Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy.

April 28, 2007 at 11:20 pm | Posted in h-dawg's book club, pop culture, the art of bullshit | 7 Comments

Over the past few months, I’ve found my recreational reading and viewing taking a decidedly masculine tone. It started when I took up Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece/neverending story, Gravity’s Rainbow. It continued with several evenings over a few months spent viewing spaghetti westerns, thus building a close, personal relationship with that famous Man With No Name, Clint Eastwood.

While completing my graduate work, which focused in part on feminist and gender studies’ critiques of literature, I was often urged to do some work on masculinity, because, you know, it’s so hott right now. Naturally my response was to roll my eyes at the drunk gentleman making this intelligent point — who of course by now was singing the praises of D.H. Lawrence — and mosey on back to the bar.

Well, time passes, and now that nobody’s trying to recenter the conversation around himself at a party, I’d like to look at how masculinity shows up in the work I’ve read and watched recently. Like traditional femininity in most cases, on closer inspection the masculinity of these cultural placeholders is a cheap thrill, manifested in objects of violence and desolation. Going further, though, the book and films (particularly The Outlaw Josey Wales) acknowledge the masculine role is ultimately untenable, despite its allure and seemingly valued position.

[Warning: spoilers all over the place.]

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I don’t want to come off like I’ve discovered that our bad boy archetypes are a bunch of crybabies. Nuh uh. Rather, their authors/auteurs revel in depicting their masculine heroes at ridiculous angles, exaggerating the theater of their actions. Tyrone Slothrop, the protagonist of Gravity’s Rainbow, is inextricably linked to the V-2 rockets developed by the Germans during WWII — he’s been conditioned from infancy, in Pavlovian fashion, so that the rocket triggers his sexual response. As the book begins, his frequent sexual encounters seem to predict the location of future rocket attacks in London. Pynchon is expert at exaggerating and demystifying the sex appeal of the rocket, as we see in this passage from Slothrop’s studies of the rocket’s components at the Herman Goering casino in the south of France:

For some odd reason he finds himself with hardons right after study sessions. Hm, that’s peculiar. There is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily translated from the German — brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish undergroundd from the latrines at the training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss… or memorizing conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to Pferdestarke, drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of fuel, oxidizer, steam, peroxide and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers — what’s sexy about that? still he emerges from each lesson with great hardon, tremendous pressure inside… some of that temporary insanity, he reckons, and goes looking for Katje, hands to crabwalk his back and silk stockings squealing against his hipbones….

Hot stuff. In fact, the novel is chock-full of fetishes and trysts, so many that they reach the level of cliche within the narrative structure and become increasingly meaningless. As does Slothrop: when his personal ties to the V2 are revealed, he runs away to “The Zone,” the deteriorating, indeterminate postwar landscape around Germany and Eastern Europe, looking for answers by way of a secret rocket (the 00000) and its mysterious components. Instead of finding the elements to restore his own sense of order and purpose, though, Slothrop’s self begins to mimic the world around him, literally fragmenting so that he is everywhere, nowhere, and finally invisible. The rocket, that powerful phallus speeding through the sky, has to fall, obliterate itself along with its targets. Ultimately, the masculine model whose trajectory we trace in Pynchon’s book is one of disintegration.

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Masculinity in excess is also the catalyst for lawlessness and violence in the Clint Eastwood classic The Outlaw Josey Wales. The film opens on Josey and Josey Jr peacefully tilling the land, wifey calling the kid in to clean up his face as per laundry commercials of decades past and future — y’know, until a bunch of renegade Union soldiers roll in to torch the place (and the kid), rape the wife and give Clint a hot scar (see photo above). Thus our happy farmer turns into, well, Clint Eastwood in a Western. This is a guy who spits chew on everyone he comes across, sends his buddy’s dead body into a Union camp for distraction without a second thought, and practices a studied nonchalance so that, gunning down the men who killed his family, tells a compatriot it’s really because he ‘aint’ got nothin’ better to do’.

Many have noted that unlike Eastwood’s nameless character in the westerns of Sergio Leone, for example, or Eastwood’s earlier effort as director, High Plains Drifter, Wales does not find lonely solace in a blood-red ride into the sunset. Rather, the final showdown consists of himself and an unlikely gang of fellow-travelers, all similarly abused by the slash-and-burn tactics of the men in power, taking them out one by one. While this film follows the rules of the genre by ending shortly after the climactic shoot-out, it differs in that the viewer has a sense of the story’s continuity, rather than the absolute lack of further action. The Man with No Name has nothing beyond the latest score to settle or head to collect. Even his sexual encounters are just asides to emphasize other masculine qualities like strength and emotional detachment. His rape of the town wench in High Plains Drifter may be read, as Dworkin would say, as an exertion of power more than a sexual act. In contrast, Josey Wales rejects the structure, dominated by a masculine ideal of power, that interrupts his life and causes a violent fragmentation of his self, through the creation of a new community.

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I’m particularly interested, at the moment, in complicating my own ideas of a feminist aesthetic and critique of literature, film and popular culture. I certainly don’t mean to imply that these works should be held to some ‘social realist’ standard, or that their depictions of women aren’t problematic; but I’d like a fuller understanding of how gender operates on both sides of the divide. What are the blind spots in our ascribed positions as gendered subjects as reflected back to us in art? If a goal of a feminist criticism is to in fact highlight the performative aspects of gender, how can I do so while avoiding reading reductively? This is some of what’s on my mind as I reenter the blogging game in earnest, and hopefully a taste of what’s to come.