . Let?s put it this way. She might have fooled me but she didn?t fool my mother.? Even until the final scene and the explanation given by the psychiatrist does not paint Norman as a villain, but as a very sick man: He was already dangerously disturbed, had been since his father died. His mother was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man, and it seemed to Norman that she threw him over for this man. That pushed him over the line and he killed them both. Matricide is probably the most 109 unbearable crime of all, most unbearable to the son who commits it. . . . .He was never all Norman. But he was often only Mother. . . He was ?pathologically jealous? of mother so assumed she was equally jealous. [But he was not a transvestite;] A man who dresses in women?s clothing in order to achieve a sexual change, or satisfaction, is a transvestite. But in Norman?s case, he was simply doing everything possible to keep alive the illusion of his mother being alive. But when reality got too close, when danger or desire threatened that illusion, he dressed up. . . . The dominant personality won. . . .Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all. Most unbearable to the son who commits it.84 He is, in the end, abject not only because of his illness but because of the form his illness takes: an over-identification with his mother, the most horrifying image of manhood. Anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss pioneered the method of analysis which said that we discover what a story is really about, what conflict deep inside its hearers and tellers it seeks to resolve, by disregarding the narrative sequence and breaking the myth down into its most fundamental events and character types.85 Inevitably, one would find them repeated in different circumstances or with different character names, but the same ?mythemes,? the same basic elements of the myth, would be repeated again and again (206-31). It doesn?t even matter, Levi-Strauss said, whether you are using an early or a later version of the myth, its inner logic will persist. Psycho is a modern myth with momism as its primary ?mytheme.? 110 To conclude, I repeat my argument from earlier, Alfred Hitchcock created a market for psychoanalysis while psychoanalysts feed the cultural appetite for Hitchcock film. When read in Deleuzian terms of the Desiring Machine, neither film nor psychoanalysis fulfills desire but rather creates desire for production of more film and more psychoanalysis. Likewise, the fear of the maternal, the mytheme of ?bad? motherhood was fed by portraits in film just as the assumption of veracity in the myth creates more unhealthy maternal characters. It may be so that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, Alfred Hitchcock simply used our fears to create our fears. After all, he claimed that Hollywood had fed the psychology industry; it makes sense then that the cuisine he serves is fear. 111 CHAPTER 4 ?YOU CAN?T FIGHT IN HERE, THIS IS THE WAR ROOM?: DARK HUMOR AND POLITICAL MASCULINITY IN DR. STRANGELOVE Manchurian Candidate and Psycho were followed by Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which satirically portrayed a nuclear holocaust resulting from a fear of female sexuality and a military general?s misguided attempt to save America. In 1962, the year Kubrick started the Strangelove project, Americans were riddled with anxiety over Communist infiltration and nuclear annihilation. In this year alone, The Bay of Pigs and Soviet arms trade with Cuba prompted a political crisis of legendary proportion; The Berlin Wall was erected in 1962; on a weekly basis ?Twilight Zone? tackled fears about Communists, aliens, and SS agents; Operation Sunbeam had been running above ground nuclear tests on the Nevada Proving Ground for eleven years; President Kennedy oversaw the escalation of the Vietnam War; and Marilyn Monroe was found dead. Conspiracy was everywhere. 1962 was a banner year for American hopes for global supremacy as well as for fears of nuclear annihilation and anti-Communist sentiment; along with The Bay of Pigs incident, in 1962 Fidel Castro was excommunicated and Cuba signed a trade pact with Russia while the U.S. signed a trade embargo against Cuba; in 1962 Albania had gained its independence, formed it?s first government allied with China, and was accepted into the United Nations; in 1962, six members of the Committee of 100 (of the Campaign for 112 Nuclear Disarmament) were found guilty of treason; in 1962 in a speech at Rice University JFK renewed his dedication to putting an American on the moon; by October, 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis had begun; and as if to give the ?Cold? War a reason for its moniker, Britain experienced a ?Big Freeze? where the temperatures fall below freezing at least once every 24 hours for six months. Also in 1962, MAD Magazine, a medium that routinely made fun of the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation, turned ten years old. For a decade, MAD gave weary Americans an opportunity to laugh it off. M. Thomas Inge explains MAD creator, Harvey Kurtzman?s influence on America culture through his use of satirical humor; after identifying Kurtzman?s form and use of satire as one that transformed all American humor which was to come after him,86 he asks: Would the shape and nature of American humor and popular culture have been the same without the presence of Kurtzman? Would there be no Lenny Bruce or Woody Allen, no Laugh In [sic] or Saturday Night Live [sic] on television, no Monty Python or Second City among comedy groups, no Robert Crumb or underground commix? . . . Was Kurtzman . . . a minor voice in the groundswell of satirical thrusts at conformity and complacency in the 1950s, or was he a major leader and spearhead in this development? (125) With a mock acronym for mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.), Alfred E. Neumann?s goofy smile, and his ?What, me worry?? axiom, American?s were able to anxiously poke fun at their fears. Given Inge?s argument, it seems that without Kurtzman?s brand of 113 social satire, ?antiestablishment humor,? American?s may have dwindled into apathetic despair (128). Humor analyst David Noonan comments on the effect of MAD on his childhood: ?. . . when you are 9 and air-raid drills are part of your third-grade routine, it?s not so easy to laugh at a joke in which the punchline is a mushroom cloud. But what else could we do?? (58). Noonan seems to confirm Inge?s final point that: All of the humorists . . . of the 1950s were part of the liberation movement away from conformity and apathy . . . the pleasures and playthings of childhood were powerful instruments of indoctrination and needed to be read with a careful eye to their political and ideological agendas. Readers were being prepared for dealing with the rest of the century . . . and no art can serve a higher purpose than making us better people.? (138). The ideas expressed in the humor of the 1950s and early 1960s were the products of progress, they were instigated by a drive toward cultural improvement. But the ideas expressed in mid-century humor also expressed the limitations of free will; because progress at that time brought with it recognition that we were capable of annihilating humankind. Hurling the nation into a state of existential angst, faced with their own non- being, fiction writers responded to the weight of absurdity and the loss of faith in humanity. Emerging from these writers was Stanley Kubrick. It is well known that Stanley Kubrick?s Dr. Strangelove as a dark satire pointed at critiquing the paradox of protection by mutually assured destruction, the idea that neither side (neither the Russians nor the Americans) would launch a nuclear attack given that both sides would be completely annihilated by engagement.87 We can see that by 114 examining Dr. Strangelove as a revolutionary statement; surreal and ironic, it is a satire geared at awakening the political sensibilities of an American audience. In this chapter, I will lay bare the use of satire in Strangelove while discussing the revolutionary potential of Kubrick?s film. I will also discuss the attendant sexual politics of nuclear warfare, and in this context, discuss the repercussions of existential angst on the development of the American male subject by discussing his classification as an object: a deliberate military weapon. More importantly, I will argue that Dr. Strangelove portrays a fear that the American male could become the object of his own desire; by illustrating the male characters? over-identification with weaponry, I will argue that by conflating his subjectivity with national security, the men in Strangelove risk loosing their sense of unified Self. Facing an existential crisis, each man in Dr. Strangelove shows himself to be a machine functioning without a clear-cut boundary between his subjective self and his objective self. While this is indeed a dismal state for American manhood, I will show the ways split-consciousness lends itself to a dark comedy like Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick, whose work includes 2001: Space Odyssey, developed an interest in the Cold War and nuclear strategy in the 1950s. In an essay on Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick wrote: ?I was very interested in what was going to happen and started reading a lot of books. . . and I began to subscribe to military magazines. . . to follow the US naval proceedings? (12). What Kubrick learned must have bothered him for some time because he started looking for a nuclear war scenario to treat almost immediately after he finished filming Lolita (?Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove?). He began researching America?s policy of mutually assured destruction: the concept that 115 the arms race was a necessary deterrent to global thermonuclear war - if mutual destruction was assured, neither side would initiate a nuclear war. Not only was this concept frighteningly absurd, it was nearly surreal given that some Americans who thought that nuclear war a good idea and an opportunity to ?start over.? Generally seen as a capitalist boon, bomb shelters, gas masks, and alternate protective gear were portrayed as chic. 88 Kubrick found the novel Red Alert by Peter George and began adapting it for film. At that time, there was another adaptation, a ?straight? adaptation, in the works: Fail Safe. Sidney Lumet?s Fail Safe is violent. It begins with a nightmare of Hemingwayesque proportions; a loud siren and a bull fight resolve into military braggadocio and a cocktail party. Though Fail Safe is a straight drama, it reeks of anachronistic patriotism which the nation had not relished since the films of the World War II Era; what?s more, it doesn?t capture the true sense of George?s novel in the way Strangelove does.89 Despite its satirical bent, the film is actually fairly true to the original which begins: To ride a few feet above an explosive power so potent that five or six B- 52?s could have settled World War Two decisively for either side, did not worry them. There was little risk of accidental detonation. But all of them, as part of their indoctrination, had seen the films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of them had been shown the comparative strength of the puny twenty kiloton bomb dropped then, against the fifteen megaton monsters which they carried. . . . [which could] destroy upwards of five 116 million human beings at the press of a button. . . . They believed they guarded the peace of the world. . . . (George) Wanting to rouse his countrymen to the dangers inherent in national security policy, Kubrick embarked on a political commentary like no other before it. The novel described a very real worst-case scenario for the American military; from inside their ranks comes a madman, Air Force Brigadier General Quinten, who launches a full-scale nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R. The plot of the novel is deliberate; it revealed the ease with which nuclear war could be triggered. However, the absurdity of the paradoxical relationship between national security and mutually assured destruction mystified both Kubrick and his Strangelove co-writer, James Harris. What may have been more mind-boggling to the pair of writers was national complacency about nuclear war. Unable to accept the absurdity of the situation at hand, Harris left the project and Kubrick brought screenwriter Terry Southern on board and together they wrote Strangelove as a satire; the political content was subversively eye-opening to its original audience. This farce characterizes male political figures that range from yielding to fanatical. Paired together are the placating national leader and the bull-headed military general in the war room; and the practical British Exchange Officer and the destructive and paranoid American officer on the Air Force base. As Strangelove opens, our narrator tells us that the Russians have built a secret doomsday machine much like the one described in Herman Kahn?s 1960 On Thermonuclear War, which was among the books Kubrick had read and recommended to others.90 We are told at the outset of the film that: 117 For more than a year, ominous rumors have been privately circulating among high level western leaders, that the Soviet Union had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon, a doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the site of the top secret Russian project to the perpetually fog shrouded wasteland below the arctic peaks of the Zokov islands. What they were building, or why it should be located in such a remote and desolate place, no one could say.91 The action of the film opens at Burpelson Air Force Base, where General Jack D. Ripper has just used the loopholes in a nuclear attack fail-safe to launch a first strike attack on the Soviet Union; he has given a launch code to a fleet of B52 bombers, each two hours from a strategic target in Russia. The film proceeds to follow one bizarre but plausible twist after another as the President of the United States, Merkin Muffley, and his advisors try to recall Ripper?s bombers and prevent a nuclear apocalypse. Rife with images of exaggerated male sexual prowess the film tells a story of a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union to fend off a perceived threat to American masculine potency. When the opening credits run, we voyeuristically survey stock footage of a B52 bomber and a refueling plane coupling in mid-flight (the pseudo- pornographic scene is heightened by the soundtrack, ?Try A Little Tenderness?). The planes heave and swell in mid-air until they finally come together; the prominent coupling tube, a proboscis not for sucking fluid but for expelling it, extends from the belly of the fueling plane until it hooks up with the B52. Together the planes traverse the skies as the credits roll. At the end of the song, the fueling tank breaks away from the 118 B52 and makes its way off into the blue, presumably to couple with a different B52. At every turn Dr. Strangelove is sexy. The climax of the film, for instance, features a cowboy (Slim Pickens) astride a grotesquely phallic nuclear warhead. Major Kong, the cowboy, has been jettisoned out of the bomber waiving his Stetson and yelling and orgasmic ?Yeeeehaaaa? as he plummets toward his target below. His enthusiastic ride culminates in eruptions of ejaculatory mushroom clouds. The content in-between is equally sexually charged. When we first see the bombardiers, lead by Major ?King? Kong, they are on the plane engaged in stereotypically masculine things when the order to execute Plan R - Romeo - comes across. In the plane, a satirical microcosm of American culture, Kubrick parades a cross section of the typecasts of American masculine culture: one man is playing with a deck of cards, one man napping, the only non-white man on the plane is in the belly of the bomber, another man is looking at a pornographic magazine. On the ages of this magazine we see the only female character in the film; in the photograph, Miss Scott is laying bare except for a copy of Foreign Affairs draped across her buttocks. Later we will meet her again, this time in a bikini, as she relays the message between General Turgidson - still ?indisposed? from their recent romp - and General Fred Puntridge, with whom she speaks as if she knows him intimately. This scene is an interesting illustration of Gayle Rubin?s theory of the ?exchange in women? explicated in ?The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,? an account of the ways in which social structures which oppress women emerged and are maintained.92 Within this argument Rubin explains that structural domination by 119 men over women places men and women in an asymmetric power relationship by rendering men as ?givers? and women as ?gifts?; this leads to her concept of ?exchange of women.? Further, obligatory heterosexuality causes men to use women as conduits for their desire for another man. In this scene we can see that General Turgidson, in a state of post-coital and detumescent vulnerability -- he is, after all, in the bathroom with his pants around his ankles -- is unwilling to approach General Puntridge on the phone. In order to bridge the gap between himself and Puntridge while maintaining obligatory heterosexuality, Turgidson conveys his message/desire through Miss Scott. Turgidson replies in kind. Miss Scott is hypersexualized; we have already seen her as a centerfold and she plays the entire scene in a bedroom wearing a bikini. Relaying messages between two generals, she stands as a conduit or exchange item between the two powerful men. These additions, the characterization of Major Kong?s flight crew and the depiction of Miss Scott, are Kubrick?s satirical interpretation of American culture. Peter George plays the storyline closer to the vest; Kubrick twists the plot into an illuminating glimpse at American gender relations. In the novel, the men in the B52 named ?Alabama Angel? are relieved not to have to drop the bomb. The men are portrayed as being fearful and respectful of the cargo they carried and the responsibility it implied. They are described as ?highly trained men of good educational background? who ?could think for themselves? (George). When the men of the Alabama Angel reach their fail safe point, the X point, and no order is received, they are comforted: ?They were only too glad to obey those orders? to return to the next fail safe point. Nevertheless, the men of the Alabama Angel, who are neither 120 insane nor warmongers, in the end, initiate a global thermonuclear war. In Kubrick?s representation of this scene, when the order to execute the nuclear attack comes, the bombardiers follow orders blindly - though there is one fleeting moment of reservation. Major Kong enthusiastically leads the men who, as they paradoxically prepare to launch a strike to kill ?The Ruskies? also prepare to survive the strike. Imbedded in this scene is further evidence that Kubrick is not only attacking weapons proliferation ideology, but it also reveals Kubrick?s propensity to amalgamate sex with violence. Kong runs down the list of items in the military issue ?Survival Kit? which contains tools of destruction: one 45 caliber automatic, two boxes of ammunition, four days concentrated emergency rations, one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills, one miniature combination Rooshan phrase book and Bible. The survival kit also contais sexually charged objects: ?one hundred dollars in rubles, one hundred dollars in gold, nine packs of chewing gum, one issue of prophylactics, three lipsticks, three pair of nylon stockings.? Commenting on the tawdry juxtaposition of both weaponry and prophylactics, Major Kong declares, ?Shoot, a fellah could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.? And we understand that man?s warlike tendencies and his sexual urges stem from the same aggressive instincts. But this was nothing new to Kubrick?s audience. As I discussed in regard to Manchurian Candidate, Cold War anxieties regarding American manhood often equated communism with voracious femininity or seductive female sexuality. Kubrick?s first film had hit the screen nine years previous; Fear and Desire (1953), was about a team of 121 soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a fictional war. One of the most disturbing scenes of this film is not a war scene however; it is the attack of a female . . . by the group of men. From the beginning, Kubrick?s vision of war has been laced with violent sexuality. The tagline for the film was: ?Trapped... 4 Desperate Men and a Strange Half-Animal Girl! and the Story of French Prostitute... and The Male Brute? (?Fear and Desire.? iMDB). Pitting the civilized man against the brute sexualized and animalized woman was also no new theme. Consider a pivotal scene in J. Lee Thompson?s The Guns of Navarone (1961) when two military men, the American officer, Mallory, and the British officer, Miller, have discovered that the ?the lady? has tricked them; the men decide that her sexuality is duplicitous and that she poses a grave threat. Corporal Miller says to Mallory: . . . aren?t you forgetting something? The lady. As I see it we have three choices. One we can leave her here . . . .Two, we can take her with us . . . . And three. . . well . . . I?m not anxious to kill her, I?m not anxious to kill anyone. You see, I?m not a born soldier. . . . I prefer to leave the killing to someone like you, an officer and a gentleman, a leader of men. Miller says this as if killing and leadership were synonymous, as if murder were gentlemanly. Indeed, after the end of two world wars, military strength became analogous to national identity and American society became increasingly inclined to assume masculine imperatives such as ?courage,? ?duty,? and ?strength.? During the era of Dr. Strangelove, on screen violence against woman had become just another part of the masculine imperative. 122 It seems that sex and war had become so inseparable that, whether he intended it or not, this connection was just the sort of thing Kubrick would satirize in Strangelove. To critique the paradoxical logic of Cold War national policy which asserted that the country?s only hope of protection from nuclear annihilation was mutually assured destruction, Strangelove presents an absurd pretext for a preemptive strike: purity of essence. Though it may sound like a simple vehicle to rouse humor, this is a very serious thing. The remained of the plot becomes driven by this phrase (P.O.E is the recall code) just as contemporary men?s fears were touched by a protection of their ?essence.? In Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man?s Most Precious Fluid, Lisa Jean Moore traces historical, religious, scientific, and legal preoccupations with ?essence.? Moore ?view[s] sperm and semen representations as symbols of different types of masculinities . . . . sperm can be seen as a fierce competitor . . . a benevolent father . . . an absent-minded professor . . . or an impotent wimp? (13). She points out that in the early Cold War Era, scientists were anxious to ?normalize? sperm; just as the Industrial Age had encouraged a standardization of gender expectations, beginning in the 1930s and ?The first attempt to classify sperm?s cell morphology? men?s body fluids were being qualified on a ?probabilistic system . . . based on a wide variety of quantifiable parameters? (27, 26). This fear is not only significance in gendered terms (both in cultural and bio-evolutionary terms) but also in nationalistic terms. Consider the telling line which begins Ripper?s apologia for attacking Russia; connecting one unrelated fluid to another and provoked only by a suspicion of ?fluoridation,? Colonel Ripper asks British Exchange Officer, RAF Mandrake, ?Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?? 123 To clarify this inexplicable question, Ripper clarifies that he only drinks ?pure grain alcohol and rain water.? As Mandrake becomes surer of Ripper?s ?undone? state of mind, he continues: [Clemenzo] said war was too important to be left to the Generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap - - and - - impurify - - all - - of our precious bodily fluids. Pauses added to emphasize effect. Insanity is a classic indictment of the satirist who customarily argues that the madness of ?rational? men often equals or exceeds that of lunatics. Kubrick gives us Ripper who is clearly unstable, delusional, and dangerous. Nevertheless, Kubrick gives us a Ripper who makes us laugh. This works in a satire because, according to Thomas Hobbes?s century-old theory, the laugher finds humor in a perception of self-superiority; we laugh when we feel superior to someone else?s misstep. We laugh when Charlie Chaplin slips on a banana peel because we feel superior because he slipped and we were seated safely in our theatre chairs.93 However, in case of the insane, I would argue that people do not, when perceiving the truly mentally ill, laugh at ?inferior? beings; rather, we laugh at the insight we attain from satiric representation of insanity because of the incongruity between our expectations and reality. We expect Ripper to have a ?good reason? for 124 initiating thermonuclear war; however, we are provided only an absurd expression of paranoia.94 Kubrick?s audience is already certain that Ripper is mentally unstable. However, the leaders in the war room are only beginning to learn the level of derangement at work in this situation. When a soldier is expected to blindly follow his superior officer?s lead, there can be no wiggle-room for supposed insanity. Case in point, Major Kong, whose name conjures a primitively apish mentality, gives evidence of outmoded notions about war in his pep talk to the crew after they have received the ?go? code in a way that only a fighter pilot wearing a cowboy hat while launching a preemptive strike can convey. Such a pep talk might be appropriate for a World War II film - in fact, most pre-nuclear films contained some such scene - but, like the men of the Alabama Angel in George?s novel, Kong?s devotion to what he is being asked to do is dangerously complete. Kong wears a cowboy hat while making the speech and ?When Johnny Comes Marching Home? plays on the soundtrack in the background, thus reinforcing the conception of Kong, the warrior cowboy, as a dangerous anachronism. Resistant to the possibility that the entire military is operating completely at the caprice of a madman, General Turgidson reports that Major Jack D. Ripper has explained to the duty officer, ?God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids.? Dubious, Turgidson tells Muffley, ?We?re still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.? To which Muffley replies, ?There?s nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.? Meanwhile, while the US military is ineffectual at preventing the attack, Exchange Officer RAF Mandrake attempts 125 to pry the abort code from Ripper. Rather than abort the mission, Ripper shoots and kills himself. While it is well established that insanity is contrary to American ideals of masculinity, there is a more insidious connection to be made. Politically, insanity was equated with an instability that was detrimental to the state of the American republic. Political leaders feared that male insanity weakened the nation by reducing male citizens to the mental level of their supposed intellectual interiors; namely women, children, and minorities. Because insanity was indelibly linked to Communism and, by association, emasculation, Turgidson recommends that the President ?hold off judgment on a thing like that . . . until all the facts are in.? To suppose that even a low-level officer was insane would be detrimental to the conception of the American military. But the power gleaned by Ripper?s manipulation of political loopholes, creates a situation where one military madman can (and does) destroy the entire world as we know it. The iconic madman, satire, and humor all go hand in hand. As I will discuss at length in my next chapter focused on One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest, the laughter of the madman is the most powerful laughter of all. When we laugh at the madman, we laugh at our own irrationality because, if we?re to believe the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, ?The power of laughter lies with [the person] who laughs, not with the object of laughter,? and we understand that no person can laugh at his/her own foible without becoming ?mad?; that is, unless s/he ?is a philosopher, [one] who has acquired, through habit, the ability to double [her/]himself rapidly and look on as a disinterested spectator? at the spectacle of his/her own fall (Qtd in de Man 220). For Paul de Man, this 126 rapid splitting of the self ends in the hysterical laughter of madness. He writes, ?[A]bsolute irony is a conscious-ness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself? (de Man 216). This is not to say that laughter is an expression of legal or debilitating insanity, but to say that laughter reflects and altered perception of the self as simultaneously a transcendental subject and a material object; or, to quote Baudelaire, we might say that ?laughter is one of the most frequent and numerous symptoms of madness? because it is ?the expression of a double, or contradictory, feeling? (159). Such a paradoxical understanding of self is at the heart of satire. The recognition of duality, hypocrisy, contradiction, or incongruity is a feeling that de Man, in a discussion of Baudelaire, terms the ?self-escalating act of consciousness, a doubling that catalyses the self as representation? (de Man 158). This point of philosophy, this negotiation of the subject / object problem and the resolution of a Hegelian un-happy consciousness, applies itself as aptly to humor as it does to political movements. Though audiences are typically able to recognize satire, a sense of humor is an enigmatic thing, especially when dealing with dark comedy. Because dark humor had its genesis in the interrogation of unified subjectivity (both whiteness and maleness), it involuntarily lends itself to political revolution.95 What?s funny about black humor is that it often collides with the mutability or instability of a unified subjectivity and engages the assumed stability of subjectivity and analyzes the extent to which this social construct takes shape. The audience sees something they do not expect to see; when audience members expect to observe a unified subject but instead is presented with a fragmented 127 subject their expectations collide with reality and, as they realize that they too are split subjects, they tend to laugh. Such humorous representations of gender challenge the hallmark of invisibility -- of unmarkedness -- by making subjects surveillable and censurable. The disjunction between the assumed and the portrayed is where the humor lies. And dark humor it is. Questioning the absurdity of our assumptions is a sinister path. Better to laugh it off. In his genealogy of dark humor, Douglas Haynes? argument is a valuable one: ?Breton coined the phrase ?black humour? to describe a complicated combination of Hegel?s poetic ?objective humour? [Objektiverhumor] and Freud?s ironic ?gallows humour? [Galgenhumor]? (25). It is here, between the two, that we detect the possibility of the revolutionary space provided by surrealism and dark humor. It is between the object self and the subject self that we find a mutable space were we are capable of transforming identity. Haynes first points to Baudelaire, who in his essay ?On the Essence of Laughter? (1855), is among the first to consider the importance of a duality for humor. Discussing the coarse but ?delightful? laughter derived from watching another person fall over, he observes that, ?[the man who trips] would be the last to laugh at his own fall, unless he happened to be a philosopher, one who had acquired by habit a power of rapid self-division and thus of assisting as a disinterested spectator at the phenomena of his own ego? (154). To become an object for oneself in this way, even an object in pain, Baudelaire suggests, is philosophically and ironically humorous: ?a didoublement indicating a partial transcendence from one?s naturalized material and psychic predicament? (Haynes 30). 128 At the outset of ?The Meaning of the Wild Body? Wyndham Lewis establishes the primary premise for his theory of comedy which involves separation between the object of comedy and the laughing spectator, between the Wild Body and its observer: de Man?s dedoublement. Laughter at one?s self can only result from self-consciousness, and to be self-conscious is to split one?s own identity into the subject-self, (which is conscious) and the object-self (of which it is conscious). In the case where men have been acculturated to a Cartesian concept of self that radically divides mind and body, thought and emotion, men?s material beings - the fact that they are men constructed in such a cultural ideology - radically conflicts with their epistemological selves. The men of Strangelove are faced with a struggle between external self-representation and the contingencies of interiority. It is in this moment, this ?hiccup,? or trip, or rupture in self perception that we find humor - because we are uncomfortable - because we recognize absurdity - because, as Baudelaire said, ?all men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons. . . . If you saw . . . a sack of potatoes suddenly get up and trundle off down the street . . . you would laugh . . .? (123). It is, of course, the political function of satire to hold a mirror to a culture and reveal such stumbles and trips. In opposition to this, it is the function of American masculine identity to use humor as deflection - to hide the stumbles and trips. Satire is a way of bridging the two - the breach of identity can be revealed in a coded way because in cinema, my application of de Man?s philosophy does not apply only to the observation of the self as self but also to the self of the screen. When a film serves to reflect our political selves, we see our own 129 persons fall with the characters on the screen. For the audience, the screen is a mirror for political identity. It is when we become conscious of the ironic separation - via the characters on the screen - between our own object self and subject self, we can find that revolutionary space to change our political consciousness. Strangelove is a mirror of the political climate which has had a stumble. The audience, now recognizing their own stumble depicted on the screen, understands it as irony. The stumble to which I am referring is more than related to the political climate of nuclear proliferation. There is also a misogynistic disposition which is beginning to be perceived as a stumble. The feminist movement would not be in full swing in America for a few years, but America had already seen the ridiculousness of its anti-feminine and anti-domestic hegemony.96 By applying gallows humor to the sexual politics of Cold War cinema, Strangelove brings to the surface other cinematic subtexts to which we now turn. I have argued that the application of satire in cinema can be an instrument to launch revolution. In this case the revolution was against the outmoded McCarthy era mindset which created national anxiety about polemic cinema. I have explicated the philosophical approach that illustrates the ways in which irony occurs as a manifestation of the transcendental split between the object self and the subject self. Engaging in a dialogue situated between postmodern philosophers like de Man and Breton and contemporary humor critics, Solomon and Haynes, I have asserted that dark humor provides a boundary-less space that fits my established use of abjection - simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. 130 This abjection, between subject and object, is played out further in the necessary machinations of a military body. In ?Docile Bodies,? Michel Foucault delineates the connection between military discipline and machine-like movement.97 The human body is, of course, a mechanism; martial arts are able to wage war, using no appendages aside from the body. But when an army becomes technologized, there tends to be a differentiation between soldier and weapon. This boundary is ambiguous, however, and is the most vicious of monstrous abjection. A position that lies between subject and object. This final portion of my argument claims that the lack of clear separation between man and machine - between solider and weapon - creates an abject space. Further, the men in Strangelove ironically conflate their selves with their machines. Just as the nation identified itself (almost synecdochally) with its military, the men in the military identified themselves with their weapons. In this relationship the subjects (men) become objects (weapons) and the objects become identified as subjects. This is particularly true of the ?Doomsday Machine? which, as is often said of male reproductive organs, seems to have a ?mind of its own?; it activates itself and cannot be deactivated through human interference. It is not merely object, it is a monster machine. In other places, weapons are conflated with the phallus; Turgidson continually refers to ?the BIG board? as a precious commodity. Underscoring the pretence that size does matter, Turgidson over identifies with the weapon tracking device. In another scene, Turgidson and deSadesky argue over a phallic camera. Clearly, Ripper has become a weapon of mass destruction. Turgidson?s ideology is destructive, as is Dr. Strangelove?s murderous zeal. It is Muffley?s and Mandrake?s near incompetence that drive the plot toward its 131 ultimate destruction, however. Through the misuse of radio codes, Ripper sends B-52s on their destructive mission. This is of course the inciting incident and it controls the remainder of the plot. But consider the remaining uses of technology. In the end, the Americans do not realize that Kong?s B-52 remains in the air because he is flying below Russian radar. This breach in technological effectiveness causes a delay which fulfils the bombardier?s destiny. Another technological snafu which provides comic relief as well as plot development is the conversation between President Muffley and Premier Kissov. During Muffley?s call to Kissov, social amenities and small talk hinder attempts to stop the bombers and slows the process. Consider the following scene which begins with Alexiy deSadesky without a phone, and then progresses into an absurd conversation between Muffley and Kissov. In the end, the President of the United States has to dial ?information? (today, the equivalent of 411) to contact the Russian People?s Central Air Defense Headquarters in Omsk. Muffley asks a resistant deSadesky?s to, ?Tell him where you are, and that you?ll enter the conversation if I say anything that?s untrue, but please don?t tell him anything more than that. Alexiy, Alexiy, please... I beg you.? deSadeski: I don?t have a phone. Muffley: Give him your phone, Frank. deSadeski: I?ve done as you asked. Be careful Mr. President. I think he?s drunk. Muffley: Hello? Hello, Dimitri? . . .Well it?s good that you?re fine and I?m fine. I agree with you. It?s great to be fine. Now then Dimitri. . . . one of 132 our base commanders . . . . ordered his planes to attack your country. Well let me finish, Dimitri. Let me finish, Dimitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I?m calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. . . . Alright, well, listen... who should we call? Who should we call, Dimitri? The people...? Sorry, you faded away there. The People?s Central Air Defense Headquarters. Where is that, Dimitri? In Omsk. Right. Yes. Oh, you?ll call them first, will you? Uh huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dimitri? What? I see, just ask for Omsk Information. This is not the only scene where a simple machine like a telephone does not serve its purpose appropriately. Such a breach could be read as a commentary on the use of a machine, particularly in a military setting, for a feminized purpose such as communication. Imagined as a ?woman?s domain,? telephone communication is an emasculating task. When we first see Turgidson, he nearly refuses to take a phone call. He is indisposed when General Frank Puntridge calls to inform him of the impending air strike. Even after he has returned from bathrooming, he Miss Scott to finalize the conversation; in the end, he takes the call. What?s more, Miss Scott has to translate the official information into more domestic language for General Turgidson. As a side note, consider the ?red? phones represented in Hollywood; if a male character must have an emergency phone, it is typically masculinized by being red. There are typically no dials on such a phone, indicating that a man of importance has no need of telephone 133 communication. Should one of his subordinates require instructions or have information to impart, the phone will receive incoming calls only. Likewise, when Mandrake tries to phone the President with the recall code, he cannot. The telephones in Ripper?s office have been destroyed and the other phones on the base have been disconnected. He finds a payphone but comically cannot be connected because he does not have enough change. Ingeniously, he finds a Coke machine and orders a soldier named ?Bat? Guano to obtain change; this too diminishes into absurd absurdity: Mandrake: Operator? This is Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, I?m speaking from Burpleson Air Force Base. Look, something very urgent has come up and I want you to place an emergency person to person call with President Merkin Muffley in the Pentagon, Washington D.C. . . . Aaaa . . . Burpleson 3-9180. . . . No, I?m perfectly serious, operator, the President, yes the President of the United States. . . . I?m sorry, I haven?t got enough change. Um, could you... could you make this a collect call, operator? . . . Just one second, operator. . . . [To Guano] They won?t accept the call. Have you got fifty-five cents? . . . Operator, look, ah . . . is it possible to make this an ordinary, ordinary trunk call? Well, what do you call it, you know, ah, oh, ah - station to station? . . . Oh, blast. Still twenty cents short. Operator, hold on one, ah, I shan?t keep you a second . . . [To Guano] Colonel, that Coca-Cola machine, I want you to shoot the 134 lock off it. There may be some change in there. . . . Shoot it off! Shoot! With the gun! That?s what the bullets are for, you twit! Guano: OK. I?m gonna get your money for you. But if you don?t get the President of the Unites States on that phone . . . . [y]ou?re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company. The banal machines of communication fail miserably, nevertheless, the destructive machines function very effectively. The infantry maintains a solid perimeter around the air force base, preventing the ?informed? military leaders from contacting the ?uniformed? soldiers at Burpleson. The bombers succeed in dropping the bomb against all odds. In the end, one B-52 cannot be recalled and the plane?s crew proceeds to a target within range. Comically, the B-52?s bay doors have jammed, and in forcing them open, the pilot, Major Kong, ends up riding one of the bombs to the ground, rebel-yelling all the way. Kong straddles the bomb, gripping it with one hand and waving his cowboy hat in the air in rodeo bull riding style, whooping and hollering as he plummets to his death. As a result, a doomsday device is triggered and according to the Soviet ambassador, life on Earth?s surface will be extinct in ten months. Although Dr. Strangelove does not speak until the last third of the film, he is roused by the thought of a post-war, centrally controlled, male-dominated society whose members have been specially selected from the population. This idea is evocative of Nazi visions. When the leaders realize that the world will have to be repopulated, Dr. Strangelove recommends to the President that a group of about 100,000 people be relocated deep in a mine shaft, with 135 a gender ratio of ?ten females to each male.? In the concluding scenes, a visibly excited Strangelove bolts out of his wheelchair shouting ?Mein F?hrer, I can walk!? seconds before the film ends with a barrage of nuclear explosions, accompanied by Vera Lynn?s famous World War II song ?We?ll Meet Again.? It is as if the success of the machines of war animated Dr. Strangelove as if his vitality were conflated with the vitality of the machines. While cinematic humor in Strangelove provided a space for the expression of a revolutionary anti-proliferation ideology and the space for evolutionary masculinity, the irony of the argument lies in the imbedded subtext of man?s displacement by technology. Though he does it tongue-in-cheek, while depicting General Ripper as a mad- ?bermench, Kubrick shows that men are capable of being simultaneously effective (in insanely destructive pursuits) and ineffective, fallible, and vulnerable; in Strangelove, technology takes over from them, and in the end they are destroyed by their own self- assuredness and inability to change. This applies to my broader argument about the gender-political uses of satire in Dr. Strangelove as the idea of split consciousness (or self consciousness simultaneous to the realization that we are not just selves but also perceived representations) underscores our motivations and reactions. It is in this split between self and realization of self that the men of Dr. Strangelove act and react. In an attempt to reconcile masculine invulnerability with the inevitability of nuclear annihilation, the men of Dr. Strangelove chose not to identify with a frail human imago but with a self that is aligned with the indestructible machines of war. Take for instance one of the scenes in the ?War Room? at the Pentagon where General Turgidson briefs 136 President Muffley on the developments in the air; director, Kubrick, manipulated George C. Scott?s performance so that Scott, who would later play General Patton, delivered his lines with zestful enthusiasm, and his animated features suggest that he can hardly wait for the annihilation to begin (Inside Strangelove DVD). President Muffley asks for a situation report: ?General Turgidson, is there really a chance for that plane to get through?? Here, Turgidson begins mildly but begins to physically emulate a B52. At the moment when he mimics the powerful bomber, he works himself into excided fervor, waves his arms wildly, and bulges his eyes: Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he?s short of know how. I mean, you just can?t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. And that?s not meant as an insult, Mr. Ambassador, I mean, you take your average Russkie, we all know how much guts he?s got. Hell, lookit look at all them, them, Nazis killed off and they still wouldn?t quit. . . . . If the pilot?s good, see. I mean, if he?s really sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low [spreads his arms like wings and laughs wildly] you oughtta see it sometime, it?s a sight. A BIG plane, like a ?52, VROOM! There?s jet exhaust, flyin? chickens in the barnyard! . . . . Has he got a chance? Hell yea. . . ye. . . [stops short] Realizing the implication of his statements, Turgidson coves his mouth in alarm. But he doesn?t give up; the plot imperative necessitates that Turgidson again incite combat. Although he had been originally unaware of Ripper?s initiative, Turgidson tries to take 137 advantage of the situation and convince Muffley to launch a full scale attack on the Soviets. Rather than concede to vulnerability, Turgidson aligns himself with the durability of a machine. Turgidson approaches the war as if it were a game of Stratego?. The effect is not lost on the audience and it is apparent that Kubrick went to great pains to make a satirical parallel between nuclear war and an inconsequential game. In the middle of the war room there is a large circular table which, it is celebrated, Kubrick insisted be covered with green baize (although this could not be seen in the black and white film) to reinforce the actors? impression that they are playing a round of poker for the fate of the earth. Indeed, poker is a stereotypically masculine pastime, poker bets are raised and only the fainthearted fold, meanwhile, the daring ?go all in.? I will discuss the application of poker as a metaphor for masculinity in the chapters that follows where in Ken Kesey?s One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest, card games figure widely as a barometer for masculinity, and James Bond displays his mettle at the poker table. Like in the previous chapter where the red queen was symbolic Raymond Shaw?s unconscious, in Dr. Strangelove, poker is an equally apt symbol. Consider that the men are metaphorically playing poker for the fate of the world, and that their poker ?hands? are a metaphor for their military influence, then given the previous argument that subjects and objects are widely conflated in this film, then synecdochally the men are their poker hands; the amount of strength that they have as ?men? is defined by the cards they hold in their hands. They are only as influential as their hands. Just as deMan explains the splitting of the self which ends in conscientious laughter, the inability to recognize our 138 own madness (and thus the creation of satire) and laugh at our selves binds our subjective being to our object selves. Because they have overly identified with the machines of war, in Dr. Strangelove the world leaders become their military, their weapons, and their machinery. In the end it is a bomb which will set off a Russian doomsday machine that will wipe out not just Communism but the entire world. The conflation of objects and persons, of machines and men, is the most darkly sinister aspect of Dr. Strangelove?s humor. Because the men of Strangelove have forsaken their humanity in favor of a mechanistic imago, they abandon the frailty of all human life. Turgidson?s indifferent response to the ?death count estimates? show us that he has already disregarded the cost of human life and is only thinking of the utilization of war machines. Once it becomes apparent that the 843rd bomb wing cannot be recalled and that the American planes will be detected by Russian radar within fifteen minutes and will subsequently launch a major retaliatory attack after which America would ?suffer virtual annihilation,? Muffley asks for advice. Turgidson?s advice ?to immediately launch an all out and coordinated attack? with ?a five to one missile superiority . . . . three missiles to every target.? The ?bright side? to Turgidson?s lethal scenario is that: . . . we would destroy ninety percent of their nuclear capabilities. We would therefore prevail, and suffer only modest and acceptable civilian casualties from their remaining force which would be badly damaged and uncoordinated. . . . [we must] choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguish-able post-war environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred 139 and fifty million people killed. . . . Mr. President, I?m not saying we wouldn?t get our hair mussed. But I do say. . . no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh. . . depending on the breaks. . . . When Muffley responds that he does not want to, ?go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolph Hitler,? Turgidson wryly replies: ?Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people, than with your image in the history books.? Such understatement, a useful tool in satire in instances where the vice is already so immense that it need not be exaggerated, serves to shock the complacent American audience into realizing the grim reality of nuclear war. Other elements of satire appear more broadly throughout the film. Of course, innuendo, ambiguity and pun are key devices for the satirist because they permit the implication of a target without the danger of a direct attack as it is possible to disavow insinuation. For instance, consider the portrayal of the U.S. President who is trying to avoid a war. Peter Sellers plays this role with a disposition reminiscent of Adlai Stevenson, anti-nuclear proliferation liberal of the 1950s. This is striking because in Fail Safe, the President of the United States is unnamed but apparently modeled on JFK, the popular President who supported a treaty banning nuclear testing98 but by had, within the same year, ?discussed the feasibility of using nuclear weapons in the event China attacked India? (Taipei Times 7). On the other hand, Muffley is modeled after the gentle intellectual, Stevenson, the anti-proliferation diplomat who famously interrogated Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.99 Such metaphors are effortlessly amassed as satiric weapons in Dr. Strangelove, particularly extended 140 metaphors.100 As an example, consider the scene where, while trying to defuse the impending destruction, the soft-spoken and consolatory President and the Soviet Primer, Dimitri Kissov, argue like a married couple. The indictment is coded in parody. Kubrick does not expose himself to censure by saying that Stevenson is perceived as a feminized pushover, but he shows us through Merkin Muffley?s character. Anti-proliferation (as a concept) becomes rhetorically linked to emasculation. In a metaphor of Lacanian proportion, those who have and identify with their weapons are perceived as masculine whereas those who lack weaponry are perceived as feminine. The rhetorical manipulation of language and a consistent connection between two phrases, words, or concepts creates an unconscious link between those concepts. This in turn leads to acquiescence and erroneous logic; politicians are very savvy at making these connections in order to persuade the people they govern.101 This was particularly true in the years after the war as George Orwell?s dystopia 1984 shows us that ?The Ministry of Peace? wages war; the very vocabulary of the nation had been manipulated until ?War is Peace,? ?Freedom is Slavery,? and ?Ignorance is Strength? (4). Because of the capacity words have to muddle the truth, oxymoron is commonly used in satire to make a keen emphasis on a contradiction in the target?s philosophy. Just as 1984 begins with a description of the Ministry of Truth, or Minitru, the first image we have in Dr. Strangelove is Burpleson Air Force Base where a large and looming sign declares, ?Peace is our Profession.? Though it is a military instillation and geared at warfare, their slogan reflects the concept of protection through mutually assured destruction. Ironically, it was assumed by national policy that a strong military 141 paradoxically assures peace. Another method of drawing paradox is the creation of a list of items, people, or concepts which are basically similar, save one or two seemingly absurd items. The satirist asserts that the absurd items have the same value as the ?legitimate? items. Take for instance the items on Ripper?s doodle-pad. While desperately seeking the recall code, Mandrake sees Ripper?s doodle-pad covered in ?Peace On Earth? and ?Purity of Essence? - P.O.E. and O.P.E., the fringes of the pad displays the face of a matronly woman, a phallic arrow, and a zygote. This is significant as Ripper protects his bodily fluids from women by withholding his seed. It is not insignificant that 1961 saw the American availability of Envoid -- the pill -- for contraceptive use. General Ripper?s primary concern about ?precious bodily fluids? and ?purity of essence? is a reflection of reproductive changes. Post-War culture imagined promiscuous women as a threat to the social order where women were expected to be sexually docile; the increased availability of contraception became a threat to that social order as it was ?assumed that what held most women?s passions in check was their fear of pregnancy? (McLaren, Sexual Blackmail, 207). What?s more, the idea that women could have intercourse without the burden of conception created her as a sexual creature capable of enjoying sex; this ran contrary to a hegemony where ?the man demanded his ?rights? and the women relied on her female friendship network for support? (McLaren, A History of Contraception, 231). This may be Rippers greatest fear: the leveling of gender hierarchies. Inclusion of the pill, refusal to abort the mission, the zygote doodle, the doodle of the matron, Ripper?s desire to withhold his seed, the prophylactics in the survival kit, all seem to stem from an the 142 politics of birth control, anxiety of conception, and the connection between the Enola Gay delivering the Little Boy she carried in her belly and Cold War anti-maternal attitudes. Likewise, Colonel Ripper has conflated war and sex. It is immediately following the sex act that Ripper admits that he comprehends that there is a Communist plot against American men and their ?precious bodily fluids.? Confusing body fluids with national security and confusing a feeling of tristesse with a Communist plot, in a series of revelations, Ripper tells RAF Colonel Mandrake: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face? . . . A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That?s the way your hard core commie works. . . . I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. . . . Yes a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly: loss of essence. . . . I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women. . . women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.? Imbedded in this paranoid speech is the reflection of another kind of cultural anxiety during the Cold War Era: the fear of the feminine. Not that this is ?new? to the era, but that it manifests in insidious ways. In his 1984 article, ?Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, 143 Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,? Michael Rogin outlines the connection between anti-feminine ideology and Cold War American cinema; he comments: ?The feminine mystique came to dominate American culture and society at the same time that the cold war took over politics. Cold war cinema emerged from that conjunction? (6-7). When Ripper conflates the date 1945 and his realization of contamination during the act of love, he makes a connection between Communist pollution of the American Way and feminine pollution of masculinity via the sex act. Like many contemporary American films - Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Jarhead, to name some of the most disturbing - politics and war continue to be intertwined with violent sexuality and physical abuses. These are portrayed as masculine privileges of war. The political implications of such masculine identity were that American men imagined themselves as a microcosm of the military. The inability to philosophize oneself into a state of Hegelian un-happy consciousness, a strict adherence to the Cartesian concept of res cogitans (which I will investigate further in the next chapter), created a struggle for subjective unification. In this case, Baudelaire?s fall is a political stumble, an allegorical loss of footing. Because the men in Dr. Strangelove too are both object selves and subject selves, we are able to read humor in the breach between the two. What?s more, they misidentify the self that is ?object.? Not only are the men in this film faced with their political destruction, they are faced with their VERY destruction. In conclusion, in the recognition of a dual masculine self there is always a limenal space (be it ?performance? or otherwise) - between our interior selves and our culturally 144 materialized manifestation. It is in that space - like Kristevian abjection - that we can evolve beyond forms of gender which oppress the female subject position. When we tap into those ruptures between the object self and the subject self, we can make changes in the superstructure. Dark humor, in the elemental aspect of irony, provides a revolutionary, philosophical, boundary-less, abject space for the formation of identity (in this case, American masculinity). Because irony, affiliated with satire, provides those philosophical spaces within which boundaries become mutable and like the abject, its mutations elicit simultaneously our anxieties and our fascination, satire is the ideal venue to launch such a revolution. 145 CHAPTER 5 ?DISCIPLINE AND SURVEILLANCE IN ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO?S NEST? ?They?re out there.? From the first words of One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest, Ken Kesey sets up a polarity between his narrator and others: ?they,? ?them.? The narrator, Chief Bromden, a Native American from the Columbia tribe, is a schizophrenic who imagines ?the Combine,? a conglomerate apparatus he believes is controlling people by using technologically advanced machinery - to regulate not only the hospital, but society as a whole. At its core, this novel is a commentary on American manhood, an illustration of the social construction of American mid-century masculinity in an ontological paradigm in which mental illness and masculinity are mutually exclusive. It is also a narrative on race and gender stratification in which the trope of mental illness is used to describe social docility to such stratification and the discipline of hegemonic masculinity. But Kesey?s representation of the world, concerned with the discipline of the masculine body by means of surveillance and stratification, creates a topsy-turvy reality where sane is insane and powerful is weak. At the end of the American Industrial Revolution the influence of a market economy altered the national hegemony toward one that privileged production and homogenization: people became interchangeable parts. Michael Schudson argues in The Good Citizen, a treatment of the demarcations of political and private American citizenship from the early days of the colonies to the end of the twentieth century, that 146 one ?way to characterize the past three hundred years of political change is to say that the type of authority by which society is governed shifted from personal authority . . . to interpersonal authority . . . to impersonal authority? (8). The eventual affect of an ideology which took specific individuals and recreated them as parts of a conglomerate influenced the desired outcomes of everything from material production to mental production and the manufacture of sanity, which Thomas Szasz would argue for the remainder of the twentieth century, was no more than a sham. In the mid-twentieth century, the goal was to make a ?standard? and interchangeable American male and to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. In an era where the ?surveilable? body became the most reliable gauge of physical conditions, physicians were encouraged to focus on the observable symptoms, rather than on an underlying disease. According to early behaviorist practices, rather than attempting to find the cause of emotional outbursts or childlike behaviors, many physicians rehabilitated or ?retrained? men to act within the limits of a conventional masculine ethos. Once male patients ceased their (supposedly) errant behaviors, physicians ?released? them into society with their ?reason,? and perhaps more importantly, their rights as citizens fully restored to republican concepts of manhood. (As a matter of fact, this time period also saw a rise in legal insanity defenses. In many cases the accused was able to feign insanity by mimicking certain behaviors.102) According to Roy Porter, ?Social existence is a rule- governed game-playing ritual in which the mad person bends the rules and exploits the loopholes. Since the mad person is engaged in social performances that obey certain 147 expectations so as to defy others, the pertinent questions are not about the origins, but about the conventions, of insanity? (2). This phenomenon is very clearly represented in One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest as Randall Patrick ?Mac? McMurphy initially struggles to comprehend his fellow- inmates? ?rabbity? demeanor and asks, ?What is there [Big Nurse] can do to you, anyway? . . . She can?t have you whipped. She can?t burn you with hot irons. She can?t tie you to the rack. They got laws about that sort of thing nowadays; this ain?t the Middle Ages? (63).103 Familiar with incarceration and realizing that psychiatrist cannot overtly ?torture? patients, McMurphy nonetheless fails to realize that, much like a Medieval inquisition, the psychiatric staff is by the authority of the State. What?s more, psychiatric machinations are more subtle than an arsenal of thumbscrews and iron maidens.104 In this chapter I will discuss One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest as Ken Kesey?s representation of the success of the schizophrenic?s world view as described by Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). It is within this world view, contrasted with the systems of discipline and the control of surveillance, that insanity is reasonable and chaos is coherent and where insanity is powerful and conformity is weak. Like the panoptical prison described in Foucault?s Discipline and Punish, psychological behavior modification was implemented to make men docile to the influences of hegemonic masculinity through means of surveillance and discipline. In much of his theory from Madness and Civilization (1961) to The Order of Things (1969), Michel Foucault historicizes and finds microstructures within social macroconstructs. 105 148 For example, in Madness and Civilization Foucault traces the history of ?madness? arguing that in the Seventeenth Century, European physicians considered madness a contagion akin to leprosy; in the eighteenth century, madness came to be seen as the reverse of Reason; and, finally, in the nineteenth century as mental illness.106 Foucault also examines the rise of scientific and ?humanitarian? treatments of the insane; however, he claims that these new treatments were no less controlling than previous methods.107 The Birth of the Clinic picks up from Madness and Civilization by tracing the development of the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the clinic. Its central motif is the concept of ?the medical regard? (often translated as ?medical gaze? which evokes Mulvanian scopophilia).108 It is in Discipline and Punish (1977) that Michel Foucault defines disciple as a means of controlling a populace. In regard to the movement of the body, a docile body is a body which can be ?subjugated, used, transformed and improved? (136). But discipline can also be a type of domination or power derived from the manipulation of bodies through physical regulation.109 Accordingly, masculine standardization and docility of mind and body have historically been achieved by deploying discipline.110 During the time when Kesey was working at a psychiatric institution, the notion that biological psychiatry was a measurable science was being challenged by social critics such as Foucault; Dr. Thomas Szasz was becoming a prominent, if controversial, psychiatrist and academic as a prime figure in the antipsychiatry movement. His criticism of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry is outlined in The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970). Szasz?s views on 149 psychiatric treatment stem from doctrine that each subject has the right to be free from violence from others. Overtly libertarian in the classical sense, Szasz wrote that along with the beneficial practices of medicine, that suicide, the use of illicit drugs, masturbation and sexual orientations and relations are private and outside of state jurisdiction; thus he posits that modern medicine has become symptomatic of religion?s influence on human morality (The Myth of Mental Illness). His main arguments that while people might behave or reason in ways that are seem troubling, this does not necessarily mean that they have a disease; to Szasz, diseases are measurable or testable (in scientific method), must be locatable (even on the autopsy table) and must meet longstanding pathological definitions rather than elected into being by the American Psychiatric Association (with ?heart break? and ?heart attack? belonging to two incompatible categories) (The Manufacture of Madness). Rejecting drug-control and death-control, Szasz?s primary assertion is that the state should not interfere in practices between consenting adults. In Ceremonial Chemistry (1973), Szasz argued that the discrimination which formerly besieged witches, Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, groups of people who were taken as scapegoats of the community, was being directed at ?drug addicts? and ?insane? people. Szasz?s ideas can be summarized by his famous quote: ?If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic? (?Schizophrenia, The Second Sin,? 2).111 He states: Since the notion of mental illness is extremely widely used nowadays, inquiry into the ways in which this term is employed would seem to be 150 especially indicated. Mental illness, of course, is not literally a ?thing? -- or physical object -- and hence it can ?exist? only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist. Yet, familiar theories are in the habit of posing, sooner or later -- at least to those who come to believe in them -- as ?objective truths? (or ?facts?). During certain historical periods, explanatory conceptions such as deities, witches, and microorganisms appeared not only as theories but as self-evident causes of a vast number of events. I submit that today mental illness is widely regarded in a somewhat similar fashion, that is, as the cause of innumerable diverse happenings. As an antidote to the complacent use of the notion of mental illness -- whether as a self-evident phenomenon, theory, or cause--let us ask this question: What is meant when it is asserted that someone is mentally ill? (Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, 113) According to both Foucault and Szasz, ?mental illness? is nothing more than a euphemism for objectionable behaviors; therefore the state forces psychiatric ?treatment? on these subjects in an effort to control such behavior. (So when Mac points out that ?You boys don?t look so crazy to me,? he recognizes the manufacture of masculine madness (22).) One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest takes place in the late 1950s and is the story of a few remarkable weeks in an Oregon insane asylum culminating in the narrator?s escape. Still engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Americans feared the possibility of a nuclear conflict, and people identified as Communist sympathizers??reds??were 151 frequently ostracized and even persecuted for their supposed beliefs by government committees such as that headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. But, as I have argued in previous chapters, toward the end of the decade, a national rebellion against civil injustice and cultural mediocrity was in the making, and young people in particular began questioning the values and beliefs of those in power. Groups such as the Beats became part of a larger counterculture which eventually gave rise in the 1960s to the ?hippies.? This group was associated with the pursuit of expanding inner horizons through the use of mind-altering drugs such as LSD. Noted for his involvement with the Merry Pranksters (a group which included Neal Cassidy, Timothy Leary and Tom Wolfe, author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Ken Kesey had his own exposure to LSD when he was a subject in a scientific experiment on the effects of LSD. It is this experience that he drew upon to formulate his first novel. In Kesey?s novel, a tall and conspicuous Native American from the Columbia tribe, a schizophrenic, Chief Bromden is our narrator. Integral to his first description of the ward is our first exposure to his hallucinations. During the first interaction of the novel, Big Nurse glimpses the janitorial staff relaxing rather than working and she becomes so enraged that she ?swells til her back?s splitting out the white uniform and . . . her arms section out long enough to wrap around the three of them five, six times. . . . and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor. . .? (11). Nurse Ratched?s monstrous form, ?her hideous real self,? diminishes back into her human form and into her nurse?s uniform when others are around. By the time the first scene is played out, we know that our narrator is a delusional 152 paranoid schizophrenic; but it is Chief?s hallucinations which eventually show us the ?truth? concerning conditions on the ward. Bromden feigns deafness in effort to surreptitiously collect information, information that he believes helps him temporarily evade this machine. The main action of One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest consists of Mac?s resistance to the austere rules enforced by Nurse Ratched; Mac defies these rules from the moment he arrives arrogantly upsetting the ?democratic? atmosphere of the ward by questioning the procedure of group therapy. He also challenges more benign contrivances designed to control the patients; he brushes his teeth before the appointed time and he gambles for cigarettes. These petty challenges are met in kind by Nurse Ratched?s exploitation of the men?s fears and her domination of their teleology. By providing the novel with a single tight-knit setting, the ward, Kesey is able to fashion a society in miniature which has its own edicts and penalties.112 As a matter of fact, One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest is commonly read in one of two ways. The most familiar reading sees a commentary on U.S. society. Another very familiar reading sees it as the story of a highly individualistic messianic figure that enters a realm of oppression, sacrifices himself for the good of the collective, and provides liberation. Reinforcing this messianic theme are the frequent images of crucifixion: Ellis is ?nailed? to the wall behind him, the EST table is cross- shaped table and Mac is strapped to it while a ?crown? of metal is forced onto his head, Bromden describes the position in which an epileptic patient, Sefelt, lies after he suffers an seizure: ?His hands are nailed out to each side with the palms up . . . just the way . . . men jerk at the Shock Shop strapped to the crossed table. . . ? (154). However, I am 153 interested in exploring the novel as it critiques societal convictions of sanity and rationality. Though the first-person narrator is portrayed as a paranoid-delusional schizophrenic, Kesey?s plot is fairly linear; except for revelations about Chief?s childhood disclosed in flashbacks and digressions, the story is told from beginning to end.113 Bromden?s bizarre testimony triggers some skepticism, but it is paradoxically through Bromden?s distorted and perhaps erroneous perception that the reader gets the most accurate information. By gauging Bromden?s mental states, rather like a barometer, we can chart Mac?s success in elevating the crushing conformity of the ward. In a negative corollary, the constant constraint of the ward causes Bromden to manifest insanity; on the other hand, the chaos produced by Mac?s insubordinate disruption causes Bromden to experience moments of lucidity. As he says after Mac leads the revolt over the television schedule, ?I was seeing lots of things different. I figured the fog machine had broke down in the walls when they turned it up too high for that meeting on Friday . . . . For the first time in years I was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have . . .? (140 - 141). The portrayed relationship between constraint and psychosis call social definitions of sanity as conformity to regularized standards of behavior into question. Kesey challenges his reader to ask if sanity is merely conformity or if sanity requires a sense of self apart from ideological mandates. In the context of an absurd conformity, the medical practices represented in Kesey?s novel urge readers to ask if it is more conscientious to ?brainwash? a citizen to achieve a conformist yet unfulfilling subsistence or to allow an imperfect society which allows self-realization, notwithstanding perceived norms. This 154 question is portrayed through the inmates; Kesey exemplifies the capricious absurdity of American orthodoxy. It is all brought to bear when Mac discovers that many of the patients are admitted to the hospital voluntarily. It is Mac?s impression that the men on the ward are not ?crazy that way? and he tells Harding: I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you?re not any crazier than the average asshole n the street . . . . But not, you know, crazy like the movies paint crazy people. You?re just kinda hung up . . . (61). These hang-ups are, in Nurse Ratched?s estimation the reason the men ?could not adjust to the rules of society in the Outside World? the cause for which she claims is ?foolish lenience on the part of [the men?s] parents? (171). Blaming parental care and ?faulty upbringing? was a prominent theme of psychiatric care of the twentieth century, such that we can make a connection between parental discipline and hegemonic discipline. The character?s ?hang-ups? can be read as little more than rejection of compulsory heterosexual performances as outlined by Judith Butler (Gender Trouble). Szasz explains in ?The Manufacture of Medical Stigma? that such hegemonic rejection was diagnosable as disease (The Manufacture of Madness 207-241). This is particularly salient given that among Bromden?s recurrent delusions is that there is a large system of machinery regulating not only the hospital, but society as a whole. He imagines Nurse Ratched, not in charge of, but in cahoots with this machine. Bromden explains: The big nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine. The slightest 155 thing messy or out of kilter or in the way ties her into a little white knot of tight-smiled fury. She walks around with that same doll smile crimped between her chin and her nose and that same calm whir coming from her eyes, but down inside of her she?s tense as steel. I know, I can feel it. And she don?t relax a hair till she gets the nuisance attended to?what she calls ?adjusted to surroundings.? (31) What is interesting is that he refers to the regulatory systems of the asylum, of his prior life in the military, and many of his childhood memories in mechanical terms; the people he encounters are also mechanized as cogs in the overall structure of what he calls ?The Combine.? This is a curious metaphor given that the Bromden family is from a mountainous fishing village near The Dalles and the Columbia River in Oregon and a combine is a farming machine used to simultaneously harvest, thresh, and clean grain - grain grown on a level farm. It seems that what we can take away from this metaphor is a (perhaps accidental) loss of identification with home and can be read in one of two ways -- either of which is useful. The first way we can see the Combine metaphor is to refute the assumption that Bromden?s parents, though they may have caused some personal obstacles, are not wholly responsible for his ?diminished? mental state. Unlike Ratched?s assumption that the men?s mental instability stems from a faulty childhood experience, Bromden?s Combine seems unrelated to the backdrop of his childhood. If we are to imagine the combine as part of Bromden?s childhood landscape, we must consider the nature of a combine; as a machine that has to be adjusted to the soil over which it must run, the 156 Combine metaphor parallels Nurse Ratched?s desire to keep things ?adjusted to surroundings.? It also dehumanizes the victims of the Combine, thereby making its effects (presumption of mental illness) less painful to acknowledge. More intriguing is that Chief does not limit his delusions to the ward he is admitted to nor does he limit the machinery to the hospital; Chief imagines the hospital, the ward, and Nurse Ratched as parts of the Combine - cogs and spokes in a larger machine. One of the ways Ratched ?rigs things? is with fear and animosity. Our first exposure of life on ?the ward? involves the malevolent ?black boys? who Chief tells us are ?up before [dawn] to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before [he] can catch them? (2). What we immediately learn from Bromden is that the ward is sated with fear, hate, racism and enmity. He tells us that the ?Black boys in white suits. . . [are] sulky and hating everything,? and that ?Big Nurse,? the woman in charge of the ward, represents grotesque femininity expressed in terms of mechanics and warfare. Because there is no sensible reason for the men to subject themselves to Ratched?s reign Bromden offers the explanation that Ratched badgers her patients, rubbing their noses in their every weakness ?till what little dignity [they] got left is gone and [they] shrink up to nothing from humiliation? (131). Nurse Ratched dreams of having a ward that it completely mechanized: precise schedules, conforming behavioral patterns, and medicated judgments: What she dreams of . . . is a world of precision efficiency and tidiness like a pocket watch with a glass back, a place where the schedule is unbreakable . . . . she wields a sure power that extends in all directions on 157 hair-like wires too small for anybody?s eye but mine; I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants. (30 - 31) In order to achieve her dreams, one of her most effective tools is fear. In order to keep this tool sharply honed, Ratched maintains an arsenal of segregation, alienation, suspicion, and humiliation; she is a disciplinarian par exemplar whose machinations are designed to emasculate and mortify the men of the ward thereby rendering them docile to the ?therapeutic community,? employs Machiavellian methods routinely to undermine the men?s confidence rather than encouraging it; here Kesey portrays ?madness? as a mechanism used by an authoritarian culture to control the individual. Because many of the patients are self-admitted while a few others, including Chief Bromden, are committed, readers need to understand why the men contend with the conditions on the ward. Mac too requires an explanation; comparing group therapy to a ?pecking party,? he asks Harding why the men allow Nurse Ratched to turn them against each other: ?What other reason would we have for submitting ourselves to it . . .?? (55 - 56). With this statement, Harding explains that all of the men have bought into the notion that there is ?some kinda cure? to be had through the therapeutic community. What?s more than that, the men have bout in to the notion that they are each genuinely suffering from some sort of mental illness. As readers, we understand that the men are indeed sane (as Mac recognizes and points out to them) and that their only transgression is gender non-conformity. Harding is effeminate and may be homosexual, Bibbit is a ?momma?s 158 boy,? and Cheswick is passive; Sefelt and Fredrickson are not hospitalized for their being diagnosed epileptic but for being homosexual. Because of this commonality, it is important to note that Ratched?s is an all male ward though the hospital is not an all male institution. We are told that there are other wards in the hospital including ?Disturbed.? It is also important to note that this particular ward has a mixture of ?treatable? and ?untreatable? patients. One of the primary lines of control, segregation, is the line that separates the ?Acutes? from the ?Chronics.? While it is a physical separation (they segregate themselves to opposing sides of the room) there is a stronger intangible separation between them. Much like the treatments/punishments of electro-shock therapy and lobotomy, the Acutes serve as an example, indeed a warning, to the Chronics of what could happen if they step out of line. This segregation engenders a sense of isolation; each man feels as though he must keep his defenses up at all times which indeed prompts a very real sense of paranoia. Furthermore, the men are racially segregated from the black orderlies. Nurse Ratched has seen to it that the (white) men of the ward are terrified of the (black) orderlies in charge. Ward attendants have been carefully chosen by the Big Nurse: Her three daytime black boys she acquires after . . . testing and rejecting thousands. They come at her in a long black row of sulky, big-nosed masks, hating her and her chalk doll whiteness from the first look they get. She appraises them and their hate for a month or so, then lets them go because they don?t hate enough. When she finally gets the three she wants . . . she?s damn positive they hate enough to be capable. (31) 159 While Bromden does not explain precisely what the Big Nurse wants the orderlies to ?be capable? of, we understand that violence is key to Ratched?s version of control. Given that the inmates are ?initiated? into ward life when they are molested by the orderlies, something we see Mac avoid when he first enters the ward, we understand without Bromden?s clarification that Nurse Ratched desires a system based on hate and violence. In order to perpetuate feelings of paranoia and confusion, Ratched employs tactics -- or encourages the use of such tactics by others -- which would be normally inconceivable in a mental health facility. That is to say, desiring intentional violence directed against patients in a medical facility is typically inconceivable; therefore any perception that hate and violence are motivational drives for her staff can be disregarded as delusional misunderstanding on the part of the ?weak minded? patient who simply cannot understand the ?therapeutic value? of his treatment. In order to build such a staff, ?capable? of violence and the intentional masking of that violence, in order to fill staff positions with men that ?hate enough,? required Nurse Ratched to create a targeted search. We learn that one of the men who fit her criteria is ?a twisted sinewy dwarf the color of cold asphalt? whose ?mother was raped in Georgia while his papa stood by tied to the hot iron stove with plow traces, blood streaming into his shoes? while ?The boy watched from a closet, five years old and squinting his eye to peep out the crack between the door and the jamb? (31). This kind of trauma, both sexually charged and racially directed, is the kind of experience that Ratched suspects could create a sadistically Machiavellian aide. Indeed, we learn that his hate is nurtured; he is coached in the techniques of discipline: 160 He wanted to carry a sack full of birdshot when he first came on the job, to work the patients into shape, but she told him they didn?t do it that way anymore, made him leave the sack home and taught him. . . not to show his hate and to be calm and wait, wait for a little advantage, a little luck, then twist the rope and keep the pressure steady. All the time. That?s the way you get them into shape, she taught him. (31-32) Like the aides who are molded and dominated by Ratched?s system, the men of the ward understand themselves as subjects under Nurse Ratched?s regime and objects to be manipulated and produced. It is through this division and alienation that the men become susceptible to Ratched?s control; it is through surveillance and fear that the men become docile to her discipline. Nurse Ratched knows that Mac, as a potentially unifying stimulus, represents a disruptive force on the ward. She knows that his attempts to make the ?democratic? nature of the ward truly fair by way of an egalitarian vote, his disregard for schedules, his disdain for restrictions, and his seeming imperviousness to her attempts at humiliation, and his attempts to fill the men with self-confidence will eventually undermine her tyrannical control of the ward. Promoting a solid sense of ?us? versus ?them? avoids the dangers inherent in solidarity. The men are divided among themselves, at odds with the staff, antagonized by the orderlies, and they are even conflicted within their Selves. The ?theory of the Therapeutic Community? is much like Rousseau?s democratic Social Contract in that ?a guy has to learn to get along in a group before he?ll be able to function in a normal society?; but rather than developing into a healthy social system, the ward becomes an 161 organism in which those in power attempt ?to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. . . . It makes you sick . . . . a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger? (Kesey 54 - 56). Likewise, Foucault?s conceptual Technologies of the Self refers to practices which enable subjects to constitute themselves within and through systems of power (which seem to be a priori or ?natural?) and to the ways in which subjects represent and regulate their own identities within social structures resulting in their perceived subjectivity (by others as well as themselves). In other words, each subject (consciously and unconsciously) decides who s/he ?is? within a social structure based on what s/he ?does.?114 Such choices in representations are self-conscious moments of behavior, thought, and action which are triggered by one?s awareness of their relation to. Such behaviors consequently propagate that society?s ideas concerning individuality. In other words, we try to portray our selves in the best manner possible - though our ?self? is never fixed - in order to manufacture our position within society and therefore determine how much power we hold at any given moment. This level of power hinges on being seen. Foucault explores Jeremy Bentham?s 1791 Panopticon, a prison building designed to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners knowing when they are being observed, thus conveying the feeling that the observer is always everywhere. This level of surveillance extends the principle of power/knowledge beyond the physical bounds of the individual. Power/knowledge is Foucault?s theory concerning the creation and transference of in an ?economy? of discourse showing that power is transferred according to the knowledge 162 one has. It is important to note that such knowledge does not have to be factual; needs only be perceived as truthful. In her development of power/knowledge -- her attempt to control all dialogue and therefore maintain all power -- Nurse Ratched manufactures her own version of the panopticon by way of her logbook. Here, the patients (/prisoners) are encouraged to survey their fellow inmates. By giving Nurse Ratched access to information she would never be privy to otherwise, the men unwittingly surrender all knowledge and therefore all power to her. Chief tells us early in the novel that: They spy on each other. Sometimes one man says something about himself that he didn?t aim to let slip, and one of his buddies at the table where he said it yawns and gets up and sidles over to the big log book by the Nurse?s Station and writes down the piece of information he heard -- of therapeutic interest to the whole ward, is what the Big Nurse says the book is for, but I know she?s just waiting to get enough evidence to have some guy reconditioned at the Main Building, overhauled in the head to straighten out the trouble. The guy that wrote the piece of information in the log book, he gets a star by his name on the roll and gets to sleep late the next day. (19) This method of control, this self-sustaining information gathering, allows Nurse Ratched to regulate not only the patient that is reported on, but also the patient doing the reporting. Further, it makes the authoritative body innocuous and the social body divisive; Nurse Ratched is, as Harding sardonically calls her, the ?loving mother? and because of their (mis)perception of her nurturing concern, the men cannot unite together to form a swarm 163 of power/knowledge against her. For instance, at one point in group therapy, there are no reports in Ratched?s log book; when Nurse Ratched asks if anyone ?has committed some act that he has not admitted,? rather than sitting quietly or turning on Ratched, the men turn on themselves (49). The men admit to (for the most part erroneous) atrocities such as incest, cat-killing, and robbery. This makes Ratched happy. She is not happy because the men are baring their souls, after all, she knows that the men are lying. The confessions of the men is ?better than she dreamed? because she sees that her system is working (49). It is only ?Ol?? Pete Bancini that reacts ?appropriately? to the situation; causing a disruption and halting the stream of false-confessions, Bancini declares, ?I?m tired? and ?it?s a lotta baloney (49, 52). Nurse Ratched?s reaction to Bancini is to immediately subdue him and isolate him. This is much same as the way a warden would handle a prison outbreak; disruptive inmates are at once subdued and segregated from the general population. It is not a stretch to consider the ward a system of incarceration. We know from Thomas Szasz that social aberrations were imagined as simultaneously politically subversive, criminal, and insane. After all, Mac is relegated to the care of the mental hospital as if it were synonymous with the prison system which he had ?escaped.? Mac?s crimes (that he ?fights too much and fucks too much?) were sufficient to land him both in prison and on a mental ward (18). This conflation is important when considering Nurse Ratched?s logbook; her patients/inmates have to understand her system of laws. In order to report information that is of interest to an authoritative body, the subject must understand the dynamics of subjectivity, the subject must understand what information is of value to the authority. In 164 the case of Nurse Ratched?s ward, the men must have a perception of the information which Nurse Ratched would like to include in group meetings. For instance, no one would report that one of his fellow inmates enjoyed his breakfast; however, the fact that an inmate had violent thoughts or admitted to a past sexual indiscretion would be suitable for the log book. What makes this significant is that the facts reported in the log book are often gender related. When the information seems banal, yet is met with castigation, we have to decipher the crime. In the most salient cases, the crime is one of gender non- conformity. But it is not the case that the men of the ward are overtly subversive; their transgressions are as subtle as Ratched?s punishments. Here we can make the closest parallel to Foucauldian discipline. The smallest measures are controlled; and by controlling micro-behaviors, the entire social organism remains docile. Case in point, during McMurphy?s first group meeting, Nurse Ratched uses her log book to attack Dale Harding?s masculinity through information concerning his wife: ?According to the notes listed by various patients in the log, Mr. Harding has been heard to say that she ?damn well gives the bastards reasons to stare.? He has also been heard to say that he may give her reason to seek further sexual attention. He has been heard to say, ?My dear sweet but illiterate wife thinks any word or gesture that does not smack of brickyard brawn and brutality is a word or gesture of weak dandyism.? . . . ?He has also stated that his wife?s ample bosom at times gives him a feeling of inferiority.? (43-44) 165 Because the men understand Ratched?s desire for absolute gender conformity, Harding?s masculinity is repeatedly called into question. Therefore, Harding?s defensiveness regarding his manliness causes him to interpret other social cues and comments as being attacks on his virility. On the occasion when his wife visits (the only visit we observe in the novel), Harding does not have cigarettes and Mrs. Vera Harding claims that he ?never [did] have enough.? Defensive, Harding concludes that Vera?s mention of his lack of cigarettes was a direct metaphor of his lack of masculinity though she claims that she ?didn?t intend nothing by it? (158). What starts as an offhand comment spirals into a hostile domestic dispute where Harding insults his wife?s intellect thereby prompting Vera to comment on the ?friends? that have come to the Harding residence to see Dale: ?. . . hoity-toity boys with the nice long hair combed so perfectly and the limp little wrists that flip so nice.? Harding asks her if it was only him that they were dropping around to see, and she says that any man that drops around to see her flips more than his damned wrist. (159) This exchange shows us that Ratched?s contrivances lean more toward causing the men?s instability rather than curing it. When she calls attention to Harding?s hands, she reinforces his insecurities. Rather than therapeutically encouraging him to see his individual self and his idiosyncrasies as valuable, she discourages any behavior which does not conform to hegemonic masculinity. We already know that Harding has a hang- up concerning his hands; he realizes that the other men see them as too feminine and that his gestures are too conspicuous. Comparing Harding?s hands to birds, Chief lets us know that Harding regularly and self-consciously restrains his hands in his lap. Given the 166 evidence that we have surrounding Harding?s gender insecurities, we can read Nurse Ratched?s continual confrontation of Harding?s masculinity, ??Mr. Harding?s problem,?? as part of her method of gender control (96). This means that the inmates who write notes about Harding?s masculinity recognize Ratched?s desires. Another patient with a hang-up which both calls his masculinity into question and attracts Nurse Ratched?s continual attention is Billy Bibbit. Like Raymond Shaw, Norman Bates, and Bruno Anthony before him, Bibbit is a momma?s boy. As I have argued extensively in previous chapters, an overly-close relationship with one?s mother is perceived as detrimental to American masculinity. When we first meet Bibbit, his most striking feature is that he stutters; along with his boyish face, we learn that he has an attachment to his mother. Also, Nurse Ratched has a relationship with Mother Bibbit. As she walks through the ward each morning, she reestablishes her dominance by seizing each man?s weakness. She knows that Mr. Harding?s hands are particularly irksome to him, she says, ?Good morning, Mr. Harding -- why, look, your fingertips are red and raw. Have you been chewing your fingernails again?? (90). But nail chewing is not the limit to her denunciation, she addresses both epileptic patients, Fredrickson and Sefelt, who have a medicine sharing arrangement. Nurse Ratched implies that their arrangement could be read as a metaphor for a concealed sexual relationship (sharing medications stands in for sharing body fluids) at a time when homosexuality remained an item on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): ?Good morning Mr. Fredrickson, did you and Mr. Sefelt have a good night last night? You bed right next to each other don?t you? Incidentally it has been brought to my attention [that you are sharing medication]? 167 (90). These brief but open mention of the habits and intimate relationships between the men, verifies Nurse Ratched?s power over all of the men. Because the other men want to avoid open censure and because they fear humiliation, the men steer clear of Nurse Ratched?s notice. Billy, however, cannot escape her control: ?Good morning, Billy; I saw your mother on the way in, and she told me to be sure to tell you she thought of you all the time and knew you wouldn?t disappoint her? (90). Just as Ratched attacks Harding in the ?pecking party? group therapy session, Ratched attacks Billy by making him discuss his stutter, his former sexual relationships, and his mother as if they all stemmed from the same neurosis. After Billy explained that he failed out of ROTC (an emasculating event in and of itself given the established perception of connection between military and masculinity) because of his stutter, Ratched asks him when he first stuttered. Billy?s reply is telling: ?Fir-first stutter? First stutter? The first word I said I st-stut-tered: m-m-m-mam-ma? (119). This is much like the bungle his speech impediment causes during a marriage proposal. Echoing ?m-m-m- m-mam-ma? Billy stutters ?muh-muh-muh-muh-muh? and cannot pronounce ?marry? (121). We learn that Billy?s mother was instrumental in breaking the couple up which goes a long way to explain the conflation of stutter/sex/mother and Billy?s tragic end. It is when Billy leans to separate sex from mother that his stutter fades. When Nurse Ratched awakens him with Candy in the isolation room after Mac?s ill-fated going-away party, he does not stutter: ?Good morning, Miss Ratched. . . This is Candy? (263). However when Nurse Ratched brings Mother Bibbit back into the conversation, ?What worries me . . . is how your poor mother is going to take this,? Billy?s stutter returns with a vengeance: 168 ?Nuh! Nuh! . . .N-n-no! . . .Duh-duh-don?t t-tell, M-M-M-Miss Ratched. Duh-duh - -? (264). Ratched badgers Billy relentlessly until he reaches the depths of despair, slitting his own throat.115 Leaving Billy alone in Dr. Spivey?s office was at least an act of dereliction, it was at its worst an intentionally made-to-order suicide scene. Nurse Ratched?s actions need to be called into question here as she has previously made a point of enforcing ?therapeutic groups.? If the men should be together in groups of seven, there would be no cause for Nurse Ratched to abandon Billy at the lowest point of his degradation unless she is exercising disciplinary power rather than therapeutic care. Another aspect of the Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge to which I will now turn is the distribution of power; given that power/knowledge is as fluid as the discourse which creates it, we cannot assume that some people will hold all of the power and others will hold none. Instead, Foucault?s argument is that everyone has a realm of power; even those who seem not to have power, have power in that they support the majority power-structure. As Rousseau put it centuries earlier, ?Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men. If an individual. . .can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people do the same and make itself subject to a king?? (Rousseau 592). In other words, though a ruler may hold power, he holds it at the will of the people who willingly make themselves subject to his rule. Likewise, in a non-monarchical culture, those who hold power do so at the will of the other members of the society; in this case, Nurse Ratched holds power only because the men of the ward allow themselves to be made subject to her authority. 169 Further, the basis of Foucauldian discipline requires observation, tracking, confining to control a populace; the subject must be kept surveillable by the controlling power when standardization and expedience were valued above the needs of the individual. However, the method for overthrowing such a system of power involves the power of the ?swarm.? If enough underpowered members - separate subjects - of a culture join together to form a unified swarm, then they can overpower the standing authority. For this reason, Nurse Ratched carefully controls the numbers of men together at any given time. This is how she is able to earn the ?prize for cooperation,? ironically hung within eyesight of the logbook. This award is accompanied by a ?little brass tablet tacked to a piece of maple wood that has printed on it ?CONGRATULATIONS FOR GETTING ALONG WITH THE SMALLEST NUMBER OF PERSONNEL OF ANY WARD IN THE HOSPITAL?? (22). From this award we see that the control of numbers is valuable to the overall institution; it further shows us that Ratched has established a method preventing Foucauldian ?swarms? by controlling the patient to aide ratio and by controlling the number of men allowed in one place at a given time. For example, Nurse Ratched insists on therapeutic groups; she tells the men ??because of your proven inability to adjust to society. The doctor and I believe that every minute spent in the company of others, with some exceptions, is therapeutic . . .? which is ?the reason that there has to be at least eight guys together before they can be taken off the ward to OT or PT,? Occupational Therapy or Physical Therapy (145). This is consistent with Nurse Ratched?s other manipulations of statistics on the ward; in the scene were the men vote on the television schedule, she includes the Acutes in the total 170 number of men to her advantage. She also insists that men only leave the ward in groups of eight; this provides limited trips off the ward. By taking no fewer than eight patients off the ward at a time, Ratched limits the amount of time the orderlies spend off the ward, yet eight patients cannot cultivate a large enough swarm for a rebellion. It is for this reason that Ratched so fervently resists the freedom allowed by the tub room. Her fear is that should she allow the Chronics, those patients capable of revolt, to spend time away from her surveillance, they may (and indeed they do) forbear her chronic bullying and form a revolt. We also see that Ratched understands the power of the group when, at the beginning of the novel, she ironically tells the black boys, ?now mind you don?t go grouping up in there? while processing the new inmate, McMurphy (15). Her purposes here are sinister. Though she tells the orderlies not to ?group up,? she furtively sanctions repeated sexual and physical battery of her patients. Using the shower and the Admission intake as an insidious tool, Ratched allows the orderlies to molest patients; Maxwell Taber is brutally attacked by two orderlies for resisting enforced medication: The two big black boys catch Taber in the latrine and drag him to the mattress room . . . They push him face down on the mattress. One sits on his head, and the other rips his pants open in back and peels the cloth until Taber?s peach-colored rear is framed by the ragged lettuce-green. . . . and the black boy . . . saying, ?Tha?s right, Mistah Taber, tha?s right . . .? [Nurse Ratched] has left the Vaseline jar in the room. . . . They?re in there a long time before the door opens up again and they come out carrying 171 him . . . . His greens are ripped clear off now and he?s wrapped up in a damp sheet.? (36-37) This kind of abuse is one of Ratched?s methods of ?adjusting.?116 Through terrorism and isolation, Nurse Ratched exercises discipline over her ward which she sees as necessity to produce hegemonic masculinity. Recalling Foucault?s logic of Technologies of Self, we cannot presuppose that certain people will hold all of the power and others will hold none at all. This ?old? concept relies on stable identities, such as class, race, gender, and sexual preference. Instead, Foucault?s argument concerning the manipulation of the individual body as relative to the manipulation of a culture as a whole shows power as a method which can be used by different people in different situations, it is therefore not tied to specific groups or identities. This is how Nurse Ratched, a woman, is able to control a ward full of white middle-class men with only the assistance of a lesser nurse and some ?Black Boys.? However, it is also the way in which the patient?s are capable of usurping power away from the institution, including Big Nurse Ratched. The structure of power fluctuates throughout the novel so that the institutionalized men, who in the beginning have no power on the ward, begin to perceive themselves (and indeed their status as insane men) as powerful. When Mac first arrives on the ward his observation is that the ward is ?a sorry-looking outfit? and that none of the men ?look so crazy? to him. This is our first indication that true insanity is powerful, by pairing ?not so crazy? with ?sorry-looking? indicates that if the men appeared to be crazier, they would also appear to be more powerful. Mac goes on to ascertain who is in charge based on the level of insanity: 172 ?Which of you claims to be the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It?s my first day and what I like to do is make a good impression straight-off on the right man if he can prove to me he?s the right man. Who is the bull-goose loony here?? During this scene, Harding and Mac engage in a conversation, much like two alpha males in the wild, to determine who the more powerful man is. Harding is currently perceived as ?in charge? by merit of his position as president of the Patient?s Council, ?on account of he has a paper that says he graduated from college? (22). Mac, on the other hand, is ?accustomed to being the top man? as he has been ?a bull-goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton.? (22). Farcically, the determination is based on which man is accepted as the most insane. They banter back and forth, using Billy Bibbit as a conduit, and come to the conclusion that voting is about the craziest thing an American man can do: ?I figure if I?m bound to be a loony, then I?m bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one. Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man of he?s a yaller skunk and better be outta town by sunset.? Harding leans farther back, hooks his thumbs in his lapels. ?Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I?ll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we?ll settle this affair once and for all, libidos a -blazen? . . . . You might also warn him that I have been bull goose loony on this ward for nigh onto two years, and that I?m crazier than any man alive.? 173 ?Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I?m so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.? ?Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I?m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!? ?And you tell Harding right back? -- he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low -- ?that I?m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.? ?I take off my hat,? Harding says . . . (23 - 24). After the alpha-dog, bull goose has been decided, Chief ruminates, ?There?s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy?s won, but I?m not sure just what? (24). Chief understands that Mac has used Foucauldian technologies of the self to establish himself as the most powerful of the group, but he also understands that being leader of that group is no boon. It is not until the second half of the novel that the men realize that insanity can yield power in the greater social order. When the group is out on the fishing expedition, Harding realizes how much power is associated with mental illness. When the group pulls into a service station, there is a clash between the service station workers and the men from the asylum. At first, Mac tries to convince the service station men that they are part of the asylum staff; when that fails, he tries to convince them that they are hardened criminals. Mac explains mordantly: we ain?t ordinary nuts; we?re every one of us hot off the criminal-insane ward, on our way to San Quentin where they got better facilities to handle us. You see that freckle-faced kid there? He might look like he?s right off 174 a Saturday Night Post cover, but he?s a insane knife artist that killed three men. The man beside him is known as the Bull Goose Loony, unpredictable as a wild hog. You see that big guy? He?s an Indian and he beat six white men to death with a pick handle when the tried to cheat him trading musket hides. . . . They got me on a bum rap. I killed a man in the ring, ya see, and I sorta got taken with the kick? . . . . ?I want you to look here.? He put his hands up in the guy?s face, real close, turning them over slowly, palm and knuckle. ?You ever see a man get his poor old meat- hooks so pitiful chewed up from just thrown? the bull?? (201). Mac?s hyperbole doesn?t persuade anyone. The men in his group are left feeling better but are still not robust enough to laugh, the novel?s symbol of individual strength. It is when a man on a bicycle stops to ask who they are that Harding feels a positive sense of self. He says to the man: ?We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? No? You must hurry on? Ah, and he?s gone. Pity.? He turned to McMurphy. ?Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become? (202). This verbalizes one of the main tenants of Deleuze and Guattari?s ?schizoanalysis.? The most precise definition is given in by Felix Guattari as ?the analysis of the incidence of Dispositions . . . of enunciation upon semiotic and subjective productions, in a given 175 problematic context? (433). In other words, it is a practice of semiotic transformation as a response to the perceived inadequacies in standard Freudian analytic practice, namely, the use of the Oedipus complex and the paternalistic role between the psychoanalyst and patient (Holland). In the Anti-Oedipus, customary articulation is revealed as an absurd system of ontology and the therapeutic standard of practice comes under fire while the schizophrenic system of enunciation holds power. It is for this reason that the institution for the mentally ill must maintain such control over its patient-inmates. If the powerless were to obtain influence, society as a whole would change. Such variability in the relationship amid sanity and power is punctuated by the disparity between Big George?s personality on the ship and the ensuing scene with Big George Sorenson in the shower. In this novel, size and power are perceived as directly corollary, though this turns out to be one of Kesey?s greatest ironies; Nurse Ratched is referred to as Big Nurse and Big Chief has a telling concept of size, big means strong to Chief yet he sees himself as small in comparison to Mac. Sorenson is called, ?Rub-a- Dub? when he is meek and inhibited but he is also called ?Big George? when he is performing as captain of the fishing boat. When the group of men goes on the fishing excursion, none have the experience necessary to make the trip a success. Further, Nurse Ratched almost has the men too frightened of the weather to participate; she scares them by posting newspaper clippings that state that ?the sea was rough and dangerous? (177). The men sign up despite her warnings and ?the nurse started steadily bringing in clippings from the newspapers that told about wrecked boats and sudden storms on the coast? (177 - 78). Just when it seems 176 like the Big Nurse will be successful in putting the kibosh on Mac?s trip and regaining her power, Mac makes a final call for participants: C?mon loafers, I need one more mate to round out the crew, I need one more goddamned volunteer . . .? But he couldn?t talk anybody into it. The Big Nurse had the rest scared with her stories of how rough the sea?d been lately and how many boats?d sunk, and it didn?t look like we?d get that last crew member till a half-hour later when George Sorenson came up to McMurphy in the breakfast line where we were waiting for the mess hall to be unlocked for breakfast. Big toothless knotty old Swede . . . stopped in front of McMurphy, and mumbled something in his hand. . . . He mumbled in his hand til McMurphy finally reached up and pulled the hand away so?s the words could get out (193). Realizing that Big George is giving him fishing advice, Mac asks if he know a little something about the ?fishing business? to which Sorenson affirms, ??You bet, su-re. Twenty five year I work the Chinook trollers, all the way from Half Moon Bay to Puget Sound?? (193). After this, George Sorenson gains two titles: Big George (meaning powerful George) and Captain. Along with these titles he gains the respect and admiration of his crew - including Dr. Spivey, the director of the asylum. But his power is short-lived. After the fishing expedition, Nurse Ratched designs a way to reverse the men?s advances in self-development. Throughout the novel, she finds ways to 177 individually attack the men. She knows each man?s weakness and viciously uses it against him; Harding is sensitive to issues regarding his virility, his heterosexuality, and his wife, so she attacks him repeatedly with those topics; Billy is particularly intimidated by his mother, so she threatens to reveal specifics about Billy?s life to her in order to keep him in check; she openly insinuates that Fredrickson and Sefelt, while they maintain a ?medication-sharing? agreement, are engaged in a more intimate relationship. Big Nurse also knew that Big George Sorenson had ergophobia yet he did not want to be touched by soap. According to Chief, ?The Big Nurse had her next maneuver under way the day after the fishing trip.? In order to trigger this fear, Nurse Ratched insists that the men be disinfected and deloused in a ?special shower? (227). Using the presence of a prostitute on the ship as an justification for humiliating the men by treating them for pubic crabs, the abusive and opportunistic interns take the opportunity to molest the patients: ?We lined up against the tile, and there one black boy came, a black plastic tube in his hand, squirting a stinking salve, thick and sticky as egg white. In the hair first, an? turn around an? spread your cheeks!? (227). At the threat of this invasive shower, George backs away and becomes helpless, ?He looked . . . at the tube in the black hand before him, slow mucus running out of the little hole at the top of the tube down over the pig-iron knuckles. The black boy moved the tube forward a few inches and George listed farther back, shaking his head? (228). George refuses to submit to having salve slathered on him, and the interns pursue him relentlessly. In the end, Mac defends him. It is the melee in the shower which instigates the cascade of events which lead to the tragic end of the novel. Mac hits the black boy and is 178 sent to electroshock therapy which makes him angry enough to escape; but before doing so, he throws a final raucous party during which Billy sleeps with Candy. Finding Billy and Candy together, Nurse Ratched realizes that she has lost control and therefore coerces (either intentionally or with cruel indifference) Billy to commit suicide. In grief and defiant anger, Mac strangles Nurse Ratched and is subsequently sent to have a lobotomy. After his return, Chief realizes that he cannot let ?something like that sit there in the day room with [McMurphy?s] name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system? (253). Chief euthanizes him and escapes; the novel ends with several other men signing-out of the ward. In the end, Bromden?s new world view is formed by a rejection of the language of docility and his new belief that the machines can be overthrown when he realizes that ?[m]aybe the Combine wasn?t all-powerful? (239). The consequences of this statement when analyzed in Deleuzian terms are that Bromden?s schizophrenic realization - the statement which is outside of Lacanian restraints and therefore truer - is that the machine is fallible and subject to the desire it produces. For Deleuze and Guattari, the triumph of schizophrenic revelation is a recognition of ?the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as ?the essential reality of man and nature?? (5). Thus, Kesey?s world of order and discipline is a representation of the success of the schizophrenic?s world view where insanity is reasonable and chaos is coherent and where insanity is powerful and conformity is weak. 179 NOTES 1 At least publicly. There is a line of reasoning which maintains that President Roosevelt was all too happy to engage Japan and Germany but that he wanted popular support. There have even been a number of conspiracy theories, commonly called ?the backdoor to war? theories, that claim Roosevelt was at least aware of and at worst sanctioned the attack on Pearl Harbor so that he could muster support for his war. For more information see Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision by Roberta Wohlstetter and Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor by Robert Stinnett and the popular At Dawn We Slept by Gordon W. Prange. Recently, the History Channel aired ?Conspiracy: FDR and Pearl Harbor.? 2 For an in depth investigation of this subject in the period from the end of the American Civil War to the First World War see Gail Bederman?s Masculinity and Civilization, the title for which evokes Foucault?s Madness and Civilization. Bederman?s work is historically insightful but must be read with a critical eye as it perpetuates many of the fictions it supposes to expose. 3 Desire, which according to Slavoj ?i?ek, is taught to us by fantasy (The Sublime Object of Ideology). 4 For this argument see Debrah Tannen?s discussion of gender signification in ?Marked Women, Unmarked Men.? 180 5 Wildmen was the brainchild of Robert Bly whose 1990 book Iron John began a dialogue about a ?masculine mystique? and a recovery of a ?deep masculinity.? 6 Of course theses individual identities only appear to be individually constructed. The hegemonic imperative dictates the limits within which one can materialize. Individuality remains an individual choice when it remains safely within the hegemonic superstructure. 7 I mean this quite literally. The acceptable becomes the ?invisible? background to the rejected ?visible? relief. 8 Kristeva?s idea of abjection stems from Mary Douglass. 9 This does not refer to any one individual. Though some individuals possess more power than others, Foucauldian theory shows us that power is found in numbers. This subject in power is actually a mass of individuals, like a swarm, subscribing to a unified hegemony. 10 Unless they make themselves invisible ? which is a complication I will deal with in the following chapters. 11 Of course I am not implying that minorities and those who do not embody the accepted norm are monsters based on any real monstrosity; they are monsters because they embody the abject defined by the subject in power. 12 While the race theorist critiques the standard of whiteness, the postcolonial theorist critiques the ideals imbedded in Cultural Imperialism. Materialist Feminists and socioeconomic theorists likewise have a staging point. Though I acknowledge that these 181 cultural criticisms exist, I do not address them here. 13 David Halperin, much like Michel Foucault?s historicizing of sexuality, historicizes the construction of homosexuality; Judith Halberstam (Female Masculinity) investigates the gender identifications that fall between the binary of male/female opposition. 14 See Jacques Derrida?s interview with Christine V. McDonald, ?Choreographies,? where he explains his philosophy concerning ?woman?s place? as described in his Spurs/Eperons (1978). 15 For more information on the political economy of Cold War masculinity see Robert Corber?s Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. 16 For an investigation into African American masculinities see bell hook?s We Real Cool. 17 For further discussion of the materialization of gender based on mass media culture see: Susan Douglas?s Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media, Susan Bordo?s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body and The Male Body, David Gauntlett?s Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, Angela McRobbie?s Feminism and Youth Culture, Stephen J. Duncat?s The Wimp Factor, Sally Robinson?s Marked Men and for a more specific discussion of black masculinity see bell hook?s We Real Cool. 18 Part of this movement was the formation of the Boy Scouts of America which 182 taught boys to be self sufficient, patriotic, and honest. Ironically their uniforms made them look like Hitlerjugend, Hitler?s Youth. 19 Though I will save further examination for the following chapters, heroes and archvillains are not at polar opposites. The polar opposite of the hero is the monster. 20 I will carry the ideas established in this chapter to discuss Billy Bibbit of One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest and Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse 5; both of these men have something in common: they have each been rhetorically branded by their writers as ?unmanly.? From the very beginning, their ?boyish? infantilized names serve to signify to readers that these male characters are to be interpolated immediately as unmasculine. While they are still male characters, they are decidedly not manly. In contrast, consider Billy and Billy in relation to their hypermasculine counterparts: R.P. ?Mac? McMurphy and Paul Lazarro. Mac and Lazarro are characters that embody the masculine ideal: virility, aggression, and physical prowess. 21 Historical information regarding the Enola Gay mission was verified from several sources including The Manhattan Project Heritage Preservation Association, Inc. 22 For an in depth look at global issues concerning motherhood see Ties that Bind: Essays on Mothering and Patriarchy and Carolyn Dever?s Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins.; Pauline Schloesser?s The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic gives an extensive account of relationships of race, gender, and Constitutional Citizenship in 183 American Founding In The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother, Shari Thurer explores the mythology surrounding the Western maternal figure. 23 In the patriarchal society of colonial America, fathers acted as heads of households, and because they were viewed as more rational and more effective disciplinarians, they were considered to be better suited than mothers to raise and educate children. Mothers were to bear, nurse, and care for infants, but were considered too affectionate and lenient to ensure their children?s obedience and morality; beginning in the Revolutionary period, American attitudes regarding mother-son relationships became more favorable, and the responsibility for child rearing increasingly shifted from fathers to mothers. According to Carl Degler, mothers? methods of child rearing actually supported emerging republican political theory emphasizing voluntary bonds between citizens that ?stressed affection and voluntary obedience over stern discipline, mothers were viewed as ideally suited to foster virtue, honesty, and love of liberty in their sons? (32). Also, the influence of Romanticism on American culture in the early to mid- nineteenth century reinforced the values associated with sentimental affection and nurturing over the harsh discipline and child rearing associated with the ?rationale? of the Enlightenment. 24 My thanks to Pam Horn for pointing out the connection between the increase in ?sober mothering? tracts and the Temperance Movement. 25 For a fuller exploration of the term ?masculinity in crisis,? see Sally Robinson?s ?The ?Discovery? of Middle America and the Marking of White Masculinity.? Marked 184 Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. 26 For examples see Linda Gorden?s ?Putting Children First: Women, Materialism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century? In A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear, Janna Mallamud Smith explores the things that frighten mothers and the things which make ?mother? frightening. 27 For a general gloss of Freudian influence on constructions of gender see Mary Jo Buhle?s Feminism and its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Freudian Psychoanalysis. 28 For a contemporary reading of maternal transgression, see ?Bad? Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. The cover of the paperback edition features a female silhouette and the word ?MONSTER? prominently across the bottom. 29 Stephan Ducat?s The Wimp Factor is a fascinating discussion of the ?War on Terror? and American masculinity. Ducat?s observations about the connections between masculinity and political ideologies have informed my argument immensely. 30 In ?Stabat Mater? Julia Kristeva explores aspects of motherhood as do many other post-Freudian psychoanalytic feminists: the pregnant mother is at once subject and object, further she is at once herself but she also contains her child, and after the child is born there is a separation of what was once part of the subject and is no longer part of the subject (Tales of Love). Rosi Braidotti discusses the mutable pregnant body as ?monster? in ?Mothers, Monsters, and Machines? (Nomadic Subjects). 31 The issue of mothers and daughters does not seem to become much of an issue 185 until the very end of the Cold War with American prosperity and corporate growth. Aside from the early Mommy Dearest (which monstrizes celebrity adoption in general and Joan Crawford specifically, rather than mothers and daughters, per se) we begin to see memoirs about mothers and daughters with Carrie Fischer?s 1987 Postcards From the Edge (which is still about celebrity motherhood - Debbie Reynolds is Fischer?s mother - but is more specifically about the relationship). Many other novels and memoirs trace mother daughter relationships such as Amy Tan?s 1989 Joy Luck Club. In the early 1990s, more critical attention was paid to mothers and daughters in anthologies and criticisms such as Mothers and Daughters: An Anthology, Norgard Klages? Look Back in Anger: Mother-Daughter and Father-Daughter Relationships in Women?s Autobiographical Writings of the 1970s and 1980s and Carl Kerenyi?s Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter which argues that the ancient myth of Demeter?s search for her ravished daughter Persephone equates with woman?s quest for completion and pursuit of identity. Kerenyi draws on the archaeology, objects of art, and religious history, and suggests parallels from other mythologies. However, this use of myth, suggesting that mother-daughter relationships can be ?diagnosed? by recontextualizing an ancient fiction, is similar to Freud?s development of the Oedipus Complex. 32 For more information on the ever evolving perception of motherhood see the following: Hans Sebald?s Momism: The Silent Disease of America, Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture, and Bad Mothers: The Politics of 186 Blame in Twentieth-Century America. 33 Among these are Borderlands and Gladiator: ?The Lusty Life of an Uninhibited Superman.? The liberal minded female college student in Smoke Across the Moon, serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, believes that women should have careers and rejects the role of supporting a husband and mothering his children. This subversive, who favors sex without commitments, seduces a minister who hangs himself when she refuses to marry him. 34 The imagery of mother as monster is greatly exaggerated in the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds where the alien vehicles look like lumbering ovaries, the humans trapped inside are, then, ovum. The image becomes grotesque when the alien vehicle?s proboscis penetrates the human / ovum and rains human blood all over the earth. 35 Keeping in mind that satire need not be humorous, but is chiefly a literary device in which cultural inadequacies are censured through ironic methods; the purpose of satire is not principally humor but rather a critique of a target (this can be one person or an ideology). 36 Some of these arguments can be found in Patricia Melzer?s Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought, Charkes Elkins? ?The Uses of Science Fiction? and Donna Haraway?s Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan?Meets_Onco Mouse?: Feminism and Technoscience. 37 Along with other academic scholars like Rogan and Whitfield, I categorize Manchurian Candidate as science fiction based on the generic definition where science 187 fiction involves speculations based on current or future science or technology, in this case, mind control. Science fiction contains imaginary elements which are largely believed to be possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation). Discussing Manchurian Candidate as science fiction is useful when we consider that sci-fi is typically used to discuss alternate possibilities or new ways of being. When we take this into consideration, along with my postulation that Manchurian Candidate is a satire geared toward change, the argument follows that Manchurian Candidate, rather than supporting the outmoded ideas surrounding momism, is a text which points itself toward the feminist movement and toward the future. I do not mean to depict a positive future here; rather, it is my argument that 1960s America, while no longer fearful of mother, remains fearful of power-seeking women. 38 Along with Manchurian Candidate, many Cold War films have been remade in one form or another during The War On Terror. Jonathan Demme remade The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and adapted the film to reflect contemporary politics. The War of the Worlds, which in 1953 represented clearly the invasion of communism, was remade in 2005 by Stephan Spielberg; and The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were recently conflated and evoked in Slither. This phenomenon reinforces my belief that the arguments made by Ducat in The Wimp Factor are a revisiting of Cold War ideologies and fears. The political atmosphere of the ?War on Terror? - fighting an invisible and infiltrating enemy - parallels the fearful atmosphere of The Cold War. 188 39 Consider the prevalence of American television programming around this time. Several popular programs revolve around a widower or bachelor father: ?Gidget,? ?The Courtship of Eddie?s Father,? ?Family Affair,? and the original premise of ?The Brady Bunch.? Keep in mind that the theme song portrays ?the lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls,? but Mike Brady and his sons were ?four men living all together, yet they were all alone? indicating, still, that is more natural for a woman to raise children then for men to. 40 Satire also relies on incongruities which are designed to draw attention to logical fallacies. The most blatant of these incongruities was the paradoxically logic of Cold War national policy which asserted that the country?s only hope of protection from nuclear annihilation was mutually assured destruction. 41 In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin consistently repeats is that what he wants to communicate is an ideology. While the censors under Brezhnev thought he was doing a proper obeisance to the Party because he was seeming to glorify the aesthetics and philosophy of the Party by using patriotic themes (which he did feel intensely but wholly tragically and filled with hatred for communism) however he was simultaneously promoting a revolutionary and violent ideology intent on political overthrow. Bakhtin clearly demonstrates a world of violence, death, eating and excrement where the only universality is in the cycle where death comes out of life and life in turn comes out of death. In other words, Bakhtin has turned many of the traditional and fundamental notions of proper ?bourgeois? state communism in the USSR against that state. 189 42 Films from the ?early? post-Cold War Era, like Red Dawn (1984) and ?The Day After? (1983) return to an obsession with nuclear attack. Currently, most films take a historical approach like a recent film aired on German public network which reconstructed the real-life story of a GDR mother; ?The Woman from Checkpoint Charlie? tells the story of Jutta Gallus (Veronica Ferres), a young mother in East Germany who famously planted herself at Checkpoint Charlie with a placard around her neck reading: ?My children have been forcibly given up for adoption! Please help us!? Gallus became a daily fixture at Checkpoint Charlie, and this image of maternaty was seen around the world. 43 All quotes transcribed from the captioning of the 1998 MGM DVD. 44 It is difficult not to see Shaw as a parody of John F. Kennedy (and the name of Johnnie Iselin doesn?t detract from that impulse). Due to his own father?s influence, Kennedy had an illustrious military career, having received a number of military decorations including the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for the well-known PT-109 incident. Kennedy, a Democrat, famously claimed that he felt that he didn?t deserve the award because it was the result of a failed military operation that, like Shaw?s fictional operation, claimed the lives of two crewmen. The PT-109 incident ?is arguably the most famous small-craft engagement in naval history, and it was an unmitigated disaster? and, like Shaw, when asked about his heroic act, he declared, ?It was involuntary. They sank my boat? (JFK Library and Museum Online. ?John F. Kennedy and PT-109.? 29 October 2007). 190 45 Some of the script?s absurdities are more subtle, though. This film, which is to show that the American military can be infiltrated by ?the enemy? and therefore has inherent hypocrisies, shows that communism too has its hypocrisies, consider when Yen Lo tells Commander Zilkhov that he is going to spend the afternoon reveling in capitalistic, materialistic consuming at Macy?s: ?Madame Yen has given me the most appalling list.? 46 In a suggestion of racist proportions, Melvin awakes from his dream shrieking hysterically whereas Marco simply moaned softly and sweated. 47 ?Dry Cleaning,? Yen Lo, a Communist officer, jokes, adding to the satirical domestic connection. 48 Comrade Yen says of Raymond, ?Do you realize . . . the implications of the weapon [Raymond] that has been placed at your disposal? . . . Having been relieved of those uniquely American traits, guilt and fear, he cannot possibly give himself away.? The son being controlled by momism is perceived as a dangerous weapon. 49 We may suspect that her involvement with the Communists resulted in the death of Raymond?s father, her first husband. 50 For a look at the development of perceptions of intellectualism see Trish Travis? Reading Matters: Book Men, ?Serious? Readers, and the Rise of Mass Culture, 1930- 1960. 51 An element of satire is found in the fact that the ?cover? for the brainwashing project is called ?The Pavlov Institute.? Further the Communist controllers, Zilkov and 191 Yen Lo, jest that the institute: ?. . . is one of the few Soviet operations in America that showed a profit at the end of the fiscal year.? Yen: ?Profit. Fiscal year. Tut-tut-tut. Beware my dear Zilkov. The virus of capitalism is highly infectious.? 52 Again at the very end of the film the convention turns into carnivalesque revelry; here Shaw, the assassin, is costumed as a priest. 53 After Hitchcock invested a good deal of time and money personally coaching and mentoring Hedren, a former shampoo commercial girl, she is said to have insulted his weight, a particular sore spot for him, when he would not give her leave from filming Marnie to attend a charity event where she was to receive an award. Biographer Russell says: [Hedren] took this amiss, and then, according to Hitch, ?She said something no one is permitted to say.? ?What did she say? What did she say?? I quizzed him eagerly. ?She, um, referred to my weight? (if that?s how you define calling him a ?fat pig? in front of the assembled crew). Ever after that, on set, it was ?Would you ask Miss Hedren . . ? ? ?Would you tell Mr. Hitchcock . . ?? Mention of Hedren raises of course the vexed question of what, exactly, were Hitch?s relations with those cool blondes with a sizzle of sexuality beneath the frosty exterior. (?The Truth about Hitch and Those Cool Blondes.? Times Online, April 5, 2005) 192 54 For instance, Modleski?s The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Patrick Humphries? The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, and Lesley Brill?s The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock?s Films, all portray Hitchcock?s mothers as fiends. 55 To support this, I offer evidence from an offhand scene in I Confess; while seeking out her husband, a Canadian civil attorney, Ruth Granfort (Anne Baxter) overhears - and therefore we overhear - a case for women?s rights. Given that Hitchcock could have shown the court case to be about anything, it is significant that the case being heard in the courtroom concerns ?equal pay for female schoolteachers.? In 1953, equal pay rights would have been an unpredictable issue, therefore this seemingly benign scene reflects Hitchcock?s awareness of gender stratification. 56 It is important to recognize that she does not eliminate physical bodies, she argues that language posits materiality (as both form and matter) and she critiques such language 57 His famous ?McGuffin?, what Slavoj ?i?ek points out is the protagonist?s object (petit) a, is most often described as ?the spy papers or the briefcase? which the hero pursues (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)). Indeed, in Topaz, the McGuffin is the briefcase holding secret Russian documents. Hitchcock?s other films which overtly focus on Cold War espionage include Torn Curtain, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jamaica Inn, and Notorious. Rope, a film about two aspiring ?berm?nner, makes some ado about ?good American men . . . dying on the battlefield.? 193 58 While this evidence is purely anecdotal, I find it fascinating that whenever I ask people, ?Who was the killer in Psycho?? their gut-instinct is to say, ?The mother.? Inevitably they revise their answer and say something like, ?Well, no. It was Norman dressed as his mother.? Very few people (save those who are die-hard Hitchcock fans) have answered ?Norman? without making some sort of cognitive adjustment first. 59 Consider the early ?slasher? film Friday the 13th (1980) where the mother, Mrs. Voorhees, was indeed the killer rather than the son - as expected. Such a plot twist might not have worked as well had it not been for Friday the 13th?s predecessor, Psycho. 60 As another example, in The Birds, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) finds he must protect four women, one of which is often called a ?needy? mother; however, Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy) is not clingy out of possessiveness as she is often represented; she is merely afraid. When we realize that Mrs. Brenner has never had to take responsibility for a family, we recognize that Hitchcock is representing the world as it was for women who were entirely subject to a paternalistic domestic order; once Mr. Brenner died, he left his wife ill-equipped to manage a crisis. 61 It is unfortunately so that many Hitchcock studies have been written by chauvinistic and grossly under-informed critics. Price is one such example. Not only does he consistently demean female characters and actors by calling them by their given names (?Tippi? and ?Ingrid? etc.) while referring to male characters and actors by their surnames (?Connery? and ?Grant? etc.), but he makes the gross miscalculation of stating: ?I?m not sure, but I do believe that the real-life criminal on whom the Norman Bates 194 character was patterned killed boys, not girls . . .? (88). It is at this point that Price should lose all credibility. It does not take much research to uncover Ed Gein as a killer of matronly, older women - neither ?boys? nor ?girls.? 62 Edna Best played, Josephine McKenna, a rightfully protective mother (complete with rifle) in the British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. (In the 1955 remake, Doris Day played the role without shooting.) 63 For further discussion of Psycho see Stephen Rebello?s Alfred Hitchcock and The Making of Psycho and Janet Leigh?s Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. 64 In American culture, the girl who plays the part of daddy?s girl is in no way as troublesome as a momma?s boy; whereas a mamma?s boy is seen as entrenched in a shamefully intimate and dependant relationship with his mother, a relationship that jeopardizes his masculinity and invites the ridicule of others, a daddy?s girl is seen as articulating a nurturing, quasi-romantic tenderness and idealization of her father, which often educes approval from the surrounding culture. Of course the fact that this intimate tie with father is embraced by culture reflects its purpose to the culture. To be a daddy?s girl is perceived as benign. 65 There is a father / daughter duo in Topaz, but the Kusenov family plot-line is ancillary to the real action of the film. 66 Many sources credit Joseph Stephano with creating the image of Norman Bates that we have on film and for totally altering the plot and consequence of the film Psycho. Even his obituary touts him as the ?Screenwriter who changed the plot of Hitchcock?s 195 Psycho.? Having read Bloch?s Psycho, I find that the book and the movie are absolutely corollary except in a few details (the novel begins with Norman reading a book rather than in a hotel with Sam and Marion (Mary in the novel) and Mary is beheaded in the novel). Most of the dialogue is the same and the action is fairly unaltered. The major difference is the character of Norman. This is not something Stephano can take credit for. When Stefano met Hitchcock to discuss the script of Psycho, he disliked the character of Norman Bates who is fat, clumsy, balding, myopic and middle-aged. Stephano said: ?I really could not get involved with a man in his 40s who is drunk and peeps through holes, . . . I wish Norman were somebody else?; to this Hitchcock replied, ?How would you feel if Norman were played by Anthony Perkins?? (Obituary). The choice of Perkins changed the character of Bates altogether and insanity was disguised as innocence in true Hitchcock form. 67 For information on films to follow, see Charles Derry?s The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock and A Hitchcock Reader, Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, eds. 68 For Information on and examples of Hitchcock?s wit see Patricia Hitchcock and Laurent Bouzereau?s Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man and Alfred Hitchcock Interviews. Sidney Gottlieb, ed. 69 I recognize that all of Hitchcock?s films were adaptations; he chose the novels he would work with very carefully. 70 For a discussion of Hitchcock?s impression of American gender politics see 196 Jonathan Freedman and Richard H. Millington?s Hitchcock?s America and Robert Corber?s In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America. 71 For an exploration of the connection between media and eating disorders, see Susan Bordo?s Unbearable Weight. 72 For a discussion of advertisements in the Cold War Era which portray phallic masculinity, see Susan Bordo?s The Male Body. 73 Though there are countless sources which claim that Hitchcock was a misogynistic homosexual, I find Mathieu Deflem?s ?Alfred Hitchcock and Sociological Theory: Parsons Goes to the Movies? particularly discordant. 74 Many believe that the famous musical score heightens the terror; however, I have recently viewed the scene without the music and the human sounds of distress and tearing flesh are more ghastly than violins. 75 For more information on Hitchcock and psychoanalytic content, see Robert Samuels?s Hitchcock?s Bi-Textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory, William Rothman?s Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Paul Condon and Jim Sangster?s The Complete Hitchcock, and Charlotte Chandler?s It?s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock: A Personal Biography. 76 First, he pretended to hold a casting call for the role of Mrs. Bates. This was followed by rumors that top-ranking Hollywood stars would take the role. Then, upon the release of the film, Hitchcock insisted that very strict rules be maintained; no one was 197 to enter the theatre after the film had begun. Such marketing led to unprecedented attendance with multitudes of viewers queued-up outside the theatre. Passersby noted the long lines and thus increased popular interest in the film. 77 All dialogue is transcribed from the film. 78 Weigman illustrates how Linnaean and Darwinian classifications of being became useful for the purposes of categorizing human ?species? by scientists interested in establishing the cause of racial differences (some looked for geographical causes, some looked for climate causes, some looked for biological causes, some resorted to scriptural causes) and that, wanting to establish a theory of polygenesis (that various ?races? cropped up in different areas of the globe rather than all humans descending from the same biological ancestry), methods for categorizing ?man? started to be used to support the superiority of white men (features such as a jutting jaw or small head became equated with a lower level of evolution or lower intellectual abilities, comparisons were made to apes, comparisons were eventually made between African males and Caucasian females thus primitiveizing the female and feminizing the African). 79 In an interview, ?Choreographies,? with Christine V. McDonald, Jacques Derrida explains his philosophy concerning ?woman?s place? as described in his Spurs/Eperons (1978), Derrida?s critique of Nietzsche (or rather his reading of Heidegger?s critique of Nietzsche), by asserting that there is no woman?s place as such because there is no woman; in Derridean Deconstruction, the term woman is a (false) signifier for a difference (sexual difference), or diff?rance, which does not exist because it is a construct 198 of subordination and not an actuality. In the second question, McDonald asks what Derrida recommends as a course of action to alter the ?representation of woman,? citing the deficiency of the wife/mother paradigm. 80 In ?The Sex Which Prevail?th? Fausto-Sterling discusses the practice of conforming to one sex or the other in the case of biological hermaphrotism. 81 All dialogue is from the Psycho script available at www.paradiselost.org. 82 Immediately on the heels of her conversation with Sam about mother?s presence and money, Marion returns to work with a headache and the talk turns to mother again. Marion asks if anyone has called and her co-worker says that her own husband called and that her own mother called to see if her husband had called. This subtle intrusion into the marriage relationship by a maternal presence is punctuated when the co-worker offers a headache remedy: ?I?ve got something. Not aspirin. My mother?s doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding. Teddy was furious when he found out I had taken tranquilizers.? Mother?s seemingly intentional sabotage of the couple?s wedding night does less to preserve the girl?s virtue, since a married woman was not expected to remain virginal, and more to emasculate the groom who has a greater stake in the matter. 83 ?Trapped like a trap in a trap? is a quote from Dorothy Parker?s short story, ?The Waltz.? 84 Joseph Stephano tells us about this scene: The psychiatrist?s speech at the end was something that Hitch had some qualms about. He was afraid that the audience wouldn?t be interested. He 199 called it ?a hat grabber.? I said, ?I don?t think anyone is going to grab their hat and leave the theatre after what we?ve just told them. We just said that that this boy has been pretending that he?s his own mother. And we need a really good scientific explanation. (The Making of Psycho.) 85 For the full argument surrounding the mytheme, see Claude Levi-Strauss, ?The Structure of Myth.? 86 Thomas Inge points out that even British humorist, Terry Gilliam, was influenced by Kurtzman (123). 87 Both irony and satire, in their postmodern forms, are connected with the broader surrealist movement and have, as such, a capacity for revolution. As this is a gender study, I must disclose that Feminist theorists have, in the past, critiqued the surrealist movement as anti-Feminist. They have claimed that surrealism is primarily a male movement with a primarily male fellowship (despite the celebrated female surrealist painters and poets) which adopts a primarily male attitude toward women: worshipping them symbolically through stereotypes and sexist norms. However, I see that surrealism, as a cultural, social and political movement asserting that liberation of the human mind and subsequent liberation of the individual and society, can provide a revolutionary space for the development of identity (in this case, gender) and therefore, if used ethically, can be a powerful Feminist tool. It is by implementing the creative powers of the ?unconscious mind? to realize an alternate state of being unlike, and (in theory) ?truer? than, familiar reality, surrealism attempts personal, cultural, and social change. The 200 original advocates of surrealism believed that the misery of World War I was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and a product of so-called ?rational? thought. As a result, ?irrational? thought and the fantastic were imagined as the intuitive remedy. Much like Deleuze and Guattari?s schizoanalysis, which argues that a schizophrenic perspective is a more truthful perspective, the aim of surrealism is to transform human understanding by liberating the culture from restrictive mores and constructions. 87 Andr? Breton, explicit in his belief that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement, proclaimed that the true aim of Surrealism is, ?long live the social revolution, and it alone!? (27). 88 For the American media reaction to this fear see Prideaux, T. ?Take Aim: Fire at the Agonies of War.? Life 20 December 1963. 89 In actuality, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler?s wrote the bestseller Fail Safe; however it so closely resembled Red Alert that George successfully sued on the charge of plagiarism; therefore it could be argued that both films were based on the George novel. 90 For more biographical information see Vincent Lobrutto?s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. 91 All quotes are transcribed from the Special Edition DVD. 92 By combining Levi-Straussian and Freudian theories concerning the internalization of valued identity, Rubin argues that no social arrangement relies solely upon biology, but on a set of negotiations by which a society transforms biology into a cultural value system. She explains how the internalization of male and female identities 201 by children (rather than biological differences) creates social values associated with gender. What boys actually learn, Rubin argues, is the superior social values associated with being male; likewise, what girls internalize is not ?penis envy? based on her anatomical lack, but rather the recognition of lower social status that comes with being female. Therefore, it is Rubin?s argument that female passivity is a reaction to social conditioning, not anatomical destiny. 93 Of course physical humor is intended to allow the audience to feel superior. 94 The advent of modern warfare produced new mental stresses for American men. The ?new? designations for male insanity had repercussions on the perception of national strength. During World War I, medical doctors and psychiatrists encountered a phenomenon which they referred to as ?shell shock? and today we understand as Post- traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); however in the early part of the Twentieth Century ?shell shock? provoked new reservations about American manhood. 94 Patients attempted to repress memories of war with varying success; aversion to revisiting the battle-field clashed with popular concepts of American masculinity. Psychiatrists noted that victims of shell shock exhibited the same symptoms as women diagnosed with hysteria; they assigned a different name to the condition in order to emphasize its association with masculine activity. After the end of two world wars, military strength became analogous to national identity and American society became increasingly inclined to assume masculine imperatives such as ?courage,? ?duty,? ?strength,? and ?rationalilty.? Mental weakness, it was feared, rendered the nation unable to confront the 202 perceived threat of Soviet Communism. 95 In the process of assembling an anthology of the surrealist idea of humor at the end of the 1930s, Andr? Breton laid claim to the phrase ?black humor.? At that time, black humor?s meaning lost the implication of the racial connotations it previously provoked. In the ensuing time, the phrase has taken on a corrupted definition and has been kept in popular circulation as a misused phrase which encompasses anything satiric or ironic. William Solomon explains the devolution from ?black humor? to the misapplication of ?dark humor.? Among Solomon?s main goals was to, ?recover [the] lost sense of the racial significance the expression took on in the era of the civil rights and Black Power movements.? 96 The importance of traditional ideals of domesticity and femininity to American cold war posturing was apparent in 1959 when Vice President Nixon traveled to Moscow to open and attend an American exhibit that consisted mostly of an average American home with modern conveniences. This became the site of the famous Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev. In the debate, Nixon praised the material abundance of the United States as a sign of the superiority of the American capitalist system. His argument that us superiority and freedom ultimately depended less on weaponry that on material abundance and a middle class lifestyle implied that it rested on full time homemakers and male providers. The containment of communism abroad, Nixon suggested, required the containment of female sexuality and the activity of American men in the public world of capitalist exchange. 203 97 This argument is found in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 98 Consider JFK?s Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (July 26, 1963) and his address before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations on the introduction of the limited test ban treaty (New York September 20, 1963). Also consider Stephenson?s interrogation of Zorin (25 October 1962). 99 On a rudimentary level, pun is played up for base laughs too. Almost all of the characters? names are sexual puns. Mandrake is a root said to increase virility; deSadesky is reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade; Primer Kissov?s name sounds like ?Kissoff,? Jack D. Ripper is very nearly the name of the nineteenth-century serial killer who targeted and savagely attacked prostitutes in England?s Whitechapel District. ?Buck? is, of course, a rutting deer, and Turgidson refers to the anatomical term for an organ that has become full of fluid to the point of rigidity: turgid. Major ?King? Kong conjures images of animalistic primitive masculinity. In contrast to these masculine puns, Merkin Muffley, Puntridge, and Laputa, the name of the primary target in Russia, are all puns on female genitalia. Laputa, while it is also an island in Gulliver?s Travels, sounds similar to the Spanish insult la puta; therefore if the B52 had not lost fuel and the wing would have made their primary target, Kong?s orgasmic ride would have penetrated Laputa. 100 Parable and allegory, both have the same benefits as simile and metaphor, for they can conduct a prolonged discussion on two levels of meaning while at the same time inherently comparing and contrasting those levels without further comment. 204 101 ?The Daily Show,? a contemporary political satire often compiles news clips to illustrate the construction of rhetorical links; for instance, a video montage illustrates the way President George Bush gradually replaced anti-Taliban, anti-El Qaeda rhetoric with anti-Iraq and anti-Saddam Hussein rhetoric in the months prior to the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some segments that explore these kinds of verbal transformation include: ?WMD: Everywhere except Iraq,? ?Headlines - Five Stages of Grief,? ?Oliver - Safe but Not Safe,? ?Bush?s Words,? and ?Bush v. Bush.? 102 For statistical information see Neil S Kaye?s ?Feigned Insanity in Nineteenth Century America Legal Cases.? 103 A number of works which cover aspects of institutional psychiatry include: Linda Arking?s ?Certain Hard Places? (1974), F. Scott Fitzgerald?s ?The Long Way Out? (1937), Max Frisch?s ?Schinz? (1950), James Thurber?s ?The Catbird Seat? (1942) and ?The Unicorn in the Garden? (1939), Anton Chekhov?s ?Ward Six? (1892), Joachim Maria Machado de Assis? The Psychiatrist (1881-82), Katherine Anne Porter?s Noon Wine (1936), Millen Brand?s Savage Sleep (1968), Peter Breggin?s The Crazy from the Sane (1971), Ralph Ellison?s Invisible Man (1947), Hannah Green?s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), Ken Kesey?s One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest (1962), Jack London?s The Iron Heel (1908), Penelope Mortimer?s Long Distance (1974), Sylvia Plath?s The Bell Jar (1963), James Park Sloan?s The Case History of Comrade V. (1972), Valeriy Tarsis? Ward 7 (1965), Kurt Vonnegut?s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and Robert Penn Warren?s All the King?s Men (1946). The list spans several countries 205 and almost a century in time. 104 This is primarily due to a shift in philosophical approaches to torture. Whereas seventeen-century Church purposes were to raze the body so that the spirit would find salvation, twentieth-century scientific-psychiatric purposes were to break the spirit so that the body -- the physical becoming of the patient -- could correspond. 105 For more information on the evolution of psychiatry and psychiatric care in the twentieth century see: G. A. Zilboorg?s History of Medical Psychology, C M. Vaillant?s ?An Historical Sketch of the Emergence of Liverpool Psychiatry,? and German E. Berrios? The History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology Since the Nineteenth Century. 106 In ?The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought and the Seventeenth-Century Flight From the Feminine,? Susan Bordo explores how seventeenth-century philosophy shifts emphasis away from a connective female cosmos to a mechanist male ?rationality? that not only disassociated human existence from the medieval feminine paradigm, but completely erased it as though the Earth Mother archetype never existed; Bordo refers to this as a ?murder? of the female soul. 107 One treatment for the mad was a country retreat which consisted of punishing the madmen until they learned to act ?reasonably.? Similarly, another treatment of the mad amounted to extended aversion therapy, including such treatments as freezing showers and use of a straitjacket. This method was most famously portrayed as a failure in Anthony Burgess?s A Clockwork Orange. 206 108 Foucault?s next two books follow as such: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences claims that all periods of history possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse, and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) addresses discursive formations by arguing that that truth and meaning depend on the historical discursive and practical means of truth and meaning production. Finally, Power/Knowledge explains Foucault?s theory of how power is created and transferred throughout an ?economy? of discourse (or conversation). It shows how power is transferred along conduits of dialogue according to the knowledge one has. Knowledge does not necessarily have to be true, but it only needs to be passed on as true for the statement to have an effect on the speakers in the discourse. 109 Foucault traces the origins of discipline back to monasteries and armies, where one of the primary principles that sustains discipline is uniformity and conformity (the barracks and uniforms look and function the same, they are identifiable as are the individuals connected with the discipline: soldiers look and move ?like soldiers,? monks look, dress and act ?like monks,? factory workers perform interchangeably and without distraction). Another concern is proximity (discipline requires observation, tracking, confining) the subject must be kept at a close range so as to surveillable by the controlling power. This was recognized as a highly efficient method of control and as part of the philosophy of a market economy, standardization and expedience were valued above the needs of the individual. 207 110 Foucault was indeed interested in masculine sexuality as part of this system of discipline. In The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (or An Introduction) he attacks the widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth century, repressed our natural sexual drives; in The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self deal with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. 111 Thomas Szasz is a prolific writer; many of the ideas mentioned in this chapter can be found in, ?The Lying Truths of Psychiatry,? The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, ?The Socrates Option,? ?The Sane Slave: An Historical Note on the Use of Medical Diagnosis as Justificatory Rhetoric,? Liberation by Oppression, and Law Liberty and Psychiatry: An Inquiry Into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices. 112 Only once do the characters leave the hospital to go on a fishing trip, this supplies a stark contrast to the days on the ward. 113 Unlike Kurt Vonnegut?s Slaughterhouse 5 which ?blinks? back and forth from points in Billy Pilgrim?s, the narrator?s, life: not only does Billy slide effortlessly from Dresden in WWII to his civilian life with his wife Valencia, but he also slips effortlessly into the ?future? and to a planet called Tralfamadore where he is in a zoo of sorts with an ?adult actress? named Montana. 114 Bearing in mind that Butler establishes the ways in which different subjects have different, often limited, choices for self-representation. 115 This is the accepted reading of this scene, though I would argue that it is equally 208 possible that Ratched may have actively killed Billy; at the very least, she provided a tailor-made situation for Billy to kill himself. 116 Upon his release, we are led to believe that Taber too has become a sexual abuser when we are told that: ?every night . . . he bends over the doped figure of his wife, his two little girls just four and six . . . he adjusts them like he was adjusted? 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