Our National Mirror Stage

Since the United States leaped on screen at the turn of the twentieth century, "Hollywood's 'America' has been represented as a plucky waif in wartime (The Little American, 1917) and a desperate housewife with a dick (TransAmerica, 2005)," not to mention a gigolo, a pie, a quilt, and a werewolf (19). Mandy Merck highlights the rash of sexual significations implied by this assortment and asks her contributors and readers to reexamine that most imperializing brand name, American, and how Hollywood has used it both to disappear all other nationalities from the Americas and to propagate a wealth of openly contradictory mythologies around gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, national origin, naturalization, nature, and, of course, politics. Merck's anthology thus responds to Jack Valenti's 1984 assertion that "American films and television dominate the screens of the world and that just didn't happen," by asking what sort of work our commercial agitprop does, to whom, and in whose interest.¹ Such a study of the nationalized identities and discursive structures perpetuated by U.S. filmmakers is long overdue, and Merck makes it critical reading for anyone in American studies, film studies, or gender and sexuality studies who believes in fiction's role in international politics.

Those who remember Merck's work in In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies or Perversions: Deviant Readings will recognize her commitment to cultural context and textual analysis in the essays she commissioned for America First, especially those that interrogate the relationships among compulsory heterosexuality, patriotism, assimilation, and film form in early U.S. cinema.² Kristen Whissel's chapter on The Little American and William R. Handley's on The Vanishing American (1925) both demonstrate a superb command of U.S. film history, here deployed to explain how an heiress marries and a Navajo veteran dies in order to rationalize U.S. involvement in World War I and Native American displacement, respectively. As Whissel explains, "The Little American deployed sensational scenes of suffering to mobilize its heroine (and, by extension, its audience) into dynamic, self-sacrificing action," whereas in The Vanishing American, the protagonist, Nophaie, sacrifices life and interracial love to put down an Indian insurrection and be redeemed by "a transubstantiation of the Indian body into pure American soul—a soul which makes race malleable for its purposes, and that in turn is transubstantiated into the visualized American ground from which Indians had to be removed in order for it to be made American" (43, 59). Between them, Whissel and Handley demonstrate how early U.S. cinema pushed certain national subjects to fall in love and others to die for love in order that its audiences might be properly assimilated into government projects.

National assimilation is also a project of incarceration, however, or so Ana María Dopico argues in her tour de force reading of Edward James Olmos's American Me (1992). The movie uses cinematography to construct the state "not merely as an abstract notion or disembodied law but an implied protagonist" whose point of view dominates the spectator's access to Pedro Santana and his foreclosure from American subjectivity (231). By focusing on the trope of foreclosure, Dopico explains American Me's intractable nihilism as a "prison break" from previous connotations of Americanness, in that it forces "a psychic, social and critical opening" in the myth of assimilation to demonstrate how certain Chicano knowledges "cannot be tolerated by either the state or by the community that aspires to a normative American identity" (238, 238, 237). Ethnicity, incarceration, and sexuality thus become the hinges in American Me's contestation of U.S. subjectivity, as Santana must negotiate his desire for heterosexual incorporation against his homosocial (and at times homosexual) affiliations with gang life.

Dopico's essay establishes the theoretical stakes for Merck's own contribution to America First, a queer reading of teen gross-out comedies like American Pie (1999). Here Merck finally makes explicit the significance of Americanness and this anthology for queer readings of U.S. film history, specifically its union of...