In all the clinical/case studies Freud cites, it is men who are being maso-
chistic, but the passivity that allows their penetration, laceration, and so forth, is coded as female. “In the case of the girl what was originally a maso-
chistic (passive) situation is transformed into a sadistic one by means of repression, and its sexual quality is almost effaced,” he declares. “In the case of the boy,” on the other hand, “the situation remains masochistic.” For he “evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious phantasy [of being beaten, penetrated, by his father]; and the remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy is that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice.” In these psychoanalytical terms, maso-
chism on screen looks and feels like men trying to be women—men trying to identify as women—but without cross-dressing and without coming out of a closet to renounce heterosexuality. Again, it is the psychological space in which an imaginary femininity becomes actionable.
At any rate, it is the cultural space in which the mobility—the increasing instability—of masculinity can be experienced. Clover has shown that the predominantly male audience for crude horror films like I Spit on Your Grave is not indulging its sadistic fantasies by identifying with the rapists, as pious mainstream critics would have it; instead, that male audience is placing its hopes and fears in the resilient character of the Last Girl Standing, the young woman who ignores the law because she has to, the gentle female who comes of age by killing the slashers and the psychopaths. Violence is the cinematic medium in which this transference, this out-of-body experience, gets enacted. Violence is the cinematic medium in which male subjectivity gets tested, in other words, and is finally found wanting except as a form of emotional solidarity with the female character who outlasts her tormentors.
So male masochism at the movies looks and feels bad—it is hard to watch, particularly when Mel Gibson’s William Wallace is getting tortured in Braveheart (1995), when Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky is being beaten to a pulp, or when Brad Pitt is begging for more punishment in Fight Club—but it accomplishes something important. Its violent sensorium lets us experience the end of modernity as the dissolution of male subjectivity and the realignment of the relation between what we took for granted as feminine and masculine (keeping in mind that this realignment may well prove to be regressive and destructive). Freud was on to something, then, when he suggested that by way of male masochism, “morality becomes sexualized once more [and] the Oedipus complex is revived.” Translation: the identities we discovered as we detached ourselves from a primal, physical, emotional connection to our parent(s)—as we worked through the Oedipus complex—are perturbed and perplexed, perhaps even reconstructed, by the horrific experience of maso-
chistic violence at the movies. These identities now become fungible, divisible, negotiable, recyclable—in a word, scary.
The criminal element of late-twentieth-century film is of course related to the increase of spectacular violence done to heroes, victims, and villains alike. The American fascination with crime runs deep because rapid change is normal in this part of the world—here “crisis becomes the rule,” as a famous philosopher, John Dewey, once put it. His admirer Kenneth Burke explained that “any incipient trend will first be felt as crime by reason of its conflict with established values.” It’s hard to distinguish between criminals and heroes because they both break the rules and point us beyond the status quo, and they’re always urging us to expect more (the heroes of sports are heralds of this type, from Bill Russell and Mickey Mantle to Michael Jordan). They’re like the revolutionaries of the college textbooks—Max Weber’s “charismatic” leaders—but they’re more rooted in everyday routine, in what we call “practice.” They’re more visible, more approachable, more likable than, say, Lenin, Mao, Castro, or Che, because they don’t want to change the world, they want to change the rules.
So crime, like violence, is as American as apple pie. But the late-
twentieth-century filmic rendition of criminal behavior departs from its antecedents, especially in depicting gangsters. Where such felons were once represented as deviations from a norm of manhood and domesticity, and thus as a threat to the peace of the city and the integrity of the nation—think of Paul Muni, Jimmy Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson in their founding roles of the early 1930s—by the 1970s and 1980s, Gangsters R Us. By the 1990s, accordingly, crime as committed at the movies became the origin and insignia of everything American. This is a useful notion, mind you. It forces us to acknowledge that the Western Hemisphere was not a “new world” when Europeans invaded America and that the idea of original sin still has explanatory adequacy. At any rate, it lets us know that our country was not born free: it is no exception to the rules of history, no matter who—whether Marx or Freud or Weber—wrote them up as the laws of motion that regulate modernity.
It also lets us know that the private space of contemporary home and family is not exempt from the public atrocities of the political past. Poltergeist and the remake of The Haunting (1999) suggest, for example, that the extermination of Indians on the frontier of American civilization and the exploitation of child labor during the Industrial Revolution cannot be forgotten, not even by the most ignorant individuals and the most insulated, intimate, social organisms of the present—they suggest that the return of the repressed is always already underway from within the family. The political is personal in the late-twentieth-century United States. Otherwise it is almost invisible.
The “traditional” family was, after all, breaking down in the late twentieth century, and crime rates were, in fact, climbing in the 1960s and after: for many observers, such as George Gilder and Charles Murray, the relation between these two phenomena was clearly and simply cause and effect. And the extrusion of women from the home—from familial roles and
obligations—looked to them like the proximate cause of the cause. Feminism signified “sexual suicide,” in Gilder’s hysterical phrase. It takes on new meanings in the context of awful yet rousing movies like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45 Here the female protagonists, young professional women who are victims of brutal and repeated rape, decide to kill the perpetrators instead of waiting on the law made by their fathers, husbands, or brothers. In doing so, they broaden the scope of their vengeance to include male supremacy itself. They’re carefully killing off the idea that men should have control
of women’s bodies. So the figurative mayhem on view is not suicide but homicide—it is patricide, the adjournment of the law of the father, the inevitable result of giving women the weapons they need to protect themselves against violent men.
And that brings us back to where we began, to the ascendance of the horror genre, wherein violence, crime, and family are typically represented, and sometimes rearranged, by the suffering of women at the hands of men. What links our five filmic trends of the late twentieth century, in this sense, is gender trouble—that is, “the disturbance of cultural norms” which derives from the social (and thus political) problem of the new, “postfeminist” woman and which redraws the perceived relations, the effective boundaries, between males and females.
Cartoon Politics
A similar disturbance, a similar problem, meanwhile recast the politics of cartoons. In the next chapter, we’ll get to the excremental visions of Beavis and Butthead and South Park and to the liberal tilt of The Simpsons. There we will note, once again, that even in these small-screen suburbs of Hollywood, popular culture in the United States kept moving to the left after Jimmy Carter, after Ronald Reagan, after George H. W. Bush, and, yes, after Newt Gingrich, leaving the learned scribes and earnest scolds from the New Right to wring their hands until the second coming of Bush in 2000. For now, to conclude this chapter, we’ll look at The Little Mermaid (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1992), and Toy Story (1995) on the big screen—for these were the movies that woke Disney Studios from its long artistic slumber and reminded us of the
possibilities residing in the comic abstractions of animation.
Females are never very far from the leading roles in Disney’s feature-length productions: the studio’s memorable hits before the 1960s and 1970s, when it began cranking out musical extravaganzas starring dogs, cats, and mice, were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), both driven by their female leads’ search for true love in a world dominated by incestuous envy or anonymous violence (and what you remember about Bambi [1942] is the death of the mother). The character of Cruella de Vil in One Hundred and One Dalmations (1961) affirms this precedent, but she has no human content or counterpart—she’s all cartoon. Something new happens in The Little Mermaid, a movie produced with the computer technology and political sensibility promoted at Disney by Jeffrey Katzenberg, a young visionary who, like Matt Groening over at FOX TV, wanted to make comics that mattered.
The questions they kept asking in the 1990s were, What are the functions of families if females have been freed from an exclusive preoccupation with domestic roles (as wives and mothers)? What can we do with a past we’ve outgrown? What are parents good for, anyway? And where’s Dad? In Disney films, however, as in fairy tales, these familiar antecedents are never given by the past—they’re not just there because they happened in the past,
because they somehow preceded and produced us. Instead, they get created by fantastic narratives that erase them, reinstate them, and reinvent them at inappropriate times, according to the bizarre but rule-bound logic of contradiction that regulates cartoons (to wit, every category or distinction sustained by common sense is now subject to violation by the principle of plasticity). They’re always there, in short, only not so that you would notice. They’re mostly missing, like absent causes or like real parents who can’t seem to show up when it counts but who shape your lives anyway.
Ariel, the little mermaid, is the “postfeminist” woman par excellence: she has Promethean curiosity and energy and ambition. “What’s a fire,” she asks, “and why does it, what’s the word, burn?” She wants to escape from the fluid, formless, watery world where the everyday objects that signify modern human civilization—things like eating utensils—have no name and no purpose and where fire, the origin of civilization as such, is impossible. She wants the forbidden knowledge available only to the people who walk around on land and use wooden ships to skim her ocean. Above all, she wants freedom from her father’s stifling supervision—she wants to be the father of herself.
Ariel introduces her agenda of desires by singing about all the things she’s found in the shipwrecks she explores. She calls this stuff treasures, wonders, gadgets, gizmos, whose-its, what’s-its, thingamabobs. She doesn’t understand what any of it is for—how or why it gets used by people “up there”—but she’s sure that all of it somehow fits together in a way of life that is very different from hers. When Ariel calls herself “the girl who has everything” (she’s using a phrase common in the 1980s), she’s really complaining that by themselves, as simple objects, her things don’t have any significance. So when she goes on to sing “I want more,” she doesn’t mean more stuff. What she wants is the way of life in which the stuff makes sense.
That’s why she doesn’t sing about the stuff in the rest of the song. Ariel sings instead about seeing, dancing, running, jumping, strolling—about walking upright as the prerequisite of “wandering free.” What would I give, she asks herself, “if I could live out of these waters?” But it’s obvious that she can wander more freely in the water than anybody her age can on dry land. So she must have some ideas about freedom that involves more than moving about in space. She makes those ideas clear in the next part of the song. “Betcha on land,” she sings, “they understand—bet they don’t reprimand their daughters.” She’s singing about how her father has scolded her, has tried to keep her in her proper place, under water, where nothing seems to matter. Then she identifies herself with all the other ambitious girls who don’t want to stay in that same old place where men get to make all the decisions: “Bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to stand.” Ready, that is, to stand up to their fathers (and husbands and brothers), to face them as equals on their own two feet.
Ariel’s agenda is eventually contained by her devotion to the human being she falls in love with (yes, he’s a handsome prince) and learns to want to marry. All the dangers of her proposed departure from her undersea world—all the sexual tensions and fears this departure from her family, this deviation from her father’s wishes, might create—are eventually tamed by the idea of marriage. When Ariel is paired off with the prince, the possibilities of her ascent become familiar: her goal becomes the start of a new family that marriage symbolizes.
But this use of the familiar let Katzenberg and his animators take chances with their mermaid story without offending or troubling their audience, which of course included millions of unsophisticated children as well as educated adults. The movie did contest the common sense of its time—it did contest the related notions that women should not want what men do and that women are so naturally different from men that equality between them is unimaginable. Even so, it ends up suggesting that marriage is the way to answer all the questions raised by those “bright young women” who were, then as now, “sick of swimmin’” under the direction of their fathers (and husbands and brothers). And that is a way of suggesting that the important questions of our time can be answered from within the family.
You may have noticed that Ariel seems to have no mother—no one to help her father, Triton, the king of the oceans, decide what’s best for her. But look closer. The only character in the movie who is the king’s equal is Ursula the Sea Witch (she’s the devil who gives the girl legs in contractual exchange for her voice, thus putting her on land in range of the prince, but also casting the little mermaid—that would be the teenager—as the Doctor Faustus of the late twentieth century). Ursula competes directly with Triton for control of Ariel’s future, as if she were the mermaid’s mother. And in her big number, she shows this “daughter” how to get the man she wants. She’s the closest thing to a mother Ariel has.
Now Ursula seems simply evil because what she’s really after is the power of the king—she used to live in Triton’s castle, she tells us in passing, and she wants to move back in. So it’s clear that, once upon a time, just like the devil himself, she challenged the king’s powers from within his own home, his own castle, and got kicked out as a result. No matter where we look in the movie, then, it seems that females, both mothers and daughters, have to leave the castle if they’re going to stand up to the king as his equal. This departure is either cause or effect of conflict with the father who rules that castle, but it happens to both Ariel and Ursula.
Yet we’re supposed to be able to tell the difference between them, apart from the obvious differences of age, size, shape—and species (the devil is a huge octopus). We’re supposed to know that Ariel is good and Ursula is evil. So we have to ask, what does Ursula want that makes her evil? What makes her rebellion so awful? And why is Ariel’s rebellion acceptable in the end, when Triton relents and uses his powers to give his daughter legs and a human husband? Both stand up to the father. But one is killed by Ariel’s husband-to-be; the other is rewarded with entry into the enlightened world of men on earth. One is driven out of the castle; the other chooses to leave. One tries to challenge the inherited (“normal”) relation between father and mother; the other wants to re-create this relation in a new family. One breaks the law of the father by defying him; the other upholds it by doing the same thing. How so?
If we read this movie as a comic retelling of the ancient Oedipus cycle, we can see that the law of the father still works only if Ursula’s rebellion gets punished by death. Only if the sea witch is removed can Ariel pair off with the prince by calling on her father’s great powers. But remember that Ursula is in effect the mermaid’s mother. And remember that she is killed by the prince—the future son-in-law of the father, the king
—with the bowsprit of the shipwreck Ariel found at the very beginning of the movie. Everybody is cooperating, in the end, to aim this shaft, this phallic device, at the belly of the beast; everybody is cooperating to kill the mother, to remove her from the scene she’s tried to steal. By doing so, they preserve the law of the father and let Ariel ascend to earth.
That is what must happen if we believe that the important questions of our time can be answered from within the family—something’s got to give if we’re confined to this small social space. The Little Mermaid suggests, accordingly, that either the law of the father or the mother herself will give way. All those “bright young women” still “sick of swimmin’” need new ground
to stand on, but if that ground can be found only within the family, father or mother must go. No wonder single-parent households were the fastest-
growing demographic of the late twentieth century.
Where’s Dad?
Beauty and the Beast was the politically correct sequel to The Little Mermaid. It solidified Disney’s reputation as the place to be if you wanted to experiment with computerized animation—Pixar soon lined up with everybody else—but the movie was a boring love letter to the narcissistic nerds, the high school geeks, who wrote it as their revenge on the athletes who, once upon a time, got the girl. Here the female lead rejects the dumb jock and chooses the hairy intellectual with the big library, all in the name of her hapless father, the absentminded professorial type who invents useless, even dangerous machines. He’s the mad scientist without portfolio, without purpose—he’s the father figure who, like Homer Simpson, remains benign because he has no power, no purchase on the world. His inventions explode like fireworks, not like bombs.
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