Legends of the Fall: Phallocentrism and Democracy in Mexico

The Latin man and his penis are at the center of the Hispanic universe.

—Ilán Stavans

Y las tres historias [in Amores perros] son historias de padres: en la primera nadie tiene padre, la segunda es un padre que abandona y la tercera es un padre que abandonó y que quiere regresar. Todo eso reunido por el azar de un accidente y por los perros.

—Guillermo Arriaga, qtd. in Afanador

Jesús González Dávila's play Crónica de un desayuno, which later became a film with the same title, focuses on the interaction among the family members of what many would consider to be a typical Mexican working-class family: Luzma, the mother; Pedro, the father; Marcos, the oldest male sibling; Blanca, the daughter; and Teo, the youngest child who provides the point of view. The play chronicles the two hours (starting at about 6:30 A.M.) in which the family begins the day together after celebrating Mother's Day the day before. The play does not include the character of what the director calls a transvestite (Juan, played by Eduardo Palomo), whose story frames the film version that Benjamin Cann directed (2000). The film in fact foregrounds the figure of the transvestite by presenting her in the opening scene.² As the film opens Juan and Roberto engage in foreplay, and Roberto discovers that Juan is a transvestite. Enraged, he runs to the kitchen and picks up a knife, returns to the bedroom, holds the penis of the transvestite, and cuts it off. In a flash scene, he even holds the severed penis up like a trophy, before going to the window and throwing it out into the street.

I. Castration and Identification: The Transvestite and the Father

Laura Mulvey writes in her famous "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" that the threat of castration stands at the center of narrative cinema, since, as in all phallocentrism, the female form "speaks castration and nothing else." As she explains it, in the patriarchal order the woman symbolizes castration by her real lack of a penis. Women can only exist in this world in relation to castration:

The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.

(438)

Cinema allows for the voyeuristic exercise of pleasure, inasmuch as its very form isolates the viewer into a complacency of participation that erases the fact that the film was made to be watched. According to Mulvey, the spectator's complacency allows for the enacting of a primordial preverbal, pre-subjective scene that both erases and reinforces the ego. "The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that presubjective moment of image recognition" (441). Mulvey believes that this process determines the beginning of what she calls the spectators' ". . . long love affair/despair between image and self-image" (441). She goes on to point out the contradiction in the process that both demands identification and detachment: on the one hand the viewers objectify the image watched (the scopophilia that demands the separation of the viewer from the characters on the screen), and on the other erase their ego by identifying with the object on the screen. Mulvey concludes:

Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is women as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.

(442)

At the subliminal level, Crónica exposes Mulvey's cinematic process by very directly addressing the threat of castration, turning the gaze into a dangerous instrument of discovery that...