The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

21. The Phallus UnFetished: The End of Masculinity As We Know It in Late-1990s "Feminist" Cinema

21 The Phallus UnFetished The End of Masculinity AsWe Know It in Late-1990s “Feminist” Cinema Alexandra Juhasz THE PHALLUS UNPLUGGED The telling moments from my two favorite feminist films of 1999: 1. David Fincher’s Fight Club. Marla and Tyler are about to rush out of her seedy flophouse, just steps ahead of the police. He’s saved her from suicide. Sort of. He eyes a dildo on her dresser. “Don’t worry, it’s not a threat to you,” she states impassively. 2. Trey Parker’s South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Saddam Hussein and his lover, the Devil, are in bed, arguing once again about sex. Saddam wants to fuck all the time; the Devil would rather communicate, maybe cuddle. But this time, Saddam wants it so bad, he pulls his penis out from under the covers and waves it in the crisp night air. “I’m just fucking with you. It’s not real,” he snickers as he chucks aside what is, it turns out, a dildo. DILDO TIME Two telling dildo moments. That’s what did it; that’s what told me these films were feminist. These two free-floating phalluses (the unlikely possessions of a whacked-out girl and a tyrannical Arab fag) generated a space carved into their elegant late-1990s misogyny that was made especially for the likes of me: 1980s-style feminist film professor. A dildo 210 puts something close to a penis into the hands of anyone who desires one. Masculinity, revealed as an effect of signification, becomes available to all.1 Academic feminism and its more sordid sister, queer theory, applaud all acts that unlink genitals from their gendered homes, that sever biology from destiny. They instruct us that a proactive political practice can occur whenever bodies (or body parts) are separated from their culturally determined duties. In these late-1990s movie manifestations of male gender angst, the sex/gender/sexuality system reaches a feminist apex, so fully destabilized that unanchored genitals are up for grabs. The films accomplish the complex theoretical/political project of detaching bodily organs from their host organisms and presenting them, instead, as fully dependent on discourse. Throughout Fight Club the narrator enjoys addressing the audience as his disembodied vitals: I am Jack’s medulla, Jack’s nipple, Jack’s colon. “My father dumped me, Tyler dumped me, I am Jack’s broken heart.” Meanwhile, Stan, from South Park, spends most of his time in search of the clitoris, which finally does appear to save the day at movie’s conclusion—this enormous, doughy, pink mound, fashioned after a men’s bowler, who expounds moralistic half-truths: “Behold my glory. I am the clitoris. Have confidence in yourself. Chicks love confidence. The clitoris has spoken.” These films are decidedly feminist in the sense that they are aggressively self-conscious (and self-confident) about the mobility of gender . The super-wimpy protagonist of Fight Club (Edward Norton), the unnamed narrator who sometimes calls himself Jack, is so uncertain about his masculinity that he opts for schizophrenia to refashion himself as male through the hypermasculine Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). In South Park, so unformed, so emasculated are the film’s ideas and desires that the protagonists could only be the presexual, homosocial little boys Kenny, Eric, Stan, and Kyle. A PROSTATE CHECK AIN’T NO CURE FOR THE POSTMODERN CONDITION The postmodern condition is, it turns out, fundamentally a male condition involving nothing more than the loss of masculinity. Both Fight Club and South Park center on worlds-of-men fully peopled by unmales , quasi-males, uncertain-males, males-in-waiting. “At least we’re THE PHALLUS UNFETISHED 211 still men,” snivel the divorced, bankrupted, pathetic members of the testicular cancer survivors group—Remaining Men Together—who make up the community where Jack hopes to begin to eradicate the feminine within. “Yes, we’re men. Men is what we are.” But we all know they’re not; they’re hugging, crying, whining, and one even has breasts. (“Bob. Bob had bitch tits.”) Sure, they don’t have balls, but a deeper loss is indicated by their behavior. “Not just male hysteria in relation to sexual lack,” write Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in their study of early-1990s male hysteria, “but as the emblematic sign of a more primordial lack in postmodern society.”2 It turns out that most men are women...