Calvin Thomas

Last Laughs Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of Abjection

Because it deals with a male “superhero,” Tim Burtons 1989 film Batman inevitably the-matizes certain issues concerning masculinity. Specifically, Burtons film foregrounds an anxious relation among “armored” masculine subjectivity, the male body, and the mechanisms of photographic and cinematic representation. The close reading of Batman presented here argues that the film articulates a specifically masculinist anxiety about the very medium of cinema, a constitutive unease about a mass cultural “technology of abjection” that both threatens and enforces the boundaries of normative, heterosexual masculinity. By thematizing its own material engulfment in the “feminizing” mass culture it attempts to transcend, Batman complicates the very terms of masculinity on which it insists.

Must Desire be Taken Literally

The writer of these words is an academic man in his early fifties who has never been fucked in the ass. Indeed, for a number of reasons, this writer may very well go to his grave without ever having been fucked in the ass.1 Not utterly a stranger to some relatively thin and shallow forms of receptive anal eroticism, this writer has nonetheless never known what it feels like to be ass-fucked, has never fully experienced what Leo Bersani describes as “the seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (“Rectum” 212). That is to say, I have never negotiated with this “seductive and intolerable image” of being fucked in the ass as anything other than image, as anything more (or less) than metaphor. Of course, the extent to which I find this image seductive only as image may well indicate the extent to which I must find it intolerable as embodied fact, since I have never factually tolerated it. And yet, as my previous writings on masculinity and the male body lay bare, I have indeed been unable to refuse Bersani s various elaborations of anal sex as metaphor—for ebranlement, for self-shattering, for the abdication of phallic power, for the exuberant discard of hyperbolic subjectivity, for a beneficent crisis in and of the masculinist self. I have allowed myself to be seduced by the thrust of Bersani s arguments, by the cold intimacy—the anal battery, if you will—of his words.

“It's no longer your Film”

Reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of representation most favoured by the dream-work and one which is capable of employment in the most diverse directions. It serves in the first place to give expression to the fulfillment of a wish in reference to some particular element of the dream-thoughts. ‘‘If only it had been the other way round!’’ This is often the best way of expressing the ego’s reaction to a disagreeable fragment of memory. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, The Standard Edition 4 328

“It’s No Longer Your Film”: Abjection and (the) Mulholland (Death) Drive

Very early in david lynch’s mulholland drive, the film provides attentive viewers with sufficient clues that what we are watching is the dream-work at work. Indeed, I would hazard a guess that anyone who has made much sense of the film has most likely accomplished this feat by recognizing that the first two hours or so of Mulholland Drive represent an extended dream on the part of the central character, Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), while the last segment narrates the “actual” historical circumstances that have informed the dream’s patterns of imagery and that culminate in Diane’s hallucinatory psychotic breakdown (if that’s what we should call it) as well as her final hysterical suicide (if, indeed, that’s what occurs).1

Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body

Calvin Thomass Male Matters reveals the act and production of writing as a bodily, material process that transgresses the boundaries of gender Wise and quirky, sophisticated and coarse, serious and hilarious, this look at male identity and creativity and dislocation at the end of the twentieth century definitely will not assuage male anxiety!