Intimate Objects

I watched the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being last night and found myself putting Mulvey’s theories onto it. It was not hard to do.

The film follows the lives of three people: Tomàš, a philandering doctor, Tereza, the childlike woman with whom he falls in love, and Sabina, one of Tomàš’ mistresses. With that description I mean to imply that is a patriarchally structured film: the film begins with and centers around Tomàš, and the two women are introduced to the audience only through their relationships with him (Sabina especially, who is introduced after a title card says, “But the woman who understood him best was Sabina”). Tomàš is Mulvey’s typical male Hollywood hero, the character with whom the male viewer narcissistically identifies (and can form himself after).

And boy, is there scopophilia in this film. Tomàš spends much of the film seducing women. His technique? He looks at a woman straight-on, hard, with a devilish, smiling glint in his eyes, and says, “Take off your clothes” (in a Czech accent). It always works. Tomàš is thus an extreme example of Mulvey’s typical male protagonist. Speaking of the way the male audience member identifies with the male protagonist, Mulvey says, “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving  a satisfying sense of omnipotence [to the male viewer]” (2187). Tomàš’ erotic look does more than coincide with his control of events, it is the way he controls events. Which I would say affects the male viewer rather strongly: I remember that for weeks after my teenage self first watched this movie I would try to imitate Tomàš’ look almost every time I looked in a mirror.

The seduction scenes also exemplify Mulvey’s split between active/male and passive/female. Tomàš’ gaze is in control; he sees the women as spectacles, and they, conscious of his objectification of them, display themselves. As Mulvey puts it, “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (2186 in the blue book). For instance, in one scene he makes Sabina put on a bowler hat, take off her robe, and crawl on a mirror in her lingerie; spectacle. She allows him to make her do this, and then, while on the mirror, conscious of herself as spectacle, asks him, “What are you looking at?” He replies, “Your eyes.”

This reply points, I think, to the way Tomàš’ pleasure in looking does not fit completely into Lacan’s and Mulvey’s theories. At one point in the film he tells Sabina that his chief erotic pleasure is in discovering the particularities of the women he sleeps with, in that part of their physical existence in the world which is unique to them, those expressions or movements which are theirs alone. He does project his desire onto them by turning them into spectacles, but he pays attention to them as spectacles. They are not simply objets a, objects that he only looks at for an outline that he can fill in with his fantasies. Rather, the beauty (and, perhaps, ugliness) of Tomàš’ look is that, in actually seeing women’s bodies for what they are, it makes their bodies special and beautiful and individual, and it makes them conscious of their bodies as special and beautiful and individual. He shows them that they have power over him, power to incite his desire, and they delight in exercising that power. This is still objectification by men of women, and thus still a subjection of women, but is there not a possibility for beauty in it? I mean to make a compromise out of Tomàš’ look which might satisfy both feminists and queer theorists: if a woman, independent, conscious of herself and her innate dignity as a human being, were to voluntarily allow Tomàš to look at her and see her beauty, there would be intimacy in his objectification. The same if a man allowed himself to be looked at in such a way. And why not make “intimacy” the trump signifier, especially in matters of sex, where objectification is the point?

 

The abject

I have two long quotes:

In its social context, ‘abjection’ means to operate at the social rim. Adolescence is a time of cultivating group identity; socially abject figures cannot seem to manage either the material conditions and habits or the identifications necessary to sustain a position in a social group… Both social and psychological abjection precipitate violence in the narratives of young-adult fiction and hence offer suggestive ways of thinking about the increasing violence of adolescent society. (138-139)

Just as we abject the unclean and improper evidences of the body’s physicality in order to constitute a clean and proper body, so in the social realm we abject the unclean and the improper, again often on the basis of physicality, in order to constitute the boundaries of community and nation…. Throughout social history, the exclusions of peoples based on race, sexuality, and disabilities have established and bolstered both personal and national identities…. Identities, communities, and nations are “permanently brittle” constructs because they are built on abjection, which haunts their borders. (141)

So then. The adolescent moves into society, either entirely unaware or only vaguely aware of it as artifice, as a construction of the Law. Society needs abjection (the naming of a thing as unclean and improper) to survive, needs to make boundaries in order to define itself. Those who (through an unquestionably performative use of Language) are deemed abject often meet with or exercise violence, there being fear and dislike between the abject and the accepted.

One of Coats’ illustrations of this is a discussion of S. E. Hinton’s young adult novel The Outsiders. She gives a synopsis: a group of young men called the Greasers (who are the socially abject heroes of the story, she tells us, excluded from the discourse of the majority) clash violently with another group, the Socs (some clean and proper young men); two of them, Johnny and Dallas, die (though not at the hands of the Socs; Johnny dies from burns he gets while saving some children from a fire, and Dallas “cannot accept Johnny’s death and challenges the police with a loaded pistol” (150).) Coats says, “That they die suggests that abjection is an unsustainable social position.… the unconscious truth of her 1967 text is that figures like Johnny and Dallas must be expelled from a clean and proper society. Ponyboy’s [the protagonist’s] successful adult identity is contingent upon his ridding himself of his associations with these abject figures” (150).

I thought of the 1995 film La haine (in English, Hate), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui. The camera follows three friends (Vinz, a Jew, Hubert, an Afro-French, and Saïd, a Maghrebin) through a day in their lives. They live in the banlieues of Paris (roughly equivalent to the ghettoes of America) and all three are or have been involved in riots, violent protests of their social marginalization; they are some of the socially abject of French society. (a side note: The notion of the “clean and proper” body reminds me of a remark once made by Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France. In 2005, as Ministry of the Interior, he called the youth of the banlieues “racaille” (roughly, “scum,” with racist connotations) and spoke of cleaning out the banlieues “a Kärcher” (referring to a manufacturer of power hoses).)

In the film the three friends move in the society of their fellow abject banlieue inhabitants, in a culture of camraderie, rap music, and violence. Toughness, sexual prowess, and humor are respected, and vulgarity is the norm. Many of the men of the banlieue speak in one of the various versions of verlan, a slang that works by inverting words (“verlan” comes from “l’envers,” or reverse). Marginalized economically and racially, they affirm their uncleanness and impropriety and transgress the laws of Language. In one scene the three end up at an art gallery, where they drink the wine and eat the food and make fun of the art. They see a couple of girls and Saïd asks Hubert to help him charm them (“Didn’t I buy you a taco last week?” he says); Hubert plays it cool with the girls, but Saïd comes on too fast. This impropriety disgusts the girls, and Saïd, Vinz, and Hubert get angry and end up yelling at everyone in the gallery (“You can all go suck dick in hell,” and “Yo momma in hell”) and breaking a champagne glass and a sculpture. They cannot play by the rules of polite society (having never been taught to abject sex properly), and when it rejects them they return that rejection with violent vulgarities. They walk out the door and the gallery owner turns around, tired and disgusted, and dismisses them with, “The malaise of the ghetto.”

I have perhaps been too quick to label Hubert, Vinz, and Saïd as abject; I only did so because they are excluded from the discourse of the majority by a lack of material wealth and power. In the above scene, each society (that of the banlieue and that of the rich) abjects the other because neither accepts the Language and Law of the other.

Becoming a Real Boy

“A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)”, the 2001 film directed by Steven Spielberg, follows the life of a boy, but certainly no “nor-male” boy. The boy, named David, is a mecha, a super advanced robot that is actually capable of not only emulating, but experiencing emotions and acting on original thoughts. Created by Cybertronics of New Jersey, David is an even more advanced type of mecha, who is able to actually feel love for whomever owns him. He is constructed to look, act, speak and love as a child does, enacting the same imprinting mechanisms that a human child does with its parents, particularly its mother. David especially imprints on Monica, his “mother,” who grows attached to him as well, until her actual son, who was sick, is able to return home and take up his role as a human son.

The story goes on for much longer than this, but first, I would like to address children as a whole. Children are some of the most familiar individuals in the world. Despite cultural differences, they follow developmental characteristics that are universal. Instinctively, the average adult will be protective and caring towards any child they come across, which is essentially ingrained within our psyches. In the most primal sense, we want the next generation, our offspring, to survive.

However, how is one supposed to react to David? He is essentially a child in all of the ways that are familiar to us, and yet he is not. Because he is not made up of the organic matter that we are made of, he cannot be human, no matter how convincing he is. He is not entirely flawless in his child-like state, either. He cannot eat, he does not blink, and he cannot dream when he is “sleeping.” He is the epitome of Freud’s theory of the uncanny, in a sense. He is everything that is familiar and homely, yet he is, concealed from perception, very much unfamiliar and unhomely. Of course, in realizing this, David’s nature is disconcerting and even frightening. He is even more frightening because he plays with our emotions, our care-giving desires. He sparks within us the desire to treat him as something he’s not, manipulating our hearts, even as we know in our minds that he is not what is familiar.

Lacanian theory can also be applied to “A.I.”, although the stages that Lacan applies to child development are skewed due to the fact that David is no ordinary child. After David’s “brother,” Martin, returns home, the two experience a sort of sibling rivalry in which Martin, who has fully been assimilated into the Symbolic, exemplifies. He is a son who has conformed to the Law of the Father. Because of this, he does not understand the queerness of David and is cruel to him, attempting to sabotage him in order to regain his position as the true son. In doing so, David’s defensive “programming” is triggered, and puts the life of Martin at risk. After this event, Henry, Monica’s husband, wishes to destroy David, but she sets off to save him.

In a pivotal scene (0:00-4:30), which I have embedded below, Monica drives David to the woods to leave him there, in order to save him from “death,” but also to separate herself from the unconditional, clinging love that David exhibits. As they drive to the woods, they pass the sign and entrance for Cybetronics of New Jersey, which represents the Father, the Symbolic realm. The creator of David is a graspable, socially real thing, and Monica stops the car, almost as if she wishes to return him, but she instead thinks better of it, realizing that he will be destroyed. She forces her reason, which lies within the Symbolic, out. Instead, she employs her fantasy that David is real, and deserving of life, reverting her mind into the realm of the Imaginary.

As Monica tries to leave David in the woods, he begs and pleads with her not to leave him there, but she, despite the tears she is also shedding, and the pain it causes her, is determined to eject David from her social reality, almost as if she is forcing him into the third term, forcing him to form a new Symbolic order outside of herself, his “mother.” When she and David first developed a bond, she read to him the story of Pinocchio, which convinced him that it was possible for him, despite the fact that he is a mecha, to become a “real boy.” As he begs, he says, “No, mommy, please no. If Pinocchio became a real boy, and I became a real boy, can I come home?” She then responds to him with, “Stories are not real!” However, as Karen Coats would say, stories inform children, shape children into what society expects of them. In this sense, David is frighteningly more real than expected. He is actually capable of taking a piece of society, even though fantastical, and applying it to himself, attempting to fulfill the example that language provides for him.

David, however, is left by Monica, and for the remainder of the film, his one true desire is to return home to her. He is aware of the hole that is missing and wants only to fill that hole with the perceived, yet literally non-existent mother of the Imaginary realm. In his quest, he both adheres to the Symbolic realm, but also diverts from it. He is far more capable of living between the Imaginary and Symbolic because he is not “nor-male.” Eventually, through a ridiculously long succession of events, he is able to have a final, peaceful, blissful day with Monica (who is not actually Monica, but a mecha who holds the memories and physical and emotional characteristics of her), in which he acts out with her all of his desires. In all his life, he does not enter into the realm of the Real, as his desires are not unconscious. He does not even have an unconscious. After all, he cannot dream. However, at the end of the film, he quite literally does. He becomes a “real boy” after Monica finally tells him that she has always loved him. His deepest desire is met and he is no longer stuck in the Imaginary, but instead of moving back into the Symbolic from which he was born, he “for the first time in his life…went to that place where dreams are born.” In entering the Real, he becomes real.

Vampire MILFs

Dear old mom. In our culture, the mother is generally a very wholesome concept–think Norman Rockwell paintings and June Cleaver. Often, mothers are seen as the key figure of a home, being referred to as homemakers, housewives, and stay-at-home moms. For those of us in our culture who actually had this presence in our homes growing up in addition to being bombarded with this socially accepted (and, in many ways, expected) role, the figure of Darla in “Buffy” is extremely uncanny.

Darla is Angel’s mom. She brought him into this life as a vampire and helped “raise” him to be a powerful and violent vampire. In many ways, the way Darla interacts with Angel is reminiscent in how a mother would interact with her son. She seems to truly care for him (as much as an amoral, supernatural being can, anyway), saying she misses him. She’s intensely jealous and (for lack of a better word) belligerent towards Angel’s new love interest, Buffy, falling into the overly jealous and protective mother stereotype (world’s worst mother-in-law?). There is also the sort of bizarre (as well as uncanny) “family” that Angel was formally a part of–the master vampire as the patriarch, Darla as the matriarch, and then perhaps Angel (who the master vampire said he had wanted as his right hand guy) and the little boy as the kids. Darla even has a sweet, almost motherly voice–very calm and in a high, breathy register. Also, technically, there was penetration that began the process of Angel’s conception as a vampire, but that leads us straight into the total uncanny-ness of the motherly role Darla plays.

First of all, that penetration occurs between Darla and Angel in a variety of ways. There is the initial vampire fangs to victim penetration, followed by any number of sexual penetrations between Angel and Darla. This is not how the typical mother-son relationship plays itself out. It directly feeds into Freud’s Oedipal complex, except, instead of the son, Angel, being forced to suppress his desire for his mother, he, as a supernatural creature who seems to dwell only within the Id, he’s able to feed this desire to both his and Darla’s hearts content. Interestingly, we, in our discussions over Freud’s Oedipal complex, never really touched on whether or not the mother desires any sort of sexual encounter with her son. It’s clear Darla does in her continuous attempts to seduce Angel, both with sex and with human blood (when she comes to his home and when she bites Buffy’s mom), and this only adds to her being uncanny. Most of all, Darla is dangerous, most definitely to Buffy, Angel’s love interest, but also quite possibly to him as well. While Darla desired Angel at the time, her volatile behavior suggests that her feelings towards could potentially changed, given enough fear for her own survival. So, of course, mothers in the homely sense, are not dangerous. In fact, they are quite the opposite, but Darla, as the uncanny mother, turns that idea on its head.

This idea of the unhomely/uncanny mother is seen in almost the exact same way in another vampire show, True Blood. Bill, the Angel equivalent for the show, also has a maker/mother who harbors sexual desires for him, and in the same way Darla went around with Angel, wreaking havoc and teaching him just how bad a vampire can be, Bill and his maker had the same relationship. When Bill decided he was tired of being this creature of evil and destruction, he left his maker, but years later he is still dogged by her. The difference here, however, is that Bill doesn’t seem to repress his desire for her because he senses the wrongness of their incestuous relationship, but because he doesn’t like her as a person (she really is a pain in the ass) and because he’s found love with Sookie Stackhouse. I think this is an interesting way to look at vampires (or any sort of creature who typically dwells solely in the id), because Bill, who is considered to be a vampire with a conscience, still doesn’t toe the same moral line as his human counterparts. I probably would have written about this if it hadn’t been months since I last was able to watch True Blood.

Sarah Palin: someone who can be trusted?

 

 

I chose Sarah Palin’s official portrait as my photograph, which is also on her official website, and there are two things that struck me most about this picture. First, she is looking staight at the viewer and into the camera, and her body and face are completely square and facing forward. this gives her the image of frankness. she is almost leaning forward with her arms inverted, like she is leaning into to tell whoever she may be looking at a secret. this makes her seem more personable and friendly, like a girlfriend that can be trusted. i think it is in this way that it is a very feminized photograph, for i dont think there are any pictures of john mccain, barack obama, or joe biden (or any male politicians, for that matter) with quite the same posture, leaning forward with both arms in. we can see that her campaign is really pushing the “first female vice president” idea. this seems to be a different approach from, for example, the picture of palin with the freshly shot elk, where she is portrayed as “the first vice female president who is also quite rustic and outdoorsy. look how rugged she is! that is exactly how she will protect our country.” here, she is a woman VP contender who will keep your secrets, america’s secrets, and has nothing to hide from us. as george bush may be to many people “the president you could have a beer with”, plain is depicted as “the VP you could have a cup of tea with, and then polish off a rack of elk meat”. she is feminine, yet strong and honest looking, which is probably an important aspect of her and mccain’s campaigning because the trust americans have in republicans has been slowly dwindling within the past…eight years.

a second thing i noticed right away was the color of her suit, bright red, a risky choice for such an official photograph. this not only contributes to making palin more “feminized”, for a red suit is probably only appropriate for a woman to wear when campaining in politics (imagine john mccain in a red suit?!?) At the same time, however, red is also a very aggressive color, and red amkes her not only stand out more but makes her seem like a “go-getter”, someone who is assertive and will make her assertive nature known, by force if necessary.

the depictions in this photograph, then, are manipulating the viewer into associating many things with palin: assertiveness and frankness, as well as feminine and someone who can be trusted.

McCain, McCain, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can!

Here’s our buddy, John McCain, the guy who always puts his country first.

The first photo is the banner on his official home page, the welcome mat to his “Ready From Day One” biography of his career.  The photo is a three-quarter view of the candidate, beckoning the viewer to look towards one of his campaign slogans, “Always Putting Country First”.  The bold white letters against the blue background are evocative of the 50 white stars against a blue backdrop that can be found on our nation’s flag.  This connection isn’t hard to make since there are actually stars displayed faintly in the background; they really don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?

The position of McCain’s face suggests the “looking towards the future” ideal, and I assume that he is referencing the future of our country since he is always putting it first.  The future McCain is looking towards is outlined in his biography below the picture, which discusses his mission to reform Washington.  The stars in this case could also be viewed as suggestive of the universe, which lends itself to the whole “gazing into the future” idea; McCain must be shooting for the stars!

The actual image of his face is softly lit, which emphasizes his wrinkles a bit, and it does the same thing for his white hair.  He is formal in this image, wearing his suit and giving a speech in an arena in the photo that sits on the other end of the banner.  These are like his “game-face” photos, showing his professionalism and animation on the floor.  The picture to the left plays up his grandfather appeal quite a bit, making him a paternal figure looking over our nation.  You might even say God-like.

Ironically, just underneath this banner, is another three-quarter shot of McCain, this time in his “I’m the average, all-American guy that lives next door to you” baseball cap and button down.  I would bet anything that he’s probably got a pair of Levi’s on too.  This picture stands in juxtaposition to the first, making his wrinkles seem more like laugh lines and showing off his full set of teeth- not dentures!  The baseball cap (reading NAVY- still putting country first!) hides his white hair, as well as all the forehead wrinkles.  This picture seems to be acting as a balancing act to reach audiences of all ages and interests.

Obama goes “Old School”

“A photograph is a mirror, what we are asked to read is the familiar, the known; it offers to the voter his own likeness, but clarified, exalted, superbly elevated into a type” (1465). If we take a look at this photograph of Barack Obama, from his official website, and compare it to the ones I have selected of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy- we definitely see the “familiar” that Barthes speaks of. The essence of King and Kennedy is echoed through this photo of Obama. Not only is Obama’s photo in Black and White like those of Kennedy and King, but the some of the components of their photos are repeated in his. The view of Obama is between a full and three-quarter face, as is King’s; and he also is casting his eyes upward as Kennedy does in his photograph. As Barthes tells us, “a three-quarter face…suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars” and when the eyes look above, “the face is lifted towards a supernatural light which draws it up and elevates it to the realm of a higher humanity” (1465).

It is as if Obama it trying to even further distance himself from the current administration and their agendas by transcending time. He has created a “throw back” to a time when things were in some ways simpler and more hopeful; a time when the American people had faith and belief in their candidates. JFK was such a popular president, a man of the people- to attempt to emulate his spirit through this photograph is a smart choice. Also, through evoking the character of King he is showing not only his support for minorities in this country, but also his publicized platform for “Change.” What two Americans would be a better choice to echo in this photograph? Through the likeness in Obama’s photo, to the above photos of King and Kennedy, he is calling on the youth, spirit, racial awareness, charisma, determination and wisdom of these two men.

When looking at this photo I notice the “thumbs up,” perhaps a subliminal “every thing’s going to be ok” to the American people; as well as the waving flag in the background representing his patriotism. The phrase “Meet the Candidate” implies that he is the only choice- he is “THE” candidate to win, “THE” candidate to lead this nation. Another element of this photo that really stands out to me is the “halo” effect that has been imposed on Obama’ image. This greatly adds to the elevation of his persona, in this photo there really is a “supernatural light” that adds to the candidate’s “blessed” persona. I think that through the attractiveness and magnificence of the image and the apparent correlation with past photos of iconic, celebrated men- it is clear that Barack Obama fits Barthes category of the “good-looking chap, whose obvious credentials are his health and his virility” (1465).

-HIQ

 

 

Semiotics of Moxie

Inspired by Roland Barthes’s landmark study of popular and mass culture, Mythologies (first published in French in 1957, translated into English in 1972), I decided to look more closely at the “myth” of Moxie, to investigate the “message” of Moxie soft drink’s seemingly simple graphic design, and perhaps to find out a little more about the “mystery” (as the advertising copy above calls it) of the “Moxie Boy.” Moxie’s trademark image has remained remarkably consistent, with the exception of a few changes in hairstyle, over the soft drink’s history. To use Barthes’s terms, if we regard the Moxie Boy as a “signifier,” as something roughly equivalent to a unit of speech, what does this boy have to say for himself, about himself, and, more importantly, about why he is an appealing icon for the consumer of Moxie–for that consumer is the intended recipient of the Moxie Boy’s message.

In the essay “Myth Today,” Barthes asserts that “myth is a type of speech,” and by “myth” here he means a concept that is something in addition to our more commonly understood definition of mythology (as in “ancient myth,” “classical myth,” the “myth of Sisyphus,” etc.) (109). For Barthes, myth is the means by which contemporary mass society “naturalizes” ideology, conveys messages that are not necessarily inherent in the “obvious” or common sense meaning of an image, phrase, or even an event. One of the insights from Mythologies that has been particularly influential is Barthes’s argument that anything (not just words) can be made into language, that is, can be used to communicate ideas and concepts: “We shall therefore take language, discourse, speech, etc., to mean any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: a photograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as a newspaper article; even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (111-12). Thus, among the many essays collected in Mythologies, Barthes advances his “ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture” through clever analyses of wrestling, soap-powders and detergent, toys, steak and chips, striptease, Greta Garbo, and the use of photography in elections (9).

As an example of the difference between what we might call the “common sense” meaning and the ideological meaning, Barthes writes of a trip to the barber’s, where he thumbs through a copy of Paris-Match: “On the cover a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors” (116). The seemingly innocent photograph serves a larger ideological purpose, as visual evidence in support of a particular political point of view.

Among the more interesting oddities related to the soft drink Moxie is that its name represents one of the few examples of a proper name changing over to become a noun in the English language. Thus, Moxie is not only a trade name, but it is a also a word that means: “1: Energy, Pep 2: Courage, Determination 3: Know-How, Expertise” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). As a noun rather than a proper name, it is a perfectly legal (and potentially high-scoring) word to use in Scrabble. Thus, although the Moxie Boy is a visual image, he already is associated with a verbal meaning, as he is supposed to be the very embodiment of the qualities Moxie purports to offer. And, if we look more closely into the history of Moxie, we can see quite clearly that one of the selling points of the soft drink is the promise, explicit in its early days, more implicit as time went on, that Moxie has the ability to impart those very qualities to the consumer who purchases it.

Moxie Nerve Food, as it was originally called, was a “tonic,” a medicinal concoction intended as a cure for those who were lacking in such qualities as pep and energy. In the late nineteenth century, when Moxie Nerve Food first went on the market, Americans were worried about a disease (primarily affecting men) called “neurasthenia,” a “nervous disease” no longer recognized as a medical ailment, the symptoms of which might be simply stated as “not being manly enough.” When Moxie dropped the “Nerve Food” from its title and its (rather spurious) claim to medicinal power, it nonetheless kept the concept of “manliness” as part of its marketing (and, thus, the Moxie Boy and not the Moxie Girl).

And the approach worked quite well. Until the 1920s, Moxie was the most popular soft drink in America, although it has receded to being a New England favorite, and the grocery stores here in Maine are well stocked with it.

Of course, it was invented by a Mainer, Dr. Augustin Thompson, who sold it initially as a cure for “loss of manhood, paralysis and softening of the brain.” And here we might pause and look more closely at Moxie Nerve Food’s first marketing campaign, and unpack exactly what “loss of manhood” meant to late nineteenth century consumers. Well, it’s not difficult to guess, but “loss of manhood” was a polite (or coded) way of saying “erectile dysfunction.” In short, Moxie was (or claimed to be) the Viagra of the late-nineteenth century.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a pointing finger is just a pointing finger, but it seems to me, anyway, that the imagery of Moxie still contains a hint of its original meaning, presented implicitly through visual imagery rather than explicitly through verbal text. Even the dictionary definition of the word Moxie is suggestive of a gendered meaning. Although we might now regard words such as “energy, pep, courage, determination, know-how, expertise” as gender neutral, coming out of the nineteenth century, those qualities would be primarily associated with masculinity. Moxie is a virtual synonym for “virile” (which is defined as “energetic,” “vigorous”), a word specifically associated with male qualities: “having the nature, properties, or qualities of an adult male; specif: capable of functioning as a male in copulation.” The mythology of Moxie, which we have uncovered here, refers back to its earliest days as a “nerve food,” and although that original meaning of Moxie (as cure for “loss of manhood”) has not been an explicit selling point for over a hundred years, a hint of that original meaning remains in the image of the Moxie Boy and his vigorous finger pointing. Perhaps that’s why the “Moxie Boy” logo, which has gone through many variations over the years (and is currently a Moxie Man rather than Boy), almost always features Moxie Man’s pointing finger (or other prominently featured phallic objects).

I think I can safely leave it to you, dear reader, to “decode” the phallic imagery here.

For more about Moxie and its history (and more samples of Moxie ads), see http://www.moxie.info/.

Posted by Dr. Johnson.