The World Turned Inside Out

by James Livingston

  That is why the eviscerated world on view in these movies seems “posthistorical”: technological progress can no longer look like the horizon of expectation, not even for the citizens of the most advanced capitalist nation on the planet. Even here the machines are taking over, downsizing every sector, but particularly manufacturing, making good jobs in the factory or the foundry—or for that matter in the back offices—a thing of the past. When the machines do everything, the prospect of getting a better job than your father (if you have one) becomes unlikely, and the prospect of human civilization looks no better than bleak. Put it another way. If the future of Man doesn’t look so good because the difference between sentient beings and inanimate objects has become arbitrary, accidental, inexplicable, and uncontrollable, the future of men looks even worse.

  Fourth, the self, the family, and perhaps the nation are at risk in a world ruled by simulacra—that is, where you can’t specify the difference between appearance and reality, between machines and men, or when you realize that everything, maybe even your own self, is a sign of a sign. We have already noticed that John Connor’s adoptive father is a cyborg; and we’ve noticed that the parents in the original Nightmare are a big part of the problem our pubescent heroine faces.

  We should also notice that only two of the small band of heroes which recruits Neo to the cause have been born outside the Matrix—you can tell because they don’t have metal inserts in their necks and arms—but there’s no explanation of who Mom and Pop are, except that, like the leader, they’re African American. This is a family? We must assume so, because these two are designated as “brothers.” Meanwhile the others are trying to figure out where they begin and the computer code ends (we in the audience are as well, especially when the traitor decides he wants to go back into the Matrix and eat virtual steak). Their creaky old craft—it, too, looks like a remnant of industrial America—is named Nebuchadnezzar after an ancient king of Babylon who had conquered Judaea in accordance with a cranky God’s wishes, but the key to their survival is “Zion,” the mainframe that unites the resistance.

  This naming of the thing that keeps them together is significant because it is shorthand for a nation that is imminent but not extant—it’s an idea whose time has not yet come, as in the “promised land.” The question it raises is, how are we to imagine a productive relation between these three categories (self, family, nation) now that we have put them at risk, that is, in motion, in cyberspace, where the weakened condition of a fixed, external reality loosens all ties?

  Generic Panic

  So the end of modernity was not the intellectual property of academics isolated in their ivory tower, lacking any connections to the “real world.” It was deeply felt and widely perceived in the popular culture organized by film (and by TV and music, of course, which we’ll get to later). One way to measure the breadth of this feeling, this perception, is to notice how it informed really bad movies as well as really good ones and how it reanimated—in the most literal sense—the politics of cartoons. Or, to put it in the terms proposed by Carol Clover, the brilliant analyst of horror films, one way to measure the widespread panic induced by the end of modernity is to watch how the thematics and sensibilities of truly awful movies entered and altered the mainstream.

  Let’s begin with the panic.

  Many historians and critics have pointed to the profound sense of an ending that permeated American film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But it was not just the American century that was waning in Oscar-winning movies like The Deer Hunter (1978), which dramatized the military defeat of the United States in Vietnam as a crushing blow to American manhood. The fin-

  de-siècle feeling built into the approach of a new millennium was compounded and amplified by realistic reports—and hysterical fears—of pervasive criminality, random yet universal violence, maybe even ineradicable evil; by the decline of patriarchy, which accompanied the decomposition of the traditional nuclear family and the deindustrialization of the American economy; by the rise of the new “postfeminist” woman whose bodily integrity, moral capacity, and sexual autonomy were validated by the Supreme Court in the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, then contested by the emergence of the Religious Right; by corporate malfeasance and government corruption—

  incessant scandal, public and private—from Watergate to Gary Hart on toward Iran-Contra and the dangerous liaisons of the Clinton years; by damning revelations of the uses to which American power had been put during and after the Cold War from Iran to Chile to Nicaragua, where revolutions in the 1970s were designed to discredit and disarm the Great Satan, the Whited Sepulchre based in Washington, D.C.; and by the public, determined, sometimes flamboyant display of homosexual affection and solidarity in the name of gay rights, a movement both complicated and magnified in the 1980s by the eruption of a deadly new sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS.

  When everything—law and order, manhood, fatherhood, womanhood, family, heterosexuality, even national honor—is ending, the apocalypse is now. At any rate that is the feeling that permeates the atlas of emotion etched by American culture in the late twentieth century. To illustrate this feeling, let us take a look at what happens generically in American film from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

  Probably the most important trend is the ascendance of the horror genre, in all its weird permutations (slasher, possession, occult). It remained a lowbrow, B-movie genre from the early 1930s into the 1970s, but then, with the rapid expansion of the Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) franchises in the 1980s, it became the stuff of blockbuster box office. As Mark Edmundson and others have noted, when Silence of the Lambs, a tasteful, muted, sublimated—almost stuffy—slasher film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1991, horror had become the mainstream of American film. It had meanwhile reshaped every other genre, even Westerns, for example, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1972).

  Another important trend is an integral part of the ascendance of the horror genre. Where once female protagonists were hapless victims of violence unless they could rely on their fathers, husbands, and brothers—or the law—to protect them from the slashers, psychopaths, and rapists, they now take the law into their own hands and exact a new kind of revenge on a world of pervasive criminality coded as male. Here the thematic movement “from the bottom up,” from truly awful to pretty good movies, is unmistakable. A terrifically bad movie called I Spit on Your Grave (1976) first installs the female victim of rape in the role of single-minded avenger, for example, and it thereafter presides, in spirit, over more polished, upscale films like Silence of the Lambs.

  Yet another important trend in late-twentieth-century movies is the hypothesis that the family as such is dysfunctional, perhaps even destructive of social order and individual sanity. As Robin Wood has argued, the horror genre is the laboratory in which this indecent hypothesis has been tested most scientifically, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to The Omen (1976) and Poltergeist (1982), all movies about families permeated or penetrated by unspeakable evil—families confused by the modern liberal distinction between private and public spheres. But the return of the repressed gangster, begun by The Godfather cycle in the 1970s, magnified in the 1983 remake of Scarface (the original appeared in 1931), and completed by The Sopranos on cable TV in the late 1990s, also demonstrated, in the most graphic terms, that strict devotion to family makes a man violent, paranoid, and finally unable to fulfill his obligations to loved ones.

  If all you inhabit or care for is your family, both these genres keep telling us, you are the most dangerous man alive. At the very least you’ll forget your loyalties to a larger community, contracting your commitments until they go no further than the boundary of your own home; at that point, you will have destroyed your family and broken the rules that regulate life out there where everybody else lives. But how do you situate yourself in relation to a larger community—to the state, the nation—in the absence of this middle term, the family? It was an urgent political question in l
ate-twentieth-century America, as the decomposition of the traditional nuclear family accelerated, and it was raised most pointedly on screen, by a culture industry supposedly out of touch with “traditional values.”

  A fourth important trend in the movies of the late twentieth century is an obsession with the ambiguities and the consequences of crime. Film noir of the 1940s and 1950s was predicated on such ambiguities and consequences, of course, but the sensibility of that moment seems to have become a directorial norm by the 1980s. The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is at first difficult to discern in the battle between the criminals and the deputies staged by Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in part because it is clear from the outset that our heroes are deranged. It gets more and more difficult in the 1970s and 1980s, when Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise makes the detective less likable than his collars; when drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes become lovable characters in “blaxploitation” movies (Sweet Sweetback [1971], Shaft [1971], Superfly [1972]); when gangsters become the unscrupulous yet dutiful bearers of the American Dream (The Godfather [1972]); when Custer’s Last Stand becomes a monument to imperial idiocy (Little Big Man [1970]), even as the Indians become the personification of authentic America (Dances with Wolves [1990]); when the origin of civic renewal is a crime that appears as both domestic violence and foreign policy—it begins as incest and ends as the colonization of what was once exterior to the city fathers’ domain (Chinatown [1974]); and when the assassination of a president becomes comparable to the “secret murder at the heart of American history” (JFK [1991]: this is the district attorney talking to the jury!).

  That not-so-secret murder is of course the American Dream itself—the dream that allows you to become father of yourself, to cast off all the traditions and obligations accumulated in the “Old World,” to treat the past as mere baggage. If you are father to yourself, you don’t have a father except yourself: you don’t have a past to observe or honor or, more importantly, to learn from. But when you’re on your own in this fundamental sense, as Americans like to be, you lean toward radical visions of the future and radical resolutions of problems inherited from the past. As D. H. Lawrence noted in his studies of classic American literature almost a hundred years ago, the masterless are an unruly horror.

  And when you know that every cop is a criminal—and all the sinners saints—sympathy for the devil becomes your only option as a viewer of movies. The lawful and the unlawful intersect in startling ways in this social and cultural space. So do the natural and the supernatural, as witness Quentin Tarantino’s easy transition from Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994)—movies about the redemption of the most callous criminals—to the vampire flick written with Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn (1997), a movie that mixes so many genres it seems as contrived as a cocktail invented in SoHo. Witness as well the epidemic of celestial messengers, angry demons, impossible conspiracies, and talented witches on TV after Tony Kushner, an avowed Marxist, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his two-part Broadway play Angels in America. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was waiting in the wings, state left. The X- Files entered earlier, stage right.

  One more important trend, which tracks the other four quite closely, is the remarkable increase in spectacular violence done to heroes, victims, and villains alike. The analogue of video games is not very useful on this score, however, because the recipient of excruciating violence in the movies of the late twentieth century is typically a female who then exacts revenge (I Spit on Your Grave, Ms. 45 [1981]) or a male who revels in the physical torture he’s “taking like a man,” presumably because this debilitating experience equips him with the moral authority he will later need to vanquish the enemy without ceremony or regret. The Rocky (1976) and the Rambo (1982) franchises sponsored by Sylvester Stallone are the founding fathers of the latter movement, in which masochism finally becomes unmistakably male.

  The Lethal Weapon (1987) franchise animated by Mel Gibson’s jittery impersonation of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”—Gibson’s cop character has to teach his African American partner (Danny Glover) how to live in the moment, how to be existential if not suicidal—is the parallel film universe in which guys get crazy because they have to, because the world has excluded them from the theater of good wars and good jobs, where boys once learned how to be men. Fight Club (1999) is the final solution to this fear of male irrelevance and the apogee of male masochism at the movies. In its moral equivalent of war, men keep trying to mutilate themselves, but we know it’s okay because they use their bare hands: until the ugly and inexplicable ending, they’re purposeful artisans, not mindless machine herds.

  Experience and Explanation at the Cineplex

  Let us work backward in this list of filmic trends of the late twentieth century to see if we can make historical sense of them, to see if they have anything in common. The increase of spectacular violence at the movies has of course been explained as a result of the recent decline in the median age of the audience—adolescents it is said, have always experienced the onset of their pubescence and then their reluctant graduation to adulthood in the unholy images of dismemberment. More scenes of carnage, more rivers of blood are what these hormone-fueled maniacs need and what Hollywood gladly delivers. It is an argument that works pretty well until you realize that adults still buy more tickets than the teenage crowd and that the violence on view increased exponentially in every genre toward the end of the twentieth century, to begin with in Westerns and war movies—for example, The Wild Bunch (1969), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), and Saving Private Ryan (1998)—where teenagers did not tread unless accompanied by their parents.

  The better arguments are offered by film theorists who suggest that the extreme fury inflicted on the human body in the movies since the 1970s should be understood in terms of a general unsettlement of subjectivity—of selfhood—and who suggest that by the late 1980s, the signature of this unsettlement had become male masochism. In The Philosophy of Horror, a groundbreaking book of 1990, Noel Carroll suggests that the ever more elaborate violence visited upon the characters of his favored genre constitutes an “iconography of personal vulnerability.” Horror as such, he insists, is “founded on the disturbance of cultural norms.” The late-twentieth-century festival of violence in movies is, then, a visual depiction, a pictorial externalization, of the anxieties necessarily attached to the end of modernity, when “an overwhelming sense of instability seizes the imagination in such a way that everything appears at risk or up for grabs.” But the crucial cultural norm in question is the father of himself—the modern individual, the American Adam.

  That is why Carroll correlates the “death of ‘Man’” postulated by postmodern theory with the “demotion of the person” expressed by the extraordinary violence of a recent horror film—the popular, colloquial, vernacular version of academic elocution can be seen at the Cineplex, he suggests, long before (or after) you are forced to read Foucault and Derrida by your demented professors. Carroll summarizes his argument as follows: “What is passing, attended by feelings of anxiety, is the social myth of the ‘American’ individualist, which, in the case of horror, is enacted in spectacles of indignity, [and is] directed at the body.” What is passing, right before our very eyes in the artificial night of the local theater, is that remnant of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois proprietor of himself. It is a violent business, this cinematic execution of our former self, and it can never be finished. No wonder we want to prolong the agony on screen.

  What is also “passing” in the torrent of violence that floods every genre in the late twentieth century is manhood as it was conceived in the “era of the ego,” circa 1600 to 1900, as it was then embalmed in the canonical novels and the literary criticism of the 1920s—Ernest Hemingway and Lewis Mumford come to mind—and as it was reenacted in movies, mainly Westerns, of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The strong, silent types who inhabited that imaginary American space west of everything give way, by the 1980s
and 1990s, to male leads who are anything but. All they want is to talk about their psychological afflictions, as if we—the audience—can cure them. Tony Soprano is the culmination of this cinematic species. And it is no accident that the backstory informing every episode is Tony’s search for meaning in a world turned inside out by race and gender (“Woke up this morning, the blues [that is, the blacks] moved in our town,” as the song goes over the opening credits). For it is here, in the world of therapy and thus the language of psychoanalysis, that the problem of male masochism at the movies becomes visible and, in the most old-fashioned sense, remarkable.

  Kaja Silverman and Carol Clover are among the accomplished film theorists who have deployed the language of psychoanalysis to interpret the systematic abuse and abjection of males in late-twentieth-century movies (by then, a film theorist who did not trade in the currency of psychoanalysis was an anomaly, something like a chaperone at a bachelor party; Noel Carroll resisted the urge and found a voice by falling back on the Marxoid rhythms of Fredric Jameson). Like their counterparts—David Savran and Barbara Creed are probably their best contestants—both Silverman and Clover rely on two famous essays of 1924 by the founding father, Sigmund Freud, in which masochism is defined as the psychological space that permits, maybe even demands, male experimentation with an imaginary femininity.