Your Film Professor

NOTE: This isn’t a blog post but rather one of my academic essays. I hadn’t intended to post any of my academic essays on my blog but because this essay is just so darn long (82 pages!), I haven’t been able to get it published anywhere. It will be part of book project later, but for now I still wanted to get it some exposure, hence why I’ve decided to make an exception with this essay and post it here.

The Cognitive Mapping of Phallocentrism, Patriarchy, and Hypermasculinity in Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, and Fight Club

To my mind, four key intersecting ideologies inform an American (self) destructive mode of being, especially in terms of masculinities formations: patriarchy, phallocentrism, hypermasculinity, and capitalism. That is, these four ideological imperatives inform and/or intersect each other in complex ways, under girding our very collective ontological way of being, e.g., the “root causes” of so much of our many pathologies. For my study, I want to focus on three films – Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick), Full Metal Jacket (1987, Stanley Kubrick), and Fight Club (1999, David Fincher) – that cognitively map a devastating mode of masculinity informed by these four ideological normative identity formations, aspects of masculinity that need to be addressed if masculinity is ever to turn from its unhealthy, destructive path of a self defined by its difference to and superiority over Others – and thus keeping intact ideological self/Other annihilating and assimilating drives – and move forward in directions dictated by a “whole” (healthy) self.

Dr. Strangelove:

At the heart of many of Stanley Kubrick’s films is a focus on a famous line/ideology, “white man’s burden” (from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden”), and, by extension, the overriding conception of “manifest destiny.”  The most obvious case of this conception is in The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick) where Jack Torrance explicitly uses the reference “white man’s burden,” a reference that not only speaks to his explicit disdain for his wife Wendy (who the term is unambiguously targeted at when he says the line: “White man’s burden Lloyd, my man. White man’s burden”) but also as it informs the deeper thematic of Otherness in the film in general, which means not only the obvious Native American thread that runs throughout the film but how Kubrick collapses many Others into this oppressed (“white man’s burden”) category, e.g., women, the working class, and African Americans. We also see this motif most obviously in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, especially in a single stand out signifier: the “cowboy” motif in both films – as the “cowboy” signifier informs a frontier/manifest destiny/white man’s burden ideology of “civilizing” the west, e.g., assimilating and/or annihilating Native Americans.

In Dr. Strangelove, this motif shows up most potently with the character Major T.J. “King” Kong. For one thing, Kong is played by Slim Pickens a famous “cowboy” actor. Textually, Kong is most distinguished by perhaps the most telling “cowboy” (phallic) signifier ever, the cowboy hat. When Kong realizes that his crew isn’t being tested and that it really is time to go “toe-to-toe with the Rooskies,” Kong symbolically puts his cowboy hat on. Further reinforcing Kong’s signification as “cowboy” are several key lines (e.g., “I’m gonna get them doors open even if it harelips everybody on bear creek)” voiced with a western inflection. Topping this “cowboy” motif off of course is Kong “riding” the atomic bomb down to its destination, whooping and waving his hat rodeo style.

That the atomic bomb is between Kong’s legs explicitly “endows” him with not just any phallic symbol but the mother of all phallic symbols. The key here then is this packaging of phallic symbols (cowboy hat and Hollywood Western genre heritage) and the ultimate destructive phallic symbol (atom bomb), an intersection that makes this moment more than just another phallic symbol (even if it is perhaps the most potent phallic symbol in film history!): Digging a little deeper, one could perhaps read this moment more provocatively: It isn’t an atom bomb that destroys the world; rather, it is a “cowboy” (e.g., in this case Kong) who destroys the world. Since the “cowboy” (frontier) sensibility of American patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine masculinity has a specific ideology – that violence is a natural and normal solution to conflict; that authoritarian, hierarchal, patriarchal (non-critical) thinking is the encouraged norm; that one thinks reactively rather than contemplatively; that emotional and empathetic reactions should be suppressed; that masculinity is based on a single-minded dedication to bravery, heroism, sacrifice, purpose (rather than contemplating consequences), and extraordinary abilities; that the world is set in black and white (good and evil) terms – all of which informs Kong’s decision to blindly carry out his self-destructive mission, we can take this meaning even further: This ideology of a “cowboy” sensibility goes hand-in-hand with – is informed by and informs – an even more omnipotent ideology in the film, the ideologies of a patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine sensibility. And, thus: It isn’t just a “cowboy” who destroys the world, it is, in short, patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine ideologies.

More pointedly, the atom bomb that Kong rides down takes on another phallic dimension that informs these phallocentric, hypermasculine ideologies. In Kubrick’s most provocative play on this phallic metaphor, in Full Metal Jacket, we get the infamous moment when Sergeant Hartman and the men say, “This (their gun) is for fighting and this (their penis) is for fun,” making a direct link between penis and gun, and, even more provocatively, between the orgasmic discharge of the gun and the orgasmic discharge of the penis. In Dr. Strangelove, we get a similar analogy though in this case, the discharge of the weapon (the atom bomb) becomes an orgasmic discharge that ends the world. This becomes in part the “strange love” of the title, how phallocentric, hypermasculine men get an orgasmic sensation with both “creating” (penis) acts and “destructive” (bomb/gun) acts. This phenomenon of phallocentric, hypermasculine men getting an orgasmic rush from weapons/violence has been documented during wartime, as Loren Baritz reports of Vietnam experiences: “It was not unusual for GIs in Vietnam to be explicit about the sexual excitement their weapons induced. The war’s leaders in Washington had similar, if vastly more sublimated, attitudes. It was partly the thrill of domination, but it was more than that. They loved weapons” (52). Baritz goes on to give several specific examples: One grunt testified that “to some people carrying a gun constantly was like having a permanent hard on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger” (53). Another military man, a pilot, Carlos Campbell, says that firing and killing from his plane simulates the sex act: “[W]hen you’re in the airplane, and you fire a rocket, and you hear that whoosh leave your wing, then all of a sudden it hits. POW. It’s like an orgasm” (53). Michael Herr describes flying helicopters as “sex…pure sex” (53).

Arguably, in terms of sex also being a creative act, this equation isn’t an equation of equal parts; rather, because hypermasculine men don’t have the tools for real (emotional, vulnerable, expressive) intimacy, even the creative, expressive act of sexuality becomes a “destructive” act, in the sense that instead of a “spiritual” union based on love and emotional intimacy, the sexual act becomes just another barometer of hypermasculinity and/or sublimation of internal psychological issues and/or a “violent” expression of patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine masculinity. In terms of a barometer of hypermasculinity, Gary R. Brooks perfectly sums this up with one key component of what he calls the “centerfold syndrome”:

[Most men] are programmed to crave validation of their masculinity, and they frequently view women’s bodies as a medium for that validation…. When women are envisioned as sexual objects and made the centerpiece of men’s visual world, they become imbued with enormous psychosocial power. They are seen as having invaluable manhood tokens that they may, or may not, choose to dispense. (5-6)

Allan J. Johnson talks about the deeper implications of a reality where patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine ideologies innately entail violence against women:

To understand violence against women as both a social and a psychological problem, we have to ask what kind of society would provide fertile ground for it to take root and flourish as a recurring pattern of behavior. Decades of research have established a clear link between pervasive sexual violence against women and a patriarchal environment in which control and dominance are highly valued in men. Under patriarchy, for example, ‘normal’ heterosexuality is male identified and male centered, emphasizing men’s access to women and equating ‘real’ sex with intercourse, a practice that’s far more conducive to men’s pleasure than women’s. Such a system encourages men to value women primarily in terms of their ability to meet men’s needs and desires and to support men’s self-images as potent and in control. The huge pornography industry, for example, exists primarily to provide men with female images available for them to appropriate and incorporate into masturbatory fantasies. As a result, men’s use of coercion and violence to control women sexually and their use of women as objects on which to act out feelings of rage, shame, frustration, or fear are commonplace, not only in behavior, but as popular themes in literature, films, and other mass media. In other words, given the values promoted by patriarchal culture, men resort to violence against women because it works. (His italics 48-49)

Crucially, that “violence” is innately second nature for phallocentric, hypermasculine men stems from an ideological imperative towards violence:

What then emerges is a picture of considerable socialization toward violence. Whether learned in gangs, sports, the military, at the hands (often literally) of older males, or in simple acceptance that ‘boys will be boys’ when they fight, attitudes are conveyed to young males ranging from tolerance to approval of violence as an appropriate vehicle for conflict resolution, perhaps even the most manly means of conflict negation. From this perspective, violent men are not deviants or nonconformists; they are overconformists, men who have responded all too fully to a particular aspect of male socialization. (Harry Brod, his italics, 51)

Added to this formative “socialization toward violence” is another disturbing formative identity marker that compounds a male’s violent nature: Via attaching themselves to the mother early in life, males profoundly associate themselves with the mother – “inhabit the feminine position” – which, ostensibly, creates a positive experiential association. However, due to the toxic conditioning of a patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine environment, this “habiting” of the “feminine position” leads hypermasculine men to “overcompensate in the direction of aggression,” compensating for perceived feminine contamination:

Children of both sexes, being in a position of weakness vis-à-vis adults, are thus forced to inhabit the feminine position; they necessarily develop a sense of femininity and doubts about their ability to achieve masculinity. The ‘childish value judgments’ formed about this masculine/feminine polarity persist as a central motive in later life. Submission and striving for independence coexist in the child’s life, setting up an internal contradiction between masculinity and femininity. ‘This usually initiates a compromise’; in normal development some kind of balance is struck. The adult personality is thus a balance under tension. But if there is weakness (and [Alfred] Adler had the idea that neurosis often was triggered by some physical inferiority or other) there will be anxiety that motivates an exaggerated emphasis on the masculine side of things. This ‘masculine protest,’ in Adler’s famous phrase, is central to neurosis. It is basically a matter of overcompensation in the direction of aggression and restless striving for triumphs. (his italics R. W. Connell 18)

Importantly, Connell (and Adler) are stressing that this identity formation goes for both males and females, but due to the “subordination of women” in this phallocentric ideology, women ultimately accept their feminine self; it is phallocentric males who cannot reconcile this “feminine” self within – interpreting it as a symptom of “weakness” – hence the “overcompensation.”

Aggregately, then, this intersection of a strong sex drive – and, as Johnson and Moore suggest above, males’ sex drive is hyper-accentuated out of all proportion due to consumerist elements in society, especially the permeating presence of objectifying and dehumanizing pornography – this “socialization toward violence,” this “overcompensation [of perceived feminine attributes] in the direction of aggression,” and this lifelong incubation of male identified, male centered sexuality that both reinforces hypermasculinity and becomes an emotional and psychological outlet/sublimation for feelings of self-loathing, rage, and resentment (in large part towards women) fosters this “strange love” of displacement, displacing sexuality as an emotionally intimate and bonding experience with violent acts..

Kubrick especially emphasizes this hypermasculine sexuality element in the film with his play on named hypermasculine characters: Major T.J. “King” Kong, Jack D. Ripper, and Buck Turgidson. In the case of Buck Turgidson, the play is both on “Buck” – an alpha male deer and a hypermasculine name – and Turgidson – signifying “swollen” or “extended” as in an erect penis. In the case of Jack D. Ripper, Kubrick is obviously referencing the serial killer of women, seemingly suggesting that part and parcel of hypermasculinity is not only sexism and an objectification of women, but a misogynistic sensibility. Furthering this equating of hypermasculinity with misogyny, throughout the film, the only references of women that we get are centerfolds (e.g., in the inside door of the safe and Kong is shown gazing at one woman with, tellingly, a “Foreign Affairs” newspaper on her buttocks, further emphasizing her Otherness); Miss Scott, who looks like the woman in the centerfold (and is played by the same actress, Tracy Reed) and is initially seen in the same pose, not to mention that in a sly bit of editing, Kubrick cuts from Kong’s flying plane to Miss Scott in a kind of graphic match, suggesting the objectification of her by Buck, which is then reinforced a little later by Buck’s suggestion to her to begin her “countdown,” yet another objectifying reference; and of course the hint at what a post-apocalyptic world would look like for women, where they would be subjected to a 10-1 ratio of women to men and go back to an extreme patriarchal-hierarchal structure in its most degrading form. Johnson affirms this permeating misogynist ideology, “[T]o live in patriarchy is to breath in misogynist images of women as objectified sexual property valued primarily for their usefulness to men” (41). Jean Kilbourne importantly punctuates the disturbing implication of this hypermasculine norm:

Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step toward justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing. We see this with racism, with homophobia. The person becomes an object and violence is inevitable. This step is already taken with women. The violence, the abuse, is partly the chilling but logical result of the objectification. (278)

In this way, Kubrick materializes the symbiotic links of hypermasculinity and women, women becoming just another phallic symbol, as much as an object of masculinity compensation and reinforcement as a weapon or cigar.

In terms of Kong, the reference here is all too clear, Kong being analogous to the most destructive phallic “animal” of all time, King Kong. King Kong is the ultimate patriarchal, alpha (hypermasculine) male, mindlessly “protecting” his woman/possession no matter the cost to self or Other. Indeed, King Kong is the ultimate phallic masculinity, the embodiment of destructive power, dominance, and control, and which Major Kong can then personify, becoming the hypermasculine patriarch to his crew. Johnson emphasizes that this sensibility is at the core of patriarchy: “By its nature, patriarchy puts issues of power, dominance, and control at the center of human existence, not only in relationships between men and women, but among men as they compete and struggle to gain status, maintain control, and protect themselves from what other men might do to them” (42). In this sense, then, Kubrick is not only making an analogy to “King Kong” but also to primates in general, Johnson’s description of patriarchy also being a description of primate nature. The other telling angle here is how this “King Kong” analogy intricately intersects with another crucial element in the film: How hypermasculinity can also be defined by its infantilism.

Interestingly, the three key hypermasculine men in the film – again, Ripper, Turgidson, and Kong – all also exhibit infantile tendencies. Ripper and Buck chew their cigar and gum so vigorously that one can’t help but see an oral fixation for both men, which is also reinforced by childish behavior, including tantrums and reinforced by taking on parent-child relationships with more “adult” acting men (Mandrake for Ripper and Muffley for Turgidson – not to mention that Turgidson infantilizes himself to Miss Scott by calling himself “Bucky”). In Freudian terms, this oral fixation suggests two men locked in the “oral” stage of development, still attached to their mother’s breast. This element suggests key structural formations for hypermasculine men, men who pathologically suffer from a lifelong internal conflict that begins at infancy, when the male child experiences the “all-satisfying maternal object” (Diamond 65) an “illusory wholeness” (Diamond 65) that both equates to a desire to go back to “the lost breast, missing mother… fusional jouissance” (Diamond 64) that which “provides satiety and security that, once lost, is forever longed for and sought” (Diamond 61) – a position of both absolute contentment but also “absolute vulnerability” (Diamond 61) – and at the same time pathologically rouses in the male child “the accompanying terror of this longing in its unconscious association with being possessed by and annihilated by the omnipotent mother” (Diamond 61). In terms of the former (“fusional jouissance”), for hypermasculine men who particularly feel the pathological expectations of this crushing weight of constantly reinforcing their phallocentric masculinity, there is an unconscious desire to return to this point in their life where they not only felt “whole” (nurtured, secure, taken care of) but also could be free from this devastating, oppressive phallocentric mode of being. In other words, in their symptomatic infantile behavior, we can discern this deeper desire for an infantile state of being, this longing for the harmony and absolute nurturing sustenance of the mother, though, in turn, again, this modality also incites an infantile feeling of vulnerability and helplessness.

As this underlying, unconscious desire (as signified by the oral fixation of Ripper and Turgidson) to return to their mother’s breast also triggers a constant fear of loss of Self, a terror of “possession” and “annihilation” by the “omnipotent mother” – an infantile helplessness – to compensate for this threat to their phallocentric sense of self, hypermasculine men must create “phallic defenses,” brilliantly explicated by Michael J. Diamond in these two lengthy passages, which I quote in their entirety because they so well illuminate our understanding of the psychosomatic symptoms of these infantile, hypermasculine men:

[T]he little boy’s traumatic loss of the paradise of the originary, highly gratifying relationship with his mother predisposes him to create a phallic self-image to regain control of the object now experienced as quite separate from his ego. Accordingly, the phallic image provides him with an illusory way to win his mother’s love—a triumph apparently reflected by the gleam in his mother’s eyes—and, as his mother’s all-conquering hero, he becomes focused on activity and agency, the phallic conquest of the world, in order to stave of loss and chaos. Therefore, the phallus—based on the binary distinction between having and not having—partially represents the lost breast, while also signifying his inherently unrepresentable vulnerability. Phallic monism—the belief that the penis is the sexual organ—comes to guard against any recognition of lack or deficiency, defending against receptive dependence on good objects. Thus, the penis replaces the breast as the superior organ, and breast envy is relegated to the deeper unconscious…. By focusing on an external, visible organ, the penis—rather than coenesthetic sensations that produce more unsettling anxieties—the boy is helped along as he enters the phallic phase via the use of externalization and denial of the ‘insides.’ Accordingly, he shifts from inside to outside, and his inner genital sensations are externalized upon the phallus to protect against archaically feared attacks and…unrepresentable primordial anxieties. The term phallus, signifying false completeness and narcissistic, illusory wholeness, is thus initially employed to assuage differentiation anxieties and less accessible annihilation terrors. It becomes the symbol of invulnerability—a permanently erect monolith of masculine omnipotence—manically defending against the depressive and persecutory dangers of experiencing the lack of an all-too-separate but still needed, desired, and all-satisfying maternal object to transform the discord of infantile helplessness. (His italics, 64-65)  

The phallus then – as it becomes attached to symbols of “omnipotent,” “erect” masculine power – becomes a crucial template for phallocentric men to offset, compensate, and sublimate: “loss” (“of the paradise of the originary, highly gratifying relationship with his mother”), “deficiency” (of a feeling of “incompleteness”—that lack of wholeness that stems from the loss of the mother’s breast) the “inherently unrepresentable [primordial] vulnerability” and “dependence on good objects” and “annihilation terrors” (of that moment when Being was wholly dependent on the mother/the mother’s breast) and “differentiation anxieties” (of relating to or, indeed, desiring to be, the feminine/maternal). Also crucial here is the anxiety that attends those “coenesthetic sensations” that signify “insides,” stemming from that “originary” “sucking to take in from the breast” (Diamond, his italics, 69), which is “inherently anxiety provoking…as the boy associates the inside of the body with femininity” and thus the desire “to be penetrated” (by the mother’s breast) must be “defensively externalized” and “projected onto women and subsequently onto homosexual and ‘girlie’ men” (Diamond 69).  For hypermasculine men this psychosomatic defensive processing can be pathological:

Throughout the entire phallic phase, the high valuation of the penis is manifest in phallic pride with its associated desires and anxieties. The primacy of the body and manifestations of infantile sexuality… produce urges to penetrate and impose one’s self into that which is other …. For males, then, extending, thrusting, and penetrating—figuratively speaking—become paramount, along with the associated personality traits of assertiveness, aggression, strength, and potency in the realization of one’s desire. Moreover, the boy’s primordial vulnerability becomes anatomically anchored in this observable and erectable genital organ and accompanying testicles, which in their visible exposure are particularly vulnerable to attack from outside, and hence concretized in castration fears. Such castration anxieties, triggered by oedipal conflicts, often signify even more alarming fragmentation and annihilation terrors that derive from the boy’s primordial vulnerability. Phallic propensities, impulses, ambitions, and energies— characterized by part-object relating and accompanying paranoid-schizoid anxieties that frequently pertain to bodily loss and castration —are utilized, integrated, and transformed throughout a male’s development…. [D]efensive phallicity frequently reflects more transitory regressive tendencies in an otherwise healthy personality, or, alternatively, may indicate more rigid characterological distortions based on primitive defensive operations employed to protect a fragile, inflexible masculine gender identity. The so-called phallic character is characterized by exhibitionistic self-display, haughty reserve, a regarding of the penis as an instrument of aggression (rather than love), recklessness, misogyny, and an excessive narcissistic need to display one’s potency so that sexual relations are regarded as narcissistic reassurance rather than mutually valued object relations. Such phallic struggles for control and domination can manifest at varying developmental junctures, though they have been traditionally understood as regressively based on oedipal-phase anxieties….The hazard of phallic masculinity in its forever unreachable demands is that a hypermasculine, illusory image of phallic manhood constitutes a narcissistic end in itself—for example, in the constant urge to assert oneself impressively—rather than serving more creative purposes that require integrating phallic and genital ego ideals. Understanding and simply being (rather than doing) seem threatening, and as a result, compulsively driven, manic activity dominates …. (66-67)

For hypermasculine men, then, “defensive phallicity” takes on deeply pathological formations due to these “primitive defensive operations employed to protect a fragile, inflexible masculine gender identity,” which, crucially, includes “paranoid-schizoid anxieties that frequently pertain to bodily loss and castration,” which, in terms of hypermasculine men, compounds those already-in-place “alarming fragmentation and annihilation terrors that derive from the boy’s primordial vulnerability.” Kubrick’s infantilized men, especially the psychotic Ripper, exemplify this “fragile, inflexible masculine gender identity,” who, in their “distorted” pathological hypermasculine identity are “compulsively driven [to] manic activity [to] dominate” and “exhibitionistic self-display…a regarding of the penis as an instrument of aggression (rather than love), recklessness, misogyny, and an excessive narcissistic need to display one’s potency so that sexual relations are regarded as narcissistic reassurance rather than mutually valued object relations.” Most disturbingly, this pathological “illusory phallic manhood constitutes a narcissistic end in itself,” Ripper’s actions clearly being a “constant urge to assert oneself impressively,” which, in the case of Ripper means “produc[ing] urges to penetrate and impose one’s self into that which is other.”

We can especially see this in Ripper’s sexual dysfunction, which he puts this way: “After the physical act of love…a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed…a loss of essence…. I do deny them my essence.” Ripper’s impotence (or something akin to that, e.g., the natural post-coitus “deflation”) triggers his need to reassert his masculinity on a small scale and a large scale. Ripper’s fear is the fear of phallocentric, hypermasculine men, a fear of women/mother, those constant “terrors” of “possession” and “annihilation” and “penetration” – in Ripper’s words, “loss” of his “essence” – by the mother.  Such a fear of engulfment intricately interconnects with a fear of the “feminine”/maternal in general, phallocentric males fearing perceived “feminine” power and their attendant perceived “vulnerability” that wells up from “primordial anxieties” fixated from archaic sensations of loss of Self to the mother. Crucially, this sensation, again, stems from a triggered response to longing for that moment of “wholeness” when hypermasculine men could return to the only time in their life when they were anxiety-free, this psychosomatic bind playing havoc on the self, compounding the pathological breakdown of self. As I conveyed above, added to all of this is the fear and anxiety of archaic desires to be the mother/feminine – “inhabit the feminine position” (Connell) – a pre-Oedipal state of being that cannot entirely be elided, a point that Michael S. Kimmel affirms: “[H]e suppressed those traits in himself, because they will reveal his incomplete separation from mother. His life becomes a lifelong project to demonstrate that he possesses none of his mother’s traits. Masculine identity is born in the renunciation of the feminine, not in the direct affirmation of the masculine, which leaves masculine gender identity tenuous and fragile” (127). In other words, this original relating becomes a lifelong anxiety of the feminine within that can never be fully suppressed it is such a part of our natural self. Ripper “overcompensates” for all of this, for his neurotic perception of lack of (masculine) “essence” by the ultimate act of “aggression” and “striving for triumph.”

Compounding all of this is how Ripper’s peculiar sentiments suggest a deeper element here as well:

• “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the International Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
• “God willing we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God Bless you all.”

Ripper suffers not just from a fear of a loss of masculinity; rather, his stated fear of Communist “contamination” (added on to his implied fear of women, e.g., him “denying” them his “essence”) suggests something deeper. Ripper fears something he is not even consciously aware of: The fear of contamination of Otherness in general. The terms he uses in his words above are loaded with evocative meaning: “Bodily fluids” suggest not only “water” and “semen” but “blood.” “Purity” takes on historically loaded connotations, all which center on a “pure” white race, which, of course resonates in the form of former Nazi Dr. Strangelove (more on him and the “Jewish” element in a moment). And then “essence” speaks to Ripper/(hu)MAN as an abstraction, something of which defines him (maleness) as an ideological (hypermasculine, white) constant. Purity and (hyper) masculinity, in turn, again evoke this “white man’s burden”/manifest destiny ideology, which, in turn, informs a compounding self/Other incubatory formation, patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men programmed in formative years to symbiotically identify – come to see themselves as gatekeepers of – patriarchal ideologies, which, in addition to “white man’s burden”/manifest destiny, includes and intricately intersects with nationalism, patriotism, and Christianity/Protestantism, all of which are phallic symbols as well, formations that in turn affirm patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men’s masculinity. In this complex identity formation, Others (e.g., “foreign” Others, alternative belief systems) also become a threat to patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men, a threat to their privileged position and a threat to their belief in their superior self.

Finally, as these identity formations are incubated in formative years, they also collapse into each other, this self/Other split all signifying the same thing, the Other signifying that which is NOT masculine (e.g., the feminine within), making the threat of Others all that much more threatening for patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men, which, in turn, also triggers “defensive phallicity.”

In short, the hypermasculine male must prevent “penetration”/contamination of self at all costs, even if it means ending the world.  In a sense, then, the same phallocentric, hypermasculine destructive drive to create the biggest bomb – the ultimate phallic object relation – is the same drive that dehumanizes (or destroys/annihilates) Others: Again, hypermasculine men create phallic weapons (or the biggest bomb) to reinforce their masculinity and to sublimate innate “penetration”/contamination anxieties, as well as a form of orgasmic stimulation, the former two informing the latter. Comparatively, hypermasculine men oppress (assimilate) and/or destroy (annihilate) Others to reinforce their hypermasculinity and to sublimate innate “penetration”/contamination anxieties, as well as a form of orgasmic stimulation (the latter of which we especially see with Rafterman’s shooting of the Vietnamese sniper in Full Metal Jacket, which I’ll come back to in my discussion of the film). In this way too, then, we can see how such ideological drives as manifest destiny and “white man’s burden” (and protecting nationalistic, patriotic, Christian ascendancy) become part and parcel of phallocentric euphoria, ideological drives that in effect artificially suture this “fragile, inflexible masculine gender identity” to archaic (patriarchal/white man’s burden/manifest destiny) formations already in place, not to mention that these ideologies sanction this ultimate phallocentric, hypermasculine stroking of egos.

In sum, the ideology of hypermasculinity creates these Others as a way of: (A) creating an Other against which hypermasculine men can set off their more “pure” self; and (B) creating an Other against which hypermasculine men must constantly work at reinforcing their hypermasculinity, often through various means of violence and subjugation. Kimmel says as much when he says that “we come to know what it means to be a man in our culture by setting our definitions in opposition to a set of ‘others’ —racial minorities, sexual minorities, and, above all, women” (120 “Masculinity as Homophobia”). But as we see above, phallocentric identity formations go even deeper than that, with hypermasculine men seeing Otherness as a threat to their “inside,” a “penetration” (“contamination”) of self, which, in turn, triggers all those anxieties attached to their fear of the feminine/Mother. That is, for hypermasculine men, all attacks on identity (e.g., patriotic, nationalistic, white, capitalistic) all intricately congeal around this core patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine identity formation, the threat to one part of identity triggering those same feelings of weakness and “penetration” that feminine/Mother threats incur, a threat of a loss of self (to Otherness), a sublimation of that fear into an “overcompensating in the direction of aggression” (assimilating and/or annihilating the Other becomes an assimilating and/or annihilating of the Other within) and, in turn, violence against Others reinforcing self/hypermasculinity. In other words, for hypermasculine men, any attack on the self is an attack on their “fragile, inflexible masculine gender identity,” and that, in turn, sets off the same “defensive phallicity” responses mentioned above, though for military men, these responses become incredibly dangerous!

In terms of this Otherness, as I suggested previously, Kubrick often does a synecdoche thing here: He posits one Other as a part of or in placement for other Others: In Dr. Strangelove the equation would be something like this: Communist/women/Jew (more on the Jewish part of this equation in a moment); again, in The Shining it is Native American/women/African American/working class/children (And Jewishness as well? I’ll come back to this element as well); in Full Metal Jacket, it is Vietnamese/Native American/women. In all cases this synecdoche of Otherness in general is transparent, especially when Kubrick inserts that one line into one of his films: “white man’s burden.”

Another way to think of the oral fixation of these infantile men is the overriding fact that these infantile, hypermasculine men constantly need that nurturing reinforcement to their always threatened, insecure masculinity/self, especially symbolized by Ripper’s chomping on his phallic cigar.  In effect, they have substituted the healthy-nurturing breast for the unhealthy-nurturing breast (“insides”) of phallic reinforcement, a substitution that enacts the lifelong need to suppress the maternal symbiosis/relation, as Diamond conveys above, the penis replacing the “lost breast” and phallic objects replacing the lost phallus of wholeness with the mother (see above quote). Again, in terms of Kong, the King Kong reference echoes a simple (animalistic-instinctive-primal-reactive) mode of being. In both cases, more disturbingly, this infantile element has profoundly disturbing implications: These hypermasculine men can only act on impulses dictated on a permutated desire  to feed their need for  wholeness, in this case – as we see above – the need for constant reinforcement of their masculinity and sublimation of “penetration” anxieties, whether that be in terms of sexuality (potency, penetration, performance), or in terms of women/Other-as-object (trophyism, patriarchal reinforcement), or in terms of other phallic reinforcements/object relations (e.g., of course guns/bombs in this film, but, more generally, in the real world, also many other phallic signifiers such as cars, dogs, muscles, and so on). Kimmel emphasizes this point, though adds to it how this need for constant phallic reinforcement/sublimation stems in part because of the “constant careful scrutiny of other men”: “Think of how men boast to one another of their accomplishments—from their latest sexual conquest to the size of the fish they caught—and how we constantly parade the markers of manhood—wealth, power, status, sexy women—in front of other men, desperate for their approval” (128-129 “Masculinity as Homophobia”).

Such an implication profoundly reveals another one: On the surface, the military is a necessary and positive entity, there to serve for our “protection” and to keep the “peace” (as seen by the numerous darky satirical “Peace is our Profession” signs) but what the film reveals is that this is really just a smoke screen for the Real[1]: As the film didactically satirizes, in short, again, the military is really just a instrument for hypermasculine men to exercise their need to reinforce their fragile masculine egos, sublimate their “penetration” anxieties. Brilliantly encapsulating this idea is the “doomsday device,” a brilliant symbol to exaggerate the arms race of the Cold War, the “arms race” just amounting to men acting like infantilized “boys” saying that “mine” is “bigger” than yours. Though that would seem to simplify this complex equation too much, I think the brilliance of Kubrick is that it really is just that simple! Helen Caldicott affirms this observation:

The hideous weapons of mass genocide may be symptoms of several male emotions, reflecting inadequate sexuality, a need continually to prove virility, and a primitive fascination with killing …. The names used by the military are laden with psychosexual overtones: missile erector, thrust-to-weight ratio, soft laydown, deep penetration, hard line, and soft line…. The American missiles are smaller than the Soviet missiles, a fact that is used to good advantage by the generals to persuade Congress of the need for more money. Boeing constructed a model of the different size of missiles, painting the American ones blue and the Soviet ones red. The generals take this model to House and Senate hearings to say: ‘But Senator, how do you feel when America has these small blue missiles and Russia has these great big red missiles?’ They always get what they ask for. (238-239)

No character in Dr. Strangelove embodies these intersecting formations (masculinity reinforcements, masculinity “penetration” anxieties, this “essence”/Other binary) than Dr. Strangelove. In literal terms, the character of Dr. Strangelove is a reference to the US and other countries repatriating some of the Nazi German scientists after WWII, in effect bringing in Jews into this Otherness mix as well (as Geoffrey Cocks compellingly argues for in The Shining as well).[2] In symbolic terms, Dr. Strangelove is a much deeper figure. For one thing, I suspect he is created to show the distinct similarities between the actions of American ideology and those of Nazi Germany ideology. Dr. Strangelove then acts as a mirror to our (the United States’) own (ideological, capitalist, corporate) actions, views, and decisions, e.g., again, our manifest destiny and “white man’s burden” (“city upon a hill”) sensibility that at least in part still drives our ideology today, our xenophobic distrust of “foreign” (Other) people in general, and our drive for power and profit. Or, in other words, Dr. Strangelove becomes the ghost in the machine, hiding in the shadows (as we see in one striking shot late in the film), lurking in the wings (as he was throughout most of the film), the fascism latent in our system, always ready to emerge into full view.

Even more disturbing is this angle: In terms of thinking of what Dr. Strangelove’s ultimate goal is, this eagerly anticipated “repopulating” idea (with suggestions of Hitler’s/Nazism’s “white supremacy” ideology), Dr. Strangelove’s “desire” is just another way to say that his drive too is a drive to the phallus, which is especially emphasized at the end where we get Strangelove standing “erect” (after his Nazi-imbued arm keeps going uncontrollably “erect”) just before the Doomsday scenario, as if the prospect of (orgasmic) nuclear war and the objectification of women (the mine shaft scenario) and a more “pure” form of authoritarian (hypermasculine) patriarchy (as mostly patriarchal, hypermasculine men will be chosen for the mine shafts)  “arouses” Dr. Strangelove’s desire or…”strange love.” In a sense, then, Ripper’s desire for a “purity of (hypermasculine, phallocentric, patriarchal) essence” is fulfilled.

Full Metal Jacket:

Full Metal Jacket more explicitly stresses this focus of manifest destiny (and, by extension, our frontier heritage) in that it represents a war – the Vietnam War – that becomes an explicit extension of America’s manifest destiny ideology. Kubrick didactically manifests this ideology in the scene where the men compare the Vietnamese enemy to “Indians” and in the more disturbing scene where a colonel chides Joker for his “peace sign” and lack of commitment to the “cause,” saying that “We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out” (Kubrick punctuating this disturbing polemic with a row of dead Vietnamese in the background, covered in white lime!) Adding to this mix is the recurring references to how “God is on our side,” a direct reference to American’s “city upon a hill” and “white man’s burden” ideology. In her essay “Full-Metal-Jacketing, or Masculinity in the Making,” Paula Willoquet-Maricondi similarly observes: “Kubrick stages the masculinization process to show that the myth of masculinity is bound to another central myth that forms the basis of American nationalism: the myth of ‘the city upon a hill’ which manifests itself through the belief in American idealism and technological invincibility” (6).[3] Intricately under girding this ideology is a manifest patriarchy – the colonel chides and patronizes Joker, echoing the paternal hierarchy of the military – especially as it informs the strategy used by the Marine Corps, a patriarchal institution if there ever was one. What this complex strain in American ideology informs is a deeply ingrained patriarchal, phallocentric hypermasculine masculinity.

God/Christianity-Patriarchy
Perhaps no mechanism informs this manifest destiny (“white man’s burden”), patriarchal ideology than the Marine Corps’ use of God to get the men to embrace a hypermasculine identity. By invoking “God,” the Corps reinforces in the men (since this is part and parcel of American ideology anyway) this sense of their phallocentric, patriarchal superiority and entitlement. In his superb disquisition on patriarchy, Johnson gets at this key element of patriarchy:

And just as what men do tends to be valued more highly than what women do, those things that are valued in a social system’s culture will tend to be associated with men more than with women. God, for example, is of enormous importance in human life, and so it should come as no surprise that every monotheistic patriarchal religion worships a male-identified God gendered as masculine. As Mary Daly argues in her book, Beyond God the Father, this, in turn, puts men in the highly favorable position of having God identified with them, which further reinforces the position of women as ‘other’ and the legitimacy of men’s claim to privilege and dominance. (his italics, 9-10).

Johnson’s observation here – that God and masculinity are wedded together – hyper-accentuates this historical-cultural-ideological (phallocentric) positioning of men as the privileged gender. Add in the special place God/Christianity has in American ideology: God/Christian language (“minister,” “pray,” “savior,” “pilgrim”) is sprinkled throughout Full Metal Jacket though is especially prevalent in the training sequence where the Corps conjoins Christian purity (“born again”) with hypermasculinity (“hard”), the training grounds a space for men to be “born again hard” (especially ironically said to Leonard/“Gomer Pyle” after he has literally been broken and is anything but “pure”—more on this in a moment) Sergeant Hartman spells out this Christian coda during a Christmas morning ode to Jesus (the men sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus) and we especially get this Christian model set up in this Corps’ Christian diatribe, spoken by Sergeant Hartman: “Chaplain Charlie will tell you about how the free world will conquer communism with the aid of God and a few Marines. God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. He plays his games we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much power we keep heaven packed with fresh souls. God was here before the Marine Corps. So you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Corps.” This Protestant refrain echoes “city upon a hill” refrains from many presidents and a general feeling of America’s (“white man’s burden”) duty to the world[4], most glaringly explicated by President Woodrow Wilson: “When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare. I will not cry ‘peace’ as long as there is sin and wrong in the world” (Baritz 37). Such a sensibility has deep roots in American ideology, as Baritz says: “Because of [America’s] Puritan roots, it is not surprising that American’s nationalism is more Protestant than that of other countries. It is more missionary in its impulses, more evangelical. It typically seeks to correct the way other people think rather than to establish its own physical dominion over them. It is, as it were, more committed to the Word, as befits serious Protestants, than other nationalisms” (37).  Such missionary (manifest destiny, imperialistic) roots stem from a deeply ingrained “American exceptionalism”: “The fact is that Americans have always seen themselves as exceptional…a people specially chosen by God and given a destiny to fulfill by him” (Wilsey 16). This too becomes an ontological mode of being informing and informed by a patriarchal, phallocentric ideology and a dangerous incubatory formation of masculine identity.

God is not just evoked as on the Corps’ (America’s) side (“with the aid of God”; “God has a hard-on for Marines”) but also that the Corps’ leaders are “ministers” of God’s word, as the same colonel above tells Joker that all he asks is that his men “obey [his] orders as they would the word of God.” What is so striking about Sergeant Hartman’s and the unnamed colonel’s words above is how they hypermasculinize God by emphasizing a “hard” God who wants Marines to kill for them. Wedded to this Christian language is language and images that ideologically reinforces patriarchal ideology – a patriarchal hierarchy – with officers becoming de facto surrogate fathers to these men, “ministers” who will do God’s will to christen these men “born again hard.”

Throughout the training sequence, the men are infantilized and Sergeant Hartman/the Corps coded as a patriarchal father figure. This sensibility is first manifested early on when the men have their head’s shaved, are stripped down to their underwear (which we see throughout the training sequence), and given new names, all of which is about a psychosomatic re-birthing of the men, the men’s development stemming from the hypermasculine father/(God). Willoquet-Maricondi emphasizes this fundamental shift in nurturing: “[T]he original unity between mother and child that, according to post-Freudian ego psychology theories, constitutes that child’s primary identity is now replaced with the unity between the reborn masculine and the patriarchal mother” (15). But unlike the healthy unity between mother and male child, here we get its fundamental opposite, the hard father infantilizing and re-modeling the men in its “hard” image, fostering those patriarchal qualities that epitomize a “warrior” class of men. We see this infantilization especially with Leonard Lawrence, who, due to his constant mistakes, is seen in infantilized states, pants down around his ankles, sucking his thumb on two occasions, and given a surrogate father/mother figure in the form of Joker, who, at the behest of Sergeant Hartman – “He will teach you to pee” – takes Leonard under his wing and attempts to nurture him into compliance, at one point saying, “that a boy,” praise a father might say to his son. In the hierarchal structure of military institutions, the men are placed in hierarchal situations, a patriarchal structure of authority and power, a structure that is also an ideological extension of patriarchal hierarchies already part of these men’s lives. This authority structure emulates paternal authority, authority figures such as Sergeant Hartman meting out punishment – sometimes extreme punishment – to get the “ladies” (children) to obey and comply with the Corps’ systematic manipulation of minds and bodies, and later, when the men are no longer “ladies” but “people” and then “men,” positively reinforcing the men for jobs well done. Such systematic re-birthing resonates with similar patriarchal-phallocentric/hypermasculine historical movements that came before (and which are still in place today), instilling in these men already conditioned desires to seek out these spaces and embrace them as an integral part of their “ritual” “purification” of self:

By adolescence, ‘boy culture’ was to be organized and disciplined under male supervision, but strict separation of the sexes was to be maintained to ensure that boys would grow up to be real men. The reorganization of the Young Men’s Christian Association in the 1880s and the organization of the Boy’s Brigades and Knights of King Arthur in the 1880s and 1890s indicated an effort to provide young boys with adult male role models, simultaneously disciplining and controlling boy culture and demarcating male space from female space in a highly ritualized and mythopoetic setting. The founding of Boy Scouts of America in 1910 By Ernest Thompson Seton provides a graphic indictment of contemporary manhood. Women, he argued, were turning ‘robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood into a lot of flat chested cigarette smokers with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality…. Cultural feminization was challenged by religious leaders, who sought to reinvest the cultural image of Jesus with virile manhood. The Muscular Christianity movement sought to transform religious iconography, which often portrayed Jesus as soft and gentle. Jesus was ‘no dough-faced, lick spittle proposition,’ proclaimed evangelist Billy Sunday, but ‘the greatest scrapper who ever lived.’ ‘Lord save us from off-handed, flabby cheeked, brittle boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, ossified, three carat Christianity’ Sunday pleaded…. Adult men could retreat to their fraternal lodges. Fraternal orders were enormously popular at the turn of the century; slightly less than one of four American men belonged to an order (Harwood, 1897). The lodge was a homosocial preserve, celebrating a purified, nurturant masculinity…. These fraternal orders are the turn-of-the-century precursor to contemporary mythopoetic retreats. Here men’s initiation rituals took on a systematic, routinized character: With up to 50 different levels of status, one could be reasonably certain that an initiation was going to take place at each meeting. Such rituals followed a similar appropriation of tradition. The profane man, the man born of woman, is symbolically killed and reborn into the band of equal brothers…. (278-279 Kimmel and Kaufman, “Weekend Warriors…”)

In this way, then, the Corps (and other military/law enforcement organizations) continues a long ideological tradition of a ritual re-birthing of “boys” into (hypermasculine) men. Moreover, in this same vein, the Corps does something quite ingenious as well: By activating this ideologically embedded patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine programming in the men, the Corps, purveyor of this patriarchal mantle, a mantle that the men accept and revere and covet, instill in the men a sense of their own patriarchal responsibility to a white man’s burden/manifest destiny/city upon a hill (God) ideology – reinforcing the mythical/higher calling motivation of this identity formation – Others (Vietnamese in this case) taking their place as needing a re-birthing into this “pure” American ideology, because, as the unnamed colonel says, “inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”

The intricate conditioning here is that men understand that this process of self-immolation is not only “natural and normal” (as dictated ideologically) but in fact a mandate by God and country, making their desire for ultimate manhood the penultimate goal of identity attainment. In other words, again, males shaped by this identity formation early in life will ineluctably move towards patriarchal institutions such as the military (or other hyper-masculine/patriarchal institutions such as law enforcement, security organizations, intelligence systems of government, and so on) in the understanding that this movement is the grand culmination of achieving the desired level of masculinity, even if it means tearing down their self to get there. Indeed, for these type of men, they see this movement to a more “pure” (“born again hard”) masculinity as needing some sort of initiation, another kind of phallic reinforcement, the men’s manhood determined by their ability to endure punishing mental and physical assaults. As Don Conway-Long says, these initiation rituals are part and parcel of masculinity identity formations,

What emerges are separate rituals for men and for women that are central to the development of each as gendered identities. The rituals incorporate symbols that are interpreted individually yet result in collective beliefs and behaviors…. It is of great interest in understanding gender symbology that girls are frequently thought to be born with all of the necessary internal functions to become a biologically full-grown woman naturally. No intervention is necessary. Boys, on the other hand, require intervention to develop…. [W]ar builds men. So does sexual conquest or the acquiring of riches. But something must be done to make a boy a man; some proof of masculinity, some achievement, is necessary. (68)

Perhaps no modern process takes on archaic hypermasculinizing ritual-like attributes as the “training camp” regime. The “boot camp” gives the men an “initiation” or baptism by fire – what Willoquet-Maricondi calls a “program…of purification” (13) – where the men’s mind and bodies are sadistically made malleable, so they can then be “born again hard.” Again, throughout this initiation/indoctrination, the Corps makes it clear that it is a branch of God and country and that in this molding the men are becoming not cogs or tools but “rebirthing” into a custodian and missionary of an American (manifest destiny) ideology, a gaudy responsibility indeed and the “proof” that phallocentric men long for of their masculinity attainment. The other “proof” here – deeply and inextricably ingrained in phallocentric, hypermasculine men and another reason why phallocentric, hypermasculine men will give themselves up to such sadistic abuse – is the absolute break from the “nurturing power of the mother,” which, as suggested in my Dr. Strangelove section, is a lifelong project for hypermasculine men still feeling the contamination of this formative moment in their life:

Recognizing that a child’s attainment of identity as self and as gendered being are closely connected, if not always coincident, and that such attainment takes place in a gendered environment where women are the primary caretakers in the earliest years, signifying to the child a basic division of labor; recognizing also that the attainment of masculinity is a different process from that of femininity because the male must break free from the nurturing power of the mother through the violence of a second birth into his masculinity, one finds a clear explication of the habitus of gender—an embodiment of sex-based gender arrangements that remain hidden from the social eye (and the social ‘I’) due to their close, association with the biology of reproduction. Bourdieu (1977) argues, I think correctly, that the child learns a sexual identity and a division of labor simultaneously, ‘out of the same socially defined set of inseparably biological and social indices’ (93). I can think of nothing that is more naturalized than the gender arrangements (appropriate sexual behavior, gender behavior, division of labor) that have been constructed on the biological divisions of sex. These arrangements are considered to be objective, natural, and above human choice. (Conway-Long 72-73)

In other words, the phallocentric male’s masculine identity formation begins with a “repudiation” of the mother/feminine – that need to “break free from the nurturing power of the mother” – which entails the need for a “second birth into…masculinity,” which, in turn, means not only accepting “the habitus of gender” but crucially needing such a “division of [gender] labor,” allowing a “naturalized” mechanism that actually reinforces this self-perceived need to utterly castrate themselves from part of their whole being. The military indoctrination serves this function as purely as any other societal institution.

John Wayne/The Lone Ranger (Cowboy Motif)

Further manifesting this patriarchal coda is the recurring reference of patriarchal man-“God” John Wayne.  That early moment when Joker says, “Is that you John Wayne? Is this me?” enrages Hartman because Joker is irreverently mocking the patriarchal father exemplar. That is, Kubrick is already establishing that Joker has the self-awareness to see through this indoctrination – and thus question it – whether that be Hartman/the Corp’s blatant physical, verbal, and psychological indoctrination or the ideological conditioning that stems from such patriarchal, hypermasculine representational icons as John Wayne. (This mockery also already begins Joker’s ironic split identity formation between his indoctrinated “hypermasculine,” “Born to Kill” Self — “Is that you John Wayne?” — and his “peace” Self — “Is this me?”) John Wayne is a crucial signifier in this film because he is the quintessential hypermasculine, patriarchal hero/father (ego ideal) of military men everywhere, not to mention that John Wayne held the mantle of a hegemonic American masculinity that still resonates today, three decades after his death. Part of Johnson’s definition of patriarchy – what he calls “male identification” – perfectly sums up why John Wayne so embodied patriarchal, hypermasculine ideology, why he became such a mythological icon, both in his most famous parts and in the patriarchal, hypermasculine “star” image that he cultivated so well:

Another aspect of male identification is the cultural description of masculinity and the ideal man in terms that closely resemble the core values of society as a whole. These include qualities such as control, strength, competitiveness, toughness, coolness under pressure, logic, forcefulness, decisiveness, rationality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and control over any emotion that interferes with other core values (such as invulnerability) (7).

Such qualities not only inform why John Wayne so embodied patriarchal, hypermasculine ideals and thus why he was so embraced and adulated but also informs how he personified not only patriarchal, hypermasculine values but also the patriarchal informed American ideology in general: “These male-identified qualities are associated with the work valued most in patriarchal societies—business, politics, war, athletics, law, and medicine—because this work has been organized in ways that require such qualities for success” (Johnson 7). And “success” itself is one of the key barometers of a phallocentric masculinity, the patriarchal, hypermasculine ideological rationale and phallic endpoint for such a way of being. In other words, patriarchal, hypermasculine hero-icons such as John Wayne incubated and reinforced this unhealthy mode of masculinity, playing on devolved archaic representations, romanticizing and idealizing a form of masculinity that gave men an impossible standard for an ideal and “successful” masculinity. More crucially, such a mode of being also kept men from progressing beyond such (self) destructive masculinity norms. These patriarchal qualities that inform an “ideal” (self-destructive) masculinity also eschews those qualities that better accentuate a healthy mode of being: “In contrast, qualities such as cooperation, mutuality, equality, sharing, compassion, emotional expressiveness, and intuitive and other nonlinear ways of thinking are all devalued and cultural associated with femininity and femaleness” (Johnson 7). In this ideology, too many men are kept in a perpetual state of lack or un-wholeness.

Accentuating this hegemonic, hypermasculine thread is the “cowboy,” western genre motif in general. Like Slim Pickens, John Wayne automatically signifies a cowboy sensibility, as that is the role he came to be associated with, and Joker invokes his presence through imitation several times in the film, including a key standoff moment with Animal Mother. As mentioned above, the “cowboy” and “Indian” back and forth by the men in a key war moment particularly registers this cowboy sensibility as well, especially as it informs just how indoctrinating the western genre was to a whole generation of males at this time, something Kubrick understood very well: “Kubrick is conscious of Vietnam literature’s use of the western as a mythic-interpretative device. The Vietnam generation was conditioned by westerns from pre-puberty, so it was an easy transition to view the Vietcong as Native Americans” (130 Williams). Further reinforcing this cowboy motif and frontier heritage/manifest destiny conditioning – emphasizing the powerfully romanticized spell put on male children growing up – Kubrick cunningly has The Lone Ranger playing in a blown-up theater (we can see the title and images on the theater marquees).

Perhaps no western genre signifier in the film pulsates meaning more than The Lone Ranger. Kubrick’s play here is multidimensional: Again, as a general signifier of the western genre motif in the film; as a signifier of the imperialistic, post-colonial Americanization of Other third world countries (ironically indoctrinating Others to their own assimilation—that The Lone Ranger is even playing in a Vietnamese movie theater speaks volumes of Americanizing/westernizing hegemony)[5]; contradictorily, as one among many signifiers that signify “innocence,” punctuating the devastating loss of these men, a loss that is more complex than just a loss of childhood innocence (I’ll come back to this point); and, as this blown out space becomes the space for the men having sex with a Vietnamese prostitute, as the Real of this cartoon (American) ideology, the ultra-romanticizing The Lone Ranger papering over an enormous violation of Otherness in general, especially women, a point I will also return to in a moment.

The John Wayne/Lone Ranger references do more than even the above: In the ideological “purity” of these supra-quintessential icons, the Corps doesn’t have to do much to convince the men that they lack the purity necessary to scale such heights. Such western genre icons and the patriarchal, phallocentric western genre ideology that pre-60s westerns perpetuated – manifest destiny/American exceptionalism, white man’s burden (taming/civilizing the west, assimilating and/or annihilating the “savage Indians”), rugged individualism, hypermasculine heroism, Christian/Puritan ideology – had already instilled in men this same dogma avowed by the Corps and other military branches. Indeed, we could take this a step further: In short, patriarchal heroes such as John Wayne and The Lone Ranger (and the many such larger than life heroes created by the western genre) naturalizes male privilege, a point that Johnson persuasively emphasizes: “As I grew up watching movies and television…the message was clear that men are the most important people on the planet because they’re the ones who supposedly do the most important things as defined by patriarchal culture. They’re the strong ones who build, the heroes who fight the good fight, the geniuses, writers and artists, the bold leaders, and even the evil – but always interesting – villains. Even God is gendered male” (31). Perhaps no vehicle substantiated this ideological mode of being than the western genre, where the hero was almost always male, a heroic figure embodying all the phallocentric, hypermasculine, and patriarchal traits that define the ideal man, not to mention embodying this rugged individualism, manifest destiny ideology.

The Corps—The Infantilization and Birth of the Hypermasculine Man

As Willoquet-Maricondi exceptionally elucidates, Full Metal Jacket reveals “the profound analogies between the making of the marine and the making of masculinity in general” (5). Willoquet-Maricondi suggests that from the beginning – starting with the men getting their heads shaved – the men are stripped of their identities and re-created in the hypermasculine, killing machine Marine Corps image. They do this by suppressing all that is feminine/maternal/homosexual/bisexual: “The masculine is shown to be contaminated by an ‘other’ defined as feminine by expressions such as ‘ladies’ and ‘sweetheart’ or as homosexual: ‘Only steers and queers come from Texas,’ ‘Only faggots and sailors are called Lawrence’” (13).  As Willoquet-Maricondi further suggests, this process becomes a tearing at the fabric of the recruits’ selfs: “Kubrick’s deconstruction of the masculinization process in the Parris Island portion of the film shows that the first space to be colonized is the Self. The Self becomes, in fact, a combat zone where the unity of being is shattered. The drill instructor’s mission is to ‘sweep and clear’ what he identifies as ‘enemy’ in the core of the marines’ selves” (12).  But this “masculinization process” only takes to an extreme a process that has already been put into place before entry into the Corps. As Michael Kimmel says, “Historically and developmentally, masculinity has been defined as the flight from women, the repudiation of femininity. Since Freud, we have come to understand that developmentally the central task that every little boy must confront is to develop a secure identity for himself as a man” (126 “Masculinity as Homophobia”).  This development begins with the Oedipal complex, which means that the boy must come to identify with his father – relinquishing his attachment to his mother – out of fear of castration. This has enormous consequences for the boy:

Masculinity, in this model, is irrevocably tied to sexuality. The boy’s sexuality will now come to resemble the sexuality of his father (or at least the way he imagines his father) – menacing, predatory, possessive, and possibly punitive. The boy has come to identity with his oppressor; now he can become the oppressor himself. (126-127 Kimmel “Masculinity as Homophobia”)

In this context, phallocentric, hypermasculine males who take on the Corps as their patriarchal “father” model, will re-enact this scenario, all too easily “purify” themselves even further by renouncing the “feminine”/“maternal” and identifying themselves with the patriarchal Corps itself, a deeply disturbing cathexing of this Othering/oppressor institutional model.

The Corp doesn’t just focus on the “feminine”/“maternal” and homosexuality but, similar to what Kubrick does in Dr. Strangelove, lumps all Otherness categories into the category of “contaminants,” which has extreme ramifications for the development of these already still developing males: First of all, via all of the slurs, the Corps associates the “feminine” and “maternal” with these Other contaminants (e.g., Communism, atheism, foreign/Vietnamese Otherness), thus making the “feminine” and “maternal” even that much more undesirable. Second, as I convey above, it enshrines in the men’s mind an actual goal of a kind of purity – free of these contaminants – of hypermasculinity, making that pursuit by these men even more zealous. Third, because this conditioning expurgates characteristics associated with femininity/maternalism – e.g., empathy, compassion, healthy emotional expressivity and connectivity, sympathy, nurturing – and because this conditioning conversely homogenizes self into the most extreme characteristics of (hyper) masculinity – paternal authority, emotional suppressivity (excepting negative emotions such as hate and anger, which become compensating or displacing emotions for any “feminine/maternal” emotions), aggression and violence as a natural and normal (indeed, encouraged) solution to conflict, rugged non-critical thinking individualism, intolerance of Otherness – this conditioning also contributes to a groupthink (pack) mentality where objectifying, degrading (killing in the case of the “enemy”) of the demonized Other is uniform – again, a key barometer of hypermasculinity during wartime – which is in part how wartime atrocities come about, as we see with some of the worse examples of the men in the Vietnamese scenes (e.g., helicopter gunner who shoots innocent women and children). Of particular concern in this masculinization process is “empathy erosion.” Simon Baron-Cohen attributes historical cruelties (e.g., the Holocaust) to “empathy erosion,” where low or zero degrees of empathy cause people to turn (Other) people into objects: “When our empathy is switched off, we are solely in the ‘I’ mode. In such a state, we relate only to things, or to people as if they were just things” (4-5). Kathleen Barry refers to this dehumanized state of military men as the “sociopathic condition of war”:

Where empathy might have been, callousness and sometimes glibness reigns. That is the sign of a sociopath, which, when it has infected a collective as large as that of combat soldiers and the military, is a social condition I refer to as the sociopathic condition of war. Wars of aggression – wars that are made for reasons other than imminent threat of war by another state – are themselves large-scale sociopathic conditions with the militaries generating sociopathic conditions. The military has reduced itself to a sociopathogenic institution…. Sociopathic behavior was foreign to most soldiers before entering the military. Rather, it has been induced in them through training. In combat, it is ordered. Sociopathic behavior among soldiers, I suggest, results not from some proclivity to amorality but from depersonalization that brings about numbness to feelings when one is committing acts of depravity in war that are driven by military conditioning and brainwashing” (her italics 73).

In short, Barry goes on to sum up, “The work of the military is to normalize amorality for soldiers in combat, the same amorality found in sociopaths” (73).

Though Barry is right, that military training especially pathologizes masculinity, many men come to military training already pathologized.  As Michael Kaufman says of phallocentric, hypermasculine men in general, “[M]en learn to wear a suit of armor…to maintain an emotional barrier from those around us in order to keep fighting and winning. The impermeable ego barriers discussed in feminist psychoanalysis simultaneously protects men and keeps us locked in a prison of our own creation” (150 “Men’s Contradictory…”). This “suit of armor” matches the film’s “full metal jacket” metaphor, a metaphor that speaks to at least one consequence of this masculinization process of suppressing the feminine/maternal/homosexual, which, in turn, in effect, informs how men “suppress a range of emotions, needs, and possibilities, such as nurturing, receptivity, empathy, and compassion, which are experienced as inconsistent with the power of manhood” (148 “Men’s Contradictory…”). But, as Kaufman goes on to say, “These emotions and needs do not disappear; they are simply held in check or not allowed to play as full of a role in our lives as would be healthy for ourselves and those around us” (148 “Men’s Contradictory…”). This suppression of emotions and needs puts in place a deadly chain reaction, furthering the destructive capacities of these men: As these emotions and need keep pushing back for recovery, phallocentric men interpret that as the “feminine” or homosexual, which, in turn, produces “fear” and panic and gets channeled into self-destructive behavior to quell these unwanted emotions associated with the “feminine” (148-149 Kaufman “Men’s Contradictory…”).  And, again, that is because, as Kimmel says, “the boy also learns to devalue all women in his society, as the living embodiments of those traits in himself he has learned to despise” (128 “Masculinity as Homophobia”).  This is on top of all that I have discussed previously, how patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men are conditioned to dominate and control in general, see violence as a natural expression of self, sublimate and compensate for “contaminates” attributed to women, and enact “defensive phallicity” whenever threatened by Otherness.

The consequences of this patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine masculinity can especially be seen in the abhorrent violence against women in the military. Cheryl Abbate perfectly articulates this sensibility in her cogent essay on the rampant, “normalized” “culture of sexual assault” in the military, a climate that stems from a “culture of hyper masculinity which is responsible for uncontrolled violence and aggression” (2), a climate that instills in men the need to “assert power and domination over another ‘weaker’ being” (17) and violently, angrily, hatefully compensate for feelings of “inadequacy” for not being able to live up to “unobtainable hyper-masculine ideals of military combat soldiers” (17).

The Corps’ suppression of those characteristics associated with the “feminine”/“maternal” – again, compassion, emotional expressivity, empathy, sympathy, nurturing, and so on – does not just enact sociopathic behavior towards Others, such a pathological state of being also negates the possibility for a healthy (human) functioning and being in the world. That men cannot have access to these crucial emotions and needs becomes a lifelong source of pain, pain not only from the constant feelings of inadequacy that these unquelled emotions and needs bring but also from not being able to express basic human needs, a shattering mode of being. Kaufman sums up this “alienated” way of being:

Men’s pain and the way we exercise power are not just symptoms of our current gender order. Together they shape our sense of manhood, for masculinity has become a form of alienation. Men’s alienation is our ignorance of our emotions, feelings, needs, and potential for human connection and nurturance…. Our alienation increases the lonely pursuit of power and emphasizes our belief that power requires an ability to be detached and distant. (150 “Men’s Contradictory…)

Sexuality-Objectification/Abjection of Women:

If Dr. Strangelove posits a “strange love” for phallic reinforcement, Kubrick ups the stakes in FMJ: In terms of sexuality, as I suggested above in my analysis of Dr. Strangelove, the discharge of a weapon is linked to the discharge of the erect penis (“this is for fighting, this is for fun”), the Corp then trying to instill in the recruits an orgasmic charge to killing. Further, sexuality in general is used as a way to reinforce hypermasculinity, Sergeant Hartman constantly denigrating homo-sexuality, which serves to hyper-emphasize hetero-sexuality, which, in turn, means men needing to use sex to prove their hyper-masculinity, which is all reinforced by the constant references to erections (“God has a hard-on for marines”), the erect penis not only hyper-emphasizing the phallocentric nature of American (patriarchal) ideology, but also equating arousal with hypermasculinity and the violence embedded in this phallocentric ideology. That is, “hard” (“born again hard,” “hard-on for marines”) in general comes to collapse erect penis and hypermasculinity ideology, arousal then becoming not a prelude to emotional intimacy but a prelude to orgasmic violence.

Of course, as I’ve also suggested at length previously, embedded in this phallocentric ideology, women are purely phallic symbols themselves, turned into objects for men’s reinforcement of their masculinity, which is wholly realized when the men name their guns female names, which also further offsets making this most phallic of phallic symbols a homosexual reference! To sum up Johnson again, who perfectly puts this misogynistic sensibility into a disturbing context: “[T]o live in patriarchy is to breathe in misogynist images of women as objectified sexual property valued primarily for their usefulness to men” (41).

Even more disturbing is Kubrick’s materialization of the depths of how deeply phallocentric, hypermasculine ideology pinpoints women as the source of contamination. As conveyed above, Kubrick gives us numerous references of women being degraded throughout the film (and the prostitute scenes further this objectification-dehumanization of women). The most stunning and distressing summing up example of this extreme degradation is Hartman’s “Mary Jane Rottencrotch” reference, a reference that Joker echoes again at the end of the film, a complex signifier that both links the Boot Camp training moment to Joker at the end (more on this in a moment) and intersects the self/Other (feminine) split in the extreme, a woman’s “crotch” signified as “rotten,” abjecting – or Othering – a woman’s sex, which doesn’t just degrade women in general but, again, suggests in the extreme that women are the source of male contamination. In this way, patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine ideologies can both signal femininity as the source of man’s potential fall and signify women as the ultimate Other, a necessary ingredient for patriarchal ideology to define themselves as superior.

“Gomer Pyle” and the Pure Head

Kubrick’s most disturbing deconstruction of this hypermasculine ideology – and in this deconstruction a further crystallization of it – is in the allegorical character of Leonard Lawrence, aka “Gomer Pyle.” Leonard’s character (much like his name sake, the TV character “Gomer Pyle” from the TV show Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) is the absolute antithesis of the hypermasculinity of the Marine Corp. Leonard is the “simple minded” (mildly developmentally challenged?) infant (innocent), someone not “wired” to be turned into a hypermasculine killing machine. When he, in Hartman’s words, “malfunctions” we see more clearly just how destructive and dehumanizing this process is, something that would not be seen as starkly if he were not included. In essence, from the Corp’s perspective, Pyle is the quintessential “contaminating” “feminine” male/Other who must be “born again hard,” and, indeed, they seemingly succeed in this transformation of body and mind – Hartman gives Leonard the ultimate signature of approval, telling him that he is “born again hard” (which, ironically, comes just after Joker has failed a task). However, Pyle’s self is unlike the other men. He is the simple-minded innocent who should not – can NOT – be turned against his core self, his cognitive self more fixed than the other men. (Indeed, if Leonard really is developmentally challenged, he literally cannot be “re-wired” so to speak, or, at least not naturally or healthily re-wired.) And the turning point – when Pyle loses his core innocence – comes in the most shattering of acts: His “brothers” – his fellow marines – and his surrogate parental figure, Joker, viciously beat Pyle into submission. This singular act of betrayal is a sign of just how heartless the world is – or, rather, more pointedly, how literally heart-less a hypermasculine world is – a signifier of loss for and violation of Leonard who can only see the world in innocent terms. Leonard’s cries into the night signify just how shattering this act is to Leonard which is also signified by Joker’s acute awareness of what he has done, him becoming the key mechanism (e.g., we see Leonard visually implore the hesitating Joker not to participate in the beating) of Leonard’s loss of a “pure” innocent self. Joker and the other men beat Leonard not only to “punish” him and coerce him into conformity so they don’t get “punished” for his actions anymore, they also can only see Leonard as the contaminating Other in their presence, a reminder of their own stubborn Otherness and that which they must constantly “beat” back, subdue, less they lose their self to its contaminating presence. Punctuating this point, Kubrick has the men beat Leonard with soap, a not too subtle signifier of this need to “cleanse” the Corp of this contaminating presence. For Joker, and his more extreme beating of Leonard, his act may double as constitutive of his own fear of being a contaminating Other and/or quelling his own self-doubts of his inability to conform, e.g., overcompensating for his own persistent Otherness screaming from the depths of his being, which is explicitly made manifest in his parental/maternal nurturing of Leonard, a contrast to Hartman’s paternal-hypermasculine authoritarian-sadistic conditioning.

Allegorically, Leonard functions in even more complex ways: Again, because Leonard is cognitively incapable of being anything other than what he is – in phallocentric, hypermasculine terms, a “feminine” Other (in non-ideological terms, a healthy, whole human being!) – we can see how this colonization of the self works on the men, the men’s core, whole self annihilated in the process, “annihilated” in the sense of what Willoquet-Maricondi suggests above, not literally being killed (though Leonard dies because of this process) but in the sense of the men losing their whole – or, in ideological terms, “feminine” – self, becoming in effect, a hypermasculine killing machine, to a lesser or extreme degree. In this sense too, then, Leonard’s suicidal act is allegorical, in the sense that his suicide is what figuratively happens to the men in general, their succumbing to the hypermasculinization process an act of self-annihilation. In this context, we can make a secondary allegorical leap here as well: In him becoming something monstrous Leonard becomes the embodied “return of the repressed,” the distorted Real of ALL of these men whose self is also getting twisted into something unnatural. Thus, Leonard’s final shattering act of loss – him killing the patriarchal “father” Hartman and his suicide – is not an anomaly but rather the Real violence at the heart of this dehumanizing (hypermasculinizing) process, in more ways than one, e.g., violence becoming the normal-twisted mode of purification of self/Other in general, in large part what drives these men in warfare, the film’s ultimate deconstructive point hyper-emphasizing that killing in war is NOT heroic but self-annihilating (suicidal) acts.

More pointedly, Kubrick spells out this violence to the self in his focus on Leonard’s splattered blood and brains on the wall of Sergeant Hartman’s “pure” “head.” This “pure” “head” becomes the incarnation of the metaphorical microcosm of Kubrick’s operative deconstruction in general. That is, if patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine (Christian, American) “purity” becomes the modus operandi of the Corps, this is ironically represented by the bathroom (Kubrick’s notorious dark humor at work, bathrooms/toilets a recurring motif in his films!). At one point, Hartman says he wants the bathroom so clean that the “Virgin Mary herself would be proud to take a dump in it,” suggesting that he wants a pure space, e.g., this space of waste and excrement is paradoxically “pure.” In this way, Kubrick cunningly sets us up for this most potent and dramatic metaphor: As this “head” becomes the physical space of purity – though paradoxically still a space of “shit” (more on this key term in a moment) – this space also metaphorically signifies accordingly a false surface, the seeming purity that is really a space of “shit” equates to a patriarchal/hypermasculine, Christian, American ideology veiling a monstrous REAL.

This “veiling” is reinforced formally as well. The whole first half of the film is one of absolute order and cleanliness, which is particularly set up via the cinematic apparatus, e.g., still camera work versus hand held camera work, symmetrical mise en scene versus chaotic mise en scene, clean mise en scene versus messy mise en scene, and so on (the second half of the film taking on the latter half of this dichotomy). The irony here is that the surface state of order and cleanliness is also set against the destructive dehumanizing process these young recruits go through. The suicide of Leonard – his abject blood and brains rupturing the “pure” border of the “pure” head – then functions in multiple ways, as, again, punctuating the destructive Real of this process and as a segue into the intricately connected violence and chaos to follow (the setting switches to the actual war in Vietnam), Kubrick making this violence and chaos more than just a “realistic” representation of a corrupt, unclean war, but rather allegorically signifying the “return of the repressed” – or deconstruction – of a “pure” ideology, the violence and violation of the men’s selfs tied to an (American) ideology’s violence and violation of Others in general. In other words, in using the men as its tool in furthering its “manifest destiny” to consolidate its power and spread its ideology in Vietnam, Leonard’s (the Other’s) “blood” on the anally clean wall of the “pure” “head” allegorically signifies the “Real” of this destructive ideology itself, Kubrick revealing the enactment of this bloody ideology in micro terms (Leonard’s/the men’s loss of self and Leonard’s ensuing suicide) and in macro terms, the bloody “horror” of Vietnam, an ideological (manifest destiny) war if there ever was one.

More emphatically, we can see this “latent” Real in another way. Though utterly de-humanized, Pyle’s humanity comes through in a sliver, in his self-consciousness of what he has become: He says he “is” in a “world of shit,” his voice heartbreakingly cracking, one of the most painful moments for me in cinema. Then Joker calls him “Leonard” and Pyle doesn’t kill him like he does Hartman, I think a telling non-act. By calling him “Leonard,” Joker in effect attempts to bring “Pyle” back to “Leonard,” a return that is of course impossible due to Leonard being in a “world of shit.”

“World of Shit”

This phrase becomes a key phrase because it (A) ties together the two halves of the film; and (B) signifies the Real damage to both Leonard and Joker, and, by extension, all of these men who are put through this hypermasculinization process. In terms of the former, the two halves interconnect by the connecting threads of Leonard’s suicide and Joker finally succumbing to the hypermasculine, killing machine drive (more on this point in a moment). In both cases, Joker and Leonard say they are in “a world of shit,” which Hartman earlier says means being a “dead marine.” Applied to both Leonard and Joker when they use the phrase, they are both signifying that they are “spiritually” “dead” when they say the words.

The Ending Sequences: Joker’s Fall

In my reading of what for me is one of the most provocative endings in all of cinema, for Joker, the whole hypermasculinization process that he had resisted until now comes to an end: He is forced to commit the ultimate “horror,” mercy kill a fellow human being, which also, symbolically, because it is a (Vietnamese) woman, is Joker “killing” his Other (feminine/maternal) Self. This moment is extremely complex, Kubrick packing in multiple layers of meaning.

To begin, in the initial attack by the sniper, Kubrick keeps our focus on the sniper’s gun, keeping the identity of the sniper hidden until Joker first confronts her. The sniper is efficient and lethal, killing three men, including, conspicuously enough, “Cowboy,” a key figure, the only man from the first half of the film (other than Joker) to show up in the second half of the film. While “Cowboy” would seem to further reinforce the “cowboy”/western genre motif in the film, “Cowboy” doesn’t live up to his “cowboy” moniker. “Cowboy” takes on a more studious, thoughtful gait (stereotypically reinforced with him wearing glasses), which is further reinforced by “Cowboy’s” decision making, him constantly making “wrong” choices/observations, e.g., thinking that there is a whole platoon across the way instead of one sniper; choosing to leave “Eightball” and “Doc Jay” behind; visibly uncertain how to confront the sniper.

Interestingly, it is “Animal Mother” – the quintessential hypermasculine “killing machine” – who is the embodiment of a “cowboy” masculine ideal, not “Cowboy,” another darkly Kubrickian ironic signifier, since he is given the moniker “mother” as part of his “re-born” name. However, in this case, “mother” doesn’t signify anything remotely associated with our usual conception of “mother” (maternal, warm, nurturing) but instead takes on a secondary level of signification, signified by the other part of his nickname “Animal,” a common hypermasculine slang term signifying a higher level of ferocity and brutish execution. Coined with the term “mother” and “Animal Mother” becomes the embodiment of the “born again hard” ideal, which, in turn, presumably means that procreation here stems not from the actual birthing and maternal nurturing of boys-to-men from biological mothers, but instead stems from a different kind of nurturing, men psycho-somatically processing their identity through the example set by “Animal Mother,” which is of course all reinforced or set up by the processing of these “boys” to hypermasculinity in training camp.

Indeed, it is “Animal Mother” who takes the initiative to save “Eightball” and “Doc Jay” and who takes the initiative to “avenge” his “brothers’” deaths, the latter of which is heroically punctuated by Animal Mother’s “payback” line. However, Kubrick won’t allow this romanticized version of hypermasculinity to stand. While “Animal Mother” is clearly signified as a positive force in this prelude to the confrontation with the sniper, in addition to what comes next (more on this in a moment), is the latent meaning behind “Animal Mother.” Along with “Crazy Earl” and the helicopter pilot we see murdering “women and children,” “Animal Mother” is clearly also an extreme example of hypermasculinity, men who have lost all sense of “duality” and who the Marine Corps (re) constructed all too well, men who are literally “killing machines,” ideal for war but who will need, in Eightball’s words, someone throwing “bombs at them” for the rest of their life, less they become Charles Whitman or Lee Harvey Oswald, the devastating Real of the heroic side of such men (these two notorious figures referenced earlier in the film), here again, Kubrick deconstructing this typical war time “hero” figure we see with “Animal Mother” but in numerous other war and action films as well.  In this way too, Kubrick is giving us yet another Real signification, “Animal Mother” (and “Crazy Earl” and the helicopter pilot) taking on an allegorical conception of destructive men who will destroy the Other as part of their identity and also Kubrick giving us a kind of trace of monstrous Leonard, though unlike Leonard who has self-awareness of being in a “world of shit” (and perhaps even some understanding of what his monstrous self will do in Vietnam), because these three men have lost their Otherness, they have also lost any vestige of what makes them human, their empathy for Others as we see over and over again with “Animal Mother” (e.g., even with his own brothers-in-arms, as we see with his disturbing racist degradations of “Eightball”).

When Joker finally confronts the sniper, Kubrick begins anew his deconstruction of hypermasculinity, again, in extremely complex ways. To begin, that the sniper is revealed to be a woman has enormous implications. In the ideological programming of the Marine Corps, that a woman could kill three men and hold off a whole platoon of hypermasculine marines is in itself a deeply emasculating signification. That Joker’s gun jams and he fumbles it, in effect, making himself helpless against the sniper, furthers this emasculating signification of the woman sniper. Rafterman finally neutralizes her but his hyperbolic (bordering on hysterical), “orgasmic” bodily gestures and declarations of “I fucking blew her away. Am I bad? Am I a life-taker? Am I a heartbreaker?” ring hollow at this point, considering that he shot her while her attention was turned from him, Kubrick seeming to further his deconstruction of “heroic” acts. In the ensuing exchange, Kubrick ups the stakes of everything that has come to this point, deconstructing not only hypermasculinity but the whole manifest destiny/white man’s burden ideology along with it.

First of all, this moment and the ending moment are keenly allegorical: Kubrick creates in this space and the ending space apocalyptic signifiers: A Vietnamese city has been laid to waste, Kubrick casting his mise en scene in dark, saturated colors, low key lighting giving these ending scenes a shadowy effect, which further accentuates the aftermath of a blown out city, debris, twisted metals and objects, leftover shells of buildings, and flames dotting the landscape, creating a Dante’s Inferno feel to the moment. Add in the edgy sounds layered on the soundtrack and Kubrick gives us more than just a specific moment, instead upping the ante and suggesting an allegorical apocalyptic space and moment, not unlike what Francis Ford Coppola does at the end of the film Apocalypse Now (1979).

And yet another signifier further accentuates this reading. When Joker approaches the unknowing sniper, Kubrick juxtaposes Joker with a conspicuously undamaged Vietnamese flag, which later becomes juxtaposed to the five men hovering over the mortally wounded Vietnamese woman soldier and then becomes an inflamed signifier throughout the mercy killing scene. Also standing out in this moment is the remnants of the blown-out building, signs of what was once an architecturally eloquent and sublimely “ancient” looking edifice, which strikingly evokes perhaps my favorite line in the movie. While being interviewed by a news show, Joker mockingly says: “I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, the jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture…and kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.” (Significantly, while Joker says this he is framed within the images of the theater marketed icons, e.g., The Lone Ranger and Tonto fighting another Native American, further linking the Vietnamese with Native Americans, further emphasizing this American ideology of assimilation [Tonto] or annihilation [Native American] of Others.) These lines by Joker satirically encapsulate what should be (seeing and revering the Vietnamese as an “ancient culture” and as an equal) and what is (seeing the Vietnamese as an Other to be annihilated and/or assimilated) an echo throughout the rest of the film, especially in this key moment, an extremely complex play of signifiers and meanings all congealing at this moment when Rafterman shoots the sniper and the men gather around her. In short, in this moment, Kubrick again uses shorthand signifiers to offer us larger allegorical meanings. In this case, via these loaded signifiers (Vietnamese flag, building, sniper) he cognitively maps out his key project, how ideological drives such as manifest destiny – informing and informed by patriarchy, phallocentrism, and hypermasculinity ideology – instill in these men the will to violate – or penetrate (e.g., colonize, imperialize) – Other spaces and cultures and bodies (as they themselves were “colonized” in training camp), in this case, represented by the space of the allegorically coded Vietnamese building and the allegorically coded Vietnamese woman, whose penetration by bullets takes on hyper-innuendo with the added comments by the men, Rafterman’s “heartbreaker” comments, “T.H.E. Rock’s” “No more boom boom for this baby-san,” and Animal Mother’s curt “Fuck her” comments adding to and informing the provocative (semi-circle) posture of men and Vietnamese woman (with phallic guns placed appropriately), which is also underscored by how these men see violence in orgasmic terms, this moment then being an illustration of how all of these registers – violence against women as the constant, under girding general violence against contamination/Otherness (see my explication of this angle above in my Dr. Strangelove discussion); sexuality coded in violent terms, as affirming (hyper)masculinity; patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine ideology; manifest destiny ideology – all collapse into a single register that could be spelled out this way: American (patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine, manifest destiny) ideology/men violate, penetrate (colonize, imperialize) – assimilate/annihilate – Others.

Arguably, up to this moment, unlike the other men, Joker has not fully succumbed to the hypermasculinization process. Throughout the film, Joker has mocked and ironized the hypermasculinization process as well as America’s ideological rationalizations of fighting the war: his mocking John Wayne line; his “duality” conception throughout, especially as he defines it to the colonel asking him “which side are you on?” (“It’s the Jungian thing”); and in his ironic mocking of why he is in the war (“jewel of Asia”). In this moment, when Joker mercy kills the Vietnamese sniper, I argue that Joker finally succumbs to the hypermasculinization process, though in a more complicated way. Willoquet-Maricondi puts it this way:

The fact that she is female and that Joker delivers the shot that finally kills her can be read to mean that, in killing the sniper, Joker takes a further step toward self-mutilation and, therefore, toward masculinization…. Joker’s killing of the sniper can…be seen not just as a self-mutilation but as a suicidal act. Kubrick establishes once again, that the Other is always the Self because the distinctions between the masculine and the feminine are false. Masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs, symbolic scripts, and masculine is not to be confused with male…. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is an attempt to disentangle this confusion by showing that women too can be grunts and by exposing the process through which masculinity is constructed.  (17-18)

In other words, Joker’s mercy killing is not just a killing of the Other and thus the Other within – finally enacting his indoctrination into the Corps/hypermasculinity “club” – but because this “suicidal” act becomes a killing of the Other-as-Self, in this moment, the Vietnamese woman sniper becomes a kind of symbolic mirror image of Joker as he wrestles with his action, the contemplation of which is very much an interior Otherness (in ideological terms, in the language of the film, the “feminine” within) pushing back against such a traumatic, monstrous act.  I would strongly argue that because of the nature of this killing, this moment takes on even more than this symbolization. To get at this deeper implication, let’s look at the signifiers, signs that at the very least suggest something quite profound and disturbing happening in this moment:

• The dramatic music, lighting (half of Joker’s face cast in shadow emphasizing his duality), saturated colors, and that omnipresent flame just behind Joker all continuing this sense of something apocalyptic going on in this particular moment.
  
• Joker’s peace sign disappears when he takes the shot, leaving only the “Born to Kill” on his helmet, suggesting of course that his duality is at an end.
• Joker’s face contorts in a mask of what looks like supreme will power, a look that seems to suggest that it takes all his will power to commit this extremely difficult act. Is this Joker’s “war face,” that which Sergeant Hartman was never satisfied with? I don’t think so. To my mind, this look too is an ironic statement by Kubrick, suggesting that a typical “war face” is the mask of a killer while Joker’s face here is the “Real” (or return of the repressed), the face of a shattering of self.
• As Kubrick continues to linger on what looks like a very un-ironic Joker, we hear Rafterman say that Joker should be put up for the “Congressional Medal of Ugly” and Donlon says “Hard-core, man. Fucking hardcore,” the lines registering just how disturbing this act is, even for hardcore men who have seen and done what they have.

In other words, in short, Kubrick gives us the Real of war: Sanctioned killing is sanitized by the military and in most war genre representations (especially filmic!), but when presented in this form, where distance and self-preservation and ideological (nation state) sanctioning does not apply (“mercy killing” is not part of wartime killing), we see that killing has consequences, is a killing of the self. In this way, like he did with developmentally challenged Leonard (e.g., more starkly revealing the violation of the hypermasculinization process) Kubrick can show us via this overdetermined moment/killing that while this “mercy killing” is an obvious violation of the self, it also speaks to how killing the Other in general is always a killing of the self, a “suicidal” act.

The Ending Sequences: The Mickey Mouse Club Song

We then get this all punctuated by the ending march of the men, the men crazily singing The Mickey Mouse Club theme song, Joker’s ending interior monologue intermixed. In terms of the interior monologue, there are a couple of interesting aspects to this: First, Joker talks about a memory of “Mary Jane Rottencrotch and a homecoming fuck fantasy” and says, “in short, I’m in a world of shit…,” which doesn’t speak to “home” (of the past or what’s to come) so much as it speaks to his training camp memories and his indoctrination (again, brilliantly tying the whole film together), the training camp moment (again, Sergeant Hartman also said “Mary Jane Rottencrotch”) coming back to this moment and spelling out the REAL: Again, Joker’s hypermasculinization indoctrination is fully actualized in Joker’s violent encounters with the sniper but what Joker’s narration makes clear is that this hypermasculinization process began during training camp, his self-awareness of what has happened to him also echoing Leonard’s penultimate self-awareness just before his suicide: Both men are in a “world of shit,” not suggesting that they are literally “dead” but “dead” nonetheless, their “suicidal” acts of self-mutilation signifying a psychological, spiritual death. In a powerful, gut wrenching section, Kathleen Barry relates “Steve Hassna’s story of Vietnam,” a “story” that disturbingly echoes this ending (spiritually “dead”) sensibility:

Staying in the present tense of the firefight that he was talking about, using his own words for killing, I asked him ‘When you take someone out, what happens to you?’ To keep our attention close to this experience, I continue in the present tense. He tears up. But his reference point is still the other guys—his buddies. ‘Essentially you join a club…that you can never leave.’ Quiet—tears, just a few. Then I can barely hear him say ‘You become part of a fraternity…. I think the closest I can get to it… You inadvertently have a hole…in your soul’…. Over the years, Steve has had to answer this question that I asked about what happened to him the first time he took someone out, and it is clear to me that this is as much as he can say about it. I do not press him for more. He knows that something of his humanity was ripped apart at that moment, and there is no going back to the guy he was before that. All of his socialization to be a man and his training in the military have served this moment. He is not dead, but, in becoming a killer (the word that is not said), something of his humanity died. And the hell of it is that he knows it and must live with it for the rest of his life. (45)

There is another interesting aspect to this interior monologue of Joker’s: Joker narrates that the Marine Corps does not want “robots.” What’s ironic is that he says this in a very robotic fashion, the irreverent irony of Joker gone. That is, it becomes clear that Joker’s narration further indicates what he has become at the end, another Kubrickian indictment on humanity, how institutions and ideologies – specifically manifest destiny and “white man’s burden” ideologies – hypermasculinize, homogenize, reify, objectify, dehumanize (roboticize so to speak) these men (or humans in general). What’s so striking about this is that the one stand out representative of humanity the “joker” who pushes Power’s buttons, is stripped of his Joker-ness, his individuality. Further reinforcing this is the homogenizing coding of The Mickey Mouse Club itself.

In terms of The Mickey Mouse Club theme song, the connotations are rich, deep, and multi-layered. Like The Lone Ranger reference, The Mickey Mouse Club reference signifies both ideological and symbolic meanings. In terms of the former, the TV show was an ideological incubator of children, promoting and reinforcing ideological (“normative”) American ideals, such as (Christian based) “family values,” Capitalistic values, patriarchy, and gender norms.[6] In this way, again, before the men ever get to training camp, they are already programmed for the Marine Corps programming, a programming that amplifies what has already been conditioned in the men, a God based sense of entitlement, patriarchal and phallocentric, hypermasculine identification and sense of privilege and upholder of American values – which, again, includes a “white man’s burden,” manifest destiny to civilize, normalize, Americanize Others (e.g., Vietnamese) – and normative gender roles, again, because characteristics are divided between masculine and feminine roles, hypermasculine institutions such as the Marine Corps, can use these divisions to further their agenda to hypermasculinize the men, which, as I discuss above, means colonizing the self and eliminating traits characterized as “feminine” and “maternal.” Willoquet-Maricondi says,

[T]he Mickey Mouse episode shows that boot-camp and war are continuous with the rest of American popular culture. The ‘Vietnam generation’ was the first generation to grow up with television, and the ‘Mickey Mouse Club’ was a popular program during the time the members of that generation were growing up. War is thus shown to be the logical conclusion of a process which begins with the Mickey Mouse Club, the Boy Scouts, the high school football team. (18)

The Mickey Mouse Club song does more than this though. Again, like The Lone Ranger reference, The Mickey Mouse Club signifier also contradictorily signifies Kubrick’s dark irony, him giving us the disturbing, jarring ironic picture of innocence (Mickey Mouse and all that represents) with young soldiers who have been twisted out of anything associated with that kind of innocence, which is further punctuated by the jarring contrast of the song with the setting, a city on fire, the dark saturating colors, the violence we have just seen, and The Rolling Stones’ song “Paint it Black” that follows just after this moment into the end credits. In short, for me, this moment raises the specter of innocent boys lost to a “suicidal” “club,” lost to a devastating ideology, an apocalyptic sensibility indeed.

Fight Club:

Fight Club adds a crucial ingredient to Kubrick’s important framing of a masculinity informed by patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculinity ideologies: Capitalism; or, more pointedly, consumerism and corporate reification.  In a milieu where men lose their sense of a hypermasculine, frontier self, Fight Club reveals this deeply felt need by phallocentric, hypermasculine men to return to this frontier sensibility. This binary of an imaginary lost and re-found self is best explicated by opposing signifiers in the film: On the one hand, we see a society that is made all the same, or, in the language of the film, “a copy of a copy.” The film’s opposing vision comes in a key monologue by “return of the (phallocentric) repressed” Tyler Durden:

In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the Grand Canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty car-pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

In other words, phallocentric, hypermasculine men long for the day of the frontier, where they can, in Tyler’s words, “bring society back around to a level of reality where people were judged by action rather than by possessions.” Tyler envisions a day where men are again hunters, a day when they are again the kings of their castle, the center of their world, in short, when they have agency and control of their world. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Kaufman best exemplify this “contemporary crisis of masculinity”:

The contemporary crisis of masculinity has structural origins in changing global geopolitical and economic relations and in the changing dynamics and complexion of the workplace. Traditional definitions of masculinity had rested on economic autonomy: control over one’s labor, control over the product of that labor, and manly self-reliance in the workplace…. Economic autonomy, coupled with public patriarchy, gave men a secure sense of themselves as men. If they should fail, they could always head out for the frontier, to the boundaries of civilization, where they could stake a new claim for manhood against the forces of nature. That world is gone. The transformation of the workplace—increased factory mechanization, increased bureaucratization of office work—means that fewer and fewer men experience anything resembling autonomy in their work. [The 20^th and 21^st] century has witnessed a steady erosion of economic autonomy: from 90% of U.S. men who owned their own shop or farm at the time of the Civil War to less than 1 out of 10 today. (261 “Weekend Warriors…”)

“Copy of a copy” versus Frontier Individuality

We get this “copy of a copy” moment when the “narrator” (aka “Jack”) is making copies for his work and says as he is making these copies and watching his co-workers do the same (e.g., mirror images, or “copies,” of him): “Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy.” Further informing this moment is what “Jack” (as I will refer to him from now on) says next: “When deep-space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. The Planet Starbucks.” Reinforcing these words, Fincher takes his camera into a garbage can (which “Jack” is presumably staring at while he says this) and pulls out of it revealing numerous corporate brand containers (Krispy Kreme, White Castle). A little later we get this corporate power-consumerism writ large when “Jack” talks about being a “slave to the IKEA nesting instinct” and “defining” himself according to brand name objects, Fincher again punctuating these words with a playful placement of these objects in “Jack’s” apartment.  These two moments key a focus throughout the film, the role that consumerism plays in masculine identity formation. When “Jack” says that “corporations will name everything” he is pinpointing how transnational corporate power is corporatizing the world, permeating virtually every space and objects with its logos, transferring what was once societally and culturally marked signifiers with corporate marked signifiers. Perhaps the most tangible illustration of this drive is the drive to change sports arena names to corporate sponsors, such as Minute Maid Park (even more egregiously once called Enron Park!), Citi Field, and Reebok Stadium. In the same way, “Jack’s” “Ikea nesting instinct” refers to our drive for not just material possessions but name brand material possessions. “Jack” says that these possessions define who he is and that sums up how name brand identification becomes part and parcel of identity formation, people identifying themselves with the name brands that permeate their spaces, clothes, décor, cars, and so on, to the point of thinking of themselves as representing the status and image that is perceived to come with such corporate name brand objects. (This is especially true of celebrity worship, which I explore in my analysis of the film The Bling Ring.) Via how this “display culture” reifies both men and women, Susan Faludi cogently identifies how for men this ontological shift is fundamentally different:

By century’s end, the dictates of a consumer and media culture had trapped both men and women in a world in which top billing mattered more than building, in which representation trumped production, in which appearances were what counted. This was good for no one, of either sex, but at least ‘femininity’ fit more easily into the new ethic – the sort of femininity that was a continuation of the supposedly feminine ‘vanity’ to which women had once been relegated. Whether this was the only role women wanted or not – and, as the success of the women’s movement made abundantly clear, most didn’t – it was still, for women, a familiar role, with familiar rules and perks as well as debits. Women could take consolation in the assurance that, no matter how demeaning their objectification, it at least would not threaten their sexual identity. Society might hold a vain woman in contempt but would never question here femininity; rather, the very fact that she gazed into the mirror confirmed her womanliness. But what would it mean to be a man in this new realm? Narcissus was not celebrated for his virility. Was there a route to manhood through the looking glass? What could masculinity possibly mean in a display culture? (451)

For phallocentric men, this consumerist branding becomes a huge problem, for two reasons. First, as Faludi suggests above, such consumerism is associated with femininity (“nesting instinct”), the ideological (patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine) “norm” suggesting that only women care about superficial possessions that do no more than register superficial meanings dictated by Others not them. Second, entailed in this consumerism is mass production. That is, in a capitalist (corporate-consumerist) system, the key to maximize profits is to mass produce. To do that, corporations must make everyone the same so that they buy all the same mass produced stuff (even while creating the façade of uniqueness, e.g., Jack’s “glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of…wherever”). The result is a society that has largely become homogenized and reified (e.g., determined and defined by commodity objects and consumerist messaging; privileging a consumerist lifestyle over Others): We wear the same (corporate produced) clothes, eat the same food, watch the same entertainment and media discourses, decorate our homes with the same décor, and so on. As David Gartman says,

[T]he cultural products of [of monopoly capitalism, which is dominated by large-scale, mass-production corporations], are necessarily homogenized and uncritical commodities, offering to all people the same superficial escape from alienated reality that make them content with the system…. The Frankfurt thinkers argue that these reified production organizations also leave their marks on cultural products, helping to produce reified consciousness. To cheaply mass produce culture for large markets, these bureaucracies rigidly standardize not merely work tasks but also the products themselves. Diversity and innovation are eliminated from products in order to achieve the efficiencies required for profitable production…. Further…consumers of all classes are offered the same standardized products, which are differentiated only superficially…. (5)

For phallocentric, hypermasculine men, this is the absolute antithesis of their desired identity for the kind of “rugged individualism” – American exceptionalism – that is still messaged to them in media representations (more on this in a moment). Like everyone else in society who has bought into this way of (name brand) life, everyone becomes “exchangeable” (“a copy”) with Others, again, antithetical to phallocentric, hypermasculine men who see themselves as distinct from Others. As I’ve discussed above, a frontier, manifest destiny, patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine ideology is dictated upon a special brand of individualism that sets men apart from Others, including other men.

The other part of this castration is how men became, after the industrial revolution, more and more automatized, turned into displaceable “tools,” also antithetical to seeing themselves as “special” masters of their fate.  As Kenneth Clatterbaugh says, “[M]en often find their civilized role un-attractive because the workplace itself is filled with abuses of power, inhuman treatment, ‘monotony,’ and ‘impotent dependency’… The male worker is totally ‘replaceable,’ and his value is set not by his humanity but by the market” (27). As Clatterbaugh goes on to stress (via Karl Marx),

The more one’s life is limited by other people, the greater the degree of alienation. In a capitalist economic structure a male worker has only his labor to sell, but he is forced to sell it in order to make a living. When he does sell his labor, he comes under the working conditions set by the owner and, regardless of his preferences, must make what the owner demands. Even after he has made the product, it is appropriated from him by the owner…. He is little more than a means to an end, a profit for the owners. He is interchangeable with machines and easily discarded. The owners do not relate to him as a full human being; he has little opportunity to choose which talents he will pursue. (129-130)

Here again, this classic case of “alienation” can be seen in the “copy of a copy” moment, “Jack” and his co-workers not only displaceable tools but automated tools. “Jack” feels alienated from himself (via his emasculating and dehumanizing job) and looks for ways to be “whole” again, his extreme insomnia becoming a symptom of his deep angst. “Jack” is a “recall coordinator,” his job is to “apply the formula”: “Take the number of vehicles in the field, A. Multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B. Then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A x B x C…equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.” Fight Club compounds “Jack’s” source of alienation with another demoralizing element: It isn’t just that he is in the quintessential alienated “tool” position but that his job entails “abuses of power, inhuman treatment,” e.g., putting profit before people, the corporate line making people numbers in an equation to determine cost/loss over doing the right thing. In other words, “Jack’s” tool status goes beyond the Marxist definition of losing one’s labor/self to a corporate machine, it also means selling one’s ethical and moral self – a general human disposability that also echoes the disposability of the worker – an all too common situation for corporate workers today.

In this way, the film perfectly illustrates how capitalism alienates (“castrates”), well, all of us, but for patriarchal, hypermasculine men who equate masculinity with control and agency, they feel it as a wound to their masculinity!

Schizophrenic Masculinity

Added to this mix of toxic ingredients are factors that create a schizophrenic masculinity, to my mind the most important takeaway from this film. On the one hand, men still feel today (via media messaging—more on this in a moment) like they must conform to this oppressive, unhealthy, (self) destructive perception of hypermasculinity. This core identity based on trenchant historical-psychological conditionings are still firmly entrenched and act in increasingly (self) destructive modes of being, an existential crisis explicated by psychiatrist Willard Gaylin: “Men become depressed because of loss of status and power in the world of men. It is not the loss of money, or material advantages that money could buy, which produces the despair that leads to self-destruction. It is the ‘shame,’ the ‘humiliation,’ the sense of personal ‘failure.’ …A man despairs when he has ceased being a man among men” (37). For phallocentric, hypermasculine men, it is this constant, relentless crushing ontological mode of (hypermasculine, patriarchal) being that dictates their reactionary mode of being. On the other hand, informing a natural and healthy way of being, many sources (artistic and media representations and discourses, feminist messaging, academia, and so on) tell men to find their “feminine side,” to become a more “whole” individual. That’s the kind of schizophrenic tearing at identity that too many men must wrestle with. Frederick Hayward nicely sums up this tearing apart sensibility: “Men are told to be gentle, while gentle men are told they are wimps. Men are told to be vulnerable, but vulnerable [men] are told they are too needy. Men are told to be less performance oriented, but less successful men are rejected for lack of ambition. The list of contradictions is seemingly endless” (qtd in Clatterbaugh, 75).

In terms of this “wimp” messaging, in addition to historical precedents (again, that frontier, manifest destiny, “rugged individualism” mentality discussed above, which, of course is still reinforced in media/film representations, even if the main purveyor of such representations – e.g., the western – has lost its currency), through cultural conditioning, media discourses (especially advertising), entertainment (action films, superhero films), video game reinforcements, sports influences (mixed martial arts, football), parental influences, peer reinforcements and so on, males today more than ever feel pressure to be hypermasculine. Most dismaying is consumerism/advertising that employs and exploits these archaic hypermasculine images, which, in turn, exploits men’s insecurities and vanities to get men to buy into a hypermasculine image, which, in turn, gets them to buy the products (steroids, testosterone injections) that will, in turn, get them this hypermasculine image.

Added to this is the reality of phallocentric men’s situation, where consumerism, commodification, corporationization utterly emasculates them through the ways I’ve mentioned above. These two enormous influences (be a “manly” man and be a “whole” man) and realities (emasculation through consumerism and alienating, emasculating jobs) create an ontological mode of being that literally tears these men apart, creating a deeply felt schiozophrenic self. That is what Fight Club captures so well, the explosive desire to escape not only this feeling of emasculation but on a deeper level of angst, this schizophrenic bind. Susan Faludi comes to a similar conclusion when she discusses the deeper implications of a purposeless toxic masculinity participating in what she calls an “ornamental culture,” a deeply (self) destructive mode of being that invariably leads to some form of cathartic “violence,” “fight club” and “project mayhem” situated as just this outlet made allegorical by this permeating need by hypermasculine men, though as Faludi also conveys here, ironically such displays of violence (whether the representational violence depicted in Fight Club or real societal violence) only inform the consumerist nature of such violence, violence that does not in itself signify any real sense of purpose but becomes “performative,” a playing out of this intensely felt need to exercise feelings of emasculation through spectacles of violence, the spectacle of “fight club” itself perfectly illustrating what amounts to “ornamental” violence:

The fathers did give the sons a New Frontier, but it was a land made sterile by the onrush of mass consumerism. The more productive aspects of manhood, such as building or cultivating or contributing to society, couldn’t establish a foothold on the shiny surface of a commercial culture, a looking glass before which men could only act out a crude semblance of masculinity. And what act could be more crudely and stereotypically masculine than a show of violence? But while violence uses all the visible aspects of male utility – strength, decisiveness, courage, even skill – its purpose is only to dismantle and destroy. Violence stands in for action but is also an act of concealment, a threatening mask that hides a lack of purpose…. As men’s utilitarian qualities were dethroned, as their societal roles diminished, violence more and more came to serve as the gang leader for a host of rogue masculine traits…. By the end of the American Century, every outlet of the consumer world – magazines, ads, movies, sports, music videos – would deliver the message that manhood had become a performance game to be won in the marketplace, not the workplace, and that male anger was now part of the show. An ornamental culture encouraged young men to see surliness, hostility, and violence as expressions of glamour, a way to showcase themselves without being feminized before an otherwise potentially girlish mirror. But if celebrity masculinity enshrined the pose of the ‘bad boy,’ his rebellion was largely cosmetic. There was nowhere for him to take a grievance because there was no society to take it to. In a celebrity culture, earnestness about social and political change is replaced by a pose of ‘irony’ that is really just a sullen and helpless paralysis…. The images produced by the culture, however, still promote the model of an American man who dominates his world. If anything, such images have been inflated as superstars prevail, again and again, on athletic courts, the battlefields and cityscapes of giants. For the ordinary man, however, there is less and less to control beyond his remote-control device, and ever fewer venues in which he can harness the energies of his masculinity productively. He is still expected to dominate, but when mastery of a trade and mastery over one’s life fade as possibilities, all that may seem to be left is raw dominance. The urge to control, unharnessed and unmoored, soon spins out of control. Without a society, Daniel Boone would have been just a killer. It was this dead end that faced not only the many men who got shoved aside by celebrity culture but the few who were elevated in it. (37-38)

As Faludi persuasively points out here, this consumerist “ornamental culture” creates a built-in dysfunctional schizophrenic contradiction that informs this acutely felt desire to express one’s (ideologically “produced,” “expected”) hypermasculinity in the only way possible to them, “performative” (“sterile,” “cosmetic”) violence, though, I would hasten to add here that this reactionary mode of violence only complexes the untreated consequences of this dysfunctional constructed hypermasculinity to begin with, e.g., that violence in general is, as I’ve exhaustively conveyed throughout this essay, part and parcel of this ideologically constructed patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine masculinity. Faludi continues her important stress on the deeper implications of such a masculinity construct:

In a culture of ornament, by contrast, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and ‘props,’ by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered ‘individuality’ that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one. The aspects of this public ‘femininity’ – objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing – are the very ones that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are ‘gaining’ the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing…. The old American male paradigm can offer no help to a man competing with ghostly, two-dimensional armies of superathletes, gangsta rappers, action heroes, and stand-up comedians on television. Navigating the ornamental realm, much less trying to derive a sense of manhood from it, has become a nightmare all the more horrible for being virtually unacknowledged as a problem. At the close of the century, men find themselves in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture and awarded by lady luck. There is no passage to manhood in such a world. A man can only wait to be discovered; and even if he lucks out, his ‘achievement’ is fraught with gender confusion for its ‘feminine’ implications of glamour and display. (38-39)

Here again, Faludi perfectly captures the angst ridden ontology of patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men, still trapped in this archaic “manly” mold (echoed in “ghostly, two-dimensional armies of superathletes, gangsta rappers, action heroes, and stand-up comedians on television”), fooled into thinking (or given little in the way of an alternative) that a consumerist (“ornamental”) masculinity gives them the equivalent of a “passage to manhood” but which in truth only offers a “performative” masculinity, a consumerist (“ornamental”) masculinity that in actuality commodifies, objectifies, renders as the object of the (corporate) gaze. We get this element impeccably illustrated in the moment on the bus when “Jack” and Tyler contemptuously mock a “Gucci Underwear” ad:

“Jack” (narrating): “I felt sorry for guys packed into gyms…” (cut to him looking at a “Gucci underwear” ad, a man posing both in underwear and out – he has either taken them off or about to put them on – the focus on his glossily coded, toned, muscular body, especially his crotch and his buttocks) “…trying to look like how Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger said they should.”

Jack (verbally to Tyler): “Is that what a man looks like?”

Tyler (looking at the ad and cracking up): “Ah, self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…” (cut to men participating in “fight club,” e.g., a fight)

With this “Gucci underwear” ad and this exchange, we see materialized how men’s bodies have also become “feminized,” posed as sex objects – that despite men seeming to be in control of the gaze, they are ultimately as objectified (commodified) and controlled as women – and, again, with this castrating realization comes the need for cathartic violence. Again, this cathartic violence is an anxious, hyperventilating outlet from a growing sense of hypermasculine men’s “passivity,” of men being the “hunted”:

The invasive, prying gaze that so unsettled men…came from ornamental culture itself, from corporations and advertisers and publicists with their one-way mirrors and tabulations of you and your purchases. The male crotch could be replaced by the female breast on Details’ cover, but no matter how huge the bed, the corporate leer persisted. The cleavage shots were fig leaves, camouflage to hide from male readers their own fears of their own naked passivity in the face of display culture, their own prone positions as the objects of corporate desire…. Whether the ostensible objects of desire in the new Details or Esquire or GQ were breasts or pecs, a male reader couldn’t help but suspect as he leafed through his newest issues that he was not the hunter but the hunted, run to ground by the radar of reader surveys, demographic subscriber studies, and focus groups. (Faludi 528)

And this then becomes the “enslavement” of men to a commodity (“ornamental,” “display”…“feminine”) culture:

Cast into the gladiatorial arena of ornament, men sense their own diminishment in women’s strength. But the ‘feminine’ power whose rise most genuinely threatens men is not the female shoulder hoisting girders at a constructions site, not the female foot in the boardroom door of a corporation, not the female vote in the ballot box. The ‘femininity’ that has hurt men the most is an artificial femininity manufactured and marketed by commercial interests. What demeans men is a force ever more powerful in the world, one that has long demeaned women. The gaze that hounds men is the very gaze that women have been trying to escape…. Truly, men and women have arrived at their ornamental imprisonment by different routes. Women were relegated there as a sop for their exclusion from the realm of power-striving men. Men arrived there as a result of their power-striving, which led to a society drained of context, saturated with a competitive individualism that has been robbed of craft or utility, and ruled by commercial values that revolve around who has the most, the best, the biggest, the fastest. The destination of both roads was an enslavement to glamour. (Faludi 599)

However, unlike women’s commodification (objectification), the “male march” to commodification is less transparent because it is “disguised in masculine terms,” the commodification coming in large part via phallic representations, an emphasis on gaining the phallus through representation, e.g., “is seen as a new horizon of amped-up virility, a technological enhanced supermanhood”:

At century’s end, feminists can no longer say of consumer culture with such ringing confidence that ‘what it does to everyone, it does to women even more.’ The commercialized, ornamental ‘femininity’ that the women’s movement diagnosed now has men by the throat. Men and women both feel cheated of lives in which they might have contributed to the social world; men and women both feel pushed into roles that are about little more than displaying prettiness or prowess in the marketplace. Women were pushed first, but now their brothers have joined that same forced march…. If the male march seems different, that’s largely because it’s been described, and thereby disguised, in ‘masculine’ terms. The departure point of that march – the shutting down of places like the Long Beach Naval Shipyard – has typically been depicted as the loss of workplaces where men could exercise masculine brawn. But the more profound loss is of a world where men cared for each other and for the workplace society in which they were embedded. Likewise, the endpoint of that march – the world of superathletes, action heroes, and Viagra studs – is seen as a new horizon of amped-up virility, a technological enhanced supermanhood. But it’s really the rise of face-powdered vanity in another guise. This transit is a familiar one, previously traversed by women, a historic westward march in which the Colonial ideal of the strong pioneer mother gave way to the commercial icon of the Las Vegas showgirl. (Faludi 602-603)

In sum, what Faludi brilliantly elucidates here is, again, this added layer to this schizophrenic bind, phallocentric, hypermasculine men seeing this commodification (“new horizon of amped-up virility”) path as one of their primary modes of exerting their masculinity – capitalism/consumerism exploiting archaic (phallic) ideologies for profit, ingeniously normalizing this mode of false phallic attainment – while at the same time phallocentric, hypermasculine men also experiencing the Real of their constructed (hollow) being, translated into a deeply alienated state of being, so keenly registered in Fight Club. Perhaps the best embodiment of this schizophrenic sensibility is Bob, the man that “Jack” meets at the testicular cancer self-help group.

Bob/Self-Help Groups

The whole film has a penis/testicle (or lack thereof) motif, further accentuating the phallocentric focus of the film. Of course, the most notorious signifier of this motif is the penis inserts that we get, first with Tyler’s insertion of penises in family films and then at the end when we get that flash of penis inserted into the final moments. I’ll come back to the specific meaning behind those inserts. For now, in terms of this recurring motif, they inform a larger discourse going on in the film. In terms of Bob and the testicular cancer self-help group moments, here too we get a focus on the penis, via the blatant (literal) castration of men, cancer negating this symbolic source of masculinity-potency, the testicles of these men. In the case of Bob, Bob not only has lost his testicles but he has also developed enlarged breasts, misogynistically called “bitch-tits” in the film, hyper-accentuating his feminization. Ironically, Bob comes to this state of being via steroids, his attempt at developing a (phallic) hypermasculine physique, a significant problem for boys and men in this country, a more specific target for males, the unnatural hulking body image that advertisers and other media representations pose as the ideal masculine body.
In the allegorical form of Bob, then, we get this schizophrenic mode of being encapsulated: Bob bought into this marketing of a hypermasculine body ideal, which is further emphasized by his turn to “fight club,” a form of masculine bonding that emphasizes hypermasculine behavior in the extreme. However, we also see a tender and sensitive Bob during the self-help group sessions, his “feminization” stemming not only from his appearance (or at least as it is coded ideologically) but also from his easy acceptance of male bonding coming via body-to-body and verbal intimacy and emotional bonding.

Indeed, this schizophrenia is illustrated in these self-help group moments in another way. The self-help group moments, especially the testicular group, offers us a glaring contrast to the brutal pugilism of the “fight club,” the men intimately bonding via physical and emotional connections. Perhaps best summing up this connection comes in an extraordinary moment: “Jack” embraces Bob, saying, “I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom,” all signifiers that speak to this moment as a deeply maternal moment, in effect, “Jack” going back to his mother’s breast, back to the womb, which, in turn, also speaks to this glaring schizophrenic reaction in the men: Again, on the one hand, men feel like they must conform to what is an oppressive, unhealthy, destructive perception of hyper-masculinity (Bob’s steroid crush) while on the other hand they just want to in effect return to their mother’s breast where these kind of crushing perceptions, preconceptions didn’t exist. As I conveyed in my analysis of the infantile element in Dr. Strangelove, “this element suggests key structural formations for hypermasculine men, men who pathologically suffer from a lifelong internal conflict that begins at infancy, when the male child experiences the ‘all-satisfying maternal object’ (Diamond 65) an ‘illusory wholeness’ (Diamond 65) that…equates to a desire to go back to ‘the lost breast, missing mother… fusional jouissance’ (Diamond 64) that which ‘provides satiety and security that, once lost, is forever longed for and sought’ (Diamond 61) – a position of…absolute contentment’ (Diamond 61)” (see above). So, these moments spell out this schizophrenia in two ways: The desire to return to a more infantile state that lacks the constant (media, societal, cultural, ideological) stresses on men to live up to an unnatural and impossible (hypermasculine) actualization and the tear between healthy physical and emotional bonding and the taboo against such behavior, substituting healthy forms of bonding with physical primal bonding. This dichotomy is best exemplified by the contrasting bonding moments, “Jack” and Bob embracing and later “Jack” and Bob fighting each other in a “fight club” bout.

“Tyler Durden”

“Tyler Durden” also reflects this schizophrenic masculinity. “Tyler Durden” is the embodied, allegorical unconscious of “Jack,” our narrator. Best accentuating Tyler’s being are the “inserts” in the early part of the film, “Tyler” getting inserted four times before his actual actualization. Adding to this meaning, each Tyler insert is temporally different, each lasting a little longer than the one before it, emphasizing that Tyler is slowing emerging from “Jack’s” unconscious.

The first insert establishes the core of “Jack’s” (everyman) problem: Again, the “copy of a copy” moment speaking to the general thematic of a dehumanizing homogenization of men: Here is the seed of “Tyler” emerging, when “Jack” desperately does not want to be a “copy” anymore, Tyler becoming the “rugged individualist” that can rebel against this homogenizing (castrating) system.

And then the second through fourth Tyler inserts offer possible solutions/escapes to this problem, the second one referencing self-medicating, masking drugs, the third one the self-help groups, and then the fourth one, critically, Marla. Even further accentuating Tyler-as-unconscious, the first “real” image of Tyler is telling: “Jack” is on a people walker, but we don’t see “Tyler” before he approaches “Jack” on the people walker; we only see him after he passes by Jack. That is, it almost looks as if “Tyler” materializes from “Jack,” which of course is apt for “Tyler’s” signification as “Jack’s” unconscious.

Because “Jack” is never named, he becomes a more embodied “everyman,” a placeholder for patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine men. “Tyler” is rightfully read as “Jack’s” outlet for his rage and desire to return to a phallocentric, “rugged individualist” self. However, because he is “Jack’s” unconscious, he is more complex than that. He also takes on that side of “Jack” that is sensitive and available to emotional intimacy, as we see when Marla intriguingly says, “You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side….” But then as “Jack’s” embodied unconscious, those repressed/suppressed emotional parts of the self also find ways to come through, for after all, as Kaufman, says “these emotions and needs do not disappear,” even in the most hypermasculine of men, “they are simply held in check or not allowed to play as full a role in [men’s] lives as would be healthy for [them] and those around us” (148). With this curious thread in the film, we already get set up “Jack’s” ending shift to a more “whole” man, an important transformative moment that I will come back to in a moment.

However, “Tyler” better represents Jack’s unconscious, much like Mr. Hyde was Dr. Jekyll’s repressed unconscious raised to the surface. In the most basic sense, at least in large part, Tyler is “Jack’s” repressed rage: In that sense, then, Tyler gives him agency: That is, he allows him an outlet (e.g., fight club and project mayhem) to escape from all the above, his commodified, reified, and homogenized (objectified) state and Tyler offers him a means to smash to pieces the system that he hates so much, that has done this to him, which is not far from all the masculinity rage and violence we see occur regularly in society. And because this Jack-Tyler configuration is very much an allegorical figuration, Tyler represents the results of this unconscious schizophrenic rage in all phallocentric, hypermasculine men. In short, Tyler is the lifeline to phallocentric, hypermasculine men, giving them the clarity and means to break free from this emasculating consumerist/capitalist system that has put them in this schizophrenic bind. Ostensibly, of course, that means giving them back their masculinity, or, more precisely, giving them back an ontological clarity of being they lack, the dominant desire in their incessant tug-of-war, a much-needed relief to self.  More pointedly, “fight club” itself reproduces a crucial ritual for men, a way to be “reborn” hard, to use Full Metal Jacket’s language. Historically, “nonindustrial cultures are seen as providing a mechanism for young boys to successfully pass through an arduous rite, at the end of which they are secure in their manhood…. As with baptism, there is symbolic death of the boy (the profane self, the self born of woman) and rebirth” (Kaufman and Kimmel, 268, “Weekend Warriors…”). In the case of “fight club,” the “baptism” is the quintessentially “marker of manhood”: “Violence is often the single most evident marker of manhood. Rather it is the willingness to fight, the desire to fight” (Kimmel 132). Moreover, “fight club’s” archaic stress on a mythical “essentialist” hypermasculinity leads phallocentric men “to adopt a version of manhood that corresponds rather neatly with this society’s dominant conception of masculinity—man as warrior and conqueror—and to suggest that this represents the quintessence of manhood” (Kimmel and Kaufman 270). For the men of “fight club” this “baptism” is not about the “symbolic death of the boy” but rather the death of the capitalistic/corporate/consumerist man and the rebirth of a more traditionally minded phallocentric, hypermasculine agentic man.

Marla Singer

Another interesting motif-metaphor in the film is the “disease” thread. We get this in the self-help groups where cancer becomes a dominant signifier. At one point, “Jack” calls Marla a “tumor” that infects his life because her presence casts a light on the lie of his attending self-help groups, bringing his insomnia back. “Jack’s” insomnia itself speaks to this “disease” motif in the film. Indeed, that the men need “fight club” to relieve themselves of their angst feelings of alienation also speaks to this disease motif in the film. That, then, becomes the center to which this disease metaphor swirls, the locus of “infection” being consumerism/capitalism itself. We see this most cogently with Bob, who, again, due to the consumerist programming of hypermasculinity, takes steroids to fit this consumerist image, which, in turn, is what ultimately “castrates” him (e.g., gives him testicular cancer). The larger allegorical reference here spells out the real castrating mechanism of men, this intersection of phallocentrism and consumerism/capitalism. (The capitalism part of this equation not only that which consumerism emanates but also the source of the labor-alienation/class mode of being I discussed above.) Embodying the symptom of this consumerism/capitalism-phallocentrism disease is Tyler, who, again, not only becomes the manifestation of “Jack’s” alienation/schiozophrenic angst but all men who have fallen under the ideological conditioning of this phallocentric ideology. Tyler’s counterpoint in the film, and, thus, ironically, a countering symptom of a possible cure for these men comes in the form of Marla.

Marla is an interesting allegorical figure herself, a woman who represents an alternative to this oppressive consumerist, phallocentric ideology. To that end, Marla takes on much greater significance than simply being “Jack’s” girlfriend (the explosion of “Jack’s” apartment coming while Marla answers her phone punctuating her significance). The straightforward reading is simply that Marla has invaded his newfound space (self-help groups, power animal space), a space that gives him shelter and relief from his deadening life outside. However, that Marla becomes his power animal (and hence his mirror Other image) already telegraphs her significance for “Jack.”

For one, she seems to parallel Tyler in many ways and seems to take on an opposite position of him as well, most notably shown when she talks to “Jack” at the top of the staircase: Jack is between her and Tyler below him. Like Tyler, she has basically rejected the commodifying world of consumerism and apparently doesn’t work an alienating job. More pointedly, she doesn’t care what people think about her, she doesn’t care what she looks like, and she does what she wants when she wants, and she doesn’t answer to anyone. She too sees in the self-help groups the key to life – opposite of the present conditions – the re-establishment of those profound (collective) connections between people, mutually reciprocal, mutually nurturing, sensitive to Others’ needs rather than submitting to the sucking sounds of pure consumption and the concurrent loss of a “whole” gendered self. Their differences are obvious of course. Tyler, a manifestation of Jack’s repressed rage, is ultimately a destructive force, anarchistic and hypermasculine, while Marla is a constructive force, bonding and gender neutral, taking on all the attributes of masculinity and femininity, the truly “whole” human being.

The Ending, A New Vision of (Hu)man

Marla also sets us up for what might be an alternative possibility to the Tyler/phallocentric-hypermasculine option. In the last moment of the film, we get Marla and Jack holding hands in exact symmetry; indeed, their clothes (punctuated by their bare legs), the lighting on the side profiles of their faces, their bodies placed in rectangular glass windows, their hands crossing the symbolic dividing line of the windows, all suggest a mirror image of the two. Couple that with the phallic buildings coming down (phallic because of their shape yes but also because high rises are usually associated with phallic power, e.g. the Trump Tower, the Rockefeller Center, and so on) as they look on, the last building coming down being the one in-between them, their heads turning to each other as it comes down, and we get an extremely evocative ending moment: In effect, they are the ones left standing, they have displaced these phallic-capitalistic structures of power (and Marla has displaced “Jack’s” unconscious hypermasculine alter ego, Tyler Durden). Is this the new “frontier” beginning that Tyler envisioned and, indeed, set in motion? Or is this a radically contrary new “Adam and Eve” vision, a new start, one of equality (unlike the original Biblical story) between man and woman – an exact balance of femininity and masculinity – replacing the phallocentric (patriarchal, masculine) world of what has come previously? In any case, based on what I’ve suggested before, Marla’s importance as a counterpoint to Tyler, it seems to me that Marla is the key to “Jack’s” alternative self, not just love but also what she represents, in short, an empowered, non-consumerist “whole” self free of the phallocentric schizophrenic bind.

Penis Insert

This ending moment has one other important image, the now infamous “penis insert” that is placed just after Fincher holds that moment of perfect symmetry between “Jack” and Marla, and then briefly comes back to them as he fades to black. This image harkens back to Tyler putting penis inserts into family films and adds, in my view, a highly problematic last layer to this ending. I say problematic because the ostensible reading here is that “Tyler” is still alive inserting the same semi-erect penis shots into this film, suggesting that patriarchal, phallocentric ideology is alive and well, utterly undercutting any possible alternative reading.  However, two other readings may be possible here as well: The penis insert may just reference a kind of “ghost in the machine” type of thing, the hypermasculinity ideology that remains latent however much one (as in this newly enlightened “Jack”) has moved in a more balanced (ala that stubbornly surviving yin/yang table/symbol), healthy direction. Or, in a more progressive reading, it may just be another reinforcement of my earlier possible reading, Fincher hyper-emphasizing this displacement of phallocentrism by gender “equilibrium” by not only having our Jack/Marla pairing displace the phallic buildings but also the penis motif that has run through this film, the penis insert then not so much as interjecting itself into – or undercutting – this alternative possibility (e.g., “Jack”/Marla) but rather Fincher giving us a more pronounced penis insert (unlike the single frame that Tyler inserts into the family films, so subtly placed that it is only subconsciously recognized) allowing the penis to literally be “cut” (or castrated) in the editing, a final “cutting” away of the phallocentric, again to be displaced by the Marla/Jack equilibrium image, our finally lasting image.

Conclusion: Breaking Free from a Phallocentric-Alienation Prison

In a sense, the testicular self-help group moment in Fight Club perhaps suggests a way out of this phallocentric, hypermasculine, patriarchal mode of being. That is, if we subversively invert the negative connotations of the term “castration,” these men’s “castrated” state of being speaks not about their literal “castration” – the loss of their testicles – but about a positive “castration” of those destructive ideological identity formations that oppressed them. In other words, the potential of the “castrated” men in the self-help groups is the potential of phallocentric, patriarchal, hypermasculine men, that historical-cultural-ideological (figurative) “castration” is necessary for the health and well-being of men, a way of being that negates the deeply oppressive and fragmenting patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine self-destructive mode of being that they have lived with for centuries. And since “gender” is not “fixed,” such an ontological shift is very much doable: “The notion of gender work suggests there is an active process that creates and recreates gender. It suggests that this process can be an ongoing one, with particular tasks at particular times of our lives and that allows us to respond to changing relations of gender power. It suggests that gender is not a static thing that we become, but is a form of ongoing interaction with the structures of the surrounding world” (Kaufman 147). The “surrounding world” is indeed acting in this direction though it is also acting to hold on to archaic, phallic (ideological) modes of being as well.

Perhaps a better way to put it is to put in terms that phallocentric, patriarchal, hypermasculine men can understand: In her brilliant work on alienation, Rafel Jaeggi examines the many components of alienation, including how society (or ideologies) prescribe “roles” for us, not in itself a detrimental thing; that is, Jaeggi contends that “roles” are what define us, make us what we are. It isn’t the conception of “roles” themselves where we can determine how we are alienated but how we use “roles.” Jaeggi narrows this down to three key elements: “Standardization and Conformism,” or where

roles are given in advance; their script is already written. Viewed in this way, they are a fixed form that individuals can only ‘fill in’…. This limits the possibilities for shaping one’s own behavior and the space within which an individual can respond spontaneously. Thus, from the perspective of alienation critique, we are ‘caught’ in roles and shaped by them; our own freedom, as well as the possibilities of expressing ourselves as individuals, are constrained.  Standardization, then stands in contrast to the aspiration for individuality and uniqueness (84-85);

“Fragmentation and One-sidedness” where

roles, as the parts individual plays in the fabric of social cooperation, are always a constraint as well: they always involve only a certain portion of the qualities and potentials we have at our disposal. This means not only that our own capacities are developed one-sidedly but also that in roles our possibilities for interacting with others are constrained. In social relations mediated by roles we take note only of pieces of one another…. [T]his means reducing the complexity of individuals: being fixed in a role not only excludes other possible competencies; it also fixes us to certain aspects of our personality (88);

“Artificiality,” where Jaeggi uses the term “artificiality” in a positive sense:

[T]he artificiality of roles in its most positive sense refers to the fact that one is not fixed in one’s roles, that there is no ‘substance’ to be found behind one’s roles. This is the point of Sartre’s analysis of bad faith, according to which a person behaves inauthentically precisely when she denies that her own existence is something to be ‘played’ and that it is always lived within the realm of possibility…. Only someone who knows she is playing a role and does not pretend to be identical with it, and who, at the same time, knows that she cannot avoid playing roles, counts as ‘truthful’ in Sartre’s sense. In his provocative inversion: ‘True human existence is always played.’ It is precisely making roles natural, not their artificiality, that is problematic from this perspective. The artificiality of roles should not be opposed to genuineness but to a way of using, structuring, and playing this role so as to open up a sphere for action. Reifying or alienating roles, then, are those that no longer allow the contrived character of roles to appear and that mask their nature as something that must be played. (91-92)

In other words, the false “role” player is the individual who takes her “role” as God given or otherwise “natural” or who clings to it so desperately because she identifies with what it represents. Think of the rich socialite who comes off as “phony” because she identifies with her “role” all too absorbedly. Contrast that to the individual who has some self-awareness of role playing to begin with and thus sees her “role” as a construct (and not “natural and normal,” fixed) and thus flexible, adaptable, a “role” that can open onto other horizons of possibility, potentialities.

Altogether, I think it becomes clear how valuable this line of alienation thought is for my focus here: Males who take on patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine “roles” – which, again, means repressing what society defines as “feminine”/“maternal” attributes and suppressing homosexual/bisexual desires – in effect “standardize” (predetermined by an already written “script”), “fragment” (“involve[ing] only a certain portion of the qualities and potentials we have at our disposal”), and “fix” (see as “natural and normal”) one’s self in this phallocentric, patriarchal, hypermasculine mold, shatteringly rob themselves of the full spectrum of what it means to be human, to be “whole,” not to mention that such a way of being inevitably translates into such (self) destructive ideologies as what I’ve discussed at length above, “white man’s burden,” manifest destiny, a “city upon a hill” ideologies. In this context, it is time for phallocentric, patriarchal, hypermasculine men to see their way out of what is a symbolic (crushing) ideological (phallocentric) disempowering, determined prison, the only way out being to cut away this ideologically determined phallocentrism, free the self from this “fragmented” alienated way of being and, finally, self-determine one’s self in all the potentialities of what it means to be human.

[1] I’m using the “Real” in the Slavoj Žižekian sense of how the Real can be shown, especially in cinema, where we can “touch the Real through those points where symbolization fails; through trauma, aversion, dislocation and all those markers of uncertainty where the Symbolic fails to deliver a consistent and coherent reality” (Daly).

[2] See Geoffrey Cocks’ interesting and compelling work The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History & the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang P, 2004) for more on this focus.

[3] The “city upon a hill” reference comes from one of the most famous quotes in American history and is thought to be the first stress on American exceptionalism. Puritan John Winthrop conceived this imagery in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity”: “For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

[4] See this site for a partial listing of the many prominent politicians who have referenced this “city upon a hill” metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill

[5] As Wilber W. Caldwell says, “Very early on in the American experience, citizens began to harbor the notion that American institutions, values, and way of life were superior to those of other nations and that their spread throughout the world was inevitable. Despite the now-obvious pluralistic nature of the modern (or postmodern) world, such ideas sill engage the American mind” (6).

[6] As Jerry Bowles says, “[T]he Mickey Mouse Club was no less an important instrument of national policy than the most flagrant propaganda of Pravda” (21). Steven Watts nicely articulates this show’s “socialization” of youth (335-345) though many works have focused on the ideological conditioning at the heart of Disney in general, works such as The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Henry A. Giroux), From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture (Eds. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells), and Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Nicholas Sammond).

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