Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema 9780755697106, 9781845118310
Borrowing its title from Gregg Araki’s 2005 film, in which the camera’s contemplation of the male body encourages us to...
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Illustrations

Figure 1: Ewan McGregor in The Pillow Book. Kasander Film Company.

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Figure 2: Daniel Brühl in Das Weiße Rauschen. X Verleih AG. Germany.

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Figure 3: Moritz Bleibtreu in Lola rennt. X Filme. Germany.

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Figure 4: Tony Leung in 2046. Sony Pictures Classics.

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Figure 5: Tony Leung in 2046. Sony Pictures Classics.

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Figure 6: Paul Hogan in poster for Crocodile Dundee. Rimfire Films.

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Figure 7: Kenneth Branagh and Garry McDonald in Rabbit Proof Fence. Olsen Levy Productions/ Rumbalara Films.

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Figure 8: David Gulpilil and Gary Sweet in The Tracker. Globe Films Australia/Vertigo Productions.

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Figure 9: Tran Manh Cuong in À la verticale de l’été. Les Productions Lazennec. Paris.

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Figure 10: Tran Manh Cuong in À la verticale de l’été. Les Productions Lazennec. Paris.

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Figure 11: Unidentified boy in Xich Lo. Les Productions Lazennec. Paris.

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Figure 12: Nicolas Cazalé in Le clan. Sépia Productions. Montreuil.

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Figure 13: Edouard Collin in the ‘making of’ Crustacés et coquillages. Agat Films et Cie. Paris.

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Figure 14: Nicolas Cazalé in Le clan. Sépia Productions. Montreuil.

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Figure 15: Nicolas Cazalé in Le clan. Sépia Productions. Montreuil.

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Figure 16: Nicolas Cazalé in Le clan. Sépia Productions. Montreuil.

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Figure 17: Joan Cossas and Anna Azcona in El perquè de tot plegat. Els Films de La Rambla.

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Figure 18: Sergi López and Naïm Thomas in Carícies. Els Films de La Rambla.

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Figure 19: Kevin Bishop and Paul Rhys in Food of Love. Els Films de La Rambla.

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Figure 20: Thomas Lockyer in Dog Soldiers. Carousel Pictures Production Company, The Noel Gay Motion Picture Company and Kismet Entertainment Group.

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Figure 21: Emma Cleasby and Kevin McKidd in Dog Soldiers. Carousel Pictures Production Company, The Noel Gay Motion Picture Company and Kismet Entertainment Group.

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Figure 22: Emma Cleasby in Dog Soldiers. Carousel Pictures Production Company, The Noel Gay Motion Picture Company and Kismet Entertainment Group.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 23: Darren Morfitt in Dog Soldiers. Carousel Pictures Production Company, The Noel Gay Motion Picture Company and Kismet Entertainment Group.

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Figure 24: Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal in Y tu mamá también. Anhelo Producciones.

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Figure 25: Alejandro Fernández in Zapata: el sueño del héroe. Zapata Dreams, Plethora Media Works, Hamsa, Angel Isidoro Rodríguez Productions and Zapata Productions.

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Figure 26: Harvey Keitel in The Piano. Jan Chapman Productions PTY Limited.

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Figure 27: Mark Gerber in Sirens. Australian Film Finance Corp., WMG Film, British Screen Finance Limited, Samson Productions Two Ply, Sarah Radclyffe Productions.

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Figures 28 and 29: Yekaterina Golubeva and David Wissak in Twentynine Palms. 38 Productions, Thoke Moebius Filmcompany.

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Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders in order to acquire the necessary permissions.

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Contributors

Nathan Abrams was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham. He is Director of Graduate Studies and a Lecturer in Film Studies at the School of Creative Studies and Media at Bangor University. He has written widely on Jewish Studies, American Studies and Film Studies. His books include Jews & Sex (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2008), Commentary Magazine 1945– 1959: ‘A journal of significant thought and opinion’ (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), Containing America: Production and Consumption in Fifties America (coedited with Julie Hughes; Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2000) and Studying Film (co-authored with Ian Bell and Jan Udris; London: Arnold, 2001). Chris Beasley is a Reader in Politics at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. She has also lectured in a number of other disciplinary/interdisciplinary areas – particularly Women’s Studies, Sociology, Aboriginal Studies and Cultural Studies. Her books include, Gender & Sexuality: Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers (Sage, 2005), What is Feminism?: An Introduction to Feminist Theory (Sage, 1999) and Sexual Economyths: Conceiving a Feminist Economics (Allen & Unwin, 1994). Her analysis of hegemonic masculinity is the centre-piece of a symposium on the subject in Men & Masculinities (2008). Chris Beasley’s main interests are gender/sexuality studies, social and political theory, cultural studies, international politics, embodiment and ethics. She is currently writing a book on the politics of popular film, continuing shared research (with Carol Bacchi) on global ethics and embodied citizenship, and preparing a co-authored book on heterosexuality. Robert Davis (PhD, Harvard University; MFA, University of Southern California) is Professor of Film History and Production at California State University, Fullerton. He has written, particularly on Asian Cinema, for Film Criticism, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film-Philosophy and Senses of Cinema. He is a regular contributor to American Cinematographer, for which he has conducted extensive interviews on visual style with dozens of Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese directors, cinematographers and production designers. xi

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Santiago Fouz-Hernández lectures in Spanish Cinema at the University of Durham (UK). He is co-author of Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (I.B.Tauris, 2007) and co-editor of Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations (1982–2003) (Ashgate, 2004). His work on masculinities in contemporary Spanish and British cinemas has also been published in journals that include Romance Studies, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Men and Masculinities and New Cinemas. He is reviews editor of the journal Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (Intellect) and guest editor of the journal’s special issue on the male body (3.3). He is currently preparing a Spanishlanguage manuscript on representations of the body in European and NorthAmerican film, advertising and popular culture entitled Cuerpos de cine. Susan Hunt is a faculty associate at Santa Monica and Pasadena City Colleges. Her essays on the representation of sexuality and the mind/body split in films – co-authored with Peter Lehman – have appeared in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film, Framework, Jump Cut and the forthcoming Persistence of Whiteness. She and Lehman are currently writing a book on the same subject for Rutgers University Press. Rachael Langford is Senior Lecturer in French at the School of European Studies at Cardiff University. She has published widely on French and Francophone African film, literature and visual culture, and on nineteenth-century French culture. She coordinates a cross disciplinary research network on the representation of migration, mobility and identity in European cultures, and is currently preparing a monograph on genre in Francophone African film, and commencing a research project on representations of the Congo in Francophone textual and visual culture in the pre-Independence period. Peter Lehman is Director of the Center for Film, Media, and Popular Culture at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is author of Roy Orbison: The Invention of an Alternative Rock Masculinity and the revised, expanded second edition of Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. He is editor of Pornography: Film and Culture and Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. Vek Lewis lectures in Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has written on the articulation of gender and sexuality in Latin American literary and cinematic forms, mostly notably with respect to the representation of gender variant homosexual and trans subjectivities. His current line of work examines Mexican media texts and the production of gendered marginality. It

CONTRIBUTORS

centres on how mediatic discourse on contemporary urban minorities from certain locales interacts with the production and establishment of juridical frameworks. While interested in the way multimodal texts function socio-culturally as they produce, circulate and limit dominant knowledges about subjects, Lewis is also concerned with how publics make sense of, use and contest knowledges found in the cultural forms around them. His contribution on Mexican cinema and practices of codification, decodification and viewer spectatorship continues this critical focus. Tim Maloney is a graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/Television. He was director of the ABC– Disney Saturday morning animated series, Mrs Munger’s Classroom, and his artanimations have been shown in major galleries throughout the world and on Good Morning, America. He has published essays on copyright issues, the post-production pipeline and the experimental cinema of Craig Baldwin. He is currently Assistant Professor of Film History and Production at California State University, Fullerton. Gary Needham is a lecturer in the School of Arts, Communication and Culture, Nottingham Trent University. He is the co-editor of Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and has published on Hong Kong Cinema, Italian Cinema, film music, disco and American television. He is the co-editor of Queer TV (Routledge, 2008) and author of a monograph on Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Konrad Gar-Yeu Ng is an assistant professor in the Academy for Creative Media at the University of Hawai‘i at Ma-noa. Formerly, he was Curator of Film and Video at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and a film programmer for the Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival. He is author of the exhibition catalogue Won Ju Lim: In Many Things To Come (2006) and has published articles on cinema, race and gender in academic and popular journals. He teaches courses on the art, politics and history of global cinema and is currently working on a book about Asian cultural identity, politics and digital media. D. Cuong O’Neill is an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He completed his PhD from Yale University in Japanese Literature in 2002. He teaches courses in modern Japanese literature and aesthetics, post-war intellectual history and popular culture. His research interests include the novel in comparative perspective, critical theory and gender/sexuality studies. He has published essays on modern Japanese literature, literary criticism, translation and gender theory in journals including Japan Forum: The International Journal of Japanese

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Studies (2006) and Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture (2008). Alison Peirse is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull, where she teaches Horror Film, British Cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, and Film Theory and Analysis. Her research focuses on representations of gender, sexuality and the body in horror film and cult television. She has recently published articles on postfeminism and horror in contemporary television, and on the 1930s output of filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer. She is currently writing a research monograph on the male body in 1930s horror film. Heidi Schlipphacke is an associate professor of German and European Studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, USA and she is currently Visiting Associate Professor at Haverford College. She has published widely on the European Enlightenment, family and gender, Critical Theory, and post-war German film and literature in journals including Camera Obscura, The German Quarterly, Orbis Litterarum and The Lessing Yearbook. She recently completed a manuscript on nostalgia in post-war German literature and film, and she is currently working on a project on masculinity in post-war German cinema. Aparna Sharma is a film scholar and filmmaker keenly interested in the cultural implications of the cinema and its scope as a historical medium. Her filmmaking deploys a mix between theory and practice, deriving particularly from the disciplines of Visual Anthropology and Ethnography. Her recent PhD submission involves a thesis arguing for a regime of viewing ethnicity by mobilising modernist aesthetic practices such as montage. Her submission is supported by a short experimental documentary, Crossings in a Beautiful Time, which surrounds the Gujarati community in Cardiff. The film was premiered as an installation at the Next Wave Festival of Youth Art, Melbourne 2006. Aparna is a critic and reviewer for a spread of publications across the world including Leonardo Digital Reviews (MIT Press) and the Women’s Feature Service. She also serves on the editorial panel of the Oxford University Press.

Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without the hard work of the scholars who have contributed with their chapters. I have been extremely lucky to have been able to work with 14 extremely diligent and generous academics who have made the sometimes taxing job of editing an immensely pleasurable and rewarding experience. My main acknowledgement is to them. Peter Lehman deserves a special mention for agreeing to contribute to this collection and for his confidence in this project. His work in this field has been and still is a major source of inspiration for my own research and partly responsible for my drive to put this book together. I also thank all those scholars who submitted excellent proposals for this book, but whose work could not be included here. Durham University (UK) supported this project with a period of research leave in 2007 which allowed me to research and write my own contribution to this book, as well as to edit most of the manuscript. I conceived this project while working on a previous book on the male body in Spanish cinema. That earlier period of research was supported by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and British Academy grants and I would like to express my gratitude to those institutions. I am indebted to my editor Philippa Brewster for putting her trust in me once again and for her constant encouragement and support, and to everyone else who has been involved in the production of this book at I.B.Tauris, especially Gretchen Ladish and Jayne Hill. I would also like to thank Natascha Teunissen for granting me, on behalf of Kasander Film Company, permission to use the cover image (and also the image used in the introduction). On a more personal note, I would like to thank my partner Christian for his patience and constant support. He also developed my concept for the cover, produced the cover artwork and helped me with formatting issues in the final stages. As always, I thank my close family and friends, especially Mario and Ian, who have been around the longest, and are always there when I need them.

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Introduction: Mysterious Skin Santiago Fouz-Hernández The representation of the body has been extensively discussed in film studies since the 1970s. Following an initial emphasis on the study of the representation of the female body, the 1990s and 2000s have seen attention turn also to masculinity. In 1993 alone a number of key contributions to the field were published, with monographs by Peter Lehman, Yvonne Tasker and Steven Shaviro as well as edited collections by Cohan and Hark or Kirkham and Thumin. These books were pioneering in their studies of genres (from gladiator epics to comedy, horror, musical, melodrama, pornography, suspense or war films), stars (from Schwarzenegger, Stallone or Willis to Ford, Gable or Hudson) or specific films paying particular attention to masculinity and the male body. What connects these books is their critical approach to the wealth of criticism that, in its attempt to counteract the gender imbalance described in Mulvey’s much-discussed essay about visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975), focused almost exclusively on femininity (the female subject, the female gaze) and left nearly untouched ‘the secure and comfortable “norm” of masculinity’ (Cohan and Hark 1993: 2). The need for a shift of focus onto men and masculinities was clearly summarised by Lehman: ‘only after […] centring the male body will it be possible truly to de-centre it for it is precisely when the penis-phallus is hidden from view in patriarchy that it is most centred’ (1993: 5). Other important studies followed suit throughout the 1990s, notably by female authors. Among the most influential are Jeffords’s monograph on ‘hard bodies’ and masculinity in 1980s Hollywood cinema (1994) or Bordo’s (1999) book on the male body, which included a chapter on 1950s Hollywood films and references to the gay male body in more contemporary Hollywood comedies. Journals such as the Michigan Quarterly Review also published special issues on the male body in the mid-1990s.1 The field has been equally productive since 2000. Lehman published a new collection of essays on bodies and masculinities in 2001 (Lehman 2001a); Holmlund a monograph on male and female bodies in Hollywood film in 2002; Powrie, Davies and Babington an edited collection on masculinities (including a section on male bodies) in 2004; and journals such as Paragraph and Men and Masculinities also published special 1

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issues on male bodies in 2003 and 2007 respectively (see Still (2003) and Stephens and Lorentzen (2007a)). While there is no room here for a detailed summary of the ongoing discussions in the field (see Powrie, Davies and Babington for a useful overview (2004: 1–5)), it is crucial to note that, as evidenced in the titles and short descriptions of many of these books, most of the work to date on male bodies in film studies has focused on Hollywood cinema. One of the main aims of this volume is precisely to readdress the balance by offering a wider and more representative picture of the depiction of the male body in contemporary cinema. This book borrows its title from Gregg Araki’s 2005 film, itself borrowed from the Scott Heim’s novel on which it is based.2 Araki’s Mysterious Skin is the story of two eight-year-old boys who, sexually abused by their high school paedophile sports coach (Bill Sage), find different ways of coming to terms with this memory (or lack thereof). For over a decade, Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), now a shy and unconfident teenager, still living in the small Kansas town where the abuse took place, suffers from inexplicable nosebleeds and blackouts, struggles to remember what happened at the time of the abuse, trying to find an explanation in an imagined alien abduction. By contrast, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), faces the harsh reality of a rent boy now living in New York. The ‘mysterious skin’, seen from Neil’s perspective, might refer to the male skin of the mysterious men that he had been sexually attracted to from an early age (the coach, his sister’s boyfriend) and now that of his older customers (one of them affected by Kaposi sarcoma asks only for a back massage because he ‘needs to be touched’). Brian’s own skin conversely, is mysteriously marked with what he thinks may be evidence of his alien abduction but also frequently stained with his nosebleeds. Notably, the more resilient Neil (barely distressed by his various STD episodes) is physically hurt by a client and bleeds for the first time just before his re-encounter with Brian back in Kansas ten years later. Like Araki’s previous films, the male body is presented to the viewer as a site of intense desire, pleasure and pain. As in some of the examples from other films discussed in this volume, the camera contemplates the male body in a way that makes us feel it, provoking an enhanced ‘carnal’ experience in the spectator, to use Sobchack’s term (2004). Mysterious Skin is thus an appropriate title for this collection of essays on representations of male bodies in world cinema in that, although the male body may have ceased to hide behind its status as ‘the norm’, it seems nonetheless that there are still many mysteries to resolve; indeed, even in their attempt to deconstruct dominant representations of ‘the’ male body (one that is markedly ‘male’, heterosexual, young, white and often Anglo–American), existing studies of masculinities and male bodies in cinema often focus on Hollywood productions.

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1: Ewan McGregor in The Pillow Book. Kasander Film Company.

One of the films that I had in mind when conceiving this book was Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996). Appropriately, the film brings together the main three areas that are explored in this collection: national and ethnic identities; the body as a cinematic canvas; and the vulnerability and versatility of those gender and sexual identities usually associated with ‘masculinity’. The choice of Scottish actor Ewan McGregor as the male protagonist of that film adds a layer of complexity to his role as an ‘English’ translator living in Hong Kong. As I have argued elsewhere (Fouz-Hernández 2005), his job as a translator who lives abroad and is fluent in four languages, further resists those identifications with Britain that are suggested elsewhere in the film: he feigns suicide like in Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet and he lives in what at the time was still a British colony at a time of flux, just before its return to China. As shown on the cover of this book, his markedly white Anglo-Saxon body is written on with Japanese characters – and later made into the pages of a book inspired by a Japanese text (Sei Shônagon’s The Pillow Book).3 The vertical direction of the writing in itself undermines (phallic) Western understandings of linguistic linearity. Indeed, Jerome’s (McGregor’s) body is also susceptible to other types of deconstruction. While the noticeable size of his penis (even when flaccid) may suggest a phallic type of masculinity, this contrasts not only with the vertical writing on his body, but also with his willingness to have his skin written on by his female lover Nagiko (Vivian Wu) and later inspected by the male publisher (Yoshi Oida) and the calligraphers that transcribe the text. Jerome’s posture and gestures when revealing his ‘book’ to the publisher suggest a willingness to be looked at traditionally associated with female stars (Mulvey 1975) and reminiscent of the

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female (decidedly not male) strip show and fashion business (see Figure 1). His gender versatility is thus contained in his adaptability as an ‘active’ calligrapher and a passive canvas which, in turn, is linked to his ambiguous sexuality. Beyond its deconstruction of national, gender and sexual identities, Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, also opens itself up to a number of readings of film as a corporeal experience. The narrative calls for a constant inspection of the male body in all shot types while it is shaven, written on, checked by the publisher and calligraphers and so on. The cinema screen, often split in this film, becomes the perfect metaphor for the skin as canvas. Like the screen, Jerome’s body will be later split, while his shaved and flawless skin will form the medium on which part of the story is written. As highlighted in the film’s press book, the calligraphic style used for Jerome was the most sensual of all the books, applied as if to describe his anatomy and ‘caress his skin with words’ (Kasander and Wigman 1996). The visual contrast established between the male body in all its beautiful plenitude and its later destruction in death (internally by pill ingestion and externally with razor-sharp cuts into the corpse’s skin shown in close-up as the skin is removed from the flesh, dried and made into the pages of an actual book) further emphasise the vulnerability of a male body which is no longer to be perceived as monolithic, hard and invincible. As mentioned above, the areas exemplified in this short analysis of The Pillow Book form the three key themes explored in this book. Inevitably, these areas overlap and there are frequent intersections between all the chapters. Whereas a ‘geographical’ division of the book might have proven an appropriate way to structure it, it would also have been somewhat deceptive. Despite the wide range of genres, films, directors and stars discussed here, this book makes no claims to global coverage. Whereas the films discussed are to some extent representative of the cinematic traditions of the various countries of origin in the last twenty years or so, the chapters were not conceived as studies of ‘national’ cinemas. It should also be noted that, although some of the essays in this book draw in part upon studies of Hollywood films to reach nation-specific conclusions, they do so with the aim of opening up debates that will shed new light on future interpretations of mainstream Hollywood productions. Partly due to the global influence of Hollywood, representational politics and conceptions of masculinity and the male body are perhaps less differentiated than one might have expected in the films studied here. Indeed, many of the essays in the first section of the book, about ethnic and national identities, engage in an open dialogue with Hollywood. Abrams, for example, focuses on the representation of the Jewish body in mainstream Hollywood films, while Beasley and Langford refer to Hollywood models of masculinity as an immediate reference point to define

INTRODUCTION

those of Australian and Francophone African films. Conversely, Ng reminds us that the norms used to study Hollywood cinema should not be used to measure ‘other cinemas’ and Sharma’s essay makes a point of studying Indian cinema beyond the big Bollywood productions that international audiences have come to associate with Indian cinema. Nathan Abrams’s essay explores the idea that the apparent increase in representation of Jewish male bodies in Hollywood cinema has brought about subtler representations that could suggest that Jews are more integrated into mainstream society. Beyond the traditional two-tiered representations of tough and queer Jews, in its extensive analysis of films that include Spielberg’s recent Munich (2005) or the American Pie and the X Men sagas, the chapter identifies a relatively wide range of representations that take into consideration religious subtleties and do not shy away from nudity or discussions of the circumcised penis as a source of laughter as opposed to its most traditional association with suffering and the Holocaust. In turn, Heidi Schlipphacke’s essay about the male body in recent German films interestingly focuses on how the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust has affected German male identities. She argues that the success abroad of a particular type of German film that tends to focus on the past and ‘the abnormality of Germany’ (in particular period films such as Der Untergang/Downfall (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004) and Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others (dir. Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)), contrasts with the wish to be ‘normal’ marked by the German effort to present itself as a friendly and welcoming nation during the hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2006. Yet, a number of national productions successful at home seem to present what she calls, based on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), a ‘schizophrenic’ male body that has come about as a result of the necessary break-up from the past and the lack of father figures and appropriate models of masculinity. In films such as Das weiße Rauschen/The White Sound (dir. Hans Weingartner, 2001) or Lola rennt/Run Lola Run (dir. Tom Tykwer, 1998), the bodies of representative German actors Daniel Brühl or Moritz Bleibtreu respectively often seem lost and disorientated, as shown by their positioning in the margins of the frame or in oppressively enclosed spaces. Beyond the Nazi past, the unification of Germany has also impacted on notions of national identities and the German male body. The disjuncture between the past and the present also haunts the other chapters in the section. Konrad Gar-Yeu Ng analyses Wong’s trilogy of nostalgia films about relationships between men and women in 1960s Hong Kong. Through a detailed analysis of A-Fei Zhengzhuan/Days of Being Wild (1991), Huayang Nianhua/In the Mood for Love (2000) and, especially, 2046 (2003), the chapter criticises the notion of ‘Chineseness’ as a single ethnic identity. Using Deleuze

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as a starting point, Ng argues that the palimpsest Chinese male bodies in Wong’s films embody a critical temporality in which the cinematic form of Chinese cultural identity becomes ‘a state of permanent crisis’. The use of the same actor Tony Leung and his character Chow throughout the trilogy with ever so slight physical changes in each instalment, further complicates the notion of any fixed identity by association with Leung’s own star persona and previous performances. Chris Beasley’s essay on Australian male bodies is equally critical of any notion of hegemonic masculinity. She calls for a revision of what she regards as a monolithic account of the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in Connell’s work and proposes the consideration of supra- and sub-hegemonic masculinities, arguing that, even at a local level, understandings of ‘the hegemonic’ are necessarily plural. Cinematic representations of the Australian male have varied according to their context. She uses Paul Hogan’s iconic characterisation as Mick Dundee in Crocodile Dundee (dir. Peter Faiman, 1986) as an example. Despite what foreign audiences may perceive as an excessive and even camp representation of the stereotypical Outback Aussie man, in the film, North America becomes feminised (even tamed) by the brutish, nature-wise, idealised Australian man. Elsewhere, the identity of the ‘Australian’ male body may be determined by his various states of undress. In comparison with the colonial suited ‘supra hegemon’, the Australian is portrayed as somewhat primitive, sun-weathered working-class ‘bloke’, revealing his wiry musculature and overall relaxed manners. Yet, as seen in films such as Rabbit Proof Fence (dir. Philip Noyce, 2001) or The Tracker (dir. Rolf De Heer, 2001), his position with regards the aboriginal male is one of white superiority. He may not wear a suit, but wears some clothes and is usually seen standing up, in contrast with the aboriginal male who is often semi-nude and literally placed lower, closer to the ground, than the white Australian. Some of these ideas are developed by Rachael Langford in her analysis of the Western genre in Francophone African films. After a useful revision of the main interpretations of the American Western in terms of gender and sexuality (from those that regard the Western as a hyper-masculine and hyper-heterosexual genre, to those that focus on the implicit homoerotic nature of many of these films), Langford discusses gender issues of the French colonial discourse. The core of her essay analyses the representation of the male body in Francophone African films such as Tilaï/The Law (1990), Samba Traoré (1992) and Kini et Adams/Kini and Adams (1997) (both directed by Idrissa Ouédraogo) or Sissako’s Bamako (2006), and argues that the use of common tropes of the American Western film provides a critical intertext of Western cultural and political domination through an engaging dialogue between America, Africa and France.

INTRODUCTION

As already noted, in the essay on Indian cinema that closes the first section, Aparna Sharma draws the line between Bollywood and Indian cinema to focus on the film Daayara/The Square Circle (dir. Amol Palekar, 1996) and explore its subversion of traditional Hindu views of masculinity and the male body through cross-dressing. The film is a love story between two characters, a male transvestite and a young female who has been a victim of rape. The woman, who will have to wear men’s clothing herself in order to find work and eventually seek revenge on the men who raped her, frees herself of previous prejudices about cross-dressers, induced by institutionalised Hindu religion. In an analysis drawing on Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, Sharma argues that cross-dressing destabilises dominant notions of masculine identities and the body in Hindu societies, where the transvestite is seen as a pariah with a biological defect. The nomadic experiences of these characters reflect a spiritual journey that is visually emphasised through the use of long shots that integrate the characters in the lush landscape of east coastal India. The film thus ‘naturalises’ the alternative identities of these characters as it expresses a nostalgia for the rural that, in itself, contains a critique of the urban-oriented Bollywood productions and the heroic image of the Indian male that they uniformly favour. The second section of the book, ‘Feeling the Body’ includes four essays that, despite touching on elements of national identities in Vietnam, France, Spain and Britain, discuss the male body in more visual terms. Robert Davis and Tim Maloney analyse three films by Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung – Mùi dud u xanh/The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Xich Lo/Cyclo (1995), and À la verticale de l’été/Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000) – where the prominence of the male body is significant. In a close analysis of four key scenes based on Sontag’s ‘erotics of the art’ approach, they argue that Tran’s films encourage a heightened sensorial experience in the spectator. This is partly achieved through the use of unusual editing techniques and the tendency to shoot the male body from angels or poses that defy Hollywood conventions. Gary Needham’s essay on the use of the close-up in shots of the penis in contemporary French cinema develops the idea of enhanced corporality in film. He suggests that, whereas international audiences have come to expect nudity from French films, the attention paid to the male body, and to the male genitals in particular, has gained a notable prominence in films not necessarily ‘queer’ as such but which favour non-hegemonic gazes. Drawing on Mary Ann Doane’s (2003) work on the close-up and Laura U. Marks’s (2000) on haptic visuality, Needham explores how the filming techniques and props used in films such as Gäel Morel’s Le clan (The Clan) (2004) successfully draw us ‘closer’ to a male body ideal. Such an ‘ideal’ can often be deceptive, as in Ducastel and Martinez’s

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Crustacés et coquillages/Cockles and Muscles (2005), but also pleasurable for the queer spectator. Some of these issues are also crucial to my essay on the films of Catalan director Ventura Pons. Focusing on three films that span across three decades, my choice of films engages with key tropes of the representation of the male body in Pons’s extensive oeuvre. Starting with the documentary Ocaña, retrat intermitent/ Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait (1978) I argue that the approach to male nudity and male bodies in this film is iconic of the Spanish democratic transition. The film not only favours the perspective of a male transvestite, but in the year in which censorship was officially abolished, it encourages explicit discussions of homosexual sex and features male frontal nudity at a time when female nudity was prominent in Spanish film. The vivid descriptions of Ocaña’s sexual experiences draw the spectator closer to the male bodies being discussed. In Carícies/Caresses (1997) the proximity to the body is achieved through the contrast between scenes of explicit violence and the film’s only caresses at the very end. Further to this, the ‘fleshiness’ of the film is enhanced once again through dialogue and descriptions of sexual organs. Finally, in his Englishlanguage film Food of Love (2001) the sense of corporality materialises in the visual comparison between the city of Barcelona (often celebrated in Pons’s films) and the body of young American tourist Paul (Kevin Bishop), as well as in the comparison established between his body and those of his older lovers, another trope of Pons’s cinema. Alison Peirse’s study of the British horror film Dog Soldiers (dir. Neil Marshall, 2002) engages with Halberstam’s (2007) view that bodies that splatter challenge the gender stability dependent on notions such as the hard and phallic male body. Contrary to what may be suggested at first by the presence of squaddies in a training exercise on the Scottish highlands, the presence of werewolves in the area will undo any preconceptions about the genre. Not only is the werewolf a girl, but, in Peirse’s reading, the traditional role of the ‘Final Girl’ in the horror movie, will be here allocated to a man. Peirse questions gender-specific notions of masochistic spectatorship as well as gendered associations of abjection with the feminine. Perhaps even more intensively than in other films up to this point of the book, the male body will be destroyed and dissected in a visceral disintegration of the phallic male body, even when the most horrid moments of such destruction occur off-camera. The three essays included in the final section of the book further challenge established conceptions of masculinity and the male body in their respective cultural backgrounds, this time focusing on sex and sexuality. Vek Lewis’s study of two key contemporary Mexican films – Y tu mamá también/And Your Mother

INTRODUCTION

Too (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) and Zapata: el sueño del héroe/Zapata: Dream of a Hero (dir. Alfonso Arau, 2004) – focuses on the films’ deconstruction of the quintessential Mexican macho as seen in the figure of the charro in Mexican Golden Age cinema. The strong homoeroticism of Cuarón’s coming-of-age story provoked a certain degree of disquiet in Mexican audiences, unaccustomed to facing male nudity on the screen, specially from behind, where the male body is at its most vulnerable, an ‘open body’ associated with Colonialism and the mythical raped Indian woman (the Malinche). Even more controversial was the choice of pop singer Alejandro Fernández to incarnate the iconic revolutionary macho hero Zapata in Arau’s version. Not only was the singer-come-actor surrounded by rumours about his sexual orientation, but his performance in the film lacked the physical resilience and sexual prowess associated with the mythical figure. The Taiwanese film analysed by D. Cuong O’Neill also debunks a mythical symbol of masculinity in its own socio-historical context by queering it in a more contemporary context. Tsai’s Bu san/Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) reinvents the kinaesthetic male bodies of the martial arts film by projecting King Hu’s martial arts film Long men ke zhan/Dragon Gate Inn (1967) in a decaying cinema theatre in its closing night. The cinema is now used by gay men to cruise in the semi-darkness of the surroundings. As O’Neill points out, although Hu’s male bodies were celebrated more for their nobility than their muscularity, the editing and careful choreography of the hyper-masculine supernaturallymoving bodies were associated with some sort of indestructible patriarchal power. Interestingly, some of the actors of the original film reappear here as ageing cruisers in a nostalgic confrontation with the more agile, young and perfected images of themselves projected on the screen. O’Neill’s analysis explores ways in which the kinaesthesia of the bodies on the screen contrasts with the awkward movements of the cruisers in the darkness and how the dialogue and soundtrack of the original film acquires a new meaning in Tsai’s film, thus further heightening the deconstruction of Hu’s celebration of a particular type of Taiwanese male body. The final essay of the collection is a contribution by Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt. Their analysis of the French–German co-production Twentynine Palms (dir. Bruno Dumont, 2002) illustrates their concept of ‘the body guy’ (usually rivalled by the ‘mind guy’). The authors trace this mind/body duality back to 1930s Hollywood, with special emphasis on well-known examples such as The Piano (dir. Campion, 1993), Legends of the Fall (dir. Zwick, 1994) or Titanic (dir. Cameron, 1997) among others. In Dumont’s film, David’s (David Wissak) masculinity seems threatened by what could be perceived as a penis-size issue and by an unexpected

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episode in which he is physically humiliated in front of his Russian/French girlfriend Katya (Yekaterina Golubeva), with disastrous consequences for both. By somehow closing the circle opened with the discussion of circumcision in the first chapter, Lehman and Hunt’s discussion of the representation of the penis brings the collection to a close by appropriately drawing attention to an issue that should not be taken for granted in studies on the male body (as Lehman himself has argued in his ground-breaking Running Scared (1993: 24)). Although this book is a collection of essays that cover a wide range of genres and national cinemas, the essays have been selected to provide an overview of representations of male bodies in contemporary cinema worldwide. Readers are encouraged to read the entire collection, not just separate essays, and thus discover that, while the differences in representations of male bodies around the world reveal the vulnerability of ‘masculinity’ and ‘the male body’ as uniform or incontestable concepts, the similarities can also be surprising.

NOTES 1

2 3

The impact of these texts is perhaps best evidenced by their enormous popularity and the frequency with which they are quoted (for example, in this collection, even fifteen years later). Furthermore, the special issues of the Michigan Quarterly Review were republished in book format – see Goldstein (1997) and Lehman’s influential book was revised for a second edition in 2007. Shaviro, on the other hand, has recently published an article that revisits his own book and outlines what he now sees as the shortcomings of his frequently cited work (see Shaviro 2008). I would like to thank Tom Whittaker (Queen Mary, University of London) for drawing my attention to this film upon its DVD release. I am grateful to Jo Lumley (Newcastle University, UK) for his help deciphering the Japanese writing.

1 From Jesus to Jeremy: The Jewish Male Body on Film, 1990 to Present

Nathan Abrams

I. INTRODUCTION

Representations of the Jewish male body in mainstream Anglo-American cinema have traditionally fallen into four categories: invisible; idealised – replaced by the gentile body playing the Jewish one; stereotyped; and victimised and humiliated. Recently, however, representations of the Jewish male body on film have entered a new phase. Not only have they multiplied, they have also taken on different forms, marking a radical rupture with the past. Cinema and television have witnessed a shift towards more subtle, nuanced, playful and even outrageous representations of the Jewish male body. In contrast to earlier representations, the male Jewish body is not just as a site of suffering, humiliation, victimisation, stereotyping, idealisation and sexual inadequacy but has also become a site of identification, pride and sexual prowess where male Jewish bodies, in all their variety, are openly and proudly identified as Jewish. Although there has been a trickle of such representations over the course of the twentieth century, recently it has become a veritable flood, and the list of films is numerous and continuing. Certainly, the Jewish male body has become almost ubiquitous on present-day screens. One need only mention Sandler and Stiller, as well as Jack Black and Steven Berkoff to prove the case. This essay will survey these changed and changing but recent representations of the Jewish male body in recent mainstream cinema. However, I propose not to look at Israeli cinema here. In addition I will only discuss those characters (whether real or fictional) who are identified as Jewish in 13

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their films regardless of their actual ethnic status. This is because Ashkenazi Jews (those of Eastern and Central European descent) are now, in the main, considered white. Combined with the prevalence of circumcision, particularly in America, Jewish men are thus harder to identify, particularly in contrast to those who, by dint of their skin colour, cannot hide their ethnic and/or racial origins.

I I . A H I S TO R Y I N B R I E F ( S ) O F T H E C I N E M AT I C J E W I S H M A L E B O DY

In general self-images of the Jewish male have fallen into two opposing categories: the ‘tough’ Jew, that is the idealised hyper-masculine, militarised and muscled, though not very intellectual, Jew of the Zionist project (Yosef 2004: 2; Brienes 1990) and the ‘queer’ Jew: the effeminate, gentle and delicate Jew of traditional Eastern European Jewish culture who devoted his life to the study of the Torah (Boyarin 1997: 23). Both models of masculinity were ‘openly resistant to and critical of the prevailing ideology of “manliness” dominant in Europe’ (Boyarin 1997: 23). Cinematic representations of the Jewish male body in American cinema have navigated distinct paths between these two dichotomous poles. As mentioned at the outset, these responses can be divided into four very rough categories since the beginning of the twentieth century, according to the different stages of Jewish life in America. Of course, these distinctions are not watertight and we see exceptions in every period. The first category is that of the ‘Invisible Jews’, c. 1900–47, the period, as described by Neal Gabler in his An Empire of Their Own (1988), in which Jews were hidden on screen both literally and figuratively. Jewish actors changed their names, as their Jewish bosses considered that their predominantly white and working-class audiences did not want to watch Jews on screen. This period encapsulated what Sander Gilman has called ‘the desire for invisibility, the desire to become “white”’ (1991: 235). The two major exceptions to this general invisibility were The Jazz Singer (1927) and Crossfire (1947). Yet, even here, in the former film’s depiction of Al Jolson playing an Orthodox Jew seeking to assimilate into the wider American culture by rejecting the ways of his cantor father and adopting the profession of singing jazz in blackface, it is the desire to become hidden that is noticeable. While in the latter, the Jew is largely concealed: as a murder victim, his actual screen time is minimal since the film devoted itself to exposing the roots of racism and bigotry rather than its consequences. The second category was that of the ‘Idealised Jew’, c.1947–67. The post-war period has been described as a ‘golden age’ in American Jewish history. Hitler had been defeated, overt and explicit anti-Semitism had been made unfashionable to be replaced by the more ‘gentleman’s agreement’ type which itself was slowly

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being eroded. Restrictive practices in hiring, university entrance and the professions were being destroyed. Yet, this did not make Jews any more visible on screen. Instead, rather than being hidden, the Jewish body was idealised, de-Semitised and played by non-Jews. The major examples include Gregory Peck as Philip Schuyler Green in Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) – Hollywood’s other post-war movie about anti-Semitism alongside Crossfire but ironically made by the only Jewish studio not headed by a Jew, Twentieth Century Fox – Charlton Heston as Moses and Ben Hur in The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959) respectively and Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan in Exodus (1960). By 1967 the ‘golden age’ had come to an end and, if Commentary magazine is to be believed, then it had been replaced by an age of anxiety, stirred by Jewish reactions and non-Jewish reactions to the Six Day War which led to the respective growth of what has been called a ‘Holocaust consciousness’, as well as anti-Zionism often allied with anti-Semitism. The result was the period of ‘Stereotyped Jews’, c.1967–89, in which representations of Jews, according to Elliot B. Gertel, ‘became more aggressive, more pointed. There was a determined and concerted effort to stand up for Jewish identity and to throw Jewish practices back into the face of a film culture that had ignored them or shunted them aside’ (2003: 2). But this ‘explosion of Jewish references, associations, and even ambivalences’ (Gertel 2003: 2), betrayed a contradictory impulse: a retreat into affectionate nostalgia as symbolised by Fiddler on the Roof (1971), versus neurotic, anxious stereotypes as mastered by Woody Allen whose richest period was from 1971–89, or a combination of both as depicted by the films of Mel Brooks. Overlapping with all of these previous periods and reaching its zenith in 1993 with Schindler’s List is that of the victimised and humiliated Jew, the site of suffering most usually during the Holocaust. In direct contrast, however, stood the criminal gangster and killer. Rarely, however, were these Jewish male bodies presented as spectacle or erotic. Furthermore, underlying these visual characterisations of the male Jew on screen were certain recurring stereotypical physical tics, particularly in American cinema, which David Desser has listed as fast-talking intelligence, physical weakness small stature and sexual entanglement with non-Jewish female bodies (2001: 269, 275, 276). Since 1990, however, representations of Jews have not only multiplied but also taken on a new form, which, within the context of a century of Anglo-American cinema, marks a radical rupture with the past. There had been a trickle of such representations hitherto but from 1990 onwards, it became a veritable flood. It is marked by the advent of Seinfeld in 1990 – which, according to the Nielsen ratings, was the most popular sitcom of the 1990s – a show about nothing which featured four nasty, selfish, self-serving, venal characters. Since then, the list is numerous

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and continuing. These representations both play with and debunk the underlying stereotypes listed by Desser, as well as the poles of the East European/Zionist Jewish self-image.

I I I . S O L I TA R Y, N A S T Y, B R U T I S H A N D S H O R T

Since Seinfeld the number of mean, nasty and venal Jews has proliferated on screen. These Jewish bodies are often also represented as physically unattractive and un-erotic: short, ugly, fat, balding, frequently with brutish, self-serving and selfish characteristics to match. Such physical drawbacks are not ameliorated by wit, intelligence or sense of humour. Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski (1998) is a complete reversal of the previous stereotypes, Sobchak is not only a slightly deranged Vietnam veteran (most likely suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder), he is – atypically – a convert to Judaism, having done so at the request of his wife; and even though he has since divorced from her he still maintains his religious identity and is very proud of it: he claims insistently, ‘Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax…[shouting] You’re goddamn right I’m living in the fucking past!’ and ‘I’m as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevya!’ He quotes Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism. He even maintains a level of Jewish Orthodox practice. He explains that he can’t bowl (‘roll’) or drive on Saturdays because he is ‘shomer shabbos’ and absolutely refuses to do so unless it is an emergency. Walter is proud of his Jewishness and does not mind shouting about it. At the same time, however, he is an unattractive figure both physically and mentally. He is overweight, given to frequent profanity (‘This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass,’ he frequently warns) and is close to unhinged – he waves his gun in the face of an opponent whom he believes is cheating at bowling. The irony here is that size and beard apart, he couldn’t be farther from Fiddler on the Roof’s cute, cuddly, kitsch, aphorism-spouting Tevya, itself merely a fantasised, Americanised image of shtetl-dwelling Jewry. Another figure who fits into this category is Ron Jeremy. Although Jeremy is known predominantly as a porn star, he has made a number of crossover appearances into mainstream cinema such as 52 Pick-Up (1986), Killing Zoe (1994) and most significantly Pornstar: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001). If his viewers did not already know it, the latter film outted Ron as a proud Jew. His longevity in the adult industry aside (he began his porn career in the 1970s), Jeremy is a highly unusual porn star in that he is not conventionally attractive: described in Pornstar as ‘small, fat and very hairy’, his overweight and unkempt body has earned him the nickname ‘the Hedgehog’. Although presented in erotic

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scenarios, his body is the obverse of the normative models of masculine sexual attractiveness. One scholar has gone as far as to describe him as ‘repulsive’ (Shelton 2002: 119). Nonetheless, this very repulsiveness has helped Jeremy’s cinematic Jewish body to achieve iconic status. In part this is due to his positioning in erotic filmic texts, his longevity in the industry as well as his above-average penis (this will be discussed in more detail below), but no doubt it is mainly due to his collapsing of the boundaries between porn’s hyper-masculine excess and the average, everyday male physique. As Gill’s film states, he is ‘a hero for the common man’.

I V. J E W S I N S P A C E

At the end of his History of the World, Part 1 (1983) Mel Brooks offers up a humorous sequence depicting an alleged sequel to his preview of ‘Hitler on Ice’ entitled ‘Jews in Space’, a sci-fi spectacular featuring Star-of-David-shaped spaceships, flown by obviously Orthodox Jews, singing of the glories of ‘defending the Hebrew race’ (Desser 2001: 267). But where Brooks offered up such a vision for parody, recent cinema has actually realised such visions seriously. In Serenity (2005), Mr Universe (David Krumholtz), is a reclusive techno-geek who lives alone on a moon with his love-bot ‘wife’, Lenore. He has a great affinity for data, and is capable of intercepting nearly any transmission or recording in the universe. He is also identified as Jewish when seen stepping on a cloth-wrapped glass while wearing a yarmulke in a video clip of his wedding and after his death, stones are placed on his grave in the Jewish tradition. Likewise Independence Day (1996) features what Rogin calls a ‘neurasthenic hysteric’ Jewish character (Rogin 1998: 48) in David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum). Stereotypically, like Mr Universe, and building upon his previous roles in The Fly (1986), Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World (1997) Goldblum is an intellectual, a scientist, a ‘Jewish computer whizz’ (Rogin 1998: 49). He is a talker or ‘Jew is mouth as nervous brain’ as Rogin has put it (Rogin 1998: 49) who marries his non-Jewish wife not once but twice (the Jew–Shiksa relationship is a key part of Desser’s typology). Thus, Serenity and Independence Day feature smart nerdy, weak, Jewish bodies, defined only by their intellectual rather than physical capacities – both are scientists. Neither is shown nude which stands in clear contrast to Independence Day’s Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith), the fast-talking, wise-cracking black fighter pilot, whom we first meet semi-naked in bed. It says much that Hollywood has not yet considered reversing the roles that Goldblum and Smith play so that we see the Jewish fighter pilot and the black scientist.

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Goldblum and Krumholtz are both still ‘queer Jews’, whose bodies are reinforced by the presence of further ‘queer’ Jews. David’s father, Julius (Judd Hirsch), is a Yiddish-speaking male hysteric Jewish mother stand-in and Harvey Fierstein is Levinson’s panicked and somewhat effeminate sidekick, Marty Gilbert, who not only calls his mother from under his desk but also his psychoanalyst ‘Dr Katz’ from his car phone. Indeed, ‘queer’ Jewish male intellectual rather than bodily values are valorised by both films, as it is ‘Yiddishe kopf’ or ‘Jewish brains’ that brings salvation (Gertel 2003: 132). This is most notable in Independence Day for it is Jewish hypochondria – a key device of Jewish cinematic queerness – that becomes a key plot device as when David’s dad asks him if he’s getting a cold, he gets the idea for using a computer virus as a weapon (Rogin 1998: 57). Yet, the sense of the ‘tough Jew’ also creeps in, for as David and Steven prepare to go into orbit together, a black lab assistant rushes up with a yarmulke and prayer book for the religious ceremony that will consecrate their journey into space, and some of the warplanes which help to destroy the alien invasion bear not only the American flag but also the Star of David, consequently invoking the State of Israel and its alliance with America. Incidentally, brief shots of Israeli fighter pilots standing in front of an Israeli flag and jets invoke the ‘tough Jews’ of the Zionist project. Furthermore, ultimately, a shift has taken place for while both Mr Universe and Levinson are contemporary incarnations of Dr Spock they, unlike him, have come out of the ethnic-religious closet to unashamedly assert their Jewish (‘queer’) values. Where William Shatner and Lenoard Nimoy could only refer to their Jewishness by submerging it into allegory (see Shandler (1999) for more on this), Goldblum and Krumholtz are open about theirs.

V. J E W S A S J A W S

In contrast to erstwhile depictions of the Jew as victim, recent cinema has represented the Jew as assassin. Although this is not a new development, in terms of Jewish manhood such films present contradictory sentiments. In Munich (2005), Spielberg’s dramatised reconstruction of the Israeli government’s response to the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, three of the five members of the assassination team sent to exact revenge – all but one of whom are played by non-Jews – are killed. On the other hand, the team reverses the traditional paradigm of the Jew-as-victim in having the Jews as killers driven by bloodlust (Jews as Jaws perhaps), as well as vengeance. Steve (Daniel Craig), the South African driver, articulates these sentiments unambiguously: ‘Don’t fuck with the Jews.’ The team is seen killing in cold blood and sometimes taking intemperate

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and undisciplined revenge. Jewish violence is presented as brutal, heartless and methodical, not the expression of individuals willingly sacrificing themselves for a just cause but the coldly mechanical and calculated product of the intelligence apparatus of an aggressive state. While some of the individual agents on the team may have moral qualms about their task, their bosses are presented in no such way. Jewish officials are shown to be zealous, chilly and clearly using the team who are instructed ‘You’ll do what the terrorists do. Do you think they report back to home base?’ At the same time, the film taps into enduring ethnic slurs concerning Jews and their relationship to money, for they are presented as nearly obsessive on the subject, suggesting a cavalier attitude towards human life. The team leader Avner (Eric Bana) needs to obtain receipts for every expenditure no matter how trivial and his fellow team members fret over such things as the price per kill; their first target, one of them notes ruefully, ‘cost us, by my calculations, $352,000’. They are thus clearly the ‘tough Jews’ of the Zionist project. Furthermore, the assassination team and the larger organisation of which it is a part are not simply represented by intellectual values as they are not as efficient as its global reputation suggests. Mistakes, blunders and errors recur throughout the movie. The bomb maker played by Mathieu Kassovitz is recruited without anyone realising that his actual skill was in dismantling such devices. One bomb he makes is so large that an Israeli honeymooning with her Lebanese husband in the next room to the target is blinded by the explosion. He later dies when a bomb he is creating (accidentally?) explodes (although, interestingly, we never see his dead body). Throughout the film, Avner and his team show an undue reliance on a shadowy French outfit for their logistics, weapons, intelligence and safe houses which leads to one mix-up when both Israelis and Palestinians share a room for the night. Undoubtedly, this sequence was deliberately engineered by Spielberg and the screenwriter Tony Kushner in order to produce an (artificial) meeting between the two sides in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But, it serves to undermine the competence of the Israelis. Finally, only two of the original five members survive and one of those is killed by a female mercenary. The death of a male at the hands of a female not only problematises his masculine identity but also in death his body is represented as passive and hence feminine, submissive and impotent. In an echo of the 1950s the film resorts to using non-Jews in the lead roles. The team could be described as handsome, scrupulous, exceptionally well-mannered Jewish agents and, as played by Eric Bana, Avner is certainly a fine-looking and loving husband (even if he does abandon his family and home for the greater cause of his homeland). As the only member of the team depicted naked, he is the fulfilment of the Zionist project of a ‘Jewry of muscles’. His body is toned, taut and fit. Yet, in general, Munich shied away from revealing the musculature of its

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protagonists, with the exception of Avner on rare occasions. He is virile and shown having lovingly flushed sex with his beautiful pregnant wife (Ayelet Zurer) and even endangering himself by flying home illicitly from his secret mission to see the birth of his child which, in itself, proves his potency as a father even while he is not so proficient as a killer. Ultimately, Avner is presented as a good father (he takes his family to the relative safety of pre-9/11 Brooklyn), but a bad killer (although one wonders if he was cast for his previous incarnations as psychos and killers from Chopper (2000) through to Black Hawk Down (2001), The Hulk (2003) and Troy (2004)) – in the end he and his team are ineffectual against the hydra-like rise of terror – and a bad Israeli as he abandons his homeland for the United States. Another tough Jew is the antagonist in a completely different genre of film. Ian McKellen plays the mutant leader Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, in the X-Men trilogy (2000, 2003, 2006) and is presented as both victim and victimiser. The opening scene of X-Men (2000) depicts him as a young boy being separated from his parents at a Nazi death camp in Poland during the Second World War. Via this sequence we are then led to believe that like many others his entire family was murdered. He is thus scarred and seemingly no different from the millions of other Holocaust victims. His status as victim/survivor is reinforced both in narrative terms (‘I have heard these arguments before. It was a long time ago’) and visually/physically by a glimpse of the tattooed number on his arm. At the same time, however, Lehnsherr/Magneto is a mutant who possesses special powers – in his case, as the name implies, a telepathic ability to generate a magnetic field which can bend or deflect metal objects such as guns and bullets. While the mutant powers is a new twist on the representation of the Jewish male body, particularly as the protagonist superhero is openly Jewish and not hyper-masculine (unlike say Superman or Spiderman), he confirms existing stereotypes by having his mutant power derive from his mind rather than his body which, in contrast is physically weak. Furthermore, Magneto is superficially represented as an evil body (although by no means in a stereotypically anti-Semitic way). He grows up with an obsession to supplant humankind with a race of mutants like himself. In the trilogy’s diegesis, as the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants whose aim it is to overthrow mankind, he is seemingly the villain, positioned against the hero, Dr Charles Xavier, who, in contrast, founded a school to teach mutant teenagers ‘to learn to use our powers for the benefit of mankind’. As Lawrence Baron points out, in its representation of a man confined to a wheelchair whose special power is mindreading, the film has created ‘a Gentile hero who fit the traditional stereotype of Jewish males as intellectuals with weak bodies’ (Baron 2003: 47). Furthermore, it is Xavier, and not Magneto, who is pursuing the traditional Jewish social justice

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agenda of Tikkun Olam (healing the world). However, a subtler reading of the film suggests that both are heroes who, like contemporary Jewish Democrats and Republicans in America, use Jewish tradition and religion to achieve their different political objectives. While Dr X is unequivocally ‘good’, using his powers for the benefit of mankind, Magneto is not his binary opposite nor represented as unequivocally ‘evil’. Indeed, in its insistence on depicting events from his childhood in 1944 and constantly reminding us of the Holocaust through a series of visual and aural signifiers, the film gives Magneto genuinely understandable motives, summed up by the words ‘Never Again’. Magneto wants to prevent another Holocaust, albeit this time against mutants. In this light, then, it is the non-mutants who are evil in their desire to locate, categorise and demonise others simply because they are different. Furthermore, perhaps it is Dr X and his optimistic Panglossian naiveté (for which he pays the ultimate price) that is the true albeit unwitting villain of the films, for he seeks to protect humanity. Overall, then, Magneto presents an interesting combination: the queer Jew with tough values.

VI. HARD JEWS

The modern (if retrogressive) religious epic The Passion of the Christ (2004) presents yet another version of the male Jewish body on screen. Replicating the Biblical films of the 1950s, Jesus is played by a non-Jew (Jim Caviezel) and within the terms of the film clearly does not derive from the same world as the first-century Palestinian Jews. In multiple sequences, he is visually contrasted with his co-religionists and even though he speaks the same language as them, he shares nothing in common physically. The gulf is further reinforced in that Mel Gibson’s Jesus speaks Greek thus aligning him with the Greco-Roman world in comparison to the male Jews who speak Aramaic and are clearly depicted, in dress, speech and mannerism as proto-Muslims. Furthermore, as Scott Bartchy points out, Jesus is a ‘hunk’, with ‘abs’, and essentially an amalgam of the director Gibson’s previous roles in Braveheart (1995) and the Lethal Weapon series (1987, 1989, 1992, 1998) and more: a man who can ‘take beating, flogging, flaying, even filleting, and finally crucifying’ (2006: 80, 85). The film’s use of lingering slow motion to capture the beating, flagellating, raking, ripping, dislocating and piercing of Jesus’ flesh fetishises the Jewish male body and its ability to withstand torture. It is an irony here that Gibson, whose views of Jews are dodgy at best, has unwittingly produced a cinematic Jewish male body which fulfils the Zionist vision of a muscled Jewry.

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From Jewish crime czar Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) in The Godfather II (1974) through to Abraham ‘Cousin Avi’ Denovitz (Dennis Farina) in Snatch (2000), there have been many extremely violent male Jewish gangsters, criminals, killers and corrupt bookmakers on screen such as those in The Long Goodbye (1973), Lepke (1975), GoodFellas (1990), Bugsy (1991), Casino (1995) and Inside Man (2006). But few present as interesting a take on the male Jewish body as Lucky Number Slevin (2006). The film presents much paradoxical juxtaposition which plays on the traditional cinematic representations of Jews. Shlomo ‘the Rabbi’ (Ben Kingsley), is the neurotic leader of a Hasidic criminal gang. He is a rabbi who would rather be a gangster and a gangster who would rather be a rabbi. Although he is a soidisant ‘bad man’, like Walter he is also a practising Orthodox Jew who will not answer the telephone on Shabbat. Nor will he contemplate premeditated murder as it is proscribed by Jewish law, but he will act in self defence, as this is permitted, and as such is armed with a shotgun for his personal protection. The representation of the rabbi as Orthodox is not just signified in narrative terms but is reinforced by the film’s use of mise-en-scene. Deploying the traditional symbols of Judaism, the rabbi is shown wearing a yarmulke and reading from the Torah. His office, which he never leaves, is adorned with the Star of David and its entrance gates are wrought from Hebrew lettering. The rabbi’s bodyguards are Hasidic Jews who wear the traditional garb of that sect: long black coats, hats, yarmulkes and side curls. Unlike traditional characterisations of that group, however, these Orthodox Jews are violent. Thus, the ‘queer’ Jewish scholar has paradoxically become hard and, within the film’s narrative, brutal, too. Although the concept of the male Jew as gangster is neither new nor innovative in either reality or art, the representation of an evil and Orthodox Jewish gangster is and one would be hard pressed to discover any similar vision elsewhere. Indeed, cinema rarely treats the male Jewish body in a religious sense, preferring to code it ethnically. Thus, in this respect, the film’s depiction of religiously Orthodox Jews as cruel, which in the film they undoubtedly are, is a breakthrough cinematically. Two further characters play on the depiction of the cinematic male Jewish body and code the poles of Jewish masculine self-image. The Rabbi’s son is gay (a fact of which the rabbi is, presumably and therefore blissfully, unaware): Yitzchok the fairy is the epitome of the weak, effeminate, homosexual Eastern European Jew. He is unable to protect himself, is constantly accompanied by two ex-Mossad bodyguards and in a unique use of a traditional Jewish sign even wears a panic button around his neck in the shape of a Star of David. In direct contrast stands

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the protagonist, the eponymous Slevin Kelevra (Josh Hartnett). He is a cold, calculating and ruthless Jewish killer who, unusually, spends a good proportion of his screen time wearing only a bath towel, revealing, like Avner, his toned and muscled upper torso. Although he is superficially similar to the Mossad assassination squad in Munich in his profession, unlike them, he has no moral qualms about his vengeful actions and is completely and lethally successful, suffering no reverses or humiliations that he does not himself intend. Indeed, he is presented as disciplined, controlled and ordered, fully in control of his destiny, as encapsulated in his very surname (kelev ra) which in Hebrew translates as ‘bad dog’. These images are tempered by more traditional ones, in particular, the Jew as victim. There is a body count of at least eleven Jews during the course of the movie and many shots depict these Jews either dead or dying. Yet, many of these Jews have been killed by one of their co-religionists and this proves to be a highly unusual development in the recent depictions of the Jewish male body on screen. Typically, Jews are shown as victims of non-Jews in cinema and rarely, if ever, are they victims of each other. Again, unlike much traditional and even recent cinema such as Munich, this Jewish killer is shown as coming out on top as he successfully avenges the murder of his parents, and not only has no regrets but gets the girl at the end, too. Thus, the film clearly takes sides in which representation it prefers as the secular tough Jew kills the transgressive, tough and queer ‘Eastern European’ Jews. It must be said, though, that the film cannot escape cinematic stereotyping in that not only is Kelevra played by a non-Jew and hence harking back to the era when gentiles played Jews, but also the paradigm of the Jew–Shiksa relationship is maintained as it is highly implausible that his girlfriend (Lindsey) played by Lucy Liu is in any way Jewish.

VIII. THE SCHMOK1

Ever since Abraham and Isaac, a key signifier of Jewish masculinity has long been the circumcised penis. It sets the male Jew apart as Jewishness is literally inscribed on his body (Gilman 1991: 91). And this is also true on screen. To take but two recent examples: in Hostel (2005) and The History Boys (2006), the Jewish characters in the films are identified by references to their circumcisions. In his extensive (albeit Holocaust-focused) survey of the Jew in film, Omer Bartov concludes that the circumcised penis is ‘a focus of identity, danger, and fascination’ (2005: 341, n. 33). Typically, as Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt (2007) have pointed out, the Jewish penis is the nub of suffering, and representations of male Jewish nudity, with particular reference to the Holocaust, have ‘exposed’ the

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Jewish penis in all its ‘passivity’, namely, ‘femininity’. Often, the Jewish penis is the focus of this representation, as the site of suffering. Recent mainstream cinema, in constructing Jewish masculinity, can not help but allude to the Jew’s genital organ; however, it has been played with (both literally and figuratively) in a number of contradictory ways. While films such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Sunshine (1999) clearly maintain the equation of the Jewish penis as locus-of-suffering paradigm, these and other films seek to turn that notion on its head. Even as it depicts the Jewish male in death, Munich also symbolises almost the exact opposite: the reversal of the Holocaust paradigm from Jews who are killed to Jews who kill. Although the Mossad agent’s death is depicted as humiliating, particularly given that he is seduced and killed by a female agent, the image stands against the narrative trajectory of the film which is a projection of Jewish potency. Indeed, the love-making sequences are clearly a vindication of Avner’s sexual prowess which, unusually for film, is endogamous. What is more, Ron Jeremy’s naked, sweaty, sexual body, in particular his penis which itself is renowned for its size, is displayed and celebrated in explicit, perpetually hard close-up on film. The Jewish penis is no different here either and hence it provides a contrast to those images of the penis which project male Jewish humiliation, vulnerability, suffering, victim-hood and death. And they clearly explode Hunt and Lehman’s assertion that ‘The Jewish penis is always shown in situations of humiliation, vulnerability, and death – never sexuality – never as potent; always as impotent’ (2007: 160). Indeed, Jeremy in particular is celebrated across America by Jews and non-Jews alike for the use of his penis. Although the prevalence of circumcision in the genre of pornography confuses the Jewish/ non-Jewish penis distinction given its prevalence among gentiles there, such representations present a counterpoint to Lehman and Hunt’s focus on the humiliation of the Jewish male. The nebbish (an unfortunate simpleton; an insignificant or ineffectual person; a nobody; a nonentity) in which the Jewish male body is represented as a site of fun, laughter and most usually ridicule is also nothing new on screen but it is the use of sexual prowess and the penis as the locus of this laughter which is. Interestingly, cinematic depictions of circumcision as a source of laughter have been few and far between when compared to television. The distinctively Jewish protagonist of the American Pie trilogy (1999, 2001, 2003), James Emmanuel Levenstein aka Jim (Jason Biggs), is also the only character to feature in several sequences that focus (literally) on his (unseen) penis as the source of ridicule. In the first film, he fails (twice) in his public (they are depicted over a webcam) attempts to seduce the visiting student Nadia and he is caught red-handed by his father (Eugene Levy) while making love to the eponymous American pie. By the

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second instalment, Jim has graduated from tarts to women and is caught midcoitus by his father again. In yet another sequence he manages to glue his hand to his member when he mistakes a tube of superglue for lubricant. Although these scenes superficially resemble those of suffering and Jim is indeed humiliated by his efforts, unlike the films identified by Bartov, Hunt and Lehman, we see no close-ups of Jim’s penis; the genre is clearly comedic rather than serious and, in the final analysis, Jim always comes out on top and is clearly represented as the filmic hero. One only need to compare him to the quite obviously gentile Stifler to demonstrate this point: despite the suggestion implicit in his name that he is a symbol of hyper-masculine potency, Stifler suffers a series of humiliating reverses when he unwittingly drinks semen, eats dog shit and has to live with the fact that his mother was willingly seduced by his archenemy. Likewise, Ben Stiller’s various Jewish characters suffer in ways similar to Jim. In There’s Something About Mary (1998), which replicates the older Jew-chasingthe-blonde Shiksa pattern, he is so nervous that he catches his genitals in a zipper, and, later in the film, a dog, and a little one at that, attacks his crotch. In Meet the Parents (2000), his father-in-law (Robert De Niro) keeps bursting in on him and his girlfriend as they are about to make love, and, in the sequel (Meet the Fockers (2004)), it is still only his parents who get to make love and live up to the promise of their surname. In doing so, we see a rare cinematic depiction of endogamous coupling as compared to both Stiller and Biggs, who maintain the filmic tradition of either sleeping with or marrying non-Jewish women. Nonetheless, the cinematic depiction of their bodies occupies the interstice between the hyper-masculine Zionist Jew and the callow Talmudic scholar, being neither one nor the other.

IX. CONCLUSION

‘There is more than one way to be Jewish,’ said Israeli novelist Sami Michael, opening a gay pride rally in Jerusalem in 2006. Nowhere has this been more convincingly demonstrated than in mainstream cinema’s depiction of the Jewish male body since 1989 where we have seen nasty and brutish Jews, tough Jews, gay Jews, Jewish criminals, Jewish porn stars, Jewish assassins, rebellious Jews and Jews in space. Restrictions have not permitted me to mention every film or even every category. To the above can be added: Jewish cowboys, Jewish skinheads, Jewish transsexuals, Jewish superheroes and deviant and dysfunctional Jews. This shift towards more subtle, nuanced, playful and even outrageous representations signals that Jews feel more comfortable, particularly in America, that they have

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arrived. It says much that there are so many examples of this trend in recent film that not all of them could be listed or treated here. It is also in part a cinematic fulfilment of the dream of the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who said ‘We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew’. Furthermore, many of these cinematic narratives are not marked by invisibility or the desire to become ‘white’, but rather celebrate the Jewish (albeit Ashkenazi) male body in all its guises. And in that many of these films include religious factors, namely Judaism, in their representation of the Jewish male body on screen, they break the predominant paradigm in the field of film studies, which has largely tended to focus on Jewish identity as an ethnic rather than a religious category. Yet, this essay must end by saying that although the use of non-Jewish actors or what is known in Jewish culture as ‘the goy’ – ‘the hypermale gentile’ (Yosef 2004:18) – only serves to reinforce the musculature of filmic Jewry by collapsing the real non-Jewish body with the imaginary Jewish one, Anglo-American Jewish cinema can only really perhaps be said to have succeeded when it can film Jews as Jews on screen. In this last respect, in its creation of a new paradigm, the Jew playing the Jewish character that falls into neither category of the tough nor queer Jew, this has been achieved.

N OT E 1

The Yiddish Dictionary Online defines schmok as ‘jerk, fool, idiot, contemptible person; naive person, person easy to deceive; (vulg. penis, dick, asshole) (American Jewish)’, Last consulted in April 2007.

2 Fragmented Bodies: Masculinity and Nation in Contemporary German Cinema

Heidi Schlipphacke

In recent years, a discourse of ‘normalisation’ has entered mainstream discussions about national identity, history and art in Germany. The notion of a ‘normal’ Germany, one no longer defined by its abnormal past, is simultaneously desirable and unnerving to Germans. The histories of Nazism, the Holocaust and the division of Germany have fundamentally defined German national identity since 1945, placing it always in an anomalous position vis-à-vis its Western peer nations. The left/right divide that had distinguished discussions of German normalisation among historians and literary scholars in the 1980s and 1990s seems to have all but vanished in the twenty-first century. The goal of being normal, just like the others, cuts largely across the contemporary German political spectrum so that both Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democrat, and the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl have expressed their commitment to the national goal of normalcy. Schröder’s embrace of the new German Unbefangenheit (unselfconsciousness) (Taberner and Cooke 2006: 10) mirrors a national fantasy of being blissfully average as articulated by Helmut Kohl. Asked by Serge Schmemann of The New York Times at the transformative moment following the fall of the Berlin Wall about his goals for Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl expressed the desire that ‘things will normalize. That’s the most important thing for us, that we become a wholly normal country, not “singularized” in any question […] that we simply don’t stick out. That’s the important thing’ (Brockmann 2006: 17). Germany’s path to prosperity and global acceptance is imagined as the path of the Average Joe, a national identity that would appal patriotic Americans, French or British citizens. And this intensely 27

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modest German patriotism has, to my mind, profound repercussions for conceptions of gender and, in particular, models for masculinity. In this chapter, I will explore the link between the national desire for normalcy and contemporary German masculinity. As George Mosse shows, the masculine body has stood in for Western and, specifically, German conceptions of nation since the eighteenth century (see Mosse 1996: 3–16). Visual representations of masculine beauty have symbolised national ideals as manifested in the neoclassical revival of the German Enlightenment and its perverse re-appropriation by the Nazis in the twentieth century. I will focus on contemporary filmic representations of masculinity because the medium of film, I suggest, contains both the weight of Germany’s tortured history as well as the dream of a global future. I will argue that many contemporary German films reflect the desire for normalcy via a proliferation of ‘average’ male types. Indeed, three of the most popular and critically acclaimed German male film stars – Moritz Bleibtreu, Daniel Brühl and Jürgen Vogel – embody the ideal of ‘averageness’. They are neither truly beautiful nor unattractive; they are often weak, but never entirely bad. And they are often insecure, lost and alienated. Indeed, their lack of orientation – what is sometimes depicted as psychic and physical fragmentation – is a product both of the type of stars currently en vogue in Germany as well as the narrative and stylistic techniques that frame their characters. What is imagined by Helmut Kohl as an ideal – the dream of being normal, of not standing out – is then dramatised in a number of films as a new crisis of masculinity and nation.1 During the summer of 2006, when Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup, Germans seemed to be obsessed with proving to the world that they could be ‘normal’, a gracious, relaxed host to the world, a host who could simultaneously cheer on the home team and party with the fans from other nations in the streets of Berlin. Indeed, one could say that the dream was almost realised; within Germany, one had the sense that the visitors were enjoying themselves. German flags were more prominent than ever before since the end of Nazism, yet these flags were generally not perceived as symbols of a Nazi threat. Here, many claimed, was the arrival of German normalcy, of the new unselfconsciousness (‘Neue Unbefangenheit’). Yet how would this normalcy be defined? So many articles were written at the time about the new, relaxed Germany by the Germans that it would be difficult to support the claims of unselfconsciousness. To be ‘normal’, it seems, is to be unselfconsciously average – to accept one’s past with a shrug, with some level of pride and to enjoy the present. The fantasy of normalcy was quickly shattered in the autumn of 2006, when the moral compass of the nation, Günter Grass, admitted to having served in the Waffen SS, an especially brutal arm of the Nazi military machine, unleashing a nation-wide debate about the relevance of

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the Nazi past for present-day Germany. Lightness and normalcy do not come easily to Germans, and perhaps this is how it should still be. Yet the desire to be average, not to stand out, remains reflected in contemporary film heroes who are alienated and ‘clueless’, to use Horst-Eberhard Richter’s (2006) term to describe German masculinity in the twentieth century. And the lack of orientation on the part of these figures is not surprising, for the goal of ‘averageness’ is ultimately anathema to notions of national and, indeed, of masculine identity. The cultural embrace of the ideal of normalcy has unleashed a new kind of national identity crisis. If Germany were no longer to stand out by virtue of the horrors of its past, then who would it be? Worldwide repulsion and attraction to Germany has long been predicated upon its indelible link to its abnormally atrocious recent history. If the nation were able to achieve its dream, to shed its villain’s mantel for the slicker of an average guy, would the world still be interested? And how would one slip into the new identity without repressing the past, a gesture generally scorned in German culture today? I believe that these contradictory desires are reflected in contemporary German films which present alienated and lost male protagonists. In particular, I will focus here on films that have been well received in Germany but which have not had great distribution outside of the domestic market. In general, heritage films like Der Untergang/ Downfall (dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004) and Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (dir. Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) have grabbed all the attention outside Germany. The former, nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, is a costume piece dramatising the last days of Hitler, and the latter, the winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, depicts the lives of an East German Stasi officer and the GDR citizens he observes. Hence, as Paul Cooke, has pointed out, in using ‘the difficult topics as a “selling point”’ the success of German films abroad ‘paradoxically, resides in their ability to reaffirm, through their choice of theme, the abnormality of the nation and its continuing need to address aspects of its past’ (Cooke 2006: 225). The drama of the average post-wall boy, it seems, is of interest to no one but the Germans themselves. The elusive desire for a ‘normal’ national identity ironically cements Germany’s particularity within Europe and the West. What other Western nation shares this fantasy? Indeed, Germany’s desire for unselfconsciousness is a product of years of unresolved confrontations with the nation’s history. The utopian view on Germany’s anomalous historical position is that nationalism might be re-imagined within this nation, that nation might be conceived as always already split, fragmented and aware of its own split. Stephen Brockmann articulates the unique potential within contemporary Germany along these lines: ‘In this sense Germany, precisely because of the singular horror of the Nazi dictatorship, is well positioned

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to attempt the creation of a non-conventional national identity, an identity based as much on self-questioning as on self-affirmation’ (Brockmann 2006: 28). Yet while Germany exhibits symptoms of fragmentation, the cultural splitting reflected in contemporary German cinema is, to my mind, rarely articulated as utopic freedom.

I . T H E S C H I Z O P H R E N I C B O DY

The impasse reached at the juncture of ‘normality’ and national identity may be described as particularly German. This fractured state resembles the fragmentation characteristic of the schizophrenic body. The desire to be ‘normal’ and ‘average’ is ultimately akin to a negation of the self. The desired and the ‘real’ self do not match, and an irreparable rupture follows. Hence, the post-rational mode of schizophrenia could be said loosely to define the current state of German national identity and, in consequence, German masculinity. Representations of masculinity in films such as Das weiße Rauschen/The White Sound (dir. Hans Weingartner, 2001), Lola rennt/Run Lola Run (dir. Tom Tykwer, 1998), Agnes und seine Brüder/Agnes and His Brothers (dir. Oskar Roehler, 2004), Goodbye Lenin! (dir. Wolfgang Becker, 2003) and Ein Freund von mir/A Friend of Mine (dir. Sebastian Schipper, 2006), among others, are either literally or figuratively schizophrenic. These films dramatise the schizophrenic split that follows from the attempt to achieve identity without wholeness, without the past or usable models for masculinity. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2000) lauded schizophrenia as the antidote to fascism, as an escape route via ‘schizoanalysis’. Schizophrenia is ‘anti-ego as well as antihomo’ (Seem 1983: xx) and, hence, liberatory, beyond the rigid thought structures of the Cartesian ego. In the films discussed here, German male figures seem indeed to have a tenuous grasp on the ego as they unconsciously reject the fascist past through their utter lack of sovereignty. All of the films discussed in this chapter represent contemporary German masculinity as schizophrenic, whether in the form of frustrated fragmentation and disorientation or elated escape from the self. Yet the film that most explicitly pictures masculine schizophrenia is Hans Weingartner’s Das weiße Rauschen, starring the boy next door, Daniel Brühl. In appearance, Brühl has achieved the look of ‘normalcy’. He has a sweet if not beautiful face, medium brown hair, and an average body that is not too buff and not too weak. Even in his most unsympathetic roles, he never seems truly dangerous. In Das weiße Rauschen, Brühl plays Lukas, a young man about to begin his studies at the University of

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Köln but whose university career is interrupted by the onset of schizophrenia. Lukas leaves his grandparents in the country to live with his sister, Kati (Anabelle Lachatte), and her drug-obsessed hippie boyfriend, Jochen (Patrick Joswig), in their chaotic playground of an apartment. The film begins with Lukas arriving at the train station in Köln, and already here his exaggerated disorientation is apparent. The abruptly moving hand-held shots render enough of Lukas’s state of loss and heightened anxiety to hint that something is wrong. Kati is late, and Lukas almost loses his sense of reality while waiting for her. However, all is seemingly well after she arrives and takes him to the communal apartment he will now share with her and Jochen. Lukas is initially elated by the freedom this space offers, the ready drugs and possibilities, but he is soon overwhelmed by the lack of structure. Although Lukas’s schizophrenia is not caused by the lack of structure in his new home, the paucity of any positive authority figure in Lukas’s life contributes to his feelings of disorientation. Kati is quite loving, but childish, interested in taking drugs with her boyfriend. And Jochen is anything but an authority figure for Lukas. When Lukas is overwhelmed by the labyrinthian nature of the administrative buildings and neglects to sign up for university courses, Jochen shrugs off the importance of the university and invites Lukas to take drugs with him. Throughout the film, Jochen never seems to hold any kind of job; Kati occasionally goes to work, and when she returns, they party together. A drug-inspired trip to the country during which the three take hallucinogenic mushrooms together may serve as the catalyst for Lukas’s psychotic break, but his inability to navigate the spaces around him is apparent from the beginning of the film. He is likewise unable to interpret meanings in basic conversations, and his date with a woman he meets at a party is abruptly aborted when the women selling tickets at the theatre informs him that Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976), the film they planned to see, will not be screened until the following week. In response, Lukas is unable to accept the schism between his own understanding of the world and the one offered by the ticket seller, and he flips out, repeatedly insisting that he wants two tickets for Taxi Driver, finally resorting to paranoid accusations that the woman doesn’t want him to see the film. Lukas’s interest in Taxi Driver is a sly reminder on the part of the director of the ways in which films can represent shifts of perspective and paranoid schizophrenia. However, Lukas’s interest in Taxi Driver is rather derivative; he chose it, he tells his date, because his sister said it was good. Lukas’s identity seems, even when lucid, to be strangely unformed and indistinct. He is simultaneously ‘average’ and without character. Das weiße Rauschen is, in my view, both a sensitive depiction of a young man’s fall into the nightmare of schizophrenia and an allegory of contemporary German national identity and masculinity. Lukas’s radical lack of orientation, his indistinct

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identity and the lack of male authority figures who might offer a usable model for ‘normal’ masculinity parallel the schism I have described in the German desire for normalcy. Lukas’s state of fragmentation is beautifully portrayed in scenes in which Lukas alternately resists and embraces ‘the white noise’ of schizophrenia. In German ‘Rausch’ means ‘noise’ but also intoxication and ecstasy. Hence, ‘Das weiße Rauschen’ is conceived by Lukas as both the nightmare of insanity and the ecstatic release from reason. Along the lines articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia contains here also the potential for release from the ego and the tyranny of Enlightenment reason (which Deleuze and Guattari link to fascism). Hence, while the film depicts Lukas’s intense suffering as he hears voices and experiences a radical split between possible realities, the film nevertheless always maintains the tension between the goal of normalcy and the dual potential beyond reason: the potential for a post-fascist utopia beyond subjects and, alternatively, the regression manifested in the anti-rational mania of German fascism. Brühl’s Lukas and Weingartner’s film embody all possibilities in one body, providing a hyperbolic picture of a new crisis of German masculinity, a masculinity that attempts to achieve identity while preserving fragmentation and eschewing history. Das weiße Rauschen places the spectator in uncomfortable proximity to the fragmented psychic state of its protagonist. Liberal use of hand-held shots creates an atmosphere of confusion so that the spectator, like Lukas, is often unsure of the location of the shot without the larger space depicted in the film. Likewise, the camera frequently alternates between a perspective closely allied to that of Lukas’s to one slightly distanced from him. At other times, long shots are used that depict Lukas’s body out of sync with his environment; he rarely inhabits the screen in a sovereign manner but rather often occupies the periphery of the frame, his bodily stance denoting insecurity and anxiety. Here, the spectator experiences Lukas’s body as fragmented and small. One of the most memorable shots of the film is a high-angle one that shows Lukas lying naked in the shower in a semi-foetal position, flooded in a golden light, a variety of shampoo and soap bottles near his feet (Figure 2). The ‘white noise’ of the shower provides an escape for Lukas from the voices that hound him, and he remains for hours in this fragile position. The image cements Lukas’s vulnerability and utter helplessness; indeed, his body is highly androgynous here and in stark contrast to idealised images of masculine strength and beauty. The position of the camera nears that of a bird’s eye, so that the spectator is forced to view Lukas’s body coldly, almost clinically. The golden light simultaneously envelops and entraps Lukas and provides a bright light for the clinical eye of the observer. Yet this sovereign perspective is juxtaposed with shots that provide little distance from Lukas’s perspective. The spectator is privy not only to Lukas’s mad

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paranoia, but also to the voices he hears, voices inaudible to the other figures in the film. In this sense, the film never offers a viable space for reflection outside of Lukas’s world. Beginning and ending with a voice-over of Lukas’s thoughts about ‘the white noise’, thoughts themselves highly ambivalent, the film circumscribes the experience of the spectator within this logic and hence avoids taking a stance on which form of masculine identity would be desirable: some semblance of medicated ‘normalcy’ or a form that embraces the white noise beyond reason. In the end of the film, having left the more restricted cultural space of Germany, Lukas sits alone at the sea in Spain and reflects on the trappings and potential of the ‘white noise’. In this way, the film never entirely alienates the spectator from Lukas and refuses to take a position on a desirable mode of masculinity for the new Germany. The shifting perspectives of Das weiße Rauschen dramatise both Lukas’s schizophrenia and the schizophrenic nature of contemporary German masculinity. Another recent German film that represents German masculinity as symbolically schizophrenic while refusing to prognosticate or moralise is Der freie Wille/The Free Will (dir. Matthias Glasner, 2006). The film stars Jürgen Vogel (who also co-wrote the script), another ‘average’ male type with a somewhat goofy, but generally attractive appearance. Like Das weiße Rauschen the film has received a great deal of critical acclaim in Germany (Jürgen Vogel won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival). This relentlessly intense film focuses on the damaged lives of Theo (Jürgen Vogel), a rapist, and Nettie (Sabine Timoteo), a multiply abused woman who falls in love with him. Theo emerges from years of treatment desiring only one thing: to be ‘normal’. Although the film depicts Theo ruthlessly

Figure 2: Daniel Brühl in Das Weiße Rauschen. X Verleih AG. Germany.

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raping two women, it nevertheless refuses to demonise the character entirely. The spectator is radically alienated from this figure, but the fil