It’s (Not) a Wonderful Life

So if we’re going to ‘ruin’ any Christmas movies with a Zizekian interpretation, it simply must be the Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life.  (Notably, James Stewart is the lead actor in this film and in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a Zizek favorite.) 

The clip (shown above) shows life as if George Bailey, the film’s protagonist, had never been born.  Clarence, George’s guardian angel, in a last ditch effort to gain his wings, shows George life in Bedford Falls (which has become Pottersville, named after the evil antagonist banker of the film, Ben Potter) without him.  (A Marxist reading of this film would be delightful were it not for the confines of time, so Real during the week before finals.) As George walks through town, all that was once beautiful and familiar is no longer.  Everyone and every place become unheimlich; what’s worse is that George is a mere observer…the man who knows too much and so all of his interactions with people are rendered uncanny.  The tree he hit with his car after a night of collegiate-level consumption? Gone.  The barkeep named Martini?  No, his name is Nick and the only thing he’s serving is a black-eye to George Bailey.  And his wife, Mary?  The horror: “a spinster, George!”

Interestingly, the softly falling snow seems to signify the oral stage, increasing, we move into the anal stage, and by the phallic stage, it’s a blizzard.  The camera work follows the stages as well; the anal stage is a “montage,” according to Zizek, and as such, the scenes become increasingly fragmented; what was once a bizarre scenario of life without George Bailey has become a frightening series of short clips consisting mainly of George running about town in panic.  (I might also point out that, excepting the happy ending, American Psycho ends in a similar vein with Patrick Bateman running direction-less, full of dread and despair.)

Queer Eye for the Man-Cave Guy

Donald Hall, in his description of “Queer –the verb” writes “the broad social fear is always that the abnormal and degraded will not stay in their assigned place, that ‘secure’ social systems and identities will become unmoored…” (14).  Hall uses the pronoun “their” which seems to imply that he is referring to people who will not remain within the confines of their social roles.  But as readers discover with a reading of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper,” notions of work can be queered as well.  Thus, it is not simply people who must stick to their social parameters; objects and ideas can be queer as well and must be kept in their own spaces.  As a result, we have the creation of the man-cave, Dad’s shed or garage or basement space that acts as a drainage basin for all his stuff.

I’m not prepared to say with certainty the reasons for the existence of the man-cave.  I posit that it originates out of a need for a space which harbors the things wives/girlfriends/partners do not deem appropriate when house guests are visiting.  Although women often require their own space, I was shocked to discover the fan fare surrounding man-caves.  There is a website (http://www.mancavesite.org/) in which men share their man-caves with others (presumably, men).  But what makes man-caves so queer is how diverse they are.  The definition of the man-cave, to employ Sedgwick’s words, traverses socio-economic  boundaries.  Brief exploration of the site shows that man-caves can be places to manifest one’s wealth; in one man-cave we find a billiards table, fine leather couches and a bar stocked with ample, high-end booze.  The man-cave can be neat and organized and simply a projection of our desires.  (Of course, if our partner allowed the man-cave to be in a different, more visible and open space, that would destroy the power relationship.  A wife cannot admit and openly display that she lets her husband purchase”frivolous” things like a big-screen TV if she herself does not have a similar space, though she may have a burgeoning purse or shoe collection, these objects do not constitute a “space” per se and therefore are not equivalent to a man-cave.)

Other man-caves are repositories for plain-old stuff: hats, stuffed –err, taxidermied –animals (which they obviously shot when they were out hunting; never would a stuffed duck be a gag gift they have kept for too long or memory from a frat party), televisions (one is rarely enough), sports paraphernalia, and (maybe even) pictures of other women (although I suppose gay men can have man-caves in which case, the pictures would be of men) etc. They are cluttered, disorganized, full things that hold memories but questionable value.  In either case, the man-cave is queer in that it transcends categorization (there is not “typical” man-cave) and crosses socio-economic borders (they can be for anyone, even middle-class serial killers from Miami).  Dexter has had several caves throughout the series, all of which threaten his un-doing by exposing his identity, if they are discovered.  The Bay Harbor discovery almost brings Dexter’s killing days to an end, though his bachelor pad apartment (pre-marriage) shares the role of the man-cave equally with the ocean as he conceals his blood samples (taken from every victim) inside his air conditioner. After Dexter marries Rita, he compromises and gets a shed which Rita acknowledges in a fashion that makes man-caves all the more normal.

There are no concretes with the man-cave.  What is in it and what is says about our identity always vary.  What man-caves have in common is their ability to threaten our security, particularly the security of marriage.

George Banks, Batman & The Name of the Father

“Lacan does articulate both a masculine and a feminine position in his theoretical model, and they are not, as in Freud, opposed to one another.  Nor are they in any way biologically determined…A person has a masculine or a feminine structure according to how he or she is situated with respect to the Name of the Father” (99).  So declares Karen Coats.  We can think of the Name of the Father as a division between the Symbolic and Imaginary (to use Lacanian terms).  The Symbolic Father regulates the Oedipus complex by intervening in the non-existent relationship between son and mother and imposing order (Law).  The Imaginary Father is an imago, an idealized father created from childhood images and interactions.  (Notably, the Imaginary Father can be idolized and glorified in positive or negative terms i.e. the best father ever or the most awful, abusive father ever).

Coats uses George Banks, the father of Jane and Michael in  Mary Poppins as a means of relating this position in relation to the Name of the Father.  Banks assumes a traditional masculine position; he is a man of wealth and he fulfills his literary and social status, “wholly determined by the signifier’s [his name's] symbolic mandate” (102).  Where there is no order, when his children are missing in the park, for instance, he attempts to impose his system upon the situation.  Worse yet is his apparent ignorance for things which may disrupt his neatly-organized reality as when he obliviously puts Katie Nana’s luggage in the car without realizing that she is leaving after his children went missing.  Nonetheless, his action of assisting her has fulfilled his masculine duty and image.  From Banks’s name, Coats points readers to the Symbolic Father; from the luggage incident, readers discover a man attempting to fill the masculine image.  As a result of Banks’s position, he can neither relate to nor recognize otherness as its waves might capsize the Symbolic/Imaginary Order that has been instilled within him.

Coats opines that Banks’s “very name indicates the relation he has to the signifier –he is a banker, and his name is Banks.  Hence his being is wholly determined by the signifier’s symbolic mandate” (102).  We might think of the superhero Batman in the same way.  His superhero moniker is not just a byproduct of his nightly superhero activities (fighting crime, saving women), he literally flies like a bat and conforms to the signifier’s mandate.  Batman’s struggle to fight crime mirrors Banks’s; he persists in his battle to eliminate crime and bring Gotham back to a state of l/Law and order (Symbolic).  Furthermore, Batman often maintains his role by doing what he thinks is right, though he can sometimes misunderstand his role as in The Dark Knight when he attempts to save Rachel, but ends up saving Harvey.  (The Joker has forced Batman to choose between saving one of the two, Harvey at one address, Rachel at another and accidentally saves Harvey as the Joker lied to him about which person was at which location.) Batman is restrained by his identity, one of the (idealized) norms of that identity being that women are viewed as precious and must be prioritized in the process of saving.

(American) Psychos & The Problem of Place

Zizek’s discussion of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Cixous’s interest in woman writing woman led me back to one of favorite texts: American Psycho (a movie and book; the book is by Bret Easton Ellis).  For the purposes of the discussion, I will use the film as evidence to support my ideas rather than the literary text.

American Psycho reverses Cixous’s idea of woman writing woman; in this case man (Patrick Bateman) writes man.  While Cixous probably held high hopes that women writers would be able to write about all women as a means of creating a universal sisterhood.  In Bateman’s case, his narration of man is only himself because he believes himself to be the ultimate man and therefore, the only man.  Bateman’s (in-)famous “morning routine” exemplifies man (instead of woman) rebelling against traditional phallocentrism, describing the tedious intricacies of the creation of the mask of himself (the moisturizers, the exercise, the rigid diet).  The ultimate rebellion of course comes in Bateman’s sadistic murders, killing the people who he sees as reinforcing the phallocentrism that has made him the way his –empty.  While Cixous might have envisioned women writing about and exposing the great pains of being women in a heteronormative, phallocentric world, Batemen is a manifestation of man narrating the struggle of creating his manhood everyday.  (Notice how he hides his pain of creating himself everyday beneath the dull mechanical description he provides.)

The Problem of Place: While Zizek envisions the house in Psycho as a physical form of id (basement), ego (first floor), and superego (second floor), Bateman’s apartment cannot be constructed in such a way and thus, he experiences a crisis as his id, ego, and superego mix and interact physically in the apartment.  The opening statement (or lines) locate the apartment geographically which, as we will learn, is the only way to define place in the film as Patrick experiences a crisis of place which cannot be cleaned up and organized as in the levels in Norman’s house even after he has meticulously eliminated all visible physical evidence of murder.

Bateman murders people mostly in his apartment and while he stuffs them in plastic bags in the closet, eventually disposing of them, viewers see how this gradually becomes a problem for Bateman.  In the bathroom, living room, and kitchen (in the movie it is in every room, but in the clip we see these three rooms), we see Batemen constructing his ego and superego, accentuated by his personal narrative.  But, since murder is a revelation of Patrick’s id and he can’t seem to confine women to one space (either because they attempt to escape or because he simply does not care where he kills them), his id meets his ego and superego.  The apartment, no longer neatly, emotionally divided (it does keep its organized bachelor-pad air about it for most of the film) becomes chaotic and this chaos reflects in the eventual mistakes Bateman makes in his murders, leading to a grand crisis in the final scene.

Surrealist Bodywash & Polyglas

Isaiah Mustafa, famous for his series of Old Spice commercials during the 2010 Superbowl (and less famous for his short-lived career in football), completes another encore of “the man your man could smell like” (see video below).  Oddly, Mustafa’s character isn’t addressing men; his monologues notoriously open with “Hello ladies.  How are you? [no pause] Fantastic.” and a mention of “lady-scented body wash.”  He creates an immediate binary between “lady-scented body wash[es]” and manly-scented body wash, in this case, Old Spice.  As Mustafa’s character moves quickly from setting to setting, Barthel’s observations become apparent: this man is not passive; he transitions from log rolling on a lake in the mountains, to walking on water, to building a kitchen, to diving from a waterfall, to a hot tub which falls into pieces as the viewer sees Mustafa in his final pose straddling a motorcycle in glory.  The ease of Mustafa’s movements highlights the manly quality of performance.  Through all of these activities, particularly the Christ-like walk and counter-top construction while making a cake, this body wash serves men well.  Moreover, the signifier (e.g. deodorant) has a new signified with each transition in place: strength (log-rolling), divinity (walking on water), robust (building a “dream home”), virility (swan diving), sexuality (hot tub), power (motorcycle).

Perhaps what makes this commercial so fascinating is how absurd it is.  Its surrealist nature makes it non-traditional and it illustrates the arbitrariness of masculinity and femininity and in so doing, makes manliness more appealing.  Mustafa generates a character who is outrageously chauvinist and whose life is an impossible dream for viewers, but a dream they wish for nonetheless.

The next video from the late-60s/early 70s presents unconventional notions of women while reiterating traditional gender roles.  The woman of this commercial is not passive or seeking to please others by making a choice which will add to her beauty and sex appeal.  Instead, we encounter a woman braving the elements and the dangers of driving (danger which is accentuated through the dramatic musical score), mainly those strange things like other drivers (on the road!), detours, and crosswalks!  As Barthel rightfully points out, masculine imagery can be imposed on commercials for women; this is the case here.  The woman’s safety, the assurance that she can fare well on the roads is created through two masculine qualities.  First, the beginning of the commercial features two men who boast of the trustworthiness of Goodyear tires.  Second, the car and its tires are symbols of masculinity, especially the precision that comes with masculine things and it is that quality which ensures the woman’s safety.