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Anglo agonistes: English masculinities in British and American film

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Anglo agonistes: English masculinities in British and American film

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ANGLO AGONISTES:
ENGLISH MASCULINITIES IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN FILM
By
Robert James Dickinson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Cinema-Television Critical Studies)
AUGUST 1996
©1996 Robert James Dickinson
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UMI Number: 9705091
Copyright 1996 by
Dickinson, Robert James
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089
This dissertation, written by
Robert.. J ame s ., D i c Id n so n.................................
under the direction of k .U . Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF Pm LO SO PH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
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Robert James Dickinson
Dissertation Abstract
Anglo Agonistes: English
Masculinities in British and
American Film
August 1996
ABSTRACT
Anglo Agonistes begins w ith the Otherness which often clings to
American perceptions of English nationality, and considers two aspects of this
Otherness in particular: American perceptions of Englishness as its own past,
and the association between English-marked forms of masculinity and Britain's
decline as an empire. To the extent that Englishness represents a past Americans
have superseded, we view it with some ambivalence. Since it has come to
represent failure, we view its expression through masculinity in m uch of the
same way we m ay view male homosexuality as failure.
British film culture bears an analogous relation to this understanding of
English masculinity. The boundaries between British film and Hollywood, as
well as between British film and television, are similarly blurred by the
common language and cultural traditions. Because the history of British film
history has often been expressed as a m atter of repeated failure, British film in
relation to Hollywood has often also been viewed as feminized in a m anner
which again suggests homosexuality.
Anglo Agonistes examines this relation between Englishness, masculinity,
and homosexuality in British film, as well as representations located within the
official geography of Hollywood. This history is presented according to several
figures which have most clearly represented English masculinity in the US: the
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theatrical actor, the gentleman, the villain, the spy (especially James Bond, who
might seem to be the major exception to these arguments), and the post-punk
punk. Anglo Agonistes considers each these figures w ithin the context afforded
by cultural studies' own Anglophilic orientation. In addition, Anglo Agonistes?
final section discusses not only the punk, but this figure's relation to science
fiction and its representation of the future. While Englishness may represent
some image of our American past for us, contemporary and futuristic images of
Britain offer up possible images of masculinity in our own post-superpower,
post-Cold W ar future.
Film, literature, television, and music texts discussed include The Crying
Game, Olivier's Hamlet, True Lies, James Bond, Star Trek, The Quatermass
Experiment, David Bowie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Real World, J. G. Ballard's
Crash, No Skin off M y Ass, and Heart of Darkness.
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DEDICATION
To Marian and Walter Dickinson,
for their gracious and generous support
To John Herrero,
for his unflagging patience and persistent encouragement
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................1
PART 1
Actors.............................. 55
CHAPTER
1. Crying G am es........................................................... 56
2. The Odor of Boiled M ilk...........................................92
3. The British M ethod.................................................107
PART 3
Gentlemen, Villains, and S pies................................................................ 138
4. The Days’ Rem ains............................................ 139
5. From the Shallow End of the Gene P o o l............... 170
6. Bonds.......................................................................209
PART 4
Futures.......................................................................................................251
7. The Picard Maneuver........................................ 252
8. The Quatermass Effect...........................................288
9. Plastic S o u l............................................................ 314
10. “that’s rock and roll for you” ..................................343
11. Beyond....................................................................381
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................... 388
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INTRODUCTION
1
We go to Europe to be Americanized, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. In
the latter part of this century, Europe itself has undergone much of the same proc
ess, all without the bother of leaving home, or, in the case of British intellectual
life, without straying that far from campus. Americanization, and the mixture of
fear and desire it arouses, has long been both a text and subtext for many authors
working within what has come to be called cultural studies. Richard Hoggart,
Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson each founded some part of their revisions
of the Leavisite tradition upon the postwar transformation of Britain into an Ameri-
can-style consumer society, as well as the tensions that this transformation caused
between the Labour Party and its official commitment to socialism. After Labour fi
nally excised that commitment from Clause Four of its constitution in 1995, Stuart
Hall also warned of Americanism. While Labour’s change might actually be for the
best, Hall argued that the British Conservative Party might yet leam from the
American right and again squash Labour’s new-found optimism. The
“Gingrichism” triumphant in the 1994 US elections could easily translate into a par
allel Contract With Britain.1
But the threat of Americanization has certainly not been the sole signifier of
nationality in British cultural studies’ histoiy so far. While Hall and others identi
fied with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies had earlier re
sisted the urge to define or codify cultural studies, at the beginning of the 1990s
several works appeared which did begin to do just that. Among them was Patrick
1 Stuart Hall, “Son of Margaret?” New Statesmen and Society, 6 Oct. 1995, online. Journal
Express, 2.
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Brantlinger’s Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, a sur
vey introduced by the image of Daniel Defoe’s shipwrecked English sailor nearly
mistaking the footprints of another for his own. Drawing upon Michel de Certeau’s
reading of the passage, Brantlinger took the lesson of Crusoe’s mistake and his
subsequent relation with Friday as emblematic of cultural studies’ own lessons con
cerning our understanding of the Other.2 Yet Crusoe’s presence at the beginning of
Brantlinger’s study also suggested the extent to which American cultural studies, in
a sense, has itself mistaken for its own the footprints of Hoggart, Williams,
Thompson, Hall, and others. While Brantlinger places more emphasis upon cultural
studies’ international character than, say, Graeme Turner’s British Cultural Studies:
An Introduction (also 1990), Brantlinger still prefaces his approach with Williams’
evocation of “our common life together”3: combined with the image of Crusoe’s
footprints, it is not unreasonable to wonder who Brantlinger’s unquestioned “our”
actually includes, and what mis-recognition may occur when we Americans take
cultural studies’ British footprints for our own.
Perhaps Emerson’s observation should be modified, at least when Britain is
substituted for Europe. Cultural studies may be symptomatic of a more general
American tendency to mis-recognize the boundaries between ourselves and Britain,
to appropriate or either reject aspects of British identity and history without fully
acknowledging or examining the process. While the US has certainly undergone
nothing paralleling the magnitude of Britain’s postwar Americanization (not even
the Beatles could accomplish that), it is nonetheless productive to consider the
2 Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’ s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New
York: Routledge, 1990) 1-3.
3 Brantlinger ix.
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3
largely un-remarked upon interchange which continues to occur between our na
tions.
American perceptions of British nationality within the context of film and
television present a remarkably apt field for such considerations, if only because
Hollywood has so often functioned as an international representative for American
nationality, interests, and power. The boundaries between Hollywood and British
film, like the cinemas of Canada and Australia, have remained exceptionally ill-
defined, in part simply because of a shared language. But the disparity between
Britain’s past power and the contemporary strength of the US has been woven into
a distinctly different colonial family narrative. These two nations continue to share
that narrative, even as the American hold upon its Anglo past becomes more and
more strained by contemporary identity politics.
One result of this relationship has been a unique, shared film history char
acterized by markedly neurotic symptoms on both sides of the Atlantic. From an
American perspective, British nationality bears the burden of the past, the origins of
our own national identity. Yet as we begin to approach the millennium and question
our own international significance, this historical interchange carries with it a
greater charge. To an increasing extent, British culture not only models our past,
but, in the nation’s decline and its own distinctive collisions between multicultural-
ism and English high culture, Britain may also model aspects of our future.
Therefore, in order to understand contemporary British film, I have not
followed the more familiar path of segregating its history from that of American
film. Instead I have attempted to follow the path of mis-recognition with my eyes
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4
wide open, by turning to American film history and Hollywood’s representations of
English nationality as well as British film itself.4
Juxtaposing these two national film cultures has allowed me to examine one
symptom of their interaction close up, a symptom which provides this project with
its focus: conceived at a key juncture of nationality and gender, English masculinity
has emerged from both British and American film as a particularly peculiar, if not
actually queer conceit. During the 1990s, the postwar history of the Englishman in
film has coalesced from a variety of previous figures, including the actor, the gen
tleman, the spy, and the punk; while British film may have successfully offered
Hugh Grant as an English light romantic lead, Hollywood has more often adjusted
the formula to fit the homophobic coalescence of the now prevalent English villain.
Yet even though homophobia may underline some of Hollywood’s current preoc
cupation with the English villain, I will nonetheless draw upon the vocabulary of
gender studies and the British history of cultural studies to argue for a final opti
mism toward the many different negotiations we conduct under the guise of
Englishness. In a sense, we follow Crusoe’s footprints just as he followed Fri
day’s. By beginning to map this relay of mis-recognition, American cultural studies
may indeed meet the goals attributed to it and attend to the discourse of the Other.
4 “American” will be used throughout this study to suggest the somewhat fluid postmodern
nationalities represented by phrases such as “American film” and “American audiences.” As I will
argue later, Hollywood is no more solely American than it is located solely in Los Angeles
county. Therefore, when distinctly US practices and policies are discussed, I will use that designa
tion rather than American.
“English” I will use to describe the qualities and characteristics associated with that southern
portion of Great Britain. (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland represent diflerendy-gendered
“nationalities” in American culture, I will argue.) “British,” in turn, will be used to describe such
entities as the film industry centered in London: while this industry and the general film culture
surrounding it is hardly reducible to the narrow adjective English, neither does its ties to American,
European, and other cultures and financing really fit under the still exclusive boundaries suggest by
British. But for lack of better terms, I have chosen “American” and “British” film as the twin con
cerns here.
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5
Following the Footprints
There is, I will admit, a certain conscious perversity to these arguments.
Anglophilia, no matter how embellished with a healthy compensating An
glophobia, may still appear inconsequential within the wider frame of contemporary
American culture. To take an extreme but familiar case, how can a cinema so often
compared to Masterpiece Theatre's traditionally bland snobbery be construed as
“relevant” here in the US? Even in a time in which an oil company has crassly af
fixed its sponsorship to the series’ title, and contemporary British drama become
favored rather than ignored, hasn’t irrelevance been Mobile Masterpiece Theatre's
precise function and appeal throughout its three decades?
As I think of England and type these questions, HOLLYWOOD looks
through my study’s window across a slightly brown Los Angeles sky. Some days
this sign perched up in the hills disappears completely in the dirty haze, while on
others its letters appear implausibly sharp, as if they were impervious to the tan
gled, busy, noisy streets of East Hollywood which lie between us. Yet even though
the icon has been a constant companion to this project, I am probably still more fa
miliar with its numerous representations than with this real visual presence outside
my window, a presence which seldom seems to register. But while traveling in
1992,1 found myself standing in Times Square dumbly watching footage of Los
Angeles burning, glamorously punctuated by shots of HOLLYWOOD perched
above a landscape of looted mini-malls and shotgun-toting merchants. I found it
surprisingly strange to accept that this landscape was the same as what I saw from
my own window at home in Koreatown. I live there, I thought, I live there and I
see this HOLLYWOOD every morning when I open the blinds.
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6
For a moment Hollywood, the sum and product of American myth, pos
sessed a geographical reality I had ceased to believe in long before I ever moved to
Los Angeles. As I watched broadcast footage of my neighbors’ stores going up in
smoke under the sign’s empty eyes, I understood the long-removed “LAND” which
had once completed it: Hollywoodland was not just an international confluence ne
gotiating meaning through technology and ideology. . . but a solid, knowable
place, where the public decolletage of ornate studio gates framed an unseen work
ing world of slapping clapboards and cameras strapped to graceful, delicately im
portuning cranes. And Britain is safely elsewhere, a much more civilized (if poorly
heated) land where underpaid crews gather politely for regular teabreaks.
But the perversity I mentioned is not this irrational, albeit familiar desire to
frame film within the amber-washed nostalgia of Hollywood’s many autobiogra
phies, nor is it the Little Englandisms of British film’s own stiff-upper-lip narrative.
Whatever epiphany I experienced in New York that night, upon my return it did not
stop me from again ignoring the romantic icon outside my window. And I believe I
was correct to ignore it. The everyday Hollywood which has slowly rebuilt itself
since 1992 is (and was) something other than the outgrown remnant of an industry
which has simply moved itself to safer and roomier accommodations in Burbank,
Vancouver, or elsewhere. Geographical realism has often come to mean acknowl
edging Los Angeles’ place along the Pacific Rim, and Hollywood’s own fiscal in
tegration within a cultural system largely ignored during earlier decades’ eastward
orientation toward Europe.
Even our long-running romance with Britain, itself always an ambivalent af
fair, might seem to be drawing to a post-CoId War close. Margaret Thatcher’s death
in 1990 may have seemed to seal this relationship: although the former Prime Min-
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7
ister (now Baroness) still lives and prospers, it is difficult to view her startlingly
quick plummet from power in the Conservative Party as anything other than a
death, at least from this side of the Atlantic. Ever since she succeeded Edward
Heath as party leader in 1975, and then as Prime Minister in 1979, her accom
plishments prophesied the way for Ronald Reagan and the conservative politics
which defined American political life during the 1980s. Even while Britain’s strate
gic importance as a Cold War ally steadily faded, our political fortunes remained
intertwined. And whether it was Sen. Joseph Biden’s alleged plagiarism from a La
bour Party speech during the 1988 presidential campaign, or the glib arrival of an
American photographer to record Thatcher’s dismemberment of the British social
state in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), the left on both sides of the Atlantic
could join together in a similar analysis of their own paralysis before the popular
onslaught of either the Reagan Revolution or Thatcherism. Without Thatcher’s
presence, however, the neat parallels gave way to the complex and contradictory
complications which made a joke of George Bush’s New World Order. The British
perception that Tony Blair’s revision of Labour’s Clause Four was following in Bill
Clinton’s centrist footprints hardly even registered in the US, and so it goes. Earlier
on, in the fall of 1994, Los Angeles had rolled out its two-month long “UK/LA
Festival,” dressing the boarded-up remnants of not only the 1992 civil disturbances
but the still-recent earthquake with banners heralding the arrival of British theater,
art, and film: a loud advertisement for Anglo-American ties, the festival itself
nonetheless seemed dramatically disconnected from a city then-obsessing over O. J.
Simpson, and would probably seem scarcely any different today. Even the festi
val’s emphasis upon a new multicultural Britain (accompanied by Prince Charles’
announcement before his arrival that his title should be “Defender of the Faiths,”
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8
not “Faith”) fell flat when compared to the musty Anglophilia filling out the effort
As one Los Angles magazine cozily confided to its readers, multiculturalism may be
nice. ..
But let’s face it, we still want the Brits to come here and
show us what they do best. We want Shakespeare, and
theater that isn’t warmed-over ‘50s musicals for the couch
crowd. We want old British movies and new British televi
sion. We want Monty Python and a Royal or two. And
we’re going to get it.5
Perhaps we did. To skeptics, post-Thatcher British culture may seem to have di
minished to the agreeably irrelevant niceties of English escapism such as Four
Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and its imitators, or the Jane Austen revival
launched the next year. Like the long-lost HOLLYWOODLAND, Britain too might
seem to be a land somewhere lost back in some politely remembered, if profitable
past: a Merchant Ivory England sealed in place and time, and sharing no boundaries
with the L.A. through which this festival marched.
Nonetheless, I would argue that there is more here than Masterpiece Theatre
or Alistair Cooke might have suggested over the years. The perversity I promised
for this project is more than simple Anglophilia; it is a matter of turning aside from
the familiar boundaries between the US and Britain in order to map new, better
ones, and in so doing historicize the often “improper” but interesting uses to which
British nationality has recently given itself. Even while HOLLYWOOD watches
across a painfully divided and racially violent Los Angeles, I will argue that
Englishness possesses meanings far different from the mix of Shakespeare and
Royals we supposedly still want beneath any grittier New Britain wrappings.
Rather than a quaint novelty among America’s polysemic mix of nationalities,
5 Sally Ogle Davis, “Bloody Big Show,” Los Angeles Magazine, Sept. 1994,44.
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9
tions of Britain often either happily dwell upon its green and pleasant land, or else
center their impatience or repulsion around these same images; this pattern was es
tablished before Thatcher, and it continues after her. And, undoubtedly, the demise
of the Thatcher-Reagan marriage has dissolved some of what once propelled
American academics toward the cultural travails of the British left.
But while the permutations of the 1990s have already begun to recast the
previous decade as a relatively simple time, and while the call of the Pacific Rim
continues even in the wake of Japan’s burst bubble economy, the symbiotic inter
change between the US and Britain continues in ways which are often just as obvi
ous but just as ignored as the festival banners once littering an oblivious Los Ange
les.
In many ways, this interchange may appear less symbiotic than harshly
helotopic: mastery has often been the most significant issue at stake, whether it con
cerns the Anglo’s place in American culture, or the relation of American identity to
its past and to the rest of the world. In the American endeavor to craft nationality
out of our once colonial history, the British have provided an Other whose failure is
inimical to our own success. Not only must the British prove incapable of either
understanding or restraining our own democratic ambitions at their birth, but the
national narrative we follow charts our own international destiny as an inverse rela
tion to the 20th century decline of the British Empire.
This association between failure and the British has displayed at least two
consequences. One is that even while the US is still a relatively young nation, its
oedipal-like conflict with Britain has so greatly diminished in intensity since the
early 19th century that any real resolution (through war or incorporation) is impos
sible to imagine seriously. To draw upon Kaja Silverman’s reading of Freud and
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10
oedipal-like conflict with Britain has so greatly diminished in intensity since the
early 19th century that any real resolution (through war or incorporation) is impos
sible to imagine seriously. To draw upon Kaja Silverman’s reading of Freud and
perversion, the tension underlying both American Anglophilia and Anglophobia has
been so extended, so postponed that there would appear to be no “end-pleasure”
upon the horizon, only the perverse repetition and rehearsal of the process itself.6
And British film presents its ideal example. Forever on the brink of extinc
tion, the British film industry compulsively confesses its inferiority within the
frame of Hollywood hegemony, even while they repeatedly tailor their products for
its hoped-for approval. Although he may be somewhat of an exception, veteran di
rector Ken Loach sums up a long-standing perspective of colonization and defeat:
The industry is colonized and has been for a long time ....
[M]ost people in the [British] film industry have their eyes
on the States, because the States is the center of the empire.
It distorts the people who work in it, because they cease to
say, What can we make films about here? They say, What
can we make films about that will attract an American audi
ence? An image of Britain is presented which North Ameri
cans like to see—it becomes part of the tourist industry.7
As I will discuss, this familiar pessimism is one reason why the history of British
film cannot be understood apart from the “empire” with which it shares a common
tongue: like other English-language cinemas, British film would seem to be forever
suspended between the opportunities of its similarity and the accent of its differ
ence. Or as Stephen Frears opined in Typically British (1996), his entry in the
“Century of Cinema” documentary series, “Whatever you can say about British
films, you can say the opposite.”
6 Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity,” Camera Obscura (17): 31.
7 Ella Taylor, “Eight Days in London,” LA Weekly, 26 April 1996,42.
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1 1
Of course British film has repeatedly drawn back from the brink of failure,
yet almost everyone would seem agreed that the cycle itself is unalterable. With its
auteur-heavy New British Cinema providing critical standing, and its middle-brow
gambles grabbing Oscars for Chariots of Fire and Gandhi, Britain in the 1980s was
still poised to leave behind yet another failed revival for film historians to worry
over. Thatcher’s tightly guarded purse strings certainly should have undermined the
art-house pipeline funded by Channel Four. Disastrous over-extension should cer
tainly have shut down the more commercial avenues.
But for all the cutbacks announced, and all the many elegies pronounced,
British film has built upon its 1980s integration with American independent film
production and distribution, and emerged as a vital, if sporadic force along the mar
gins between mainstream and more alternative American film culture. At least it
would seem that British film’s death has been greatly exaggerated. What has been
recognized as British film may simply be television by another name (like My
Beautiful Laundrette). Or, if an example is a “film” by whatever standards are ap
plicable, it may only be British through its evocation of British nationality and sen
timent, as was the case with a long list of films including the hyper-patriotic Chari
ots of Fire. Although this film was briefly hailed as the patriotic salvation of the
British film industry, it had been rejected by that same industry prior to its distribu
tion in 1981.
But rather than simply bow to the complicated production histories which
characterize not only Chariots of Fire but many “American” films as well, what of
those films which do qualify without exception for the canons of histories such as
British Genres and Sixties British Cinemal Whether they are the quota-quickies of
the 1930s, the American-funded New Wave of the 1960s, or the typical Channel
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Four and Miramax product of the 1990s, their meaning and function seems indi
visible from the vicissitudes of Hollywood’s international practice.
Failure and Masculinity
Another consequence of the association between failure and the British is
that gender has also passed through this articulation of nationality. English mascu
linity often bears an accent of difference, of a perverse resistance toward the nor
mative end-pleasures American (and British) culture has typically prescribed as in
herent both to heterosexuality and masculinity. What I mean by this claim is not that
English masculinity operates as an American signifier for homosexuality, although
that might be true of some examples I will examine— just as a lisp may quickly in
dicate male homosexuality, differences in gender and sexuality have traditionally
found expression through the verbal markers of national difference. And for the
past several decades, English masculinity has certainly been linked with male ho
mosexuality upon the screens of the American art house circuit, and sometimes
even the multiplexes of the mainstream: from Victim and A Taste o f Honey in the
‘60s, Sunday, Bloody Sunday and Nighthawks in the ‘70s, and My Beautiful
Laundrette and Maurice in the ‘80s, to the ‘90s The Crying Game, Edward II, and
Carrington, British film as distributed here has provided the patina of high culture,
similarity, and simultaneous distance which may have been necessary in order for
Americans to approach such a topic at all. Simply on the crude statistical level as the
list above suggests, British film stands out as a striking intersection of nationality
and sexuality, at least when compared to Hollywood’s own output.
But more is going on here than the art house-marketing of cheaply made,
non-subtitled films to American gays and lesbians—or, for that matter, the recent
propensity for British actors and directors to come out of the closet. The argument
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which I will sketch through the examination of the actor, the gentleman, the spy,
the punk, and other figures is that English masculinity has come to represent a spe
cial case in American culture, more so now in the 1990s than ever before. This no
tability is a result of Britain’s unique function for our own sense of nation-ness,
and the debate over political correctness has only underlined the Otherness of Eng
lish masculinity in the 1990s: the English villain represents one obvious summation
of all these other figures, and his still-growing popularity within Hollywood indi
cates the extent to which we are actively displacing a wide range of anxieties and
desires onto the one last figure who somehow still deserves the abuse.
In other words, Vincent Price has never been busier. Price himself may be
dead, but the queer intimations this American achieved through the careful English
artifice of his speech lives on. Like one of his last roles, the kindly Dr. Franken
stein figure of Edward Scissorhands (1990), Price spoke with a quality which pur
posely alienated the actor from his own Mid-Western origins, even when he was
not cast as a villain. (His breakthrough, in fact, came as Queen Victoria’s consort
on the London stage in the early 1930s. Passing as English characterized much of
his career.) In Edward Scissorhands, Price’s elegant beneficence does not drown
out his character’s estrangement from the suburban American normalcy surround
ing his castle-like home; less usual, however, his creation of Edward follows the
same path of male reproduction which might more typically mark his endeavor as
morally wrong, perverse, even villainous. In part this reversal is due to the fond
ness the film shows toward Price’s iconic presence, and in another part, it is due to
what Edward represents here. When Edward does leave his creator’s home for the
unpleasantly hyper-real community outside, his appearance signifies a difference
which carries with it the traces of British culture in a manner oddly parallel to
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14
Price’s affected speech: Johnny Depp’s body is tightly encased in Edward’s belted
and buckled black leather of bondage wear, and his colorless, powdered skin is
topped by a teased mound of tangled, jet-black hair. This gothic-punk costume of
the early 1980s (still worn by the film’s director, Tim Burton) becomes a shorthand
sign that Edward’s sense of masculinity will greatly contrast with his letterman
jacket-ed, All-American rivals.
It does. Punk, after all, previously suggested not a British subculture or a
genre of popular music or even its current ragged association with some sort of
cultural transgression, but the younger male sexual partner of an older man. For the
past several decades British popular music has implicitly played off of this double
meaning, from David Bowie and glam rock to the post-punk queers of the Smiths,
Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bronski Beat, and a long list of other forerunners of
the 1990s’ now American-dominated alternative format But what I will stress is
what may be drawn from Edward Scissorhands, that the punk margins of English
masculinity crafts nationality within the contours of what we may discuss as science
fiction: this flexible sense of punk, found in MTV’s The Real World as well as such
diverse locations as The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin off
My Ass, is another form of the desire “to body forth . . . the atrophy of our time,” a
quality which Fredric Jameson once found in American science fiction.8 British sci
ence fiction—cold, pessimistic, and always a fertile source of imagery for Bowie’s
play with homosexuality as transgression—also embodies Jameson’s claim that sci
ence fiction has the peculiar ability to present the present as history.9 Dressed in the
8 Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ Science-
Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 153.
9 Jameson 153.
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15
garb of dystopias still to come, this triple layer of past, present, and future underlies
both James Bond and the English-under-erasure presented in Star Trek's Capt. Pi
card, as well as the tradition of science fiction television and film so often ignored
in British media histories. Finally I will argue that at the fin de millennium there is
not that much distance back to the discreet fin de siecle conflagration of gender and
nationality in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, except that now “the horror” of the
Other with which Marlow returned to England now haunts American culture, just as
Edward does suburbia or Crusoe’s footprints do Brantlinger’s cultural studies.
Imagining England
But this end-point lies at the conclusion of what may sometimes appear to
be an eclectic, if not meandering path. Like the map Marlow followed, history has
darkened mine as well with many names and annotations. Yet unlike Marlow’s pre
charted path, the interstices between American and British nationality have not been
so well recorded—in fact, as I have suggested above, these interstices have more
often been actively ignored in favor of either “our” common culture, or else the in
dependence of both. So rather than begin with a map, I have therefore had to craft
these names and annotations into the rough shape of one. What has resulted is a
map governed less by a chronological structure than by a more spatial organization
centered around those figures of English masculinity which have most affected the
representation of British nationality in recent British and American film, and, at
specific junctures, television and music. For the same reason that this study’s title
uses “Masculinities” rather than its singular, the history I have examined is not now
reducible to one simple linear thread. While the villain may in some respects repre
sent a current summation, each of these figures, in a sense, is a way into this his
tory, as well as a loosely chronological continuation or manipulation of certain as-
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16
the villain, and the spy, and, finally, in a section named as the future, the inter
twined figures of the Englishman in science fiction and the post-punk punk.
But even though the history I chart here cannot easily be simplified to a lin
ear structure, it does share a common foundation, one which I will commence to lay
here. Each of this study’s sections draws upon the British discourse surrounding
nationality and postmodernism discussed in this introduction, as well as the
grounding that British nationality has often provided for American self-conceptions
of Anglo origins and identity with which I begin.
History Lessons
“Taught from the cradle to scorn, insult and abuse us . . . Britain will never
be our friend,” John Adams warned Thomas Jefferson, “until we are her master.”1 0
While British culture has repeatedly been the focus of Anglophilic appreciation,
sometimes it has seemed that US history consists of very little else than rehearsing
the nation’s early attempts at Adams’ task: his prescribed mastery, I will argue,
helps to figure the contemporary American use of the term “Anglo,” as well as the
understanding of Englishness offered by British cultural studies. As I introduce the
theorization of nationality, race, and Englishness itself, I will stress the significance
of such arguments to an understanding of recent American culture: within this con
text we find we may locate the often politically-inflammatory rhetoric surrounding
the Anglo and its function in the political and social imaginary of the US.
Adams’ stress upon mastery and its implications for Anglo-American rela
tions may help to explain why the attention Americans have paid the English has
been at times incommensurate with Britain’s own post-Suez global fortunes—
10 See Lawrence S. Kaplan, “Jefferson as Anglophile: Sagacity or Senility in the Era of Good
Feelings?’ Diplomatic History 16.3 (Summer 1992): 491.
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17
postmodemity has not yet completely erased our grade school memories of Pilgrims
and the American Revolution. For example, following the April 19, 1995, bombing
of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, press coverage of the growing
American militia movement traced the double significance of the date: not only did it
mark the first anniversary of the assault upon the Branch Dividian compound in
Waco, Texas, the bombing fell upon the 220th anniversary of “the shot heard round
the world” at Lexington and Concord, and symptomatized the connection the mili
tias’ “patriots” felt with the earlier American revolutionaries. The first time around,
the British were members of what had been only shortly before these Americans’
own culture, nation and law. This time around, members of the radical right have
taken to the Internet and the airwaves to declare their independence from a parallel
“British,” including the purportedly UN-controlled federal government, minorities,
gays and lesbians, and abortionists.11 Mastery is yet again the matter at hand.
Just as the image of the UN rounding up NRA members might not be en
tirely disturbing to all citizens, so has Britain sometimes represented the gesture of
escape from American tyranny. An example may be found in one of America’s fa
vorite purveyors of Anglophilia, the production-direction-screenwriting company
Merchant Ivory. In their Jefferson in Paris (1995), Simon Callow’s vain, foppish
portrait painter, Richard Cosway, pushes his European wife into the American am
bassador’s arms, and it is this sexual licentiousness which almost deflects the future
president away from his Yankee sense of duty and responsibility; Cosway’s per
versity sexualizes Adams’ metaphor, and, implicitly, presents Georgian England in
11 See Robin Wright and Josh Meyer, 'Tradition-Rooted 'Patriot1 Groups Strive to Curtail
Modem Tyranny,"' Los Angeles Times 24 April 1995: A12-13.
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homoerotic terms. As in Adams’ letter, Merchant Ivory’s England is an Other
space, one governed by desires which must be resisted and mastered.
While Jefferson in Paris may be symptomatic of the attitudes I will discuss
in many other films, this Merchant Ivory film does not by any means present the
sole representation of England in American culture. Within literature, generaliza
tions concerning British culture have frequently crafted England as a site for Ameri
can dissenters; their counter-revolutions may encompass an idea of England which
parallel to Jefferson in Paris' own licentious intimations, but they may also draw
upon the repressive, repression-bound England I will discuss later in Merchant
Ivory’s adaptation of The Remains o f the Day (1993). Henry James, T. S. Eliot,
Sylvia Plath, and, most recently, the gay novelist David Leavitt all followed this
Anglophilic path away from the US, either for a greater sense of tradition, a greater
freedom, or possibly a mixture of both. In each case, and for varying durations,
British identity promised resources and freedoms unavailable at home.
Similarly, once the American blacklist had ruined his film career, Joseph
Losey knew where to take his exile, as did the cadre of Americans who, oddly
enough, worked on the BBC’s Robin Hood television series alongside Lindsay
Anderson and other future British filmmakers.1 2 In the 1950s, British culture still
retained a patina of Philistine-resisting idiosyncrasy, even though Americanization
dominated the decade, and the ruling Conservatives hardly differed from their Eis
enhower counterparts; this other, repressive Britain forms the backdrop for a wide
range of films, from the often autobiographical complaints of the New Wave in the
late 1950s and 1960s, to later biographical works portraying the “Not Waving But
12 Producer Hannah Weinstein settled in London, launched a television studio, and hired
blacklisted writers Ring Lardner, Jr., and Ian Hunter. Fellow Traveler (1989), an HBO film co
produced with the BBC and the BFI, dramatizes this era.
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19
range of films, from the often autobiographical complaints of the New Wave in the
late 1950s and 1960s, to later biographical works portraying the “Not Waving But
Drowning” poet Stevie Smith (Stevie, 1978), executed murders (Dance With a
Stranger, 1985, Let Him Have It, 1991), depressed future film directors (Terence
Davies’ autobiographical films), and others who responded creatively to the envi
ronment.
British film has also presented the American desire for the repressive clime
Davies and other directors have bemoaned: although set before the war, Tom & Viv
(1994) presents Eliot’s England as a paradox, as an environment of social repres
sion which nonetheless stimulates artistic expression—“actually, I think tight little
England was just what Tom wanted,” his badly-used first wife accurately observes
in the film.1 3 In recent years, this tight little England has even surprised Hollywood
by delivering its support of the national film industry in the protectionist phraseol
ogy of anti-Semitism.14
Although Britain may have provided a relative refuge to some Americans
fleeing from the McCarthy era (and later ones as well), the Cold War also presented
the US with some compelling tactical reasons why our influential, diplomatically-
phrased “friendship” with the British still mattered. Bui when British rock ‘n roll
13 Eliot’s critical work displays just how badly Eliot wanted that tight little England as a pro
tection against crass American modernity. As early as 1917, his defense of ‘Tradition and the Indi
vidual Talent” discusses “English writing” and “English ears” with a stress which makes clear his
own sense of belonging when he writes “Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative,
but its own critical turn of mind The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a con
tinual extinction of personality.” In Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1932)3,7.
14 See William Cash, “Kings of the Deal,” The Spectator 29 October 1994: 14-6. Neal
Gabler, whose An Empire o f Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood was quoted by Cash,
angrily responded with “In a Lament of the Old ‘Establishment,’ Hollywood Encounters Anti-
Semitism,” Los Angeles Times 13 November 1994: M1+.
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20
swept over the nation in the early 1960s, it appeared we had perhaps obsessed over
the wrong enemy. Suddenly the disgruntled proponents of the homegrown varieties
joined with the yet more disgruntled parents and barbers to resist the insults of
British long hair, sexual ambiguity, and preciously wacky films. As the American
rock critic Greil Marcus enthused just at the onset of the 1970s, England had pre
sented a utopia as geographically grounded (or is it groundless?) as the intersection
of Haight and Ashbury:
In London, in the sixties, when styles on Camaby Street changed by the
day, when each new group was thrilling, when America looked to Lon
don with envy, joy, and, really, wonder, what one saw was the mad
pursuit of every next day, and what one saw looked like the most com
plete freedom the world had ever known.1 5
In a wave of 1960s deja vu, the 1992 presidential campaign even suggested that this
same era of British culture may have tempted Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton away
from his native Arkansas sensibility, and corrupted him with sex, anti-war protests,
and marijuana. Even after the campaign, Ross Perot continued to deride the political
and cultural theory Clinton had studied at Oxford. Perot foreshadowed later national
debates concerning nativism and isolationism when the former candidate claimed
that Clinton’s education had blinded him to the values of conservative American
populism: “They didn’t teach you about that over in England. They taught you
about the global economy; they taught you about one world.”1 6
15 Greil Marcus, “The End of the 1960s,” Rolling Stone 27 December 1969, reprinted in
Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92 (New York: Doubleday, 1993) 11.
16 Ronald Brownstein and Ronald J. Ostrow, "Perot Reports Plot to Kill Him for Opposing
NAFTA," Los Angeles Times 8 November 1993: A 16. Clinton's status as a former Rhodes
scholar continues to irritate conservatives. Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing. Playboy
published Mel Gibson's musings: "Cecil Rhodes established the Rhodes scholarship for men and
women who want to strive for a new world order. Have you heard that before? George Bush? CIA?
Really, it's Marxism, but it just doesn't want to call itself that." (Quoted in Liz Smith, "Mel's
New World Order," Los Angeles Times 31 May 1995: F2.)
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21
For most of the 1980s, however, Britain had a rather different political
value. During Margaret Thatcher’s long reign, her political sympathies with Ronald
Reagan helped to nurture the illusion that Britain and the US could again be privy to
a special political union. Oxford and Harvard be damned, the ambitions of Thatcher
and Reagan suggested another “one world” different from the liberal utopias Perot
derides. Recasting generations of liberal rhetoric, Thatcher and Reagan symboli
cally united the two nations to resist Tripoli, Moscow and other Evil Empires, and,
also with Empire in mind, retain the Islas Malvinas’ colonial name. Thatcher’s gen
der seemed more than a little convenient in this otherwise homosocial liaison be
tween thoroughly patriarchal regimes. At the peak of Thatcher’s and Reagan’s
power in the early 1980s, their faces were grafted onto the clinched bodies of Gable
and Leigh for a popular anti-nuclear parody of Gone With the Wind's famous
poster. But with these leaders’ retirement, the two nations no longer even have that
charge of personal chemistry and political coincidence left. The Conservative Party
pushed knighthoods for past presidents Reagan and Bush, the highest honors be
stowed on US citizens since W.W.II, but the favor seems unlikely to be returned.
Simply put, the British have very little claim on our continuing show of “mastery”
Adams prescribed. And unlike either Vivian Leigh or the Faulklands’ era Thatcher,
the British themselves seem to give little enthusiasm now to talk about upbeat to
morrows. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Scarlet O’Hara was cast with British
actors in both the film and its 1994 television sequel: there may be a certain subtle
sense in which personifications of the defeated South and its put-upon aristocrats
such as O’Hara, Blanche DuBois, and Miss Daisy have been easier for the North to
celebrate when linked to Britain intertextually.1 7
17 Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for the 1989 version of Driving Miss Daisy, while Joan
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22
The British, however, are not so likely to celebrate stoically their own re
writing as dear, dead Dixie. Instead, the eternally depressed pop star Morrissey is
simply left to mourn the seemingly one-sided hold of “Glamorous Glue”:
I used to dream and I used to vow
I wouldn’t dream of it now
We look to Los Angeles for the language we use
London is dead, London is dead, London is dead, London is
dead, London is dead, London is dead .. . .1 8
Much the same post-colonial dirge has been sung by voices from George Orwell to
the Sex Pistols, albeit with varying degrees of bitterness, reproach and commercial
viability.
But if London is indeed a corpse ready to melt down, it is still, as Morrissey
and marketing executives know, a corpse with exquisite potential. The “glamorous
glue” which has given British popular culture such a visible place in America’s own
may very well continue to hold in the future, if only because the British seem to
have an inexhaustible rendering stock, particularly in relation to film. At the 1993
Cannes Film Festival, as Michael Leigh’s Naked, Kenneth Loach’s Raining
Stones, and Stephen Frear’s The Snapper (based upon an Irish novel by Roddy
Doyle but produced for the BBC) took center stage, Frears could still use his visi
bility to stamp the British film industry as dead:
It’s not a joke. What is there to joke about? The fact that a
few corpses have risen from the grave doesn’t change that
Some people—Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, myself—make
films in the cracks, you steal money or something. It doesn’t
deny the central fact that the industry is gone.1 9
Plowright played the part in a subsequent television pilot. In 1995, Terence Davies directed his
first American film. The Neon Bible, starring Gena Rowlands as a Blanch DuBois-type in a heavy,
southern Gothic redux of Davies’ earlier British projects.
18 Morrissey, "Glamorous Glue," Your Arsenal, compact disc, 1992.
19 Kenneth Turan, "British Movie Makers Show Their Determination," Los Angeles Times
17 May 1993: FI.
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23
Carrington, The Madness o f King George, Loach’s Land and Freedom, and
Leigh’s Secrets and Lies have resurrected the dead British cinema at Cannes several
times since. But in 1993 the wings were already crowded with Anglo-American
successes such as The Remains of the Day, Shadowlands, In the Name o f the Fa
ther, The Piano (all 1993), and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), the first in
dependent non-“genre” film to take the top spot in the weekly US box office race.20
But just as all of these films far out-grossed the Loach, Leigh, and Frears produc
tions at home and abroad, none of them actually provided any concrete evidence
that the corpse had indeed stirred. Each were made possible either entirely or in part
through American or other investment. T wo of them, In the Name o f the Father and
The Piano, bested The Snapper by not only representing the decidedly removed
perspectives of, but having been directed by former colonials (Irish and New Zea
lander, respectively).
What does hold all of these films together is the strength of that glamorous
glue: the endlessly reenacted spectacle of British culture dead and decaying, seen in
both In the Name of the Father's morally corrupt judicial system and The Piano's
severely patriarchal 19th century Scotland. Even the squarely Irish-set Snapper, a
generally sunny, domestic semi-sequel to Alan Parker’s The Commitments (1991),
provided Frears (as it did Parker) with a chance to heal after a failure in Hollywood,
as did yet another sequel, The Van, in 1996: “for English directors, Ireland is like
Lourdes. You go there and are refreshed. You get up and walk.”21 In such easily
patronizing words, Ireland functions mostly as a rustic, albeit violent surrogate
20 That is. Four Weddings and a Funeral was not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or a Hallow
een, but, as a romantic comedy, lay outside the horror/sdence-fiction/fantasy/children's film ghet
tos which have traditionally been the staple of the financially successful American independent.
21 Turan, "British Movie Makers” Fl.
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24
ministering to the bond between Hollywood and London, or, as I will later suggest
concerning The Crying Game, Ireland may even provide a source where white male
bodies may replenish their imperiled “English” masculinity.
Anglo Troubles
But if Ireland is indeed Lourdes, then Los Angeles must be Rome, and
Hollywood the Vatican to British directors. Similarly so, regardless of the crucial
role Irish culture and politics have played in the US, Irish nationality here has usu
ally remained only one element of a variously defined multi-cultural mix: even the
note at the end of In the Name o f the Father—that one member of the falsely-
charged “Guilford Four,” Tom Owen, has married the daughter of Robert Ken
nedy—may be viewed not so much as an equation between American and Irish so
much as one between American and Irish oppression by their common historical
oppressor, the British. However, British nationality, and the American sense of
combined reverence and mastery over it, still construct what has often been an un
questioned degree zero for US identity. Thus In the Name of the Father provides
Emma Thompson’s compassionate English advocate as a shining source of identifi
cation and entry into the narrative. At the same time, Owen may have been incorpo
rated into one of the US’ most prominent Irish families, yet for all of their political
“uniqueness” as Irish-American and Roman Catholic, the Kennedys still represent
an Anglo identity which in contemporary American culture is not incompatible with
St. Patrick’s Day parades. In the US, the Irish Owen would be Anglo, too.
Ironically, as the familiar “Anglo-Saxon” has shifted to the widely used
“Anglo,” the latter term’s referent(s) have brought into question the equation of
English ancestry and culture with an American identity tabula rosa. Many main
stream US publications and authors have routinely used Anglo to replace white as a
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f
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parallel step to naming African-American, Latino, and Asian communities, but as
some of the newly re-christened Anglos have complained, that division has a differ
ence-leveling effect. Neo-conservative (and other) Jewish voices have been par
ticularly irritated at the invisibility this term has given to the differences within Cau
casian America, and to the loss of meaning it may extract from Jewish-American.2 2
David Horowitz, omnipresent pundit, author, and chair of the conservative Com
mittee on Media Integrity, has argued that
In fact there are no Anglos. Not even Anglo-Saxons refer to
themselves by this term, which is not the self-identification
of any group but an expression of derision connoting a hos
tile or oppressive “other,” something akin to “goyim.”23
Horowitz’ project is to refute the cohesion of larger, nationality-spanning para
digms such as Anglo or Latino, while preserving the “natural” homogeneity of na
tionality-based identities such as Armenian, Iranian and Eastern European, among
which he includes Jewish (as if, according to this logic, the latter bears no distinc
tion from Israeli nationality).
Yet even if his words evoke related arguments too broad and complex to be
adequately addressed here, Horowitz’s animosity toward the term Anglo nonethe
less illuminates its hegemonic complexity as a representation of whatever (or
whomever) “white,” privileged American culture and identity may be. Such an
“Anglo” incorporates a potentially disturbing range of formerly ethnic Otherness
within the white picket fenced, Cape Cod bungalows of American dreaming; it is
whiteness not as absence but as presence, a presence officially traceable only
22 For examples from the left, see Mike Davis’ shifting use of Anglo in City of Quartz-
Evacuating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Random House, 1990) 82 and in passing.
David Reid discusses the crucial inadequacies of the term in the post-Rodney King preface to Sex,
Death and God in LA., ed. Reid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 1994) xiv-xxiv.
23 David Horrowitz, "The Language of Oppression: Anglophobia," National Review West, 20
July 1992: 6.
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26
through the lineage of the nation’s familiar fathers. Writing from near the other end
of the spectrum as Horowitz, the critic and journalist Enrique Fernandez has simi
larly sketched the problematics of these multi-fragmented, politically correct identity
politics:
Although the word Anglo originally meant English-
speaking, the term European American would be enforced
by some . . . English speakers. And although Latinos is a
name for people whose origins are in Latin America, where
they speak languages derived from the tongue of the original
Latins in Ancient Rome, Latins and Latinos should only be
used to identify Italians, according to some Latins of Italian
origins. Does that mean I’m no longer a Roman Catholic? Or
that if I convert to the Episcopalian church I cannot be an
Anglicanl A grave spiritual crisis is at hand.24
Race, ethnicity, nationality, culture—their epistemological boundaries blur and con
fuse this crisis’ semantic absurdity.
Even retreating to dictionary definitions gives little comforting simplicity to
this both trivial and serious crisis. In the appropriately-titled American Heritage,
Anglo simply describes any white US resident not of Latin descent, a shortened
form of Anglo-American. Yet Anglo-American (rather than Anglo-Saxon) is under
stood more narrowly, as “an American, especially a resident of the United States,
whose language, ancestry, and culture are English."25 This slipperiness does sug
gest an implicit association between English as an epistemological category and
what someone such as Horowitz would view as the all-inclusive liberal guilt de
scribed in Anglo’s self-deni grating Otherness: Anglo is not simply a convenient,
value-free catchall for those who are not “people of color”—it is, it would seem, a
24 Enrique Fernandez, "El Norte: Decadence," Village Voice 23 February 1993: 26.
25 Curiously enough, another parallel term, Anglo-Irish, refers both to natives of England re
siding in Ireland and to Irish residing in England, a reciprocity not extended to US expatriates. The
American Heritage thus stresses, inadvertently or not, a sense of both US mastery over British cul
ture and a dependence upon it American Heritage Dictionary, ed. William Morris [Boston: Hough
ton Mifflin, 1978] 51, and Bookshelf '95, CD ROM, 1995.
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27
code word for the haves, the boss man, the privileged place at the top of the hierar
chy.
In this sense, the English themselves have then been extricated from the
Anglo’s Englishness. As a tool with which to mark whiteness, Anglo appropriates
the colors of British past history, particularly from its images of colonial power,
and applies them to American identity. At the heart of whiteness Richard Dyer situ
ated two fears, of controlling one’s own body, and of controlling those other bod
ies upon whose exploitation western culture depends; it is this “hysterical bounded
ness of the white body” which Anglo identity both strengthens and possibly, as
Horowitz’ claustrophobia suggests, exceeds.26 Rather than describe his whiteness,
his lack of an African-American, Latino or Asian’s Otherness, Horowitz as Anglo
has been given a corporeal outline he himself would recognize as goyishe, as Other.
Yet his rejection of that Anglo identity or body threatens the equally imaginary co
herence of his Jewish-American identity, itself a series of imaginary boundaries
giving coherence to the racial, national and cultural heterogeneity of the Diaspora.
At the same time that Anglo can foreground a construct of whiteness as
power and Otherness, it also encodes the assumptions of mastery exchanged be
tween American and British cultures. Metonymically, England embodies the past,
and it is in this function that the British literary critic and essayist James Wood
found the main benefit for Americans in popular films such as Richard Attenbor
ough’s Shadowlands (1993), an account of C. S. Lewis’ tentative late-life romance
with an American poet: immersed in their Merchant Ivory and Ralph Lauren visions
of country estate Englishness, Americans “concede a limited English superiority—a
superiority contained, placed and distanced; a superiority that, precisely and liter-
26 Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29.4 (1988): 63.
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28
ally, doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t done for some time (say, since the last
war).”27 Although Americans may not be quite so reticent as he describes them,
Wood sharply summarizes the complicity of both sides in the process of national
marking:
For our modernity is an American modernity, and it would
seem that neither Americans nor the English want to accept
this. Both of us are happy to persist in the equation of Eng-
lish-ness with an idealized, bucolic past because both of us
extract from this dream the consolations we want. Both of us
use these pastoral images of England to buttress our particu
lar local arrogances.
Quoting John Updike’s cutting dismissal of England as “a tame and castrate land”
in a poem, Wood makes succinct links between British nationality, modernity, and
masculine lack.28
But most immediately important here, Wood describes the temporal and
class distinctions of this equation. The “Constable clouds” beneath which Updike’s
England drifts are the ones that have more recently dappled the railway yards where
little boys abandon murdered infants and the backyards where fathers bury their
butchered children. Wood marvels that American journalists still find it necessary to
clear away the idyllic images of Brideshead in order to represent contemporary Brit
ain. Wood’s own response is a wistful Nietzschean desire to chuck it all, for a life
lived “unhistorically.”29
Another approach, one which still seeks to consider rather than deny the
Otherness of the Anglo, does not seek to immediately dispel those Brideshead
wisps. Instead it examines the junctures where Brideshead Englishness itself no
longer seems quite so lily-pure and proper. After all, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead
27 James Wood, "An England in Shadow Land," The Guardian 2 March 1994: 22. Italics his.
28 Wood 22.
29 Wood 22.
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29
Revisited (1945) (as well as his Sword o f Honour trilogy, 1952-61) was explicitly
concerned with the peculiar position of the Roman Catholic upper class and its
juncture with homosexuality: American Anglophilic reverence for English culture
and tradition may not be quite the dodge of contemporary diversity and tensions it
sometimes seems on Masterpiece Theatre, in Granada’s lush television adaptation
of Brideshead Revisited (1981), or, even, in the early 1960s Oxfordania of Shad
ow lands.
There may be more to the exquisite recreations of Merchant Ivory and com
pany than their hermetic manners seem to allow. Although he saved few kind
words for Merchant Ivory, Richard Dyer for one saw as much hope in Shadow-
lands as Wood did cause for despair. Dyer argued that while there is a “danger” that
the heritage film may flatten feelings into a sterile stereotype of English reserve,
there are legitimate pleasures to be found in their careful museums of period de
tail.30 The underlying problem, Dyer argues persuasively, is the persistent charac
terization of the English people and, even more so, British film, as unfeeling—”it is
a skewed view of British cinema that sees nothing but frigid dramas and tepid
comedies, that treats Gainsborough, Hammer and the Carry Ons as exceptions, that
fails to feel the emotional pull of Cornin’ Thro’ the Rye, Brief Encounter, If... or
Letter to Brezhnev.”31 The representation of emotional inexpressiveness and inhi
bition is something even Gainsborough, Hammer, and the Carry Ons are concerned
with, a legitimate national marker, yet their narratives are propelled by the energy of
dispelling such bonds. Even in the “other English cinema” of cool repression, Har
old Pinter, and Dirk Bogarde, England may be something other than a “tame and
30 Richard Dyer, "Feeling English," Sight and Sound February, 1994: 18.
31 Dyer 17.
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30
castrate land” where the only alternative is to live outside of history. Understate
ment, Dyer stresses, does not necessarily mean a lack of emotional power; rather it
suggests the degree to which “English” has become a synonym for middle class,
the result of both Victorian imperial expansion, and this century’s exploitation of
Britain as a tourist celebration of that past prosperity’s physical remains.3 2
“Perhaps that’s why I’ve waxed harsh about the innocent Anglophilia that had so
many Americans glued to Upstairs, Downstairs, or flocking to export-driven trifles
like Enchanted April,'1 '' Ella Taylor, a British bom film critic, has written. “The
England I know is far better served by television, a breeding ground for neo-realist
filmmakers . .. .”33
But to take British film to task for the over-bearing discretion of middle
class identity may be to lose this cinema’s value behind a veil of veneration for ei
ther the realism of Loach or Leigh, or the formalism of Lindsay Anderson, Peter
Greenaway, and other self-conscious iconoclasts. Understanding the Anglo and the
Anglo-American necessitates a consideration of the more recent models of US and
British nationality, of the arguments concerning the postmodern practice and value
of constructing nationality.
American Dreaming
Make capital into an image, Guy Debord wrote, and the result will be spec
tacle: for a significant portion of this century capital has been American, and specta
cle Hollywood. Appropriately, the most influential tomes of postmodernism, such
as Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
concern themselves primarily with the effects of universal Americanism. Film criti
32 Dyer 18.
33 Ella Taylor, “Found in America,” LA Weekly 12 January 1996: 37.
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31
cism influenced by postmodernism often replicates this pattern, concentrating upon
how Hollywood has affected the construction of other national film cultures, even
the concept of “national film culture” itself.
Yet it has also often seemed more urgent to study the nation-ness of film
cultures marginalized and imperiled by Hollywood than it is to be concerned with
how Hollywood makes use of those same or other film cultures—this postmodern
national pastiche, in some respect, may be more recognized than analyzed. But in
practice, the processes through which national identity is constructed through Hol
lywood and outside of Hollywood may be rather difficult to extricate from one an
other, as Roy Armes’ study of Third World film making suggests at its outset. It is
not so much that Armes’ work necessitates additional considerations; it is simply
that other histories of mainstream cinemas often lack those considerations. The pre
sumed autonomy of national cinemas, including the US’ own, stands first in Ar
mes’ list of blind spots, supporting the questionable fiction that somewhere out
there pure national forms await the jaded cineaste’s discovery.34
Homi Bhabha’s refusal to consider the colonizer or the colonized apart from
one another makes a similar, post-Heisenberg Principle argument. Using Fou
cault’s “ pouvoir/savoir” distinction, Bhabha describes the subject’s placement in “a
relation of power and recognition that is not part of a symmetrical or dialectical rela
tion— self/other, Master/Slave—which can then be subverted by being inverted.”35
If Hollywood is to be made to speak with a univocal colonial voice, the path of re
sistance for British film (as well as for Spanish, Senegalese, Thai. . . ) may then
34 Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987) 7-8, and in passing.
35 Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question . . . Screen 24.6 (Nov.-Dee. 1983): 25.
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32
become a matter of restoring a national essence. But if colonial power has indeed
been diffused throughout, authorizing and disputing various positions, national es
sence becomes a very difficult matter to identify and segregate. Walling off nation
alities from one another, even when considering the presumably secure and domi
nant American one, takes on a Quixotic cast.
Negotiating GATT
Nothing so clearly illustrated such difficulties as the December, 1993, con
clusion of the 116 nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Services’ Uruguay
Round. A highly public process, GATT articulated, defended, and possibly re
drew stable, traditional norms of nationality.36 That Hollywood is no longer the all-
American off-spring of Beverly Hills and Wall Street may be old news by now, and
not a perception at all dependent upon GATT, but the continuing process of sorting
out the emerging identities still demands attention. During the GATT negotiations
themselves, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti lobbied
hard to include entertainment media within the agreement’s drive to integrate the
members into a closer-knit global economy, and the Clinton administration, mindful
of the industry’s $3.6 billion trade surplus in the previous year, gave its blessings.
(Europe, in turn, had exported only slightly more than $100 million to the US in
1992.)
36 As well as the desire not to become like Britain. Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina)
argued against GATT:
We are on the way, as England. Years back, they told England, "Don't worry; instead of a
nation of brawn, you will be a nation of brains. Instead of producing products, you will
produce services and be a service economy. Instead of creating wealth, you will handle it
and be a financial center." And England has gone to hell in a hand basket, economically.
We can prove that. It came out in the hearings. We are on the same road, and I am trying
to get us off that road ....
Congressional Record, November 30,1994, online, GPO Access, Congressional Record Online, 1
January 1996. Available: wais.access.gpo.gov.
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At the treaty’s conclusion Forbes could celebrate that GATT and its sibling,
the North American Free Trade Agreement had given “free trade” two of its biggest
victories. GATT alone would swell the US economy by as much as $1 trillion in
the coming decade.37 But the particular interests Valenti represented—and, after all,
entertainment is the nation’s second leading export—failed against French-led in
sistence upon protection from Hollywood. Audiovisual matters, in the end, re
mained absent from the agreement’s re-visioning of world trade practices and pro
tections; while the US insisted that the dialogue was basically commercial, the
European Union successfully argued that it was instead cultural, and should there
fore be omitted. “GATT is gone,” Valenti calmly declared at the Berlin Film Festi
val early in 1994, allowing the previous year’s vitriolic rhetoric to fade away in fa
vor of genial public relations efforts. Enlightened nationalist solidarity would seem
to have neatly resisted American efforts to further entrench its empire, particularly
in the currently expanding European fields.
Yet there is another, and potentially more influential reading of the GATT
campaigns and their aftermath. With the exception of a high profile exchange be
tween Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and a cadre of angry European directors,
Valenti’s voice as a spokesperson for Hollywood remained peculiarly isolated.3 8
The complexity of the issue, as well as Valenti’s own sufficiently strong stature
may have been why studio employees reportedly “spent more time discussing the
holiday box office grosses than the international fate of their industry.”39 There
may have been more to this indifference, however, a possibility which was under-
37 Louis S. Richman, "What's Next After GATTs Victory?" Forbes 10 January 1994: 66.
38 Leonard Klady, "Scorsese, Spielberg in Euro Gatt Spat," Variety, 8 November 1993: 2.
39 Alan Citron, "Hollywood's 15 Minutes of Silence on GATT," Los Angeles Times 14 De
cember 1993: D4.
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lined by the coverage offered by the industry’s gatekeeper, Variety. Low-key and
conciliatory throughout, Variety's accounts of the US loss at the GATT tables eased
Valenti’s own reproach. Le Figaro may have unexpectedly greeted the 1994 Cannes
Film Festival by rebuking the wisdom of France’s successful GATT tactics, but
Variety had already revamped allegiances by emphasizing the peculiarity of an al
ready internationally diversified US industry fighting for US privilege. As Variety
stressed by quoting a Warner official, ‘This is no longer America vs. foreign.”40
Credit Lyonnaise in unlikely control of MGM, money from the Japanese “bubble
economy” years still everywhere—these theatrical interventions only divert attention
from such small steps as Disney’s into the production of British morning television,
to such large ones as NBC’s controlling interest in the European cable network
“Super Channel.” Then there are always the ironies of American independents such
as Savoy, backed by European funds, or, better, of a company such as the manic-
depressive Carolco, backed by Euro-Japanese funds, employing a significantly
European talent roster, and producing films which generally play better abroad than
in the US. And now, post-GATT, EU officials have taken to bemoaning the com
mercial quandaries of the European industry which they had formerly defended in
cultural terms 41
It is hard to imagine films more consonant with international notions of US
nationality than Serial Mom (Savoy) or Terminator 2 or Universal Soldier (both
Carolco). But “what is the nationality of Carolco?” Variety quotes a media analyst
rhetorically asking. The same article reflexively turns the question to the all-
40 Christian Moerk and Michael Williams, "Moguls Swat GATT-Flies: Recession and Euro
crats Can't Nix Global Ties," Variety 20 December 1993: 62.
41 See Tyler Marshall, "European Him Industry Bids to Take On Hollywood," Los Angeles
Times 3 July 1994: A4.
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American Variety itself, currently the revamped property of the British-Dutch com
pany Reed Elsevier, whose co-chair makes a “rethink” of restrictions upon cross
media ownership a prerequisite for European economic growth. It is clearly not so
much that Variety has been made the enemy’s dupe as that the enemy is increasingly
difficult to identify—where the enemy may be even more so. In the end Variety
opines that it is only the smaller European independents, dependent upon subsidies
and protection, who really “care” about GATT.42
All along allegiances regarding GATT have failed to follow the tidy schema
of Jack Valenti versus the French-led EU protectionists: although Variety gave
Hollywood an image of newly militant British filmmakers inspired by French re
sistance, the mainstream British media have responded with much greater indiffer
ence. For example, The Times o f London, while it gave the GATT talks considera
bly more coverage than many US papers, consistently praised the agreement’s pos
sible economic gains but remained skeptical concerning the successful drive to ex
clude protected audiovisual matters from deregulation. Not to be accused of em
bracing Hollywood imperialism out of blind Francophobia or lingering Thatcher
ism, The Times o f London instead noted the mediocre to moribund state of French
films, and pointed to the US’ undisturbed ability to continue diversifying and
metamorphosing throughout Europe. France may continue to support national
audiovisual production, but what of this support when, on the one hand, it pro
duces banalities such as Claude Berri’s Germinal (1993), and, on the other, Holly
42 Moerk and Williams 62.
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wood and big EU corporations have become such indistinguishable international
entities?43
How America Dreams the World
Timothy Corrigan’s A Cinema Without Walls deserves extended notice in
this context (more, perhaps, than other international studies such as Robert Phillip
Kolker’s The Altering Eye or Peter Lev’s The Euro-American Cinema, for exam
ple44) because it clearly sets out to address American nationality as nationality, one
which may be associated with certain, if diverse, subject and reading formations.
Yet, Corrigan’s title, A Cinema Without Walls, suggests something else, an ab
sence of walls rather than, say, porous, contradictory or false ones; the title retreats
so immediately that it typifies how the construction of American nationality may be
strangely lost in the light of its international power.
This book is about watching movies from within American
culture. At the same time, however, films discussed here de
scribe an international menagerie. Without denying the con
tinuing significance of different nationalisms in the cinema
today, this merging and overlapping of cultural differences is
meant to reflect the growing internationalization of national
cinema cultures. Stuart Hall has suggested some of what is
behind this cultural internationalism when he observed that,
through the globalization of Hollywood, “the world dreams
itself to be ‘American.’"45
Corrigan buttresses his project with a nod toward Hall, a quote which is concerned
with the world, not the (waking) “American” the paragraph mentions first. Hall
43 Charles Bremner, "Where Did French Films Go Wrong?" The Times of London, 10 Dec.
1993: 18; Colin Narbough, "Free Trade, Not Fine Detail, Is the Real Boost from GATT," The
Times of London, 15 Dec. 1993: 25.
44 Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983); Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1993).
45 Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, 1991) 4.
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would seem to suggest that while the rest of the world dreams a I’ americain, Amer
ica’s sleep may be taken up by who knows what other sort of REM activity. Per
haps in these dreams we might find the effusive, lip-synching pop stars of “We Are
the World.” Or, less pleasantly but more recently, our dreams may be the haunts of
the oddly twinned ghosts of the unstoppable civil wars in Bosnia, and of a United
States purportedly “Balkanized” beyond unity by the politically correct, a US no
longer the world, no longer any one in particular.
In the wake of buying sprees by Sony, Rupert Murdoch, Pathe, and Mat
sushita, Hollywood is certainly both more and less than what it once was, and A
Cinema Without Walls is self-consciously symptomatic of such changes: taking up
Malraux’s modernist image of the museum without walls, Corrigan provides a
model for film in which cultural difference has become effectively displaced by the
urgency of the resulting “international complicity.” Moreover, to situate the films of
Raoul Ruiz or My Beautiful Laundrette within specific national contexts is “to di
minish the complexity of their reach. To speak of a cinema without walls refers also
to the walls of cultural nationalism within an international landscape.”46 No walls—
and yet there are walls: Corrigan’s paradox is textured by the national borders his
“universal” images suppress yet still spill across.
In his formulation, however, it appears that only the American viewer is
privileged to respond to this universality as an “international viewer,” international
complicity notwithstanding. Regardless of how the world may be dreaming itself,
for the parochial British viewer of a “film” such as The Singing Detective, the pro-
46 Corrigan 5.
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38
gram’s broadcast places it within those so-called walls of cultural nationalism.47
Postmodemity is global, yet American, as Jameson reminded his readers of what
was “obvious” in 1984; if the world chooses to think of itself as American, then
this dream re-figures “the internal and superstructure! expression of a whole new
wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this
sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death
and horror.”48
However, Stuart Hall himself argued for a somewhat different understand
ing of postmodemity in the interview from which Corrigan’s “American” quotation
was taken. Hall referred to national identity within the context of an interrelation
ship between a lingering modernism and an oppositional American postmodernism,
the former decaying and the latter cynically inflated, if somewhat justified:
But I think the label “postmodernism,” especially in its
American appropriation (and it is about how the world
dreams itself to be “American”) carries two additional
charges: it not only points to how things are going in modem
culture, but it says, first that there is nothing else of any sig
nificance—no contradictory forces, and no counter
tendencies; and second, that these changes are terrific, and
all we have to do is to reconcile ourselves to them. It is, in
my view, being deployed in an essentialist and un-critical
way. And it is irrevocably Euro- or western-centric in its
whole episteme.49
47 Corrigan 5. The Singing Detective did receive a limited theatrical release in the US, but
only following its broadcast in Britain and then here. Apparently it is only the international
American viewer who is thus able to recognize this British miniseries as a true film, and thus Cor
rigan refers to it as a "film."
48 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left
Review (July-August 1984): 57.
49 Stuart Hall, "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall," ed.
Lawrence Grossberg, Journal of Communication inquiry 10.2 (Summer 1986): 45-46.
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39
Hall wished to preserve the hegemonic, constantly re-negotiated quality stressed in
his work as a whole; he was not willing to give up the national in the more progres
sive name of postmodernism.
Yet A Cinema Without Walls is more than a counterpoint to (or a misquota
tion of) Hall. In a more general sense, Corrigan’s argument, like Hall’s, attempts to
alter media studies’ anxiety toward national identity. Corrigan wants to affirm the
value of difference itself, particularly in the form of foreign (art) films, yet at the
same time his humanistic project calls for him to celebrate art’s traditional ability to
overcome such difference. Striving to reach beyond academia, Corrigan wishes to
re-convert an American audience unfamiliar with the pleasures once afforded by the
likes of Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa. Unfortunately, Corrigan’s ambition
leaves non-American audiences comparatively walled-up in the ghettos of their na
tional cinemas; A Cinema Without Walls is a representation of nationality con
sciously alien to the vagaries and complexities which surfaced during Hollywood’s
musings on GATT.
Nationality has thus been both lure and obstacle, and for more than Corri
gan alone. No doubt this double nature is also in part a symptom of the discomfort
nationalism has continually caused in progressive First World politics. The left has
had little better luck than the Academy in adjudicating its foreign language catego
ries. As Steve McIntyre put it,
The problematic nationality/nationalism/national identity
(plus all the attendant ‘isms’ currently so potent) has always
embarrassed the left Historically, no doubt this is partly as-
cribable to Marx’s failure to elaborate any adequate theory of
nationalism and the nation state, and later Marxists’ suspi
cion that the primacy and internationalism of the class strug
gle could not but be undermined by bourgeois national sen
timents—indeed it was usually assumed that the expansion
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40
and development of capitalism could anyway undermine the
significance of nation states.50
The decade since Screen published these words have taken us even farther from ei
ther the universal dictatorship of the proletariat or the bland UN utopias so prevalent
in the immediate post-war era.
The pleasures of home computers and the Information Superhighway not
withstanding, the future has turned out to be a white- and pink-collar version of the
past, and still very much a quarrelsome tangle of nations and nationalist ambitions.
Nationality, so long a detour for the left, has increasingly become a more produc
tive concern for cultural and political theory. Edward Buscombe, for example, pro
vides a suggestive summary of this history by contrasting a marxian deprecation of
the nation, from Lenin to E. J. Hobsbawm, with the recent “attacks” upon the same
as guided by postmodernism or cultural theory. Whether national culture is per
ceived as false consciousness, as a mote in Jameson’s “totalizing space,” or as an
hallucination in the reality of multiculturalism, it still remains for Buscombe to stand
up for the “merely local” of the British television audience.5 1
The Internet may be beginning to electronically re-figure our notions of the
local, but even as the Internet does so, it reloads new versions of the debate over
nation and nation-ness. CompuServe, for example, has given a new dimension to
the dialectic between American and British nationality: ignoring however many
English-speaking Canadians use the commercial computer network, the English
language portion of CompuServe is carefully bifurcated by a sizable minority of
50 Steve McIntyre, "National Him Cultures: Politics and Peripheries," Screen 26.1 (1985):
67.
51 Edward Buscombe, "Nationhood, Culture and Media Boundaries: Britain," QRFV143
(1993): 30-32..
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“UK’Mabeled sources of information, from cricket scores to royal reportage to the
weather to specific forums on British culture. While the Internet’s more chaotic
complex of world-wide computer relays effects a happily schizophrenic complexity
in nationality (the University of Pisa’s computer will as likely carry postings from
Sydney as from Chicago), CompuServe’s structure has replicated a carefully ho
mogeneous cyberspace America and located all national difference in the frequent
“UK” tag. 52
British Film Culture: Reclaiming Nationality
Behind most of the works discussed above lies the influence of Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a study grounded in the increasingly useful
distinction between the nation as neither a given of race nor ideology, but, like
CompuServe’s distinctions, as a cultural artifact. Stepping lightly over national
ism’s stubborn refusal to fade away, Anderson derides Marxism’s failure to come
to terms with it, and proceeds to re-define nation-ness (leaving aside the difficult
definition of nation itself) as something other than the previous false consciousness:
“an imagined political community .. . both inherently limited and sovereign,” na-
tion-ness becomes available for the left to re-appropriate.53 And so it has, adding to
a growth in the study of nationality which may be traced from the pre-Anderson
Tom Naim to the post-Derrida Homi Bhabha, and from George L. Mosse’s initial
52 Meanwhile, German and French language areas remain invisible to the casual English lan
guage user—with the partial exception of CompuServe’s decision in 1995 to edit selected news
groups for all customers in order to satisfy German complaints concerning content.
53 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread o f Na
tionalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991) 6.
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crossover to gender, Nationalism and Sexuality, to its boundary-expanding sequel,
the anthology Nationalisms and Sexualities.54
But British film criticism and theory has been slow to throw off the indiffer
ence, even hostility that characterized Screen's treatment of British feature film pro
duction during the journal’s 1970s heyday.55 Even during the advent of the New
British Cinema in the mid 1980s, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith dramatically turned his
attention toward British Film Now—and shrugged. Perhaps, so the film theorist
and Gramsci scholar allowed, he was wrong, perhaps there had been and will be a
popular tradition of British films. Perhaps “the hidden history of cinema in Britain”
hadn’t been American film. Perhaps British film culture did have some essential tie
to British film production.56 Nonetheless, the essay’s stinging title was “But Do
We Need It?” and that title still has the power to sting.
In New Questions of British Cinema, the first of the BFI’s series of
“Working Papers” on the nation’s film industry in the 1990s, John Hill’s lead essay
situates Nowell-Smith’s doubt as a central symptom of the critical left’s need to re-
appropriate nationality. We do and will need it, Hill insisted.57 Hill’s essay pro
vides an excellent summary of how Anderson’s definition has come to motivate the
subsequent Anglo-American re-conceptualization of national cultures within what
54 Tom Naim, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neocolonialism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso,
1981); Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modem Na
tion," in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); George L.
Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Andrew Parker, and others, eds.. Nationalisms and Sexualities
(New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
55 For example, see Alan Lovell, "Brecht in Britain—Lindsay Anderson," Screen 16.4 (1975-
76): 62-86.
56 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "But Do We Need It?" British Cinema Now, ed. Martyn Auty and
Nick Roddick (London: BFI, 1984), 150-152.
57 John Hill, "The Issue of National Cinema and British Film Production," New Question of
British Cinema, ed. Duncan Petrie (London: BFI, 1992) 15.
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43
he calls “actionist” terms. Not only must these cultures be seen in terms of continual
historical flux, but this new nation-ness must be hybrid, made up of elements in re
current interaction with other outside forces. Thus within this nation there may be
found “sites of actual and potential contestation and challenge.”58
Optimistic, as much of cultural studies has been since “the turn to Gramsci”
helped to blur the stark oppositions of the 1970s, postmodern readings of Anderson
nevertheless may leave little room or patience for claims to national identity. Rather
than embracing nationality, Hill finds that it is once again transcended, as in Now-
ell-Smith’s provocative rhetoric; one result is that authors such as Corrigan are able
to defer to the vocabulary of postmodernism within what is effectively a return to an
auteurist emphasis upon a Hollywood-centered canon.
Another result is a nonplused continuation of liberal emphases, conforming
to a familiar blend of empirical norms and essentialist assumptions. Naim’s special
concern for Scottish nationalism may be one example, and Hill suggests many still
lurk within the study of national cinemas.59 Hill himself opts for a different route,
persuasively rejecting a consensus view of unity:
What I want to argue instead is that it is quite possible to
conceive of a national cinema which is nationally specific
without being either nationalist or attached to homogenizing
myths of national identity.60
Taking as an example a Screen essay by Andrew Higson on ‘The Concept of Na
tional Cinema,” Hill argues that “national specificity” has unfairly become indistin
guishable from the taunts of “imaginary coherence” and “a unique and stable iden
tity.”6!
58 Hill 15.
59 Hill 16.
60 Hill 16.
61 Hill 16.
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Exactly how Hill’s call may be answered is the problem. For British film
culture, and for British culture in general, this concern is paramount since British
identity is so often synonymous with Anglo racial identity, particularly during the
twinned tyranny of the English south during Thatcher’s reign, and of the skin
heads’ and the National Front’s persistent racialist agitation. Written during this era,
Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’ t No Black in the Union Jack persuasively presented Brit
ain as a crucial counter-example to Anderson’s assertion that, since the nation is
conceived in language and not blood, it is based upon class and not racism.62 Gil
roy argues that “British” is a category simultaneously cultural and biological, and
that while Britain may be a multi-racial society, it is not as yet a multi-racial na
tion.6 3
“Not yet” is important as a qualification because it links Gilroy’s project to
Hill’s: neither is willing to view nationhood, in Gilroy’s words, as an empty cate
gory meekly waiting to be appropriated, yet still they wish to retain some version of
national culture and specificity. Gilroy depicts the left as so many rabbits transfixed
in the beams of Thatcher’s on-rushing nationalism, and rejects black cultural na
tionalism as simply an inversion of the problem. These negative definitions, how
ever, tend to leave the new nationalism Gilroy points toward as attractive but almost
as sketchy as Hill’s.64
Both of these writers make weighty claims upon class, yet as a political
foundation class often appeared lately to be not up to the task. Stuart Hall concluded
his 1988 collection of essays on Thatcherism, The Hard Road to Renewal, with the
62 Anderson 145, 148-49.
63 Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics o f Race and
Nation (London: Hutchison, 1987) 45-46.
64 Gilroy 54,69.
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45
persuasive assertion that class will not be enough for the renewal of either the left or
Britain, that this road must mean people identifying with a new conception of Brit
ish society.65 Hall insists that the slogan “learning from Thatcher” must not mean
the re-dressing of Labour’s class politics with Thatcher’s successful buzzwords of
morality or nation.
But Gilroy’s advocacy of a new nationalism is still not so easily dismissed,
nor is it to be viewed as an appropriation of the sometimes separatist politics of Af
rican-American nationalism, a tactic he strongly attacked in the British film Wel
come II the Terrordome (1995).66 As Gilroy has restated the arguments of There
Ain’ t A J o Black in the Union Jack, black British cultural production may be viewed
as part of “a wider cultural struggle to affiliate with England and in so doing, to
change what it means to be English.”67 Since the British imaginary has so often
been mis-identified as English identity, it is there that national culture must be re
formed, at the level of pleasure in “affiliation” with England. Gilroy makes his ear
lier rhetoric more specific by endorsing the attempts of black Britons to adopt “an
approach that has moved far beyond the typical Anti-racist practice of peering into
the murky pool of English culture in order to locate evidence of its monolithically
racist character.”68 Ignoring the resistance some black Britons might have toward
this English affiliation (the “humorous” anomaly of the black Scottish clergyman in
Local Hero comes to mind), it still seems that there must be some place in Hall’s
65 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London:
Verso, 1988) 282.
66 Paul Gilroy, "Unwelcome," Sight and Sound February, 1995: 18-19.
67 Paul Gilroy, "Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problem of Belonging to England," Third
Text 10(1990): 46.
68 Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black46.
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46
new writing of British identity for the rewriting of the past and its pleasures
stressed by Gilroy.
Ironically, in light of the recent American battles over political correctness,
multiculturalism and the “loss” of a traditionally unified sense of American identity',
Hill quotes James Donald to give
a further reason for the enthusiasm of critics and writers for
American rather than British films in so far as, as one ob
server puts it, “the heterogeneity of ‘the popular’4 4 as pre
sented by Hollywood may be seen to challenge “the fixity of
the ‘national’4 4 as exemplified by British cinema and British
culture more generally.69
To loosen this fixity is to risk Americanization, a British fear and desire organizing
much of the nation’s history since World War II and before. Yet even Hill has
modified his rhetoric. As he noted in 1994,
. . . one of the ironies of the GATT talks, supposedly about
“trade,” was how in the end they pivoted upon questions of
culture . . . .Hollywood films have now been so massively
present in Europe and have provided such a stimulus to the
creativity of Europeans, including filmmakers, that it is diffi
cult to conceive of Hollywood cinema as particularly
“other.”70
Despite Hill’s earlier rhetoric embracing national specificity in film production, the
world post-GATT would seem to offer a more realistic emphasis upon national
specificity in reception. The British finally seemed indifferent to what the French
had fought for during the GATT negotiations: Sight and Sound, presumably echo
ing British Film Institute consensus, resisted giving editorial approval to the French
effort because of the increasing complexities involved in identifying American or
any other national cinema. The magazine’s editors primly pointed to both Manthia
69 Hill 15.
70 Hill is introducing other writers’ works, but the argument he makes would still seem to be
his own. Introduction, Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, ed. Hill, Martin
McLoone, and Paul Hainsworth (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1994) 5.
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47
Diawara’s description of African films increasingly tailored for a European market
(in the same issue, it so happened), and the complex financial lineages of Much
Ado About Nothing, JFK, Under Siege and other seemingly un-contradictorily
British or American films of the 1990s.7 1
From London, if not from Paris, Hollywood would seem to dream the
world, and the world would seem to dream through Hollywood. It may be no coin
cidence that Richard Hoggart’s landmark The Uses o f Literacy (1957), an Ur text
for much recent work, supported its paean to a past and more authentic working-
class culture upon a network of quotations and allusions from de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America. Of course, Hoggart did not mean to suggest the present day
US as a model. For 19th century United States, Hoggart substituted post-W. W. II
Great Britain, and where the US has led, well... there Britain will follow. As
Hoggart quotes de Tocqueville:
By this means, a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately
be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but
enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of ac
tion.72
To give up such national fixity—that is, in the sense of taking on Hall’s task of cre
ating a new conception of Britain—threatens to enervate Britain’s own will to cul
tural production to such an extent it becomes a passive recipient of an international
ized, American-produced product Turnabout it seems, may have been fair play in
our games of cultural imperialism.
71 Editorial, "Cinema Wars," Sight and Sound January 1993: 11.
72 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971). 141.
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Academia and Imperialism
The anthology in which Hill’s call for national specificity appeared was it
self caught up in such a game. New Questions o f British Cinema appeared in 1992,
at the start of what appears to be a modest revival of the small publishing boom of
the early and mid 1980s, if only on the basis of the manuscripts promised by the
contributors to the Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism.73 The latter
American volume’s appearance in 1993 also inadvertently underlined the nationalist
stakes Hill proclaims: compared unfavorably with New Questions, Fires Were
Started received not simply a politely dismissive review in Screen, but Andy Med-
hurst’s angry Sight and Sound review took the occasion to announce that
“American academic imperialism” had resulted in an embarrassingly Martian-eye
view of British film. On top of “the little green men and women’”s sometimes
“surreal” mistakes concerning geography, slang, and history, Medhurst accused the
collection of slighting British film criticism: Fires Were Started had ignored pre-
1980s film, and,
Even worse, it is condescendingly asserted that British crit
ics have fought shy of defending their pitiful cinema, turning
their attention instead to Hollywood or Europe. This is news
not only to the present writer, but to Charles Barr, Pam
Cook, Raymond Durgnat, Sue Harper, John Hill, Robert
Murphy, David Pirie and others too numerous to mention.74
As Fires Were Started editor Lester Friedman noted in a subsequent, equally an
tagonistic reply, these writers have in fact most often structured their work around
the real indifference of earlier critics toward the indigenous cinema.75
73 Lester Friedman, ed. Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcher (Minneapolis: Uni
versity of Minnesota Press, 1993).
74 Andy Medhurst, "Spaced Out," Sight and Sound (June 1993): 45.
75 Lester D. Friedman, letter to the editor. Sight and Sound (August 1993): 64.
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What Medhurst asserted in his review appears to be a rather unusual nation
alist revision of British film criticism, one in which its history has been retroactively
re-written by the efforts of Barr, Murphy, Pirie and company. Fires Were StarteeTs
British critical reception was, admittedly, of rather limited importance to Hill’s
campaign for the re-appropriation of nationality. But Medhurst’s review neverthe
less solicits attention if only for the relative uniqueness of its image of British film
criticism fervently engaged in the active, sustained construction of British national
film form, and, moreover, British national identity. Revisionist as it may be, Med
hurst engages in the performance of nation-ness, and articulates it against and
through the vocabulary of American imperialism.
To put it another way, from Medhurst’s perspective Fires Were Started (and
by extension the earlier indifference to British films displayed by Screen, Movie,
Sequence and other critical arenas) was simply not politically correct. How this
term might be employed in a British context raises broader Anglo-American ques
tions which return yet again to the polemics of Hill and Hoggart: as Paul Gilroy ar
gued it in the early 1990s, if the p.c. discourse represents a right-wing caricature of
left-wing vocabulary and goals, then for conservatives fully to make use of p.c.
they must find a British parallel. The problem for both conservatives and for Hill,
Medhurst and others upon the left, is that
This country lacks a political language for making sense of
its post-colonial and hetero-cultural condition. The absence
of such a language is underlined in recent initiatives such as
the BBC’s document Extending Choice, which unsuccess
fully links an affirmation of national heritage (the invariant
repetition of long-established traditions) with some ritual
genuflection towards the distant goal of a tolerant, plural so
ciety. The characteristic product of this strange mixture of
concerns is an image of die nation as a cultural archipelago: a
string of discrete locations on which dissimilar sovereign
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50
cultures can reproduce without any unwelcome intrusion
from the neighbors.76
Like Stuart Hall’s earlier criticisms of pluralism, Gilroy’s own attack upon a false
multiculturalism of self-sufficient archipelagos demands another approach to nation-
ness, in which difference may be presented “as a complex principle of social and
cultural life which urgently demands new tactics.”77 In other words, the great grail
of 1950s liberal cultural criticism reappears once more: connection.
What it means, however, is another matter. Hoggart himself approvingly
quoted E. M. Forster’s admonition in Howards End to “Only Connect,” comparing
it favorably to the odious “only conform” of consumer society. Yet the connection
he valued is explicitly confined to the national: from advertising to teenagers, the
“shiny barbarism” imported from America moves thoughtlessly toward the future,
ignoring the British past.78
Traditionally viewed as a somewhat musty, highly localized cinema, British
film has often depended upon the so-called heritage industry in order to keep its
“springs of action” in motion by not connecting the past and present in any mean
ingful ways, by providing the lush, hermetically sealed beauty of costume dramas
such as Howards End, Maurice, and A Room With a View. Their air is often
viewed as rarefied and thin, and because of that quality, Hill suggests, British
76 Paul Gilroy, "Mixing It," Sight and Sound (September 1993): 24. Gilroy's rhetoric should
be recognized as a sort of preemptive strike against the p.c. discourse, specifically motivated by the
British publication of Robert Hughes' The Culture o f Complaint and its potential appeal to the
black middle class; the British Him Institute's attention toward race and gender in its funding prac
tices, together with the recent, relatively high profiles o f Gilroy, Hall and Bhabha in Sight and
Sound, have produced letters to the editor which would be completely familiar in the US.
77 Gilroy, “Mixing It” 25.
78 Hoggart 162, 160.
Ominously, the Merchant Ivory film version of Howards End (1992), in some sense an exam
ple of what Hill means by national fixity resisting Hollywood heterogeneity, manages to gloss
over the novel’s most famous line.
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51
filmmakers have succeeded in enervating themselves to a state of delicious decay.
That frozen state is also what Fredric Jameson found in Barry Lyndon (1975): cit
ing Lukac’s analysis of the historical novel, Jameson identifies Barry Lyndon as
“that moment in which this once new genre begins to lose its social vitality as the
living expression of the historicity of a triumphant and class-conscious bourgeoisie
and to survive as a curiously gratuitous formal shell, whose content is relatively in
different.”79 Merchant Ivory’s signature actor, Helena Bonham Carter, has so se
curely come to represent this tasteful enervation that the British sitcom Absolutely
Fabulous could simply deploy Bonham Carter’s name as an insult. Edina, the PR
hack played by the series’ star, not only dismissed her prim, conservative daughter
Saffron with the taunt, but in Edina’s dreams, Bonham Carter even deigned to play
the role.
But denigrating the heritage industry’s Britannia comes rather easy, and
sometimes it does little justice to its acerbic entries. In a sense, Absolutely Fabulous
was itself a heritage industry product, although the heritage is plays off of is that of
1960s’ Swinging London; interestingly, it is Bonham Carter’ s Saffron who de
lights her mother by deciding to run off to Paris and experiment with sex and
drugs—perhaps there is something more to the stereotyped Merchant Ivory aes
thetic than simple enervation, perhaps even the hope of connection. As Dyer has ar
gued above, heritage films offer pleasures which are sometimes too quickly dis
missed as “a curiously gratuitous formal shell.” Cairns Craig, for example, notes
the preoccupation of films such as A Room With a View, Maurice, and Where An
gels Fear to Tread with clashes between classes, sexualities, and nationalities, but
still he labels them as Thatcherite: “In effect, these films engage with the idea of
79 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) 91.
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52
crossing the border between, cultures, but in the knowledge that there is a safe ha
ven to retreat into.”80 Yet accompanying the essay Sight and Sound arranged a lush
color spread of stills which left the text as a border—as Gilroy acknowledged, there
are pleasures here which are not necessarily to be denied. To summarily reject them
is possibly to make the same mistake Gilroy saw in the anti-racist movement, which
had resisted laying claim to English traditions and history. Nor do all British cos
tume dramas easily display the usual generic qualifications of the Merchant Ivory
school.
At the same time, Merchant Ivory’s Forster adaptations also should be rec
ognized as somewhat more complex than Craig makes out; besides The Remains of
the Day, a project such as the gay romance Maurice (1987), for example, not only
diligently works against Brideshead Revisited's expedient mixture of homoeroti
cism and homophobia, but it also comments upon the gay sensibility which may be
read across other Merchant Ivory films. One might even in the titular merging of
producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory’s names.8 1 Gay readings of
these heritage productions once again brings up Gilroy’s stress upon preserving the
pleasures of affiliation with England, and the difficulty in summarily proscribing
any specific textual system.
80 Cairns Craig, "Rooms Without a View,” Sight and Sound 1.2 (June 1991): 13.
81 In some respects. Merchant Ivory represents a latter-day version of the Ross Hunter aes
thetic: Merchant Ivory is often derided for a visual prettiness and narrative softness which describes
Hunter’s rejection of 1950s realism in his signature productions of the 1950s (Magnificent Obses
sion, Imitation o f Life, Pillow Talk). While Hunter emphasized the ahistorical glamour of the
American present. Merchant Ivory emphasizes the historical perfection of the English past—two
sides of the same coin, perhaps.
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53
Contestants
The motives for and dangers of buying into fixed, traditional representations
of Britishness extends beyond the borders of British production—all the way, I
have argued, to contemporary American debates concerning the Anglo, its meaning,
and its significance. The noise of these arguments over the Anglo may seem far re
moved from the discourse of gentility and restraint exploited by Merchant Ivory’ ,
and the associated green and pleasant images often associated with American An
glophilia. But over the course of the chapters which follow, it will become clear that
England’s place in our imagination is not always so green and pleasant. I will argue
instead that the value of this Anglophilia (and Anglophobia as well) may be consid
ered through the figures of the actor, the gentleman, the villain, the spy, and the
post-punk punk, as well as through the less well-typified population of science fic
tion and fin de millennium anxieties.
American Anglophilia may not be reduced to Merchant Ivory or Masterpiece
Theatre, even in the series’ new, “relevant” guise. Yet each of the figures I will dis
cuss does represent, in a sense, the same object under only a slight dimensional
shift, somewhat like the movement from one panel to the next of a Francis Bacon
triptych. Coolly frozen in moments of obscene, highly visceral frenzy, Bacon’s
canvases display the same never-inelegant sexual agony my title might seem to as
cribe to these various figures of masculinity. But the Anglo of Anglo Agonistes
may just as well refer to the American use of Anglo as a convenient racial synonym
for white. This glibly overly-formal title could thus suggest not only the national
death rattle that Britain has repeatedly sounded since the post-war dismemberment
of its empire, but the whine of imperiled Anglo privilege heard in the US. In either
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54
of these respects, the title evokes the tragedy of Milton’s Samson Agonistes as
much as it does the sarcasm of T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes.”
“Agonistes,” however, is derived from the Greek for protagonist or contest
ant (an agonist, one who engages in the game of life, the agon& 1 ), and also carries
that literal meaning here: under both the mythic sign of HOLLYWOOD and the eve
ryday practice of Los Angeles, Anglo identity often continues as the base-line pro
tagonist against which difference is measured, as the contestant whose record goes
unchecked. If the Anglo is to become one among many, as Britain itself must
eventually in a unified Europe, then the history of the Anglo must be told rather
than assumed, and its own foundational interpolation across the boundaries of na
tionality be mapped. A starting place, I believe, may be found within the discourse
of the English actor.
8 - See John Broadbent, Introduction to Samson Agonistes, Sonnets, Etc., ed. Broadbent and
Robert Hodge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 153.
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55
PART 1
Actors
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CHAPTER 1
Crying Games
Two magazine covers, two English faces.
Premiere: Hugh Grant’s flawless, milky-white face rests its chin on a chalk-
striped flannel arm, his blue-gray eyes calmly meeting the camera’s gaze, his eye
brows delicately arched and pointing up toward the mousse-ed and tousled hair
peeking from behind the magazine’s name. Like the Paris-Match Roland Barthes
studied at his barber’s several decades ago, this cover floats upward through a play
between the denotative (English actor on cover of American movie magazine) and
the connotative (Hollywood’s ever-inclusive power, the inevitable migration of
British successes to American shores, the pleasures of fey upper-class Englishness
finally embodied again in a romantic leading man). The African features of a French
soldier saluting the tricolor may have caught Barthes’ attention, but here “the greater
semiological system” revolves around an equally erotically-charged signified, an
Englishman’s meaning in Hollywood.1
“HUGH TALKIN’ TO ME?” small print along the magazine’s spine more
announces than asks. “He smells of damp wool, of an Englishman rushing around
in a light London rain, late for lunch at the club. Which is exactly what he is,” the
story inside sighs. ‘That, and Britain’s most lucrative export.”2 Of course, shortly
after the July, 1995, issue of Premiere had hit the newsstands . . . front page news
stories quickly moved the book deal Grant had inked with Hyperion just the sum
mer before onto the back burner. How to Be a Gentleman had been overtaken by an
1 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 116.
2 Holly Millea, “Hughmongous,” Premiere July 1995: 67.
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African-American prostitute, a mint-flavored condom, and a British press on the
one hand incredulous that Hollywood had not successfully hushed up Grant’s ar
rest, and on the other (somewhat more restrained) hand, curious that the LAPD had
checked and discovered that Divine Marie Brown was indeed biologically female.3
‘ The dewy-eyed deviant in Merchant and Ivory’s Maurice would no longer be
haunted by that role,” one media pundit claimed, and Newsday offered that there
are worse things for an “arch and rather precious Brit.”4 Apparently so. Grant’s
big-budget American debut, Nine Months, successfully grossed over $70 million in
the US alone. Grant’s other film that summer, playing yet another “deviant” (but
not so dewy-eyed this time) in the British An Awfully Big Adventure, vanished
with hardly a whimper.
Divine Marie Brown, however, lingered slightly longer, as did the contrast
this “cheap date” provided to Grant’s pearly white official escort, Estee Lauder
model Elizabeth Hurley: race, as Richard Goldstein quickly noted, was not only the
story’s great unspoken, but also its lingering force as Grant and his publicity ma
chine lumbered through news features and talk shows.5 Yet perhaps not just race,
but its intersection with class, and with the particular boundaries suggested by
Grant’s face on the cover of Premiere gave the story its tenacious life. Photo files
and Brown’s appetite for publicity provided the opportunity for ironic re-
contextualizations: Grant photographed earlier with Hurley, dressed in a revealing
Versace evening gown held together with safety pins, and Brown posed in the same
3 See Ian Katz, “Hugh and Cry,” and Derek Malcolm, “Script For a Happy Ending,” The
Guardian 2 29 June 1995: 2-3; Allan Hall, “Hacks and Macs,” The Guardian 2 29 June 1995: 13;
Michael Musto, “La Dolce Musto,” Village Voice 11 July 1995: 10.
4 Richard Goldstein, “Hooked!” Village Voice 11 July 1995: 8.
5 Goldstein 8. In 1996, Brown was signed to play herself in a film version of the event, 9
Minutes.
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dress for the cover of News o f the World—designer neo-punk suddenly indistin
guishable from a working girl’s uniform.6 By the same token, Grant’s oft-
displayed LAPD mug shot, showing him hunched forward, haggard, his hair mat
ted, superimposes itself over the glamorous Premiere cover7: the result is the recur
rent British tabloid narrative of this decade—the good white Englishman (Prince
Charles even more so, Kenneth Branagh somewhat less) whose sexual indiscretion
undermines not only his marriage but the privilege and practice of his place in the
class and racial makeup of Britain. The Englishman in defeat. The Englishman
whose un-gentlemanly behavior grossed $70 million domestic ....
The Face'. Jaye Davidson sneers slightly into the camera, hooking one hand
into the open V of a ragged denim work shirt just so the tattoo on his wrist peeks
above his jacket sleeve. Unlike Grant, his features are broad, blunt, somehow very
English despite (because of?) the not-quite milk-white color of his skin. A heavy
chain hangs about his neck. Ash is about to fall from the cigarette that his hand
holds, and his lips look slightly chapped. The Gap featured Davidson in an over
lapping American ad campaign, using roughly the same costume but turning on a
wind machine to gently part his shirt and display his (flat) chest8: all together, the
more disdainful dishabille of his cover pose for The Face suggests something far
closer to the queer circles governed by fashion and Derek Jarman in which he had
moved before playing Dil, The Crying Game's own 1992 version of Divine Marie
6 See Hall 13.
7 Nine Months' trailer included strikingly similar, if more flattering mug shots of Grant that
had, reportedly, already been cut from the completed film. Audiences gasped, laughed, and ap
plauded at their inclusion in the trailer (which was already playing at the time of Grant’s arrest).
8 Still, Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” displayed the Gap ad but changed the logo to
. . . Guess Jeans.
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Brown. But here only the thick cluster of large hair salon clips pinning back his
long curly hair suggest. . . a difference.
The article inside, ‘The Trying Game: Jaye Davidson and the New Brit
Pack” (yet the cover title cries “Acting Up!”), stresses that, really, there is very little
that is different, either about Davidson, or, for that matter, about British actors. Six
years earlier the savvy, trend-conscious British magazine had profiled an earlier
“Brit Pack”—Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and so on—and now, in the 1990s, the
magazine returned to the current gang of actors: David Thewilis, Naveen Andrews,
et. al., trying to make it in a close to non-existent British film industry, hoping to
find roles in Hollywood, and doing their best to shed the “effete young things” la
bel long clinging to British actors.9 Unaware that, shortly in the future, the supreme
Effete Young Thing Hugh Grant might just rewrite their career options with Four
Weddings and a Funeral (1994), these actors list Merchant Ivory at the top of their
CVs, but dream of a grit and authenticity which they locate in American alternative
filmmaking. All slumps and dirty fingernails shot in harsh black and white, these
young men provide The Face with a 1990s redux of the working class actor, with
the exception that what was once marked Northern England in the 1960s now spins
out a web of cross-national references that are no longer easily American or British.
‘Thus,” Dick Hebdige wrote in a slightly different context, “The Face can some
times be a desert full of silent bodies to be looked at, of voices without body to be
listened to not heard. This is because of the terror of naming.”1 0
9 Charles Gant, “The Trying Game,” The Face, July 1993: 64.
10 Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York: Rout
ledge, 1988) 170.
Or as a glib, clove-smoking young Angeleno claims in Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, “I
bet you don’t even read The Face. You’ve got t o Otherwise you’ll get bored.” (New York:
Penguin Books, 1985) 96.
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How strange it may seem that The Face should choose Davidson’s body to
represent, to name this group of men. Like the earlier Brit Pack I (and how many
similar groupings before and after?), the article simply seems to assume that the
group is and should be male—and this despite The Face's otherwise adamant politi
cal correctness. As in The Crying Game itself (perhaps Davidson is a good choice
after all), biological women are rather superfluous in this self-creating company of
actors. Not that the actors, with the exception of Davidson, make a point of being
gay. They may momentarily ignore the pretensions of the Olivier/Gielgud theatrical
model, and they may pick upon the newly outed (“Naturally,” the author writes of
The Young Americans' star, “Rupert Everett is not his role model”), yet the tone is
hardly homophobic.11 Davidson himself positions recent independent film by gay
American filmmakers as the model for what a healthy, “little” British industry
should be like, and The Face gives no reason to turn away from a new national cin
ema modeled after the efforts of Tom Kalin or Todd Haynes.1 2
The proposition may not be quite as deliberately provocative as it might
seem. Comedy Central seemed tuned to a similar wavelength when it presented the
popular BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous to American audiences in 1994. The US
cable network placed Jennifer Saunder’s farcical saga of Edina and Patsy, two ag
ing pop-culture parasites from old swinging London, squarely within a gay male
11 Everett belongs to a considerable list of out gay British actors, mostly character actors in
Hollywood’s view, including John Gielgud, Ian McKellen, Nigel Hawthorne, Simon Callow, and
Stephen Fry.
12 In the US, gay films are cohering not so much as a genre but as a field similar to that of
nationality or race: 'Today a gay film that works can gross $3 million to $5 million even without
any crossover or 'breakout’ attendance from a more mainstream audience,” the president of
Gramercy Pictures has claimed. "That’s bigger business than foreign films right now.” In Richard
Natale, “'Gaysploitation’ Films Find a Nicely Profitable Niche,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, 12
October 1995: 29.
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context: look-alike contests in clubs, filmed promos featuring Joanna Lumley’s
Patsy meeting gushing New York drag queens, and an endlessly recycled Pet Shop
Boys video featuring the two characters. These and other efforts helped to re-frame
the sitcom’s satire of post-’60s London for American gay culture.1 3 Edina and
Patsy may be horrifically narcissistic and morally vacuous, yet good, conservative
figures like Edina’s daughter Saffron are completely overcome by the pair’s abso
lute fabulousness, by their diva destructiveness. Because the series roots these
characters in swinging London excess (and maps it through the pair’s subsequent
disco, punk, Thatcherite and rave addictions), English pop culture becomes yet an
other paradigm of camp. And within an American context, the series’ Englishness
wraps this outrageousness in the form of a national imaginary. In Absolutely
Fabulous the aura of outrageous consumerism and misogyny long debated in camp
blended with nationality to provide the series’ American fans with something both
familiar and unique. “I have a theory that all Englishmen are gay,” Patsy’s sister
Jackie announced at the start of the series third and final season; this state of Eng
lish male sexuality is Absolutely Fabulous' bitter bedrock joke, one entrenched in
the series’ weekly comedy of cultural disillusion, and one which is hard to imagine
ever neatly “Americanized.”1 4
13 TV Guide even hired gay gossip columnist Michael Musto to explain why Absolutely
Fabulous' over-dressed and bitchy straight women should have become such overnight American
gay icons—why the exaggerated but still dry accents of the title’s buzz phrase should have seemed
to encapsulate half a century of camp attitude in just eighteen, endlessly replayed episodes. See
“Sweetie Darling,” TV Guide, 10-16 June 1995: 26+.
14 US sitcoms influenced by Absolutely Fabulous (notably Cybill, High Society, and, if it
ever comes to fruition, Roseanne’s long-promised official adaptation of the series) may strike
viewers as somehow gay in their humor and characterization of their diva stars, but they lack both
the national other Americans found in the series’ image of the English, and the cultural other the
British found in the series’ decadent image of pop culture.
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Jackie was not alone in her assessment of Englishmen: the same subtext
follows the media careers of both Grant’s slick reign as ‘ TOP OF THE FOPS”1 5
and Davidson’s punk stance at the borders of race and gender.1 6 At the same time
that Davidson’s Face appeared on British newsstands, the Los Angeles premiere of
Isaac Julien’s short film The Attendant gave the oft-quoted filmmaker a chance to
respond to the way in which Americans had suddenly become aware of British film
following The Crying Game's success. Julien amplified Davidson’s rhetoric by
suggesting that
The film industry in Britain is a very queer industry. If it
weren’t for queers like Derek Jarman, Terence Davies and
myself, there wouldn’t be a film industry. . . . Even the
straight filmmakers are queer. It must be the miserable
weather or something.1 7
However much a put-on Julien’s essentialism may be, there is a real sense in which
his description rings true. British cinema, as a forever-failing industry in passive-
aggressive thrall to Hollywood, has been received in a manner consistent with very
similar models of male homosexuality as failures of masculinity. Or as Vanity Fair
put it in a Snowdon-photographed “Portfolio Spectacular” entitled “Empire of the
Stage,” “The British are stage actors first, and last”: there, below the type, sat Jer
emy Irons in full butch splendor, working on a motorcycle in an overhead shot
reminiscent. . . not of the theater, but of the opening scenes of Lawrence o f Ara
bia, even down to Irons’ newly blond hair.1 8 (Rather than, say, for Hamlet, Irons
15 Quoted in Millea 69.
16 One might also mention the films released in 1995 following the well-publicized breakup
of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s marriage: he gave Othello's Iago a notably queer read
ing, and she played the title role in Carrington, the Bloomsbury chronicle of her character’s self-
destructive commitment to the gay Lytton Strachey.
17 Isaac Julien, discussion held at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, 11 July
1993.
18 John Helipera, “Empire of the Stage,” Vanity Fair, November 1995: 194.
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63
had bleached it for his Die Hard With a Vengeance villain.) Similarly, little distance
lies between the insistence of American theater authority George Jean Nathan that
“Women, and Englishmen, are actors by nature” earlier in the century, and Zsa Zsa
Gabor’s only slightly more coy description of her marriage to George Sanders, a
portrayal narrowing down the “theory” of Absolutely Fabulous: “All English actors
are a little bit gay.”1 9
In these and other Anglo-American exchanges there seems to be an only
partially hidden histoiy to be traced, and the “secret” of The Crying Game's Dil
stands by as one of its enigmatic symbols. The Face's “Trying Game” article itself
provided little long-lived nationalistic hope for Davidson’s own queer little industry:
as Davidson told The Face, perhaps with an eye to the future, “I don’t think it’s
worth doing crap films even for the money. Mind you, no one’s offered me a mil
lion pounds.”20 Shortly after he accepted a presumably well-paying supporting role
as Ra, an androgynous alien royal in Stargate (1994), a large scale, Euro-budgeted
science fiction film fronted by American stars and even more unexpectedly success
ful than Davidson’s first film. Taken together with the slick, savvy Four Weddings
and a Funeral, perhaps the most effective evocation of the English gentleman as
sensitive contemporary boy-toy, Stargate's near science fiction remake of The
Crying Game might be yet another reason to bemoan ‘The Trying Game” as an
other sign of blighted hope, afflicted by the cruel, crass realities of British cinemas.
Whether or not this may be a valid description, these two rather different ar
eas—the pleasures of Grant’s comically failing gentleman, the science fictionality of
19 George Jean Nathan quoted in Bryan Foibes, That Despicable Race: A History of the Brit
ish Acting Tradition (London: Elm Tree Books, 1980) 9; Zsa Zsa Gabor quoted in Michael Musto,
“La Dolce Musto,” Village Voice 8 June 1993: 36.
20 Gant 62.
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Davidson’s gender—are aspects usually considered apart from nationality. Of
course Englishness is not an unnoticed topic of discussion, particularly concerning
matters of official culture and its definitions. But American Anglophilic regard for
the prowess of British high culture, and its usually entwined response, Anglopho
bic disregard for such enervated, classist snobbery, both often overlook how Eng
lish nationality functions in American discourses concerning masculinity, its mean
ings, and its future.
But as I will repeatedly note, defining the topic has time and again been a
nagging problem—and pleasure—in the study of British cinema. Even deciding
upon what precisely constitutes the object of discussion in a study of British cinema
presents several real problems concerning “British” and “cinema,” as well as na
tionality in general, including the increasingly hybridized boundaries of interna
tional film production. Defining cultural specificity means recognizing the degree to
which British nationality subsumes Cornish, Scottish, and Welsh nationalities, as
well as Caribbean and other Commonwealth identities, into the project of English
nationalism. At the same time, British cinema has increasingly become recognized
as an internationalized export good, skillfully designed to coexist with, even infil
trate American dominance. The study of British cinema has usually presented this
history according to paradigms which privilege two national spaces, a national-
dominant cinema which competes with Hollywood (as Indian cinema has done),
and a national authorial cinema whose auteurs may even create the marks of national
identity within Hollywood’s international apparatus—the honor role of directors
such as Attenborough, Schlesinger, Ridley Scott, Parker, Frears, Yates, and so
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65
on.21 Yet even though expatriate British directors may have traditionally presented
film scholars with the most prevalent (if conflicting) evidence of this latter national
presence, the uniqueness and complexity of British cultural specificity in Holly
wood is clearly not simply behind the camera; it also belongs to actors such as
Hugh Grant, whose stardom occasionally may threaten to refigure the national and
sexual boundaries of Hollywood.
By organizing itself around matters of performance as authorial, The Face
represents its own glossy alternative to the director as national auteur. The Face's
model has its advantages, especially within the narrative of British film as a national
cinema. While the history of British cinema draws upon and is often threatened to
be overshadowed by Britain’s long-heralded theatrical tradition, film practice (and
television as well) has most commonly been doubly structured by the word and by
performance. English literature and its adaptation, and the discourse surrounding
the embodiment of those texts, have determined much of what is British film, and
of how it is thought, praised, and even diminished, as talky, literary, pretentious,
or simply not really filmic. When imagined in collision with Hollywood, a distinc
tive tradition of repeated artistic triumph and commercial defeat has been repeatedly
imagined along both sides of the Atlantic.
The English actor, in turn, has literally embodied his nationality as a corpo
real arena for the construction of Anglo-American nationalities, particularly mar
ginal ones measured as failures against the standards of hegemonic masculinity.
This history of nation and gender is here bracketed by the “non-actor” Davidson
21 See Paul Willemen’s discussion of nationality and Third Cinema in Looks and Frictions:
Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1994) 191.
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66
and the actor who surprisingly made his final film performance in Jarman’s War
Requiem (1991), Laurence Olivier, as well as by Hamlet, the film and the role
which crowned Olivier’s success in Hollywood. These names mark only selected
moments in a wider and much queerer contest in which winning has not always
been the objective, and losing not always defeat.
The Widening Gyres
Performing failure: rare is the historian who does not begin with British film
culture’s many imagined or quite valid lacks. Certainly neither Roy Armes nor
Raymond Durgnat chose to start otherwise. (Nor did The Face, or, for that matter,
the introduction to this study.) Former Screen and Frameworks editor Paul Wille-
men places the blame upon the seeming unseemliness of cinephilia in the first
place—“in Britain compliance with the social demand to cover up the manifestations
of desire for cinema has been the rule for nearly a century.”22 But this blend of pes
simism and resistance has not been completely unproductive. As Antonia Lant has
suggested, “the specification of consistent stylistic failure builds, in a convoluted
way, the possibility of an identity.”23 This misbegotten identity, no matter how
lovingly dwelled upon, appears predicated upon a constitutional opposition between
British nationality and filmmaking. Some film scholarship has indeed backpedaled
the despairing tone while still remaining critically aware, such as the work of David
Pirie and, more recently, Marcia Landy, Robert Murphy, and Coco Fusco.
Failure, however, names more than British film. Regardless of what sort of
film industry might have been if only Americans spoke any language besides Eng
22 Willemen 223.
23 Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1991) 3.
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67
lish,24 the British themselves seem hardly up to the task: as an early 1990s front
page Washington Post analysis of this Sceptered Isle’s “Bad Case of Malaise” put it
somewhat prematurely, “it’s been that kind of decade for Britain.” Lord Carring
ton’s slow motion inability to negotiate between factions in the Balkan civil war
mocked the nationalistic prowess Margaret Thatcher pursued in the 1980s. Prime
Minister John Major’s inability to consolidate power even after his reelection in
April, 1992, reflects a continuing political blockage on both sides of the house.
And, as a complement to recession and continued cutbacks in public spending, an
educational system still ruled by class threatens more than the nation’s intellectual
future: while the rich and the talented may thrive, the British work force remains
significantly less skilled and less productive than in France, Germany or the US.
“In many ways,” the Post observed, “Britain’s predicament sounds a lot like that of
the United States, only worse.”25 The pro-Major Sunday Times managed a put-
upon response by Michael Jones, the paper’s political editor, but Jones’ most col
loquial response seems also to be his most immediate: “So what’s new, doc?”26 As
others have observed, there does not seem to be much that the British would actu
ally disagree with in the more recent phobic twists of our Iove-hate relation.27
Within such debates Britain may be presented as a multiracial culture strug
gling to redefine itself within evolving Anglo-American and European spheres, but
an older image of the Sceptered Isle rarely disappears, even as it is denied. It is that
24 As novelist Len Deighton put it only most recently, “Perhaps if Britain didn’t share with
Hollywood the English language, and its demand for worldwide ‘product,’ we could still have a
film industry.” “Sand and Sea,” Sight and Sound January 1994: 33.
25 Glenn Frankel, “Britain’s Prestige Buffeted By Political, Financial Woes,” Washington
Post, 4 August 1994: A l, A16.
26 Michael Jones, “Overhyped and Over Here—US View Hits Britain," The Sunday Times of
London, 9 August 1992: 2/5a.
27 See Michael Lewis, “Deconstructing Anglophilophobia,” M, December 1991:38.
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68
image which promises to bind us even if Britain declines to irrelevance: as Jones
quotes then-Ambassador Ray Seitz,
America’s relationship with the United Kingdom extends
well beyond the official structures of government, and under
hard light, it easily exceeds the sentiments and stereotypes
which so often adorn its description. The relationship is eco
nomic, cultural, individual. Over the decades the Americans
and the British have developed a framework within which
we share aspirations, patterns of thought, ways of doing
business and how we look at things. There is an Anglo-
American habit.28
However much traditional sentiments and stereotypes may be exceeded, the habit
Seitz speaks of would still seem to function through the awareness of those images,
whether their verisimilitude may be argued or not. From the MTV-ready action
melodrama of The Young Americans to the hip-hop-inflected black nationalism of
Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), British film in the 1990s would seem to be
displaying the homogenizing framework of such a “habit.”
But as the British monarchy has seemed to reach its popular apotheosis just
as it dissolves into a mire of adultery, Dallas-styled businessmen, and American TV
movies, neither has contemporary history and its discomforts erased previous An
glo-American frameworks dominated by the traditions of English nationalism. The
British are also still “British” in the very English sense usually found as well in
avenues of traditional American Anglophilia, among the Alistair Cookes, the Miss
Marple murders, and the Ralph Lauren dreams of Merchant Ivory period pieces.
Just as Margaret Thatcher seemed intent upon re-making Britain in the image of
England’s relatively prosperous, middle class south (or was it that she re-made
Britain to the advantage of southern England?), so has American Anglophilia often
mapped Britain as Milton’s green and pleasant land, lightly dotting its urban spots
28 Jones 2/5a.
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69
with colorful ethnic sorts—Scots, Welsh, people who talk like The Beatles did.
This world remains only a little removed from that of the determinedly “eccentric”
comedies Ealing once so happily exported and, ever since the retro splash of A Fish
Called Wanda in the 1980s, the British (and their American partners) have tried re
peatedly to reproduce. American audiences, however, have not responded so prof
itably to the campaigns of the subsequent Nuns on the Run, The Pope Must Die,
Splitting Heirs, King Ralph, even Disney’s under-appreciated Funny Bones
(1995), as they have to the nostalgia of Merchant Ivory. Yet The Crying Game,
“eccentric” as well in its gender-bending ways, unexpectedly surpassed the public
ity and the box office of Howards End (both 1992); Merchant Ivory may endow
such Englishness with a beauty and quiet grace, but it does not extend through to
contemporary Britain, and that limitation seems to inspire the general critical per
ception that films such as Howards End are exquisite but stillborn. Indeed there is
something evoked by these two films which would suggest that they come from
different nations altogether, a difference denying any overlap between the one
strand of Englishness and the deliberate polyphonies orchestrated by The Crying
Game or, say, Hanif Kureishi’s much more distinct comedies of life under Thatcher
(My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, his directorial debut, Lon
don Kills Me, and the television adaptation of his 1990 novel, The Buddha o f Sub
urbia, with music by David Bowie).
Within the din of this London culture clash, the British repeatedly turn their
attention toward the US and its influence. As a result, Americans play significant
roles in many of the films mentioned above, but to dissimilar effects. For example,
Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) is partially structured by the London
exploits of an American photographer, Anna, who is cheerfully documenting Brit
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70
ain’s death throes. More than a simple, opportunistic voyeur, her sympathetic status
as an new age Anglophile is uncovered by an initially puzzled Sammy when he asks
her why she has “w” tattooed on either buttock: her blue “wow” locates the center
of the shattering pleasure she finds in the film’s burning streets and fashion
conscious riots. The film’s release title may have substituted “Laid” for Kureishi’s
original “Fucked,” but by the end “Fucked Over” better describes Sammy and
Rosie’s depressed state—it is Anna who has best fulfilled the title’s literal promise.
In less overtly sexual terms, London Kills Me (1991) places Hemingway, an expa
triate American restaurateur played by Brad Dourif, within a role variously defined
by Thatcherism as well as leftover 1960s sentiment, all the while positioning him as
the protagonist’s ironic (and forgiving) savior.
However, the very different A Fish Called Wanda (1988) located its own
brash American-ness within a structural opposition to a staid British moldiness—a
much clearer opposition. It is almost as if the latter film’s venerable director, The
Lavender Hill Mob’s Charles Crichton, had decided to retell as an ironic sex farce
the decline of the Ealing years and the resultant flight of talent to Hollywood.
American con-artists arrive in the UK, attempt to swindle their British partners in
crime, betray their own plans, and finally abscond with the British fall guy-tumed
accomplice. When John Cleese flies off with Jamie Lee Curtis at the end of Wanda,
there is a distinct sense in which British masculinity, not to mention filmmaking
prowess, has been restored through its contact with the cliches of the US’ vulgar
vitality; Ealing’s last chief, Michael Balcon, found that siding with the Americans-
on-the-make (MGM, in Balcon’s case) offered the only escape from British stag
nancy, and this still seems to be the case in A Fish Called Wanda. Left on his own,
Cleese’s Archie (given Caiy Grant’s British birth name) would have remained im
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mobile, stranded within the film’s abundantly illustrated mire of pathological mis
anthropy, a state made only barely livable by strict national norms of repression. It
is also through the agency of the film’s American stars, Kevin Kline and Jamie
Leigh Curtis, that the film achieved international currency, and this dynamic ener
gizes its narrative. Sniffing his armpits all the way to an Academy Award, Kline’s
caricature of the dimwitted, Nietzsche-spouting criminal blocks out Cleese’s Monty
Python past and plops him into the romantic hero’s seat beside Curtis’ Wanda, who
is/holds the film’s prize; it is fitting that the award should have gone to screen and
stage star Kline’s hammy-ness, since it is his comic forfeiture of Wanda which re
shapes the mostly passive Archie. Aging, and by the late 1980s most widely known
in the US for his television ads, Cleese’s—and Archie’s—comic miscasting blends
with his nationality. Even though Archie finally takes action in the film’s conclu
sion, the film still narrativizes the profitability of playing stooge to the Americans.
One finds something in this national temperament, Satyajit Ray once sniffed, that is
simply incompatible with such activity as filmmaking, and it is this perspective
which A Fish Called Wanda dramatizes in a peculiarly productive manner.29
Whatever fluctuations its history provides, in general British film has usu
ally stayed shy of the popular. Instead it has received the same snub that, as Geof
frey Nowell-Smith noted, Gramsci described concerning Italian literature: whatever
their status abroad, these self-consciously “popular” media have never been quite
popular, at least at home—a rale to which even the phenomenally popular Four
Weddings and a Funeral may simply be an exception.30 Even when British films
29 Charles Barr, introduction to All Our Yesterdays, ed. Barr (London: BFI, 1986) 9.
30 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “But Do We Need It?” British Cinema Now, ed. Martyn Auty and
Nick Roddick (London: BFI, 1985) 151.
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72
and stars have proven popular in Britain, and they have, the more audible of Brit
ain’s own critics have indeed been more disposed, traditionally, to agree rather than
disagree with Ray’s pessimism. Quoting Ray and a host of other British and inter
national skeptics, Charles Barr suggested that more serious scholarship concerning
British film has remained peculiarly invisible: the “real” work of history and criti
cism had little to do with British film, even at the peak of its mid 1980s’ popular
ity .31
These stereotypes of reserve may indeed explain much of the “reserved”
enthusiasm of British audiences, as well as its creators and critics, yet other, less
genteel explanations have been suggested as well. For example, in the early post
war period, Lindsay Anderson and the writers of Sequence either ignored or dis
dained the brief international breakthroughs of British film in favor of American
westerns and French art films. Not that they were not aware of their prejudice: An
derson acknowledged in a 1949 essay (entitled “British Cinema: The Descending
Spiral”) that
Perhaps the tendency is to treat the films of one’s own
country like its prophets—with less than justice. We are so
close to them as, week by week, they chum out of the stu
dios for our inspection; and now that their excellence has be
come almost an economic and political necessity (so that film
criticism is regarded by many as a form of national service),
the temptation to slash, to sneer rebelliously, is almost irre
sistible.32
Fittingly, little changed when Anderson and his generation eventually moved from
criticism to film production. At the historical juncture of “swinging” London’s fall
and the rise of British post-structuralist theory in the early 1970s, Anderson’s
stance was repeated by Thomas Elsaesser and Monogram, as well as the majority
31 Barr 3.
32 Lindsay Anderson, “British Cinema: The Descending Spiral,” Sequence 7 (Spring 1949): 6.
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73
on board Screen; this time the pessimism was directed toward the progressive cre
dentials of the 1960s British New Wave.33 Before the leap in critical respect and
interest that occurred later in the 1980s, what was best and brightest in film was re
peatedly spied beyond British borders.
Rank, Goldwyn, and the Small English Film
British producers, and their characteristic lack of reserve at key points, have
also helped to give British film history its familiar spiraling pattern of short-lived
triumph and inevitable catastrophe. After the success of The Private Life o f Henry
Vlll in the 1930s, Alexander Korda’s over-extension and eventual collapse pro
vided a paradigm for failure stretching all the way to Lew Grade in the 1970s and
Goldcrest in the 1980s. J. Arthur Rank, however, provided the paradigm with its
most flamboyant example, one which allowed Hollywood no anonymity: American
film may be Nowell-Smith’s “hidden history” of British popular culture, but the
Rank Organization’s rise and fall in the 1940s forced a clear reckoning of Holly
wood’s hegemonizing power.34
The British film industry has long been cloaked in a guise of romantic ide
alism concerning both its ambitions and its prospects. That the British market’s size
at its peak was incapable of supporting Hollywood-scale production—such argu
ments were temporarily forgotten during the quota-supported boom of the 1930s,
but they were quickly remembered once the industry collapsed later in the decade.
Britain may have been capable of attaining a level of production topped only by
33 For example, see Barr, 7, and Alan Lovell, “Brecht in Britain—Lindsay Anderson,” Screen
16.4 (1975-76): 62-80.
34 Nowell-Smith 151.
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74
Hollywood, but, as Rank believed (he was primarily a film distributor), more
stiffly protectionist policies could better make this level profitable.35
Protection at home, however, was to be matched by expansion in the US
market, and so during the Second World War Rank began to prepare a slate of big
budget productions designed to sell British “quality” to an American audience soon
to be newly open. With the break-up of the studios’ monopolistic hold on distribu
tion and exhibition again on track, the US seemed to invite renewed competition in
the post-war era: the coming Paramount decrees promised to offer a new commer
cial environment for the expensive spectacle of adaptations such as Rank’s Caesar
and Cleopatra (1945) and Great Expectations (1946).36 As British film history has
it, however, hubris never seems to go un-rewarded. Caesar and Cleopatra, the most
expensive British film yet produced, opened to derisive reviews, while David
Lean’s well-received Great Expectations failed to match its urban box office and
Academy Awards with mainstream American success.
But with a bravado which apparently caught Rank by surprise, in August,
1947, Prime Minister Atlee’s Labour government announced a new ad valorem tax
scheme which would allow the American studios to export only 25 per cent of their
rental receipts. After costs, the US industry estimated they would receive a figure
lower than 4 per cent of their total box office figures. Just as had happened to Aus
tralia and other countries who had attempted higher tariffs, Britain found itself the
target of an embargo cutting off all new film product from the US.37
35 Paul Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1987) 130-131.
36 Swann 94-5.
37 Swann 89-90.
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75
Within industry publications such as Variety, the trade war may have been
expressed in terms of economics and competitive pride, but for American audi
ences, Hollywood’s public relations used a tactic from the upcoming Cold War.
Appearing almost immediately, an article signed by Samuel Goldwyn took The
New York Times Magazine as a pulpit from which to assert that “America has a
much more profound stake than the prospective fifty-million dollar annual loss of
revenue . . . Rather, “we are engaged in a world-wide ideological contest,” and
in that contest, the motion picture may be “the best kind of propaganda for the
American way of life, precisely because they are not made with any propaganda
motive.”38 Not all popular American accounts had been so aggressive. For exam
ple, only months before, Harper’ s Magazine had quoted Goldwyn’s previously fa
vorable impression to lead off a detailed history of the current British film industry,
an essay which praised the British for no longer “aping” Hollywood even while it
fretted over Rank’s plans “to go bald-headed for the American market.”39 Post-tax,
Goldwyn worried that in fact the British film industry would be hurting only itself
by being forced to abandon its “artistic integrity” and produce enough films to re
place the embargoed American product. Why, he pondered ominously, should Brit
ain take such steps just when, “as never before in her history, Britain needs foreign
markets for her films, not only because of the revenues involved, but also because
of her need for friends in the world”?40
38 Samuel Goldwyn, “World Challenge to Hollywood,” The New York Times Magazine 31
August 1947: 8. Also see another related article carrying Goldwyn’s byline, “Our Movies Speak
for US,” The Saturday Review 1 April 1950: 10+.
39 Cyril Ray, “These British Movies,” Harper’ s Magazine June 1947: 517,523.
40 Goldwyn 30.
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76
Despite their contrasts, both Goldwyn’s anger and Harper’ s’ optimism
share implicit assumptions concerning how certain national characteristics of the
British may be most properly aligned with film production. What Goldwyn called
British artistic integrity, Harper’ s put in terms of pounds:
What is certain is that the new reputation of the British movie is based
more securely on cheap films like Brief Encounter than on costlier
pieces. So too is the movie as a truly national art, which is a new status
for Britain. Homemade movies of the same kind, rather than the Caesars
and the Henry Vs, are responsible for last year’ ten per cent drop in
Hollywood’s takes in Britain itself and in India, South Africa, and Aus
tralia.4 1
Much the same had been often said of John Grierson and the previous decade’s
documentary film movement. However “new,” this perception that the film’s in
dustry’s limitations are what is most British about it hardly died with Hollywood’s
embargo. Eight months after announcing the tax, Britain capitulated under terms not
entirely to the liking of US studios, yet far from the goals set by Atlee’s govern
ment; much to the relief of exhibitors, American films once more filled their book
ings.42
Forty years after the embargo, however, Screen could point to Sight and
Sound and chide it for having barely altered the overly familiar call for ‘“slightly
risky, low budget pictures’ which might involve ‘quality craftsmanship’ and tackle
‘more ambitious and relevant material.’“43 The song had grown old. But in appar
41 Ray 523.
42 Swann 102.
43 Andrew Higson and Steve Neale, “Introduction: Components of the National Film Cul
ture,” Screen 26.1 (1985): 8.
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77
ent agreement with Goldwyn, Harper’ s and Sight and Sound, not to mention the
think-small ethos of the 1950s Free Cinema and 1980s Channel Four eras, Paul
Swann also concludes that it is the “overt and deliberate rejection of Hollywood”
which most binds together British film history.44 Duncan Petrie’s argument for re
alism as a “national mode” makes a similar case for what is most essential about
British film.45
Whether or not this pattern of rejection is desirable, it was (is) a rejection
not very troubling to Goldwyn or, by extension, Hollywood. As Goldwyn sug
gested in his rebuttal to the British tax, the kindly American studios had no desire to
see the British industry remade into an unkind parody of their own (already fading)
image: just as the artistic integrity of British film seemed to be flowering, “it would
be almost tragic if those pictures should become slap-dash concoctions put on film
simply for the sake of keeping theaters open and providing something which passes
for entertainment”46 In an indirect manner this concern underlines Britain’s unique
relation to Hollywood as a foreign, but never quite foreign cinema: where the bor
der lies between the two has always been a matter of interpretation, a process com
plicated by similarities and tensions which go beyond the metonym of a shared lan
guage, and which shape the ways in which history is written.
Success and the Academy
One such writing of the parameters which Hollywood draws around itself
may be glimpsed in the records of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci
ences. Often minutely concerned with negotiating between Hollywood and nation
44 Swann 148-49.
45 Duncan Petrie, Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry (New York: St. Mar
tin’s Press, 1991) 143-149.
46 Goldwyn 30.
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78
ality, this history gives British identity roles which question its essential opposition
to the hegemony of international film. Since 1936, all English language films, re
gardless of their origin, have been eligible for nomination in the major categories,
and the remaining categories have been open since 1938.47 While the Academy’s
rules did not exclude (a dubbed) Grand Illusion from the 1938 list of nominations
for best picture, no non-English-speaking film was again nominated for the top
prize until Z in 1969. The concept of awards for “foreign films” (that is, foreign
language films) did not appear until Shoeshine's special award in 1947, and Mon
sieur Vincent's first “best foreign film” award in 1948. Since then the category’s
definition of what constitutes nationality and or the “foreign” has been often re
vised. In 1993, the Academy decided that a nominee for best foreign film must be
directed, written and produced by citizens of the nation submitting it to the Acad
emy; the same rule applies to a “substantial portion” of the film’s actors.48 In a time
when co-productions across national borders have often become the norm, not the
exceptions, the Academy has thus stripped a substantial number of films of their
eligibility, such as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Swiss entry, Red (1994).
On the other hand, since these ineligible co-productions are still potential
nominees in other categories, the Academy now has de facto labeled the hybrid
production to be simply not “foreign”; it is somehow indistinguishable from Hol
lywood itself. Fittingly, Red competed with American films in the director and
screenplay categories. Miramax, in turn, successfully played off of the Academy’s
rules in its 1995-96 campaign for Michael Radford’s II Postino: after Italy failed to
47 Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy
Awards (New York: Ballantine, 1987) 693,702.
48 David J. Fox, “Academy Changes the Rules for Foreign-Language Films,” Los Angeles
Times 18 August 1993: F2.
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79
nominate the film for best foreign film, because, in part, of the film’s English di
rector {1984, White Mischief), Miramax publicized the film’s exclusion. When the
1995 nominations were announced, II Postino became the first Italian language film
to be nominated for Best Picture—and Radford’s name was added to the director’s
list.
But while the foreign language multi-national film may have only recently
lost its “foreignness” to the Academy, the non-American film produced in English
is another matter altogether. Since English-language films have never been eligible
in the foreign language category, these films have been even less “foreign”; their
boundaries blur into Hollywood itself. It is tempting to see this logic at work in the
inclusion of Radford among the 1995 nominations for director, and in the exclusion
of Sense and Sensibility's Taiwan-based Ang Lee the same year, even though the
latter film was also nominated for Best Picture and other major awards. Lee’s Asian
presence may have seemed problematic to the film’s authenticity, while Radford’s
name helped to position his film within Hollywood’s purview.
The English language therefore provides a border which brings Britain, as
well as (theoretically, but far less often in practice) Canada, Australia, and all other
English-speaking nations, into Hollywood’s fold. Chariots o f Fire, the 1981 win
ner, may have started the cries that “the British are coming!” but the British had al
ready arrived well before. While the British presence at the Academy Awards may
most often be associated with the British New Wave of the 1960s, or with Chariots
of Fire and Gandhi in the 1980s, the British designation is scattered throughout the
Academy’s records (except in the foreign language category, in which Britain has
only once placed an entry, the 1993 Welsh film, Hedd Wyn). Beginning with
Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIITs Oscar for best actor of 1932-33, and the
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80
film’s nomination for the best picture, and extending through the 1940s, ten films
recognized as British were nominated for best picture, and eight others were nomi
nated for awards from acting to screenplay to cinematography.
Yet these designations of “Britishness” do little to illustrate the ways in
which Britain was and was not named within Hollywood. Besides Henry VIII, the
other British films nominated in the 1930s were Pygmalion, The Citadel, and
Goodbye, Mr. Chips', all were productions of the short-lived MGM-British, and, in
the case of the latter two, little more than British location shoots for what would
otherwise have been American productions. On the one hand was The Citadel, star
ring Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell, and directed by King Vidor; on the other
was its competitor for best picture of 1938, The Adventures o f Robin Hood, star
ring the Australian Errol Flynn and directed by William Keighley and Michael Cur
tiz. Was the former as clearly British as the latter was American? The story goes
that, if Donat had not had the clout of a hit, The Count of Monte Cristo, he might
not have persuaded Louis B. Mayer to allow The Citadel to film abroad, a move
which would have made this film no more British than the “American” Rebecca.49
Both Goldwyn and Harper’ s maintained that Britain had only recently be
gun to offer the United states a recognizable cinema, yet British nationality and
culture had always been a persistent accent throughout the Academy’s history, from
George Arliss, whose leading role in Disraeli won an Oscar in 1930, through the
war-era Anglophilia of How Green Was My Valley and Mrs. Miniver. In much the
same way many other nationalities have been mobilized as signs of cultural differ
ence within the ranks of the Academy’s lists, but usually without the same fluidity
characteristic of the British during the sound era. Few were the “foreign” actresses
49 Wiley and Bona 86.
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who, like Claudette Colbert, could so thoroughly connote American-ness in Pari
sian settings such as Midnight's (1939). Yet her screen persona was still part of a
binary balanced between the complete simulation of “American” identity or the
Eternal French of Maurice Chevalier; neither Colbert nor Chevalier were allowed
the uncanny fusions between “American” and Other of a British expatriate such as
Cary Grant, Charles Laughton, or, taking on an old Laughton role in Fancy Pants,
even Bob Hope.50 Nor, for that matter, was the Anglo-Irish Greer Garson given
such latitude; during her years of box office popularity, she was fixed as quintes-
sentially British—that is to say, English. Mr. Miniver, Walter Pidgeon, might pass,
but Mrs. Miniver stayed more firmly foreign. Until the chameleon-like Emily Lloyd
in the past two decades, female British stars in Hollywood have had somewhat less
opportunity than their male compatriots to play both sides of the Atlantic; it is Eng
lish masculinity which has instead been the subject of virtuosic shifts and evoca
tions of nationality.
Through these shifts British masculinity has reacted to Americanization, and
accrued meaning which melds gender and nationality and then disquietingly returns
it to American shores. Interacting with the history of national cinemas provided by
the Academy Awards, this process may be dramatically glimpsed in the British male
actor’s dialectic between the “the body” and “the Bard.”
Hamlet's Soliloquy
Either coupled or independent of one another, British culture and actors,
from Robin Hood to Charles Laughton, played a variety of more or less visible
50 Robert Downey, Jr., has recently followed a similar path, moving gracefully from gay
American roles in films such as Less Than Zero (1987) and Home For the Holidays (1995) to Eng
lish roles in Chaplin (1992) and Restoration (1995).
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roles within Hollywood. This practice was linked, no doubt, to the figure Goldwyn
cited for Britain’s share of the Hollywood’s foreign market—85 per cent5 1 But
while Hollywood effectively repackaged Britain for British consumption, much to
Rank’s chagrin, it also provided the basis for what became both Rank’s most
striking assault upon the US market as well as the backdrop for his post-Paramount
decrees retreat. Only a year after the lift of the British embargo, the Academy nomi
nated two Rank co-productions for best picture and a total of eight other awards.
That these two films won both the black and white and color awards for set decora
tion was itself hardly a precedent; Great Expectations and Black Narcissus had won
the same awards the year before, just as the embargo was ending and Hollywood
was complaining of the settlement’s terms. A literary adaptation and a lush Powell
and Pressburger melodrama, Hamlet and The Red Shoes neatly seemed to mirror
the earlier pair from 1947. But when the 1948 awards were announced in March,
1949, the breakup of the studios had already had its effect upon the Academy: no
longer, decreed the Big Five, would the awards ceremonies be supported by the
studios. The Academy, however, waited until after the Awards were held to an
nounce the studios’ withdrawal. With this timing the Academy was able to mobilize
the outcome of the awards in order to retain its corporate sponsorship: the dark
horse candidate, Lawrence Olivier’s—and Rank’s—production of Hamlet became
the first non-American (but, as noted above, not precisely “foreign,” either) pro
duction to win the best picture award. The trade papers still fumed: “From
ANYWAY you look at it, Hamlet was NOT the best picture of the year,” the Hol
lywood Reporter declared, since who else but a dupe of the “New York critics”
could convince themselves “that Britain is capable of making better pictures than
Goldwyn 30.
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Hollywood?”52 But shamed by the insinuation of bad sportsmanship, as the lore of
the Oscars recounts it, the Big Five and their followers gave in to the Academy’s
pressure and resumed funding the Awards.53
In 1946, Rank had given Olivier’s earlier production of Henry V a costly
road-show release in the US, and subsequent British “quality” productions such as
The Red Shoes either imitated Henry V s aspirations to the theater’s prestige, or,
like Great Expectations, performed under expectations in American mass mar
kets.54 Coming at the end rather than the beginning of a British resurgence, Hamlet
symbolically led the post-embargo British film industry into the Luise Rainer syn
drome of defeat through too much triumph. After Hamlet's win, no British film
achieved the particular alchemy of financial and critical support to be nominated for
best picture until Room at the Top heralded the British New Wave in 1959. While
this simple image of British decline ignores the myriad factors besetting British film
production during the 1950s, the occasional nomination given to an Ealing comedy
during this time seems to be exactly what Goldwyn and Harper’ s hoped for most:
the un-Hollywood-like British film, rich in local “character” and good writing,
cheaply made but classy, occasionally deserving a screenplay nomination.
“Sheer Music”
As a milestone, Hamlet may be compared to these films in its evocation of
British monetary and creative authorship, yet its commercial acceptance in the US is
much more interwoven with Hollywood’s incorporation of British culture. While
the Old Vic no doubt provided the most immediate context for Olivier’s perform
52 Quoted in Mason Wiley and Damien Bona 191.
53 Wiley and Bona 190.
54 Swann 97-98.
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ance, his previous roles in Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Pride and Prejudice
also shaped his embodiment of Hamlet. Box office star and recently knighted actor,
Olivier bridged several conflicting discourses concerning culture, stardom, nation
ality, genre, and, most interestingly, gender and sexuality.
The London film critic C. M. Lejeune, writing fora 1948 American audi
ence, posed these conflicts as the disquieting result of when “‘The Bard’ Competes
With The Body.’” Despairing that “the ordinary modem customer in the loges is
far less concerned with The Bard than he is with The Body or The Voice,. .. there
seems little point in trying to adapt Shakespeare to the people, until the people can
be adapted to Shakespeare.”55 Citing other British critics, what most discomforted
Lejeune about Olivier’s Hamlet was not just its alteration of the play’s text; “Make
no doubt about it,” Lejeune asserts, “it is the star’s share in the production of Henry
V and Hamlet, not the Bard’s, that has caught the public’s imagination.” Even more
incriminating, it was “the startling blond hair-do that secured for Sir Lawrence
Olivier the effect of playing in a permanent spotlight.”56 Like a vain Hollywood
starlet, Olivier seems to have compromised not only masculine propriety, but the
preeminence of Shakespeare’s words, all in the dubious name of achieving audi
ence appeal.
Yet the history Lejeune herself provides of Shakespeare and film suggests it
is not possibly so simple, particularly considering Olivier’s frothy, romantic, but
unsuccessful As You Like It (1936) during his first stay in Hollywood. Playing
Hamlet is another matter. As Francis Barker reads the play, it is a chimera: Ham
55 C. M. Lejeune, ‘“The Bard’ Competes With ‘The Body,’“ The New York Times Magazine
12 December 1948: 60.
56 Lejeune 24-25.
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85
let’s plea in Act I for the “too too solid flesh to melt” is one marker of modernity
amidst the play’s opposing force of Jacobean corporeality. The two struggle
throughout the play, and determine the bodily destruction which provides its final
spectacle. While modem drama may function through ethical and other metaphorical
forms of death,
the intense corporeality of the Jacobean spectacle that sur
rounds him and his dark, vacant mystery rejects him like an
alien virus. The text-world rounds on him and is not content,
finished, until by means it can only half acknowledge it has
reduced him to its own dimension. As the visible body
which Fortinbras orders the four captains to carry "to the
stage” the unproductive prince is finally at one with the order
of the plenum: or, in its master language, “most royal”
(V.ii.394-6).57 [italics his]
The actor playing Hamlet must embody the focus of this clash between “the Oedipal
Prince’ ”s modem subjectivity and the play’s driving physicality, and finally, be
rendered abject “ to the stage. ” No wonder that those culturally defined as more
“bodily” have had occasional access to the role: besides the tradition of women as
suming the role, a 1994 British production cast a star of Angels in America for what
became discussed as “the gay Hamlet,” just as Terry Southern’s The Magic Chris
tian (1969) had featured Laurence Harvey’s solemn striptease Hamlet bumping and
grinding down to his “bare bodkin,” all for the amusement of Peter Seller’s cheer
fully perverse billionaire and Ringo Starr, his adopted “son.”
But one of the most interesting re-readings of Hamlet occurred forty years
after Olivier’s Hamlet, in the conclusion to Withnail & T s bittersweet tale of two
morose unemployed actors sharing drugs, drink, and a flat in Camden Town at the
tail-end of the 1960s—Withnail and, as the credits identify him, the eponymous,
57 Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New
York: Methuen, 1984) 40-41.
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86
John Lennon-Iook-alike “& I” of Bruce Robinson’s autobiographical 1987 film.
After Withnail spends almost the entire film either passing himself and his flat mate
off as lovers, or fearing that others will mistake him as gay, he stands abandoned,
as his flat mate, his hair shorn, leaves him for a role and a more sober life in the
new decade. Previously in the film, “real” homosexuality only existed in the form
of WithnaiFs Uncle Monty, a prissy, neurotic former actor who regrets never
playing the Dane. But left wandering a park in the rain, Withnail, an effete drunk
from the upper-class who has seemed more interested in commercials than Shake
speare (and in intoxication more than love), solemnly speaks Hamlet’s speech to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstem to an audience of soggy, caged monkeys. Richard E.
Grant’s Withnail suddenly displays a talent we never imagined he had:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.58
Withnail, however, omits the final two phrases, and instead repeats “nor woman
neither”—his speech sends the film into the territory of longing The Hours and
Times (1992) similarly explored in its ambivalent romance of Brian Epstein and
Lennon himself. While in the play Rosencrantz’s smile prompts a discussion of
actors, and Hamlet’s interest in the troop which just arrived, Withnail & / simply
ends with its “unproductive prince” turning from the camera (now in the monkeys’
cage) and walking away, leaving his tale to be carried, like Hamlet, to the stage by
Robinson’s “I.” Man delights him not, yet. . . this formerly blase Hamlet has
58 Hamlet II.2.
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87
tragically lost his Fortinbras, his Horatio. It is a strikingly subtle conclusion to a
film which all along played by remarkably complex rules: from the very beginning,
Robinson stresses the intense need his “I” feels for Withnail, and refuses to intro
duce any women whatsoever who might place that need within a heterosexual con
text of male bonding. This narrative emphasis upon male friendship and love out
side of defined sexualities finally fragments into the flat mate’s future “normal” ca
reer as a leading man, and Withnail’s sad assumption of his Uncle Monty’s role as
a Shakespearean actor. All of the flat mate’s earlier attraction becomes suddenly
displaced onto (and left with) the aptly-named Withnail.59
It is difficult to compare Grant’s thin, greasy-haired Withnail with Olivier’s
posh prince—visually the two are opposites. Yet to the camera both present a cor
poreality which might long for the “too too solid flesh to melt” in its distance from
phallic masculine potency, but which nevertheless reiterates the actors’ physical
presence. Grant and Olivier provide material contact with their characters’ often
oblique desires, whether it is Withnail spreading menthol ointment over his frail na
ked frame to keep warm, or Hamlet turning toward the camera to sigh in full glam
our lighting and soft-focus. Grant repels, while Olivier entices, but both present a
physical presence outside of the norm.
What may seem most striking in Lejeune’s discomfort with Hamlet and
Olivier is her acknowledgment of the male Shakespearean actor’s appeal; not a
competition between but a displacement of “the Body” onto “the Bard.” Such an
actor properly stands in a spotlight as well, but one created through the music of his
vocal seduction. Bleached blond and fey, Olivier, as Lejeune described him, fits
59 Since its release in 1987,Withnail & / has enjoyed a certain cult status in both Britain and
the US. Morrissey’s Vauxhall and I album (1994) plays off of the film’s gritty, homoerotic mel
ancholy.
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smoothly into a much later Sight and Sound comparison of American Method ac
tors, and their difference from “classical English actors like Gielgud or Redgrave or
Olivier”; like Grant’s Withnail, the latter “could weave a spell with their speeches,
and create a character out of the sheer music of their language.”60 In such contrasts
it would seem that the American Method actor is a fleshly, solid thing, these Eng
lish actors seem little more than ethereal, body-less sprites, but that comparison
misses the quality (and connotations) of the “character” which they give birth to
through their voice. In Lejeune’s words there is a sense in which the “sheer music”
of voice and body imperils the strength and authenticity of British culture and iden
tity, or more to the point, the heterosexist masculinity implicated within this authen
ticity.
What Sight and Sound calls the beauty of “their language” may have set
these actors apart even at home. The bisexual Olivier’s apprenticeship to Noel
Coward, Gielgud’s relatively open gay life, Charles Laughton’s poorly closeted
one—these were passing aspects of an assumed queemess which Hollywood films
played off of with various degrees of explicitness and thematic values. John M.
Clum has gone so far as to describe as a paradigmatic moment for the treatment of
male homosexuality in both American stage and film, the 1933 Broadway produc
tion of Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree, starring a pre-Shakespeare-era
Olivier as a kept boy.6 1 Not only did the play manage to elude the New York cen
60 Hal Hinson, “Some Notes on Method Actors,” Sight and Sound 53.3 (1984): 200.
61 William Wyler saw Olivier in The Green Bay Tree; later he directed Olivier in his Ameri
can breakthrough, Wuthering Heights (1939), a source which is concerned with how a woman may
identify with a man defined as outside of her own culture, even her own “race” (“I am Heathcliff!”);
Olivier’s body marks a contested site in the film. See Jan Herman’s biography, A Talent fo r Trou
ble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler, excerpted in Los Angeles
Calendar, 12 October 1995: 7.
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89
sors by eliminating all of the more explicit allusions to homosexuality in the original
London production, it managed to connote homosexuality simply by refusing to
name it. Homosexuality therefore became a matter of culture, deportment, and na
tionality:
For American audiences, The Green Bay Tree established
the stereotypical picture of the homosexual as wealthy, ef
fete—and British. He would be played in Hollywood by
Charles Laughton or George Sanders. Slightly Americanized
in Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he would be one of the effete
psychopathic killers of Rope (1948) and Strangers on a
Train (1951).62
Although Clum’s rhetoric over-simplifies a much more complex historical negotia
tion Vito Russo and others have more fully described, it does seem more than a
passing coincidence that the shifting eras of the “professional sissies” and deadly
queens that Russo describes should have spoken (like Ian McNiece’s Uncle Monty
in Withnail & I) in the often Anglophilic accents of Franklin Pangbom, Clifton
Webb and George Sanders.6 3
Perhaps chief among them was Sanders. An actor by apprenticeship to
Coward (like Olivier), Sanders was technically Russian by birth, American by star
dom, and only English by affectation.64 Like the Missouri-born Vincent Price,
Sanders’ effete, precise diction and mellifluous tones allowed for both American
and British characters, in either case connoting a predictable blend of cultured vil
lainy, sexual perversity, and English civility. During the peak of his career in the
1940s and early 1950s, Sanders slipped easily between leads in the original The
62 John M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modem Drama (New York: Colum
bia University Press, 1992) 99.
63 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper and
Row, 1981) 59.
64 See Sheridan Morley’s gossipy Tales From the Hollywood Raj (New York: Viking, 1983)
130.
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Saint and The Falcon film series, and memorable villainous turns in Rebecca, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, and All About Eve. All the while his range of film roles
deftly refused to ground his vocal habits in either nationality or predilection alone.
Much as Wayne Koestenbaum has described opera divas in The Queen's
Throat, Sanders and these other actors spoke in a “sheer music” which displaced
desire upward through the voice, creating audible pleasures which could not be ex
pressed bodily.65 In this light Donald Spoto’s claim that, for over a decade, Olivier
and Danny Kaye had been lovers makes a certain unexpected sense: it was the vo
cally-gifted Kaye’s performance of his wife Sylvia Fine’s tongue-twisting comic
lyrics which originally brought him fame, and positioned him as a musical-comedy
analogue to Olivier’s prowess with Shakespearean verse.66
In films such as Wonder Man (1945), The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), and
The Secret Life o f Walter Mitty (1947), Kaye’s persona supports the narrative em
phasis upon his character’s comic difference from typical masculine norms. Yet
within Hollywood this difference hardly estranged or even greatly distinguished
either Kaye or these films. However, Olivier’s status as an Shakespearean actor,
film director, and an English heartthrob in Hollywood provided a highly visible site
where the general collision between British and American postwar cultures took on
meaning and significance. While the major concern of this study is the significance
of the English actor in American culture, it is crucial to understand the British dis-
65 Wayne Kosestenbaum, The Queen’ s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of De
sire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993) 156, and in passing.
66 Donald Spoto, Laurence Olivier: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1992) 228-30.
Danny Kaye represents an interesting case apart from other male musical stars such as Astaire or
Gene Kelly and their representation in studies such as Steve Cohan’s “‘Feminizing’ the Song-and-
Dance Man: Fred Astaire and the Spectacle of Masculinity in the Hollywood Musical,” in Screen
ing the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Cohan and Ina Rae Hark
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 62.
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91
course concerning Americanization which came wrapped around this figure: the
next chapter will locate Olivier and other English actors within the postwar tradition
of social criticism which has by this decade been recognized as British cultural
studies. By providing the historical context for cultural studies’ approach to Ameri
can culture, the relation of cultural studies to the Other will become clearer, and the
significance of American borrowings more complex. This chapter began with the
images of two English faces, Grant’s and Davidson’s: to understand their meaning
not only for cultural studies, but for American culture in general, it is necessary to
go back to the tensions which grew from Britain’s tumultuous recovery form W.
W. II.
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CHAPTER 2
The Odor of Boiled Milk
Politically, Americanization provoked the right and left to similar reactions
in postwar Britain. Their reasons, however, were different. Although C. M. Leje-
une wrote from a culturally conservative, tradition-bound position, she sounded
fears which were increasingly heard from what would become cultural studies’
more left-oriented approach as well: Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and oth
ers such as George Orwell, formulated their rhetoric in reaction to what they saw as
the reactionary threats of Americanization, not its crass populism as Lejeune did.
However much great British actors such as David Garrick may have once been as
sociated with internal, comparatively naturalistic approaches to their art, the sense
of authenticity these actors had once evoked was now much more a popularly-
prized property of American movies and stage; and yet these claims did not so much
bolster the populist appeal of American-influenced popular culture for what would
become British cultural studies as emphasize its deceptive, shallow dangers. Al
though cultural studies in the 1980s would begin to build an intellectual rapproche
ment with American popular culture, some of cultural studies’ British forerunners
were not so prepared to accept postwar reparation from Hollywood.
As I will argue in this chapter and the next, such postwar resistance to
Americanization fed into what eventually became a remasculinization of the working
class, visible in the early films of the British New Wave and trumpeted in the pages
of the film journal Sequence. Yet the binarism between American and British estab
lished at these early stages of cultural studies was itself unstable, and, as may be
seen in the social criticism of Sequence author and filmmaker Lindsay Anderson,
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93
by the conflicting desires and agendas shared among those on the left. Once again,
failure leaves its mark in the history of this process of representation: moving from
cultural studies to the context of British film, I will argue that the larger arc of film
history situates this unsuccessful remasculinization as another sign of what may be
read as the queer Otherness of English masculinities.
Hollywood’s “Feminizing” Attack
Charting a post-war end for earlier optimistic scenarios of working class
progress, Hoggart despaired in The Uses o f Literacy (1958) over the loss of a for
merly rich culture. And lingering throughout Williams’ The Long Revolution
(1961) was the nostalgia for a pastoral, English “common culture,” just as Orwell’s
bitter blend of Stalinism and pop frivolity had earlier animated Nineteen Eighty-
Four (1949).1 There did not seem to be much of a way out. Atlee’s muddled La
bour government ended many of the left’s certainties, and the popularity of the
Conservative Party’s subsequent consensus platform questioned the rest: through
the fifties the left looked on as the proletariat chucked its traditions (and Labour
membership) for prosperity as consumers and would-be Americans. Hoggart dis
covered that even the manly civilities of the comer pub were forgotten: a new gen
eration of milk-bar boys squandered their virility in “a peculiarly thin and pallid
form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odor of boiled milk.”2 As
David Morley and Kevin Robins have described it, for Hoggart and other defend
ers, “the authentic muscle and masculinity of the British working class” was under
1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971); Raymond Wil
liams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1975); George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-
Four(New York: Hartcourt, Brace, 1949).
2 Hoggart 248.
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94
a “feminizing” attack “from an excess of Americana characterized by passivity, lei
sure and domesticity.”3
Hollywood, of course, was prominent within this excess as it eventually
began to rain down upon post-war Britain. Within its excess was also to be found
the body and voice of the British classical actor, re-inscribed there without the high
culture guarantees usually distancing the legitimate stage from its audience. In Hol
lywood the body of the English theatrical actor (or those like Sanders and Price
who drew upon its tradition) may have been safely elsewhere, but for the British,
the male actor’s body and its homoerotics were far more immediate.
In this sense, both Lejeune and Hoggart employ similar versions of what
Sean Cubitt names the British “binary of the hard and the soft,” in which all that is
“soft—American chewing gum, milk bars and Frank Sinatra for Hoggart in the
1950s; homosexuality, drugs and intellectuals in the 1980s—is despised.”4 In
Hoggart’s milk-bar image, even the Hollywood tough guy corrupts British mascu
linity, leading the young men to “waggle one shoulder or stare, as desperately as
Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs.”5 As Lejeune despises Olivier’s
Hamlet for being soft and narcissistic, so the Film Hamlet becomes aligned with the
softening affect of Hollywood, and part of its task to make Shakespeare concise,
understandable, pleasurable—in effect, American; in this same tradition she quotes
not only Charles and Mary Lamb’s “tidy little” Shakespeare-for-children adapta-
3 David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Spaces of Identity: Communications Technologies and
the Reconfiguration of Europe,” Screen 30.4 (1989): 20.
4 Sean Cubitt, “Introduction: Over the Borderlines,” Screen 30.4 (1989): 6.
5 Hoggart 247.
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95
tions, but Norma Shearer’s Romeo and Juliet, Mickey Rooney’s A Midsummer
Night’ s Dream, and Mary Pickford’s The Taming of the Shrew.6
Only in the case of Hamlet the product is marked Rank and British— the
difference is that the American prestige productions reached across nationality to
appropriate a claim on high culture, while Hamlet (initially, that is) represented the
Goldwyn line of argument for a small-scale, intimate, non-competitive model for
British cinema. And like its ultimate example, Brief Encounter, this cinema is re
peatedly described (by contemporaries such as Swann as well as Goldwyn and
Harper’ s) in terms connoting passivity and femininity, giving British film the cast
of a dutiful wife, one who, like the tempted wife of Brief Encounter, may be
somewhat bored with Hollywood, but remains faithful in its vows. The tariff, after
all, vanished almost as magically as Brief Encounter’s dreamt-of adultery.
But Hamlet, it seems, did not fit this feminizing scenario as easily as Brief
Encounter, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Seventh Veil or other popular
British, female-targeted films of the 1940s, and not only because it went beyond
token status and took the Oscar away from its “deserving” American competitors.
Hamlet’s less than victorious reception in the British press, the quarrelsome debates
over Olivier’s abridgments, and Lejeune’s snipes over Hamlet’s appearance all
suggest that, for the British, there was a rather disturbing quality about slipping
something so associated with national culture as Shakespeare into the dainty slipper
of British film. Could it have been that Hamlet fit the slipper too well—that the
“hard” was not so hard all along?
6 C. M. Lejeune, ‘“The Bard’ Competes With ‘The Body,’“ The New York Times Magazine
12 December 1948: 24-5.
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Americanization and Sequence
The postwar period was a time when the charge of effeminacy pricked the
self-doubt of the upper class, and Leavisite literary criticism led the charge to
cleanse the study of English literature of any less-than-manly suspicions—a mis
sion Hoggart inherited and re-cast for the working class.7 Bleached, bobbed and
played by one of Noel Coward’s former proteges, Olivier’s Hamlet gained little
positive notice from the John Ford fans at Oxford starting Sequence and the Free
Cinema movement: John Grierson took puritanical pleasure in recounting Se
quence's puritanical dismissal of Olivier’s performance, his character purportedly
“dwarfed by the vastness of his settings.”8
That is not to say that these returning students, veterans of a radicalizing
wartime break in their education, fit snugly into the expressly heterosexualized
mold for the postwar man of the arts. But while the crowd led by Lindsay Ander
son, Tony Richardson, and Gavin Lambert have themselves often publicly departed
from the sexual and political norms for masculine behavior, the calls for a new cin
ema in essays such as Anderson’s “Angles of Approach,” “Stand Up! Stand Up!”
and “Get Out and Push!” were phrased with an archly masculine bombast.
Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer may be able now to almost wholeheartedly
compliment Olivier’s legacy when they claim that he “reigned as the king of actors,
a star superior in acting skill, if not charisma, to Hollywood actors, a testimonial
Figure to how British cinema was different from Hollywood.”9 But the discontents
7 Alan Sinfleld, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley and Los Ange
les: University of California Press, 1989) 63-64.
8 John Grierson, “Welcome Stranger!” Sight and Sound 18 (Spring 1949): 51.
9 Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer, '"Dead Again or A-Live Again: Postmodern or Postmor
tem?” Cinema Journal 33.4 (Summer 1994): 12.
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97
who crafted Sequence and the various other outlets for postwar frustration saw very
little to admire in such difference from Hollywood, taking it as yet another insulting
feminization. Not only did they sneer at the prestigious literary adaptation, they
chafed with often misogynistic indignation at the commercial success of
Greensborough melodramas, fussy Philistine “lady critics” like Lejeune, and the
Nanny-suffocated nursery of England in general.1 0 Echoing George Bernard
Shaw’s earlier claim that “we are a nation of governesses,”11 Anderson drew a
picture which would later become part of I f :
Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of
the Queen and her fairy-tale Prince, riding to Westminster in
a golden coach. Nanny lights the fire, and sits herself down
with a nice cup of tea and yesterday’s Daily Express', but she
keeps half an eye on us too, as we bring out our trophies
from abroad, the books and pictures we have managed to get
past the customs. (Nanny has a pair of scissors handy, to cut
out anything it wouldn’t be right for children to see.)1 2
Explicitly drawing upon Orwell’s diatribe against the provincial repression of Brit
ish culture, Anderson’s image of the Nanny parallels the paranoid threat of
“momism” Philip Wylie discovered poisoning an entire American generation; in
both cases the monstrous mother advances upon an infantilized male deprived of the
prowess proven in the war.1 3 In these respects, Anderson’s prose, if not his later
films, repeat Hoggart’s own dismay that the “cissies” dare to dismiss “the amuse
10 Lindsay Anderson, “Angles of Approach,” Sequence 2 (Winter 1947): 5-6; “Get Out and
Push!” in Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957) 155-56; “Stand
Up! Stand Up!” Sight and Sound 26 (Autumn 1956): 64.
11 George Bernard Shaw, New Statesman, 12 April 1913, quoted in Bookshelf '95, CD
ROM, 1995.
12 Anderson, “Get Out and Push!” 155.
13 Philip Wylie, A Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart, 1942), discussed in Michael
Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1987) 242.
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98
ments of the plain Englishman”—Hoggart’s distaste for the “odor of boiled milk”
floats through the work of both.14
Of course, by amusements Hoggart did not mean to champion all the
amusements of plain Englishmen. Anderson’s most provocative early film, O
Wonderland (1953), turns such a Hoggart-like eye toward a small working class
amusement park that the film’s withering scorn might seem to indict all leisure. Yet
the repulsion O Wonderland expresses for its passive, “debased” patrons links An
derson’s upper class Nanny rhetoric with the increasingly dulled working class
Hoggart would soon sketch.
Unlike Hoggart, however, the Sequence group’s proto-auteurist attachment
to Ford and to Hollywood in general provides another indication that the soft-hard
binarism between the US and Britain is an unstable and easily reversible one.
Where Hoggart was essentially isolationist, and American “momism” coupled the
powerful mother with the (foreign) threat of communism, Anderson’s Nanny is
most preoccupied with keeping her charges protected from the outside. In this im
age it is contemporary, Suez-era Britain which is soft, feminine and decaying,
while vitality lies outside its borders.
Anderson did not, however, wholeheartedly accept American culture, nor,
more particularly, the cult of “rebel” masculinity springing up around popular
Method film stars: he had, in fact, been one of the louder British voices denouncing
not only On the Waterfront's spurious appeals to democracy as “implicitly (if un
consciously) Fascist,” but Elia Kazan’s use of “the potency of Marlon Brando-
physical, emotional and dramatic. . . to palm off a number of political assertions,
14 Sinfield 63.
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99
all of them spurious and many of them pernicious.”15 Anderson may have attacked
On the Waterfront and Kazan’s use of Brando, yet his love for westerns like Ford’s
My Darling Clementine and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon derive from a valuation of
the authentic which nevertheless complements American vocabularies such as the
Method as well as Hoggart’s. Ford was hardly a Method-oriented director, but in
Anderson’s estimation, Ford’s goals (if not his actual words, as Anderson uncom
fortably discovered in their interviews) express similar concerns for emotional hon
esty in terms self-consciously rooted in US mythology.
Completed several decades after the early 1950s demise of Sequence, An
derson’s About John Ford combines his earlier work on Ford with both the con
flicts of his subsequent acquaintance with the director and a much later disgruntle-
ment toward the direction of 1970s film criticism and theory. The result is a sum
mary and capstone for the Free Cinema era: Ford’s films, Anderson asserts, are in
fact too deeply felt to be appreciated by contemporary society, and the reasons go
back beyond Hoggart, Leavis, Eliot or even the twentieth century:
Ford’s art at its best, the simplicity and subtlety of it, the
lack of ambiguity in its commitment, is too direct, too un
mistakable, too morally and emotionally challenging, for in
tellectual fashion in our declining West in this latter half of
the twentieth century. Nor is this just a malaise of the last
twenty-five years. It is a hundred and thirty years since
Matthew Arnold mourned the death of Wordsworth with the
cry: “But who, ah! who, will make us feel?”1 6
For Anderson, the quintessentially American Ford is thus the hard—irascible, diffi
cult, a man’s man who felt strongly—and in comparison, contemporary Britain, or
the west in general, has indeed become the soft and numb. Moreover, through
15 Lindsay Anderson, “The Last Sequence of On the Waterfront," Sight and Sound 24.3 (Jan.-
Mar. 1955): 128,129.
16 Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford (London: Plexus, 1981) 202.
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Ford, through the authentic American-ness of his films, Anderson relocates the lost
utopian England of the pre-industrial age; Anderson’s own confessed “obsession”
for Ford provided a crucial element of context for the subsequent films he would
popularize under the Free Cinema banner.1 7 Thus the documentaries made by Se
quence's editors (such as Anderson’s Everyday Except Christmas, 1957, and Karl
Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys, 1958, both sponsored by Ford, the motor com
pany) re-produce the British authenticity and vitality of their working class subject
through the inspiration of John Ford’s own heroic American-ness. No wonder it
was so obviously traumatic when the director, given a viewing of these documenta
ries, stubbornly refused to praise them. Anderson goes so far as to quote a second
hand report that Ford had later spoken kindly of the screening, yet Anderson also
indicates that by the time he had begun to prepare This Sporting Life, Ford’s recent
releases were no longer on his viewing list1 8
Fathers
But if Ford was the desired but distant American foster father, John Grier
son and the documentary film movement of the 1930s and 1940s were certainly
Free Cinema’s most obvious British influence, and thus to the subsequent British
films which have both rebuffed and continued Free Cinema’s ways. Grierson was a
father to whom Anderson and Sequence bore a complicated and often contradictory
relation: by reversing Hoggart’s British-American distinctions between the hard and
the soft, Free Cinema was pressed to evaluate its own national parentage, which
Grierson most immediately represented. By emphasizing a newly critical and
“committed” perspective upon feature filmmaking, particularly non-British film
17 Anderson, About John Ford 9.
18 Anderson, About John Ford 139-41.
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making, Sequence struck a strategic blow against what had formerly provided Brit
ain with its more serious, politically progressive cinema—with what was hard
compared to the soft of mainstream features from both Hollywood and Britain. An
derson despised Grierson’s “rather gruesomely” affirmed anti-individualism, and
found little hope in the postwar transition of Grierson’s disciples such as Ian Dal-
rymple, Harry Watt, and Jack Lee into undistinguished feature film directors.1 9 Yet
the gist of Anderson’s complaint seems more related to changes and stratifications
in British film production following the war. Like their Cahiers du Cinema compa
triots across the channel, Sequence's would-be filmmakers butted their heads
against the closed doors of a guarded industry. Both groups shared much of the
same resentful tone, that of sons hopelessly rebelling against an unjust father.
Still, circumstances continued to reinforce the familial bond. Not only had
the war given the British documentary its biggest boost, its successful conclusion
allowed the Labour government to rationalize the de-funding of documentary films.
In 1948, Anderson summed up the difficulties of the process:
During the ‘thirties young people who were seriously inter
ested in the cinema tended to go into documentaries, and
since documentary-makers believed in the importance of
their job and were on the whole given a great deal of free
dom, the results were very good. But to-day things are not
the same. Fewer of us are any longer able to summon up that
ardent proselytizing enthusiasm for social-democracy which
was the inspiration of the documentary movement.2 0
Since the Sequence editors eventually followed precisely this route, it is tempting to
view that group’s purportedly populist films in light of Anderson’s admitted lack of
enthusiasm: noting the often syrupy, patronizing Free Cinema manifesto with
19 Lindsay Anderson, “A Possible Solution,” Sequence 3 (Spring 1948): 9, 7-8; “British Cin
ema: The Descending Spiral ” Sequence (Spring 1949): 6.
20 Anderson, “A Possible Solution” 8.
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which Anderson publicized Everyday Except Christmas, Roy Armes’ history of
British film curtly dismisses the film as “as bad as this rhetoric might suggest.”2 1
Anderson’s work—and the Sequence authors in general—is more nuanced,
however, than the simple contrast of Ford and Grierson might suggest, a possibility
sometimes overlooked. For example, Ian Aitken’s thorough study of Grierson and
the documentary film movement mentions Anderson’s and Karl Reisz’s work as
having been opposed to Grierson’s, a stance which would seem to put them in
agreement with (for Aitken) Bill Nichols’ association of Grierson and a crude cine-
verite realism.22 Armes’ history essentially agrees with Aitken, drawing upon Alan
Lovell’s earlier argument that Free Cinema had little more than a convenient relation
to the documentary form and to a progressive notion of political “commitment”23
By placing Anderson, Reisz, and Free Cinema in a place apart from Grierson and
the earlier generation of documentary filmmakers, Aitkin, on the one hand, bolsters
his project by re-reading Grierson. On the other hand, Armes uncouples the links
between the Grierson era and the later realism associated with the Free Cinema-
inspired British New Wave. Yet Sequence had never been so completely estranged
from Grierson: in essays such as “A Possible Solution,” Anderson prefaces his
distaste for Grierson’s sociological aims with effusive praise for the aesthetic
achievements of many of his disciples, particularly when they ventured into feature
filmmaking and continued to experiment with the techniques and subjects of the
documentaries (Anderson cites 1938’s neo-realist-like I Met a Murderer).24 Nor did
21 Roy Armes, A Critical History o f the British Cinema (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978) 266.
22 Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement
(London and New York: Roudedge, 1990) 4,6.
23 Armes 266.
24 Anderson, “A Possible Solution” 8.
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Grierson (publicly, at least) hold a grudge—he passed over the barbs Sequence was
fond of and contributed a 1949 Sight and Sound tribute entitled “Welcome
Stranger!” a rhetorical move which sought to portray the young editors as his own
successors.25
Even more striking was Anderson’s own attraction to the work of Hum
phrey Jennings, whose wartime documentaries led Anderson to celebrate him as
“the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.”26 It is the erudite film es
sayist Jennings, the director of Fires Were Started (1943) and A Diary For Timothy
(1945), who provides the left’s British analogue to Ford, Anderson’s right-wing
American poet. Jennings was “perhaps too intellectual for the cinema,” yet the
command given by E. M. Forster (who also wrote A Diary for Timothy) to “Only
connect” found its answer in his work; Anderson’s Jennings is the antithesis of
Grierson’s perceived inability ever to emotionally connect.27
An important facet of Anderson’s attraction, however, seems to be its per
fect, sealed remoteness: Jennings’ unsatisfying postwar work, using staged se
quences which “do not suggest he would have been at ease in the direction of fea
tures,” together with his accidental death in 1950, provide a romantic abdication for
this path of British filmmaking.28 Jennings, like Ford, offered a poetic model of
humanistic emotions and noble commitment to individuality (Jennings did not, it
has been noted, always get along well within the documentary film movement29),
yet it was with Ford that Anderson associated the patriarchal line of English culture.
25 Grierson 51.
26 Lindsay Anderson, “Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings,”
Sight and Sound (1954):, reprinted in Film Quarterly 15.2 (Winter 1961-62): 5.
27 Anderson, “Only Connect” 12.
28 Anderson, “Only Connect” 12.
29 See Armes 152, and Aitkin 147.
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While Jennings may have made essential connections for Anderson, it was
the Irish-American film director who most fully answered Matthew Arnold’s “but
who will make us feel?”: the sensitive and dead Jennings, linked with the gay For
ster, represents another feminized form of British cinema, admired by Anderson,
but ultimately as cut-off from his ambitions for film as the models represented by
Blanche Fury, The Seventh Veil, and all the other melodramas dismissed in the
pages of Sequence. In part the preference for Ford’s model was because, unlike
Jennings’, it clearly applied to the feature film. Anderson, as well as his less pro
lific and polemic companions, consistently defined his concerns by treating the
documentary only in terms of its relation to the feature. This attitude describes Se
quence and, after its demise, the mid-’50s Sight and Sound.
During the war the producer Michael Balcon authored a pamphlet titled
“Realism and Tinsel,” an ode to the new synthesis of documentary and feature pro
duction in films such as Noel Coward’s popular war saga In Which We Serve30;
the problem was that when Anderson looked back at Balcon’s examples, he could
only lament that British film had never recovered from the stiff, stilted image of
Coward’s heroic Captain “D.” Realism and tinsel had not been satisfactorily com
bined, which meant starting over with the documentary.31 However much (or little)
Jennings’ influence may be seen in Free Cinema’s documentaries, it is difficult to
deny Alan Lovell’s assertion that they were, unlike the work associated with Grier
son, documentaries only out of convenience—Anderson himself quite freely points
out that “Free Cinema” was itself only a catch phrase he edited into a 1951 Se
3(- > Quoted in Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-1948
(London and New York: Routledge, 1989) 39.
31 Anderson, “Get Out and Push!” 158.
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105
quence article by Alan Cooke, drawn from his travels in the US. In 1956, the Na
tional Film Theatre used the title when it launched the first of several film programs
featuring work largely by the Sequence group; the documentaries’ emphasis upon
place and local culture helped to underline the strongly British qualification for Free
Cinema, but in Cooke’s essay, the author cited a list of works from Muscle Beach
and Fireworks to Wagonmaster to exemplify “all films which please or illuminate
without compromise or self-mutilation.”32 As with Anderson’s romance with Ford,
American film contributed to the model for the creation of what later became seen as
uniquely British.
Through this mediation by tropes of American freedom and authenticity,
Anderson and Free Cinema reclaimed the thematically similar realism of the docu
mentary film movement, qualities lost in the postwar shift to feature film produc
tion; keeping in mind his points of agreement with Grierson, rather than their dif
ferences, Anderson’s critical project may be read as a remasculinization of British
film. Once Free Cinema’s documentaries began to give way to the “kitchen sink”
features of the early New Wave, the gendered contours of the British industry did
begin to show signs of the project’s success. The 1940s and 1950s model for a
“feminized” cinema may have been a suitable target for Sequence's Free Cinema
advocates and the later Angry Young Men, even if they too largely embraced the
paradigm of the niche-savvy, non-threatening small cinema to popularize their pre
dominantly male-centered model of melodrama Anderson, Reisz, and Richardson
each broke from this pattern as the decade progressed: Anderson’s I f . . . (1968),
Reisz’ Isadora (1968), and, early on, Richardson’ s A Taste of Honey (1961) each
32 Quoted in Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary (New York: Viking Press,
1972) 150.
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106
helped to redefine the British New Wave, but by the time of If. . . and Isadora, the
“movement” had already begun to reach its last stages of major American financing
and distribution.
While the British New Wave prospered, it produced a new group of British
actors who drew upon a largely male acting tradition different from that of Olivier
and the classical mold, yet the gendered associations Hoggart made between nation
ality and culture would continue to grow in complexity and contradiction. The next
chapter will briefly discuss the permutations of the English actor during the period
of the British New Wave, and then use that history as the foundation for the further
permutations of this figure and of British film in the decades since.
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CHAPTER 3
The British Method
The British New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s produced a remas-
culinization which evolved and finally dissolved through the collapse of American
financial investment in the British film industry during the later 1960s. But while
that earlier period’s growth and success failed to sustain the film industry into the
1970s, the hybridized and nearly indistinct national boundaries of that time reap
peared in the form of the 1980s’ New British Cinema and its own additional hy
bridization between television and film. In this chapter I will sketch the ways in
which British film of the 1990s may be located along the boundaries between na
tionality and media which had been previously recombined by both the British New
Wave and the New British Cinema. Then I will turn to two examples which display
this hybridization process, this British method, so to speak, in microcosm: a Chan
nel Four-supported film which plays with sexual difference and nationality, The
Crying Game; and, finally, the career of Jeremy Irons, whose non-English roles
illustrates the history of the English actor apart from what we recognize as British
film. These roles suggest how often tempting it may be to consider English mascu
linity as little more than a Hollywood fantasy of masculine Otherness.
After Hamlet
Since Hamlet did not presage a threat to Hollywood’s international hegem
ony in the late 1940s, British nationality after the embargo and after the Paramount
decrees continued to flourish as a commodity in many of the same ways it had ear
lier. While the Ealing era achievements of films such as Passport to Pimlico (1949),
The Lavender Hill Mob (1952), and The Ladykillers (1956) should not be underes-
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108
timated, their foreign distribution carried little of the impact made by the later British
New Wave or its mainstream transformation and Academy award apotheosis, Tom
Jones (1963).
Much has been written about these latter films, all the more because a proj
ect like Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), financed, produced
and designed for consumption in Britain, would seem to promise so much.1 Unlike
Hamlet (or, for that matter, unlike Olivier’s own often-derided entry in the early
British New Wave, Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer, 1960), Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning's authenticity was embodied by an actor free of either the classical
actors’ “sheer music” or from the character actor’s alternation between pathos and
vaudeville. While British actors and accents have been mobilized to represent class,
privilege and history in films such as Julius Caesar, Spartacus, and Star Wars (as
well as such epic-scale television productions as Masada, 1980), here Albert Finney
represented a heroic reconstruction of British nationality different from the
“language” of those like Gielgud or Redgrave or Olivier.
Not coincidentally, the British New Wave followed the pattern promoted in
the rhetoric surrounding Free Cinema, offering a narrative and visual remaking of
British film which John Hill, Lynn Segal and other writers have recognized as a
remasculinization.2 Structured by a working class individualism quite opposite in
outcome from Hoggart’s vision of authenticity and community, these films may
1 More recently, Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992), and John Hill,
Sex, Class and Realism (London: BFI, 1986) stand out. Among other earlier works, see Alexander
Walker, Hollywood UK: The Film Industry in the Sixties (New York: Stein and Day, 1974), and
Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England (London: Faber and Faber, 1970).
2 John Hill, “Working Class Realism and Sexual Reaction,” British Cinema History, ed.
James Curran and Vincent Porter (Totawa, NJ: Bames and Noble Books, 1983) 311 and in passing;
Lynn Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunsv/ick, NJ: Rut
gers University Press, 1990) 1-25.
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109
evoke the working class in terms of iconography and atmosphere, but the narrative
result is repeatedly the failure of working class identity to offer a viable alternative
in the onslaught of postwar modernization and Americanization.3 Finney’s Arthur
follows this process and disappears into the feminized world of middle class subur
bia with a distasteful inevitability. Whatever his regrets, at the film’s conclusion
Arthur remains as outside the working class and as trapped by women as did the
class climber of Room at the Top or the beleaguered husband of A Kind o f Loving
(1962).
In the time since Sequence, the international cult for the new American
“rebel male” had grown to provide ready-made contexts for these new British mis
fits. Even though Lindsay Anderson had thoroughly denounced Kazan’s use of
“the potency of Marlon Brando—physical, emotional and dramatic,” Anderson’s
feature film debut made a similar use of Richard Harris: like Brando and his dock
worker, Harris’ own physical “potency” in This Sporting Life (1964) helps to set
his Rugby player apart from and above the others, particularly as both are bodily
tested in bloody, masochistic rites. But unlike On the Waterfront, This Sporting
Life's test is ironic, leading not to a mantle of Christ-like leadership, but to a final
reduction of the footballer’s humanity, including his thwarted desire to be accepted
in the place of the father by the dry, lifeless, middle class widow he has loved. All
that remains is the body, finally as fragile as the spider he crushes in the film’s final
metaphor.
Still, like Kazan’s use of Brando, the animalistic eloquence of this almost
mute, damaged body is due not to the ethereal fusion of body and voice in a classi
3 Hill 311.
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110
cal performance, but to a British analogue of the Method, a nakedness Anderson
made literal in the film’s remarkably forthright displays of the footballers’ bodies.
Hoggart may have aligned America with the soft and feminine, but, as has
been suggested, the comparison may be a rather unstable, or perhaps more of an
analog than a binarism at all. For the past several decades, Americanization has, for
the British actor, represented a movement away from the soft and feminine vocal
emphasis of the theatrical actor, and that has given narcissism a less suspect name.
Within even British discourses surrounding acting, the American Method actor has
often played the role of the masculine and authentic, particularly, as Christine Gled-
hill points out, on the basis of the emphasized lack of distance between the actor’s
self and character. Brando’s dock worker is Brando, and the imperative of this col
lapse, Gledhill argues, gives a renewed authentication to melodramatic conven
tions—one of the prime missions of the early British New Wave’s remasculiniza-
tion of melodrama and of British film.4 Graham McCann’s much more effusive
Rebel Males traces this gendering back to exaggeratedly romantic notions of US
and European cultures, describing the narcissistic potency of actors such as Brando
in light of American vulnerability “to glamorous pleas for the self; society, in the
sense of the dense, demanding medium in which European lives are embroiled,
does not seem to exist.”5 Like Anderson’s admiration for John Ford’s noble
Americana, McCann’s brutish image of America authenticates the masculinity that
Brando, Clift, and Dean portrayed, and with which gay male culture on both sides
of the Atlantic have long been fascinated.
4 Christine Gledhill, “Signs of Melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Gledhill
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991) 223,225.
5 Graham McCann, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni
versity Press, 1991) 29.
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I ll
On a similar track, Anderson’s revulsion toward On the Waterfront had long
been forgotten when the 1980s’ Sight and Sound returned to the topic and quickly
noted the classical actor’s “sheer music” only in order to contrast and praise
Brando’s performance (as discussed above). With an enthusiasm which stood out
in the generally friendly and popular Sight and Sound, Hal Hinson hailed those
who, like Brando, had given corporeal form to a national type, while ignoring the
parallel body given form by that “sheer music.” Hinson’s Brando “emerged on the
screen an American character,” one “created with a liberating realism that found the
words and gestures for the spirit of modem American life.” However,
American movies had given audiences stars like Cagney and
Tracy, who performed in the vernacular but whose style of
acting was still linked to the theater. What Brando brought to
the screen was different from earlier styles of performing
which developed when acting was thought of not as an art
but as a profession, and actors were appreciated more for
their skill as entertainers than for their ability to plumb the
depths of personality.6
Unlike Cagney and Tracy, the British actor in Hollywood spoke in the vernacular
of the British classical stage, and in that language he or she quoted high, rather than
low culture. In this way Cubitt’s national binary of the hard and the soft was also to
be found within postwar Hollywood itself, grouped about the distinctions among
no-nonsense craft of the American stage, the rough depths of a Method actor’s
mumbles, and the mellifluous art of the classically-trained English actor—except
that the latter two were lumped together under the rubric of art.
While the distinction between Method and the “ordinary” actor quickly be
came blurred, an English accent still carries a certain significance in American Films
in terms of character and performance style. In practice, such a content/style dis-
6 Hinson 200.
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112
tinction may be indistinguishable—it seems to be no small coincidence that the dis
tinctions between the Method and the English theatrical actor may at times remain
problematic for male British actors seeking virile leading roles in mainstream Hol
lywood: for example, at the same time that Oscar publicity geared up for Daniel
Day-Lewis’ In the Name of the Father (1993) role, both the actor’s Method-like
mental preparation and his newly acquired Irish passport were stressed. (“I knew
Daniel before he was Irish,” the film’s director and co-screenwriter Jim Sheridan
joked, publicly angering Day-Lewis.7) Not only did the Irish claim possibly lend a
symbolic credence to his performance as the falsely imprisoned IRA “terrorist,”
Day-Lewis’ newly stressed non-Englishness helped to dramatize the Brando and
DeNiro-like deprivation he employed to create the character.8
While Brando, DeNiro, and Day-Lewis’ In the Name of the Father per
formance have all proven popular, the Academy also has a rather predictable fond
ness for the theater’s claims upon art Olivier’s filmed appearance as The Enter
tainer, it might be remembered, almost brought the British New Wave to a prema
ture end, and yet it was not Finney’s raw breakthrough performance in Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning but Olivier’s recreation of his original stage perform
ance in John Osborne’s play, one which received the blessing of an Oscar nomina
tion. The British New Wave would soon begin to gamer Academy attention, but at
its start the theatrical associations of earlier generations proved more influential.
Like Hamlet, The Entertainer was a theatrical adaptation, only in this case it was a
contemporary stage work, one by Look Back in Anger's “angry young man.” Tony
7 Rick Marin, “The Fire This Time,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, 2 January 1994: 28.
8 Whether Day-Lewis conducted similar preparation for his role as the gay punk in My Beautiful Laun-
drette had never been a publicity concern.
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113
Richardson’s filming could therefore mobilize a variety of conflicting associations,
including those of Olivier as a glamorous (but aging) Hollywood star and a classical
stage actor, and of the play itself as the pathos-laden story of an out-dated per
former’s last stand and as a daring commentary on Suez and the decline of Britain.
Through these complex associations The Entertainer may be read as something like
a collision of Hamlet and On the Waterfront, one mediated by the rhetoric of Gold
wyn on the artistic integrity of a nationally pure and small-scale British cinema.9
Olivier, the aging minion of Hollywood, kindly put his Oscar-winning head on the
block for the new generation of British actors and filmmakers to lop off, in the
name (if not actual practice) of a Free Cinema.
Downward Again
It is no small irony that Finney made his film debut in The Entertainer play
ing Olivier’s doomed son, killed,, at the climax, in the war to protect the Suez canal
as well as the British Empire’s colonial self-respect. Woodfall, the company re
sponsible for the initial breakthrough films of the British New Wave, survived The
Entertainer's critical and financial disappointments. Eventually they saw the com
pany’s first non-contemporary piece, Tom Jones (1963), gross over thirty million
dollars and turn into a golden goose for the entire British industry.1 0 The American
money which had made Tom Jones' budget possible, however, began to be the ac
cepted route for British film production, and as the Academy’s foreign language
rules suggest, the production which crosses national boundaries is in effect no
longer foreign and distinct from Hollywood. After UA’s success with the James
9 Or perhaps it is another version of the Marlon Brando/John Gielgud duo of Julius Caesar
(1954).
10 See Walker 138.
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114
Bond films and Tom Jones, not to mention pop culture’s quickening fascination for
all things British, other studios began to take increased note and invest: by its peak
in the late 1960s, 80 to 90 per cent of all film production was backed by the US, a
figure which quickly fell as big-budgeted films made in Britain (such as Half-a-
Sixpence and Goodbye, Mr. Chips) began to flop as badly as big budgeted films
made at home (Hello, Dolly, Star!).1 1 New Hollywood, meanwhile, turned out The
Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and courted the youth market without the
previous British accents, and with smaller budgets. (Perhaps as one symptom,
Michelangelo Antonioni stylishly shifted from the London of Blow Up, 1967, to
the explosive American settings of Zabriskie Point, 1969.) By the 1970s the British
film industry had been absorbed, abandoned, and left once again in crisis. Thereaf
ter, Finney’s irregular film appearances came in offbeat but minor British efforts
such as Stephen Frears’ odd debut, Gumshoe (1971), about British preoccupations
with Hollywood machismo, or simpler American prestige productions such as
Murder on the Orient Express (1974).12 In 1994, Fmney stepped into Michael
Redgrave’s shoes to play the pathetically repressed school teacher of The Browning
Version, a character cuckolded, in this updated (but still enduringly dated) version,
by an American; something like a circle closed.
It is rather incomplete, however, to suggest a simple comparison of Fin
ney’s career with the fate of his doomed soldier in The Entertainer, or to imply a
parallel between the nationalistic projects of companies such as Woodfall and the
11 See Petrie Creativity and Constraint 57.
12 Until, that is, Finney began returning as an American in a run of roles including Daddy
Warbucks in Annie (1982). Yet the Academy acknowledged only his “British" roles, nominating
him for The Dresser (1983) and Under the Volcano (1984)—like Olivier’s nomination for The En
tertainer, these nominations recognized Finney’s status within the tradition of the revered British
actor in the small British or multi-national film.
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115
colonial ambitions which motivated the Suez crisis. Histories of the British cinema
tend toward such structures—the latter aspect of Duncan Petrie’s Creativity and
Constraint is clearly linked to the periodic defeats Britain has suffered in its rela
tions with Hollywood, and Alexander Walker’s Hollywood, UK announces its
perspective with its self-pitying title page quote from Tony Garnett ‘To be an Eng
lishman in the film industry is to know what it’s like to be colonized.”1 3
British nationality in these accounts rises and falls with the financial purity
of British production, but what occurs between the peaks, or in the vast adulterated
wastes of Anglo-American production, is most usually outside their charge. Even
Robert Murphy’s excellent Sixties British Film fits the pattern. Murphy quotes an
acknowledgment from Screen that the map for British cinema remains fixed by past
prejudices, yet his revisionist survey does little beyond noting that certain mid-
Atlantic films of the 1960s were not as offensive as those which came before or af
ter.14 The exclusion of these films, which cover almost every single Peter O’Toole
vehicle made during the period, means, Murphy acknowledges, that O’ Toole’s
work “has regrettably been ignored.”15 Like the Academy, Murphy’s definition of
nationality cannot adequately account for the multi-national production, yet the re
sult is the opposite: where the Academy effectively categorizes the multi-national
production as non-foreign, Murphy usually either suppresses its existence or sim
ply treats it as British.
The latter is important, because loyalty may be too pure of a criterion for
British (or any other) identity—it would almost empty the canon of films for the
13 Alexander Walker, Hollywood UK: The Film Industry in the Sixties (New York: Stein and Day,
1974) 1.
14 Murphy 5 ,3 .
15 Murphy 287, n. 17.
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116
much-vaunted renaissance of the 1980s. During that decade American art houses
flourished with the rebellious progeny of both Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and Tom Jones: the giddy London-is-buming, Thatcher-bashing chaos of Sammy
and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and the postmodern fancy dress of The Draughtsman's
Contract (1983). The Academy Awards were likewise littered with British winners
proclaiming the return of Britain in the quality drag of Chariots o f Fire (1981),
Gandhi (1983) and A Room With a View (1986). That these were not quite “British
films” in the same sense shaping the 1940s British film was somewhat obscured:
Channel Four financing gave contractual qualities to The Draughtsman's Contract
closer to those of a television production than a theatrical film, and the odd couple
of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and A Room With a View owed much the same debt
to Cinecom’s (mostly) American financing as did Tom Jones to UA’s. Even more
than the major “British” Oscar nominees of the 1970s (A Clockwork Orange, Barry
Lyndon, Midnight Express), Chariots of Fire and Gandhi further entangle any na
tional identification based upon financing, stretching their lineage from Britain and
the US to Italy and India.
For once, this hybrid aspect of British cinema placed it in step with British
film criticism and theory: voicing the rhetoric of postmodernism in an early 1980s
editorial, Screen found a much more pragmatic position than the journal had in the
last decade:
The national culture out of which a national cinema must
necessarily emerge is itself an ideological construct, a neces
sary pre-condition for the return of box-office monies from
abroad where “Britishness” is presently a precious, if pre
carious, commodity.1 6
16 Mick Eaton and Paul Kerr, “Editorial,” Screen 24.4-5 (July-October 1983): 2, quoted in
Higson and Neale 8.
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117
Just how precarious that commodity became clear as the decade wore on. Even
overtly partisan efforts such as James Park’s early Learning to Dream: The New
British Cinema were bittersweet when imaging what might have been if only (in
Park’s vision) Callaghan’s Labour government had not lost the 1979 elections.
With Labour’s plan to install a system of full state subsidy, British film would have
finally had the comparable security of its European counterparts.17 Instead, Park’s
renaissance was made up of the improbable and the nationally uncertain.
But a lineage did arise out of both the rubble of Lew Grade’s late 1970s ex
port disasters (Can't Stop the Music, Honkeytonk Freeway) as well as Riddles of
the Sphinx, Sally Potter’s Thriller and other films influenced by Screen theory.
This one was shaped by films which were (more or less) mainstream, American-
friendly but still “British” and low-budget, from Nighthawks and Radio On to The
Ploughman’ s Lunch and My Beautiful Laundrette. Picking up more from the
Screen tradition, even as its former members turned to the pleasures of traditional
narrative, non-profit groups such as Sankofa and Black Audio used the Workshop
Declaration of 1981 to build the basis for a new, critically engaged vision of post
colonial Britain: with the twin openings of Passion of Remembrance and
Handsworth Songs in 1986, these workshops pushed the color adjustment going
on in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots.18 From such films, and their generally
compatible concerns with sexuality, popular culture, and British nationality, the
film renaissance was cobbled together in the Sunday supplements and erected in
17 James Park, Learning to Dream: The New British Cinema (London: Faber and Faber,
1984) 70.
18 Coco Fusco, Young, British and Black: The Work of Sankofa and Black Audio Film Col-
/«*/ve(Buffa!o, NY: Hallwalls/Contemporary Arts Center, 1988) 15,9.
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118
time so that the National Film Theatre could salute 1986 as the year of the British
film.
Unlike the previous causes for optimism in the ‘60s, these newer films
shared significantly more diverse and or unprecedented production histories from
the start Where Sankofa and Black Audio drew upon support from the counter-
Thatcher forces still operating at the city-level of government thereby coming
closer to a realization of European-style state subsidization, the other examples
were, out of necessity, realized in the absence of Park’s hoped-for patterns. For ex
ample, the National Film Finance Corporation, a film bank created in the aftermath
of the 1947-48 tariff war with Hollywood, had refused to contribute to Ron Peck’s
Nighthawks (released 1979), leading Peck to finance his landmark study of gay
male life through a consortium of private investors and German television. Radio
On (1979), co-produced with Wim Wenders, again recruited German television
money, a move further refined in the US by the European television pre-sales
funding of Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens (1982), Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than
Paradise (1984), and the small-film boom that they led. American independents in
turn began to listen to Britain, and a new generation of co-productions such as
Cinecom’s A Room With a View and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid appeared: in the
mid 1980s the exhibition company joined Cannon, Atlantic, Orion Classics, New
Line, Miramax, and other US independents or mini-majors who had begun to tread
where UA had pioneered in the 1960s, and MGM in the 1930s and 1950s.
The Ploughman’ s Lunch (1983) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), how
ever, shared their origins more with The Draughtman’ s Contract, debuting three
years into the Thatcher era, the long-planned Channel Four provided both a com
petitive boost to the protected television market and provided a home for produc
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119
tions highly critical of the Conservatives’ agenda. Channel Four’s involvement had
been crucial to the Workshop Declaration.1 9 Even Nighthawks, after some delay,
received its British broadcast premiere on Channel Four, and its Eleventh Hour slot
provided a broadcast outlet for a range of filmmakers from Terence Davies to Sally
Potter to Derek Jarman (albeit not without equivocation and delay, especially in the
case of Jarman’s films). But it is in the production arena that Channel Four most af
fected Screen's description of “Britishness” as an international commodity. Channel
Four has produced hundreds of film and video projects for its “Rim on Four” se
ries, including many, such as My Beautiful Laundrette, which were given theatrical
release not only internationally but domestically. As films, though, these suffered
domestically not only from the public perception that they would soon be broadcast
(or had been already, in some cases), but from limitations placed upon them by the
Cinematography Exhibitors Association: their demand, for a three year span be
tween exhibition and broadcast, was designed to enforce the borders regularly bro
ken by these developing methods of finance and exhibition.
In 1988, Channel Four negotiated an exception for low-budget productions,
but by this point Channel Four’s production arm, Film Four International, had
shifted to a more flexible and less risky policy favoring partial rather than full
funding; only extremely low-budgeted, more television-limited projects were to
provide the exceptions. Both approaches complicated the metamorphosis already
overtaking the film industry: in a time when Britain was deserting the cinema for the
video store in great numbers, many of the more critically acclaimed and, in London
at least, more popular films were becoming indistinct from previous notions defin-
19 Fusco 10.
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120
ing television production.20 Soon the BBC and ITV television production compa
nies such as Thames, Granada, and London Weekend joined the theatrical fray.
Film F or . . .
By placing its support in international, multi-partnered productions such as
(to pick three projects which played in the US at roughly the same time) Palace
Picture’s The Crying Game and Waterland (1992), and the AIDS video documen
tary, Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), Film Four promoted a probably
more international slate of projects than if it had continued to solo. That is, if it had
been able to continue fully funding productions, after the drastic late 1980s cut
backs in government funding and the parallel decline suffered by American inde
pendents.
Perhaps not coincidentally, nationality has become one of these films’ most
complex tropes. Through full or partial Channel Four funding, Silverlake Life, the
Armistead Maupin miniseries Tales o f the City (1994), and various biographical
documentaries on American personalities have helped to form an association in the
US between queer politics and British broadcasting, one which (in light of its pub
licized refusal to co-fund More Tales o f the City) PBS has been fearful of repeating.
In contrast, Waterland attempted a much more familiar project transplant a
British novel to a American setting. Present day scenes follow a morose British
high school teacher and his disturbed wife in Pittsburgh, but through flashbacks the
history teacher narrates for his students, the setting returns to the couple’s native
English wetlands. By casting Jeremy Irons in the lead role, the film draws strongly
upon the “sheer music” history of the theatrical British actor which Irons and An
20 Park 57.
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121
thony Hopkins represent in the 1990s. Whether as Spanish in The Mission, Ger
man in Reversal o f Fortune, French in M. Butterfly, or as The Lion King’s Scar, a
sadistic feline aristocrat, Irons’ voice encapsulates British civility and decline in a
manner which these films were able to translate from the realm of national to indi
vidual identity. In the shift from the original novel’s English setting to an American
one, Waterland greatly increases the degree to which the central couple emblemize
English history and identity, thus managing to sum up a highly commanding, if
fallacious equation between Britishness and Irons’ sense of cultured decay.
However, Waterland and Silverlake Life, as well as most of the films dis
cussed above, represent examples somewhat apart from The Crying Game and its
unprecedented commercial and critical success in the US. But in a sense, all three of
these Channel Four projects form a sort of parallel to the modestly ambitious pan-
European productions springing up around EC incentives of the past decade, such
as Mr. Frost, The Man Inside and Voyager, English language films most remark
able for contriving to place minor American stars at the helm of carefully tokenized
EC nation casts. Determinedly international in scope, these films seem to float (like
many international productions before them) divorced from a specific sense of lo
cale or culture.
Yet unlike these cross-national examples, The Crying Game narrativizes
Irish/English and black/white differences, and Waterland American/British ones,
while even the wholly US-set Silverlake Life constructs an impressively localized
“view from here” of urban gay male identity still meaningful on both sides of the
Atlantic. Most distinct from, say, The Man Inside's journalistic intrigue or Voy
ager’ s pretentious sexual angst, are the Channel Four co-productions’ ability to
bring forward rather than suppress their own constructions of nation and belong-
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122
ing. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which Channel Four also invested in,
presents an example of nationality turned into a romantic comedy in the most confi
dent and undeniably good-natured terms: its bemused rituals of marriage have
meaning because of its hybrid history, not in spite of it
Such national constructions, however, are also admittedly provisional, cre
ating a richly complicated hall of mirrors reflecting recent British production his
tory, the films themselves, and British nationalism. The weddings may go better
than the marriages, and funerals are unavoidable—Palace expired before The Cry
ing Game could save it. Just as Britain continues to express misgivings about the
desirability of loosening its borders in increased European unity, Channel Four has
aided filmmakers who have complicated national differences by collapsing and rep
resenting them through sexual and racial difference. Among them, The Crying
Game's US success has given the film a continuing emblematic status abroad and,
in return, at home, where its American success became a mantra for the industry21;
Four Weddings and a Funeral's Anglo-American romance may have achieved a
shocking domestic success, as well as a substantial one in the US, but with far
more sweetening, It is The Crying Game which has been viewed as carrying the ra
cial, sexual, and political concerns of the New British Cinema into midwestem
multiplexes.
But as I will argue, The Crying Game is still a deeply contradictory text,
and the meaning received at those midwestem multilplexes should be considered in
21 For an example, see the editorial “Cinema Wan,” Sight and Sound January 1994: 11.
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123
light of the gleefully homophobic parodies American comedies have since made of
the film’s “surprise” sexual-revelation scene.22
Neil Jordan’s film begins with a superficially familiar tale of an Irish IRA
terrorist kidnapping of a British soldier, and worries it where the elements do not
seem to fit, where national identity begins to be seen in flux—the soldier’s African
origins, to begin with. The racist epithets which come too easily to Irish lips foretell
the struggles of Fergus, the soldier’s sympathetic IRA keeper, to be true to what is
in his “nature.” This nature the unlucky soldier insists must be independent of both
British slurs as well as Irish nationalist claims that British violence has made all
their own violence defensible. The subsequent cross-dressing “secret” of the film
underlines the narrative’s own Freudian joke value as a homosocial exchange be
tween two men through the sexual medium of a woman’s body—Fergus’ bond
with the soldier leads him to seek out the late man’s London girlfriend, Dil, who is
also black. It is Dil that Fergus would seem to fall in love with, yet it is the face of
the dead soldier, Jody, whose face Fergus imagines at the point of orgasm, and by
the film’s end Fergus has made Dil over in Jody’s cricket clothes, and created in her
an avenger for Jody. The demarcations between heterosexual and homosexual de
sire become increasingly unclear, dragging along with them both the divisions of
sex and nation—secrets beyond those alluded to in the film’s advertising.
That these details do not immediately reveal the film’s coyly publi
cized/denied “secret” suggests the complexity of the film’s use of cross-dressing: it
goes beyond the general liberal sentiment that love transcends all (even genitals) to
22 The Crying Game's see-the-penis-and-vomit scene provided the inspiration for extended se
quences in The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994) and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
(1994).; whatever subtleties The Crying Game may possess, its success apparently did not impose
the purposely benign sentiments of its conclusion.
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124
employ transvestitism as a metaphor for black identity in British culture. Jody and
Dil both wear uniforms to which they only bear a chance or convenient relation, yet
neither does the film allow us to dismiss these identities as inauthentic. Jody the
cricketer, with whom Fergus the IRA terrorist has erotically bonded, has been in
vested with the seductive power of English tradition, just as Dil embodies sexually
desirable femininity; transvestitism, of either sex, race or nationality, the film sug
gests, may just be “nature.” Even the film’s casting continues these thoughts, plac
ing familiar American and British actors in the respective roles of Jody and Jude,
the IRA femme fatale who sets the kidnapping trap. In its more restrictive associa
tions nature and people of color, the film’s general cleverness may also cease to im
press here as well. Fergus, who starts out as the stereotypical Irishman, can pick
and choose his nationality in the protean Dil’s presence—the exotic black woman
cannot tell if his accent is American or Scottish, while both Fergus’ rigid white boss
and his superiors in the IRA place him firmly in the “Paddy” role. In touch with
their “true” natures and eager to do the same for Fergus, Dil and Jody fit easily into
the familiar patterns of colonial discourse.
Much the opposite might be said of the hysterical, finally psychopathic
Jude, the film’s only biologically female character, and the one most graphically out
of touch with her own nature; it seems to be no coincidence that the film’s conclu
sion presents her in pathetic contrast with the loyal and truly feminine Dil. Knowing
his nature transforms the black British man into either an obedient soldier upholding
the empire or a passive sexual partner servicing the empire, while not knowing or
following her nature earns a woman a Hitchcock suit and the bloody fate of a
femme fatale.
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125
The result may be a fair approximation of Tania Modleski’s claim that femi
nism without women has produced a cultural bounty irrelevant to feminism’s politi
cal goals to better women’s lives, an argument to which I will return when dis
cussing James Bond. But even more than the Bond films, The Crying Game sug
gests that biological women are finally irrelevant In an odd sense, Davidson’s
moment of fame may also represent a continuation of the earlier New Wave’s re-
masculinization of the British actor through the combined evocation of American
Method actors and British working class identity: through Dil’s displacement of the
biological female and Davidson’s gender ambiguity, the threat of the grasping, do
mestic women in the kitchen sink film has finally been resolved by a new masculin
ity which incorporates the feminine and makes women (including female actors) ir
relevant
Whatever the ideological weight of the film’s sexual politics, that The Cry
ing Game achieves less than it seems to at first may be evidenced in American re
viewers’ coy refusal to identify Dil through either masculine or, more fittingly,
feminine pronouns, as if unaware of any potential insistence that sex does not nec
essarily match the performative “nature” of gender. But by avoiding naming Dil’s
gender, and by repressing the film’s homosexual “secret,” the publicity surround
ing Jaye Davidson’s performance displaced this obfuscation back upon the figure of
the British actor. In interviews such as The New York Times' “A Star to Match a
Mystery Role,”23 and, even more so, in the later coverage of his Academy Award
nomination, Davidson/Dil’s conflated status was striking. As a supposedly sexually
indistinct “perfoimer with a difference,” as a non-American black man, as a denizen
23 Janet Maslin, “A Star to Match a Mystery Role,” The New York. Times 17 December
1992: C1+.
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126
of London queer culture, and (although the American press passed this trivia by),
as the first male acting nominee to perform full frontal nudity in a sex scene, David
son occasioned a highly distinct elaboration of the difference represented by British
actors more generally.24 Appearing at the Oscars ceremony not in the anticipated
drag but in a rather nondescript suit, Davidson lost (to Unforgiven’s gruff Gene
Hackman) in a manner both hushed and truly mysterious. Davidson had evaded the
televised gauntlet of greeters outside the auditorium, and when his category was
announced, he sat dutifully still for the cameras; he was mute, whatever “sheer mu
sic” his speech might carry silent He provided a perfectly blank surface, a face
(already in Gap ads, soon to be The Face) upon which America and the rest of the
audience might project their own exegesis of that mystery, of its own dreams of dif
ference.
With Davidson and The Crying Game a new degree of fragmentation and
hybridity envelopes the decades-old discourses of the body and the Bard, the
queemess of the English actor, and the civilized sanctity of the small, social realist
British cinema. Unlike Olivier, who once threateningly joined body and Bard at
home but represented only the Bard’s “sheer music” within Hollywood, Davidson
represents an American recognition of the actor’s corporeal male body, embodied in
a openly gay man, and represented through a film medium which is no longer either
purely “film” or purely of one nationality. Where Hoggart would locate the “hard”
and the “soft” here is rather difficult to answer.
Yet the current theatrical performance of British identity, while by no means
simple at the time of Olivier’s Hamlet, has only symptomatized the concurrent dec-
24 Appropriately enough, American AIDS agitator Larry Kramer adapted and produced Ken
Russell’s Women in Love (1969) which had broken the full-frontal male nudity barriers in the first
place.
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127
ades of British cultural negotiations nationwide. The potency and racial complexion
of this process was earlier underscored in the career of the black British singer Ro
land Gift following Scandal and his more impressive role as “Victoria” in Sammy
and Rosie Get Laid: in 1990 the neophyte actor took the lead in the Hull Truck
Company’s widely-seen, pointedly modernized and racially mixed stage production
of Romeo and Juliet. While Gift’s performance was favorably, if diplomatically re
ceived in both London and, later, in New York, in London his pop-star back
ground, amateur status and skin color became emblematic of the production’s
“playing down to the young,” multicultural flash. In New York, equally conserva
tive sources complained that the production did not go far enough in suggesting
Sammy and Rosie's chaotic feel—here the context shifted to film, when in London
the context was limited to the theatrical.25 Gift suggested a register apart from the
English theatrical tradition, a difference in his case indexed by his skin color. Re
gardless of the merit of Gift’s performance abilities or the practice of blind, “non-
traditional” casting in Britain, it seems inevitable that this collision of English theat
rical tradition, popular culture, and race should remain far more problematic in Brit
ain than in the US. The Crying Game's importance lies in the transparency with
which such a discourse operates and, in addition, gender is added to the mix. Dis
cussing the racial difference which underlies The Crying Game's representation of
sexual differences, Kristin Handler has drawn upon Frantz Fanon to argue that “the
racial difference between Jody and Fergus functions as a difference in excess of na
tional difference by being visible in their bodies.... Jody’s and Dil’s shared racial
25 See Benedict Nightingale, “Playing Down to the Young,” The Times o f London, 11 June
1990: 22; Sarah Eltis, “From Cradle to Grave,” Times Literary Supplement, 22 June 1990: 668;
and Stephen Holden, ‘Top Star as a Nontraditional Romeo,” The New York Times 14 July 1990:
L10.
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128
identity encodes their ‘different’ sexuality: Jody’s hidden sexual identity, which is
not marked on his body, becomes openly displayed as Dil’s penis.”26 Rather than
the final revelation, the unveiling of the sacred fetish around which the entire film
revolves—Dil’s dick, Dil as dick—becomes another relay in the narrative’s play of
difference.
Placing The Crying Game and Davidson within the contexts of Channel
Four-era British film and performance may further Handler’s analysis, and the
(non-)actor may be viewed together as both a culmination and a disavowal. First,
through the film’s financial and critical success in the US (over $50 million in box
office receipts alone), as well as its art house adherence to “controversial” questions
of race and gender, the film has provided the New British Cinema of the 1980s
with an unprecedented symbol of recognition; this recognition, however, has
mostly been used to rewrite the market viability of Miramax, its (formerly) inde
pendent American distributor. In a sense it has been the marketing of The Crying
Game that the films’ many awards and nominations celebrated, more than the film
itself; note the film’s earlier remarkably unremarkable British reception.27
Second, even though Davidson’s dizzying “difference” as an actor may
subsume the national within a discourse of gender, this difference is clearly an
chored outside the “sheer music” theatricality of the traditional British actor.
Whether or not Davidson practices anything resembling the Method, Davidson’s re
cruitment for The Crying Game depended upon a Method-like cultural and physical
26 Kristin Handler, “Sexing The Crying Game'. Difference, Identity, Ethics," Film Quarterly
473 (Spring 1994): 39.
27 See John H ill’s discussion of this topic in “The Future of European Cinema: The Econom
ics and Culture of Pan-European Strategies, “ Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain, and
Europe, ed. Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994)
69 and in passing.
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veracity visible in his body. His mixed race appearance remains as a shorthand for
this corporeal meaning, a mnemonic relay to the film’s display of flaccid penis and
the distance it charts from the phallic power of the sacredly shielded American male
star. Even Davidson’s vocal performance returns again to the bodily. As Dil,
Davidson’s voice eschews the rounded artifice of the other actors, and the lack of
this vocal “naturalness” helps to underscore his bodily presence. In another context
the flat detachment he gave to his line readings might easily suggest the 1960s
minimalist re-workings of performance styles, yet here, surrounded by more natu
ralistic performances, Davidson voice evokes not the Pinteresque, but the amateur
authenticity endlessly reworked by The Crying Game's publicity. (Hence the dis
appointment that Davidson did not wear a dress to the Oscars.) That Dil is working
class only heightens this value, drawing upon the sexual colonialism Jeffrey Weeks
describes in the British working class’ hegemonic association with nature and the
racially Other.28 Even though Davidson was never presented per se as a transvestite
or drag queen off screen (although he had worked in Pluto drag for EuroDisney),
Davidson/Dil’s racial, professional, and sexual cross-dressing combines to create a
sense of reflexively-perfoimed artifice-as-honesty which far outstrips its American
parallels in the comic genre shared by Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, and The Birdcage.
But if the film is more a symptom than a cure—that is, if The Crying Game
may be finally viewed as a heightened and contradictory example of Britain’s in
creasingly fragmented postcolonial awareness—then perhaps attention should be
turned from Dil to the character with whose redemption the film is more immedi
ately concerned. Handler convincingly argues that because difference has been es-
28 Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers
Oram Press, 1991) 55-57.
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130
sentialized through the heavily determined roles played by Dil, Jody, and the femme
fatal Jude, the film really only stays true to Fergus, or, as he calls himself in Lon
don, Jimmy.29 In the movement from Fergus to Jimmy, the narrative performs a
transformation which takes the initially IRA-committed, heterosexual Irishman to a
final stage in which he is dressed with a seemingly antithetical identity: even though
the film takes care to present the “Paddy” racism which the Irish experience in
England, Fergus’ initial attraction to the cricket-loving Jody leads not only to the
pastoral contemplation of idyllic playing fields, but to assuming the role of Dil’s
gentlemanly protector, and, finally, to his betrayal of the IRA, and his acceptance of
jail-time penance in Dil’s place. As soon as he “crosses the water” Jimmy’s Irish-
ness is acknowledged only by two characters: the excessively crass, ridiculously
spiffed-up yuppie construction boss who employs him and taunts Dil as a tart; the
other is Dil, who strangely mistakes Jimmy’s accent for Scottish, even American,
and, when coupled with him, presents a re-visioned image of the English couple for
the film’s conclusion.
An informer homosexualized through his betrayal, Fergus would have very
little choice but exile from his former life in Ireland and the (even more homopho
bic) IRA. For him awaits the life of the good-natured, rather neutered English bar
tender who presides over the bar where Dil Iip-synchs old American pop: a pub
named The Metro, an “underground” site of tunnels and transport between genders
and nationalities. From a white English perspective, the exchange of this new
Jimmy and the gay, black Jody, clearly indifferent to his role as a soldier in North
ern Ireland, might be entirely positive. What could be more conciliatory than the
film’s final scene, in which the converted former terrorist sits in prison and peace
29 Handler 41.
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fully quotes the New Testament? “In a word there are three things that last forever
faith, hope and love,” Fergus/Jimmy tells Dil, “but the greatest of them all is love.”
If anything, the film’s emphasis upon race and gender tends to erase, not amplify,
as other IRA dramas tend to do, the national boundaries which distinguish Irish and
English; its attitude toward Irish nationality places it squarely in the colonial tradi
tion of British nationality as the foundational quality upon which all other Com
monwealth identities (not to mention the US’ own) are built.
What It Means to Play the Crying Game
Scattered in financing, multinational in construction, the Channel Four films
discussed above in this chapter follow the small-scale ideal Samuel Goldwyn and
others prescribed, seemingly without its attendant stress upon adherence to a ho
mogeneous English culture. Perhaps even more importantly, Channel Four led the
way toward opening the borders between film and television, an act which has
helped to lessen the former British incompatibility with the one and aptitude for the
other. Yet the English “conversion” of Fergus at the center of The Crying Game
suggests that the face (or The Face) may still more likely belong to Fergus’ Stephen
Rae than to Davidson, to Hugh Grant rather than Davidson—which is to say, as a
group, those films marked by Channel Four’s involvement may be as invested in
the ever-continuing drama of imperiled Anglo masculinity as those which they fol
lowed. For every effort to represent the levels of complexity within British identity,
such as the English Punjabi-reggae mix of Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji On the Beach
(1994), there seems to be a depressing Wild West (1993) blithely ready to toss off
stereotypes without thought and “meaningfully” exile its own West Asian protago
nists to an apparently more appropriate US melting pot. In Bhaji On the Beach, the
yearning to return to any purer earlier state, Indian, Caribbean, or “English,”
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132
evaporates along the way. But when Wild West's struggling country western band
abandons Britain at the film’s end, it is hard not to hear a soft sigh of relief over
their departure: the band’s female singer remains behind, welcomed into the white
English music industry’s star-making machinery, but not the men. In Britain, the
pathos of American country western music becomes absurd and comic when ap
propriated by non-white men, and Wild West remains uncomfortably complied in
factoring this assumption.
Perhaps such discomfort with negotiating a place for non-white English
masculinity (not to mention the notable critical and popular failures of Hanif
Kureishi’s London Kills Me and Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels, both 1991)
provides an explanation for why the most influential British films recently have di
rectly presented white British masculinity in either comical sexual subservience to
American female prowess, as in Four Weddings and a Funeral or Jack and Sarah
(1996), or in violent crisis. Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff (1992), Raising Stones (1993),
and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), as well as Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), have to
gether created a new hybrid of New Wave and television traditions of social real
ism; with little of the erotic pleasure or intellectual vocabulary of Kureishi’s London
films, these films rebut Four Weddings' froth with the increasingly embittered,
even psychotic position of the white working and middle class man, and occasion
ally, as in Ladybird, Ladybird, woman as well. Antonia Bird’s much more tradi
tional Priest (1995) treated the Roman Catholic clergy in a similar fashion: although
its conclusion is safely ensconced in a protective veil of tears and sympathy, by this
point the gay priest at the film’s center is almost as angry as Naked's disturbed
protagonist.
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133
This pattern may be traced in the both the mainstream and the margins of
British film in the 1990s. Slick, thematically Americanized thrillers such as The
Young Americans (1993) and Shopping (1994) throw male angst into their crash-
filled drive to be the British Lethal Weapon, yet reach much more bleak conclusions
than their would-be American counterparts. At the other extreme, the spoken words
of Derek Jarman’s last film, the blue-only Blue (1993), used its monochromatic
screen as an abstract analogue for the filmmaker’s blind, dying body, and then me
thodically cuts off the outside world until author and audience are one. ‘The earth is
dying, and we don’t notice it,” the “Jarman” who narrates the film half announces,
half commands. Finally all that remains is the blue color of the screen, “delphinium,
blue, placed upon your grave.” Whether from AIDS or from cultural exhaustion,
this death-hug wraps around Jarman’s evocation of desire, the male body, and
creative expression.
Lindsay Anderson completed his final film project a year after Jarman; An
derson’s was a bitter autobiographical documentary for the Scottish BBC, Is That
All There Is? which aired two weeks following his death in 1994. The title as easily
applies to facing death as it does to Anderson’s all-too-sparse film career, filled
with frustrations which linger as the backdrop to Anderson’s blank-faced reenact
ment of empty, everyday life. In Anderson’s view, the spiral of British film seemed
to have continued its descent almost uninterruptedly.
In various ways each of these films, from The Crying Game and Four
Weddings and a Funeral to Blue and Is That All There Is? draws upon—or abne
gates—the figure of the English gentleman. He is who Fergus’ Pilgrim’s Progress
leads to, who sleepily spouts “fuck-a-doodle-do” in Four Weddings, who the
“Jarman” of Blue gently paints as he folds up his life. And in Is That All There Is?
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this gentleman is Anderson as he dryly observes his nephew’s Angry Young Man
affectations flowing smoothly into cocktail hour networking.
But just as the English actor is a site of contestation and multiple readings,
so may the gentleman present a site of contestation for race, class, and gender, par
ticularly across the Anglo-American divide. As chameleon-like as the cross-national
decadence of Jeremy Irons’ film performances, the gentleman pushes the actor’s
discourse of authenticity' and technique into a wider cultural context in which US
nationality is performed and British identity becomes an ambivalent code. Irons’ re
sume does provide a provocative chronicle of the uses to which the gentlemanly
white Englishman has been put, particularly in those instances in which Irons’ na
tionality would seem to be most obscured, such as The House of the Spirits (1994):
possibly more reviled in both the US and Britain than any earlier performance,
Irons’ leading role as Estdban Trueba, a fascistic, initially impoverished South
American of European ancestry, required him to match his speech to the accents of
the Americans playing the film’s upper-class roles.30 With greatly unappreciated
irony, Latin American, Spanish, even actors of Indian origin filled the European fi
nanced, shot and directed production’s working class roles. Irons’ bizarre, incon
sistent and inconstant result, still English at times, encapsulates these tensions sur
rounding the film, and, especially because the repudiation and redemption of
Trueba drives the narrative, helps to overlay the Chilean soap opera of Isabelle Al-
lende’s epic novel with the hints of something suggesting Britain’s colonial history.
Trueba’s final comeuppance and subsequent submission to his wife’s, sister’s and
daughter’s wisdom suggest a male masochism which also has a national frame in
30 For example, see Georgia Brown, “The Haunting,” Village Voice 12 April 1994: 56.
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135
the figure of the English gentleman, the dark makeup and curled wigs Irons wore
providing only a momentary disguise.
Philip Rosen has theorized nationality as an intertextual symptom which
gives unity to individual texts, but here Rosen’s argument may be seen in one of the
many instances in which nationality arises intertextually as a symptom outside of
the “coherence” of a national cinema, particularly in the increasingly complex na
tional identities of films such as The House o f the Spirits31: the sadistic, often pa
thetically frightened power of privilege practiced by Irons’ patriarch reeks of the sa
hib as well as the patron, just as the seeming “American-ness” of the film as a
whole may, ironically, represent a certain European independence from Holly
wood.
And yet while American film has most often called upon the English actor to
play the gentleman, what this means, precisely, and how it relates to British nation
ality, are the questions upon which the following chapter shall build.
In these respects, the interpolated conflicts of nationality, masculinity, and
that the actor dramatized in The House o f the Spirits, as well as recent British films,
come together in the final images of M. Butterfly (1993): in David Cronenberg’s
exquisitely Anglophobic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, Irons takes on
the role of Rend Gallimard, the imprisoned French diplomat who betrayed his
countiy for the love of a transvestite from the Beijing opera. This role may be pecu
liar but, as argued above, hardly unique—Irons is the pathetic, decadent English
gentleman who, narratively, is not even “English,” not even a gentleman, but sim
ply an accent which speaks a specific musical code of failed history, past culture.
3 1 Philip Rosen, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Problems of Na
tional Cinemas,” Iris 2.2 (1984): 70.
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136
His bravura moment arrives at the film’s end in Gallimard’s climactic, ritualistic
donning of Madama Butterfly’s paint and costume; like Balzac’s Sarrasine played
across contemporary nationality, Irons’ Gallimard has been made “dead to all
pleasure, to every human emotion” by his sexual humiliation.32 Theatrically lit, and
surrounded by the other prison inmates, the film’s clumsy and naturalistic concerns
with whether Gallimard knew or not, with the “perfect woman”’s necessary arti
fice, all of these fall away as Irons blankly enacts what could be a different, Barthe-
sian sort of ending for The Crying Game, one in which Fergus becomes his own
La Zambinella, his own Divine Marie Brown, his own Jaye Davidson.
More than a non-sequitur, the diplomat’s English accent is the theatrical per
formance of English masculinity as the embodiment of Otherness. Stripped of em
pire, stripped of the national map which has previously located its power’s herme
neutic code, English nationality has become, like the “perfect woman,” something
which cannot so much be located as performed. I am Madama Butterfly, this crazed
Irons/Gallimard cries in his grotesque, unconvincing makeup. The prisoners ea
gerly applaud him, perhaps out of critical appreciation of his performance, perhaps
for the pathos of his failed life as a man, perhaps for more sexual reasons—through
words as well as makeup, Gallimard has presented himself as a feminized sexual
partner, their racial Other, their own “perfect woman.”33 After all, as George Jean
32 Honore de Balzac, Sarrasine, in Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1974) 252.
33 Philadelphia (also 1993) provides a parallel moment when Tom Hanks’ AIDS-stricken op
era lover passionately discourses on a Maria Callas aria to Denzel Washington’s homophobic at
torney; Hanks’ theatrical delivery, as well as Jonathan Demme’s suddenly non-naturalistic lighting
and overtly stylized camera movements seems integral to the speech’s evocation of a gay sensibil
ity and its power over Washington. In a sense. Hanks ’ opera lover has performed the same maneu
ver as Gallimard: he too has become safely feminized before his African-American attorney,
wrapped in the racial Otherness of Anglo opera queen-dom. From this point on, Washington’s at
torney puts his homophobia aside and fights for his demure client.
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Nathan wrote, by their nature women and Englishmen are actors. Finally silent,
Gallimard turns from the audience. He slits his throat
And the applause continues and continues.
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138
PART 2
Gentlemen, Villains, and Spies
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CHAPTER 4
The Days’ Remains
139
“in the rose garden reading richard II,” reads a subtitle near the end of Bruce
Weber’s Broken Noses (1987), a lush black and white documentary by Calvin
Klein’s signature photographer. Andy Minsker, the Olympic lightweight boxer
Weber chose as a subject, stands among the roses, bare-chested, uncertain. He
clutches a book and reads:
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a King?1
The film stock has shifted to lush color and the rose garden’s erotic display ex
plodes. There in its midst Minsker reads from Shakespeare's narrative of a narcis
sistic, effeminate monarch brought to self-destruction in the face of an authoritative
usurper. The speech Minsker reads is not any speech but from Richard’s masochis
tic “sad stories of the death of kings.” It is a curious moment in a curious, some
times disturbing film: Weber’s lens has displayed an implicit sexual aggression
throughout the film’s more typical documentary sequences, but suddenly this
staged, unexplained reading takes physical control of Minsker, who seems to have
no comprehension of what he reads. Yet he smiles and politely complies, he be
comes “subjected thus” to Shakespeare’s language, to Weber’s desire. Playing the
actor, Minsker behaves, as it were, like a gentleman, the figure I will discuss here.
Like the even more pliable and perverse Richard III, Richard II has ap
peared in some rather eccentric American contexts. For example, another of Richard
1 Richard //, 3.2.156-177.
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/ / ’ s speeches appears in Kim Robinson’s 1984 novel The Wild Shore, which ap
peared alongside of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, heralding a new American
science fiction. John of Gaunt’s bitter, despairing ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this
realm, this England” becomes a patriotic fragment of oral tradition in Robinson’s
post-apocalyptic America, a future which no longer remembers that Shakespeare
was not American, nor that England was not part of the US. As in Broken Noses,
Shakespeare’s representation of British history has been appropriated to describe
and proscribe obedience, compliance, and the values of good manners and good
culture.2 Yet in both cases, the roles appropriated are ironically imbued with loss
and failure—’’ this England” John of Gaunt cries several lines later, “Is now leased
out, I die pronouncing it,” as is the US these survivors try to remember.
Yet just like Irons’ Gallimard, composed even in his death ritual, we dress
these borrowings in a stereotypical English civility, a quality often rather close to
servility. That cultural civility has had an enduring strength: if the politely reaction
ary, quaintly inbred WASP drolleries of Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994)
continue to be attended to by their director, Walt Stillman, then tea and Jane Austen
(not to mention Weber’s Shakespeare and roses) may continue as guideposts for
Anglo deportment. Perhaps it is just that the British have always seemed such good
diplomats, so adept at saying the right thing, even if that bookish ability often
makes them comical in American culture: it is hard to imagine an American actor
stammering as gracefully as Hugh Grant did through the gamut of self-deprecation
which following his 1995 arrest Compared to Hollywood stereotypes of debauch
ery, Grant’s crime itself was a sort of model of discreet gentlemanly deportment.
2 See Tom Shippey, "The Fall of America in Science Fiction,” Fictional Space: Essays on
Contemporary Science Fiction, ed. Shippey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) 125.
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141
While the stereotype of the “eccentric” British gentleman lingers on in Grant
and others, cantankerous figures from George Orwell to Johnny Rotten have dem
onstrated how the British working class—or its pose—complicates the argument;
add class consciousness to the English middle class and the result would seem to be
the desire to provoke and self-dramatize the gentleman’s essential emptiness. Per
haps the essence of the gentleman (“gentle” conflating both high birth and polished
behavior) is that it ostensibly remains ephemerally removed from class. So removed
that it may in fact be an un-definable category, as if definition might be somehow
too common—the Labour Party, in the days when it cared about such things, once
declared the term meaningless and tried, unsuccessfully, to have it removed from
the Army Act’s “an officer and a gentleman” description. A gentleman, Labour
notes in the anecdote, has no legal definition.
And yet for countless generations gentleman and nation have been inter
woven, as when Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude, “we were brothers all/in hon
our, as in our community/Scholars and gentlemen.”3 There is that slight distinction,
however, between this community’s scholars and gendemen, a sense in which the
two designations represent alternative paths, however much postmodernity has
questioned them. (Or as one of William Congreve’s characters sniffed quite a while
earlier, “‘Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University, but the educa
tion is a little too pedantic for a gendeman.”)
Certainly the gentleman has often offered itself as a designation to be as
sumed for sometimes strikingly different purposes. The familiar image of Orwell
rejecting the left’s scholars and “slumming” among the poor shares something with
3 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 9.226-228, Internet, Web, 27 March 1996. Available:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/wordsworth/ww295.html.
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Sid Vicious’ performances of the “I Did It My Way” in the wake of the Sex Pistols’
violent rejection of “England’s dreaming”: both played off of expectations con
cerning behavior by giving the noblesse oblige of both the intellectuals and rock’s
own nobility a fierce, class-crossing rebuke, taking them deliberately down and
out But in each case the approved path of the scholar or pop artist, engaged with
his or her work and aloof from wider social contact as a pleasure, differs from the
dilettantish drive of the gentleman to pursue and provide pleasure in more generally
accepted forms.
The gentleman may also be distinguished, at least during this century, from
the aristocrat, and, according to the ever-sarcastic and highly classist Evelyn
Waugh, the middle class (which included Orwell and Vicious) has a significant
stake in perpetuating the gentleman’s persistence. In Waugh’s first novel, Decline
and Fall, the character Paul Penny feather finds himself thrown out of university,
his inheritance lost, and his career ruined, all on the absurd whim of a drunken
gentlemen’s club, yet still he clings to his dubious birthright:
For generations the British bourgeoisie have spoken of
themselves as gentlemen, and by that they meant, among
other things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites.
It is the quality that distinguishes both the artist and the aris
tocrat. Now I am a gentleman. I can’t help it: it’s bom in
me.4
But such equanimity (to use a charitable term) as Pennyfeather’s extends beyond
the deluded middle class. It has also sentimentally ensured that the best representa
tives of the working class, especially those in domestic service, shine with the gen
tleman’s politesse: from Dickens to Kazuo Ishiguro, the masculinity of the good
English manservant has been shaped in mimetic fidelity to his employer. (Or at least
4 Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1956) 54.
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143
to the ideal of his employer, since in practice the employer often lacks the attributed
qualities.) This characterization has a persistent currency. Over and over Americans
delight in the discovery that the put-upon British servant may be even more archly
classist than their superiors—the noblesse oblige of the working class. Witness the
perennially recycled Jeeves, Ruggles of Redcap, Mr. Belvedere (characters pre
sented contrapuntally in Carol Reed’s 1949 version of The Fallen Idol, the televi
sion series Upstairs, Downstairs, and Merchant Ivory’s The Remains o f the Day),
among the many other “gentleman’s gentleman” tales.5
But the British servant is not alone “in service”: crossing the Anglo-
American border is quite often represented as a form of service to one or both of the
national cultures, particularly when romantic interests provide an opportunity to
sexualize the process. Tune into a CBS’ short-lived western Ned Blessing, and dis
cover that, during Oscar Wilde’s lecture trip to America, not only did the “eccentric”
author and his impeccably good manners manage to save the hero’s life, but he ro
mantically united hero and heroine.6 Performed by the gay British actor, writer and
quiz show’ wit Stephen Fry, this Wilde blended seamlessly in 1993 into Fry’s on
going role in a Masterpiece Theater series. This latter series featured Fry as Jeeves
in the most recent adaptations of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories of an English twit and
5 Add to these the self-sacrificing “little people” in British or English-set fantasy works from The Lord
o f the Rings and The Borrowers (with their various film and television adaptations) to Legend (1985), Wil
low (1988), and The Witches (1990), as well as the talking animals of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle
(filmed 1967) and Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca books (Americanized as Disney’s The Rescuers, 1977, and
The Rescuers Down Under, 1990). Riled with hobbits, assorted small people, and hard-working mice, these
works present characters who inevitably resent their low lot—and then defy expectations with hidden perse
verance, initiative, and, finally, deference. They rescue the big people time after time.
6 Ned Blessing, September 1993.
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144
his wise but obsequious valet.7 Never mind Wilde’s Irish birth or Jeeve’s class and
station, never mind the homosexual dimensions of their stories: in both cases it is
their eccentric cleverness as de facto British gentleman, however personally tragic
or ironic or “perverse,” that saves cowboy and the faux-gentleman twit alike. Sub
lime English artificiality saves the day, particularly for the honest but inarticulate
American cowboy. Like the errant Hugh Grant, both Wilde and Jeeves are so thor
oughly artificial, so affected, that, paradoxically, they too share the Americans’
authenticity.
The association between male homosexuality and camp’s sense of sincere
articiality may take on other subtexts among the masks worn during the contempo
rary AIDS era: even safe sex is, in a certain sense, the introduction of gentlemanly
behavior into the bedroom. Fry’s role as the HIV positive aristocrat at the center of
Kenneth Branagh’s Peter’ s Friends (1992) once again juxtaposed the witty but ro
mantically vulnerable gentleman with his crass, mostly Americanized (and hetero
sexual) friends. In fact there seems to be no distinction between Peter’s end-of-the-
line status as lord and heir of tradition, and his own health status. The college theat
rical group to which they all had belonged (the theater provides the British parallel
to The Big Chill’s campus radicals) seems only to have led in two directions, to ad
vertising and American television, or to lost purpose and dissipation, leaving Pe
ter’s embodiment of Britishness thoroughly terminal, even if it is still meant to seem
more comforting and more humane.
7 Quite coincidentally, these adaptations included Jeeves' own adventures in the US, where his
aplomb once again saved his employer's bachelorhood—heterosexual romance is left to the Ameri-
cans.
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145
As Peter’ s Friends illustrates, this national stereotype has also been used to
enable more explicit constructions of homosexual identity. English costume dra
mas, from Becky Sharp to Barry Lyndon to Orlando, have reveled in the male ef
feminacy variously institutionalized during the Elizabethan, Restoration and later
eras of British history. For example, Cunningham, Tim Roth’s social-climbing vil
lain of Rob Roy (1995), provided a simple, early 18th century version of how the
English gentleman was imagined—’’ anyone with linens [who] can manage a lisp.”
Yet Rob Roy also astutely illustrates the difficulty of recognizing gay identity in ei
ther these representations or the “real” history they portray: although he is first
greeted with charges of buggery, Cunningham’s ability both to cast off and quickly
resume his foppery emphasizes the social disjuncture between effeminate manners
and the “opposing” qualities of murderous ambition and heterosexual violence. Al
though the Scottish Highlands drama of Rob Roy plays off of assumptions of Eng
lish homosexuality, there is no homosexual to be found among Rob Roy’s dandi
fied characters; unlike the homophobic Braveheart (also 1995), Rob Roy speaks
only a courtly lisp of class and power.
Yet more recent British history has provided clearer representations in
which to search for the homosexual. From Susan Sontag’s brief “Notes On Camp”
to Jonathan Dollimore’s wide-reaching Sexual Dissidence to Joseph Bristow’s very
specific Effeminate England, Wilde’s self-invention and its relation to British cul
ture and class provides the linchpin upon which these authors discuss contemporary
gay male identities.8 Their use of Wilde is hardly unique. Whereas once Wilde’s
8 Susan Sontag, "Notes On Camp," A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage Books,
1983); Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991); Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
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146
name could be coupled with a more general desire to choose Culture over the con
fines of parochial American life, as in Eugene O’Neil’s Ah, Wilderness! (or, more
recently, the heavily nostalgic television western discussed above), contemporary
usage repeatedly appropriates Wilde as an icon for specifically gay male culture.
Simon Callow’s gay character in Four Weddings and a Funeral knows the game
quite well—Gareth personally knows Oscar Wilde, he assures a gullible American.
Americans, too, have known Wilde: in Britain, the landmark Report of the
Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution was published in
1957, and three years later not one but two Wilde biographies appeared on the
screen, Oscar Wilde and The Trials of Oscar Wilde, each supported by American
finances (including that secured by the soon-to-be producers of the James Bond se
ries, an ironic twist considering the often homophobic dimensions of Bond’s vil
lains).
But Wilde’s presence went further than these two films. Wilde and the
Wolfenden Report gave a national filter to a topic to which the US media seemed
otherwise blind. American coverage of the Wolfenden Report brought homosexual
ity its most sustained, and, all things considered, most favorable coverage during
the decade between the Report’s publication and the final passage of its recom
mended decriminalization of adult male homosexual acts in 1967. From the larger
newspapers to Time and Newsweek to The New Yorker and Christian Century, the
American press followed the debate in Britain concerning the future of a law intro
duced in Parliament by Henry Labouchere during a sleepy late night session in
1885—a law which not only had made any male homosexual relation punishable by
up to life in prison, but, as source after source pointed out, a law which had marked
it tenth anniversary with the destruction of Wilde’s career. In report after report,
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Wilde’s image became the green carnation marking the latest account of Parlia
ment’s slow progress. Although some publications such as Time persisted in em
ploying terms such as “deviant” through 1967, Wilde’s case was often presented
sympathetically.9 The British controversy also gave an opportunity to assess the
civil rights the US gave its citizens—comparisons which made clear that if the Brit
ain was relatively repressive next to European standards, only the state of Illinois
came close to the reform bill that in 1965 the great-grandson of Wilde’s original ac
cuser had championed before the House of Lords.1 0 Even more, the 1963 publica
tion of Wilde’s unexpurgated letters allowed W. H. Auden the unique opportunity
to reflect at length in The New Yorker upon the significance of Wilde’s conviction,
and its influence upon Anglo-American culture. The review began opposite a full
page British Travel Association ad labeled “How to spend a day in and around
London” (garnished with Samuel Johnson’s assertion that “When a man is tired of
London he is tired of life”), and in its final section concluded that
For many years, both in England and in America, the Wilde
scandal had a disastrous influence, not upon writers and art
ists themselves but upon the attitude of the general public
toward the arts, since it allowed the philistine man to identify
with the decent man.11
Yet Auden is able to conclude that, even while Parliament still prevaricated, “the ef
fect of what in itself was a horrid business has been beneficial,” if only because
middle class intellectuals like Wilde (and Auden himself) were no longer so
stranded between upper class clubby-ness and working class exile. Wilde’s di-
9 For example, see "Facing the Dark Facts," Newsweek, 16 September 1957: 50; "Letter from
London," The New Yorker, 28 September 1957: 136-138; "Sin or Crime?" Newsweek, 21 Febru
ary 1966: 54-55; 'Dealing with Deviates," Time 30 December 1966: 17; "Shame Is Enough,"
Time 14 July 1967: 30.
10 "Their Liberal Lordships," 7 June 1965:38.
11 W. H. Auden, "An Improbable Life," The New Yorker, 9 March 1963: 166.
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148
lemma, after all, had been that the aristocracy’s protections against scandal were
denied him.1 2
While Auden may have been correctly optimistic concerning the contempo
rary effect of Wilde’s persecution, Wilde as a symbol of Anglo-American homo
sexuality is still symptomatic of the moneyed delineations which still define con-
sumerist gay male culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Like the later homosexuals
of Victim (1961), Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (1962), Darling (1965), and We
Think the World o f You (1988), Wilde’s sexual dalliances were those of a relatively
moneyed gentleman attracted to youth, much like Simon Callow’s Four Weddings
and a Funeral character (originally, his Gareth was to have been a tutor at the
group’s university, expelled for having fraternized too closely with his students).
The men in these films may often have younger lovers (“punks” is one slang term)
from the lower classes, but, true to “the perversion of the Greeks,” even more often
it is the gentleman who assumes the active role, and controls the cash. The extraor
dinary The Leather Boys (released in 1964), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Prick
Up Your Ears (1987), Maurice (1987), and Terence Davies’ work (Trilogy, 1976-
83, and The Long Day Closes, 1992, in particular) all present working class, iden-
tifiably gay men, yet as Mark Finch and Richard Kwietniowski have observed, in
films such as Maurice “homosexuality figures less as desire than a class-based
symptom of ‘wider issues’: lost youth, authoritarian upbringing, the perversities of
privilege.”1 3 With the partial exception of Davies’ autobiographical (and Catholic
guilt-ridden) projects, male homosexuality is still represented only in proximity to
12 Auden 167.
13 Mark Finch and Richard Kwietniowski, "Melodrama and Maurice': Homo is Where the Het
Is," Screen 29.3 (Summer 1988): 73.
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149
privilege and the ambition to move upward or away from working class identities.
Even Davies’s obsession with the divas of Hollywood musicals provides a similar,
class-alienating reference point for the struggling family of Distant Voices, Still
Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes.
In the US, where the tanned and affluent citizens of Castro Street, West
Hollywood, and the Village often seem to blend seamlessly with the idealized pro
tagonists of Making Love, Longtime Companion, Philadelphia, and It's My Party,
repeated associations between the Wildean tradition and “the gay sensibility” also
suffuse sexuality with the traces of national and class distinctions. The now gray
ing, prosperous clones of the 1970s, that post-Stonewall generation who first made
advertisers take notice, may say differently: writing as the generation’s representa
tive, and winning a National Book Award for it, the late Paul Monette’s Becoming
a Man (1992) envisioned an explicitly essentialist gay man umbilically linked to
Judy (or Liz or Diana or Maria or...) and opposed in sex and sensibility to gen
tlemanly English inhibition. “I’ve always had a thing for men from unpaved places,
not too polished, definitely not English,” Monette wrote. “Lust and the English
make no sense to me, Constance Chatterley’s lover notwithstanding.”14
Half-English and half Quebecois himself, Monette’s repeated emphasis
upon the libidinal power of class over that of “Englishness” actually has a rather
British cast to it Indeed, while Monette’s decision to become a writer rather than a
lawyer or doctor placed him against the social-climbing ambitions of his family’s
14 Paul Monett, Becoming a Man: Haifa Life Story (San Francisco: Harper, 1992) 24. Mon
ette may write on page one that he speaks "for no one else here, if only because I don't want to
saddle the women and men of my tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred, the particular door-
less room of my internal exile." However, he immediately adds: "Yet I've come to leam that all
our stories add up to the same imprisonment...." That the autobiography (as well as his earlier
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir) is positioned as an AIDS document also sharpens its inclusive
scope within the gay community.
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150
English side, the narrative’s conclusion finds him doing the next best thing—he
marries a Boston lawyer, and the allusion framing their gay union is the American
meeting between Walt Whitman and Wilde.1 5 Becoming a man means sorting
through a complex drift of choices marked by his mother’s English and father’s
French ancestry, and what finally wins out, whether Monette realized it or not, are
those associated not with his name but with his British grandfather, a chauffeur
with ambitions. His New England wife seems to have seen to it that these working
class origins soon disappeared behind silver salt cellars and good linen napkins,
just as the family migrated up from Methodist to Episcopal faith. “English” could
then be placed in comfortable opposition to the working class Figure of D. H. Law
rence’s gamekeeper.
Monette seems not to realize the extent to which he, as a Lady Chatterly,
remains untouched by his arch, “Paul is slumming” indiscretions. These working
class men simply fade away, their futures un-traced in Monette’s autobiography,
and their status as gay almost nonexistent. Like the Merchant Ivory version of
Maurice, the grubby gamekeeper may seem to be favored over the aristocrat, but the
pleasures of the film, its perfect costumes and lush cinematography, are the pristine
ones afforded by Britain’s ever-chugging heritage industry, and that industry usu
ally pays only passing attention to the working class. Monette’s peers, radicalized
first by Stonewall and then by AIDS, have oftentimes behaved little better.
While it will be later argued that British nationality has suffused subsequent
gay culture with the relatively different class politics of transplanted punk politics,
the dandified, eccentric gentleman nonetheless lingers on. Open a Village Voice's
“Queer Issue” in the 1990s, and its essay on gay culture will matter of factly reaf
15 Monette 276.
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firm that the British Edward Carpenter and Wilde remain the fathers of “our image
of a gay sensibility.”16 Gay filmmakers have provided similar connections. Fol
lowing his use of Wilde in Urinal (1988), Canadian John Greyson’s Zero Patience
(1993) takes the 19th century Sir Richard Burton as a ghostly protagonist in its mu
sical staging of the history of AIDS. The gentleman continues to wind his way
through popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic, carrying with him the signs
and meanings of British culture in curious places. And strange as it may seem in an
era of AIDS, ACT UP, and body-piercing queer boys with Doc Martens and Derek
Jarman buzzcuts, this figure still often appears as carefully costumed in upper class
British dress as any Merchant Ivory period piece.
Sly Civility
Simply to associate Wilde with privilege, however, may be to miss the
point, just as Finch and Kwietniowski may have done when they complained (in
the context of Maurice) that British film seems too eager to make homosexuality “a
symptom of ‘wider-issues.’“ Complete with Reading Gaol, Wilde also presents the
figure of one who once wielded class and its power, but subsequently felt its rever
sal in the full force of legal mastery, an apt example of “the perversities of privi
lege.” Like Jeeve’s securely inferior class position, Wilde’s defeat in court may be
inimical to his appeal: the British theorist Homi Bhabha has taken “sly civility” as
an apt description of the colonial Other’s polite response to the colonizer’s de
mands.1 7 Is it inappropriate to keep this in mind when, say, turning to the title page
of Alexander Walker’s history of sixties British filmmaking, Hollywood UK,
16 Richard Goldstein, "The Queer Issue: Faith, Hope, and Sodomy," Village Voice 29 June
1993: 22.
17 Homi Bhabha, "Sly Civility," October34 (1985): 77.
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which claims that ‘ T o be an Englishman in the film industry is to know what it’s
like to be colonized”? Bhabha most certainly does not have in mind the relatively
harmless ways in which the British may have themselves become the Other, but his
work does stress the invasive, double-edged function of colonial discourse. As
Bhabha has written elsewhere, it is the “repertoire of positions of power and resis
tance, domination and dependence that constructs the colonial subject (both colo
nizer and colonized).”1 8
It is this double-edged process which may be glimpsed in the construction
of the politely eccentric stereotype of the gentleman, a creation which replicates the
“sly civility” of the British through the “continual slippage between civil inscription
and colonial address.” The slippage, Bhabha explains, allows resistance to become
read as folly or madness, and
What was spoken within the orders of civility now accedes
to the colonial signifier. The question is no longer Derrida’s
‘Tell us exactly what happened.” From the point of view of
the colonizer, passionate for unbounded, unpeopled posses
sion, the problem of truth turns into the troubled political and
psychic question of boundary and territory: Tell us why you,
the native, are there.... The colonialist demand for narra
tive carries, within it, its threatening reversal Tell us why we
are here. 1 9 [italics his]
Increasingly viewed as fragmented into Anglos and people of color, American cul
ture expects African-Americans to look toward Africa for its own authorization: as
Bhabha writes of the demand for narrative explanation, “It is this echo that reveals
the other side of narcissistic authority may be the paranoia of power; a desire for
‘authorization’ in the face of a process of cultural differentiation which makes it
problematic to fix the native objects of colonial power as the moralized ‘others’ of
18 Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question," Screen 24:6 (Nov.-Dee. 1983): 18-19.
19 Bhabha, “Sly Civility” 78.
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truth.”20 If Afrocentrism may be read within the bounds of colonial discourse, then
at least Afrocentric Americans have chosen historically “appropriate” Others.
But how “appropriate” are the British as American Anglos’ Others? The
autobiographical project 84 Charing Cross (1986) provides an intriguingly un
guarded example of the powerful place the English may map out and represent
within American culture, particularly along its own ethnic seams. In the film, the
Jewish-American writer Helene Hanff (played by Anne Bancroft) finds a very defi
nite intellectual authorization in her 20 year correspondence with a British book
seller, Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins). As he cheaply supplies her with books she
has somehow failed to find in Manhattan, she progresses from lowly script-reader
in 1948 to the author finally capable of symbolically consummating their chaste ro
mance on the printed page. Entranced by the thought of an entire nation where peo
ple say “RAHZ-berries,” Hanff insists she is not naive enough to imagine that these
people live the England Past of her imagination and her slightly musty, leather-
bound books. What she desires, she says, is the England of “English literature,”
and that, she believes, is the England which the well-prepared may still find for
herself. Hopkins’ clerk provides her a guide and surrogate in this process.
Through this narrative the film replicates much of the chaste mistress-
servant colonial romances then popular in Out of Africa and Gorillas in the Mist,
other biographical and “multicultural” films of the same decade. 84 Charing Cross,
however, reproduces those film’s arguably racist black and white contrasts in a
more subtle American “ethnic’VEnglish white-on-white. Here a British man humbly
devotes himself to providing a woman with knowledge of his people. This knowl
20 Bhabha, “Sly Civility” 78.
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edge will, in turn, allow her to prove herself within her own patriarchal culture: in
the end, Hanff sells the story of her correspondence with the bookseller to a maga
zine, and that story becomes the basis for a stage play and, finally, the film. With
precisely the same painfully repressed civility he brought to the pathetic butler of
The Remains of the Day (but without that film’s critical, bitter melancholy),
Hopkins’ drably married Doel has no other desire than to export the legacy of his
culture until, finally, he drops dead on the job. The eventually successful American
writer, who assumes the position of critic and judge, returns his efforts with dol
lars, tinned ham (a ration-era treasure), and, after his death, a glorious tourist ex
cursion to the now-empty office in which he once worked.
Yet “English literature” does not represent the entirety of what he has ex
ported: although the favorable exchange rate rationalizes her business to some ex
tent, her requests for such seemingly common things as a New Testament in the
Vulgate, or, perhaps more difficult to find, the complete sermons of John Donne,
suggest that he supplies her with more than simple English daydreams. It is, possi
bly, his “whiteness” which he provided. Although Hanff explains her “great uncle
Abraham” had converted to Christianity and left the family with a good number of
Christian members, she makes a point of defining herself as “Jewish,” an aspect
unfortunately caricatured by Bancroft’s outsized performance, and contrasted with
Hopkin’s near-catatonia.
However, the film’s narrative, such as it is, proceeds by gradually erasing
HanfPs difference as a single, Jewish woman living in a brownstone in a recog
nizably Jewish community until, as she becomes more successful and older, her
anomaly as a working woman is lessened, and her friends and home are more
blandly American; she begins as that dangerous figure of the 1940s, the intellectual
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155
Jewish-American career woman, and ends as the lovable surrogate grandmother to
the child of a fashionable golden couple. This life has been made possible at least in
part, the film suggests, because Doel’s different masculinity did not withhold but
gentlemanly extend Anglo culture to her.
On a more general level, however, Doel’s gentleman represents a historical
process having nothing to do with British culture or nationality. Just as the growth
of the paperback industry widened the selection of new books available at lower
prices, 84 Charing Cross implicitly suggests that American culture has itself wid
ened to include Jewish within Anglo culture, and uses Doel to dramatize the proc
ess. By the film’s end, actual English nationality becomes as beside the point as the
services Doel had once provided. He seemingly disappears into the story which de
fines Hanff’s negotiated worth and status, leaving only his address as a sort of
tourist attraction near the end of the Swinging London era. With a subtle English
accent, Hanff gives the now-closed shop’s address to a London cabby, and the
film’s final frames finds her standing in Doel’s vacant, ramshackle space, smiling,
as if she were now somehow complete.
British Failings
It is interesting to notice just how “appropriate” as an Other the actor playing
the bookseller became. Although 84 Charing Cross barely rated a theatrical release
in the US,2 1 The Silence of the Lambs allowed Hopkins the opportunity to star in
what almost amounted to a remake of 84 Charing Cross, Richard Attenborough’s
1993 film of the British television film and play Shadowlands. The story of writer
C. S. Lewis’ early 1960s marriage to a younger Jewish-American woman dying of
21 Yet the original book was popular enough to spawn both this film and a Broadway stage
adaptation.
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cancer, Shadowlands added a sexual element the prim 84 Charing Cross lacked, but
the similarity of Hopkins’ role to that of the earlier film (and to those in Howards
End, 1992, and The Remains o f the Day) intertextually cemented the actor as a typi-
fication of stolid British masculinity and tradition. Perhaps even more similar than
dissimilar to his American role as Dr. “Hannibal the Cannibal” Lector, these Brit
ish-set films present Hopkins as initially frightening but eventually desirous of the
final thawing brought on by his masochistic submission to a strong woman, one
who is either non-traditional, as in Howards End, or an American. A grisly parody
of the gentleman’s hypocritical civility in The Silence o f the Lambs (the film hinges
upon his killer’s gentlemanly behavior to a female FBI investigator, sporadically re
casting the horror thriller as a comedy of manners), so Hopkins’ characters finally
break through masculine repression and reserve in these other films to follow fe
male bidding. In the less charitable The Remains of the Day, even though the but
ler’s final, pathetic effort to reach out to a woman comes to nothing, he attempts it
only due to the largesse of his new, significantly American employer, given true
manly form by an actor once best known for playing Superman.
Nonetheless, Christopher Reeve’s American gentleman jars, for interesting
reasons. With the exception of the deceptively more contemporary, post-Empire 84
Charing Cross, each of these period films above would seem to be critical of the
“sly civility” practiced by Hopkins’ characters. Indeed, calling it sly at all would
appear to be a stretch—dull, self-defeating, empty might be better designations. Yet
the repetition of this critique, its usual limitation to literary adaptations, and its sus
tained popularity in the US art film market, suggests that another, more cynical
conclusion may be possible. Like the butler’s new employer, all suited up in British
tweeds and ready to re-open the manor house, American superiority to all this Brit
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ish repression and thwarted masculinity may merely be there to rationalize our own
amorous, wistful preoccupation with it—the typically conflicted pleasures of An-
glophilophobia. At times our fascination seems almost to increase inversely with the
degree of failure. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Remains o f the Day screenplay’s most
dramatic alteration to Kuzuo Ishiguro’s novel was to enlarge the role played by the
new owner. In the film he is both the congressman who decries Nazi sympathies of
the butler’s aristocratic employer in the 1939, as well as the person responsible for
rescuing the late Lord’s estate from being dismantled and the manor destroyed. Like
the money from Columbia Studios funding The Remains o f the Day, the Ameri
can’s money and his congressional “title” (granted, a poor substitute for Superman)
allow the preservation of British tradition. No wonder the butler fails to redeem his
life through the love of the housekeeper he had secretly loved—the more crucial
romance, the one successfully concluded, has been between the butler and his new,
better master, the American congressman.
Or, perhaps more to the point, like the romance between Merchant Ivory
and Columbia—the same studio which in the summer of 1986 had placed Goldcrest
Films’ David Putnam at its helm, but then dismissed him the next year because, in
theory at least, he tried to practice what the Chariots o f Fire producer had been hired
to do: make American films like his previous small British films.22 That Columbia
22 He also clashed with an influential figure at Columbia, Ray Stark—a producer whose
power in Hollywood might easily have been a model for Putnam’s earlier British career. See Jake
Eberts and Terry Ilott's exhaustive chronicle My Indecision is Final: The Rise and Fall o f Gold
crest Films (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) 108.
In retrospect, Putnam’s tenure may have been marked by quarrels and a stubborn reluctance to
pursue a highly budgeted Ghostbusters sequel, but it was as equally marked by one highly budgeted
disaster which he did not resist—Bill Cosby’s family spy spoof, Leonard Part Six (1987). By the
time The Last Emperor (which Putnam had picked up for Columbia) swept the 1987 Academy
Awards, the Brit’s short reign had ended acrimoniously, and he had taken up temporary refuge in a
Canadian film studies program; Ghostbusters II (1989) quickly went into production.
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158
had not even released any of Putnam’s own projects before he departed (he had in
herited Cosby’s project) only amplified his subsequent stature in both the US and
Britain as an angry but gentlemanly figure of aesthetic and moral substance.2 3 As
an Anglo-American exchange, Putnam-the-underdog-producer had once succeeded,
but Putnam-the-studio-chief was on the wrong side of the equation, and video
stores still stock the barely released evidence, such as Daniel Day-Lewis in Pat
O’Connor’s Anglo-American culture clash comedy, Stars and Bars (1988).
As in The Remains of the Day, it is the Americans who seem poised to do
the rescuing, not the other way around; and like the director played by Richard
Grant in The Player, while British directors and actors may flourish in Hollywood,
they often do so as the weaker partners, playing the submissive role of artistic vi
sionaries fortunate to be allowed to compromise themselves in a warmer, richer
climate. Thus, like countless before her, Antonia Bird moved from Priest's bargain
basement budget to the warm embrace of Disney and Mad Love's (1995) relatively
lush $13 million. (But, as Frears found after Hero and Mary Reilly, when they fail,
the consequences may be dire enough to necessitate a journey or two to Lourdes.)
If these Anglo-American romances have rules regarding who is on top, then
the Merchant Ivory production company, which Disney brought into its fold fol
lowing the production of The Remains o f the Day, is itself the product of a similar
romance; this one is between the American director James Ivory, Indian producer
Ismail Merchant, and the originally Polish Jhbvala, on the one hand, and on the
other, the E. M. Forster and Henry James novels they have successfully adapted.
23 See Aljean Harmetz, "Peddling a Film Maker's Quirky Legacy," New York Times, 2 Feb
ruary 1989, B 1. Putnam has continued publicly to espouse a renewal of film's potential moral
force: see Laurence Alster, "Moving Images," Times Educational Supplement, 23 April 1993:
111.
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Repeating the congressman’s merciful redemption and re-embodiment of British
tradition, Merchant Ivory’s “British” films have given new life to the nation’s heri
tage industry— just as Merchant Ivory’s initial, western-friendly Indian films briefly
promised to do in the 1960s.
But British nationality has also redefined Ivory’s own abilities as a director.
Often viewed as stale and unimaginative in American projects such as Jane Austen
in New York (1980), Slaves o f New York (1989), or Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990),
or as even clumsily racist in his widely reviled Disney debut, Jefferson in Paris
(1995), Ivory’s directorial reserve apparently suggests different meanings for many
American audiences when it is turned toward British subjects and British literary
works. The “art” of these art house releases may bear little difference from its Brit
ish nationality.
In turn, this commodified nationality has not only been positioned to explain
British nationality to American audiences, it is also concerned with defining Ameri-
can-ness itself. Played by Christopher Reeve, the nationality of The Remains of the
Day’s US congressman may not be distinguished easily from the character’s oppo
sition to the Nazis and his perception of British blindness and repression. This op
position and perception are alone enough to make him American. But the film also
presents him as that which will reformulate and continue British tradition, perhaps
even fall prey to its graceful pleasures, just as the United States reformulated and
continued British concepts of democracy and honor, and may flatteringly trace its
own more “noble” weaknesses back to them.
American Colonial
True to Bhabha’s formulation, British film as a colonial product seems
uniquely poised to answer American desires to understand who we are. Britain may
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160
recede in political importance, and its political climate fall further out of sync with
our own, yet, in the years since Reagan left the White House, British culture has
become even more crucial to the “quality” traditions of American popular culture.
Surprisingly, the sexual and racial politics of The Crying Game, the Prime Suspect
and Cracker television serials, and Antonia Bird’s Priest have found their niches,
and in Priest's case, even been able to help remake Miramax’s owner, Disney, into
an unlikely object of right-wing derision at the time of the film’s Easter, 1995, US
release. Merchant Ivory offerings still appear, both brand name, and, such as En
chanted April (1991) or Sense and Sensibility (1995), sincere imitation.24
These films and television serials represent the Anglophilic discourse of
quality in various ways, yet that discourse is not the sole province of British im
ports; it is also one which reverberates through Robert Redford’s casting of Ralph
Fiennes and Paul Scofield as Charles and Mark Van Doren, the emotional center of
Quiz Show's drama (1994) of WASP privilege imperiled. The film’s liberal con
science wishes to worry the boundaries of the Anglo’s personification of truth, jus
tice, and the American way—what better way, Redford seems to have decided, than
to cast the quiz show Superman Van Doren and his upright father with English ac
tors.25 Fiennes and Scofield embodied them with an intertextual inflection of both
national essence (the British are our founding fathers) and national failure (our
founding fathers defeated the British): when the younger Van Doren’s accent slips
into an English cadence or rhythm, it is almost impossible to determine whether to
24 Or, like Angels & Insects (1995) or the stylized, avidly queer Australian bodice ripper Des
perate Remedies (1993), exquisitely sincere perversions of Merchant Ivory’s excessive sartorial pre
cision.
25 “Holding quiz show hearings without Van Doren,” Dick Goodwin exclaims in the film, “is
like Hamlet without Hamlet” On Broadway, Fiennes’ Hamlet earned the actor a Tony the next
year.
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attribute such moments to the actor’s performance, or to the character’s combination
of cultural pedigree and desire to prove himself intellectually worthy to his father.
Fiennes’ and Scofield’s authority as English actors give these roles meaning, and,
as English actors, provide a contrast between their own tight precision and the
“ethnic” expressiveness employed by their American co-stars. In a sense these
English actors are the Van Dorens, both seducing and alienating Hollywood, just as
the Van Dorens seduce and alienate Dick Goodwin, the Congressional investigator
whose work finally leads to the public exposure of Charles as a quiz show fraud.
But casting English actors as Americans is not the only way in which US
films draw upon the traditions of Anglo mastery and the gentleman so easily con
jured up by Merchant Ivory’s literary adaptations. Such American adaptations as
Martin Scorsese’s The Age o f Innocence (which immediately preceded The Re
mains of the Day on Columbia’s 1993 release schedule) and Michael Mann’s The
Last of the Mohicans (1992) exhume the US’ literary past by making reference to
British and European culture to an outstanding degree, and then melding it with the
less classical mise-en-scene of Hollywood’s 1970s formal daring. Both films also
cast the Irish/British Daniel Day-Lewis in roles distinguished by a heroic, courtly
manliness self-consciously removed from those offered in contemporary films, and
The Age o f Innocence moves squarely within the conventions now firmly associ
ated with Merchant Ivory costume dramas. Scorsese’s rapturous attention to detail
almost smothers Edith Wharton’s story of how 1870s New York society was itself
smothered by rigid adherence to outdated notions of British and European society.
His books and his wardrobe all ordered from London (in contrast to the women,
who favor Paris), Day-Lewis’ character loses what is most important in his life be
cause the “independent” Americans follow norms for the upper class which even
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162
exceed those practiced by the Europeans. His seemingly very different wife and
lover achieve their goals, however, by manipulating the rules with an often ruthless
hypocrisy. Gentlemanly to the end, Day-Lewis’ character is desirable, as his lover
tells him, because of his nobility, even though he is masochistically locked in place
by it as well. (All the while, the film’s mise-en-scene is propelled by the grace and
momentary flashes of passion which his central character gains by acceding to—
rather than rebelling against—cultural norms.) In Shadowlands, Hopkins’ C. S.
Lewis is warned by a crony that Americans simply have no grasp of British inhibi
tion, and whether or not that is true, Americans have incorporated the idea of inhi
bition as a national marker of Englishness.
A range of other similar films from the past two decades also participate in
this Anglophilic discourse, from Meryl Streep’s proclivity for accents beginning
with The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), to Robin William’s adult Peter Pan
in Hook (1991), and beyond; in varying ways, such films share a sometimes rather
curious concern with British inhibition, interetextually through casting, as well as
narratively. They also suggest that who Americans have been, are, or will be has
something to do with such ideas of British nationality.
The supra-national American actor, the enlightened Anglo-American patri
arch-each is constructed through the coupled evocation of British failures of mas
culinity and sheer American ability. The critique of such films may extend further
back than their ever-popular images of W. W. II and Victorian Britain, further than
even the reach of modernity: this Anglo-American discourse of masculine repres
sion and gentlemanly inhibition itself conceives of American identity. The Last of
the Mohicans' use of Day-Lewis as a Mohican-adopted Anglo called Nathaniel
(rather than the novel’s less distinguished Natty), is only one way in which that
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163
film approaches the synthesis of “American” identity from a pre-Revolution colli
sion of British class and culture with Native American ethics and eroticism. Like an
inversion of the British-made Revolution (1985), which attempted to sell A 1 Pacino
in 18th century dress, The Last of the Mohicans refuses the ready-made emergence
of American essence which would make Pacino’s street-wise rebel either palatable
or (as Revolution was also positioned) easily relevant to a liberal critique of Rea
gan’s Latin American policy.
Instead The Last o f the Mohicans combined a highly publicized stress upon
authenticity with a Benedict Anderson-like concern with the process of constructing
nationality. The exquisite costumes, unspoiled settings, and Day-Lewis’ publicized
ability to load a rifle while running—these all ring out with a sense of historical
authenticity and closure. However, American identity, seen as the Anglo settler’s
untested middle ground between the Native American and the British class struc
ture, has yet to be finished. The film’s title may be almost as poetically incidental as
that of The Big Sleep or The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it does stress the
imaginary conclusions reached when Nathaniel finally stands united with his
adopted Mohican father and English lover, Cora. Together they represent not only
the last of the Mohicans but the last of the British as well; it is their hybrid kind who
will repopulate the decimated American settlements. As Anderson points out, the
US is a Creole creation, sharing language and descent with the nation from which it
separated. Such nationality is therefore bereft not only of language as a unifying
force, but, for most of the Western hemisphere, its basis in populist energies.26
26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na
tionalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991) 47-48.
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164
This nationality’s always already cast must also find its mythological expli
cation elsewhere, and these are the tensions which propel The Last o f the Mohi
cans. Nathaniel embodies a solution which draws upon the language difference of
the Native Americans and the class energies of British culture, promising a nation-
ness which can be today celebrated in terms of the essential and timeless American
spirit. Of course such a future does not necessarily have much to do with either
James Fenimore Cooper’s own Leatherstocking novels or with the details recorded
in other writings of US history. But in accordance with Bhabha’s own reading of
Anderson, the film constructs American nationality in double time, as what must be
diligently performed and what, in Nathaniel, always has been.27
Perhaps this is why Day-Lewis’ casting gave so much more satisfaction
than Pacino’s: even though Pacino’s accent may have been just as “correct” (or not)
as Day-Lewis’, Day-Lewis’ British associations help to reiterate the Native Ameri
can’s Otherness (without resorting to stereotypes of Native American English), and
to give a stronger clout to the always-already Anglo nature of American nationality.
Compared to an American actor, the casting of Day-Lewis stresses the performative
aspect of Nathaniel’s Native American identity. Additionally, in Day-Lewis’ per
formance of the character’s critique of the British, British mastery has already been
both overcome (narratively) and befriended (by casting).28 As in the later In the
Name of the Father, Day-Lewis’ compliance in assuming such roles helps to reiter
ate Britain’s own “tame and castrate” compliance, creating a distinct contrast with
Revolution, which was not only British produced and directed but shot there by the
27 Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modem Na
tion," in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) 299.
28 The use of Julie Andrews and Richard Harris in the colonial epic Hawaii (1965) may be de
scribed in much the same terms, as may Day-Lewis’ later role in The Crucible (19%).
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production company GoIdcresL29 That last facet of Revolution suggests a radical
reversal of the national forces in the film’s narrative, a reading which dramatizes
Goldcrest’s own unlucky battle for existence apart from Hollywood.
Considered more straightforwardly, however, it is The Last o f the Mohi
cans which accords to the English gentleman a much greater sense of masculine
honor—but not, quite certainly, mastery. In the figure of Duncan, the newly arrived
English officer and suitor to Cora, the film presents a largely sympathetic man who
nevertheless attempts to remain loyal to British colonial interests, even when these
interests demand the unjust death of Nathaniel. The last finally loses him Cora,
whose “blood” is “stirred” not by him but by Nathaniel. Duncan’s only real talent is
in language, an ability he uses as a French translator in Nathaniel’s climactic nego
tiation to free Cora from her Iroquois captors; this ability also allows Duncan to re
deem himself, by substituting his own name in Nathaniel’s offer of his own life for
Cora’s. As a result, Duncan, played by Steven Waddington, is burnt alive—a death
still preferable to the hot poker Waddington had (barely) escaped as Derek Jarman’s
Edward // (1991).
These two films resonate oddly in ways which extend beyond the intertex-
tuality of Waddington’s equally earnest performances: one dramatically large
scaled, the other tightly reined in, each historical drama presents an excess of sen
sual and varied male bodies in bloody conflict over the direction, form, and survival
of national identities. Just as the Native Americans of The Last of the Mohicans are
resisting what will become a virtual genocide, Edward ITs gay king and his army
of lovers are placed in the context of gay bashing and AIDS funding agitation. But
29 Interestingly, the credits do not mention this detail.
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while Duncan follows his stiff upper lip to death, Edward II rewrites Christopher
Marlow’s more traditional hot poker and refuses to sacrifice its resolutely queer and
demonstrative monarch, all the while pulling the heritage film into a present day
England of Outrage demonstrations and Tory machinations—a far cry from the
equally contemporary homophobia rippling through the representation of Edward in
Mel Gibson’s Scottish-nationalist Braveheart, a portrayal which in the US gained
the ire of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “I don’t care that he’s
[Edward II] portrayed as effeminate,” GLADD’s executive director explained, “but
that he’s portrayed as a foolish, passive man who whimpers, a stupid villain.”30
Waddington’s performance, however, is far from the simpering one Gibson di
rected. In Edward II, it is Edward’s gentlemanly blood which is stirred, and the
“sheer music” of its erotic language is the theatrical Englishness evoked by Mar
low’s play and its history; in Jarman’s version, these forces are enough to transport
Edward and his would-be executioner into a timeless realm of homoerotic desire.
Sally Potter’s Orlando (1993) follows the same progression through its
hero’s narrative evolution through Elizabethan pomp and Victorian repression to a
Channel Four present in which film and video, female and male, naturalism and the
fantastic intermingle. Orlando’s assumption of lack, as he changes sexes and looses
privilege as well as real estate, joins with Jarman’s Edward II in rewriting history’s
defeats and losses as transfiguration. In contrast to The Last of the Mohicans and
the other, Merchant Ivory-led period films discussed above, Edward II and Orlando
refigure the “tame and castrate” image seen already in James Wood’s “England in
Shadow Land”; in this respect, they share more with A Matter o f Life and Death
and Four Weddings and Funeral than with other British or US costume dramas.
30 "Gay Defamation Charged," Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1995: F2.
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But while these films revision the place of the English gentleman amidst
contemporary British concerns, these are first and foremost national tasks. Ameri
can culture may find an advantage to according the British a “limited superiority”
and then restricting it to the past, but even in the close-to-baseline past of The Last
of the Mohicans, that mythical past is pushed further and further back. Now is not
the time. Yet British film, and the evolution of British film genres, has provided a
counter-argument; much of it lies beyond the usual generic parameters employed in
the discussion of British film—the literary adaptation, the historical drama, the
kitchen-sink melodrama, the sophisticated romantic comedy, the gothic horror. The
British crime film, from They Drive by Night (1938), through Get Carter (1971),
The Long Good Friday (1980), and, more recently, The Young Americans (1993)
and Shopping (1994), also addresses the material relations between class and mas
culinity, Americanization and British identity. Villain (1971) redressed the genre in
explicitly homosexual terms. Bizarrely enough, the British financing behind Mario
Van Peebles’ revisionist Posse (1993) might even serve to indicate the extent to
which that great well of American authenticity, the western, has existed in dialogue
with other nationalities, other national cinemas, including Britain’s: Marcia Landy
has summarized some of the affinities between the western and the British empire
film (Sanders o f the River, 1935, King Solomon’ s Mines, 1937, and so on), and
Charles Musser has argued that, indirectly, the British gave rise to the western.
Rejecting Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) as the western’s own
sui generis, Musser instead positions this film within a popular crime genre im
ported to the US from Britain shortly before. Only later, during the nickelodeon
era, did the film western shed its earlier origins and assume its stance of paradig
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168
matic autonomy.31 Hollywood would return the favor with the anti-English “kilts
western” (Disney’s Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue, 1954, and then, after a 41 year
rest, another Rob Roy and Braveheart). Britain, in turn, joined in the increasingly
international production of the western with Raoul Walsh’s The Sheriff o f Frac
tured Jaw (1958), a Jayne Mansfield vehicle which continued the comical practice
of setting the English gentleman adrift in the rough world of the Old West. The
casting of a well-spoken but surprisingly tough John Cleese in Silverado (1983)
continued that tradition, as did the more comical (and painful) use of Richard Harris
in Unforgiven (1992) and John Hurt in Wild Bill (1995), two otherwise more sober
films which returned to a representation of the Englishman’s problematic presence
in the genre’s masculine ethos.
But possibly most potent in their generic patchwork of crime and, most in
terestingly, science fiction, the James Bond films have emblemized what seemed to
have been a spectacularly successful modernization of the English gentleman—or as
the trailers for From Russia With Love and other early Bond films put it, of the
“gentleman agent 007.” Susan Jeffords’ description of a national body, as a mo
ment in which the many contradictions and failings of nationality become resolved
through the hyper-reality of heroic flesh, suits Bond very well.32 In his hysterically
heterosexualized and high-tech form, the English gentleman’s superiority would
seem to be anchored firmly in the future. But precisely what Bond’s national body
negotiates, and for whom, are very different questions, ones which led back to the
31 Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960 (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1991) 11,97; Charles Musser, T he Travel Genre in 1903-04: Moving Toward Fic
tional Narratives," Iris 2.1 (ler semestre 1984): 56-57. Quoted in Steve Neale, "Questions of
Genre,"Screen31.1 (Spring 1990): 54-55.
32 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) 14,21, and in passing.
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Anglo-American construction of cultural studies, and to the objectification of the
male body.
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CHAPTER 5
From the Shallow End of the Gene Pool
I am a jelly-filled pastry.
John F. Kennedy, Berlin City Hall, West Germany, 1963
Thirty-one years later, the President of the United States again stood before
the Brandenburg Gate, this time in a confluence of corrected grammar and geogra
phy: “ Berlin ist frei,” Bill Clinton pronounced, a German-phrased rhetorical flour
ish to a call for the New Germany to take its economically sanctified place as
Europe’s leader. In 1994, World War II would be politely saluted, and the US
Army unit which had policed West Berlin be de-commissioned. “I say . . . America
is on your side,” the President pledged his nation’s troth, “now and forever.”1
Clinton’s high school German had come through: possibly words for alarm,
especially for the United Kingdom, which has consistently predicated its post-war
closeness to the US upon a shared mythology of the Allies’ efforts against the
Germans. 1963 had been different. Kennedy’s difficulties emphasized the tenacious
hold of language which has bound essentially Creole Americans to their symbolic
European progenitors—that Kennedy erred in his German may have been as sig
nificant as the effort itself. After all, the British may have an irritating selection of
slang, and a seemingly infinitesimal range of frustrating accents and pronuncia
tions, but English would still appear to be recognized as our mutual language. More
recent campaigns in California and elsewhere to entrench English as the only
1 Paul Richter and Mary Williams Walsh, "Clinton Hails Unity, Freedom in Berlin," Los
Angeles Times 13 July 1994: A6.
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“acceptable” language have demonstrated how seemingly inseparable are issues of
Anglo dominance and the English language.
But compared to Kennedy’s speech, Clinton’s theatrical moment at the Gate
failed to create much stir in Britain, America, or, for that matter, Germany itself.
The shift in the US’ role between Kennedy and his Democratic successor provided
the backdrop for the non-event. In 1963, Kennedy’s problems with translation may
have inadvertently signified the difference between the US and even West Berlin,
but his sympathetic words still operated within the context of a much wider postwar
American authority in Europe, stretching from the airlift back through the Marshall
Plan. At the same time, the US Cold War culture of scientific prowess and covert
intelligence contributed a dangerous and virile aura, promising power far greater
than anv observable manifestation. But in 1994, Clinton’s anointment of Germany
1 *
as leader comes at a juncture when the US would seem to have relinquished the po
sition from which to make such a gesture—and when Germany itself has little inter
est in assuming the title’s demands.2 At the same time, the pull of the US intelli
gence community has appeared to have shrunk so far that, a short while after his
return, Clinton declassified the existence and location of the nation’s spy satellite
headquarters: he did so simply to chastise the grievous construction of too much ..
. office space.3 Less than a year later, the Oklahoma City bombing of a federal of
fice building would illustrate the radical right’s desire to assist in this downsizing.
While the US was ceremoniously decommissioning some of the remaining
legacies of W. W. II and the Cold War, Britain distracted itself with not only a
2 See, for example, Tyler Marshall, "In Earlier Era, Clinton Trip Would Have Been Tri
umph," Los Angeles Times 13 July 1994: A 18.
3 "Huge Spy Office Sneaks Up on Senators," Los Angeles Times 9 August 1994: A23.
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plethora of Normandy invasion anniversary nostalgia, but with the unexpected re
appearance of two previously popular topics of the tabloid press. Sotheby’s Books
Department had agreed, it seemed, to auction off some of the possessions belong
ing to the late husband of a former Soviet Union citizen, Rufina Philby. A motley
collection of books, cheaply made commemorative plaques and such, but Mrs.
Philby’s lot attracted a full barrage of both commercial collectors and press. They,
in turn, were attracted to the continuing retail value attached to her husband, Kim
Philby. Philby —the fascinating “third man” of the sexually intertwined quartet of
Cambridge spies, whose betrayals and defections have ceaselessly titillated Britain
ever since the early 1950s: crass sybarite Guy Burgess, neurotic depressive Donald
Maclean, prissy culture queen Anthony Blunt—and Philby, who was inevitably the
efficient, political one, the often cited spy of the century.
Of course, as the popular Another Country's (1984) fictional prequel to it all
had underlined, they were not all gay. However much homophobia may have been
mixed in with the other wrongs and slights which inspired them all, one sexuality
does not narrate it all. Philby was the heterosexual one, the one with whom Melinda
Maclean had at one point left her husband to move in with, as if to complete the cir
cle physically.
Mr. Philby sold well at Sotheby’s, with the pointed exception of some items
associated with Burgess. “Burgess is the dirty, gay one,” Philby’s biographer,
Phillip Knightley dryly observed of the dealers who predominated in the bidding,
apparently knowledgeable of a market somewhat different from Another Country's.
‘ They don’t want him . . . .”4
4 Quoted in Tom Carson, "Sale of the Century: The Collected Stories of Kim Philby," Vil
lage Voice 2 August 1994: 37.
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Only a few months after that 1994 auction, the market value of another fig
ure from Britain’s spy past came into question—this time not a Cambridge spy, but
James Bond, a faithful and greatly more dashing version of Philby. And in contrast
to Philby, Bond’s endeavors had already grossed over one and a half billion dollars
worldwide, a sum no doubt far greater than that raised by the books, films and so
on inspired by the Cambridge spies. Bond’s career, however, had most recently
been in doubt since before the embarrassing American box office failure of Licence
to Kill in 1989. Long-time producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli’s announced desire to
retire seemed further to insure that Bond would remain most active in the court
room, where various solicitors butted heads over the rights to develop Bond as ei
ther a series of television films or, as Broccoli himself proposed at one point, a TV
series. Meanwhile, a children’s animated program, James Bond, Jr. appeared in
1991. Genesis introduced a Bond video game in 1993. Fox tried its own television
series take on Bond, Fortune Hunter, in the fall of 1994. And the summer before,
Arnold Schwarzenegger had tried on Bond’s tuxedo in True Lies, with almost
enough box office success to overshadow the film’s $100 million-plus cost For
tune Hunter, with an English-accented lead, was not able to hold its Sunday foot
ball lead-in, and quickly disappeared.
The wide commercial appeal of a Schwarzenegger-less Thunderball (1965)
or Moonraker (1979) seemed as long past as did the fortunes of Bond’s studio par
ent, the beleaguered United Artists. By the early 1990s, the spy genre had dried up,
leaving adaptations of Tom Clancy novels (beginning with 1990’s The Hunt for
Red October) among its last successful, but still rather anachronistic examples. Li
cence to Kill's failed attempt to substitute the Cold War with a Miami Vice-type mix
of drugs, angst, and a hot rather than cool glamour further suggested that Bond’s
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174
rather privileged place in British popular culture might have faded as well. After all,
the BBC’s sense of “realist” proprieties in crime drama led it to either censor or
omit whole episodes of Miami Vice, while for years Bond films (themselves
equally liable to fuse and confuse fashion with violence and sex) had been a whole
some, Christmas afternoon broadcast tradition.5
But only a few months before Sotheby’s auctioned off Philby’s souvenirs,
Bond’s stock had shot up. Timothy Dalton, the tainted star of the past two films,
announced his retirement, a move quickly followed by the public appointment of
Pierce Brosnan to the Bond role. For the next year and a half, Brosnan appeared
before the international press promoting GoldenEye, a new Bond feature film tak
ing its title from the Jamaican home where Ian Fleming had written the very first
Bond novel in 1952. As the most rudimentary Bond fan could quickly explain,
casting the Irish-bom but English-accented Brosnan in the role is more than simply
gaining the comic stooge of Mrs. Doubtfire or the hero in competition with The
Lawnmower Man's computer animation. Brosnan instead represented a lost Bond,
the Bond who would have been had not American television kept him committed to
his defunct Remington Steele series and out of Dalton’s The Living Daylights
(1987): backed with a much more lush budget than either of the Dalton Bonds,
GoldenEye opened strongly in the US amidst a barrage of publicity. Bond was
back.
But whether Brosnan’s Bond will Finally be remembered as more of a
Philby or more of a Burgess (to use Knightley’s market-value terms, that is), the
Bond phenomenon of the past three decades still provides a critical moment in the
5 Yvonne Tasker describes this conflict between the BBC and Miami Vice in Spectacular Bod
ies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 112.
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understanding of how English masculinity has been projected across British and
American film cultures. Not as a paradigm for how this masculinity has been repre
sented, but as more of an anomaly, it might seem: Bond appears to embody an in
ternationally imagined mastery otherwise beyond British reach since the heady he
roic days of W. W. II.
Excess success—decidedly an anomaly. Instead of Bond, Burgess: main
stream American filmmaking has been far more likely to present English masculin
ity as villainy, as a lethal but thoroughly flawed conflation of gender and national
ity; but while the word villain may be derived from vilein, the Middle English term
for a feudal serf (villain also has the obsolete meaning of a vile and brutish peas
ant), the English villain of Hollywood tradition is situated somewhat differently.
Here may be heard the voice Jeremy Irons gave to The Lion King's (1994) Scar, a
jealous and manifestly “unmanly” sibling who plots the king’s death but refuses to
fight, lion to lion: like the bad Freudian joke of a name he carries, he’s just no good
at such things, Scar whines in an upper-crust English accent, he’s strictly from “the
shallow end of the gene pool.” The English villain may be vile, but he is certainly
no peasant The shallow end would seem to be reserved for a brute of a certain
class and gentlemanly, even effete refinement
But where Scar is from, exactly, would seem a reasonable question. It
might also be asked of Disney’s previous animated hit, Aladdin (1992), which fea
tured a similarly-accented villain. Like Aladdin's silver-tongued and sexually am
biguous Vazier, only Scar and a comically prissy courtier bird (the ineffectual intel
lectual, voiced by Blackadder comedian Rowan Atkinson) lack the others’ broad
American accents—except, that is, for a reclusive and submissive baboon shaman
who speaks in quasi-African rhythms. Although as an animated musical The Lion
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King might seem to share very few similarities with the spy or action genre, the
narrative and commercial strategies which accompany Irons’ casting and accent are
much the same: as a whole, all of these films are concerned with the negotiation of
norms of successful masculinity, a process which has simultaneously mapped out
an opposing space for failure, and identified it with a code of nationality.
This failure can be exhaustive. GoldenEye's newly female voice of author
ity, Dame Judi Dench’s M, crisply greets Bond with the film’s running subtext and
challenge: “I think you are a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.”
Time has seemed to run out. Scar’s worst sin is not even the cowardly murder of
the king, but the complete ruination of the kingdom once he usurps the throne—
Scar’s unsuitability breaks the “circle of life” which runs through all levels of the
land, his non-fruitful place in the cycle spreading contagion and moral decay. That
the “shallow end” Scar speaks from carries an English accent implies the other
deep, sustaining end speaks without an accent (that is, it speaks with a
“transparent” American one), a logic which, it will be argued, has been used to in
teresting ends most recently by the vocally accented muscle men whose bodies have
centered the action film.
But complementary to the association of English masculinity with failure is
a concurrent association between failed masculinity and homosexuality, a connec
tion suggested by the cultural overtones of Scar’s swishy, languorous body lan
guage and Irons’ fey, ironic vocal performance. The second-stage advertising cam
paign for The Lion King emphasized this triangular association of masculinity, na
tionality, and sexuality in the choice of the quip paired with the image of a limp-
wristed Scar, his pinkie claw delicately extended in a moment of camp exuberance:
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177
it’s ‘To Die For!” Scar had coyly insisted as he duped the young prince Simba into
the trap meant to kill both him and his father.6
Imagining Englishness, and by extension, homosexuality as the failure of
masculinity (and, thus, heterosexuality as its success), The Lion King and its com
mercial presentation provides a parallel to the constructivist understanding of how
both homosexuality and heterosexuality arose as identities in the 19th century:
Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks and others have repeatedly stressed that the emer
gence of heterosexuality as a social category depended upon the identification of the
individual who refuses or inverts such a pattern.7 Studies of the gay clone, or of
gay butch “drag” have drawn upon such arguments, emphasizing (to sometimes
different conclusions) that contemporary “butch” practices have arisen in gay male
cultures in opposition to the presumed opposition between hegemonic masculinity
and homosexuality.8 In the US, Leo Bersani’s much argued-over celebration of the
shattering impact of gay male sex upon masculinity has most notably rejected the
politics of butching-up, while Bruce Bawer’s neo-conservative gay manifesto, A
Place at the Table, would seem to deny the need to shatter in the first place; these
represent two very different ways in which American gay culture has measured the
recent “subversions” of failure, the desires either to embrace Scar’s anger or to
6 By paranoid coincidence, during The Lion King's release the first British theatrical film con
cerned with AIDS, Heaven’ s a Drag (theatrically distributed 1995), made its US festival premiere.
Its original title? To Die For—but Gus Van Sant’s 1995 film, from a Buck Henry screenplay, had
claims to that tide.
7 See Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), and Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History,
Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991).
8 Within the British context, see David Forrest, "We're Here, We're Queer, and We're Not Go
ing Shopping": Changing Gay Male Identities in Contemporary Britain," Dislocating Masculinity:
Comparative Ethnographies, ed. Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfame (London and New York:
Roudedge, 1994), and Simon Sheperd and Mick Wallis, eds., Coming On Strong: Gay Politics
and Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
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leave such “destructive,” campy models behind.9 The New Republic's former edi
tor Andrew Sullivan (Bawer’s young, English-born ally) has perhaps most publicly
embodied the desire to rid gay identity of what is perceived as an essential alliance
with progressive politics—after all, Scar’s vengeful coup d’etat leads only to an oc
cupation by goose-stepping hyenas and, following in Stalin’s path, the seeming de
struction of the veldt’s ecology. Only the return of the “natural” king can heal the
land. And powerful gay men like Sullivan quite often have a large stake in the
smooth hierarchical continuation of our culture’s “circle of life.” Yet this so-called
“Editor as Gap Model” still occupies a position which draws upon his homosexual
ity as a credential strengthening his role as model for Generation X neo
conservatives.1 0 No simple rich white male Republican, the accent Sullivan carries
as a talking head on television news programs perfectly marks the conglomeration
of culture, education and, most importantly, sexual difference which paradoxically
authenticates his honesty and potential appeal as a neo-conservative.11 By failing to
meet the usual perceived criteria for conservative acceptance, Sullivan achieves a
useful status which relies upon this very lack. He is a Scar, lousy gene pool and all,
who has seemed to shrug that bothersome chip off his shoulder. Still, like Scar, his
accent remains a persistent sign of his complex difference within the MacNeil-
Lehrer world.
The seduction of the English male considered as a failed, and therefore less
culpable example of masculinity draws upon the obsolescence of British nationality,
9 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ October 43 (Winter 1987): 197-222; Bruce Bower, A
Place at the Table: The Cay Individual in American Society (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993).
10 See Walter Kirn, "The Editor as Gap Model," The New York Times Magazine 7 March
1993: 26, and Ann Powers, "The New Victorians," Village Voice 20 September 1994: 24-25.
11 See Andrew Sullivan’s evocation of rain, England, soccer, and homosexuality in his Virtu
ally Normal: An Argument About Sexuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 3-4.
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upon its connotation of being past The boundaries of this discourse, however, do
not fail to illustrate Bond’s extraordinary negotiation of a place for English mascu
linity in the imagination of the future— the rhetorical move which frames Bond’s re
curring excess of success. With their casual inclusions of the narrative conventions
of the superhero and the high-tech iconography of missile-equipped sports cars and
corporate-owned space stations, Bond texts have almost always displayed an open
ness to science fictional readings. Bond’s more impassioned critical defenders have
sometimes shown an equal determination to elevate the cultural status of the films in
particular, by scapegoating these elements.1 2 Undoubtedly these elements have
added to the Bond films’ typing as low culture: they often seemed to have more in
common with Flash Gordon than with the various sober “entertainments” of Gra
ham Greene, Len Dei ghton, or John Le Carre.
But Bond’s value may also be located precisely in those moments when
Bond most savagely pulls the pop figure of the gentleman through Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World of limitless sex, magical gadgets, and casual moral corruption.
Bond’s most interesting quality may be the extent to which he has negotiated a place
for the English gentleman just as the nationality he represents ceases to place any
claims upon international significance. This sexist dinosaur has a scarred yet
“bonded” quality which may even help to explain what makes Bond still intriguing
to Americans as well. For the US, the post-imperial present of the British may well
represent our future more realistically than the scenarios left over from the optimis
tic early 1960s.
12 For example, see Nicholas Anez's three part "James Bond," Films in Review 43. 9110,
11/12, 1/2 (Oct., Dec. 1992, Feb. 1993,): Dec. 385, and in passing.
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Such considerations will be approached here in a somewhat less global and
more modest scope, through the historicization of Bond’s role in the constructive
theoretical shifts of critical studies. Such arguments which will first be approached
through a reading of the uses of nationality in contemporary American action films.
In both of these respects, the English actor once again comes into play.
Heroes and Villainy
In Last Action Hero (1993), Joan Plowright’s English teacher worries that
her students might not be familiar with the star of the day’s film, Hamlet. Eager,
and trying a little too hard, she is anxious over the prospect of prying her students’
attention away from Nintendo, Sega. . . and FX spectacles just like this Arnold
Schwarzenegger film (in which her quickly passing appearance seems to be not
much more than Mrs. Wilson doing cross-promotion for the same summer’s Den
nis the Menace). Still, she keeps a stiff upper lip.
Now about Laurence Olivier. . . her students may remember him from that
Polaroid commercial, or perhaps (with a look of distaste on her face) from Clash of
the Titans. But as Hamlet, Olivier actually played the first action hero.
This reference, is the closest Last Action Hero comes to directly explaining
its title. It also provides the film’s young protagonist, Danny, with the inspiration to
imagine his own action hero, Jack Slater, in a Hamlet redux, one in which Hamlet
does not simply waste time talking to himself but does something. To be or not to
be: with a flick of a lighter flaring into color, Slater’s cigar-chomping Hamlet
clearly takes even greater liberties with Shakespeare than Olivier did. With a simple
“you killed my fadder,” this Hamlet sends Claudius flying. “Not to be,” Hamlet
deadpans, shamelessly turning Shakespeare into a Schwarzenegger one-liner. Or
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181
ange fireballs explode, gradually fading into the animated explosions of a Roadrun-
ner cartoon.
None of Last Action Hero makes too much sense, reviews claimed, and yet
it is hard to miss a recognizable logic surrounding nationality, masculinity, and the
body. Danny magically enters the world of his favorite action hero, and returns
with him to find an escaped villain. “You see,” the hero explains once he finally
returns to the screen, “Hollywood is writing our lives.” That “our” covers a good
deal of ground. Oddly missing its original definite article, Last Action Hero's title
would seem to refer not only to Jack Slater, but to “Arnold Schwarzenegger,” the
character who “plays” Slater in the film, and beyond that, to the “real” Arnold
Schwarzenegger, the actor whom John McTierman directed on Last Action Hero's
sets. Without the article, the title played all the more easily into both Schwarzeneg
ger’s intimations that this might be his last action hero role, as well as his own stat
ure in the early 1990s as the symbolic culmination and apotheosis of the action
genre— just as Olivier is often treated in relation to Shakespeare films and other ad
aptations from the stage and literature.
But even though the film considers Hamlet a puny action hero, the English
Olivier and Austrian Schwarzenegger make an interesting alpha and omega beyond
the jokey discrepancy in their screen images or acting abilities: both represent na
tional borders within Hollywood filmmaking, boundaries marked by accents
which, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s terms, suggest a certain cultural
“translatability.”1 3 Dexterity with the spoken word is what Olivier’s accent most
generally suggested, a “sheer music” which allowed him to elegantly pass as
13 Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Han
nah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1969) 70-71.
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182
American in literary adaptations as purposely distinguished as Carrie (1952) or as
avidly lowbrow as The Betsy (1978). He remained the quintessential^ English ac
tor almost by virtue of this ability; as noted earlier, this same quality has sometimes
allowed technically adept actors of other nationalities, such as Meryl Streep or Judy
Davis, to be viewed almost as if they too were English actors. “Passing” is, of
course, what the vocally trained actor should be able to provide as a beginning;
such verbal “action” helped to place them among the initial heroes of sound film.
Hamlet even provides the narrative framework which Last Action Hero hangs
upon, the blond, Hamlet-coifed Danny’s parallel advance from passive talk
(directed toward the screen as a helpless spectator) to “real” action in the film’s real-
world conclusion. This Hamlet becomes Slater. But since Danny zones out of
Plowright’s clip before Hamlet finally does take action, Hamlet/Olivier himself re
mains securely locked out from the realm of manly action.
Compared to Olivier, accent has always been that which action hero
Schwarzenegger can never fully escape, the mark which led him to be dubbed in his
debut, Hercules in New York (1970), to sound appropriately barbarian in the
Conan films, to suggest a mechanical inhumanity apparently appropriate for the
Terminator (1984), and even to playoff of stereotypes of Germanic severity and
coldness in Junior (1994). This is how the Austrian bodybuilding champion, son of
a purported former Nazi, may be “translated.” Yet Schwarzenegger’s meaning has
not remained static. As his accent has softened (or is it a matter of our acclimation to
it?), so has growth in his acting ability often been cited. At the same time, his body
mass has decreased from the huge competitive proportions of Pumping Iron and
Stay Hungry in the 1970s to his more one-among-many scale in the 1990s.
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Soft and Hard
The complementary progress of these shifts underlines a metonymic link
between body and voice, a relationship which has shaped the hyperbolic male ac
tion hero global audiences have cheered for the past several decades. Yvonne
Tasker has called these bodybuilder action films “muscle movies,” “dumb movies
for dumb people,” and reads their complex articulation of male identity and
“masculinity” through the relationship between body and voice:
Involving questions surrounding the ability to speak and act,
which are also inevitably questions of power, an attention to
the relationship between the body and voice brings to the
fore questions of race and class, as well as the more apparent
issues of gendered identity . . . .1 4
Yet Tasker argues that power remains off-stage in the sometimes raucous critical
treatment muscle movies receive. Instead audiences are presented as having often
made an ill-informed choice of physical masculinity over that of its verbally articu
late manifestations. When the muscle man’s articulation of national identity is con
sidered, Tasker plays off the class connotations of “dumb movies for dumb people”
in order to stress that figures such as Rambo offer more complexities and contra
dictions than left-liberal paradigms usually allow.1 5
In these aspects, Schwarzenegger’s body provides a difficulty for the clear
distinction Susan Jeffords has drawn between the “soft” and “hard” bodies dialecti-
cally deployed during the past decade. She largely grounds the distinction in Ameri
can action films; in this respect, her politically purposeful work contrasts with the
emphasis offered by the postmodern perspective of Tasker, Barbara Creed and oth
ers regarding the schizogenic possibilities of the genre. In a sense, Jeffords’ dis-
14 Tasker 74.
15 Tasker 107.
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tinctions vary little from the binarism discussed earlier in relation to Hoggart—with
the crucial exception that Jeffords’ expressed intention is to discredit the metaphor,
rather than embrace either aspect For Jeffords, the soft body is “the errant body,
containing sexually transmitted disease, immorality, illegal chemicals, ‘laziness,’
and endangered fetuses.” The Reagan-favored hard body, in contrast, is “the nor
mative body that enveloped strength, labor, determination, loyalty and courage.”1 6
While Jeffords’ understanding of the Reagan years may seem productive in
terms of political debate, the reflexive match she attempts between films and politi
cal narrative is at times forced, as if somehow she too has been indoctrinated into
the discourse she insists is entirely imaginary. For example, even though Jeffords
cites Schwarzenegger as “one of the hardest bodies of the 1980s,” Jeffords ignores
the ease with which Schwarzenegger may be read in terms of the soft body as well,
even before either this current decade’s stress upon the nurturing father,1 7 or, since
Jeffords’ work was published, Schwarzenegger’s play with maternity and drag in
Junior. “Does my body disgust you?” Schwarzenegger’s voice in the radio ads for
Junior asked, taking what in the film ostensibly refers to the character’s male preg
nancy, and de-contextualizing it as a colloquium on the actor’s own figure.
But while the film’s narrative may certainly be yet another usurpation of
motherhood in order to strengthen patriarchal aggression, Junior was more than a
simply an early Clinton-era attempt to re-tailor the actor for female audiences (an ill-
advised attempt, the low grosses suggested): Junior provides a culmination of the
ambiguity and complexity with which Schwarzenegger’s body has presented all
16 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) 24-25.
17 Jeffords 143.
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along. There have been other Schwarzeneggers besides the well-connected Repub
lican one whose films seem so easily to slip the attention of the right’s sex and vio
lence complaints: Schwarzenegger the dope-smoking, Machiavellian beauty pageant
contestant in Pumping Iron (1977)... Schwarzenegger the demigod of a subcul
ture colored by steroid use, gay prostitution, and rumors of both . ..
Schwarzenegger the comically overblown object of lust in The Villain and The
Jayne Mansfield Story (both 1979). The sum is something somewhat different from
Richard Dyer’s oft-quoted study of the muscular male pin-up, his body clenched in
rigid, un-self-conscious parody of tumescent phallic power.1 8 Sly guile, spoken
with a smile and an Austrian accent, easily sets Schwarzenegger apart in settings
such as Pumping Iron’s Mr. Olympia competition; in that documentary his body is
as much plush and coyly relaxed as his words are carefully controlled and manipu
lative. Schwarzenegger smoothly overpowers his inarticulate American target, the
hearing-impaired contestant Louis Ferrigno, by first moving into his hotel room and
then casually seducing Ferrigno into the inevitability of his own defeat This play
along the boundaries between athletics and less “innocent” games not only gives
Pumping Iron’s its central narrative and its sexually suggestive title, it stresses the
inadequacy of oversimplified readings of Schwarzenegger’s ideological and sexual
meanings.
But Schwarzenegger’s image is not the only example of such mixed mes
sages. The relative ease with which Bob Paris has lately moved from a latter-day
Mr. Universe to a high profile gay “role-model” hints at something Jeffords’ bi-
narism does not currently take into account. Coupled with his bodybuilder lover
Rod Jackson-Paris as pillars of upwardly mobile sexual monogamy, the newly re-
18 Richard Dyer, "Don't Look Now," Screen 233-4 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 72.
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186
minted Bob Jackson-Paris seems to harbor no desire either to deconstruct or to dish
the homoerotics of muscle culture. Little more than his name has changed, he sug
gests. Instead the Jackson-Parises seem determined to retain their former status and
to allow bodybuilding to remain a sexually inclusive practice blurring both homo
sexual and heterosexual distinctions.1 9
But most of all, and perhaps most enduring, there is Schwarzenegger the
Hogan’ s Heroes-accented, the bodybuilder (Aryan) whose voice (Nazi) somehow
seems to promise he might taint his right-wing causes and politicians (fascists) sim
ply by association, or by simple allusion to his Pumping Iron methods. Junior gave
Schwarzenegger a character, Alex Hesse, which implicitly played off of these asso
ciations—a stiff and humorless Austrian research scientist only temporarily work
ing in, of all places, San Francisco, he becomes the subject of his own fertility drug
trial simply because his university and the FDA will not allow him female test sub
jects. Drawn out by the ethnic shtick of his American partner (Danny DeVito) and
the bumbling English eccentricities of his unsuspecting egg donor (Emma
Thompson), Hesse softens as his belly swells and “feminine instincts” take over.
But this transformed Hesse/Schwarzenegger madonna, basking in child
and, implicitly, the company of Thompson’s Oscar, still bears an accent of national
perversity and bodily excess beyond masculine boundaries: “Does my body disgust
you?” the towering, pregnant Hesse anxiously directs toward not Thompson’s but
DeVito’s diminutive and squat character—is this malleable, far from “natural” body
desirable? DeVito’s display of conflicting responses echoes the difficulty of finding
the proper fixed and “dumb” categories: any one response to
19 See Rob and Bob Jackson-Paris, Straight From the Heart: A Love Story (New York: War
ner, 1994).
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Hesse/Schwarzenegger’s swirling corporeal pool of referents would seem inade
quately normal, inadequately heterosexual.
The Body’s Accents
So even though both Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding may have under
gone a good deal of revision during the 1980s, the narcissistic, drug-toting mus
cleman never quite lost what Jeffords would call “soft” associations. Compared to
the specific Reagan-era boundaries of the American hard body, the muscleman ac
tion hero represented by Schwarzenegger is not only both hard and soft, he is also
more than the simple Anglo connotations of Jeffords’ “American.” The aesthetic
and erotic proclivity for not only the hard but the pumped up plenitude of the ex
travagant male body has a wide national lineage in both production and consump
tion: these figures may stretch from semi-verbal Tarzans to Sylvester Stallone’s
grunted dialogue of Rocky and Rambo, and from the crudely dubbed Italian sword
and sandal epics and Hong Kong martial arts films to Jean-CIaude van Damme’s
sensitive Belgian variation on Schwarzenegger. Perhaps the habitually brusque
Batman, wrapped in the film’s binding, nipple-adorned “body armor,” belongs here
too, like a refuge from the rubber and latex bondage bars of Amsterdam.20
But even when the source material indicated a verbal hero, such as Edgar
Rice Burroughs’ (however improbably articulate) original Tarzan, filmmakers seem
to have persistently followed the pattern which established the articulate monster of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as Boris Karloff’s hulking pre-verbal mute.
20 Batman Forever (1995) teased the fedsh-wear level to new heights, and casually tossed in
that Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler by day, Batman’s tailor by night, had previously worked at
Buckingham Palace. . . .
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Due to awkward dubbing and or difficulty with English, both body and
voice seem to have even further thickened in Tarzan’s and Frankenstein’s contem
porary offspring, the vocal cords becoming as tumescent and husky as the body
builders’ swollen, rippling flesh; it is as if the conflation of hard and soft have
driven these figures to incoherence, to a state of difference in which their Otherness
would seem to make them another nationality altogether. Often there would seem to
be little real difference between action hero and the many spin-off “action figures”
which silently crowd toy departments before any large release. These plastic figures
march across the shelves like would-be illustrations from Dyer’s study of the mus
cular male pin-up: their stiffly hinged bodies encapsulate the rigid, vocally crushing
strain necessary to uphold the phallic power of the male body upon display.2 1 Yet
their appeal also lies in that limited but still seductive possibility—off the toy de
partment shelves, who can imagine all the strange adventures these little bendable
Batmans, X-Men, and Lt. Worfs may have had?
The association of steroid abuse and jaw difficulties also may be more than
a curious coincidence. Like The Incredible Hulk's rampant, angry Mr. Hyde char
acter, the strain of maintaining the phallic body has so clenched the jaw that the
bodybuilder’s speech itself has become effectively inchoate, like Stallone’s, or, like
Schwarzenegger’s, van Damme’s or Dolf Lundrgen’s, marked by a resilient accent.
The cultured, well-spoken Dr. Jekyll, and the crudely physical, vaguely
foreign Mr. Hyde make an appropriate “hard” and “soft” pair here, even a century
and a continent removed from Jeffords’ distinctions. While the English have pro
vided a national model of the actor’s potency based upon the chameleon-like specta
cle of the trained and controlled voice, the visceral spectacle of the trained and con
21 Richard Dyer, "Don't Look Now," Screen 233-4 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 72.
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189
trolled body has been negotiated into the mainstream of Hollywood filmmaking
largely through the bodybuilder’s stubborn “accent”.22 The dialectical relation of
these two aspects would even seem to find support in the casting employed by films
such as Last Action Hero and Junior, by foregrounding intimations of class, intel
lectual snobbery, and, most importantly, sexuality, recent action films have em
ployed British nationality as a convenient means of defusing the suspicions of
work-avoidance, feeblemindedness, and homosexuality which have sometimes
tainted the bodybuilder and formed the polemical force for projects such as Pump
ing Iron. For example, not only did Last Action Hero incorporate Olivier’s Hamlet
(not to mention Olivier’s widow as fleshly surrogate), but the British actors Charles
Dance and Ian McKellan, playing, respectively, Slater’s evil nemesis Benedict and
Death himself, pulled from an art house screening of The Seventh Seal and behav
ing rather amiably.
While as heroes the English appear to be locked into indecision, as villains
they have prospered, to the extent that English villains seem to be emerging as a
recognized genre marker for Hollywood science fiction.23 Even Sylvester Stal
lone’s first action/comedy/science Fiction foray into the postmodern, Demolition
Man (also 1993), featured a comically effete Englishman, named Dr. Cocteau and
22 That this pattern has some force is underlined by the continued peculiarity of Richard
Gere's performance in American Gigolo (1980): as a soulful male prostitute afraid of being thought
homosexual, he delivers dialogue while fully, frontally nude. Other actors in mainstream Holly
wood films have performed beyond the "butt shot" convention, but those films which promise to
repeat American Gigolo's feat of sustained dialogue and full frontal nudity usually end up missing
these portions in their release versions. Examples would run from The Last Temptation of Christ
to Basic Instinct (during pre-production). Sliver, and The Color o f Night. In relation to Marlon
Brando, the footage Bernardo Bertolucci reportedly felt compelled to delete from Last Tango in
Paris might be included here as well.
23 For example, Gary Dauphin's review of Braveheart, describing Edward I as having been per
formed by Patrick McGoohan "with the sadistic good humor usually reserved for Brit villains in
sci-fi movies." Village Voice30 May 1995: 61.
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190
played by Nigel Hawthorne, as its overzealously p.c. villain: while floating glori
ously nude, tanned and depilatoried in cryogenic suspension, Stallone’s time-
tripping LAPD officer is programmed by Cocteau’s minions to become. . . a seam
stress. Whether Cocteau’s name is a reference to the size of his manliness (cock-toe
sums up the film’s general humor) or to the gay French artist, there is little final dif
ference in the film’s logic. Stallone’s exuberant, destructive masculinity cannot help
but shatter the repressive androgyny this future speaks with an English accent
Even the film’s omnipresent devices issuing citations for bad language do so in an
English-accented male voice, as if they were fighting some doomed battle against
the generic conventions of the R-rated action film; from Cocteau’s perspective, the
narrative concerns the science fictional quest to build a new, gentlemanly polymor
phous society with “the purity of an ant colony,” while Stallone’s “Demolition
Man” knowingly redirects the film toward the action film’s violent homoerotic ca-
tharses.
Almost identical dynamics operate in Stallone’s previous film, Cliffhanger,
a mountain-top thriller released in the US only a few months before Demolition
Man, and widely credited with restoring the actor’s domestic box office appeal: in
Cliffhanger, Stallone’s rock-climbing rescue ranger renews his estranged friendship
with another ranger by rescuing him from John Lithgow’s Qualen, a maniacal, and,
needless to say, English-accented villain searching for cases of stolen cash lost over
the High Sierras. Each of the three men are paired with women, and finally meas
ured by their ability to protect them. Stallone’s ranger blames himself for earlier
failing to rescue his friend’s less-experienced girlfriend during a failed climb, one
she apparently should not have been allowed to make in the first place. During the
course of the film, Stallone’s ranger successfully rescues his own girlfriend in a
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191
parallel accident, while Qualen calmly executes the English female pilot with whom
he has been paired, simply in order to insure his control over the recovered cash.
Sexual attraction means nothing to him, and unlike the American heroes of the film,
Qualen has no remorse with which to struggle. What at first seems efficient reserve
and ruthless leadership finally dissolves into Qualen’s final wild-eyed hysteria as he
meets his death—at least Demolition Man concluded with Sting’s voice praising the
virility of Stallone’s violent cop in the words of that film’s appropriated Police sin
gle (“he’s a walking disaster. . . he’s a Demolition Man . . . ”). Cliffhanger oblit
erates the English voice along the path to restoring its buddy romance.
Although the Die Hard films lack the extravagance of a Schwarzenegger or
Stallone body in the lead, they too belong here if only by virtue of their sexually
punning titles and the ecstatic, body-baring punishment Bruce Willis’ McClane un
derwent in the first (1988). The latter was an ordeal presided over by the over-the-
top English villainy Alan Rickman provided here, who as Sheriff of Nottingham
later menaced Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).24
But English villainy extends its opportunities beyond English character ac
tors such as Rickman: in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Jeremy Irons played
Simon, the aristocratic, nominally German brother of Die Hard's first villain, using
the same odd, floating accent which had made Irons’ Claus von Bulow seem dis
tinctly English. Even Simon’s final taunt, dismissing McClane as just another Irish
24 Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 1993, parodied this latter pairing by featuring a
broadly American King John opposite Cary Elwes’ smugly English-accented Robin—and the
American Elwes in turn had played the public school love interest of the Guy Burgess character in
Another Country, 1984, as well as the priggish colonial villain of Disney’s live-action The Jungle
Book, 1994. Like Robert Downey, Jr., or John Lithgow, whose career heights have been the
transsexual Roberta in The World According to Carp, 1982, and Gallimard in the Broadway produc
tion of M. Butterfly, Elwes’ ability to pass would seem to encompass both sexual and uational
borders.
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192
cop, seemed to point back to the lingering vocal traces of the actor’s nationality.
Still, unlike Rickman, Irons’ character stripped down to a muscle tee and went
man-to-man with the hero’s well-filled undershirt Sunken chest and spindly arms,
Irons has an Oscar, after all.
Re-mapping Jekyll and Hyde
The “fin-de-siecle homosexual panic” Elaine Showalter read in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case o f Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde may once again be
glimpsed in these action films, with the crucial exception that it is now the elite, in
tellectual Jekyll upon whom suspicion is displaced, and the more working class
Hyde who is offered as a point of identification.25 If bodybuilders may be thought
of at all as male hysterics, mutely dramatizing a contemporary “crisis” in masculin
ity across and through their bodies, then it is also rather ironic that it is their histri
onic, perversely gentlemanly English foes whose defeat insures the survival of the
nuclear family, good male role models, and the United States itself.26
Whatever peculiarities bodybuilders demonstrate are overshadowed by what
has become codified as the English gentleman’s failure and degeneracy, by the de
scent of even Olivier into the realm of television advertising and Iow-brow films.2 7
25 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York:
Penguin, 1990) 107, and in passing.
26 It thus seems only fitting that Terence Stamp should have achieved his “comeback” playing an Aus
tralian transsexual drag performer in The Adventures o f Priscilla, Queen o f the Desert (1994), a role which
not only neatly segued from Stamp’s more recent career as a patrician Hollywood villain (Superman II,
1980, Wall Street, 1987), but built upon the actor’s 1960s career as subject and object of perverse desires
(most notably Billy Budd, 1962, The Collector, 1965, and Pasolini’s Teorema, 1968): the normalcy Pris
cilla bestows upon Stamp’s Bernadette rephrases the upper class connotations of Stamp’s villains, provid
ing a queer-friendly universe parallel to that of the bodybuilder action film. Much like Schwarzenegger’s
steroid muscle queens, Stamp’s tarted-up Miss Hyde is a working class body upon which a transfigured
masculinity has been written in opposition to the high culture, refinement, and physical repression of a Dr.
Jekyll.
27 Such as the Ray Harry Hausen special effects showcase scoffed at in Last Action Hero,
Clash o f the Titans, 1981—the latter somewhat a “muscle film” entry itself.
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193
In a sense, it is the English actor’s apparent willingness to be seen slumming (an
illusion of sorts, considering the finances involved) which adds to the characteriza
tion of the roles in which they are cast. In Last Action Hero, it is Dance’s over-
qualified and bored Jack Slater villain Benedict who releases evil from the safe,
rule-driven confines of the screen. In Demolition Man, Dr. Cocteau’s ever so taste
ful power would continue to “civilize” men as perverse eunuchs, contemptuous of
male virility and 20th century popular culture (the film makes no distinction be
tween the two) as represented by Schwarzenegger action films. Finally, in Die
Hard, the manly bravado Willis’ McClane displays in defeating Rickman and his
band of high toned Euro-trash convinces McClane’s powerful wife to drop her
maiden name, and to return to her rightful place as wife. The death of Irons’ villain
in Die Hard With a Vengeance provided the McClanes with yet another potential
domestic reconciliation.
All of these convenient displacements between villain and hero are achieved
without the surface appearance of negative “ethnic” stereotypes, even though the
British press may occasionally express resentment, as happened briefly following
Julian Sands’ turn as an inexplicably English-accented surgeon in the American-set
Boxing Helena (1993). Sands’ accent in this fable-like film would seem to be yet
another hysterical symptom of his character’s anxiety over the body and pathetic
sexual inability, as are the constant sweats which soak his shirts, and the cotton
balls he must stuff into his ears; he may be handsome, rich, well-educated, yet ut
terly at odds with any physical, sexual existence. His words mark this disjunction.
The surgeon’s desire to possess forever a woman by amputating her limbs and
placing her in a box becomes an emblem of national psychosis only more so be-
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194
cause his nationality is never acknowledged: it is as if his nationality is no different
from what the film describes as pathetic heterosexual failure.
Boxing Helena was not a psychosexual hothouse anomaly. By a similar
logic, but in a very different context, First Knight's slick, romantic retelling of Ar
thurian legend (1995) implicitly presents the same consideration of English mascu
linity. Caught between the Scottish accent of Sean Connery’s King Arthur and
Richard Gere’s American accent for Lancelot, Guinevere’s distinct Englishness
would seem to be little more than a marker of sexual desirability—as in Boxing
Helena and other films which draw upon the English villain, English nationality
would seem to have been swallowed up in matters of gender. Her only English
suitor becomes Ben Cross’ (of Chariots o f Fire) perverse archvillain, a character so
obsessed by Arthur that his attention barely flickers across Guinevere’s form. And
in the wake of The Lion King's de facto English genetic degeneracy came the fully
named force of Pocahontas' (1995) British Governor Ratcliffe, voiced by David
Ogden Stiers with the same pompous inflection which had meant “upper class” in
the actor’s role on MASH and in a long list of other projects. Much like Mel Gib
son’s considerably less politically correct Braveheart (1995), which begins by dis
missing English historians and reaches its homophobic climax in its hissing por
trayals of Edward I and II, Pocahontas quickly crafts its villain through the signs of
nationality; at the same time, Gibson’s vocal performance as Pocahontas’ English,
blond-haired love, blends into the actor’s usual bland American inflection which he
has used to cover his own Australian accent
But while the recruitment of such relatively prestigious names as Dance,
Hawthorne, Rickman, and Irons might be seen in terms of their ability to purchase
some degree of mainstream, cross-gender, or critical seriousness for the action
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195
film, their casting also helps to evoke the discourse of performance styles discussed
earlier. Within each of the films above, there seems to be little difference from the
previous opposition between the American Method-typed film actor and his
(occasionally her, as in Fiona Shaw’s role in Super Mario Brothers, 1993) English,
theatrically-based, and effete parallel.28
This opposition has been re-staged, however, within a scenario which re
verses the order of Jekyll and Hyde by centering upon the domain of the “foreign”
Hyde, and making the English gentleman Jekyll the sexually suspect intruder. Now
it would seem that it is Jekyll upon whom Hyde displaces his own homosexual
panic, rather than the other way around. Even the Jekyll and Hyde narrative itself
has been reworked in this way: Steven Frears’ revisionist Mary Reilly (1996) intro
duces its title character as the third, ostensibly heterosexualizing comer of the trian
gle, Jekyll’s parlor maid. But still the homoerotic dynamic remains the film’s moti
vating subtext—except that now it is Jekyll (John Malkovich )who has become
strange. He desires to be both “the knife and the wound,” to gain freedom through
Hyde’s symbolic liberation, while it is Hyde (also Malkovich) who desires Mary
Reilly sexually, and finally poisons the pair in order to save her; surprisingly, given
the film’s casting, it is Hyde who heterosexualizes the narrative, not Julia Robert’s
Mary Reilly. Jekyll’s “fractured soul” earns Mary’s love, yet in a reversal of tradi
tion, Jekyll’s corpse reverts to Hyde’s form. Hyde, the other servants note, is no
gentleman, but Jekyll’s gentleman would seem finally to have been a pleasant but
28 Apart from film, the same connotations between nationality and sexuality even seem to be
at play in an unusually high profile and long-running example from television advertising: Tasters
Choice chose to use the same British actors but Americanize only the male half of the romantic
duo when the company adapted its popular serial ads for the US market in the early and mid 1990s.
Once again, it is the equation of a virile, spontaneous American and a cultured, more knowledge
able Englishwoman conducting the Anglo-American romance.
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196
perverse shell for the violent, virile Hyde; the visual presentation of Jekyll, as
older, weaker, sensitive, and somewhat effete contrasts with Hyde’s more youthful
and much more physical relation to the world.
Mary Reilly premiered as the presumably final portion of a triptych of high-
profile, and increasingly unsuccessful Gothic revivals which sought to give the
gloss of classic literature and auteur direction to the faded staples of the horror
genre. Bram Stoker’ s Dracula (1992) and Mary Shelley’ s Frankenstein (1994) em
phasized mixed casts of American and British stars, together with claims of faith
fulness to the literary sources, while Mary Reilly offered American actors in the
principle roles, and depended upon Valerie Martin’s popular revisionist novel for
literary' value: each of these films plays off the value and meaning of English mas
culinity, but Mary Reilly provides the most provocative example. Maikovich’s un
motivated, contextually-unexplained American accent as Jekyll and Hyde helps to
emphasize the shifts this adaptation makes: while Roberts’ Reilly more or less
speaks with an Irish, working class lilt, the final Hyde-like features of Jekyll’s
body would suggest that this contest of wills over “good and evil” has, in some
sense, also been about the meaning of the gentleman in Hollywood narrative. The
question of “who gets the girl” reportedly plagued the production, leaving screen
writer Christopher Hampton to improvise the end during production. Reilly wit
nesses two bodies visibly trapped in one skin, and the one which eventually tri
umphs, even if it is in death, is Hyde’s knife, rather than Jekyll’s desired onanistic
plenitude of knife and wound. The fractured soul splinters, leaving only one
corpse, and while at first it would seem to be Hyde’s, the final image the film pres
ents is of Jekyll, as if his physicality had somehow proved stronger even in death.
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197
Literally a body builder, in the film’s conclusion Jekyll follows Mary
Shelley’s scenario and builds a body which destroys its maker. In this one com
posite character, Mary Reilly provides a primer on the creation and function of the
English villain in films far removed from its own basically tasteful temperament: the
English villain provides the mannequin upon which that desire to be both knife and
wound may be displaced, and allows masculine endeavor to continue without com
plications.
In a sense, there is not that much difference between Mary Reilly's redemp
tion of Hyde and the other narratives considered in this chapter. Hyde is the
pumped-up action hero, Jekyll the queer villain who is finally to blame, just as
DeNiro’s American-accented Creature in Mary Shelley’ s Frankenstein out-muscled
Kenneth Branagh’s Dr. Frankenstein, another Brit who neglects his heterosexual
love interest With his full body waxing, surgically improved features, and Nauti
lus-tooled frame, Stallone’s time-traveling cop may bear little difference from a pre
sent-day gay pom star, but Demolition Man resolutely insists the finger be pointed
elsewhere—at Demolition Man’s Dr. Cocteau, Boring Helena's surgeon, Brave-
heart's Edward II, Mary Reilly's Jekyll, or, for that matter, almost any of the leer
ing characters played by Malcolm McDowell over the past two decades, from Blue
Thunder (1983) to Star Trek Generations (1994), in which he murders Capt. Kirk
and hands the franchise to Patrick Stewart. Tim Curry and David Warner have been
almost interchangeable with McDowell in their casting; their career-making roles as
unusual Englishmen in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976) and Morgan!
(1968) respectively, led to steady employment in the US as villains-of-the-week in
everything from Legend (1985) and The Island (1980) to The Muppets’ Treasure
Island (1996) and Hansel and Gretel (1987). Even The Mighty Morphin’ Power
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198
Rangers: The Movie (1995) found its own Royal Shakespeare Company and Na
tional Theatre refugee, Paul Freeman, to fill out the latex features of its evil Ivan
Ooze.
Robin Wood’s description of the buddy film’s excessive insistence upon
gay scapegoats sketches much of the same narrative strategy as here in these action
film,2 9 yet Wood’s scenarios has been significantly built upon and complicated by
the evocation of the bodybuilder’s “accent” and the repeated use of nationality both
to define and displace the villain’s difference. If his role as the evil Ra in Stargate
(1994) is any sign, The Crying Game's Jaye Davidson would appear to be follow
ing in the steps of McDowell and company. Davidson provides the film with a cor
poreal site of difference of which Stargate's publicity machine seemed innocently
unaware: little Ra action figures, incongruously muscular and masculine-looking,
flooded American toy stores, but in the film itself, Davidson simply replays Dil in
science fictional drag. Again the voice, and how it is both elided and emphasized,
plays a significant role. Rather than lip-synching to an old Burt Bacharach song,
this time Davidson’s voice comes out as a deep electronic monotone as Ra strikes
pose after pose in sumptuous, futuristic Egyptian tableaus. Ancient beyond years
and courtly, Ra “inhabits” a male body he violently possessed centuries ago. The
film’s American heroes, slowly bonding, discover a familiar-sounding backstory to
their villain:
A traveler, from distant stars, escaped from a dying world,
looking for a way to extend his own life, his body, decaying
and weak. He couldn’t prevent his own demise. Apparently
his whole species was becoming extinct So he traveled—
searched—the galaxies looking for a way to cheat death.
29 Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University.
Press, 1986) 229, and in passing.
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199
Now this galactic Englishman stands surrounded by a suggestively perverse array
of male bodyguards and children; while human, his image, like his voice, is far too
unsettling for the universe of children’s action figures. The body Ra displays seems
to have little connection with his long-ago victim; his eyes flash with digital effects,
and his chest remains coyly obscured by bondage-type vests or low-cut neck
lines.30 Rather than run to vomit, as the protagonist of The Crying Game did, Star
gate's heroes cement their bonding as buddies by nuking the abomination out of the
skies.
Of Crinoline and Crassus
Such strategic evocations of British nationality are hardly unique to action
film of the current decade, or, for that matter, to American film of this decade.
British films, notably Performance (1969), Villain (1971), Gumshoe (1971), and
The Krays (1990), also have played off of overt juxtapositions between “straight”
American gangsterism and “perverse” local interpretations, and other films have
pushed this violent Anglo-American exchange into a variety of forms. The Sailor
Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1976) adapted Yukio Mishima’s novel as a
story of sadistic, sexually disturbed gang of English public school boys and Kris
Kristofferson’s totemic American sailor. Ron Peck’s Empire State (1987) made an
interesting, if muddled comparison between the possibly freeing amorality of cor
rupt US powers and the envious, homophobic decency of the British. The Young
Americans (1993), following Harvey Keitel’s detective imported to catch American
criminals, pays homage to British crime films by quoting early on from Basil Dear-
30 Davidson’s freshly pierced nipples reportedly caused last minute revisions in the largely
chest-baring costume designs, causing the results to end up appearing much like contemporary
women’s evening wear—Ra may have become an alien drag queen more out of convenience than
design.
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200
don’s The Blue Lamp (1950), yet the film’s look and ambitions link it much more
securely to Lethal Weapon than to the earlier film’s documentary-styled celebration
of the unarmed English bobby. The Young Americans' proficiency in the former
respect even won the film’s young director the chance to helm Stallone’s Judge
Dredd (1995), a rare example of a big budget special effects film being shot in Eng
lish studios with an English director and production staff. “It’s a credit to a British
crew,” the film’s set decorator told the American press. “But Judge Dredd’s a fas
cist pig. It’s all kill, kill, kill, explode, explode, explode. . . . One longs for crino
lines again.”31
But if the history of British crime films have presented incestuous, self-
conscious preoccupation with the “American,” then American films also demon
strate a long-standing but remarkably consistent use of British-American national
contrasts. The central pairing of a muscular, inarticulate Kirk Douglas and a silver-
tongued Olivier in Spartacus (1960) not only provided the template for the film’s
representation of patrician Romans as English and slaves as American, but Olivier’s
cache as co-star apparently is what earned the then-most expensive film yet pro
duced its go-ahead against a rival project As Ina Rae Hark has also observed,
Olivier’s bisexual Crassus is a villainous figure who curiously remains both phallic
and passive, narratively successful but ultimately defeated by the American destiny
Douglas’ Spartacus is clearly meant to prefigure.32
31 David Gritten, "Disorder in the Court," Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1995: 30.
32 Ina Rae Hark, "Animals or Romans: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus, " Screening the
Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood, ed. Steve Coban and Ina Rae Hark (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993) 166-167.
The Last o f the Mohicans (1992), as discussed earlier, may seem to reverse Spartacus' strategy
by casting Daniel Day-Lewis as the proto-American, yet like Spartacus, The Last o f the Mohicans
still draws upon a national dialectic embodied in the rest of the cast's careful array of recognizably
English and American accents.
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201
Other examples of this clash of national destinies may also be easily found
in, for instance, John Wayne’s friendly sparring with a stuffy Richard Attenbor
ough in Brannigan (1975), the war between William Holden and Alec Guiness in
The Bridge on the River Kwai, or, for that matter, the Method-era Marilyn Mon
roe’s performance opposite Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl (both 1957).
Television may as well be included in this eclectic list. Bewitched, the perennially
popular television sitcom of the 1960s and early 1970s, expanded upon the then-
common practice of incorporating guest appearances from British pop groups by
using English nationality and theatrical tradition for somewhat different ends: sub
urban witch Samantha Stevens struggles each week to fend off her former life as a
jet-set witch by resisting the repeated interventions of her family, which ranged
from Agnes Moorhead’s mid-Atlantic accented mother, to the British stage actor
Maurice Evan’s performance as Samantha’s aristocratic warlock father, to a variety
of other, often Anglo-American relatives representing a range of other quaint or
swinging English stereotypes. More dramatically, Samantha’s evil twin cousin,
Serena, seemed to have abandoned herself to a chic Blow Up world. Although
Samantha repeatedly resisted Serena and weekly reaffirmed the “hard” value of
American domestic life and reigned-in female ambitions, Bewitched's pleasures
nevertheless revolved around the extravagantly “soft” eccentricities described as
European, but even more often, as English.
Recent action films in Last Action Hero's mold have differed from Spar
tacus, however, on two counts. First, this change has occurred by appropriating
Olivier’s Crassus, and placing him in well-budgeted productions of what only re
cently would have been inexpensive, action titles such as Jean-Claude van
Damme’s breakthrough Bloodsport (1987), or any number of the straight-to-video
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202
boom market of the late 1980s; these were the sort of narrowly-marketed films from
which van Damme ceremoniously graduated with Universal Soldier (1993), and the
late Cameron Lee would have with the success of The Crow (1994). In the US,
medium-budgeted films such as Universal Soldier and The Crow have become de
pendent upon their attraction beyond the core, stereotypically young male-
dominated action film market for films like Bloodsport or Lee’s Big Showdown in
Little Tokyo (1992); as Tasker points out, the 1980s created a new context for ac
tion films by moving both bodybuilding and the action genre into the high stakes,
highly hybridized mainstream.33 The move toward respectability has given even
greater strategic weight, it would seem, to the intimations of quality and critical es
teem “real” actors (such as Ron Silver in Time Cop or Raul Julia in Street Fighter,
both 1994 van Damme films) might bring. As examined earlier, the past decade’s
string of British hits in the US art film market have meanwhile succeeded by defin
ing themselves against these gigantic, audience- and genre-blending productions.
Second, and much more interestingly, the accented boundaries have begun
to blur between bodybuilder and perverse villain in a way which outstrips Spar
tacus’ own transition from near-mute to a military leader, one who, unsuccessfully,
seeks to speak through “Roman” imperialist discourse (a feat to be reserved for US
mastery over the British and later would-be masters). Both Tasker and Jeffords
chart the extents to which more recent films have self-consciously marked the dis
course between physical and verbal or hard and soft, this process representing one
aspect of a cultural re-making of the earlier, more binary distinctions. Van Damme’s
films may also offer a different representation of the hyperbolic male body, one
which emphasizes not rigidity but, through van Damme’s dancer-like splits and
33 Tasker 2.
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203
contortions, a flexibility and grace far different from that found in most other mus
cular action films. His Double Threat (1992) roles as identical twins, one a butch
mercenary, the other an affected L.A. aerobics instructor, even goes so far as to
make the schizogenic homophobia Showalter found in Jekyll and Hyde into a
knowing, comical plot devise. In addition, van Damme’s popularity among gay
men has not gone unacknowledged: while a strategic bloody tear in his tee shirt may
make Stallone appear to don a red AIDS ribbon near the end of Demolition Man (as
if in contrition for the pervasive homophobia which it displayed), van Damme has
felt comfortable enough to acknowledge his gay fandom, and to offer the press
friendly, if patronizing explanations for it34
False Truths
After the relative commercial failure of Last Action Hero, Schwarzenegger’s
come-back film brought the blending of Hyde and Jekyll, of Spartacus and Cras-
sus, to the forefront With James Bond in mind, James Cameron’s True Lies
(1994) Americanizes the French spy film La Totale! and it is in this respect that
True Lies represents a greater departure for Schwarzenegger than did the hyper
reflexive Last Action Hero, or even Junior, released only five months after True
Lies. A fearless US secret agent chasing painfully stereotyped Arab terrorists,
Harry Tasker admittedly does continue Schwarzenegger’s pattern of playing two-
fisted soldiers gifted at improvising strategy, handling weapons and firing off one-
liners—but with a difference. The Terminator, both original and reprogrammed
(1984 and 1991), the alien-battling mercenary of Predator, The Running Man's
conscience-struck cop of the future (both 1987), Total Recall's memory-implanted
347fte Face interview, quoted in Tasker 128.
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204
patsy used to hunt down mutant Martian colonists (1990)—each of these imagines
what Fred Glass has labeled a “New Bad Future,” and places Schwarzenegger’s
almost other than human body at the center of questions of “what is human, with
moral, political, and philosophical discourses spinning around that axis.”35 What
might be considered the normalcy of heterosexual, married, middle-class American
existence seems as illusory as the double-crossing “wife” Total Recall dispatches
with a bullet between the eyes and a smirking “consider this a divorce.” Even
Schwarzenegger’s comedies, such as Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1989),
seem engineered around the farcical notion that Schwarzenegger’s visage( or voice
could be fit into the boundaries of everyday American life.
However, True Lies' difference derives from its triple-edged ambition to
place Schwarzenegger’s persona in a Bond scenario, to revitalize the generic con
ventions of the Bond films by adapting them to the contemporary American action
genre, and to place this Schwarzenegger/Bond synthesis within a discourse of mo
nogamous “family values” and enlightened patriarchy; during the early stages of the
1996 presidential campaign (and just as True Lies was released on video), Sen.
Bob Dole’s attack upon Hollywood sex and violence included the GOP fund
raiser’s Schwarzenegger’s spy film—as an example that some Hollywood produc
tions (like True Lies, The Lion King, Forrest Gump, The Santa Clause and The
Flintstones) could truly be successful and family-friendly.36 But True Lies' itself
both plays to and plays off of the incongruity of these “family-friendly” efforts
35 Fred Glass, Totally Recalling Arnold: Sex and Violence in the New Bad Future," Film
Quarterly 4:1 (Fall 1990): 2.
36 Dole's inclusion of True Lies prompted cynical appraisals of Dole's relationship to
Schwarzenegger from both the left and right See Michael Tomasky, "False Truths," Village Voice
13 June 1995:21.
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205
placed next to the genre’s expectations of what and who a spy should be. In this
sense the film recalls not Bond but The Green Man, a minor 1956 British comedy
featuring Alastair Sim as a watchmaker by trade, a paid assassin by profession. The
Green Mem, however, played off the absurdity of Sim’s mousy Little England-er as
an assassin, while True Lies relies upon an additional reverse absurdity—
Schwarzenegger as ordinary, as an over-sized figure who simply seems out of
place amidst hearth and home. Schwarzenegger’s bodily scale itself seems out of
place within the disguise-heavy, deceit-laden world of Bond as well.
But any lack of fit between Schwarzenegger and the Bond-like social grace
of Tasker the secret agent lies off-limits to the film’s humor for example, in the
film’s conclusion Tasker dances a tango in long shot, his wife’s peculiar, over
compensating exaggeration never masking Schwarzenegger’s embarrassing inabil
ity to pass beyond the most elementary, stiffly muscle-locked dance steps. True
Lies’ initial advertising campaign pictured a relatively sleek Schwarzenegger in
close-up, paired not with his co-star Jamie Lee Curtis but a small chrome automatic
weapon of the sort which James Bond was so fond of—although Bond would
never be pictured in this open, tie-less tuxedo shirt.37
The film itself opens with a self-contained, high-tech infiltration of an ele
gant party at a lake-side Swiss chateau, a narrative strategy employed in Bond films
since From Russia With Love (1963). Tasker breaks through the lake’s ice and
peeling off his wet suit to reveal a tuxedo beneath—all properly Bond-like, even to
37 Several weeks after opening the advertising switched to a romantic pairing o f Curtis with a
still very Bond-appearing Schwarzenegger. The prominent movie review quote describing them as
the "Nick and Nora of the demolition set" imagines another interesting hybridization of the action
film, this time with the 1930s screwball mystery. The Thin Man's glamorous, upper-class Nick
and Nora also suggest another moment when the parallel nature of Englishness and American class
privilege may be posited.
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206
the extent of heavily flirting with the party’s predictably mysterious hostess. Yet
unlike the solitary, plays-poorly-with-others Bond, Tasker’s name describes his
work style. As might make Sen. Dole happy, Tasker is good at teamwork, and co
operates in cheerful partnership with a team of operatives guiding his movements
from a van nearby.38
The discrepancy is even greater, however. Daring solo missions completed
with debonair sexual confidence, glib sexualization of endeavors and goals, exotic
femme fatales, all of these Bond elements go hand in hand with Harry Tasker re
turning home to the bored wife and daughter who believe him to be a boring,
workaholic computer sales representative. In True Lies' narrative logic, Tasker is a
parallel not only to the duped but decent hero of Total Recall, but that earlier char
acter’s former self, the villain’s evil intelligence chief; in Total Recall, the film’s
narrative is propelled by the drive to keep the hero’s new synthetic self, and destroy
what he “naturally” was once—and that destruction includes his wife. Here, how
ever, Harry’s nearly adulterous wife, Helen, quickly turns the couple into a big
screen Scarecrow and Mrs. King when she learns (after extensive humiliation and
abuse) of her husband’s secret identity. This Miss Moneypenny gets her man, and
gets out of the office, too. Even Harry’s distant, juvenile delinquent daughter
femininely follows in her mother’s Die Hard steps once rescued by her father’s vir
ile abilities. True Lies' logic plays like a distracted doodle from one of Lacan’s
seminars: that the penis is the Phallus, that Schwarzenegger’s phallic body repre
sents the Father’s transcendental authority, is the film’s truest lie, its most special
effect
38 Fortune Hunter upped this aspect by giving its hero a video-implanted link back to his of
fice-bound partner—the series merged True Lies with the cyborg fantasies of Terminator 2.
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207
The effect is not seamless, however. True Lies, for all of its commercial
success, still provoked an amount of negative reaction not only for its racial politics
but for its narrative treatment of Helen.39 Tasker’s use of his professional resources
to intimidate Helen and her pretend-spy, would-be lover reads much more nakedly
as misogyny and violent jealousy because they blend the strident exoticism of the
Bond realm with the “everyday” machismo and “everyday” anger of celebrities such
as O. J. Simpson or, possibly, True Lies' sidekick, Tom Arnold. When Helen’s
rendezvous is shattered by Harry’s massive, full-military attack, her foolish gulli
bility for believing a used car salesman might actually be a spy quickly dissolves as
a somehow rationalizing factor. In turn, her subsequent interrogation by Harry
from behind a two-way mirror seems only slightly mitigated by the later punish
ment she physically inflicts on Harry—the narrative has no time for her anger. For
all of the infamous “sex, snobbery and sadism” of Bond, few “Bond girls” were
ever so cheerfully assaulted for such slight sins. Then again, when Bond married
(in On Her Majesty’ s Secret Service), he retired from the service.
Helen’s treatment is simply one aspect of the Film’s (sometimes pleasurable)
sense that things just do not fit But if the possibility of Arnold Schwarzenegger
successfully taking on a James Bond-type role in a $100 million-plus film might
have seemed unlikely at the time of Stay Hungry in 1976, the concept jars much
less two decades later. The idea also jars due to the apparent collapse of the Bond
franchise with low grossing Licence to Kill in 1989. In terms of marketability,
39 These issues arose as the topic not only of extensive online electronic debate in Com
puServe and elsewhere, but became a matter for denials during the film's post-release publicity
campaign. For example, see The Today Show, 25 July 1994, as well as David J. Fox, "‘True
Lies” False Lessons in History," Los Angeles Times 12 August 1994: F16.
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208
Schwarzenegger greatly overshadowed Bond before GoldenEye's release. Fortune
Hunter's quick failure seemed like a certain proof: Bond was dead.
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CHAPTER 6
Bonds
209
Of course by the time True Lies opened in the summer of 1994, Pierce
Brosnan had already been cast as GoldenEye's new Bond, but True Lies still con
notes the post-Cold War disarray in which the Timothy Dalton-era Bond found
himself. “Bond’s an aging, alcoholic Brit. C’mon! Let’s pump some new blood
into him!” True Lies’ director and screenwriter Cameron blithely put it (ignoring
Schwarzenegger’s seniority over both Dalton and Brosnan).1 Without doubt it is
True Lies’ significance as a marker of Bond’s previous failure that gives the film its
importance here: obviously there was enough optimism in this revision of the Bond
spy genre to supply the film’s then record-breaking $100-plus million budget, but
not, to oversimplify only somewhat, if Bond’s paradigmatically intertwined
Britishness and masculinity had been retained in the figure of, say, Dalton or even
Pierce Brosnan.2 First and last, True Lies was a Schwarzenegger film.
There have been other popular American versions of the Bond character, in
the middle and late 1960s alone, James Cobum appeared twice as Derek Flint, and
1 David Kronke, "Can He Do Side-Splitting Action?’ Los Angeles Times Calendar, 17 July
1994: 3.
It is interesting to note that Dalton’s darker, more introspective Bond took on assignments in
volving the unusually sober and “real” issues of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (The Living
Daylights, 1987) and South American drug cartels (Licence to Kill, 1989). The Afghan rebel Bond
allies himself with in the former film was played by the same actor (Art Malik, of the television
serial Jewel in the Crown) who later menaces Tasker in True Lies', the “new blood” Cameron
pumped into Bond struck many as the same old racist stereotypes of Arabs and Islam which the
Dalton era, in some ways, avoided.
On the other hand, Dalton wasted no time in assuming the mande of the campy English vil
lain (The Rocketeer, 1991, in which he parodied Errol Flynn). Roger Moore, on the other hand,
waited until Jean-Claude Van Damme’s The Quest (1996).
2 On the other hand, GoldenEye's successor to the fabled Ken Adam as production designer
was True Lies’ Peter LeMonL
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210
Dean Martin made four Matt Helm films. Each series carefully sought ways to pose
their secret agent protagonists as iconoclastic at a time when the activities of the CIA
and other secretive agencies had begun publicly to seem somewhat less than heroic.
Simply because of his nationality and political associations, placing Schwarzeneg
ger in an Americanized, 1990s-era Bond film would alone be rather interesting. But
it is True Lies' adamant, high-profile and high-budgeted rewriting of Bond as mo
nogamous family man which underlines Harry Tasker’s difference as a post-Cold
Warrior. The Cold War’s end may not even be persuasive as a general causal factor
in this shift; as has often been observed, Bond films were never overly concerned
with the Red Threat, but with less politically sensitive criminal organizations like
SPECTRE (rather than the Soviet-led SMERSH).
In a sense, Bond undergoes in True Lies what Schwarzenegger did in the
post-Reagan era Kindergarten Cop, trading in his former promiscuous independ
ence and self-reliance for a family life of partnership and responsibility—what Jef
fords calls, using an often-recycled term, the New Man.3 Dalton’s two outings as a
romantically yearning, almost monogamous Bond had implicitly reacted to AIDS
and related issues by moving in exactly True Lies' direction. Unfortunately for
Dalton, the American audience for his New Bond quickly evaporated, paving the
way for Brosnan’s sexist-and-proud-of-it Old Bond reborn, flirting with a Miss
Moneypenny who hopes for sexual harassment; if box-office success cannot lie,
then American audiences found something more appealing in GoldenEye's asser
tion of the virility of sexist dinosaurs and Cold War relics.
But the sudden popularity in the 1990s of the perverse English villain
should remain as a symbolic suggestion that Dalton may have had little to do with
3 Jeffords 153.
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his own demise. It may have been rather the awkward incompatibility of Bond’s
hyper-promiscuous sexuality with the New Man’s domesticity. Perhaps from the
standpoint of sociobiology, Bond was just not built to stay home. But the Cold
War’s part should not be too quickly dismissed either. The Cold War’s influence
still persists, at least in the sense that its conclusion has rapidly diminished what
ever was left of Britain’s special relation with the US. That realization may have
been brought home by Clinton’s “Berlin ist fref ’ proclamation at the Brandenburg
Gate: as a British secret agent, the power indirectly supporting Bond’s missions has
dwindled. GoldenEye's central conflict, between 007 and a 006 who has gone in
dependent, hinges upon the West’s desire to forget the Cold Wan bom a White
Russian, the former 006 cannot forgive forgetfulness. In the film’s most effective
confrontation, the two meet in a graveyard of Soviet-block state art, and it becomes
clear that if Bond is to save the world this time around, this dinosaur must remem
ber the past, not revise it—M’s parting words to Bond before his mission are
“come back alive,” and those are the heavy-handed instructions the filmmakers
seemed to have heard as well.
The goal of remembering the past, however, does not quite mesh with
Bond’s original purpose. In fact, it is neatly its antithesis.
Strategic Revisions
All along Bond’s absurd peculiarity has been that he, a British subject,
could save the world. When Ian Fleming sat down in Jamaica to write the first
Bond novel in 1952, not only was Britain still locked in its rationed, supplies-poor
Austerity gloom, but the disappearance of senior Foreign Office officials Burgess
and Maclean the year before had begun a cascade of spy scandals. These shocks
continued through the revelation of Sir Anthony Blunt as the long-suspected ac
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212
complice in 1979; Sotheby’s Philby auction was only the latest act in this drama of
upper class and queer malfeasance. Not only had the Cambridge spies been honor
able, well-born gentlemen, but they had conducted their activities through a public
school matrix of homosexuality and high culture: buggery and passing atomic se
crets to the Russians, good clubs and “simply an adolescent phase” Marxism, sus
pected spies who escaped because M5 had simply taken the weekend off (as usual).
Not quite the world of Bulldog Drummond’s heroics in adventures like The
Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934), when the legendary ex-Army officer could
have confidence that eliminating foreigners would eliminate crime in Britain. But
much the same Cambridge mix of sexuality and deceit may be found in the W. W.
II-set Five Fingers. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s well-timed 1952 film dramatized the
betrayal of Allied secrets by “Cicero,” the valet to the British ambassador in Ankara:
taking advantage of his elderly employer’s blind trust in his servant’s loyalty,
James Mason’s unusually refined and controlled valet perfectly creates what is all-
so-familiar now as the later spies’ repugnance at the dishonesty and emptiness be
hind the traditions and culture they still admire. The valet’s alternately sadistic and
masochistic relation with the woman who finally betrays him also suggests the sex
ual reading of spying which Burgess and company would later receive in Another
County, An Englishman Abroad (1983), and elsewhere. As Blunt: The Fourth Man
(1987) squarely dramatized it for British television, the tension between love of
England and disregard for British politics had been further exacerbated by
McCarthy-era American rhetoric, particularly the homophobia which that same
rhetoric would immediately seize upon to demonize Britain. It is in fact still a goal
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213
of some American conspiracy theorists to link Maclean to Alger Hiss, and to take
the case as a lingering lesson for malcontent, sexually-suspect intellectuals.4
But even more hurtful for English pride were the blows these men had
struck against the figure of the gentleman, not so much for what they had done,
but, with the exception of Blunt, for having run away and forced the matter to come
so messily to light. The privileged and moneyed Cambridge spies, by betraying
their own class, disclosed a much more acute vulnerability than did the envious
Cicero, who was simply angry that his perfect performance as a gentleman could
never win him acceptance as such. Such traitors only confirmed the communally-
accepted value of that which they betrayed. But as Hugh David has described the
tight-lipped public announcement which acknowledged Burgess and Maclean’ de
fections, the Cambridge spies had hammered
another nail to the coffin of the One Nation .... [The public
announcement] implicitly accepted that there were different
classes, that Us and Them still existed. Something was rot
ten in the State of Denmark; and it was the State or at least its
ruling elite which was adjudged to blame.5
Of the two first to go missing, Burgess has usually tended to be the more memora
ble. Homosexual, promiscuous, alcoholic, dirty, yet easily charming, Burgess (or,
more accurately, Guy Francis de Money Burgess) suddenly seemed to all too
clearly embody that which he had betrayed.
It seems strangely fitting then that the deeply conservative Fleming would
make Bond not so much a faithful Kim Philby (actually, he still retained his cover
in 1952), but a revisionist portrait of Burgess instead, carefully omitting the latter’s
homosexuality and disloyalty but emphasizing his time at Eton, Cambridge degree,
4 See Verne W. Newton, The Cambridge Spies: The Untold Story o f Maclean, Philby, and
Burgess in America (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1991) xiv, xvi.
5 Hugh David, Heroes, Mavericks and Bounders (London: Michael Joseph, 1991) 232.
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2 1 4
and snobbish consumerist passions. Although David confesses it is “plainly fanci
ful” to suggest Fleming did base Bond upon Burgess, he still notes that the
(premature) Times obituary penned for Bond in the novel You Only Live Twice
might have come close to Burgess’ own had he not fled, and his point is persua
sive.6 In 1958, the actress Coral Browne met the already declining Burgess while
on tour in Moscow; three decades later John Schlessinger’s dramatized that en
counter in An Englishman Abroad (1983), and that teleplay’s portrait of Burgess
comes close to presenting what this alternative Bond might have been like,
drunken, and painfully divorced from his perfect martinis, cigarettes, and, most of
all, his Savile Row tailors.
But while Burgess’s spying probably had little direct influence upon his
tory, Bond, it might be argued, has continued to shape events. Or, rather, the often
slippery conflation of Fleming and his alterego has so continued. As Alexander
Cockbum has reasoned it,
Without Fleming, we would have had no OSS, hence no
CIA. Sir Anthony Eden would not have embarked on his
mad Suez adventure. President John F. Kennedy would in
all likelihood be alive today. The Cold War would have
ended in the early sixties. We would have had no Vietnam,
no Ronald Reagan, and no Star Wars.7
Whether or not Fleming (as assistant to the director of British naval intelligence) did
have such a hand in World War II intelligence affairs is debatable. Whether Eden
could have learned better from the Bond novels that American support must always
be sought first, or whether Kennedy did listen to Fleming’s dinner party suggestion
to harass the Cubans (and thus provide the grounds for his own later assassina
tion)—these possibilities are, of course, part of Cockbum’s comic hyperbole.
6 David 238-39.
7 Alexander Cockbum, "James Bond at 25," American Film 12 (July-August 1987): 27.
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215
But Cockbum’s tone is quite serious when he describes Bond’s importance
as a role model for the Cold War’s methods of secrecy and skullduggery. And in
turn it was the legendary placement of From Russia With Love on Life's list of
Kennedy’s top ten favorite novels which had helped to finally propel Fleming’s
novel onto the screen.8 However, Kennedy was not alone in fondness for Bond.
Almost as curious as the left-wing Cockbum’s attention to such a “trivial” subject,
Fleming’s popularity among such Angry Young Men as Phillip Larkin and King
sley Amis reached across what seemed to be an utterly dissimilar surface. But as
Robert Murphy points out, Bond “lazily embraced” with a similar machismo many
of the same bourgeois elements which tempted the working class heroes these writ
ers both created and modeled. It is no surprise then that the increasingly conserva
tive Amis (a future Bond novelist himself) should have attacked the Bond films for
having coarsened the figure, for having disturbed the novels’ careful class structure;
like Cicero, Amis had expectations and goals. “In the new Britain,” Murphy writes,
“classless-ness was to mean that everybody had a share in upper-class luxury as
well as in working-class jollity and gutsiness.”9 In this respect Fleming’s Bond had
again offered to plaster over (however incompletely) the class-baring damage done
by the scandal of the Cambridge spies, giving a post-Austerity boost toward a
bright new, high-tech Britain, clearly driven by the wisdom of the upper class.
What may have disturbed Amis about the films was their blending of what consti
tuted class, of what constituted the gentleman himself.
But however wide these accomplishments of Bond’s and Fleming’s may
have been, Cockbum’s list of political deeds leads quite clearly toward a negative,
8 John Pearson, The Life o f lan Fleming (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) 300-1.
9 Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992) 112-13.
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216
long past-due balance. It is in Bond’s own “lazy embrace” of a certain British mas
culinity (the area in which True Lies performed its corrective surgery) which would
now appear to make Bond most vulnerable, not the antique political constructions
which had been troublesome long before Licence to Kill. Not that politics and gen
der may be that easily untangled. As described by one of the angriest attacks upon
the Bond myth of the late 1960s, Mordecai Richler’s “James Bond Unmasked,” the
long list of vaguely Jewish, physically bizarre, and sexually suspect villains form a
much too neat parallel to Bond’s equally exaggerated virility. What this anti-Semitic
xenophobia disguises is, once again, the real record of members of Bond’s own
class collaborating with the enemy—and worse, an enemy not even interested in
British secrets but only the nation’s access to American ones.1 0 Emst Stavro
Blofeld, Auric Goldfinger, Sir Hugo Drax, and so on, form such a gallery of for
eign, vulgar monsters that Christopher Walken’s casting as former East German
agent Max Zorin in A View to a Kill (1985) stands out. As a younger, heterosexu-
ally active (and very Aryan) villain, Walken’s presence was possibly more unset
tling than the film’s image of Grace Jones mounting a tired-Iooking Roger Moore.
More typically, a villain such as Blofeld might don full drag to escape Bond’s
clutches and then return to gloat in the final act. As Charles Gray (later of The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975) drawled in a perfect English accent, “Your piti
ful little island hasn’t even been threatened.”
Reading Bond completely within the bounds of British culture certainly may
not seem appropriate for such determinedly international films. Such concern
formed the basis for Lee Drummond’s defense of Bond, in which the physical an-
10 Mordecai Richler, "James Bond Unmasked," Mass Culture Revisited, ed. Bernard Rosen
berg and David Manning White (New York: Vans Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971) 350-55.
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thropologist claims Bond as a “mythic emissary of a global, American-dominated
technological culture.”11 From such a perspective, the link Richler makes between
Bond and the contemporary diminishment of Britain dissolves, even considering
“Americans’ interest in things English”:1 2
Did Richler really suppose that the seventeen-year olds
thronging movie houses in Omaha and Seattle (and even his
native Montreal) had come to watch Sean Connery do battle
with Rosa Klebb and Doctor No in order to revive their faith
in a diminished England? The idea seems as improbable as
Fleming’s characters.1 3
Drummond’s affection for Bond may lack Cockbum’s self-conscious irony, and he
seems oddly oblivious to popular culture’s persistent romanticization of British pop
stars, but Drummond does suggest the question which, on its surface at least, True
Lies answers in the affirmative: wouldn’t the Bond film work just as well, or better,
without the trappings of British nationality? The unwashed teen masses in Omaha
and Seattle would seem to be totally removed from the bourgeois, gray-haired
province of official Anglophilia.
But just as Seattle has since become synonymous with grunge rock’s
American appropriation of British punk, so does the Bond myth benefit from a par
ticular usefulness for Americans in its unique imbrication of mastery, masculinity,
and British nationality. Audiences did pass through their initial infatuation with
Bond, after all: the glut of spy films which peaked in 1967 led to the collapse of the
genre in 1968, and paved the way for George Lazenby’s disastrous debut as Bond
in On Her Majesty’ s Secret Service in 1969. The Bond formula simply didn’t make
sense any longer, The New York Times was hip enough to report: “ . .. since
11 Lee Drummond, "The Story of Bond," Symbolizing America, ed. Herve Varenne (Lincoln,
Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 69.
12 Richler 67.
13 Richler fn 255.
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218
1963, when all of us first caught sight of the dashing Mr. Bond, our heads had
gone through more changes than you could shake a joint a t”14 Post ‘68, the revi
sionist Bond might look somewhat like the frustrated, kitchen-sink anti-Bonds of
The Spy Who Came Out o f the Cold or The Ipcress File (both 1965), but even
more like the hired assassin Edward Fox played in Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of
the Jackal (1973). Cruel, aristocratic but money-hungry, the pragmatically bisexual
Jackal moves through his preparations to assassinate Charles De Gaulle with a cold
precision which shaves off Bond’s double-entendre one-liners. The result is a Bond
without the patriotic piping of duty to the Queen and, always implicit in the Bond
films, duty to the alliance with the US. The vicious but rather inconsequential con
notations of Jackal’s codename itself sums up some of the perversely pleasurable
futility his narrative represents: the film balances his ability to come so close to
killing De Gaulle, with the rational, historical knowledge that Jackal must fail in his
fictional attempt.
Bond, however, did not simply vanish into the Jackal’s own final obsoles
cence. The Bond series continued, remaining a potent, if increasingly anachronistic
commercial franchise throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s. Considered within
the “boom and bust” contours of genre cycles, or as a ritual collectively expressing
cultural tensions, or as a reflection of the dominant ideology, the Bond films pro
vide examples supporting the argument of Steve Neale and others that these ap
proaches to genre not only oversimplify but ignore the wider, often contradictory
net of cultural and institutional conditions.1 5
14 Quoted in Robert E. Kapsis, "Hitchcock in the James Bond Era," Studies in Popular Cul
ture 11-12.1 (1988-89): 73.
15 See Steve Neale, "Questions of Genre," Screen 31.1 (Spring 1990): 64-65.
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219
Neither do these approaches easily explain the timing or the purpose of an
example of generic acrobatics such as True Lies, the most recent claimant to Bond’s
past throngs of 17 year-olds in Omaha and Seattle. While the empirical study of
how American or British fans have read and used Bond is outside the bounds of
this study, True Lies and Schwarzenegger together proffer the possibility that True
Lies is less a denial than a strategic appropriation of English masculinity. Even
outwardly stripped of his British nationality and his promiscuity, Bond still pro
vides Schwarzenegger with a specific model for what comes after the Last Action
Hero finally sputters, and dies, in Jeffords’ post-hard body, fin de siecle US.
The key is the contradictory, perhaps even illusory nature of Bond’s own
mastery, something mapped out by Cockbum’s history of dubious achievements
and struggled against by Fleming’s own best intentions. Bond’s peculiarly British
evocation of failure as well as mastery falls neatly into place as yet another tool in
what Jeffords views as the re-making of the patriarchy, and while this image may
come too close simply to reflecting a one-dimensional view of culture, the misog
yny and racism “excused” by True Lies' Bond conventions underlines the obvious
negatives involved.
But even as True Lies and GoldenEye threaten to dim the importance of the
aging figure of 1960s Bondmania, the earlier, and still popular texts continue to ex
ert a powerful influence over the production, reception, and critical study of the
newer generation. As the subject of films, Bond has racked up a remarkable 30-
plus years as the most sustained British presence in the US and other international
film markets. Yet however many far-flung locations the series may manage to take
in, US interests and military authority has never been far away. GoldenEye's recent
revival of interest in Bond may provide a suggestion of the importance of this An
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220
glo-American history, but it is the older Bond texts, particularly the films, which
provide the context necessary to understand the history’s doubling of mastery and
failure in Bond’s figure.
The milestones of Bond’s life in films probably have a rather worn familiar
ity for even those outside of Bond fandom: American vegetable heir Albert Broc
coli’s teaming with Harry Saltzman to produce the film version of Dr. No in 1962,
and United Artist’s initial skepticism about the project. . . Sean Connery’s multiple
replacements as Bond, and his two returns to the role, in 1971 and 1983, the latter
one (Never Say Never Again) a disguised Thunderball remake released in competi
tion with a Broccoli-produced Roger Moore outing. . . Dalton, the significant other
of the controversial Vanessa Redgrave, taking the role and promising a more seri
ous, adult Bond. But after Dalton’s second outing, the series took its longest hia
tus, from 1989 to 1995.
These are only a few of the strands which both the mainstream press and
tiny fanzines return to over and over. One common, particularly influential strand is
Connery’s own mythic status as the “unknown” Scot who provided the lens with
its first Bond (ignoring, that is, a misfired American attempt by CBS in the late
1950s): this Connery represents a strand which is not only intertwined with the
gentlemanly performance of British mastery, but with ethnicity and the gendered
meanings of the British actor, and it is in these respects that Connery offers entry
into the early history of the films.
Connery and the English Actor
As might be supposed, Connery had already compiled something of a re
sume before Dr. No, including significant film roles, a seven year American studio
contract, and an early breakthrough lead performance in the BBC’s production of
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221
Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight. He was already pre-packaged for
American audiences—even his stage name, Sean, was apparently inspired by the
western Shane. Like Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder and a Mr. Universe contestant,
Connery supplied the required physicality to Requiem’ s bruised boxer Mountain
McClintock. In addition to his physicality, Connery’s Scottish burr helped to define
his portrayal against the usual British—that is, English—leading man. “Our chaps,
the galaxy of flannel-trousered, tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking protagonists of 50s
British cinema,” Geoffrey Macnab has observed, lacked more than the costumes for
such roles as McClintock:
Who could imagine Kenneth More or Dirk Bogarde or even
big Jack Hawkins stripping off their suits and ties and
brogues and climbing into the ring? .... (It’s surely signifi
cant that we find it easiest to characterise these British stars
in terms of their clothes and not their physique or screen
presence.)16
Connery’s later casting as Bond underlines the ironic distaste for the films of for
mer Angry Young Men such as Kingsley Amis; it would seem that by the early
1960s, they had already begun to don the tweeds of their establishment elders; and
perhaps resented the reminder.
But even if out of sync, and in the wrong medium, Connery’s McClintock
did foretell the coming generation of rougher stage and film actors who would soon
take north of England attitudes to Hollywood. Of course, Connery might just as
easily be compared to the solidly built Richard Burton, who had already left—and
was himself Welsh rather than simply “British.”
What is significant is that Macnab, writing Sight and Sound’s thirtieth anni
versary celebration of the Bond film industry, would so casually erase both the
16 Geoffrey Macnab, "Before Bond," Sight and Sound 2.6 (Oct. 1992): 32.
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222
(different) physicality and (different) screen presence of “well bred” actors such as
Bogarde. As in the early Boys in Brown (1949), Bogarde’s range of roles were
themselves not entirely of the flannel-trousered sort But in this emphasis Macnab’s
essay (a rather significant marker given both Bond’s and Sight and Sound's solid
positions in mainstream British film culture) does follow a pattern ritualized in
Connery’s 1983 biography, in most of his press profiles and interviews, and,
moreover, in much of the publicity surrounding the male British New Wave stars of
the 1960s. Connery’s body (“his commodity, his ticket to success,” Macnab en
thuses1 7 ) was constructed through the interchangeable signifiers of his Scottish
ethnicity and his class. Both British and, by virtue of the burr in his voice, other
than English, Connery’s difference seems to be the means by which Bond may be
distinguished from earlier examples of the English gentleman such as Coward’s W.
W. II officer. Fleming himself had made Bond’s father Scottish, yet the Bond of
the novels, orphaned at 11, schooled at Eton and Cambridge, firmly fixed in a Lon
don of expensive brand names, would have hardly spoken with a voice which be
trayed anything beyond English culture. But because Connery’s burr increased with
his tenure in the role, it might also be heard as an index to the extent that “Connery”
became distinguished from “Bond,” until finally Bond again spoke more clearly in
the English accents of Connery’s successors.
Connery’s embodiment of Fleming’s character is not, however, simply the
surface of “that startling national monument” which Macnab may scratch to find
“the Mountain McClintock beneath”: Macnab’s interest may be “Before Bond,” but,
despite Connery’s earlier career, it may be difficult to find that pre-Bond Con
17 Macnab 32.
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223
nery.1 8 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond also examined
similar representations of Connery, and emphasized the unique indistinguishability
of Connery and Bond, a Bond-ing which exceeds that found in most star-to-role
relations. Bennett and Woollacott cite Richard Dyer’s description of the “always-
already signifying nature of star images,” and, rather than apply it to Connery, use
it to describe Bond’s function as “a constantly destabilising point of reference.”1 9
It is as if Bond had generated Connery—which might have some validity.
Connery’s appearance as Bond of course came at a very pivotal point in Bond’s
overall history, when the 1950s Bond of the novels shifted to become the very dif
ferent 1960s Bond of the films, and Connery’s nationality took on new associa
tions: Bennett and Woollacott assert that
whereas, in the late 1950s, Bond had supplied a point of ref
erence in relation to which the clock of the nation had been
put imaginably into reverse, recalling a brighter past, the
Bond of the early to mid 1960s functioned as the condensed
expression of a new style and image of English-ness around
which the clock of the nation was made to run imaginably
ahead of itself, a pointer to a bbghter and better future.20
The films quickly btualized Bond’s bored but genial compliance as the bumbling,
fussing Q outfit him with the installment’s quota of high-tech, trompe 1 ’oeil gadg
ets; the joke always was that Bond himself had a better innate knowledge of the de
vices than did the official experts. Not much differently from a soldier given a new
weapon—or a Mod and motor scooter, surfer and board: Bond’s prowess grew out
of his masterful ability to use that which circumstances provided him.
18 Macnab 33.
19 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular
Hero (New York: Methuen, 1987), 53.
20 Bennett and Woollacott 34.
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2 24
Accordingly, Fleming’s own choice for Bond, David Niven, had reflected
the happier, pre-Suez disaster pull of the early novels, while Connery’s purportedly
“man of the people” Bond drew Bond toward the 1960s and that era’s booming
popular culture. Of course Connery’s Bond might as well be considered a stabiliz
ing as destabilizing point of reference. Connery in the role drew upon a new style
of gentleman within a discourse of modernization, as a hero, Bennett and Woolla
cott suggest, both of
rupture and tradition, heralding a brighter future by recalling
the virtues of a doughtier, more valiant and socially inclusive
tradition of English-ness which could be opposed to the
cloying and restrictive foibles of the Establishment.2 1
Bond’s modernization was more a matter of salvage than of creation.
In these respects Connery’s own history of physicality, ethnicity and class
helped to vanquish the old “Breed,” not with some new radical replacement but a
“New Site” of efficient professionalism—in Jeffords’ terms, a “new” national
body given over to pumping up a weakened past22 While the gentlemen played by
Coward and Niven displayed a quality which Macnab describes as an absence,
Connery/Bond displayed a sheer corporeality. Moreover, the new Bond would
once again make the British gentleman attractive to the American audience through
its consonance with the Playboy ethos of middle class comfort and sexual libera
tion. It would have come as no surprise in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) that the
foremost piece of identification in Bond’s wallet does not appear to be any official
slip of the British government, but his Playboy Club membership card.
21 Bennett and Woollacott 239.
22 Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) 112.
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2 2 5
In return, the American “Bondmania” which grew through Dr. No (1962),
From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965) helped
to begin a contest among US studios to pump money into the British film industry,
providing the basis which helped to make Britain fashionable for the rest of the dec
ade. The Bond films were hardly alone in popularizing British culture—
Goldfinger's US rentals were topped only by Mary Poppins, and Thunderball's by
The Sound o f Music and the English accents of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago.
However, while the other films evoked either an antique past or used British na
tionality to connote more general Otherness, the Bond films carried a patriotic ad
vertisement for an updated Empire. In this sense, Thunderball may be paired with
the seemingly dissimilar Darling (also 1965), a film which did present a bland Dirk
Bogarde, rejecting the promiscuity and ambitions of Swinging London in favor of a
more flannel-trousered traditionalism. The titular Darling, on the other hand, sleeps
her way along a Bond-girl type path to the top, only to find herself still empty, and,
in her final turn as the wife of a philandering Italian aristocrat, unable to repent and
return to her previous English life.
By constantly discarding last year’s Bond girl (as though calling to Umberto
Eco and Levi-Strauss, most Bond films follow a basic pattern of three central
women, two to be killed and the last to survive), these films affirm a similar cen
trality to masculinity. Bond, like England, will always persist, while his women
wash about him and disappear into some exile or death as surely as did Darling.
Just as in the films of Merchant Ivory and other members of the heritage industry,
the paths of British nationality appear to be gendered, clinging much more tena
ciously (like a “glamorous glue”) to the manners in which we represent masculinity
rather than femininity.
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226
Connery’s casting as Bond may also be read to have done more—and
less—than illustrate the successful Anglo-American marketing of the British gen
tleman, made manly (Americanized, so to speak23) by the infusion of Connery’s
burr and class-marked physicality. Whether this Bond is to be construed as regres
sive, progressive, or something else entirely, it might seem that the only preferred
reading the films suggest is that of a Chamber of Commerce message for this mod
em model of the buffed-up English gentleman. This assumption is in line with Jef-
ford’s description of the hard body as a sort of national body, possessing a unified
ideological value.24 Such simplification has formed the basis for the persuasive
criticism Elizabeth Traube and other have made of the approach which characterizes
not only Hard Bodies but Jeffords’ earlier work as well: as Traube notes in
Dreaming Identities, the monolithic face which American masculinity puts forward
must be tempered with a knowledge of the internal divisions caused by class, race,
and generation.25
As has been argued earlier, even such an initially historic and specific figure
as the English gentleman offers diverse readings, including seemingly incongruent
uncertainty and failed fixity, particularly in its post-W. W. II manifestations. The
film Bond, regardless of his modernization, is no exception. The very elements
which allowed this Bond to assume a position of Anglo-American mastery mark the
death of English gentleman as well as they do his potential rebirth—in fact, the two
may be part of the same process.
23 Although, as discussed earlier, Hoggart would not recognize this as Americanization. Yet
from the American perspective, the muscular authority Connery brought to the role might be con
strued as such.
24 Jeffords 25, and in passing.
25 Elizabeth G. Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Holly
wood Movies (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992) 19-20.
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227
The very strength of Bond’s body carries with it a vulnerability: to the ex
tent that Connery’s Bond represents an ethnically-enhanced, Americanized mascu
linity, so is the former model of the gentleman sexually reduced to that of the
eunuch boss or assistant, or that of the perverse foreign villain who is inevitably
greedy for the trappings of the gentleman but manifestly fails. In a sense, then,
True Lies simply follows through upon what Dr. No had already begun, taking
Bond’s Americanization of the gentleman, and using it both to further Americanize
Schwarzenegger himself and to “explain” away his stubbornly almost American-
ness.
Bu since the figure of Bond is also still symptomatic of the now-decadent
gentleman, of the queer gentleman spies Bond “redeemed,” he himself may also
represent a site of nationality(ies) in conflict, of violence which also works to eroti
cize the spectacle of his repeatedly tortured body: as a representative of Little Eng
land, Bond does the decent thing time and time again, saving us all at the price of
his own well-being. In the financially disastrous On Her Majesty’ s Secret Service
(1969), the concluding spectacle of George Lazenby’s Bond weeping, clutching the
body of his slain wife, may have doomed the film by tipping the balance too far in
the direction of the suffering, true gentleman who had retired, married and emi
nently done the Right Thing. True Lies' distinction is that it arrived at a time in
which American “modernization” has come to mean making masculinity compatible
with Lazenby’s sensitivity if not his defeat
Critical Bonds
Such historical contexts have shifted around the Bond texts as they have ap
peared and disappeared as objects of critical attention, sometimes receiving only a
moment’s attention, as demonstrated by Richler’s and Drummond’s mass commu
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2 2 8
nications and physical anthropology examples. But Bond has played a sporadic, yet
paradigmatically more significant role in the recent history of film and cultural
studies. The low- to middlebrow, reactionary, chauvinistic, and often racist aspects
of the novels and films have perhaps given a greater impact to serious attempts to
study them. Antony Easthope’s history of British post-structuralism even uses
Umberto Eco’s “The Narrative Structure in Fleming” (1966), Tony Bennett’s early
1980s Bond work, and Bennett and Woollacott’s Bond and Beyond to periodize the
shifts from structuralism to post-structuralism to cultural studies.26
The last in the list, Bond and Beyond, most thoroughly summarizes Bond’s
eclectic juncture of discourses, and brings forth much of the potential and the haz
ard implicit in Bond’s critical study; as discussed above, it also displays as well as
charts the success of Connery’s successful re-negotiation of Fleming’s character.
Bond and Beyond is itself, like the films, another sort of Bond text, and in the most
immediate sense Bond and Beyond simply continues and expands upon the project
Tony Bennett had headed ten years earlier, The Making o f The Spy Who Loved
Me. Despite the banality of the earlier work’s title, its goals and theoretical concerns
placed it somewhat outside the usual realm of mass market “making of” books. In
this way The Making o f... fills the post-structuralist Bond position left between
Eco’s structuralist and Bennett and Woollacott’s cultural studies approaches, and
resembles projects by Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and other stars of the journal
Screen during its romance with Brecht and French theory.
Yet The Making of... differs quite greatly from Screen work of that era
simply because it takes Bond as its subject, a topic more British and more low-
26 Antony Easthope, British Post-Structuralism Since 1968 (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1988)27,75.
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2 2 9
brow than the work which now characterizes that period. By content, The Making
o f. . . belongs more easily with a later Screen. Now that cultural studies itself has
begun to be canonized (beginning with such introductory texts as Graeme Turner’s
British Cultural Studies: An Introduction in 1990), both Bond projects appear se
cure as paradigmatic works in the company of David Morley’s Nationwide study
and David Pirie’s BFI Education dossier on Hammer Studios.
But while the subject immediately distinguished it from Screen's aversion to
mainstream British film, The Making o f.. . ’s adherence to Althusser’s under
standing of ideology did align it with 1970s Screen theory. Bond and Beyond
stresses this adherence, and asserts that in the decade between publications the pre
vious Marxist orthodoxy of a “crude” base/superstructure became untenable.27 In
the resulting change from certainties of determination to questions concerning the
conditions of production, Bond and Beyond's authors had abandoned the “false
consciousness”-tinged notion that a text’s ideological meaning can ever be self-
evident28 Instead Bond and Beyond's understanding of a reader’s relation to a text
is predicated upon the concept of inter-textuality, “the social organisation of the re
lations between texts within specific conditions of reading”—as compared to, Ben
nett and Woollacott add, their representation of Julia Kristeva’s description of in-
tertextual relations “within the internal composition” of texts 29 The inter-textuality
of the Bond texts permits Bennett and Woollacott to represent them individually as
textual shifters, repeatedly re-articulating the meaning of Bond.30
27 Bennett and Woollacott 184-85.
28 Bennett and Woollacott 188.
29 Bennett and Woollacott 44-5.
30 Bennett and Woollacott 233.
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2 3 0
But the relationship may as easily be viewed from the other direction—
Bond has shifted the system of critical texts to which Bond and Beyond belongs.
Because of the paradigmatic significance attributed to Bond and Beyond in the field
of cultural studies, Bennett and Woollacott’s own Bond text should be considered
as an influential shifter.31 In addition, Bond and Beyond's function may be seen in
terms of the male body and in related questions of the male gaze and the usefulness
of psychoanalysis. Here, too, the study’s influence, while hardly defining the field,
is still instructively subject to Tania Modleski’s provocative taunt that the
(gentlemanly, perhaps?) “inability to ‘decide’ on the ideological slant of a given rep
resentation is endemic to much recent cultural criticism.”32
What these emphases allow, among other things, is the avoidance of “the
text itself’ in favor of “texts in use.” Thus the shift between the ideological weight
of Fleming’s Bond in the 1950s ana the films’ Bond in the 1960s may be acknowl
edged, but there cannot be, as previous Marxist criticism would have it, “the text it
self,” nor as F. R. Leavis would have it, a return to any ideal text33 This under
standing they also distinguish from both Derrida’s “fashionable, ‘anything goes,
everything is permissible’ relativism” and a neo-Kantian characterization of the text
as present but unknowable.34 It is noteworthy that Bennett and Woollacott go so far
to distinguish their work from deconstructionist and neo-Kantian theory, the latter
presumably encompassing M. M. Bakhtin, the source for Kristeva’s (and Woolla
cott and Bennett’s) intertextuality as well as the related concepts of dialogism and
31 See Turner 128.
32 Tania Modieski. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a " Postfeminist ”
Age (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 162.
33 Bennett and Woollacott 264.
34 Bennett and Woollacott 264.
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231
heteroglossia.35 In Bakhtin’s formulation of dialogism, a text is present but un
knowable in that meaning only accrues in relation to other texts; this approach has
been attractive during the past decade in part because it offers the possibility of me
diating between what is “outside” and what is “inside” a text, just as Bennett and
Woollacott desire to do. As Paul de Man observed, this mediation offered by Bak
htin has the power to seduce post-structuralists and Marxists with the hope of
bridging the intralinguistic and the intracultural.36 Peter Flaherty, in turn, has found
in de Man’s approach the ability to move from inside and outside the text (and back
again) through the interstices, or crevices which occur in “the dialogic exchange of
fact and fiction.”37 Yet it is those very interstices which Bond and Beyond seems
determined to ignore, faithfully reproducing much of British theory’s resistance to
hints of deconstructionism, as if their turn to the reader must be protected from ex
cessively reordering the discipline.
Where The Making o f . .. had been a pragmatic project, examining British
film production despite its ideological taints and traps, Bond and Beyond brazenly
confesses to the pleasures to be found, and attempts to refuse the authorization of
any reading which denies the multiplicity of other potential readings—but not, Ben
nett and Woollacott anxiously stress, in the name of fashionable relativism.
Yet “fashionable relativism” is, in an unkind sense, exactly what Bond and
Beyond represents, leaving it cut off from many of the political goals which seemed
crucial during the earlier sway of Althusser. Bond and Beyond as a whole misses
35 See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mi
chael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
36 Paul de Man, "Dialogue and Dialogism," Poetics Today 4 (1983): 103.
37 Peter Flaherty, "Reading Carnival: Towards a Semiotics of History," CUO 15.4 (1986):
421.
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232
those interstices which might trace fissures between fact and fiction. Gone almost
as thoroughly are significant signs of feminist discomfort or anger. Race is so thor
oughly lacking as a category that it is difficult not to hear a nostalgic, or perhaps
awkward twinge in the passing mention of Michael Denning and his characteriza
tion of the Bond novels as imperialist and racist38 In light of Modleski’s criticism
of cultural studies, it may be added that Bond and Beyond's own “inability” to de
cide is symptomatic not only of the purported collapse of Screen theory, but the
general, well-documented “inability” of the British left under Thatcherism and its
lingering legacy.
Two other interrelated aspects, race and the novels’ historical context, do
move beyond Bennett and Woollacott’s stress upon such inability to present the
suggestive contradictions embodied in the films’ Anglo-American embodiment of
English heterosexual masculinity. Through race, the to-be-looked-at-ness of Bond
is both initiated and legitimized by colonial aggression, and (as suggested earlier)
through the British spy crises of the early 1950s, the hyper-heterosexuality of Bond
takes on wider meanings. That this heterosexuality should be qualified by Bond’s
lasting professional romance with the American CIA operative Felix Leiter is par
ticularly important.
The first film in the series, Dr. No, provides an immediate introduction to
the crucial role of race: set in and around Kingston, Jamaica, the film follows
Bond’s discovery that the one-armed, German-Chinese Dr. No (stiffly played by
Joseph Wiseman in full “Oriental” drag) is threatening the US space program, and
using a racially mixed army of Jamaicans to prevent detection of his activities.
Asian intelligence, African bodies, miscegenation and mutilation: although the com-
38 Bennett and Woollacott 246-47.
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233
bination reeks of the colonial stereotypes marking both Britain’s colonial past and,
in 1962, its own domestic racism in response to Commonwealth immigration, Dr.
No recognizes the “problem” as finally an American one. Bond initially becomes
involved only because it is the British government’s agent who had been clever
enough to suspect No, not because it has anything to do with the British. This agent
and his assistant then become the targets of the assassinations which the film’s title
sequence leads up to, and which eventually bring Bond from London. Ever the
gentleman, Bond stays on to guide the Americans and to save not only their rockets
but (as the films always so generously insist upon) the world itself.
The title sequence of a Bond film is usually also its most distinctive and ki
netic, as well as a schematic presentation of the following film’s continual juxtapo
sition of sex and violence toward women. Maurice Bender’s creation of these non
narrative sequences have even given him an auteur status among fans exceeding that
of the films’ directors. Although somewhat unique in its relatively modest amount
of sex and violence, Dr. No's opening is no exception to the graphic conventions
later films helped to cement, and its racial dynamics operate with surprising clarity.
The first figure itself (following the studio’s logo) is Bond’s body—or, rather, his
is the first human figure, since the opening locates Bond in one of the empty circles
which come to form 007: to the familiar strains of Bond’s signature theme, the cir
cle becomes a diaphragm-like opening, usually identified as the view through a
gun’s spiral-grooved barrel, but equally suggestive of a camera’s own opening.39
39 For example, OiC. Werkmeister’s excellent reading of Kafka and its use o f a similar image
in its publicity graphics leads him to identify the gun barrel as a “black camera diaphragm,” a mi
nor point, perhaps, but a significant element in his argument “Kafka 007,” Critical Inquiry 21.2
(Winter 1995) 470-1. And during a two week TBS marathon of Bond films at the time of
GoldenEye s release, the cable network used computer-generated animation which also interpreted
the gun barrel as a camera’s shutter. In the Bond films themselves, however, the gun barrel matte
is never animated as a diaphragm, but simply moves as a whole, keeping its “sight” upon Bond..
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23 4
The difference is slight and provocative, a confusion GoldenEye's title sequence
plays off of by plunging its gun barrel into the greatly magnified cornea of a golden
eye.
Gun or camera, in Dr. No (and each subsequent film) it fixes on Bond with
its presumably threatening gaze, which prompts Bond to crouch and fire; transpar
ent red flows down across the screen and our sight looses its fix upon Bond. It
sinks to the bottom of the screen but then oddly rises again, opening up, usually,
upon the film’s first exotic location. In later Bond films, a tightly edited sequence
would follow in which Bond is introduced in a manner which may appear to be
only tangentially related to the rest of the narrative, and then the title sequence
proper rolls—Binder’s familiar montages of female bodies dancing, writhing,
burning, dying, accompanied by the film’s particular variation on Bond’s theme.
The typical Bond title sequence is a fascinatingly obvious process, A Boy’s
Own Oedipus as studiously sleek as a 1962 Cadillac: the cinematic apparatus and
the spectator’s desire to look at Bond is represented, “punished,” and redirected to
the proper female spectacle which Bond himself looks at, all wrapped in British pa
triotism. These openings have become so distinctly Bondian that they control the
authenticity of a Bond film: in part because of its “plain” credits, the non-Broccoli-
produced film Never Say Never Again lingered on the edge of fandom’s canon
even though it starred Connery. GoldenEye's opening, the first “official” post-
Binder sequence, dramatically shifts the tradition into computer animation and digi
tal matting, somewhat refiguring the previous sequences’ emphasis upon the mate
riality of the bodies and props involved.
Yet unlike Binder’s later title sequences, Dr. No's is placed at the beginning
of the film, immediately after the iris’ assault, and provides a narrative introduction
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2 3 5
to the murders which will summon Bond: the title sequence is actually three distinct
segments, each with its own distinct music, and each moving closer to the central
narrative. First comes the iris portion, initially accompanied by animated, vaguely
computer-like, dancing dots of various colors, overlaid with the Bond musical
theme proper. Second is an increasingly-crowded montage of superimposed,
mostly female silhouettes energetically dancing to a highly percussive, “Jamaican
type instrumental. Three male figures using blind sticks and carrying cups traipse
across the screen, also in silhouette, forming the third and last portion of the title
sequence. A Caribbean-accented version of ‘Three Blind Mice” follows them as
they move from silhouettes against an abstract, colored background to become three
blind black men making their way through a naturalistic Kingstown. The film then
introduces the unlucky British agent playing a fourhand of bridge on the verandah
of a white country club staffed by demure black waiters. The agent makes his ex
cuses to leave, and in the parking lot meets the Three Blind Mice-men, who ambush
him, shoot him point blank with a large, silenced revolver, and throw his body into
the back of their get-away hearse. The film then cuts to the office which would have
been the agent’s destination, where his white assistant has just made routine short
wave radio contact with Britain. She too is quickly and efficiently ambushed, and
after her prone, bloodied body is rolled over by her black assailants, the film turns
to her perplexed radio contact in Britain.
James Bond’s formal film introduction is thus positioned at the end of a re
lay which begins with Bond as the object of an apparently threatening gaze, fol
lowed by his bloody elimination of that threat This paradigmatic enactment com
pletely free from any specific moment in the ensuing narrative(s), is then contrasted
with the sexually charged, presumably black, female dancers and the seemingly
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2 3 6
harmless “Three Blind Mice.” Finally, Bond’s narrative existence is initiated by the
highly racially charged images of seemingly incapacitated beggars able to violently
overcome a privileged white man, a British agent even, and, more sensationalist, of
armed black men from whom the film cuts just as they lay their hands upon their
white female victim. It is, in a sense, the filmic Bond’s primal scene, a colonial rape
fantasy.
Curiously, the murdered white woman disappears from consideration in the
film after this, as if her presence had been simply necessary to bear a sexual weight
the preceding murder of the male agent could or should not have bom; she is there
so that the sexual menace of No’s men may be experienced as it is transferred to a
more “appropriate” female object. In a similar way, Bond is given an unexpected
companion, Honey Rider, during his solo infiltration of No’s island fortress.
Called Honeychile in the novel, and given an un-Ursula Andress-like broken nose,
this character is one in a long line of Bond women who Cockbum takes particular
delight in as “mostly men, thinly disguised as women.”40 Noel Coward, however,
generously receives credit for much earlier making such a prodding observation.
Shortly after the publication of Dr. No, Fleming’s neighbor and frequent guest in at
Goldeneye (along with Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote . . .
and Prime Minister Anthony Eden) wrote that he was
slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Hon-
eychile’s bottom was like a boy’s. I know that we are all be
coming progressively more broadminded nowadays but
really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?4 1
Of course, not only did the films heterosexualize such lesbian characters as Pussy
Galore, but the Bond Girl steadfastly refused the androgyny of Honeychile. Still,
40 Cockbum 31.
41 Cockbum 31.
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237
the purpose of Andress’ Honey (no racially confusing “-chile”), like that of the
murdered assistant, is primarily to offer No a sexual target to threaten other than his
primary male opponent, Bond, and to maintain the film’s heterosexual matrix.
Yet despite the repeated, excessive peril women are subjected to, despite the
structurally significant insertion of women to heterosexualize the Bond-villain con
flict, even the most cursory familiarity with the Bond series should be enough to
suggest that pleasure is quite often a matter of seeing Bond in bodily danger. Bond
smiling as he steps into a government car at the Kingstown airport even though he
knows the driver is an impostor and probable assassin .. . Bond stepping into a
bar’s backroom where by all signs he will jumped and murdered . . . Bond going to
bed with the woman who knows that he knows she has been sent to kill him. These
are the titillations of Bond’s bodily destruction which often result in the films’ cli
mactic scenes of graphic torture: machines threaten him with lasers and fire, a
plethora of animals (descendants of the Three Blind Mice?) threaten to attack him, a
man with sharpened metal teeth and named Jaws threatens to devour him.
Such dangers are not, of course, without precedent. Writing as if he were
describing the Bond films, Paul Willemen described “the unquiet pleasure of seeing
the male mutilated” in the westerns of Anthony Mann, and that observation has
been often repeated in subsequent attempts to offer an account of how the male
body is viewed in film.42 Stephen Neale’s influential essay “Masculinity as Specta
cle” quoted Willemen in order to describe the difficulty heterosexual and patriarchal
society has in marking the male body as an object of the gaze—and in turn, Paul
Smith’s early work on Clint Eastwood criticized Neale for omitting the final “and
42 Paul Willemen, "Anthony Mann: Looking at the Male," Framework 15/16/17 (Summer
1981): 16.
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238
restored through violent brutality” step.43 The result is that Neale’s
“sadistic/masochist doublet” of objectification and brutalization de-emphasizes the
smoothing resolution of Willemen’s triplet. Tied to a table with Goldfinger's laser
cutting toward his crotch, these moments create the doublets which Bond remakes
in triplet form by asserting his sexual control over the femme fatale or by finally
killing the true font of perversion, the faux-gentleman archvillain.
Bennett and Woollacott’s work addresses these dynamics of masculinity
and the look, yet Bond and Beyond's strategic refusal to legitimate any dominant
reading mitigates against the employment of the familiar, and seemingly appropriate
“political use of psychoanalysis” represented by Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema.” Simplified, Mulvey makes two crucial assumptions, neither
of which would seem to be contradicted by the film sequence described above: the
first is that in film male visual pleasure controls all pleasure, and, second, that het
erosexuality structures this pleasure.44 Combined with the threat of castration
which the image of woman presents, these two assumptions determine that narra
tive success will be the hero’s “salvation” of the woman and the fetishization of her
image 45 Bennett and Woollacott counter that intertextual reading formulations and
historical and social order must also be taken into account as well.46 Yet in what
seems to be simply a reversal of Mulvey’s argument, Bennett and Woollacott seem
to assume that identification is only rarely a matter of male to male or female to fe-
43 Steve Neale, "Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,"
Screen 24:6 (Nov.-Dee. 1983): 8; Paul Smith, "Action Movie Hysteria, or Eastwood Bound," dif
ferences: A Journal o f Feminist Cultural Studies 1.3 (1989): 92-93.
44 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," reprinted in Film Theory and
Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 806,
810.
45 Mulvey 811-12.
46 Bennett and Woollacott 213-14.
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239
male.47 Bond and Beyond instead stresses the “beyond” element, how Bond is
used across gender and, although less so, across class. How Bond is used across
nationality mostly falls outside the realm of Bennett and Woollacott’s British pa
rameters, although they do mention in passing that the films plumped up the role of
Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA connection.48
If Mulvey’s commitment to the destruction of pleasure is to be discarded in
favor of an attempt to salvage and redeem pleasure, then perhaps the Bond film
openings may be reconsidered as well. Like the Bond character in general, these
sequences are also open to other readings. The initial shutter-like iris on Bond ends
with its own bloody destruction, yet it still manages to indicate the desire of the
cinematic apparatus/the spectator to take Bond as the object of what Mulvey labeled
the sadism of its voyeuristic-scopophilic look. To revisit Eco’s Bond essay, this
short scene would seem to establish the basic unit through which a Bond film is
structured—a visual shorthand so clear, so denotative of how Bond was under
stood that Dr. No's American trailer used it to advertise the first Bond film: Bond is
looked at, becomes aware of it, and “shoots.” Most importantly, we find something
more than the self-contained triplet of “the unquiet pleasure of seeing the male mu
tilated . . . and restored through violent brutality”: once the restoration is complete,
it all begins again, trapping Bond in a once seemingly-endless cycle, paralleled by
the various faces which have come and gone (and then come back again once or
twice) in Bond’s place. Bond returns ever again to the office of M, his superior,
where once again the stem, disapproving father will send him forth on another
seemingly impossible mission. Bond may discretely let drop his own better knowl-
47 Bennett and Woolacott 219.
48 Bennett and Woolacott 209.
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240
edge of wine, women and the other accouterments of power and privilege, yet still
he is defined by his own subordinate role. In fact this repetition, combined with
Bond’s to be looked-at quality (even when, in Connery’s and Moore’s last films,
they showed clear strain performing their portions of Bond’s stunts) emphasizes his
“in service” nature. As Agent 007, “on Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” Bond is
much the same as a domestic servant (albeit a well-paid one) in some houses, called
not by their christened name but by a name chosen by the employer. In this sense
Bond forms a pair with his lovelorn downstairs’ confidant, the secretary Miss
Moneypenny, a couple strangely reminiscent of the bemused butler and house
keeper of The Remains of the Day—neither man, it seems, knows much about the
ethics of foreign policy, but each is confident when it comes to food and wine. And
unlike True Lies, “normal,” monogamous heterosexuality apparently conflicts with
both job descriptions.
From these elements might be constructed a further argument concerning
Bond’s re-reading in terms of not mastery but failure. Kaja Silverman, Leo Ber-
sani, and Gaylyn Studlar have each contributed persuasive, differently structured
accounts of pleasure and spectatorship drawing upon masochism as a model, and
no doubt Bond might offer a suitable textual system for their analyses.49 Possibly
the most influential of the three, Silverman centers her argument as a whole around
perversion re-conceived as a profitably subversive turning from what the OED
would call the truth or right—a turning which has, in masochism, a double nature
49 Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Male Subjectivity," Camera Obscura 17 (1988):, 31-66;
Leo Bersani 'Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (Winter 1987): 197-222; and Gaylyn Studlar,
"Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill
Nichols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1985) 602-621.
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241
of simultaneous capitulation and revolt.50 That double nature, here evocative of
Bond’s love-hate relation with M, lurks behind Silverman’s reading of Freud’s “A
Child Is Being Beaten.” Feminine masochism, which picks up the corporeal, “is a
specifically male pathology because it positions its sufferer as a woman”; for a
male subject this can only be contained within a negative Oedipal scenario which
allows the boy the same outcome as “normal” girls—desiring the father, identify
ing with the father.5 1 Moral masochism, the tyranny of an overdeveloped con
science one is always tempted to aggravate, also manipulates the traditional Oedipal
scenario, this time by constantly reactivating it.52 Curiously, even though the
Oedipal scenario which flares up for a male moral masochist is again a negative
one, the masochistic dynamic remains hidden in the unconscious.
More to the point, however, is Silverman’s assertion that it is only through
the father-son romance of the negative Oedipal scenario that the properly Oedipal-
ized male can be produced: the love of that romance symbolically takes the form of
subordination to the father, a romance constantly played out in Bond’s service to
the homosocial milieu of M and the other male authorities who buttress his de
mands. But by investing authority and dominion in a powerful woman, the male
masochist can rewrite the father’s tyranny as pleasure and leave the mother holding
the whip—thus Bond successfully completes each mission, yet escapes submitting
to M’s rewards by purposely allowing the rescued female lead to sexually detain
him.53
50 Silverman 32.
51 Silverman 35-6.
52 Silverman 37.
53 Silverman 57-9. It should perhaps be noted here that Fleming did indeed call his own
mother M.
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242
Bond may be more justly served by instead turning to such critics of these
theories of masochism as Tania Modleski and Paul Smith. To re-read Bond within
the context of masochism evokes a central strategy of the films themselves, the
practice of drawing a female parallel to Bond, giving her a portion of Bond’s mar
tial prowess and intelligence, and then reincorporating within Bond’s realm of sex
ual and ideological superiority: from Pussy Galore in Goldfinger to the ‘Two of a
Kind” theme song uniting Bond with Octopussy, Bond’s “girls” have been as
signed a course very similar to what Modleski sees as masochism’s manipulative
attempts to create female straw despots.54 Pleasure may be taken in such strong fe
male characters as A View to a Kill’s May Day, but as Bond and Beyond empha
sizes, her ability serves a highly cynical purpose—reinforcing the potency of the
male superhero’s even greater force.55 After all, “Nobody Does It Better,” Carly
Simon testified. Provoked by the goal to redeem a still regressive masculinity
through the discourse of masochism, Modleski insists that, “for all the recent theo
retical emphasis on the primacy of masochism, a trend motivated in part by the de
sire to counter the tendency of some feminism to ascribe a monolithic power to the
phallic order, it is crucial to understand that no necessary shift in power dynamics
accompanies such a move.”56 This reservation seems highly applicable to Bond—
while Mulvey’s analysis may miss the nuances of Bond’s presentation and its use
54 For an example of the politics of the phallus' redemption, see Lee Edelman, "Redeeming
the Phallus: Wallace Stevens, Frank Lentricchia, and the Politics of (Hetero)Sexuality," in Engen
dering Men: The Question o f Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 43-45, as well as Y vonne Tasker’s discussion of this
passage in "Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the Body, and the Voice in Contempo
rary Action Cinema," in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 230-231.
55 Bennett and Woollacott 290-93.
56 Modleski 74.
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across class and nationality, Bond still merits the acknowledgment a much angrier
reading position than that offered in Bond and Beyond.
Perhaps more suitable, then, is Smith’s insistence that the actions of char
acters such as Bond produce pleasure not from transgressing norms but from rein
forcing them: within this context masochism, as read in Bond above, is not much
more than a synecdoche for the thrill of the chase. In a masculine tradition, Bond is
a hunter. Even though Bond does not, like the hunter, “momentarily [put] aside his
innate advantages in order to intensify and prolong the pleasure of the exercise,”
Bond’s role in the Secret Service does allow him to sportingly take pleasure in the
repetition of his tasks and the limitations they place upon him.57
Thus Connery’s Bond completes his cycle of transformation for the English
villain: assume the role, transform its contours, suffer for its sins, project them onto
an Other, a No—and then violently, thrillingly, reject and destroy that scapegoat.
Yet even with a more cynical view of the male hero’s masochism, Smith
still locates what he describes as an hysterical residue,
what always exceeds the phallic stakes, what jumps off. The
hysterical is marked by its lack of containment, by its be
speaking the travails of the body, and by its task of carrying
the unrepresentable of male experience.58
The excess of Bond’s masculine prowess, expressed through his suave, sadistic
manners, embodies nationality as surely as Smith’s silent, laconic Clint Eastwood.
Yet Bond, particularly Connery’s paradigmatic Bond, remains a subtly class- and
ethnicity-distinguished “gentleman” carrying out the bidding of his betters, such as
the enervated and contemptuous M. Bond’s masquerade is from this perspective
that of a virile servant taking the place of his decrepit master, and the pleasure his
57 Smith 105.
58 Smith 105.
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2 4 4
masquerade affords arrives through the repeated, ritualistic torture of that figure, al
beit in absentia. That Bond repeatedly completes the masochistic triplet and returns
for more would seem to depend more upon the degree to which his performance
represents such a masquerade, rather than the revival or modernization of any
authentic form. After all, the true gentleman spy would be an amateur, not a profes
sional. He would most usually retire until duty calls again. He would be not at
work spying the next morning—or making excuses—as so often is Bond.
The Re-Making of Bond
Perhaps then the charm of Connery’s Bond (for this study as well as for
Bennett and Woollacott) lies in the shift toward failure which more recent Bond
texts have experienced, an Anglophobic shift which has turned the imbrication of
British masculinity and nationality back upon itself. Here may be found an interstice
which will allow a path to be made between Bond and the usefulness of nationality.
But read from the confident contemporary vantage point of GoldenEye, Bond’s
past hardly represented a masterful British charge into any real future nationality
characterized by modernization and sensual pleasures. That particular Bond had
died with Fleming and the eclipse of the novels by the films—a decline which,
neatly enough, moved along an inverse path to Connery’s increasing Scottish ac
cent in the role.
Bennett and Woollacott had located the failure of Bond so that it might even
frame the 1977 The Making o f. .. project: Bond and Beyond periodized the Bond
text of the 1970s as “a negative site in relation to which earlier conceptions of
Englishness—including those represented by Bond in earlier phases of his career—
were parodied and debunked, punctured so as to release laughter, by means of car
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2 4 5
rying them to excess.”59 For the 1980s, the epilogue to the 1987 Bond and Beyond
offers a decidedly dark reading of Roger Moore’s last Film as Bond, A View to a
Kill (1985), an outing which appears to chart the final failure of Bond’s potency as
a gentleman: not only does May Day (the primary female villain-tumed-heroine
played by the African-American Grace Jones) put Bond in his place sexually—on
the bottom—her final physical prowess and courage exceeds Bond’s. Tellingly,
however, Bennett and Woollacott do not position this reading through the discourse
of multiple readings. As noted above, they acknowledge the strength and courage
of May Day, yet the authors strictly dismiss its potential in view of the generally
misogynistic and racist frame of the film, as if there were no relative difference
between May Day and the far more excessive racism surrounding Bond’s first black
lover in Live and Let Die.
Since the 1987 publication of Bond and Beyond, Bond has undergone con
siderable change. Moore’s replacement by Dalton and, now, by the Irish Brosnan,
provided considerably younger Bonds, but, fulfilling Bennett and Woollacott’s
predictions, the series still suffers considerable post-Cold War distress. Before
GoldenEye, the Bond films had seemed to be a victim, like Thatcher herself, of
some unspoken agreement that enough was enough. As a national body, Bond had
shown his paunch, even though, as in the US, the films remain one of cable televi
sion’s more durable staples.
Just as Prime Minister John Major’s tenure began, inadvertently, to restore
a certain luster to Thatcher’s final years, Bond’s future was hailed with a most re
markable American rumor: while the Tories were running third in traditionally se
59 Bennett and Woollacott 39.
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cure parliamentary races, tabloid television journalists enthused over the odds laid
down in Las Vegas that Broccoli and United Artists might take to heart the con
tinuing cult popularity of The Avengers' Emma Peel—Sharon Stone or even Emma
Thompson might succeed Dalton as a newly re-minted Jane Bond. Interviewing
American people-in-the-street produced cheerful shrugs over the possibility.60 Re
flecting the extreme irritation online fandom has shown toward such rumors, a
Bond fanzine editor insisted that “Anyone who ever believed for a second that the
producers considered changing Bond’s sex is an idiot.”61 GoldenEye's female
casting of M was itself enough to initiate much fan controversy. The wonderfully
startling image of Jane Bond would have hardly insured a feminist re-reading;
Monica Vittti’s turn in Joseph Losey’s still-derided Modesty Blaise (1966) did little
for such revisionist ambitions several during Connery’s time. But the cheerful tab
loid consideration of a Jane Bond (or a black James Bond, as was also reported)
does emphasize Bond’s body as an interstice, a site of British masculinity and na
tionality’s corporeal imbrication.62
At this site the value of failure may be measured, and the question of how
failure and national identity have become imbricated in questions of gender and
60 Reported by Inside Edition, April 1994, and the subject of talk radio speculation at roughly
the same time. In Britain, Hugh Grant was the concurrent object of rumors concerning Dalton's re
placement, a choice no doubt inspired by the unprecedented box office popularity of Four Weddings
and a Funeral (1994): as discussed earlier. Grant too would have brought an interesting history to
the role, considering his previous association with gay roles in, among others, Maurice (1987),
and the 1990 CBS AIDS film. Our Sons.
61 John Cork, editor of the fanzine Goldeneye, traces these rumors back to a 1993 Entertain
ment Weekly article which had suggested the possibility of casting Eddie Murphy or Sharon Stone
in the role. Online, Internet, e-mail, 17 January 1995.
62 At the time of GoldenEye's release. Entertainment Weekly again reported the producers’
consideration of Stone, Grant, and others, as well as the (fleeting) possibility of a black Bond. See
Benjamin Svetkey, “The Spy Who Came Back From the Cold,” 17 November 1995: 20. (And in
1996, the sketch series Mad TV presented an extended film segment titled “For Your Files Only,”
starring model Claudia Schiffer as Jane Bond.)
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sexuality may be posed—even though Bond’s most distinguishing quality might
seem to be his grateful absence from such arguments. Neither villain (at least offi
cially) nor gay (although the gay rock group Pansy Division does do a song titled
“James Bondage”), Bond would only be described as having waded in from the
shallow end by his more snide opponents, a Blofeld perhaps. Bond’s Philby would
have nothing to do with Burgess—and yet Philby did, and there’s the rub. Perhaps
that still disquieting decision is one reason that Margaret Thatcher would expose the
long protected Anthony Blunt in 1979, but then ban outright the mostly innocuous
intelligence memoir Spy catcher in 1987.63 While both homophobia and gay pride
have hovered nearby to “explain” the spies, the discourse of homosexuality does
not seem to ultimately encompass all the complexities involved in their continued
hold upon Americans as well as the British.
Perhaps it is the lure of secrets, the lure of frightful power hidden behind
covert gestures and closed doors which makes homosexuality not the explanation
but one of the culturally overdetermined elements in the fantasy of the spy. Alexan
der Cockbum had something similar in mind when he wrote
Somewhere along the line, in their post-imperial fantasy life,
the British got secrets and spying and sex and identity all
confused, and the muddle has been causing them endless
trouble ever since.64
How valid is it to say the same of the US, or, more to the point here, of American
tastes for the British spy? The ascendancy of the big budget action film and the
British villain provides one indication of how their fantasies have proven useful on
63 Peter Wright with Paul GreengTass, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior In
telligence Officer (New York: Viking Press, 1987).
64 Cockbum 30.
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248
the other side of the Atlantic, while the role Bond has played in cultural studies also
testifies to the wide range of such border crossings.
If the strategically rich complexities and contradictions of Connery’s Bond
may be simplified to any one perspective, then this character represents something
more similar than dissimilar to the English gentleman discussed in the earlier chap
ters, a figure of post-imperial failure pushed forward through a future where the
peiverse English gentleman continues stoically onward long after England—not to
mention he—has become something else altogether. The pleasure of Bond, despite
his hyperbolized abilities, is that he represents neither a villain nor a gay man, but
something at times suggestive of their particular embodiments of masculine failure.
GoldenEye, however, will have nothing of Connery’s strategies: Brosnan’s
Bond remembers Connery, yet comes draped in European rather than traditional
British culture— Brioni rather than Savile Row, BMW rather than Aston Martin,
Omega rather than Rolex. No matter how many times GoldenEye1 s publicity
screamed “THE BEST BOND SINCE CONNERY,” Brosnan’s Bond is considera
bly different in its Euro-styling from either Connery’s Bond, or even Dalton’s sen
sitive, proto-American action hero, and that too is perhaps linked to the shifting
American perceptions of modernization, and the current political schizophrenia con
cerning the family. If in True lies Harry Tasker satisfies Bob Dole’s sense of fam
ily values, then Brosnan’s Bond lives out his PG-13 fantasies of life away from the
enforced political correctness of that family. However entwined with the history of
the English gentleman Bond has been before, in some ways the detailing of this
new Old Bond would seem less and less confined to the dialogue of English and
American nationalities. As the November, 1995, issue of Esquire announced,
Brosnan brings a “BOND WITHOUT GUILT: He still drinks a lot, drives too fast,
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shoots people, and sleeps around. Way to go, 0 0 7 !... Plus! A new, postmodern
Bond adventure.” One hand holding a woman’s leg, the other a martini glass, this
Bond is “stirred, not shaken.”
Yet turn the magazine oven on the back cover broods another male figure,
his legs spread, crotch pushed forward, lips pouting, eyebrows arched above Lau
ren Bacall eyes. Clearly nothing does come between him and his Calvin Kleins.
And clearly Bond’s postmodern adventures no longer occur in the same men’s
magazine universe as Connery’s once did (or once pretended to). To put it gently,
even after Roger Moore’s been forgotten, Bond continues to be a joke, albeit not so
much a laugh-out-loud one as the smirk-of-blank-irony which Brosan’s bare
sunken chest received from some GoldenEye audiences. “Suave, Sophisticated,
Passe?” another cover story asked, but that question may be missing the point65 Of
course he is. When seen from the complex viewing positions which can incorporate
Calvin Klein’s commercial homoerotics into the explicitly heterosexist articulation
of a publication such as Esquire, Bond’s value to the present and in the future may
the extent to which he is passe in a post-Mulvey, post-Bruce Weber world.
Bond is the past, America’s and Britain’s. GoldenEye is well aware of the
nostalgia, and on more levels than the rhetoric of dinosaur and Cold War might
alone suggest As Larry Gross has argued, ever since the 1960s, Bond films move
ever closer to science fiction without ever abandoning the present66 Bond films
represent the marriage of action and science fiction, the moment of no return when
the divisions between “real” threats and the paranoid fantasies of technological pro
gress became indistinguishable— GoldenEye's mix of post-Soviet arms dealing and
65 Los Angeles Times Calendar, 16 July 1995: 1.
66 Larry Gross, “Big and Loud,” Sight and Sound August 1995: 8.
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nuclear space weapons magically controlled by the title’s non-sensical golden jewel.
But Bond himself, no matter how re-modeled or returned to form, is still that relic,
not only of the Cold War, but the space race and the utopic/dystopic mix of science
fiction fantasies it spawned. No wonder Brosnan’s Bond still seems indubitably
English even while he sheds many of the accouterments of nationality: as I will next
argue within the official parameters of science fiction, Bond, like Jean-Luc Picard,
represents a relation to the future as well as the past which encompasses both Brit
ish and American cultures. “Another stiff-assed Brit,” someone says of Bond to
ward the end of GoldenEye, “with your secret codes and passwords.”
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PART 3
Futures
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CHAPTER 7
The Picard Maneuver
The US has been incestuously intertwined with English and European cul
ture so long that this embrace is often coded as simply representing the conscious
practice of culture itself, practices of a sort which Homi Bhabha described in terms
of their narcissistic demands for explanation. Such demands may seem so innocu
ous and natural as to be invisible, as un-self-consciously common as a Great Books
list or a summer tour abroad or the Anglophilic cultural programming of PBS,
A&E, and Bravo. Or as disturbing as a well-fed suburban skinhead. Yet to dream
these “explanations” considered above and in the last chapters as solely a “white
thing,” as either a pale parallel or resistance to multiculturalism, may miss their im
portance. For similar reasons African-Americans (or Asian-Americans, Native
Americans, Latinos) may also find themselves addressing their own constructions
of European identity with the demand to “tell me why we are here.” Even more spe
cifically, the address may be to British even more than to European identity, since
the US often historicizes its own origins through its reversal of mastery with Brit
ain. Pilgrim hats, Founding Fathers, the World War rescues of the embattled isle—
we repeatedly rehearse our nationality through these moments. In Bhabha’s de
scription of a nation’s self-generating “double-writing or dissemi-na/z'on,” nation-
ness is very much a temporal product being constantly performed, not simply mys
tically passed forward from the past1 : the mastery over Britain which Adams de
sired must be doubly written as we construct and replay our history, whether that is
1 Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Na
tion,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) 299.
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in Adam’s early 19th century foreign policy or, as a previous chapter argues, the
American pre-history dramatized in Michael Mann’s The Last o f the Mohicans. As
the more contemporary 84 Charing Cross also displayed, constructing an identity
(author of “English literature,” for example) is not necessarily a matter of discover
ing roots but of rehearsing and re-rehearsing an imaginary identity.
But while both of these films seem to be “appropriate” uses of British cul
ture, outside of such Anglo-American or Jewish-American contexts the process
may be more complicated. One recent instance would be Disney’s highly publicized
troubles making an “authentic” African-American film, The Inkwell (1994), a
1970s coming of age drama originally scripted by Trey Ellis but finally credited to
an Italian-sounding Tom Ricostronza—that is, “Uncle Tom Rich Shit.” The Ink
well, as originally written, concentrated upon class and racial differences within
black culture, centering upon a somewhat effeminate teenager who listened to Elton
John and David Bowie, serenaded a potential girlfriend with the theme from The
Mary Tyler Moore Show, and pretended he was Scotty from Star Trek. The film as
released, however, hewed to a far more “authentic” vision of African-American life
by eliminating all of these moments and by substituting a far more familiar vision of
grits, gospel and funk; the film also cost Disney the potential good will it might
have won among critics by allowing them to cast the screenwriter’s disgruntlement
as symptomatic of a culture-wide oversimplification of black identity and history.2
John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” and Bowie’s “Young Americans,” the hyper-
Anglo, proto-feminist sitcom, even the capable Scottish engineer from Star Trek,
these are all potential moments in the formulation of a young African-American
2 See Kristal Brent Zook, “Red-Inking The Inkwell," Voice Film Special, 24 May 1994: 18,
20.
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man’s identity, not simply P-Funk, Angela Davis, or J. J. from Good Times. But
just as the narrative charts the protagonist’s progress toward a mature heterosexual
ity, so did Disney and the film’s director guide him toward a more securely black
starting point His own cultural difference, the potential queemess of growing up
African-American in a Disneyfied Anglo culture remained only in the screenplay
passed around after the fact. Strange as it may seem, Disney’s version of The Ink
well militantly supported a purity in African-American culture more in common
with black nationalism than with the comparatively more liberal emphases upon
compromise and consensus of Bhabha’s “dissemi-nation.”3
Considering such hybridity also evokes the concerns with multiple reading
strategies which have characterized the evolving, loosely defined field of cultural
studies. Retreating from the rich “French Freud” diet of the 1970s and its assump
tions concerning the spectator, cultural studies has not only turned to Bhabha’s de
mand for self-explanation and authorization but to an Anglocentric reverence for
Stuart Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham.4 As readers have been granted greater autonomy, national difference
has also been accorded more significant status. Although its own parameters are
often unclear, cultural studies has been used to designate a large number of projects
specifically engaged with questions of culture and nationality. But while many of
3 Kobena Mercer discusses his own teenaged fascination with the imagery of Bowie and com
pany—when he and his family left Ghana for England in 1974, his identification, like that of The
Inkwell's original protagonist, placed him outside of the authenticity valued in the rhetoric of
Frantz Fanon and others. Like James Baldwin, Mercer also found himself in the “impossible gap”
that Anglo-defined gay culture creates between “ethnic ugliness and eroticized beauty.” Welcome to
the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994)
230-32.
4 See Graeme Turner, ‘“It Works for Me’: British Cultural Studies, Australian Cultural Stud
ies, Australian Film,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrance Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler
(New York and London: Routledge, 1992) 641.
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2 5 5
these have also addressed some issues which cross national boundaries, such as
Dick Hebdige’s explication of the punk era, Subculture: The Meaning o f Style, less
common has been the work which addresses the boundaries themselves, such as
Alessandro Silj’s East of Dallas, the Europe-spanning study of television melo
drama.5
Henry Jenkins’ excellent Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participa
tory Culture, in contrast, was ostensibly concerned with American fans. Like its de
facto sequel, John Tulloch and Jenkins’ Science Fiction Audiences: Watching
Doctor Who and Star Trek,6 Textual Poachers also provides a largely uncom-
mented-upon subtext concerning American fandom’s obstinate engagement with the
sometimes rare, sometimes all but completely unavailable science fiction, spy and
crime drama of British television. Examples of fandom’s use of Blakes 7, Doctor
Who, The Professionals, and other series are plentiful in Jenkin’s work: a third of
the series’ titles listed in his appendix are British, and a good number of the Ameri
can productions, such as The Equalizer, Remington Steel, Magnum, P. /., featured
British characters or, in the case of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, engaged
self-consciously English genre conventions. Jenkins even includes several repro
ductions of “Anglofans” club material detailing the members’ British obsessions.
Facing one such illustration is another taken from the cover of the American
“genzine” (general, rather than series-specific fan publication) Rerun: the cover
features a conglomerate male body constructed from the costumes of the series
which the fanzine covers. While Star Trek contributes a leg and boot, the body’s
5 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning o f Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Alessandro
Silj, with Manuel Alvarado and others. East o f Dallas (London: BFI, 1988).
5 John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and
Star Trek (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
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other elements are drawn from the British or British-inflected male leads of Dark
Shadows, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Blakes 7, The Prisoner, Doctor
Who, and The Avengers, each of them in some way a variation upon that of the
clever, “eccentric” British gentleman. Beneath Steed’s hat from The Avengers, a
television provides a blank, yet implicitly British face.7 The “poaching” this draw
ing suggests clearly crosses and hybridizes national boundaries. Nationality itself,
however, remains only indirectly addressed by Jenkins.
As might be expected, Star Trek and Trekkers take center stage in Jenkins’
work, and provide the most immediate means to re-read Textual Poachers in light of
nationality. While Star Trek was very much concerned with (re-) mapping national
ity, the series’ British member, Scotty, was little more than one more token; the
crudeness of his Scottish persona helped to underline that he represented Scotland,
not Britain, itself a purely national construct in a time when individual Earth nations
had ceased to exist Star Trek's Enterprise crew was an earnest, 1960s vintage
melting pot, governed by the pre-Vietnam assumptions of an American millennium.
Captain Kirk, presumably, lent an authoritatively Anglo-American leg to Rerun's
composite, and the supporting members of his crew volunteered the African,
“ethnic” European, and Asian elements of American diversity.8 Spock, however,
seemed to have stepped fully formed from the pages of Edward Said’s Orientalism:
wearing the pale, slant-eyed make-up and repressed persona of an unconvincing
Hollywood “Oriental” (Leonard Nimoy had been often cast in “ethnic” roles), the
7 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans an d Participatory Culture (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992) 42.
8 Salman Rushdie’s "Chekov and Zulu” provides an excellent fictional examination of the
pleasures and limitations of adapting narratives like Star Trek to the real world process of negotiat
ing Third World identities in the West. In The New Yorker, 22 August 1994: 102+.
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half-Vulcan, half-human, and wholly deferential science officer provided the series’
with its own origins-explaining Other. This Otherness of Spock fans have fondly
appropriated for further elaborations on what it means to be human, heterosexual,
and, it may be argued, American; while other fan writing should not be ignored, the
Star Trek “Slash” fictions describing sexual relations between Kirk and Spock
(K/S) provide the most dramatic examples.9 Many of the central racial/national con
ceits of K/S, such as the Vulcan “pon farr” (highly controlling need to mate) and
“t’hy’Ia” (telepathic bonding between mates), make Spock and Kirk’s typically
atypical relationship evocative of western stereotypes of mysteriously hidden but
strangely potent Asian sexuality.
But K/S stories are not simply a matter of substituting a Vulcan for a Eura
sian. Instead, these tropes of Otherness may also be read as a more generalized
manner of rewriting American masculinity. Unlike, say, Marguerite Duras’ novel
The Lover, which uses the body, sexuality and culture of a Chinese man to distan-
ciate erotically its young writer from French culture, K/S is generally much more
concerned with confusing various boundaries than it is with poetically lamenting
them. To take an example from Patricia Laurie Stephens’ fanzine-printed 1992
novel Second Chance, K/S may be very much structured by the Otherness of even a
mostly absent Spock.1 0 Stephens adopts the convention of a parallel time-line in
which James Kirk does not become a starship captain; this Jamie Kirk remains on
9 See Jenkins’ thorough discussions of K/S in Textual Poachers and Science Fiction Audi
ences, as well as Constance Penley, “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” Tech
noculture, ed. Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 135-
162.
10 Patricia Laurie Stephens, Second Chance, in Otherwhere, Otherwhen 2 (Poway, Calif.:
Pon Farr Press, 1992) 13-160.1 chose this work more or less randomly, and believe it is represen
tative of early 1990s non-SM oriented slash fiction; such a designation is admittedly without much
basis, given slash’s still largely marginal production and distribution.
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258
Earth, feeling trapped in a marriage originally necessitated by his girlfriend’s un
planned pregnancy. James Kirk, the captain-tumed-Admiral, also feels trapped,
and, voila, the two switch places and sample the roads not chosen. Although Sec
ond Chance is labeled “a K/S novel,” very little of the usually graphic male-to-male
sex occurs. And although he appears in the epilogue, Spock is only a ghostly
“t’hy’la” at the novel’s formal conclusion, a symbol of what the starship captain
had lost but will again pursue. Throughout the novel, Stephens stresses that James
Kirk’s success as a captain, and at turning around Jamie Kirk’s life, depends upon
his previous sexual relation with the alien, mystical Spock; just as Stephens generi-
cally “feminizes” Star Trek through romance vocabulary and narrative conventions,
so has the captain’s love for Spock given him the skills to heal Jamie’s resentment
toward his own “feminine” place upon Earth. The captain’s final epiphany is that
his own stagnant Starfleet life must be overcome by re-uniting with Spock romanti
cally. Physically and spiritually, Spock provides the answer when the two Kirks
ask Bhabha’s “tell me why we’re here.”
But since Star Trek TOS (variously defined as either “the old show” or,
pointedly, “the other show”), the entire Star Trek mythos has been greatly ex
panded upon within the “official” boundaries of films, spin-off television series,
and studio-approved novels, “manuals,” and computer software. In 1987, English
nationality came into play with the Star Trek: The Next Generation character of
CapL Jean-Luc Picard, and in him the coupling of Kirk and Spock produced its
logical heir11; a “Picard Maneuver,” as fans called the Captain’s habit of sharply
11 Or as a BBC World Service feature (on the curious American popularity of C-SPAN’s
broadcast of the Prime Minister's weekly question and answer sessions) put it, “the British are
[usually] like Star Trek Vulcans in their ability to hold in emotions." Radio broadcast, 22 June
1994.
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tugging down on his tunic every time he stands—the nervous tick which not only
keeps the uniform in place, but telegraphs the character’s careful combination of re
serve and assertion. No gaps, no wrinkles. But as Roland Barthes claimed, pleas
ure is a matter of intermittence, glimpsed between pants and sweater, between the
two edges of an open-necked shirt—“the staging of appearance-as-
disappearance.”1 2
If Rerun had incorporated a limb of Picard’s into its composite, the figure
would have almost cut a thoroughly English form. But defining the gentlemanly Pi
card presents a rather significant problem—the “almost” in the last phrase is a rather
complicated modifier, itself a matter of Barthes’ appearance-as-disappearance.
Stewart’s Picard signified English nationality in a similar but even more elaborate
manner than Jeremy Irons’ Gallimard in M. Butterfly: the character was named as
“French,” yet, as I will argue here, through casting, performance, and, increas
ingly, through his narrative development over the course of the series, Picard refer
enced English nationality and culture.
Interestingly, in both Jenkins’ Textual Poachers and Star Trek: The Next
Generation, British nationality may be read as simultaneously absent and present, a
paradoxical state which, it seems, strengthens the significance of nationality and
interweaves its influence with that of gender. A striking example of Picard’s peculi
arity, one which would appear to have little overt relation to nationality, is a carica
ture Jenkins includes in Textual Poachers of the lead Star Trek: The Next Genera
tion characters, a fan drawing done by Leah Rosenthal, and titled “Star Trek; The
Next Degeneration.” To illustrate this “degeneration,” Rosenthal pictures each
member with humorously exaggerated signs of their character’s quirks. Wesley
12 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 10.
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260
Crusher is a wide-eyed space cadet in sneakers, Geordi La Forge holds a ski pole
and his visor resembles ski goggles with zebra-code lenses, Deanna Troi is playing
footsie with Kirk-throwback William Riker, and so on. Dr. Beverley Crusher, who
was written out during the second season and written back in for the third, has only
a “this space for rent” for a face. Compared to the others, however, Rosenthal’s
diminutive Picard carries two props which seem unrelated either to plot or produc
tion twists. Arms folded and eyebrows arched, Picard holds a riding whip in one
hand and wears a large hoop earring in his right earlobe.1 3 Although the surround
ing text discusses fans’ reactions to Picard, particularly in contrast to the swagger
ing, demonstrative Kirk of the original series, Rosenthal’s graphic commentary
seems unrelated to Jenkins’ text
Pointing out these details in Rosenthal’s caricature is not to claim that fans
(or even Rosenthal) generally view Picard as (any more) gay than the other charac
ters, or that Jenkins has repressed this identification in Textual Poachers: in his
chapter on homoerotic “slash” (such as Kirk/Spock) texts, Jenkins diligently details
the surprisingly wide range of gay scenarios fans have imagined for their favorite
characters. Picard makes no appearance in that chapter, and, indeed, Next Genera
tion has inspired relatively little slash activity. Early heterosexual Next Generation
erotic fanzines, such as X-Gen, have been rather low-key and reverential as well,
as if even straight fantasies were somehow inappropriate while the series was still
in production. In 1993, however, Internet requests for Next Generation slash mate
rials began to multiply in Star Trek newsgroups, and, on The Well14 at least, the
13 Jenkins 100.
14 An influential and very gay-friendly online service (short for the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic
Link) drawing largely from the San Francisco Bay area, but reaching far beyond as well.
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261
possibilities of Picard’s erotic pairing with Q, the series’ omnipotent and swishy
trickster, began to be discussed. Then-current episodes such as ‘Tapestry,” in
which Picard woke up in bed with Q, seemed (over)ripe for slashing. The concep
tual birth of Q/P, or “kewpie,” was celebrated on The Well, and conference mem
bers promised to be on the lookout for i t 15
Online excitement over Q/P material does not mean that fans are necessarily
suggesting that they read either Q or Picard as gay,1 6 any more than it might mean
either character is “really” that way in the minds of the producers or writers. Next
Generation's stubborn resistance to homosexuality as anything more than a veiled
and quickly passing topic has provided an enduring Trekker topic, as The Well’s
gay and lesbian Trek topic demonstrates; even when Next Generation seemed to
promise to recognize the possibility of homosexuality, as happened most titillatingly
in the 1992 episode ‘The Outcast,” the results were so wrapped in evasion and
double-talk that homosexuality still seems most significant by its elision. In ‘The
Outcast,” William Riker falls in love with a member of an “androgynous” race
(played solely by distinctly female and or feminine actors, it would appear) who
dares to define herself as a woman. In the contorted logic of Jeri Taylor’s script,
this means that she also automatically defines herself as heterosexual, a step mir
rored by Riker’s heterosexuals-only description of 24th century human sexuality.
After she and Riker become lovers, authorities discover the relationship and subject
her to a “psychotronic” treatment Although many fans found the speech the an
15 cynsa, “What Next? Life After TNG,” online. The Well, 25 July 1993.
16 When Jenkins presented subsequent work on queer politics and Star Trek at a 1993 televi
sion studies conference, the animated discussion which followed gave the assembled students and
academicians the chance to “out” enthusiastically almost every single Next Generation character
except Picard. (“Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers, Star Trek and Gene Rodden-
berry,” paper delivered at "Consoling Passions,” Los Angeles, 3 April 1993.)
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262
drogyne delivers at her trial to be greatly moving in its denouncement of prejudice,
the narrative still gives credence to other fans’ identification of the prejudiced an
drogynes as a mercilessly Rush Limbaugh-style squad of p.c. thought police. Most
importantly, however, Riker’s description of sexuality pointedly omits any refer
ence to practices other than heterosexuality; this 24th century may indeed not be
homophobic, but it is only because homosexuality has no other existence than as a
structuring absence. As such, homosexuality infuses the Next Generation in a per
vasive manner.1 7 Still, for fans, finding recognizably gay and lesbian identity
within the Star Trek mythos cannot be a matter of the texts’ encoding, but must be a
matter of textual poaching, as Jenkins articulates Michel de Certeau.
However, what gives this history of evasion and substitution its fascination
is due in part to the intertextual permutations Picard experienced once Next Genera
tion had ceased weekly television production in 1994 and crossed over into film: on
the desert set of Captain Kirk’s final battle, Patrick Stewart spent his time between
Star Trek Generations (1994) set-ups reading Paul Rudnick’s screenplay for his
gay stage comedy, Jeffrey. While William Shatner gasped his (presumably) last
breaths as Kirk, Stewart sat in the shade and prepared to take on the role which
would do more than allow him to gaze into a minor and wonder if a jacket made
him look like a “gay superhero.” Jeffrey (1995) gave Stewart a public chance to
read Next Generation's homoerotics out loud. Even while asserting his own hetero
sexuality, Stewart’s publicity for his above-the-title role in Jeffrey casually sur
passed the rhetoric of Jenkins and such fan lobbying groups as Gaylaxia: the series’
17 See Jenkins’ subsequent discussion of “The Outcast” and these issues in the Science Fic
tion Audiences chapter ‘“Out of the Qoset and Into the Universe’: Queers and Star Trek,” 237-265,
as well as Lynne Joyrich’s “Feminist Enterprise? Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Occupa
tion of Femininity,” Cinema Journal 35.2 (Winter 1996): 61-84.
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263
“second-class” treatment of women . . . Q’s homosexuality . . . Picard’s own pos
sible “leanings” . . . ‘The Outeast”’s inadequacy. . . the textual logic and appeal of
slash fiction . . . .18 Surprisingly enough, neither Stewart’s role in Jeffrey nor his
interviews caused much storm among Star Trek's contentious online fans: while
debates over homosexuality and its absence from Star Trek have been a staple of
rec.artstartrek for years, Stewart’s supposedly ‘“ Star’-Shattering Role”19 pro
voked only one, relatively mild flame war of note, even after a fan uploaded his
Advocate interview.20 And just two months following the release of Jeffrey, Star
Trek provided its first same-sex kiss in Deep Space Nine's “Rejoined” episode: al
though officially not a lesbian story line,2 1 Star Trek's universe has become con
siderably less resistant to the possibility of gay identity.22
Yet to return to Rosenthal’s riding crop and earring, what makes them fas
cinating is their queer-ness, not that they necessarily infer that Picard is indeed
queer. An obvious symbol of Picard’s power over the other crew members, his
18 See Stewart’s Advocate cover story, Donna Minkowitz, “A New Enterprise,” The Advo
cate, 22 August 1995: 64+.
19 James Grant, ‘Taking On a ‘Star’-Shattering Role,” Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1995:
F1+.
20 See thread begun by bkinyon@ix.netcom.com (Bert Kinyon), “Patrick Stewart—In Retro
spect a Very Bad Choice,” online, Internet, rec.artstartrek.current, 8 August 1995.
21 The relationship between the Trill science officer Jadzia Dax and another Trill involves the
species sex-changing shifts as sentient parasites move from host body to host body. All together,
the dynamics involved go beyond either lesbian or transsexual identity, yet the episode nonetheless
displayed two female actors locking lips and tongues in a forthright erotic encounter. See “Future
Shockers,” TV Guide, 7 October 1995, 20-21, as well as the Voyager Visibility Project’s Gaytrek
homepage, 8 October 1995. Available: http://www.gaytrek.com/gaytrek.
22 Then, early in 1996, the Q Continuum returned to Star Trek in “Death Wish,” an episode
of Star Trek: Voyager, the entire episode presented the Continuum, and especially John de Lancie’s
original Q, in far more fey forms than before, including a reference to the famous concluding lines
of Tea and Sympathy (“When people ask you about this, and they w ill. . . ”), incompetently per
formed “magic” & la Betwitcheefs Aunt Clara, and vague insinuations regarding Q’s relation to
“Jean-Luc.” Although declining ratings for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager probably provided
the strongest impetus for change, the series’ producers gifted the 1995-96 season with far more
queer details than they ever did before Stewart’s role in Jeffrey.
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2 6 4
riding crop is also a key tool used in sadomasochistic sex, as well as (if there is a
significant difference) the generic conventions of British public school narratives;
not coincidentally it is through the customs and images of the all male public
school, historian George L. Mosse asserts, that British upper class masculinity and
male homosexuality have both been shaped.23 Similarly, the earring—against Star-
fleet regulations, actually—is not placed in the common left ear but in Picard’s
right While this placement has often denoted homosexuality in the US (during the
1970s in particular), in Europe it indicated virility and or a more general eccentric
ity; still, although it is now commonplace for American men to wear earrings in
both ears, an earring only on the right still appears mostly on older gay men.
In both the case of the crop and of the earring, Rosenthal’s two symbols of
“degeneration” slip between connoting homosexuality (and other “degenerate” sex
ual practices) and European/British identity. Fittingly, Jenkins’ text argues against
the literary prejudice that fandom itself represents a degeneration of the more dis
tanced reader; to the extent that fandom is associated with slash and “Anglofan” ap
preciation of British media, it is also associated with perverse sexuality and British
identity.
By evoking images of perverse mastery over the crew, officially and possi
bly sexually, Picard’s crop and the earring also evokes the mastery which the Brit
ish have otherwise seemingly lost, and which, as argued above, has figured in con
structing the British as the Other who will explain and authorize American nation-
ness. But in the Star Trek mythos Picard, like James Bond, would seem still to
23 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in
Modem Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985) 62-89.
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2 6 5
possess the British Empire’s lost mastery—as the one and future captain of the En
terprise he wields that crop over the vast Star Trek universe of television and film.
Picard, however, does still lie within the post-colonial paradigm of “sly ci
vility”: without pushing Rosenthal’s drawing too far, it may be suggested that the
earring qualifies the crop. In other words, although Heard occupies the symbolic
place of the whip-wielding father, Next Generation quite purposefully revised what
this father does and means. Diplomat rather than soldier, ship-bound functionary
rather than away-team leader, bookish celibate rather than intergalactic lover—his
most dramatic scene in Star Trek Generations presents Picard breaking through his
emotional reserve to weep openly over the death of his brother and nephew, a boy
he had valued as the family’s continuation, since he himself has chosen not to re
produce. As Next Generation stressed from the pilot onward, Picard is no father.
While remaining heterosexual in name, he repeatedly resisted the structural patterns
of heterosexual relations which surround him. As the series’ publicity and its fans
were quite eager to acknowledge, Picard was quite a different captain from the ear
lier James T. Kirk. Just how different Picard was, and how it is coupled with his
nationality, may further delineate the importance of British constructions to Ameri
can identity.
Chasing Origins
In ‘The Chase,” a 1993 episode of Next Generation, Picard re-traces the
path of research which led his long-ago archeology professor to a suspicious death
in the middle of space. This initially obsessive chase, later given urgency by the
hostile competition of the galaxy’s other dominant races, leads Picard on a hunt to
piece together samples of DNA found on several far-flung planets. Once he suc
ceeds in gathering the samples and in devising the means for their combination, the
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266
compound DNA forms a computer program. Somehow this program in turn gener
ates an ancient holographic message from the long forgotten race which had once
“seeded” the worlds on which Star Trek's cast of humanoids evolved. All in all, a
surprisingly modest episode in the series long-run—not a two-part season cliff-
hanger, nor even a particularly graceful script The idea of an alien race initiating or
shaping life on Earth is hardly a novel concept either, providing the raw material not
only for tabloid UFO stories and “speculative” documentaries, but for such science
fiction classics as Ursala K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, The Left Hand o f Dark
ness, and her other linked works. Le Guin’s originating race, the benevolent and
unflustered Hainish, share distinct qualities with their Star Trek parallels.
Yet even if ‘The Chase”’s originality or dramatic quality might seem to pro
vide little cause to single it out from the Star Trek canon, nevertheless this origins
episode must be granted a rather crucial place in the construction of the Star Trek
mythos if only because it clearly excludes from the mythos traditional belief in the
Christian-Judeo creation story. While this exclusion in itself might not be the cause
of much interest to anyone but the hardened Trekker, it does attract additional atten
tion when considered in the light of Star Trek's general cultural conservatism, what
even the director of two Star Trek films, Nicholas Myer, derided as its “plaid-pants,
Republican golf-course view of the future.”24 Ironically, this currently seems to be
the most vital remaining remnant of the New Frontier’s investment in space explo
ration, a once shining but now quaintly naive future. Like the streamlined phantoms
of “The Gemsback Continuum,” William Gibson’s early short story of 1930s fu
turism haunting the present, Star Trek's insistent optimism seductively denies al
24 Michael Logan, “Star Trek XXV ” TV Guide 31 August 1991: 12.
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2 6 7
most every salient aspect of American history since the original series’ first early
1960s conception.
Gibson illustrates just how strong, however, these dead futures may be. In
his tale, an American photographer in London receives a commission to provide the
illustrations for a history of “American Streamlined Modeme” by an author named
Dialta Downes. Once on assignment, the American finds himself drawn into a par
ticularly strong version of the British own obsession for locally forgotten strands of
US pop culture, and he begins hallucinating not only the cities and highways, but
the people of this future:
They were the children of Dialta Downes’ 80s-that-wasn’t;
the Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they
probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had
said that the Future had come to America first, but had fi
nally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream.
Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew
nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, of for
eign wars it was possible to lose.25
A nonplused reporter friend of the photographer suggests that these ghosts are just
another manifestation of a culture-wide phenomenon—instead of hallucinations,
they are the semiotic remnants, the undead of mass culture. Once people saw the
Devil, but now, raised on “The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns,” they
see UFOs.26 Gibson’s photographer is frightened by his visions and flees, but the
story’s appeal, and that of the Star Trek reruns too, rests upon a different response.
Perhaps the naive “dream logic” of these narratives is one reason why fans, from
those attending the early conventions of the 1970s to those conversing in the current
computer conferences, have found Star Trek to be such an inspiring love-hate ob-
25 William Gibson, ‘The Gemsback Continuum,” Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology,
ed. Bruce Sterling (New York: Ace Books, 1986) 2,9.
26 Gibson 6.
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268
ject: while Jenkins and Constance Penley have described in print the complexities of
fan relations to Star Trek texts, Star Trek conferences, such as in the Internet’s
many Usenet newgroups and Web sites, CompuServe, America On-Line, The
Well, and assorted BBSs, and provide daily online examples of the considerable
range and contradictions of response. Using handles and greetings which may
stress the generational longevity of fan interest (“phanson,” of The Well) or their
own rewritings of the text (“Worf, his legs in the air,” also The Well), members of
these online communities do not flee but, but like Gibson’s reporter, seem to wel
come the hallucinations with good humor, and with the determination to profit per
sonally from them.
Episodes such as ‘ The Chase” have the additional fan value of altering or
adding to the canon’s official definition, which then may be re-worried and negoti
ated. But apart from how “The Chase” may define Star Trek's humanist doctrine,
the episode is of interest here because its stresses the centrality of what may be rec
ognized as a condensation of race and nationality, and, within this condensation,
the relation of the character Picard to the originating alien race. ‘ The Chase” may be
read to consider Picard himself, and the differences he embodies, as an example of
how British nationality names and complicates the process.
Bald, slight, and aging (yet in 1992, winner of TV Guide's “most boda
cious” title, male division), Stewart’s delicate and often demure Picard is himself
rather alien; compared to his anomalous status as a television action hero, Picard’s
profile within Next Generation further contradicts expectations. As faithfully re
layed in fanzines and the series’ official memorabilia, the original casting call
warned against submitting “street types” for the series’ one African-American sup
porting character, but suggested an accent for both the Caucasian Picard and the
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2 6 9
alien Troi. The call described Picard’s mid-Atlantic accent as well as a French birth
and “romantic” disposition—but Capt. Kirk’s successor was found in a more pic
turesque manner. According to Trek lore, the British Stewart was simply
“discovered” by a producer attending a UCLA staged reading. When the series’
creator Gene Roddenberry balked at a producer’s effort to cast a non-French actor,
Stewart was briefly considered instead for the role of Data, the android. Finally
Stewart won the lead role, and brought with him a distinctly more upper class Eng
lish than mid-Atlantic accent27 During the series’ first year in particular, some of
the trappings of French heritage remained, allowing Picard to mutter a merdre here
and there, and, in a clumsy episode reportedly hobbled by a Writer’s Guild strike,
awkwardly revive an earlier Parisian romance. Although his character may be
“romantic” in his enlightened sense of compassion toward the crew, Stewart’s sex
ual appeal as Picard hardly stems from either the swagger of Kirk’s red-blooded
Kansas farm boy or the “romantic” stereotype of the mature, Yves Montand-type
French lover—Stewart/Picard’s appeal may instead lie in the extent to which he
plays off of the national stereotype of masculinity the actor brought to the role.
While Stewart’s Picard became increasingly British, the other Next Genera
tion characters did not similarly shift During the course of the series run, Roots'
star LeVar Burton’s supporting African-American character, Lt La Forge, if any
thing, eliminated any earlier hints of black English; the blind La Forge, his sight-
giving visor masking his eyes, connotes even less of the “street” than does Lt
Worf or Guynan, alien characters also played by African-Americans. Historical
connotations of race and heritage such as black English, like homosexuality, seems
27 Larry Nemecek, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion (New York: Pocket
Books, 1992) 13,16-18.
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270
to have been outgrown in Star Trek's “plaid-pants” future. In its UN zeal, Next
Generation represents the galaxy as an infinite flow of world government after
world government, having avoided all the possible messy details in order to pro
duce worlds usually populated by American-accented singular races/nations (and
actors representing them through uniforms of latex facial prostheses). When excep
tions do occur, they are usually presented as comic relief or in the midst of terrible
civil wars. In Next Generation in particular, difference is only spoken of as a bad
phase which must be overcome before the reconstituted race/nation unity may take
its responsible place in interplanetary relations.
This homogeneity emphasized the drama of Picard’s accent—and not the
working class British culture inferred by the accent Stewart reportedly “overcame”
or that fellow cast member Marina Sirtis (Lt. Commander Troi) proudly displays at
Star Trek conventions. Instead, Picard’s is primarily the West End accent of high
culture, of a taste in which, for him, American, Raymond Chandler-era detective
novels28 may provide pleasure, but which still specifies that he enjoys reading pa
per printed books in an era of digitally-stored data; he has studied Latin, listens to
classical music, and plays a flute-like instrument, the series ever reminded us. Al
though all references are to Starfleet Academy, Picard is clearly the result of an edu
cation of which Matthew Arnold would approve—including, it may be inferred,
university preparation in a British public schools.
Most of all, Picard is repeatedly looked up to by the other characters as a di
rector and performer of Shakespearean plays and verse, often in the most gratuitous
28 Chandler’s won combination of Anglophilia (he was educated in England and for the rest of
his life affected the tweedy appearance of an English academic) and the homoerotic-seeming preoc
cupations of his writing provides an interesting subtext here. See Simpson, Hassell A., “‘So
Long, Beautiful Hunk’: Ambiguous Gender and Songs of Parting in Raymond Chandler’s Fic
tions,” Journal o f Popular Culture 28.2 (Fall 1994): 37-49.
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271
ways: as a prologue to “Devil’s Due,” the episode opens with Picard and Data en
acting Falstaff and Hal on the hollodeck; while stranded on early 20th century Earth
in ‘ Tim e’s Arrow,” Picard directs a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’ s Dream as a
diversion; and in “Menage k Troi” he recites a lengthy excerpt from a sonnet in or
der to foil a Ferengi kidnapper. “Earl Grey, hot,” Picard commands his replicator in
episode after episode, and the quick Trekker will point out the prominent volume of
Shakespeare decorating the captain’s readyroom, a reoccurring prop in later epi
sodes. (Indeed, Star Trek publicity repeatedly refers to Stewart’s Shakespearean
stage credits, as if to ignore that the actor might already be familiar as a star of /,
Claudius, or, to science fiction fans, as a possessed space vampire in Tobe
Hooper’s Lifeforce, and as Dune's athletic martial arts tutor; interviewed he de
murs, “they cast an Englishman with little TV experience, middle-aged, bald,
Shakespearean.”29)
Under erasure, nationality itself has become connoted by Picard within the
terms of British high culture; because Sirtis gives the half Betazed Troi a fabricated,
place-less accent (but not one shared by any other Betazed characters, including her
mother), Picard’s accent, and the culture with which it is implicitly related, becomes
the series sole acknowledged/denied mark of nationality. Picard also introduced this
British-as-French trope of nationality to the greater Star Trek universe: while the
Enterprise seemed disinclined to discover anything but American-accented aliens in
its travels, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced another English-accented con
tinuing character, Dr. Julian Bashir, played by a British actor of Nigerian decent30
29 Greg Fagan, “Our Readers’ Choices as TV’s Most Bodacious Duo: Trekker Treat,” TV
Guide 18 July 1992: 10.
30 Siddig B Fadil, who changed his name to the more Anglo-friendly Alexander Siddig at the
beginning of the series’ fourth season, reportedly after a night of London pub-hopping.
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2 7 2
Although Bashir has never been labeled French as such, suspiciously enough he
previously lived in Paris—but on the hollodeck Bashir fantasizes himself as a
1960s era secret agent, a clone of Bond all the way down to the soundtrack’s
brassy music cues.
However, to claim that nationality is under erasure in Star Trek ignores the
“USS” still prefixing the official name of every spacecraft, inferring that the Re
publican side of this future could still not bear to infer the demise of the United
States’ name, even if the United Federation of Planets is simply the US more or
less swollen to galactic size. The original series and its film sequels had heightened
the Federation/US parallel by drawing upon Cold War tropes for their depiction of
tensions with the Klingon and Romulan empires, a pattern which reached its peak
in the Soviet breakup-themed Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1992). In
this last “Star Trek Classic” film, it is notable that the quotation of Shakespeare is
prominently displayed as a Klingon appropriation of Earth culture, a command, on
the part of a villainous Klingon leader, which suggests reassuring commonality but
is actually a sign of betrayal and frightening power. When Kirk finally quotes from
Shakespeare to reaffirm the titular “undiscovered country” as peaceful cooperation
with the Klingons, he is also safely reclaiming Shakespeare as the tongue of the
Federation, and, by analogy, the US. Reclaims, that is, rather than appropriates: as
has been well argued, Star Trek placed a special emphasis upon Shakespeare long
before Picard.3 1 Mark Houlahan points out quite correctly that Star Trek VTs ar
ticulation of a future, transcendental Americanism uses Shakespearean rhetoric in
31 See two essays which appeared in the journal Extrapolations 3.1 (1995): John S. Pender-
gast, “A Nation of Hamlets: Shakespeare and Cultural Politics,” 10-17, and Mark Houlahan,
“Cosmic Hamlets? Contesting Shakespeare in Federation Space,” 28-37.
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273
the same way that the “US Man” discussed by the Mark Sinfield draws upon
Shakespeare to assert a contemporary universal quality to his nationality.32
Yet Picard represents something different in regard to Shakespeare: when
ever Picard quoted from Shakespeare or found some reason to turn to his treasured
bound volume, his accent, his “Shakespearean” bearing represented that which
Kirk and the Klingons had wrestled over. Picard is the past which Sinfield’s “US
Man” encompasses in its emblematic present-ness. Next Generation's association
of Picard with Shakespeare suggests the extent to which this future is a rewriting of
US manifest destiny, one which displaces difference onto the representative of An
glo origins: the English Shakespearean actor, the classically-educated amateur ar-
cheologist and sleuth, the patriarch with a difference. (Or, to use the popular,
campy term adopted by fans after an iron age people mistook him for God—’ The
Picard.”)
It is these aspects of Picard which make his solution of the comic DNA puz
zle in ‘ The Chase” so intriguing. Initially the episode is set up as a bittersweet re
union with his former mentor, the American Dr. Galen, who presents Picard with
the gift of a 12,000 year old “Kerlan Necros” in the hope that he will leave the En
terprise and join Galen’s unexplained expedition. A squat ceramic figure which
opens to reveal other similar but smaller figures nestled inside, the rare Kerlan arti
fact symbolizes the mystical presence of many voices inside the one, Picard later
explains, and this is why Galen chose it to draw him back to archeology: he knows,
Picard says, that “the past is a very insistent voice inside me.” Galen, whose
(presumably also American) offspring did not share his own passion for the past,
32 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics o f Dissident Reading
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 291; discussed in Houlahan 29-30.
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274
saw his true heir in Picard. But Picard refuses to join Galen and abandon his cap
taincy; angrily the professor decries Picard as being “like some Roman centurion
out patrolling the provinces, maintaining a dull and bloated empire.” Following
Galen’s subsequent death, however, Picard retraces and then finishes his research,
eventually processing the final DNA sample while an assortment of Klingons, Car-
dassians and Romulans argue over proprietary rights to the contents of the un
known message. The assembled DNA forms a program which modifies his hand
held tricorder, which in turn projects an image from 4 billions years in the past Pi
card, who holds the many voices of the past inside him, releases the one voice, and
this bald, female-shaped and voiced “earth mother” reveals to her audience that not
only do they all share a common ancestry, but that there is “something of us in all
of you, and, so, something of you, in each other.” The alien’s revelation mutely
underscores one of the later Star Trek Generations' final moments: when Picard
returns to the ruined wreck of his Enterprise, he casually tosses aside the relatively
undamaged Kerlan artifact which Galen had given him, choosing only to take his
family photo album. Inside of him, and in the memory of his family line (whether
“French” or English or something else altogether), lies the power of the past which
the nestled figures had only symbolized.
The unnamed message giver’s appearance not only recalls the artifact’s
smooth, rounded forms and pale neutral color, she bears a striking resemblance to
Picard, especially when compared to the various other life forms in her audience.
Although her appearance was also achieved through the application of latex-
sculpted facial prostheses, the effect of her prostheses is to simplify the human
skull in the same familiar manner as alien encounter films from 2001 to Close En
counters of the Third Kind to Communion; in contrast to the baroque, heavily de
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tailed faces of the other assorted aliens, this alien comes closest to the equally
rounded but blunt contours of Stewart’s face, rather than the sharp lines of Gates
McFadden’s Dr. Crusher, also present It is these two human characters who also
appear to be the only true receivers of the alien’s message from the past Thus,
when Picard later receives a tentative message from the Romulan leader, the Rom-
ulan’s reticent affirmation that his race and humans might indeed share some com
monalties allows the episode to end with Picard contemplating his own achieve
ment. Contentedly enclosing in his hand one of the small interior figures of the
Kerlan artifact, he seems to contemplate the one voice from the past he has been re
sponsible for freeing. The “insistent voice of the past” which Picard maternally car
ried inside of him has in fact been spoken through the alien’s message; although the
symbolic mother of all, she is also another 2001 Starchild, fathered by one man,
Galen, and bom to another, Picard.
Locutus of Borg
Both the past and, if the Romulan’s gesture is a sign, a beginning pass
through Picard’s body. Yet Galen’s harsh portrayal of Picard as the Roman centu
rion “out patrolling the provinces, maintaining a dull and bloated empire” still reso
nates through the episode and through the Star Trek mythos. Picard may confi
dently insist that “we both know that’s not true,” but the episode’s narrative, em
phasizing Picard’s guilt over Galen’s death, provides only the hopeful ending as
supporting evidence; more damning is Picard’s bitter spoken wish that Galen had
never come aboard. Further, for the Trekker the terms Roman centurion and empire
may evoke images of the series’ popular earlier Borg episodes: in the “Best of Both
Worlds” arc (beginning in 1990), the cyborg collective abducts Picard, physically
modifies his body and renames him Locutus of Borg, the Borg’s racial bridge to the
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Federation and the mouthpiece through which the Federation’s imminent
“incorporation” is announced. The use of such a Latinate rendition of Picard’s new
identity and purpose emphasizes the extent to which cyborg transformation is not
simply the usual narrative production of an “evil twin” for the Latin-fluent Picard,
but a boundary-confusing rape which melds his “insistent voice of the past” with
the Borg’s insistently forward-looking collective identity: not surprisingly, Next
Generation's humanist presuppositions positions it as diametrically opposed to
Donna Haraway’s feminist and anti-humanist articulation of cyborg politics.33 Pi
card is, predictably, rescued and, after overcoming the Borg “programming,” mi
raculously returned to his pre-cyborg physical state. But this does not occur before
Locutus aids in a highly lethal near-total defeat of the Federation, a campaign which
provides militaristic evidence of the empire’s “dull and bloated” state. Neither does
Locutus disappear once Picard’s implants are removed: in subsequent dealings with
the Borg, Picard has startlingly identified himself to them as Locutus, as if (in the
terms of the later “Chase” episode) the Borg voice were still among the “many”
voices inside his “one.” Indeed Picard seemed peculiarly primed to become a cy
borg—not only did he already technically qualify as one due to his artificial heart (a
“secret” which formed the basis for two episodes), but Stewart’s consideration for
the role of the android Data suggests that the series’ producers felt a British actor
might seem more appropriate to Roddenberry in this role than in the captain’s.
(Data’s precise, contraction-less diction and worship of Sherlock Holmes is almost
a parody of Picard’s speech and interests, and while the android’s ability to inter
face saved Picard in ‘The Best of Both Worlds,” Data was the next to succumb to
33 See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention o f Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1991).
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the Borg in 1993’s “Descent”; Data’s persistent desire to experience emotions and
to be “more human” might, if fully fulfilled, result in a replication of Picard. In the
series’ concluding 1994 episode, “All Good Things,” an elderly Picard visits Data,
who in the future has retired from Starfleet to teach, fittingly, at Cambridge.)
Following Picard’s Borg transformation, “Family” returned him to recuper
ate in his native French home on Earth, a plot turn which provided the series with
its clearest dramatization of British nationality as national difference and origins it
self. There, amidst the shimmering vineyards of “Labarre, France,” the hostility of
Picard’s coarse brother Robert gradually forces him to acknowledge the pain of the
Borg’s damage to him. However, two very familiar British actors, Jeremy Kemp
and Samantha Egger, played Robert and his wife, and they speak in the same
mildly mid-Atlantic British tones as Stewart’s Picard—yet Picard’s old friend from
Labarre, Louis, is given an American accent The Picard family’s nationality seems
bizarrely limited to the domain of the vineyard, its mise en bouteilles au chateau la
bel. 34
In many ways, “Family” also suggests the K/S novel described above, Pa
tricia Laurie Stephens’ Second Chance: the stubbornly low-tech Robert, like Jamie
Kirk, resents the laurels he missed by staying at home, and resents his child, Rene,
for wishing to follow Jean-Luc. In Second Chance, however, Jamie Kirk is part of
a distinctly American community, still coping with drug addiction, child abuse, of
fice politics and all the other elements of contemporary melodrama; also similar, at
least superficially, the shipboard subplot of “Family” depicts the Klingon Lt.
34 in the final episode mentioned above, Q takes Picard back in time to view a pool where amino acids
are about to form the first proteins—the beginning of human life, and as Q notes in passing, the location is
what would someday be France. However puzzlingly English Next Generation s idea of the French may
seem, this nationality certainly provides a baseline of identity for the series.
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Worf’s strained reunion with his adoptive human parents, elderly Russians comi
cally played by the well-known Yiddish actors Theodore Bikel and Georgia Brown.
But as with Picard, the identity of WorTs parents remains problematic: extensively
argued over in The Well’s topic devoted to “Is Star Trek Jewish?”35 the archly
Jewish characters Bikel and Brown played may be Star Trek's first identifiably
Jewish characters, or they may be another subterfuge, using “Russian” nationality
to cloak an appropriation or stereotyping of Jewish culture. Although the terms may
be Russian and Jewish rather than French and British, both Worf’s parents and Pi
card’s family are cut off from the secure national belonging-ness afforded to the
Kirks in Second Chance. The Picards have no equivalent connection to French
culture. If Louis is any sign, the Picards are the sole holdouts of a pervasive, fu
turistic Americanization, and what they are preserving may appear to be labeled by a
French mise en bouteiUes au chateau, but it speaks in the clipped, British colonial
accents of “Earl Grey, hot.”
“Family” also deviates from Second Chance's representation of masculinity
by evoking the narrative conventions of the returning soldier. This episode has been
the only one in Star Trek and Next Generation history not to include footage of the
Enterprise's bridge, an exclusion which heightens Picard’s purgatorial separation
from the usual supports and symbols of his ship. In Second Chance, James Kirk is
also without these supports, yet their absence has no effect upon his ability to heal
the mistakes of Jamie Kirk’s life, and he confidently returns to his Federation ca
reer, and to Spock at the novel’s end. Picard, in contrast, is finally vulnerable to his
35 See, for example, the thread begun on the Ferengi as Jews, by danlj, whose posts carried
the motto “ST: The Oy Vay Adventure.” Online, The Well, 9 Nov. 1993. This debate stemmed in
part from a published source: see Sheldon Teitelbaum, “Is Star Trek Jewish?” Hadassah Magazine
December 1991:43-7.
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brother’s taunts, and even considers abandoning his Starfleet career. While both
works conclude with what may be termed the “feminization” of their protagonist,
their import varies greatly. James Kirk’s disillusionment with playing the admiral
and his pursuit of intimacy with Spock forfeits little of the power and position Pi
card forgoes when he drunkenly crumbles under his still spiteful brother’s taunts
and cries over the pain, humiliation and self-loathing which followed his rape by
the Borg. Kaja Silverman, who emphasizes the centrality of war discourse to mas
culinity, has described this dynamic, and the shattering of the soldier’s former secu
rity-even, perhaps, “Family’ ”s generic shift away from the usual science fictional
“reality” of Star Trek.
Even under the most auspicious circumstances, moreover,
the fiction of a phallic masculinity generally remains intact
only for the duration of the war.... [0]nce removed from
the battlefront, the traumatized veteran no longer enjoys the
support of his comrades-in-arms. All that stands between
him and the abyss is the paternal imago, within which he can
no longer recognize himself. For the society to which he re
turns, moreover, he represents a sorry travesty of “our
fighting men and boys,” a living proof of the incommen
surability of penis and phallus. Because of the resulting cri
sis of faith, “reality” itself is at least temporarily jeopard
ized.36
Interestingly, this Lacanian distinction between the phallus’ abstract authority and
the penis’ anatomical specificity is given another reading in the female character of
Major Kira, the Bejoran former guerrilla fighter of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
Next Generation's deliberately multicultural and post-colonial spin-off. There
Kira’s gender both heightens and displaces Silverman’s sense of incommensurabil
ity; she represents the newly liberated Bejor’s phallic mastery over their former co
lonial situation, yet her persistent, restless feelings of post-war uselessness and
36 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity At the Margins (New York and London: Routledge,
1992) 63.
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280
disillusionment often blur strangely into the series’ emphasis upon the petite,
rounded contours of her always hyper-feminine form.37 Logically Kira would be
compared to a North Vietnamese ex-soldier, yet Deep Space Nine, through the sig
nals of her familiar angst and its evocation of concurrent Vietnam war conventions,
suggests a contemporary American reading of the character. Finding the formerly
sustaining discourse of war has stranded her, Kira’s body presents the unsettling
eruption of what Susan Jeffords has argued must be excluded from warfare and its
masculine constructions—unlike Silverman, Jeffords persuasively argues a much
less feminist-friendly view of contemporary war films. Vietnam war narratives, Jef
fords asserts, repeatedly seek to eliminate women (violently, in most cases) and
symbolically shift reproduction onto men, in order to foreclose the dangerous pos
sibility of identification with the female body and its connotations of birth, death,
37 A vital feminist fan community, Envy, has grown up around this character and the perky
actress, Nana Visitor, who plays her. Their diverse members (female and male, lesbian, gay, and
straight) would no doubt take eloquent issue with this reading. See Invidius, the official publica
tion of Envy (“N-V,” after Vistor’s initials).
Still, it seems significant that we meet Kira only after the Bejoran war for independence—a
war which, pointedly, the Bejorans did not win but which was conceded by the colonizing Cardas-
sians. Ensign Ro of Next Generation was originally slated to be spun off in the Kira role, and her
presence on Deep Space Nine would have presented a rather different dynamic. Alienated from the
Bejoran resistance during the war, and cynical toward Starfleet as well, the androgynous Ro would
have fit more interestingly into the Vietnam veteran mold. But because Deep Space Nine presents
Kira only after the fact (and even though the series repeatedly offers displays of her physical prow
ess), her sex and gender seem much more determined by contemporary dichds of the V ietnam vet.
Her repetitive exclamations of disbelief over the suddenness of the war’s end and her re-incamation
as spacestation bureaucrat emphasize the mysteriousness of this change; to use Silverman’s La-
canian distinction, it is as if the equation of phallus and penis are disturbed by her present state,
and rather than celebrated, it must be “healed” by turning her into a “true,” powerless woman, or
restoring her to a previous priapic state as warrior. In light of this instability, Kira’s fan identifica
tion as a possible lesbian is somewhat suspect; on The Well and in the newsgroup alt.fan.startrek
members were intrigued by the open door the series seemed to offer during the first season. But is
it rather that, to this extent, Kira was simply occupying the warrior’s male heterosexual space?
Nonetheless, Kira’s embodiment of a professional military officer with clear combat skills and in
terests deserves attention—and respect
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281
and vulnerable corporeality itself.38 Kira’s continuing trauma, the result of the se
ries’ progressive intent to depict female as well as male soldiers, may indeed double
back upon this good intention and instead model the proper equation of penis and
phallus by presenting an improper one. Deep Space Nine's Kira severs the valid
connections between constructions of masculinity and the returning veteran’s
trauma, substituting instead (as Star Trek so often does) the optimistic “universals”
of humanity for the unpleasant specifics of gender or race.
But to return to Picard’s trauma in “Family” (a context displaying few of
Deep Space Nine's revisionist ambitions, it would seem), this wounded soldier
may certainly suggest parallels to the Vietnam veteran’s return home, yet the gist of
his recovery from the Borg’s attack refuses the discourse Jeffords described. Or,
rather, Picard’s ordeal replicates many of its features but refuses its conclusions,
particularly to the extent that it opposes the cyborg’s utopian appeal. Haraway’s
famous manifesto, with its sacred monster marking time on a “non-Oedipal” calen
dar in a “post-gender world,”39 haunts Next Generation's Borg episodes, just as
the figure of the cyborg haunts Jeffords’ analysis of Vietnam narratives. Jeffords’
Remasculinization o f America, published in 1989, predates the implicit analogies to
Vietnam in cyborg films such as Terminator 2, as well as their explicit hybridization
in Universal Soldier, yet the cyborg also lies behind her emphasis upon “the pro
duction and technologization of the male body as an aesthetic of spectacle.”40 The
“logic” of this remasculinization relies upon four study-structuring techniques, as
pects shared also with Next Generation's representations of the Borg: masculine
38 Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) 93.
39 Haraway 150.
40 Jeffords 1.
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282
bonding, creating homosocial ties which surpass all else; regeneration of the sol
dier/veteran, providing evidence of men as victims; feminization of the government,
both deriving from and causing its loss of the war and its loss of POWs; and, re
placing the heterosexual family, reproduction refigured as male, through (preferably
male) medical personnel and or paternal figures.4 1 In a sense, these techniques de
scribe the Federation’s response to the Borg invasion of the Terran system, and,
eventually, Earth, the Federation’s “00.1” homebase; occurring at the end of Next
Generation’ s third season and the beginning of its fourth, the invasion marked a
turn to darker, much more action-oriented stories of intergalactic conflict. The Borg
attack thus “remasculinized” Next Generation, and it did so by emphasizing the
homosocial line of military command, dramatically presenting Picard as the war’s
psychic and physical victim, “feminizing” the Federation through its inability to de
fend its home, and, through Data’s interface with Locutus, providing a figuratively
male-to-male rebirth for Picard.
Granting these elements of Federation remasculinization, it may be con
versely argued that it is the Borg themselves who conform most thoroughly with
Jeffords’ paradigm. In their mission to incorporate all cultures into their own, the
Borg make no exclusions on the basis of sex, yet they are presented in the same
manner as the race Riker would later encounter in ‘ The Outcast”—while the an
drogynes appear to have been cast only with female actors, the Borg would appear
to embodied only by male. Given a constant collective conscious, they possess a
homosociality beyond that of the androgynes. Subsequent episodes, such as “I,
Borg,” in which a “baby Borg” is rescued, “individualized,” and named Hugh, all
infer a somehow masculine gendered state which seems independent of original
41 Jeffords xiii.
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283
biological sex. (Locutus even, when he stands stripped down to his essential Borg
implants, gives the conclusion to ‘The Best of Both Worlds” a gruesome enigma:
what is meant to reside beneath the hard, molded groin plate? What has been lost?)
Since the Borg are gendered as masculine, and since their biological components
presumably originated through the collective’s colonial incorporation’s, the Borg
themselves are, like the Vietnam veteran, the colonized as well as the colonizers,
victims as well as oppressors. At the same time, the Borg’s collective conscious
ness, which would be, in effect, their government, provides their fatal vulnerability
by tying them all together too closely. Like the government bureaucrats of Vietnam
narratives, trapped in their hive-like offices, the Borg do not have the power to
venture out singly and experience the “real” conflicts as do Rambo and the other
loner heroes. The Borg lack the masculine-coded distance which would allow them
to function independently; later, the individualized (and lonely) Hugh describes the
pleasure they take in their constant closeness to one another, and the Enterprise
crew respond with both distaste and intrigue. Finally, the Borg replicate Jeffords’
techniques of remasculinization most dramatically in their means of reproduction.
Not only do they forcibly “recruit” (to evoke a homophobic misreading of another
sort of “male reproduction”), but the Borg would appear to technologically produce
“baby Borgs” such as Hugh, who are seemingly untouched by any pre-
incorporation experience. (In an earlier episode an Enterprise team explores the inte
rior of a Borg ship and finds, stored neatly in a drawer, a small human infant im
planted with tiny Borg devises.)
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2 8 4
Yet Hugh is, ironically, also the closest Picard has to an offspring42: Picard
bears responsibility for not returning Hugh to the Borg collective booby-trapped
with a computer virus. Thus when Hugh’s new sense of individuality and self-
awareness instead infect the Borg, re-making them into a new and unknown threat,
the Federation blames Picard. His actions have made him the father of a new race of
beings.
These fortuitous coincidences between the Borg and Jeffords’ analysis al
lows the recovery of Picard in “Family” to have an import much closer to Silver
man’s idealized dislocation between phallus and penis: the significance of “Family”
is not simply to “heal” and reincorporate Picard back into the family, as the upbeat
conclusion might seem to imply, but is instead to reiterate his place outside of the
biological family. Fathers play a crucial part in all of this. Indeed, fathers control
the narratives of the Picard and Worf stories, as well as a third subplot, in which
the teenage Wesley Crusher plays a holographic message recorded shortly before
his father’s death over a decade ago. The youthful figure Wesley views is touch
ingly unaware of his own mortality, happily certain of the future in which he has
had no part. In each of these cases, “father” is more of a role or position than a liv
ing, breathing person. Not only is Wesley’s father dead, so is Worf’s Klingon birth
father. In Worf’s case a human guardian fills the father’s role, and Worf experi
ences shame at having to acknowledge publicly this overbearing, un-Klingon-Iike
man. For Picard, who presides as father over the Enterprise, the role of his own
late, progress-hating father is filled by his older brother Robert, who blames Jean-
42 As noted above, in Star Trek Generations Picard mourns not only the death of his brother
and nephew, but the end of his family line: Picard’s choice not to sexually reproduce emphasizes
Hugh’s continuing narrative importance.
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285
Luc (as well as his own wife and child) for his inability to escape. Jeremy Kemp’s
pinched, homely face, and his numerous British credits as a heavy, emphasize
Robert’s malevolence. In addition, when Q later introduces Picard to a simulation
of his father in ‘ Tapestry,” Picard’s father does nothing more than rattle off a tirade
upon Picard’s failure as a son. He is little more than a repulsive puppet speaking
with a clipped British accent
It is the failure of this particular father, and Picard’s estrangement from him
which seems most emblematic of Next Generation: Gene Roddenberry may have
strictly controlled the Star Trek franchise, yet over and over again the texts sur
rounding Star Trek reiterates its revival and continued health upon the efforts of the
fans who created a paradigm-changing subculture around a once-dead television se
ries. Like the non-biological link between the “the old show” and its Next Genera
tion, or between Picard and Hugh, Star Trek as a general textual system prides has
created a persuasive myth of independence from the official boundaries represented
by Roddenberry, Next Generation's producers, or Paramount itself. In response,
Next Generation has repeatedly represented the fan, most notably in those episodes
involving Barclay, an introverted character often too caught up in his own Trekker-
like fantasy life, yet capable of saving the day when called upon. Yet it may be Pi
card’s mysterious English nationality which most embodies the difference with
which the series’ has shaped its patriarch.
As a nationality under erasure, this “Englishness” suggests the weight
which may be placed upon nationality to authorize, explicate, and revision a wide
range of social constructions. The dusty, often classist Anglophilia which wraps
around 84 Charing Cross, Masterpiece Theatre, Mystery! and other common
American prostration’s before British culture may deserve its equally common dis
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286
missal in the nationalistic name of homegrown product, particularly in the arena of
public television funding. As civily sly as always, the British seem to be the poor
houseguest many PBS programmers cannot afford to turn out, since their own do
mestic programming often needs the British association with high culture to defend
itself against community protests, congressional interference and corporate conser
vatism. For years Alistair Cooke may have toiled before each episode of Master
piece Theatre to make certain that, indeed, British culture does nothing more than
mildly instruct us upon the better parts of history and literature. Yet British pro
gramming is often what most tests the limits of public television in the US. For ex
ample, WNET and the BBC relocated the setting of David Leavitt’s popular gay
novel The Lost Language of Cranes to London and produced a well-received pro
duction which the series Great Performances scheduled in 1992; even though PBS
planned to air only a sanitized version, minus male nudity and sex scenes, Texaco
still saw fit to end its long-time sponsorship shortly before the air date. Masterpiece
Theatre's Bloomsbury biography Portrait of a Marriage provoked similarly homo-
phobic difficulties, and many affiliate stations chose to air only censored versions, a
practice followed with the popular, rough-talking Prime Suspect series and others.
As a capstone, when Armisted Maupin’s Tales o f the City finally reached PBS in
1994, that gay epic of San Francisco arrived as a Channel Four production filmed
in the US; PBS’ subsequent refusal to heed its high ratings and fund a sequel
prompted a wide-spread media referendum upon the network’s fear of offending
the religious and political right Not only does British nationality mark that which is
most musty and culturally elite, it also marks the border of what can and cannot be
represented, and what can or must be hidden away.43 The meanings of British na
43 Even film titles, such as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and The Pope Must Die have
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287
tionality, then, becomes a formidably complex issue, even within the limited,
seemingly simple context of public television. What may be glimpsed on PBS also
has bearing in the wider, less self-consciously cultural realm of commercial US
television, even, as this chapter has considered, in Masterpiece Theatre's very op
posite, the “nation-less” universe of Star Trek. But however much the never-ending
narrative44 of Star Trek and its fandom might seem to suggest otherwise, there are
other science fiction traditions; the next chapter shall turn to those traditions con
cerned with re-inscribing the Englishness which Star Trek so evocatively erases.
prompted contorted play between what newspapers, video outlets, TV Guide, and cable networks
are willing to print or promote.
44 See Ilsa J. Bick’s discussion of Paramount’s never-ending enterprise, in “Boys in Space:
Star Trek, Latency, and the Neverending Story,” Cinema Journal 35.2 (Winter 1996): 43-60.
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288
CHAPTER 8
The Quatermass Effect
Why do we remember this part, and not the future?
Stephen Hawkings, in A Brief History o f Time (1992)
Do you read science fiction? Well, we’d better start, to catch up on the
facts.
Police inspector, The Quatermass Experiment (BBC 1953)
One difficulty in writing of British science fiction and nationality is that the
former may not exist. Not that British nationality may not be found in science fic
tion, but that British science fiction may not have a meaningful relation to any con
tinuing body of British cultural production. Of course many histories of both Brit
ish and American science fiction pose great problems for this “non-existence” by
referencing H. G. Wells, or, sometimes, Mary Shelley as the genre’s great pro
genitor.1 Time and time again such histories trace American science fiction back to
early issues of Amazing Stories published in the 1920s by Hugo Gemsback, an
editor and writer who proved his admiration for Wells by repeatedly filling his
magazine with Wells’ stories. Thus Wells precedes Gemsback, and if science fic
tion is somehow American, Gemsback nonetheless built upon a British foundation
in the same sense that the United States itself often has drawn upon its British ori
gins, from the Pilgrims to the stage-bound ghosts Angels in America. Fittingly,
1 Him history also provides such a narrative, running through expatriate James Whale’s work
for Universal in the 1930s, Peter Cushing’s renewed Dr. Frankenstein in the 1950s, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show's Dr. Frank ‘N’ Furter in the 1970s, Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital
Thatcher-era satire in the 1980s, and, finally, Kenneth Branagh’s brawny battle against Robert De
Niro’s American monster in Mary Shelley’ s Frankenstein this decade.
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2 8 9
when science fiction’s popularity boomed following the second world war, its poli
cies were patriotic and its masters were the Americans Campbell, Heinlein, and
Asimov. Arthur C. Clarke joined their roster as a barely distinguishable British
anomaly and, for that matter, a soon-to-be expatriate.
Against this backdrop Prof. Bernard Quatermass made his first modest ap
pearances in a series of British television serials and, with a deliberate speed, films,
novelizations, and radio plays, each a notice that larger audiences were adding to
the late 1940s fashionability of science fiction and other non-Mandarin art forms.2
That the BBC would bring itself to broadcast science fiction should not be viewed,
however, as a purely unprecedented move—the BBC had telecast an adaptation of
Karel Capek’s R. U.R. as early as 1937, and had even tried a two season “Stranger
from Space” children’s serial in 1951. But The Quatermass Experiment was the
first time an original science fiction work had been given the attention and resources
usually afforded to more culturally respectable forms. The BBC presented Nigel
Kneale’s serial in 1953, and, as the advent of commercial competition began to
threaten its popular base, gave Kneale full reign to create Quatermass II in 1955 and
Quatermass and the Pit in 1958. Over twenty years later the impossibility of shoot
ing at Stonehenge caused the BBC to withdraw from Kneale’s planned finale for
the series, leaving Quatermass to meet his apocalyptic end not only on a faked site
but on ITV, just as the channel limped back on the air after a 75 day strike. That
The Quatermass Conclusion aired on ITV may have been ironic but it was also fit
ting: although the BBC followed the early Quatermass serials with A Is for An
dromeda, Doctor Who, Doomswatch, Blakes 7, The Hitchhiker’ s Guide to the Gal-
- See Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War 1945-60 (New York: Ox
ford University Press, 1981) 114-115.
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2 90
axy, and Red Dwarf, science fiction provided the ITV’s less high-minded produc
ers with a significant element in their entry into the lucrative American market, and
thus represents a significant element in the exportation history of British television.
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s ITC productions provide the most obvious example.
Building upon their “Supermarionation” puppet series in the sixties, in the seventies
the Andersons re-crafted Stingray and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterions into two
more overtly sexualized and adult live action series. U.F.O. (1970-73) and Space:
1999 (1975-77) employed highly striking set and costume design to fuse science
fiction with British fashion.
These series never fared as well in the US as the earlier puppet projects.
Although both U.F.O. and Space: 1999 still have their fans (their devotion exer
cised electronically through the Internet), neither produced enough episodes for
strip syndication and have most often been reduced to patched together “movies”
under various titles, or to cable programming for Mystery Science Theater 3000 and
the Sci-Fi Channel. In contrast, ITV’s first unqualifiedly successful export, The
Avengers (1961-69), evoked science fiction in a much less overt manner, one
which shared many of the qualities which will be described in concurrent British lit
erary science fiction. The first British series to make an American network’s fall
schedule, The Avengers was already well-established as a stylish, spy and crime
series before it was picked up in the US. However, The Avengers which ABC
bought was not only now shot on film but, starting in 1965, purposefully more
archly “British” in its images and attitudes.3
The interesting twist is that this new, Swinging London-typed Avengers
began to turn the occasionally mad scientist of the past into a weekly staple of lum
3 Dave Rogers, The Avengers (London: ITV Books, 1983) 77.
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bering “Cybemauts,” slapstick mind-transplants, and philodendrons from outer
space. Together with Mrs. Peel’s martial prowess and Steed’s dandyism, the flip
pantly science-fictional seemed to be part of Swinging London’s pastiche of old
English drollery and new Modish permissiveness.
No matter how “swinging,” this pastiche had particularly restrictive ground
rules, and they functioned quite efficiently even as the series strove to titillate with
the new. Emma Peel’s name might be ambiguously derived from the kittenish “Man
Appeal,” so it was claimed (or did this term perhaps describe the character’s ap
pealing “masculine” traits?). She might don kinky dominatrix wear in “A Touch of
Brimstone.” But there were certain considerations to be taken into account in its
portrayal of Swinging London. After all, only a short while earlier the Conservative
government had fallen in the wake of a minister’s involvement with a Miss Chris
tine Keeler, who was, unfortunately, also involved with a Soviet naval attache. But
as the 1980s films Scandal, Personal Services, and The Krays announced quite
loudly, the John Profumo affair symptomatized more than the ruling class’ incon
venient inability to disguise discretely their own private lives. Instead a crisis of
tabloid proportions (proportions which helped to build the strength of today’s Brit
ish tabloids) built and built until Harold Macmillan not only resigned as prime min
ister but retreated into deep depression; as Scandal (1989) illustrates, stories circu
lated of another cabinet minister serving dinner dressed only with a mask, lace
apron, and a card reading, to the effect that, if his services did not please, whip
him. Taking Profumo together with the High Court judges and their orgies, and an
other cabinet member caught in the bushes by the police, the popular discourse sur
rounding British propriety, gentlemanly behavior, and perverse pleasures excelled
both Peel’s “Queen of Sin” leathers and whatever fey panache or dandified flip-
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292
pancy Patrick Macnee gave Steed.4 (Just as Miramax’s distribution of Scandal in
the US exceeded expectations and helped lead to The Crying Game and other Mi
ramax efforts.)
More specifically, what The Avengers quite clearly did not include were the
key elements which finally landed Profumo’s adventures in the papers: Keeler’s
violent relations with a pair of West Indians provided the scandal’s first act in court,
and led to the panicked confessions of her “pimp,” an ambitious, social-climbing
osteopath named Ward. Not only had the ruling class undergone a sort of ritual
(and, in the long run, only discomforting) humiliation, but the nation’s own post
empire difference played a good part in it. Race and class—they were the messy
edges which gave Profumo its (rather than his) continuing significance. Those
edges, however, were exactly those which The Avengers eliminated. The series
reached its popular and creative peak during the tenure of Albert Fennell and Brian
Clemens, originally brought in as an associate producer and story editor during the
transition to film production in 1965; by the time the series had been picked up by
the American ABC network in 1967, Fennell and Clemens were both producers,
and, in Clemens words, the formula sec
We admit to only one class . . . and that is the upper. Be
cause we are a fantasy, we will not show a uniformed po
liceman or a coloured man. And you will not see anything so
common as blood in The Avengers. If we did introduce a
coloured man or a policeman, we would have the yardstick
of social reality and that would make the whole thing quite
ridiculous.5
The peculiarities and paradoxes of The Avengers—heightened traditional
“Britishness” framing an advert for London’s sudden newness, a brash, sardonic
4 See Hugh David, Heroes, Mavericks, and Bounders (London: Michael Joseph, 1991) 254-56.
5 Rogers 77.
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female hero in league with a campy gentleman spy—seldom seem to display any
fear of the ridiculous. Yet as the producers maintained, the measure of the series’
success rested in fearfully omitting what have since become dominant tropes in the
representation of contemporary Britain, race and the police.
Two decades later Channel Four’s The Max Headroom Story followed The
Avengers' path with a crucial difference: Lorimar simply remade the 70 minute
Story as the pilot for a (short-lived) ABC series. Obviously the London Burning
image of the 1980s no longer represented quite the same cultural cachet Swinging
or even, perhaps, Punk London had—the cyberpunk conventions used by both
versions of Max Headroom would seem to pit postmodern multinationalism against
the parochial nationality of The Avengers. Yet the more specific context of 1980s
American television, where Anglophilia still provided a backbone for narrower
public and arts-oriented cable programming, provides a clue to the generally over
looked fascination of the US-made Max Headroom. In a way, this Max Headroom
represents a stripping of The Avengers' export Britishness. The series retained Matt
Frewer, the Canadian actor playing the computer-generated Max and his “real”
counterpart, journalist Edison Carter, yet these characters were no longer expatri
ates in a bloodied Britain titled by a label reading “20 minutes into the future.” Brit
ish nationality remained signified only by the accents of the actors retained to play
Carter’s female partner and an aging, still Mohawk-ed punk named Blank Reg.
“Blank” for his political resistance to computer identification, the character still rep
resents the American series’ most specific tie to any specific here. The Japanese
threaten from Tokyo, but the spatial, geographical dimensions of “20 minutes”
suggest some post-ozone, greenhouse-warmed amalgamation of Los Angeles and
London.
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294
Max Headroom's science fictional elements may be seen as a sort of talis
man against that “yardstick of social reality,” a generic distraction which must be
screened out.6 That science fictionality, however, may also led back to those ques
tions of class and race which Clemens sought to repress; science fiction provides
both television and literary contexts for The Avengers, allowing such a series to es
cape it producer’s narrow view of fantasy’s own “yardstick.” British science fiction
is not always so constrained, and The Avengers hardly represents the full extent of
what The Quatermass Experiment wrought and why it is of continuing significance.
That answer may be better found at the intersection of “authentic” ideals of
nationality with the empirical labyrinths of international production and consump
tion. The Avengers' popularity soon retired to cult status, but as Michael Pilsworth
has pointed out, it was the profits from this and other ITC exports which inspired
the British boom in international co-productions in the 1970s. In what may seem
like an unlikely manner, The Avengers led to The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs, Down
stairs and the continuing wave of corporate-sponsored PBS Anglophilia.7 In the
1990s the continuing avoidance of the policeman and “the coloured man” has been
made rather evident by the thoroughly anomalous contrast of ITV’s popular Prime
Suspect series, strikingly exported to the genteel surroundings of PBS’ Mys
tery/i and then, in 1995, to Masterpiece Theatre, to help revive that series’ aging
audience). Even Quatermass, who once represented the BBC’s attempt to counter
act ITV’s “Americanization,” met his 1979 Conclusion as counterprogramming to
6 For example, see David Buxton’s rather blinkered discussion of The Avengers' Pop context
in his From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990) 96-107.
7 Michael Pilsworth, “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime,” Sight and Sound 49.1 (Winter 1979-
80): 51.
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295
the BBC’s expensive Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a slick, US-sold Le Carre ad
aptation co-produced with Paramount
In nationality as elsewhere, purity may be tempting but difficult to find.
Thomas Elsaesser has recently argued for a distinction between a British “social
imaginary,” produced for the nation itself, and represented primarily by television,
and a British “national imaginary” marketed internationally through often interna
tionally-crafted films. Yet it is hard to hold this distinction in light of the almost
requisite involvement of American public television or studios in all but the cheapest
of British television.8 If the social imaginary is to be posited anywhere, it might
better be found in earlier, domestic-only productions such as the 1950s Quatermass
serials. Even The Quatermass Conclusion uses its opening scenes to present itself
within this discourse, allowing Quatermass an otherwise gratuitous opportunity to
view the symbolism of a US-USSR on a “Skylab 2,” and caustically reject it as the
pathetic actions of a “corrupt democracy” and a no-better dictatorship. A moment
later, Skylab is blown to pieces on live television, and Quatermass gets down to the
narrative’s main business, how an alien force is leading the world, but most par
ticularly post-empire Britain, to destruction.
In a sense The Quatermass Conclusion retells the same story told in each of
the earlier serials: starting with The Quatermass Experiment, an unknown alien
form takes over the body of a returned astronaut; in Quatermass II, it is first a fac
tory and then the British government, and in Quatermass and the Pit, a re-awakened
beacon causes all of London to revert to a murderous, chaotic mass. In The
Quatermass Conclusion, the professor discovers that ancient alien intervention has
8 Thomas Elsaesser, “Images for Sale: The ‘New’ British Cinema,” Fires Were Started: Brit
ish Cinema and Thatcher, 59.
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296
programmed all of humanity to present itself as cattle ready for harvesting. Yet the
earlier Quatermass and the Pit had pushed the paranoia further to present evolution
and humanity itself as an act of alien genetics, which makes the final “wilding” not
possession but a built-in genetic weeding designed to advance our own evolution.
All of this occurs against the combined backdrop of the military’s Cold War take
over of Quatermass’ rocket project and abundant references to race riots, Algeria,
and Angry Young Men. By the time Quatermass cries out “We are the Martians!”
the serial has refigured British nationality as monstrously alien, and redeemable
only through the most cynical sort of repression ethos. The giddy irreverence of
The Avengers' era seems very much like the nervous aftermath of exactly this ear
lier, bitterly revealing awakening.
Into Horror
The Quatermass serials themselves persist mostly as a sort of semi
repressed memory—only the first several episodes of the historic Quatermass Ex
periment escaped the BBC’s past disregard for preservation and remain in archives
today, and only Quatermass and the Pit has gained a video release. It is instead the
films adapted from Nigel Kneale’s creations which are more often recalled today, in
large part because of their unprecedented American success and the dramatic impe
tus which they gave to the subsequent, even more profitable gothic horror films:
from out of the financial loins of The Quatermass Experiment's filmed adaptation
(1955) came The Curse of Frankenstein (1956), Dracula (1958), and so on. Not
that Quatermass remained totally forgotten: as popular culture guru Clive James
noted in 1979, Quatermass’ British fan culture had persisted in the years between
the film version of Quatermass and the Pit and The Quatermass Conclusion.
Unless there are universities offering post-graduate courses
in Quatermass Studies, which I suppose is perfectly possi-
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297
ble, most of these savants must have given up all other pur
suits and settled down to full time Quatermass research.9
On the other hand, James’ remarks had followed the response generated by his own
negative characterization of The Quatermass Conclusion as having been made by
“good people slumming.”1 0 Good people such as, presumably, the prolific and
powerful producer Verity Lambert (the woman also responsible, James might have
noticed, for Doctor Who), and the equally prolific Nigel Kneale, an author also re
sponsible for a significant portion of the television projects which British television
undertook following the Quatermass projects, from The Creature (1955) to The
Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) to The Stone Tape (1972).
Kneale also followed Quatermass with the screenplays for John Osbourne’s
Look Back in Anger (1957) and The Entertainer (1959), providing a tidy triangular
link between the Quatermass serials and these quintessential Angry Young Men
plays, as well as the advocacy of literary science fiction by “Angry” authors such as
Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis. But as a marker Quatermass usually only signi
fies the gateway to what has been seen as a much more profitable realm, British
horror, or, as it is often abbreviated, Hammer, a small studio which was located in
Bray but which seemed often to encompass horror’s entirety. In the words of
Christine Gledhill, there, in the studio’s singular output was what the BFI of the
late seventies recognized to be “perhaps the only native staple genre.”11 American
filmmakers such as John Landis (An American Werewolf in London, 1981) and
Tobe Hopper (Lifeforce, 1985) may have produced the most familiar recognitions
9 Clive James, “Sorry, Quaterfans!” The Observer 4 Nov. 1979 (BFI clipping file).
10 Clive James, “Monster’s Return,” The Observer 28 Oct. 1979 (BFI clipping file).
11 Communication concerning David Pine’s Hammer: A Cinema Case Study (London: BFI
Education, 1980). Quoted in Little Shoppe of Horrors, 4 (April 1978) 91.
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298
of this “genre”’s distinctive Englishness, but British television also produced
memorable continuations of the Hammer approach. The Andersons’ U.F.O. easily
suggested a stylish gloss upon all of this by presenting a suburban British film stu
dio which serves as the unknowing cover for an anti-alien invasion command center
hidden in the basement. While something like Frankenstein Created Woman no
doubt continues in production above, the studio’s mod American chief is mean
while hard at work directing a secret British army of sweaty submarine crews in
see-through mesh uniforms beneath the sea, and receptionists in purple wigs and
silver lame on the moon: late Swinging London filtered through Hammer’s coolly
sexualized paradox of English emotional reserve and visceral bodily excess—the
same combination An American Werewolf in London used to push its lupine narra
tive to equally campy lengths of decorum and gore.
But for most purposes horror as well as science fiction have been hidden
away in U.F.O.'s basement, film histories missing even from Nowell-Smith’s
American film as Britain’s “hidden history.” At the same time as Nowell-Smith
wrote, Screen introduced a national film culture issue with the polemical claim that
persistent associations between British film and “documentary realism” still worked
to assure that films such as Black Narcissus or Hammer’s Dracula remained largely
unnoticed.12 David Pirie’s work on gothic horror had done much already to dis
prove this assertion, just as current attention given to Powell and Pressburger and
the Pirie-inspired work of Robert Murphy, Peter Hutchings and others do much to
disprove it today.1 3 Nevertheless, by strategically marginalizing science fiction in
12 Andrew Higson and Steve Neale, “Introduction: Components of the National Film Cul
ture ” Screen 26.1 (1985): 6.
13 David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (London: Gor
don Fraser, 1973); Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992); and Peter Hutch
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299
order to privilege horror, these authors do not fully answer Screen's charge that
criticism is “still orienting itself by a map of British cinema drawn up many years
ago.”14 For example, even though Marcia Landy’s thorough British Genres: Cin
ema and Society, 1930-1960 titles a chapter “Horror and Science Fiction,” a simple
browsing of subheadings will confirm that the chapter follows the same pattern as
Pine’s and Hutchings’ works on horror—that is, post-war science fiction, most
specifically represented by Quatermass, disappears almost seamlessly into the his
tory of horror.
More so than British horror film, science fiction escapes the media insularity
which give coherence to film histories such as Landy’s and Pirie’s. British science
fiction confuses their neatly mapped boundaries—like the later era of Channel Four
“film” production, British science fiction disrespects the divisions between televi
sion, film, and other media Landy and Pirie are not alone in ignoring these trouble
some borders: John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s excellent study of Doctor Who
oddly excludes the two film versions produced in the mid 1960s, and Brian Aldiss’
otherwise exhaustive survey of science fiction literature refers to the influence of the
“Quatermass school” without comment or explanation.1 5
What is lost in such omissions is a rich tradition encompassing not only The
Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass 11 (1956) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967),
but a varied and neglected list of films including the Quatermass-influenced The
ings. Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester and New York: Manchester Uni
versity Press, 1993).
14 Higson and Neale 6.
15 John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1983); Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New
York: Atheneum, 1986)442.
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300
Strange World o f Planet X, X, the Unknown and The Trollenberg Terror films of
the 1950s, as well as Village o f the Damned, The Day o f the Triffids, The Damned,
and the other John Wyndham adapted or inspired projects which then followed.
Much more widely discussed, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and The Man Who Fell
to Earth quite often remain insulated not only from questions of the their compli
cated British identities but from their relation to British science fiction. In this
sense, Quatermass’ effect upon horror silenced a range of other possibilities. To ar
gue the contrary, Quatermass may be seen to symptomize a discourse encompass
ing British television, film and literature, one which is intricately imbricated with
the conflicts of Americanization and the task of re-constructing a post-empire ap
proach to nation-ness.
A small studio releasing a variety of product, including cheap film adapta
tions from radio, Hammer gained an American distribution deal with Fox in 1951
and began to feature more and more American leads. Although other small studios
had already filmed versions of television titles, such as Nettlefold’s The Broken
Horseshoe (1953), Hammer waited until it received the rights to The Quatermass
Experiment. In A Heritage of Horror, David Pirie gives full dramatic dress to the
salvation and transformation provided for Hammer, celebrating the precise timing
of Quatermass' unexpected success just as Fox withdrew its support and it became
clear, industry-wide, that “it was no longer possible for any company to survive
simply on a diet of second features or the imitation of American formulae.”1 6 Yet in
a sense Hammer did just that, producing what United Artists could re-title as The
16 Pirie 27.
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301
Creeping Unknown, place on a science fiction double bill and use to collect an im
pressive reported gross of $3 million.1 7
Less effusively, Hutchings points to the era’s declining cinema attendance
figures and increasingly fragmented audiences to underline the importance of
Hammer’s choices at the time of Quatermass, which the studio marketed as The
Quatermass Xperiment in order to capitalize on the film’s “adults only” X certifi
cate.18 Apparently the only other British feature to have been given the X certificate
was a crime film titled Cosh Boy (Joan Collins’ first film) two years earlier. This
scarcity allowed The Quatermass Experiment and the X to be soon linked with one
another, as a sign for, among other things, the importance of new “non-family”
audiences. Hammer quickly released its next science fiction film as X, the Un
known (1956), and by the end of the decade other companies had responded by
adapting the ITV serials The Strange World o f Planet X and The Trollenberg Terror
(both 1958) into X-certificated films. But with the greater subsequent popularity of
The Curse o f Frankenstein (1956) and Dracula (1958), the X became the stamp of
initiation into horror for devotees such as Andrew Tudor, who marks the origins of
his horror study as the time he sneaked in, underage, to see The Quatermass Ex
periment. 1 9
Yet while Hammer cast their British revisions of Universal’s horror cycle
with English leads, they cast the American-accented Brian Donlevy as Quatermass
in both The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass II, and the performances he
17 See Robert Marrero, Horrors of Hammer (Key West, Florida: RGM Publications, 1984)
11. This figure is a fam iliar but questionable part of Hammer lore.
18 Hutchings 38.
19 Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History o f the Horror Movie
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1989) vii.
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gave helped to transform the character from a humanitarian gentleman professor to
something very different Much like his memorably stiff gangster in The Big
Combo (also 1955), Donlevy’s Quatermass conveys a dramatically cold pragma
tism which conveys very little compassion for the human casualties of his space
flight, and even less for the astronaut who becomes mysteriously transfigured.
Reginald Tate’s original television Quatermass had even convinced the astronaut to
come to his sense and take the honorable way out, but the film has Quatermass
oversee the creature’s electrocution and then stride out into the night, showing no
remorse and vowing the begin the entire space exploration experiment again. That
the Irish-American Donlevy delivers his entire performance in a clearly non-”mid-
Atlantic” accent emphasizes how the film capitalizes upon the banal commercial ad
vantage of an American lead to code both its story of Britain’s entry into space ex
ploration, and, with the film’s success, into the American science fiction film mar
ket. Quatermass, as an American, controls both of these aspects of the film’s sci
ence fiction discourse, while those around him react, literally, “in horror.”
Considered in these respects, it would seem reasonable to accept the filmed
Quatermass Experiment as gesture of Americanization which became re-routed into
the “native” horror genre. Such a conclusion remains less tenable, however, when
the film’s context is widened from that of film to not only television but to the pro
ductions of science fiction literature. There Quatermass has a place somewhat dif
ferent than the one assigned to it within the maps dominated by Hammer.
Yet Quatermass’ position at the crux of television and film practice also be
speaks the vulnerable borders which have given each its often precarious critical
cohesion, meaning that Quatermass presents a paradigm not easily located upon
many maps of British film or television, nor, even more crucially, within the schol-
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303
arship concerned with science fiction literature. There Quatermass’ presence may
seem as relatively slight and ghost-like as Wells’ Invisible Man, which gives
Quatermass an effect evocative of the discourse surrounding British science fiction
literature, its relation to US science fiction and to Americanization, and to the read
ing of British identity itself as a science fictional zone. The path thus suggested is
therefore circuitous, leading from the history of Quatermass’ appearance to British
science fiction literature and its theory until, once again, Quatermass is arrived at
and the way to the zone of science fiction more clear.
From Science Fiction to Speculative Fiction
Shortly before Quatermass’ first television appearance, the selling of science
fiction to the British began to alter what had been the one-way-only pulp flow from
the US. John Wyndham in particular turned from his own previous Campbell-
Heinlein-Asimov synthesis to what has been called a more British sensibility and,
as a consequence or not, suddenly found unexpected mainstream success. His The
Day of the Triffids (1951) produced a model of monsters unmatched in popularity
until Doctor Who's Daleks, and while the US fought off the bug-eyed monsters of
the Cold War, Britain curled up with its affinity for the “I’d rather not know where
they came from” drollery of what has been called the “cosy catastrophe.”20 As the
Quatermass and the Pit serial demonstrated, by the end of the 1950s the cozy catas
trophe seemed to have internalized Suez and the Angry Young Men. As one effect,
British science fiction, or speculative fiction, began to gather a New Wave for itself
around the revitalized New Worlds publication. There the work of J. G. Ballard,
Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, the magazine’s editor, and others even began
20 See Aldiss 252-254.
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3 0 4
to attract American writers such as Samuel Delaney and Thomas Disch to a new,
well-publicized “England Swings SF.”2 1 Ballard in particular found the cozy catas
trophe particularly rewarding in his early novels, which sent protagonist after pro
tagonist to psychedelic transcendence amidst mysterious worldwide transforma
tions.
But as with the other facets of Swinging London, New Wave SF ran
aground sometime in the early 1970s, and since then British science fiction has ar
guably had little impact again either at home or in the US, despite the efforts of the
magazine Interzone and occasionally revivals of New Worlds. Beyond the tradi
tional limits of science fiction publishing could be found a different story: DC
Comics became home for Watchmen's Alan Moore, The Sandman's Neil Gaiman,
and the other Brits collected in the company’s Vertigo insert. But otherwise William
Gibson’s cyberpunk boom mostly passed Britain by, even as Gibson set British
nationality to play in Mona Lisa Overdrive, the concluding installment of his
Neuromancer trilogy. In the novel, a young Japanese woman named Kumiko
makes her way in a post-post-empire London with the help of a computer “biochip”
programmed to communicate through a holographic construct Named Colin, the
construct appears as a hyped-up caricature drawn in breeches and riding boots from
“some faded hunting print,” even though he speaks in the urban rhythms more as
sociated with Hanif Kureishi’s London.22 By the time Mona Lisa Overdrive con
cludes, Colin is no longer a mere tourist guide but has attained sentience and is
21 See Judith Merril, ed., England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (New York:
Ace Books, 1968).
22 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988) 3; Neuromancer (New
York: Ace Books, 1984); Count Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1986).
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305
calmly turning his attention to Centauri and new, unknown AI empires in outer
space.23
Yet despite—or perhaps because of—the punk in cyberpunk, it is difficult
in Gibson’s work to find British nationality in any deliberate, lived sense. It is in
stead more a metaphorical space to be contrasted with its Japanese, American and
Third World counterparts. The British culture Colin “translates” for Kumiko is
more of what Brian McHale and Scott Bukatman describe as a zone, a trope found
repeatedly in such influential postmodern science fictions as Targovsky’s Stalker,
Pynchon’s Gravity’ s Rainbow, Godard’s Alphaville and a host of others.24 In
London’s case, Bukatman’s Terminal Identities finds that Moorcock mapped its
zone in his New Worlds-era Jerry Cornelius novels,25 works which may fit the
swinging stereotype but in their entropic, gender-tripping ways also encompass the
later Burning Londons of the Sex Pistols and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.26 While
in terms of affect there may be a universe of difference between Quatermass’ horror
that “We are the Martians!” and “Anarchy in the UK,” both share a similar geo
graphical location in the zone.
For Americans viewing contemporary film, this London can come to re
semble the zone of Targovsky’s film: Michael Leigh’s Naked prompted a journalist
writing for an American publication to assert that while she still loves the England
preserved in earlier films, the Thatcher era has produced depictions of working and
23 Gibson 308.
24 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) 49-50, quoted in Scott
Bukatman, Terminal Identities: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1993) 163.
25 Bukatman 168.
26 For example, see Michael Moorcock, The Final Programme (London: Alison & Busby,
1969).
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306
middle class London endlessly filled with “dark streets in the rain, the cramped
gloomy houses, the sagging, creaky beds, the nightmarish linoleum, the rats, the
telly, the squalid marriages, the incest, the bored violence, the bad teeth . . . .”27
The list goes on, and simply through its excess suggests that the objectionable
quality may not be the films’ realism but their excessive, almost gleeful detail. That
excess is what links the Jerry Cornelius’ novels’ Pop Art plenitude with the non
chalant pleasure Sammy and Rosie Get Laid took in representing police brutality
and urban riots. In a sense the map of British film Screen decried has existed pre
cisely in order to exclude this landscape—as Sean Cubitt observed about British
film’s selective memory, “Monsters and aliens play at the edge of culture, but in
creasingly also at its heart gremlins and cuckoos in the nest.”28
Queer Zones
Thomas Elsaesser also suggested something similar to this image of Eng
land as a zone when he examined the New British Cinema several years ago in an
essay titled “Games of Love and Death, Or an Englishman’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
Citing “a loose and as yet not very well defined cycle” encompassing the films
Drowning by Numbers, Hope and Glory, and Distant Voices Still Lives, as well as
the television serial The Singing Detective, Elsaesser found that
A heightened, emblematic or dream-like realism has ap
peared, for which the implements, objects, customs, the vis
ual (and often musical) remnants of a bygone culture have
become the icons of subjectivity, allowing these films to
move into the area of male fantasy and anxiety in ways per
haps comparable to the function of the New Gothic (from
Angela Carter to Fay Weldon) has had for women.29
27 Marcelle Clements, “Broken English,” Premiere February 1994:44.
28 Sean Cubitt, “Introduction: Over the Borderlines,” Screen 30.4 (1989): 3-4.
29 Thomas Elsaesser, “Games of Love and Death, Or an Englishman’s Guide to the Galaxy,”
Monthly Film Bulletin 55.657 (1988): 291.
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3 0 7
Selling an image abroad of England burnished both with the fantastic and with post
empire decay, these films may show little grime but they are films from the zone
nonetheless. They are all the more evocative, Elsaesser points out, because “some
powerful unifying fantasy seems to be at work, which the non-linear narratives . . .
can explore without naming it outright.”30
Elsaesser allows that it “may have to do with male narcissism, and with the
possibilities of identification across both gender and generation,” but an array of
additional British titles stand ready to crowd onto his list.31 From Peter
Greenaway’s The Falls (1980), with its body-mutating Unidentified Violent Event,
there is surprisingly little distance to Sally Potter’s sex-swapping Orlando (1993), a
self-knowing summation of the fantastic elements framing Isaac Julien’s Looking
for Langston (1989) and his short museum sex fantasy, The Attendant (1993).
Here, too, are almost all of Derek Jarman's films, and a good long line of other
Powell and Pressburger-indebted works as well (A Matter of Life and Death, 1946,
in particular). More recognizable science fiction has also occasionally been found in
the decade’s film out put, in Hardware (1990) and Split Second (1992), and even in
ostensible horror films such as Dust Devil (1993) or vaguely futuristic thrillers like
Shopping (1994). Welcome II the Terrordome (1995) adapted Public Enemy’s
landmark rap album as a science fiction-framed manifesto for Black British nation
alism.
Clive Barker’s Underworld (1985) and his later Hellraiser series (1987,
1988, 1992, and 1996) give visceral attention to the body, what Bukatman calls
30 Elsaesser 292.
31 Elsaesser 292.
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“the long . . . repressed content of science fiction.”32 Barker’s own well-
established status as a gay horror novelist, graphic artist, and filmmaker fits
smoothly into Elsaesser’s considerations: beyond their narrative elements of trans
formation and the perverse pleasures of degradation, his works have developed a
visual iconography which draws heavily upon sadomasochistic (SM) practices,
punk and gothic fashion, and the general tropes of cyberpunk’s eroticization of
technology. Characters such as Pinhead and the other leather-clad, flayed-flesh de
mons Hellraiser summoned may have seemed utterly fantastic in 1987, but as
piercing and body modification has entered the mainstream (as discussed in the
fourth chapter of this section), it has become clearer that “some powerful unifying
fantasy” does indeed seem to be at work. Although the Hellraiser series has been
financed through the American Orion and Miramax/Dimension, Barker has publicly
lamented that Hammer no longer existed to give his projects a British home.33 But
the Hellraiser series bridged the Atlantic in an interesting manner, the third entry,
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), shifted its location to the US at the same time it
introduced a World War II backstory for Pinhead’s demonic identity. Pinhead’s
perverse, omnisexual desire to penetrate his own and other’s flesh grew out of the
fantasies of a polite, decorous English officer and gentleman. On the one hand, the
film presents a typical English narrative of perverse repressions, while on the other,
the film graphically sketches an American landscape where nightclubs and artworks
routinely reproduce those fantasies as titillating entertainment (Once this British-to-
American transition was in place, the series’ fourth installment, Hellraiser: Blood-
32 Bukatman 19.
33 G ive Barker, (profile). The South Bank Show, Channel 4, cablecast by Bravo, Fall, 1995.
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line, 1996, moved toward the explicit generic grounds of science fiction: Pinhead in
outer space.)
Rims such as this largely routine horror sequel only add to a general genre-
blurring queemess to the nationality rehearsed in Orlando as well as the original
Hellraiser, a quality which “queer” aptly helps to locate. In a an essay Screen pub
lished concurrently with Julien’s remarks, Ellis Hanson gave an instructive defini
tion of the term as it informed his reading of “the queer voice”:
By “queer,” I mean the odd, the uncanny, the undecidable. But more im-
portandy, I refer to “queer” sexuality, that no-man’s land beyond the het
erosexual norm, that categorical domain virtually synonymous with homo
sexuality and yet wonderfully suggestive of a whole range of sexual possi
bilities (deemed perverse or deviant in classical psychoanalysis) that chal
lenge the familiar distinctions between normal and pathological, straight and
gay, masculine men and feminine women.34
Is the unnamed fantasy fascinating Elsaesser possibly found in this “no-man’s
land,” this queer zone? To reveal the fantasy as male homosexuality would miss the
point of Julien’s irony and Hanson’s theoretical dependence upon the uncanny; to
locate Britain as the Gay Isle (or Barker’s SM dungeon) would both be an absurdly
essentializing notion and a gross display of Thatcher-era, Section 28 ignorance. Yet
to deny that Britain has allowed a certain self-construction as a queer zone would
also fly in the face of the British audiences who in 1993 tuned into Channel Four’s
“Xmas in New York” specials hosted by RuPaul and Melissa Etheridge, and
capped off with expatriate Quentin Crisp’s parodic “Alternative Queen’s Message.”
34 Ellis Hanson, ‘Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34.2 (Summer 1983):
137-138.
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It may simply be that, as those Christmas specials also suggested, that British cul
ture has allowed for a zone in which the mid-Atlantic frottage of America and Brit
ain takes on a certain queer and fantastic glow.
British Science Fiction?
Elsaesser finds a male fantasy hidden away in recent British films he de
scribes, a curiously peripheral vision of a certain queemess. Nicholas Ruddick lo
cates a similar realm of “male fantasy and anxiety” in the opposition between post
war American pulp science fiction and New World's defection to literary values and
the rhetorical conversion of science fiction into speculative fiction.35 Concentrating
upon “inner space” and impatient with science and technology, the SF associated
with New Worlds escapes the generic conditions established by American science
fiction. Ruddick goes further and, drawing upon Brian Stableford’s “scientific ro
mance” work, argues that British science fiction as a genre existed only during the
immediate post-war period, and includes the Perelandra trilogy of C. S. Lewis,
1984, and, among others, John Wyndham’s novels beginning with the highly
popular The Day o f the Triffids (1951). “British science fiction” thus creates a di
vide: before belongs to Wells’ scientific romances, and after comes the speculative
fiction associated with New Worlds. Today may be found a lessening output indis
tinguishable from its American parallel—what Ruddick dismisses as a British-made
version of an international product Meanwhile, the remnants of speculative fiction
have escaped into other genres such as the New Gothic novels of Carter and Wel
don which Elsaesser cites.36 Viewed in film and television adaptations such as The
35 Nicholas Ruddick, Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood, 1993) 9-10.
36 Elsaesser 12-5.
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Company o f Wolves, The Magic Toyshop, The Ufe and Loves o f a She-Devil, The
Cloning o f Johanna May, and The Young Poisoner's Handbook, these New Gothic
works of the 1980s and 1990s bridge Elsaesser’s observations to the final turn of
Ruddick’s purely literary argument, that while British science fiction may not now
exist as a genre, its influence is widespread as a field, or in his more general terms,
as a discourse.37
But perhaps there should be something rather curious and perhaps rather
familiar about British science fiction’s generic “escape” into the New Gothic. Wel
don’s remarkable Life and Loves of a She-Devil and its 1987 television adaptation
rewrote Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—or, more precisely, Whale’s The Bride o f
Frankenstein—with a sure revisionist power. That the intertextual relation is with
Frankenstein evokes the importance some British science fiction historians have
placed upon the work as the textual progenitor of not only horror but science fiction
as well. Yet filmgoers who saw only the Americanized film, Susan Seidelman’s
She Devil (1991), the novel and television serial’s final, most spectacular turn, the
vengeful protagonist’s fantastical surgical reconstruction according to a dainty
model of bland beauty. Only the gothic elements remained. Like the earlier, fully re-
figured She Devil, the film’s own structural reconstruction produced a final product
in which the technological transformation of the body cannot be guessed at, and the
narrative’s relation to Frankenstein disappears. But more importantly here, com
parison of either the television or novel version of the work with the subsequent
film allows an isolation of Frankenstein’s own science fictional fission of flesh and
technology, and Weldon’s own darkly comic reappropriation of it for feminist re
venge. It is in that turn that Weldon does “for women” (as Elsaesser guessed) what
37 Ruddick 15-
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postmodern science fiction has done in Shelley’s male terms: this New Gothic
brings the body forward from horror and contemplates its corporeal relations to
technology and to subjectivity.
Quatermass’ Effects
Bukatman’s Terminal Identities chooses to situate this paradigmatic shift
between horror and science fiction in Alien's hybridization of the two, allowing him
to claim that since that 1979 film the genre “hasn’t been the same.”38 Bukatman’s
argument might be rephrased to instead stress that Alien represents the moment at
which “the repressed content of science fiction,” the body, might be brought for
ward and still allow the discourse of science fiction to be identified. It is also a mo
ment which Quatermass participated in, bringing the body forward in a hysterical
gesture of national doubt that still sounded through the Sex Pistols chanted insis
tence “there is no future in England’s dreaming, no future, no future, no future.”39
Perversely enough, that lack is one reason why British identity may so strongly
evoke a science fictional zone of dystopic and queer desires, of cozy catastrophes.
But while this zone may be home to Quatermass, Johnny Rotten, and the British
She Devil, it may bear little recognizability to the English couple shopping Saturday
morning in Camden Town; this zone may be as fantastic to them as Donna
Haraway’s claim that we are all becoming cyborgs.
The novel from which Stalker was adapted, the Strugatsky brothers’ Road
side Picnic, works to expand upon the artificiality of the zone as a trope: aliens visit
the Earth, apparently leaving behind both their litter and large contaminated areas,
38 Bukatman 267.
39 The Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen,” Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’ s the Sex Pistols,
compact disc, 1977.
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thus setting the stage for humans to venture in to retrieve the zones’ potentially
valuable but unknown objects. In the end the novel reveals that the zones are not
natural occurrences but are instead part of an experiment to test those who enter.40
Zones in McHale’s and Bukatman’s science fictional usage may also be seen as
constructs which may make use of British nationality similar to but even more tenu
ous than, for example, Homi Bhabha’s perfomative sense of nation-ness through a
people’s social and textual affiliation 41 Other possible “zones,” such as the Eng7
land nostalgically imagined in Merchant Ivory productions, may have no more vi
able claims to authenticity, but the zone created through British SF has the virtue of
not being able to make claims to seamless and natural homogeneity. Like the zones
created by the aliens’ “roadside picnic,” this SF zone works among the uncanny di
vides of cultural difference, dramatizing the dissolution of that very same “lost”
homogeneity. In Bhabha’s account, cultural difference emerges from “the border
line moment of translation,”42 which for British science fiction has mapped its
boundaries with the American form it preceded, derived from, and to which it re
peatedly returns crying “We are the Martians!”
40 Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic and Tale of the Troika, trans. Antonina W.
Bouis (New York : Pocket Books, 1977).
It is interesting to note that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 has brought the images of
Roadside Picnic and Stalker to life in what was once the Soviet Union: an area of approximately
800 square miles in southern Belarus, radiadon contamination has created an officially uninhabited
“Estrangement Zone,” or just “the Zone,” for short Yet some residents have returned to the deadly
area, creadng a strangely post-technological community bereft of a future and poisoned by a past
they barely understand. See Masha Gessen, ‘The Day After Technology,” Wired March 1996,143,
and in passing.
41 Homi Bhabha, "DissemiNadon: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modem Nation,”
Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London and New York: Roudedge, 1991) 292.
42 Bhabha 314.
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314
CHAPTER 9
Plastic Soul
“Whadda you think of fag-rock?”
He gets a worried look. “Do you think this is going to be wide
spread?
“Sure! David Bowie, Lou Reed, all those guys at the top of the
charts, the queers are taking over the country!”
Lester Bangs, “Screwing the System With Dick Clark” 1
If The Crying Game's American success remains one of British film his
tory’s happier moments, then Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991), released
just one year earlier amidst higher hopes, must be added to that long list of blighted
British good ideas. (Absolute Beginners, 1986, is there.) In a sense, however,
Young Soul Rebels cannot even make that list. After a brief, abbreviated American
theatrical release, this cultural-studies-illustrated story of 1977 London remains
buried in Miramax’s vault. What the film should have been, however, Julien and
executive producer Colin MacCabe made clear in the extensive British publicity the
film attracted, and in the filmmakers’ diary they published: a crossing over, a cul
mination, a justification, as well as a soundly stinging no to the theory and assump
tions of the pre-Thatcher British left The film’s story, concerning the collision
between African-American popular music and punk rock at the time of Queen Eliza
beth II’s Jubilee, was built to carry with it the somewhat faded subtext of British
film theory and criticism.
1 Lester Bangs, “Screwing the System With Dick Clark,” Cream, November 1973, reprinted
in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Random House, 1987) 137.
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3 1 5
MacCabe, once a highly visible representative of the British film journal
Screen's 1970s articulation of post-structuralism, and Julien, a 1980s star of both
Screen's revisionist, post-colonial chorus, and Sankofa’s film workshop produc
tions, were poised to construct a mainstream bridge; it would span between the
combined body of these two areas and eras, and the more or less limited market ap
peal of MacCabe’s projects while the BFI’s Head of Production during the late
1980s (such as Carvaggio, Distant Voices Still Lives, and Peter Wollen’s Friend
ship’ s Death). However anathema to the 1970s distrust of narrative’s pleasure
(MacCabe used terms such as “seduced” and “dismal” to describe that time’s Len
inist agenda and politicized aesthetics), MacCabe and Julien hoped to make Young
Soul Rebels a deliberately conventional variation upon the thriller. The film implic
itly rejects Screen's former critique of Hollywood forms, even while it embodies
the political lessons of that time.2 Yet MacCabe’s portions repeatedly return to
Screen and its 1970s vocabulary, whether bringing in Brecht’s contradictions in
“Organum for the Theatre” to justify making a “movie,” to placing the Spring,
1975, cover of Screen next to a discussion of film authorship and the author.3
The title of the film’s making-of book also told a story: Diary o f a Young
Soul Rebel. Not only would the film document the collision between African-
American popular music and punk rock at the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee,
it would contextualize the critical and film work of a grown-up member of that pe
riod’s pleasures and conflicts, Julien himself—and by extension, MacCabe, and
perhaps even the 1970s Screen “rebels” themselves. Julien’s previous success, his
Langston Hughes’ meditation, Looking for Langston (1988), had also gazed across
2 Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe, Diary o f a Young Soul Rebel (London: BFI, 1991) 12.
3 Julien and MacCabe 12,47.
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316
the Atlantic in order to study the representation of black diaspora masculinity, sexu
ality, and desire. But while Looking for Langston looked to Hughes, poet Essex
Hemphill, and Robert Mapplethorpe in order to understand British black gay iden
tity, Young Soul Rebels turned to a portion of British history still within the pur
view of MTV. Like My Beautiful Laundrette (in fact, the white punk of Julien’s
film drew “the Daniel Day Lewis character” label during production), Young Soul
Rebels drew upon the history of punk and sought to re-tell that history according to
the racial and sexual complexities stressed in works like Hebdige’s Subculture.
Caz, a young, gay black soul fan, runs a pirate radio station with his best mate,
Chris, a mixed race “soul boy” who may be straight, but, dressed in pierced ears,
tight, dandified clothing of the time, comes closer to the visual gay stereotype. Over
the course of the film, Caz becomes involved with Billibud, a white, Socialist
Worker-identified punk (with a taste for pricy Vivienne Westwood T-shirts), and
Chris takes up with an upwardly mobile black woman employed in the tightly con
trolled and inhospitable world of legitimate radio broadcasting; the narrative prob
lem of the film is Ken, a 30-ish white man who first solicits sex in a park with a
black man, and then murders him in the same spot Caz and Billibud later begin to
make love.
But as Stuart Hall noted in a Sight and Sound discussion of the film’s many
strengths, the real narrative problem of Young Soul Rebels was not Ken, nor the
film’s casually-executed thriller elements, but the very juxtaposition of race and
sexuality which My Beautiful Launderette had successfully played off of the decade
before. “Seeing Young Soul Rebels at a special NFT [National Rim Theatre]
screening may lead us to underestimate how transgressive a film it is,” Hall ob
served:
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317
Even at the preview, a section of the sympathetic black audi
ence hissed the homosexual love scenes. I can imagine a
young white audience, that loves the music, doing the
same.4
Young Soul Rebels' American release fulfilled Hall’s prophesy, opening with a
campaign which Miramax aimed at dominantly gay, rather than general African-
American or other audiences, and produced few signs of The Crying Game's later
ability to draw general audiences to its “secret” gay black British narrative. In a
sense, My Beautiful Laundrette had followed that strategy as well. Like Dil’s reve
lation as a man, the earlier film’s singular, defining moment arrives as a similar
surprise—Johnny pulls Omar into the shadows, the former National Front member
and English son of a Pakistani kiss, and suddenly everything is different. The film
therefore has a narrative excuse for maintaining its own closet-like mystery. Young
Soul Rebels allows no surprises, offering instead the everyday identity of gay and
straight, lines which both respect and obey, however reluctantly it may seem at
times.
By representing punk almost solely in the form of the gay Billibud (whom
Caz follows Melville and calls his “golden boy”), Young Soul Rebels leaves behind
Hebridge’s token nods at gay and lesbian involvement, and even surpasses Jon
Savage’s emphasis upon homosexuality both as an inspiration and context, and the
defining problem of punk. Quoting a participant’s claim that punk had to disavow
homosexuality because “gay people made up most of the audience,” Savage’s Eng
land’ s Dreaming stresses the changes made as punk moved toward rock and com-
4 Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Homi Bhabha, “Threatening Pleasures,” Sight and Sound
August 1991: 19.
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318
mercial acceptance in the US.5 Just as “punk” lost its gay slang meaning (to de
scribe the younger sexual partner of an older man), so did punk as a subculture
loose its semiotic connections to gay subcultures. The Sex Pistols’ early pan
sexuality
. . . would quickly go sour. The group’s link with the sub
terranean sexual world would be conveniently forgotten once
the music they played became part of the music industry and
once the people that actively supported them and contributed
to the package mere “fans.” Once defined, the Sex Pistols
became a Rock band and Rock bands are not usually tolerant
of homosexuality, either in their music or in the way they are
treated by the media.6
Young Soul Rebels represents soul and disco, more typically cast as gay, equally in
terms of Caz’s and Chris’ different identities and attractions; one of the film’s most
interesting aspects is its emphasis upon the male heterosexual involvement in what
now seems like “gay” 1970s fashions. But by dressing Billibud in Westwood’s
most familiar Tom of Finland T-shirt, screened with two friendly, nude-from-the-
waist-down cowboys, the connotation of the appropriated transgressive imagery is
no longer as “curiously asexual” in effect as Savage found it7; when Billibud and
Caz finally face each other and begin to make love, Westwood’s blankly ironic
quotation marks disappear into Tom of Finland’s hyperbolic lust. Young Soul Reb
els instead takes the rather less usual track of almost wholesale conversion of punk
to signs of gay desire—in one delirious moment, two male punks kiss in the middle
of a crowded club. Cast with Derek Jarman regulars (from The Garden, just a year
before), these two make out while every mixture of race and sex dance around them
in anarchic combinations.
5 Jon Savage, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) 139.
6 Savage 183,190.
7 Savage 100-1.
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319
With the crucial addition of race, Julien’s film attempted, on a larger, more
Iushly budgeted scale, what Jarman had tried with Jubilee, a 1977 project he later
recognized as a prophecy but at the time thought of as a fantasy.8 Within a science
fiction framing devise, the first Queen Elizabeth time travels to her predecessor’s
1977 kingdom. Against the disarmingly serious, high culture pretentious and nos
talgia of the Elizabethan dialogue and costumes, the film bashes the assumptions of
the official Jubilee: against a burning London Jarman would return to again in The
Last o f England {1987), Adam Ant models bondage wear, National Front thugs
menace, and Ian Charleson bares all in the film’s gay punk romance subplot. But
besides the pleasure of the later Chariots o f File-star's up-front sex scenes, Jubi
lee's seriousness resides in the performance of another celebrity, Jordon, the film’s
anti-hero. This early punk icon played a version of herself in sweater and pearls,
pouring tea, and quoting lines from The Rocky Horror Show still familiar to its cur
rent generation of fans in the US. “Don’t dream it, be it,” she grimly intones, but
the dream she plots leads finally to a punk reborn in a transfigured “Rule Britan
nia,” clearly pointing to her rising physical twin, Margaret Thatcher.
From a cynical perspective, that dream seems to represent at least some part
of the three decade tradition surrounding The Rocky Horror Show's 1975 film ad
aptation: gay camp culture, including a kitschy affection for low American art like
science fiction movies, filtered through a layer of English decadence and kink, and
finally fed back to middle class culture, as homogenized and safe as a female imper
sonator in a New Jersey supper club.9 (Much the same might be said of the James
8 Savage 377.
9 See Jonathan Rosenbaum’s early, and somewhat homophobic account of the American fan-
dom’s shift from gay to punk to straight, based upon a punk-era study conducted by Margery
Walker Pearce: “The Rocky Horror Picture Cult,” Sight and Sound Spring 1980: 78-9.
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Whale horror films which form the film’s genetic memory.) Yet what Vito Russo
once called “the ‘gayest’ film yet made by a major studio” still passed “the essence
of what every parent in America fears”10; its form was English masculinity decked
out in the menace and sexual attitude Americans would soon recognize as punk,
even if within the film they recognized themselves as the virginal Brad and Janet,
not Tim Curry’s mad scientist in tom fishnet stockings.
Oddly enough, the American film critic Amy Taubin found Young Soul Re
bel's 1977 London to be rather science fictional as well, with “a look that is fu
ture/past, Alphaville but in color.”1 1 While Young Soul Rebel would seem to be
fairly conventional in its historical markers, Taubin’s (mis-)recognition fits the
aesthetic embodied in Young Soul Rebels' punk costumes, as well as the general
narrative conventions and formal design uniting Jubilee with The Rocky Horror
Picture Show.1 2 Within the general nexus of punk and homosexuality, science fic
tion never seems more than a step away from the display of aggressive transgres
sions and strange sexualities. Unlike. Jubilee’ s apocalyptic London, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show situates its rock and roll monsters in one of the more English
pockets of the American landscape—the future/past of an Old Dark House, where
Dr. Frank ‘N’ Furter’s band of aliens mix and match horror and science fiction
conventions in the pursuit of “absolute pleasure” through “sins of the flesh.” By the
10 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper and
Row, 1981) 52-3.
11 Amy Taubin, “Soul to Soul,” Sight and Sound August 1991: 14.
12 John Gill has noted the science fiction dystopia of the Tom Robinson Band's “Winter of
‘79,” a punk classic by the most out gay punk of the time, and Savage uses Ballard, Burroughs,
and the New Wave science fiction vocabulary of entropy and isolation to describe the “new, oblique
language” feeding into punk from both American and German electronic “motorik” music. John
Gill, Queer Noise: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 116; Savage 419-21.
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321
time the house blasts off at the film’s conclusion, the dazed American couple have
not just dreamed it but been it (as the lyrics demand).
So have the generations of midnight audiences decked out and dancing be
low the screen. Regardless of Frankie’s final narrative defeat at the hands of the
other two ‘Transylvanian” aliens (suddenly forming a primly heterosexual couple,
they censor him for his excess), Brad and Janet have been sexually transformed.
Next weekend new “virgins” will attend, and it will all happen again.
But while The Rocky Horror Picture Show may have a $150 million gross
to demonstrate the appeal of this campy subversion, chances are its cult history
cannot produce much evidence (nor does it want to) of its masquerade’s erotic
power. Virgins may still be initiated on a weekly basis, but the playful, child-like
sexuality of a midnight screening usually has a decidedly wholesome quality. While
both Young Soul Rebels and Jubilee present homosexuality in ways which are
clearly calculated to arouse, Frankie’s seduction of Janet and then Brad takes place
in pantomime behind a sheet, the vaudevillian punch line to an only slightly risque
joke. Leo Bersani’s argument that the traditions of gay camp are not compatible
with sexual desire may seem, at worst, willfully ignorant of specific practices, but
in relation to Curry’s Frankie, he may have been right camp may not be much of a
turn-on.1 3
Frankie’s image blends into that of other gender-bending English glam
rockers of the time—Marc Bolan and T. Rex, Gary Glitter—and they, like him, ne
gotiated a complex image which seemed oddly immune to the homophobia directed
later toward “everyday” gay figures like the Bronski Beat. “Queers from the Planet
13 Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?’ October A3 (Winter 1987): 208-9.
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322
Fairy were Fine,” Gill observed, but “queers who started taking on the bodies of
Earthlings, like the plotline in every paranoid 1950s Sci-fi movie, were not”14
While glam rock may have played with gay identity on stage, the purpose of
glam rock, wrote one of America’s most volatile and respected rock critics, was not
to signify a shared community across the footlights:
Everybody knows that faggots don’t like David Bowie and
the Dolls—that’s for teenagers and pathofiles. Faggots like
musical comedies and soul music .... I’m not saying that
black and gay cultures have any mysterious affinity for each
other—I’ll leave that for profounder explicators, Dr. David
Reuben, say—what I’m saying is that everybody has been
walking around for the past year or so acting like faggots
ruled the world, when in actuality it’s the nigger who con
trols directs everything just as it always has been and prop
erly should be.1 5 [italics his]
Cool allowed Lester Bangs to admit in the strictly straight pages of Cream that yes,
he would “suck Lou Reed’s cock,” as surely as he would kiss the feet of the Magna
Carta’s authors.1 6 But cool would not permit Bangs to compromise his own special
relation with African-American culture by sharing it with Bowie’s “fake negritude,”
or with the gay audience Bowie courted.1 7
The Man Who Sold the World
Later, writing for a more reserved publication, Bangs recanted the language
of his claims. Yet his dialectic of “faggots” and “niggers,” whether articulated to
sound dangerous and street-wise, or couched in the later language of authenticity
14 GUI 154-5.
15 Bangs, “Johnnie Ray’s Better Whirlpool,” Cream, 1975, reprinted in Psychotic Reactions
146.
16 Bangs, “Untitled Notes on Lou Reed,” Cream March, 1975, reprinted in Psychotic Reac
tions 167.
17 Bangs, “Johnnie” 149-50.
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323
and history,18 still describes the transgression that Young Soul Rebels promised in
its deliberately hybrid representations. The black male body attracted both Billibud
and the killer in that film; in a similar way, Bowie’s conversion to the “plastic
soul”1 9 of Philadelphia R&B and Latin rhythm had attracted Bangs to the music of
Young Americans in 1975.
Yet Bowie’s mannered stylization of the music, his deliberate artificiality
contradicted the typical terms of Bangs’ appreciation for those same sources.
Bangs’ discomfort fits neatly into place with the Rolling Stone-led tradition of
genuflecting to the idea of African-American culture while keeping its eye upon the
Anglo guitar gods who have borrowed from it: from that position, glam rock be
comes a hermeneutic code to crack (“are all these guys fags, or what?”), and Bowie
himself becomes an overrated fake, the simple product of his manager Tony De-
Fries, another Brian Epstein-like Svengali queering things up.20
Bowie’s continuing significance, however, may not be so much due to ei
ther his “plastic soul” or his glam rock theatrics, but a result of something he said in
the January 22, 1972 of Melody Maker. A journalist, Mick Watts, had asked a
question that arts reporters rarely ask, and Bowie replied with an even rarer—in
fact, still nearly nonexistent—response: “Yes, of course. . . . I’m gay and always
have been, even when I was David Jones.”21 Of course that admission, like most
other aspects of the Bowie persona, has since ceased to seem as simple as it did
then. In one respect, the statement was simply redundant: the dress he wore not
18 Bangs, 'The White Noise Supremacists,'’ Village Voice 1979, reprinted in Psychotic Reac
tions 216-71.
19 As compared to, say, the Beatles ’ somewhat more organic Rubber Soul.
20 Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of
Rock and Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1986) 487,489.
21 Quoted in Jerry Hopkins, Bowie (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 76.
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324
only for the cover of The Man Who Sold the World but packed for his first public
ity junket to the US . . . the Greta Garbo-by-way-of Dorothy pose on the cover of
Hunky Dory . . . his lyrics for songs such as the one which gave its title to his
coming-out story, “OH, YOU PRETTY THING!”—despite Bowie’s marriage and
infant son, his sexual identity seemed fairly obvious even before 1972. His sexual
ity simply became a matter of denotation rather than connotation.
Yet time did make the meaning of his coming-out increasingly less
“obvious.” Even though Bowie seemed to signal some real sense when he referred
to David Jones, the series of self-consciously artificial masks he wore began to
convince fans and journalists that even David Jones might be just another pose, like
Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack or, in the pre-punk, Man Who Fell to Earth era,
the Thin White Duke. The poses themselves often seemed as unstable as their rela
tion to Bowie/Jones: Newton may have been the Thin White Duke’s name, since
Low used a profile close-up of Newton for its cover, and Station to Station (1976)
a still from the discussion with Bryce concerning his nationality. In his history of
homosexuality and twentieth century British music, Gill observes that
you didn’t need to be Roland Barthes to decode the public
persona that David Bowie was projecting. Although maybe
you did: Barthes would have picked up on the subtext of ar
tifice and performance that everyone else seemed to overlook
at the time.22
Like Andy Warhol (whom he portrayed in Basquait, 1996), Bowie celebrated the
plastic with a blank conviction which confused the question of “real” or not And,
as Paul Gilroy points out, during this same time black British culture was increas
ingly turning to the equally plastic fantasies embodied in the science fiction tropes
22 John Gill, Queer Noise: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 107.
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325
of US funk and soul groups like Earth, Wind, and Fire, not the blues-rock tradition
fetishized by Bangs.2 3
But by the time Young Soul Rebels depicts, he had already peaked as a pop
star. Bowie began to actively broaden his influence both at home and in America, as
well as in film: he produced or bankrolled Reed’s and Pop’s most influential al
bums of the 1970s (Transformer, 1972, and the Stooges’ Raw Power, 1973), and,
at the least, positioned the singers for re-discovery later in the decade.24 Early
1970s, albums of Bowie’s own, such as the glam rock The Rise and Fall ofZiggy
Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and the Orwell-inspired Diamond Dogs
(1974), contributed to the look and feel of later punk. So did his fabled retreat to
Berlin with Roxy Music’s Brian Eno and Pop, where he and Eno produced an ele
gantly minimalist, proto-ambient analogue to both punk and Kraftwerk’s techno
(notably Low and Heroes, both 1977). Bowie’s self-aware relation to fashion,
film, and other media also helped to form the paradigm Malcolm McLaren followed
in 1976 when he spun the Sex Pistols off from Sex, a King’s Road boutique, and
then pushed for the group’s aborted film debut in what Finally became The Great
Rock V Roll Swindle (1980)—a documentary almost as concerned with
McLaren’s self-display as with the band with which he had “swindled” the world.
But with each new persona, anything approaching recognizable, lived gay
identity became more marginal to Bowie’s image, until The Man Who Fell Who
Fell to Earth displaced homosexuality onto Buck Henry’s faithful lawyer, and made
Newton’s mild confession of bisexuality during a straight sex scene the token, but
23 See Gilroy’s discussion of album art, lyrics, and science fiction imagery in There Ain’t No
Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchison, 1987)
179,202.
24 See Savage 549-51.
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326
vivid nod to Bowie’s coming-out: in bed with his former lover Mary Lou, who has
aged badly while he stays young, Newton fondles, fires, and, following Chant
D 'Amour, fellates a pistol. Turned on Mary Lou (and turning her on), the gun fires
only blanks and the sex fragments into a playful musical montage more interested in
comparing the actors’ bodies than in presenting a linear narrative of heterosexual
intercourse.
This scene, which contains both Newton’s spoken confession of bisexuality
and Bowie’s full frontal nudity, was cut from the original American release print.
Yet Saturday Night Fever's argument in 1977 over whether Bowie was bad or
good, a “faggot” or a bisexual—with the conclusion that he was “half faggot”—
underlines the strategic complexity of his image(s) at the time.
Like the conflicting threads of disco’s gay assertions and disavowals,
Bowie’s blanks fired so scattershot that even Brooklyn homophobes might tenta
tively recuperate him. Bowie’s mixture of androgynous fashion and queer desires
may have only been an elaboration of Mick Jagger’s Performance-em decadence,
but it is difficult to imagine either Boy George’s or Madonna’s tenuous negotiations
between gay and straight audiences without him. By the 1980s, however, Bowie
had come out as heterosexual, only to have a gag-order expire on his ex-wife, An
gela Bowie. Just as his career hit an all-time low, her tell-all biography briefly
placed his sex life (and, thanks to the book’s most popular passage, Jagger’s) back
in the tabloids in the early 1990s.25
Regardless of the fluctuation of public preoccupation with his “real” sexual
ity, Bowie’s music and film career has helped to situate gender as a pivot point in
25 Angela Bowie, with Patrick Carr, Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David
Bowie (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993) 240.
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327
wider cultural movements; while Young Soul Rebels disappeared into Miramax’s
write-off column, Bowie successfully presented the US with a model of sexual, if
not racial hybridity. Bowie’s homosexuality, or, possibly more threatening,
Bowie’s continuous “ch-ch-ch-changes” (as his lyrics promised) filled Americans
with the same “antici. . . pation” Frankie still offers after midnight: it is the 1972
image of Lou Reed appearing in a glam makeover at Ziggy Stardust’s introduction
to the press—interrupting an interview to kiss Bowie on the lips—or the idea of
Bruce Springsteen hitchhiking to Philadelphia so that Bowie and Luther Vandross
could record two of his songs during the Young Americans sessions.26 Springsteen
did not make the album’s final cut, but the final ecstatic murmurs of its title track
tells the same fantasies as the rock trivia. The song’s narrative drifts from its initial
concern with a young married couple’s wandering desires, becoming the singer’s
first person attraction to the “young American,” like an embodiment of Richard
Hoggart’s fear of Americanization:
I want what you want
You want what I want
I want you, you want I
I want you, you want I .. .
And all I want is the young American.27
On this side of the Atlantic, Bowie’s sexuality, his perverse national Otherness in
fected the boundaries of rock’s vulnerable body, implicitly threatening Bangs’ racist
pleasures and Rolling Stone’s executive closets.28
Whether the lens of identity politics would recognize that threat is another
matter. As Gill notes, Bowie in his many disguises may have
26 Hopkins 83,135.
27 David Bowie, “Young Americans,” Young Americans, compact disc, 1975, reissued 1991.
28 The 1995 outing of Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann S. Wenner gives an interest
ing perspective to the homophobia of Rock o f Ages. He even wrote its introduction.
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328
inhabited a universe peopled by beautiful criminals, outra
geous drag queens, mugwumps, wild boys . . . .But, wit
tingly or unwittingly, Queer David set the stage for real
queers to start singing about themselves in pop songs.29
The “but” placing mugwumps and wild boys on one side, real queers on the other
might be a distinction William Burroughs would shrug off, yet Gill’s observation
has a significance that structures Young Soul Rebels and the other texts above: what
is the significance of homosexuality as a transgressive practice, and to what lived
reality does the semiotic system labeled “gay” refer? These are Caz’s questions as
he regards Billibud’s body with desire—to his rasta-spouting brothers, Caz’s desire
places him outside the community, and to white gay men, his own skin marks him
as an exotic but threatening Other. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s fan cul
ture, gay identity becomes a weekend; Jubilee eroticizes Adam Ant’s heterosexual
ity through the traditional signs and toys of gay sexual practice, while Ian Charle-
son’s subplot brings his character and his lover to a conventionally tragic end. In
both these films, gay identity falls by the wayside in much the same way the Sex
Pistols chose rock over queer subversion. All these reasons frame Caz’s gentle dis
regard for Billibud’s punk affections, even while the iconography of those affec
tions arouse his interest Gill similarly feels the attraction of Bowie’s various affec
tions, yet because their dress assumes the fantastic form of “beautiful criminals,
outrageous drag queens, mugwumps, wild boys” he places Bowie in opposition to
real gay identity. Then again, locating the real has never been simple. ‘ T o propose
that the invocation of identity is always a risk does not imply that resistance to it is
29 Gills 113.
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329
always only symptomatic of a self-inflicted homophobia,” Judith Butler has
claimed.30
Turning to the history of those mugwumps and wild boys provides one way
of understanding the process through which gay identity has been referenced and
crafted through the intersection of British and American cultures. Rather than a dis
traction, science fiction is a crucial element in the nexus of sexuality and nationality
Bowie has signified over the course of his varied career.
“Space Oddity’VSpace Odyssey
At least in part, The Man Who Fell to Earth came about simply as a result of
Bowie’s manager rather over-optimistically announcing that his client would star in
a film adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s cult science fiction novel Stranger in a
Strange Land, and later on even Derek Jarman developed a science fiction project
for Bowie, a film to be titled Neutron.31 Although millennial panic and science fic
tion has helped to define his career all the way through 1995’s Outside, Bowie’s ca
reer received its first boost through a lucky conjunction of 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) and the BBC’s coverage of the first moon landing in 1969.32 Inspired by
Stanley Kubrick’s film, and used by the BBC during their coverage of the landing,
“Space Oddity” found a surprisingly effective pop analogue for 2001's colder,
more psychedelic drive to death and transformation.
The context was again implicitly American—the song records Ground Con
trol instructing an astronaut, Major Tom, that “the paper’s want to know whose
30 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 14.
31 Jarman discusses this proposed film in several of his autobiographical works, including
Dancing Ledge, ed. Shaun Allen. (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993) 209-210.
32 Hopkins 45,50.
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330
shirts you wear/Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare.” Yet the serene lack
of emotion as his mission goes wrong suggests little of either the briskly business
like, high-testosterone language of the US space program, or the very American
form of science fiction represented by Kubrick’s British collaborator on 200V s
screenplay, Arthur C. Clarke. Colin Greenland’s study of British New Wave sci
ence fiction of the 1960s even cites Bowie’s “Oh You Pretty Things” (the same
1971 single which gave its title to Bowie’s Melody Maker coming-out) as an adap
tation of Clarke’s Childhood's End (1953).33
Yet the approach to science fiction Bowie has been associated with, in
“Space Oddity” and elsewhere, comes much closer to the work of J. G. Ballard,
Michael Moorcock, and other New Wave writers who rejected Clarke in favor of
William Burroughs’ mugwumps and wild boys; under his influence they crafted a
“soft” science fiction more concerned with sexually-charged tropes of entropy and
disillusion, often set in a present made strange rather than a future of technological
progress. And Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” persona was in part influenced by the Al-
dous Huxley-like science fiction of Evelyn Waugh’s jazz-age dystopia, Vile Bodies
(1930),34 a tradition which found its successors in the later British New Wave.
When he steps out of his capsule, Major Tom follows the path of Ballard’s
protagonists in both Crash and earlier 1960s science fiction disaster novels such as
The Drowned World, The Crystal World, and The Drought.
‘Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles,
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows”
Ground Control to Major Tom
33 Greenland 8-9.
34 Hopkins 94.
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331
Your circuits dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me Major Tom? . . .
“Here I am floating in my tin can
Far above the Moon,
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.”35
The popularity of the single helped to insure that Bowie initially would embody this
“Space Oddity,” the first of his pop personas, and that the singer’s proclivities
would be intermingled with his creation’s, even though the punning title might
seem to describe not Major Tom but whatever 2001- or Ballard-like experience he is
unable or unwilling to stop. Included in the UK on Bowie’s Man o f Words, Man of
Music album (1969), “Space Oddity’”s persistent popularity far surpassed the al
bum’s commercial performance. When the album was repackaged following the
success of the similarly science fictional Ziggy Stardust in 1972, its title was
changed to Space Oddity and the cover’s previous photograph, of a blond and
strapping-looking Bowie was replaced by a Ziggy Stardust-era image of Bowie
looking frail, androgynous, and altogether alien—no longer a Man but a Space
Oddity, a Pretty Thing out of Clarke’s Childhood's End, with the sexual proclivi
ties of a Ballard protagonist
By the end of the next decade, Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” (1980) had re
turned to Major Tom with the blithe confession that “everybody knows Major Tom
is a junkie,” cementing the equation between the two.
Yet Major Tom’s deliberate estrangement and placid self-destruction cannot
be reduced solely to the drug level any more than can 2001 ’ s affect-less astronauts
or its Stargate sequence. Whether intentional or not, as the BBC’s passive-
aggressive voice during Neil Armstrong’s conquest of the moon, Bowie’s Space
35 David Bowie, “Space Oddity,” Space Oddity, compact disc, 1972, reissued 1990.
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332
Oddity transcendental reserve allowed the audience to rewrite the American moment
of victory in a banal English accent of impotence and defeat: Major Tom’s well-
mannered disaster performs the same function as Warner Brothers’ poster for the
Sex Pistols—he announces that post-colonial England’s future is our future as well.
And as NASA learned during the 1970s, once the moon had been claimed, the US
would take no more giant steps.
“Space Oddity” operates within a nationally defined field, specifically Brit
ish New Wave science fiction. That observation obeys a rather simple logic of
shared national identity on the part of Bowie and Ballard (ignoring, for the moment,
the indirect influence of Burroughs). 2001, however, demonstrates the degree to
which relatively close, uncertainly differentiated identities such as English and
American may at times become a sort of free radicals, highly reactive to one another
and capable of curious interactions: within the context of 1960s English culture,
2001 may be more a British than an American film.
Of course, by most of the usual criteria, 2001 is securely a US film, fi
nanced and produced by an American studio, and directed by an American auteur.36
Although the author of a short story (‘The Sentinel,” from the late 1940s) upon
which the film was based, Clarke’s claim to any meaningful authorship of the film
were not only dismissed by Clarke himself, but recognized early on as antithetical
to the film’s allure.37 The thuddingly literal novelization and sequels Clarke pro-
36 Legally, 2001: A Space Odyssey was registered as a British film, unlike any of Kubrick’s
other films produced in the UK, even A Clockwork Orange or Barry Lyndon. By the criterion of
tax registration, however, films such as Superman and the Indiana Jones trilogy were “British”
also. (Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, 2nd ed. [New York: Continuum, 1989]
247.)
37 Carolyn Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1973) 32. See also Kagan 145.
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333
duced only helped to increase Kubrick’s auteurist status, and distanced the film
from British nationality.38 Equally early in the film’s heady critical history, Annette
Michelson argued for just the opposite, that in comparison with Godard’s nostalgic,
romantic Alphaville (1965), 2001 ’s “total formalization imposes futurity through
the eye and ear” in a manner totemically American:
The manner in which the different economies at work—
European as against American—seem to represent opposing
sensibilities making fundamentally esthetic decisions, leads
one to remember that Godard’s Computer—a Sphinx,
speaking with the re-educated voice of a man whose vocal
chords have been removed—asks questions, while Hal, that
masterpiece of “the third Computer breakthrough,” pre
sumably knows all the answers.39
And Americans, presumably, controlled these questions, although Michelson seems
to miss the “passionless almost homosexual voice” Pauline Kael and others heard in
HAL’s answers.40 (Kubrick had, in fact, first recorded HAL with the voice of
Martin Balsam, but reportedly found the voice “too emotional, making the visuals
redundant” Balsam was replaced by Douglas Rain, a Canadian Shakespearean ac
tor first hired to narrate the film.41)
In several senses the opposite of Michelson’s observations now appears
true: the Sphinx’s voice is now HAL’s, his smoothly opaque tones and paranoid
fears a return of the repressed, “an unconscious resuscitation,” in Ellis Hanson’s
words, “of femininity, maternity, the body and desire within the homosocial econ
38 Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968);
2010: Odyssey 2 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982).; 2061: Odyssey Three (New York: Ballan-
tine Books, 1988). See also Clarke, The Lost Worlds o f2001 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson,
1972).
39 Annette Michelson, “Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,” Artforum (February
1969): 61.
40 See Ellis Hanson’s summation of HAL’s critical reception as queer in ‘Technology, Para
noia and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34.2 (Summer 1993): 140-41.
41 Jerome Agel, ed. The Making o f2001(New York: Signet, 1970) n.p.
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3 3 4
omy of the space mission.”42 Yet if 2001 presents a homoerotic fantasy of male re
production, as Hanson and others have argued, it must also be acknowledged that it
is now the US space program whose testicular “chords” have been tied.43
The postmodern surfaces of Blade Runner (1982) and literary cyberpunk
may operate with all the material grandeur of 2007, yet the corrupt, romantic nos
talgia they express for a past that may never have been aligns them thoroughly with
Alphaville. And ever since Star Wars (1977) re-imagined the future with dirt and
dents, total formalization has imposed Michelson’s idea of futurity more often
through the digital eye of Toy Story (1995) and dancing mouthwash bottles, than
through science fiction per se.
The futurity found in 2001 is one which, as we inch toward the millennium,
the US has clearly lost or abandoned—and as “Space Oddity” may suggest, that
loss has an English cast to it. Yet more than this depressing, millennial reading,
2007 also carries with it other meaningful markings of Englishness. Granting the
auteur theory its assumptions, Kubrick’s expatriate retreat to Britain helps to give a
range of his films, from Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Full Metal
Jacket (1987), a curiously distanced frame for their hyper-American subjects of
sex, masculinity, and violence. The casting of Peter Sellers in the first two films, as
the amorphous, chameleon-like Quilty and as Strangelove's effeminate, Adlai Ste
venson-like president, RAF Captain Mandrake, and, finally, Strangelove’s pro
phetic proto-Kissinger, acts intertextually as both a reminder of the film’s simula
tion of America, and as a tie to Seller’s prominence in British television and film.
42 Hanson 142.
43 Hanson 145. See also Zoe Sofia, “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the
Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestialism,” Diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984): 48, and in passing.
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335
And just as James Mason’s performance as the “European” Humbert Humbert in
Lolita fully signifies English instead, Seller’s casting as Humbert’s American
nemesis and doppelganger suggests an unmistakably English subtext for their half
suppressed perversities. Full Metal Jacket's recreation of the Vietnamese city Hue
in Becton, an abandoned gasworks site along the Thames, also inserts an oddly
English subtext where it might be otherwise unexpected: American soldiers fighting
a Third World war in some post-industrial, multicultural Britain of the future-
after, perhaps, the final influx of Asian Commonwealth citizens following the re
unification of Hong Kong and the People’s Republic. And in Kubrick’s only pro
duction set entirely in England, A Clockwork Orange (1971), American film enters
the frame of reference only to be viciously assaulted through Alex’s rapist decon
struction of “Singin’ in the Rain”; apparently the violence of that assault may have
later helped to convince Kubrick to withdraw the film from the society in which he
lives—from circulation in Britain.44 To call Kubrick an American director may
make sense in many ways (financially at the least, thematically perhaps—A Clock
work Orange was based upon the abridged American edition of Anthony Burgess’
1962 novel45), yet as an auteur, his significance would be far less without such
highly gender-conscious English inflections and complications.
Apart from Kubrick’s intertextual associations, both A Clockwork Orange
and 2001 share in a distinctively English and austere pop sense of “futurity”
brought to film in the early 1960s by Ken Adam in the production design for Dr.
No, the subsequent Bond films, and Dr. Strangelove.46 The clean, extravagantly
44 See Philip French, “A Clockwork Orange,” Sight and Sound Spring 1990: 84.
45 French 85.
46 For example, see Robert Hughes’ discussion of design in A Clockwork Orange, "The De
cor of Tomorrow’s Hell,” Time 27 December 1971.
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336
modernist spaces of Dr. No’s laboratory and Strangelove's wall-less war room in
turn gave way to Robert Brownjohn’s text projected on Shirley Eaton’s nude, gold
painted body for Goldfinger's credits, and the op-art sets and fashions of Joseph
Losey’s visually stunning Bond-spoof, Modesty Blaise (1966). Together these lead
to the white on white, curving horizons of 2001's circular space station, the glibly
mixed classicisms of the final, lit-from-below bedroom suite, and the Monolith’s
own elegantly minimalist shifts between presence and absence. 2001\n turn leads to
the mannequin dispensers of A Clockwork Orange's Korova Milk Bar, as well as
the stylized take on contemporary skinhead fashions given to Alex and his gang of
droogs. Codpiece on his crotch, derby on his head, and a false eyelash lining his
lower right eyelid, Alex’s elaboration on the basic skinhead uniform of work shirts,
braces, and boots both draws ironic attention to the image’s combination of sexual
display and traditional form—pure (that is, impure) pop.
In a short but useful history of British film and Pop Art, Michael O’Pray
has suggested that, by the middle of the 1960s, American influences such as Bur
roughs, Warhol, and Ginsberg had coalesced sufficiently around the notion of un
derground culture to directly influence more than the Swinging London content of
films. Pop Art helped to shape both their production and reception of projects such
as Goldfinger and Modesty Blaise,47 And the 1950s Pop Art rhetoric of the Inde
pendent Group already had a connection to film criticism through Lawrence Al-
loway’s crossmembership in the film journal Movie. Yet O’Pray cites 2001 as the
peak of the 1960s British intersection of film and art, and A Clockwork Orange as
47 Michael O’Pray, “If You Want to Make Films,” in “Art into Him” Supplement, Sight and
Sound July, 1994: 20. See also Peter Wollen’s more general discussion of these intersections in
“The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Rims of the Thatcher Era,” Fires Were Started:
British Film and Thatcherism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 42-3 and in
passing.
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337
its 1970s twin, both referencing and subverting the signs of Pop A rt48 When Alex
delivers a death blow in A Clockwork Orange with a white Pop penis sculpture, a
certain era of homoerotic excess had passed—and another was just arriving with
Ballard’s Crash. But as O’Pray points out, the art-school network, which reached
from the Independent Group to David Hockney and Patrick Procktor, Derek Jarman
to Bryan Ferry and Bowie, was not so much disturbed as transformed by the shifts
of punk. Gill may be quite right to observe that these queer contacts had little or no
connection to life outside of their rarefied circles,49 yet their influence surely did
have an impact:
To trace the careers of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne
Westwood is to understand how the art-school connection
worked—how punk could be taken so unseriously by Jar
man in Jubilee. The movement, came from his own circle,
not from working class youth: it was in Andrew Logan’s
Butler’s Wharf studio (above Jarman’s) that McClaren and
Westwood kick-started the Sex Pistols, one fashionable
group used to launch another.50
Within just a few years, the American distributor of Jack Hazan’s docu-drama
about the Clash, Rude Boy (1980), would premiere a version in the tradition of
Performance's and The Man Who Fell to Earth's abbreviated US versions: the
blow job Joe Strummer casually accepted from a male fan fell on the cutting room
floor. One fashionable group may have still launched another, but the homoerotics
of the engine were purposely muffled.
Even if modified for American entry, McClaren and Westwood’s kick-start
continued to purr along across the Atlantic. In the Reagan years, Blade Runner
48 O’Pray 20. On British television, U.F.O. and Space: 1999 provided a contemporary path
that is both parallel and derivative, although the late-Hammer type of modernist art direction dis
played in Children o f the Damned (1964) and Quatermass and the Pit (Five Million Years to Earth,
1967) should also be mentioned.
49 GUI 104-5.
50 O’Pray 22.
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chose punk-inspired fashion detailing for both the few Anglos remaining on Los
Angeles’ streets, and for the existentially anguished androids Pris and Roy. Pink
Floyd The Wall (1982) brought another, similarly delusional English rock star to
L.A., Bob Geidolfs Pink, in an adaptation of the popular 1979 Pink Floyd album
and tour. In Pink’s L.A. hotel room, his heavily misogynistic dreams of paternal
loss and fascistic empowerment blend together Tommy's post-war memories of
childhood suffering with the hybridized imagery of punk and the National Front’s
neo-nazism, all embellished by the insertion of animation based upon the political
cartoonist Gerald Scarfe’s baroque post-Pop drawings. In the process, Pink
Boyd’s 1960s-era associations meld with the subsequent history of British rock to
form an overarching figure of perverse, mutilated English masculinity presenting it
self before America. Echoing Newton’s disconcerting piecemeal removal of his, or
Bowie’s, human disguise, Pink (the embodiment of the band itself, as well as Gel-
dolf’s punk lineage in the Boomtown Rats) first clumsily shaves his body, and
then, like Newton, examines his eyes in the mirror. In close-up, his fingers pick up
and are cut by a safety razor, which he bends in half to a double blade. Out of the
frame he begins to work, while the film presents only blood dripping into the white
soapy basin. When his face is finally presented, only his eyebrows have been cut,
leaving shaved, bloody, pale absences across his brows. Like Newton, made abject
and alien by the removal of his body’s hair and sexual markings, Pink’s shaven
face has a nightmare cast completely at odds with his earlier, hippie-like counte
nance. When he dons a Gestapo-like uniform and sings before a concert audience
lifted straight from Triumph o f the Will, the pop circuit between London and L.A.
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339
finally produced what the Independent Group’s Reyner Banham had imagined as
Pop Art’s “firing squad without mercy or reprieve.” 5 1
Although presented with little of Blade Runner's attention and detail, the
L.A. of Pink Floyd The Wall blends with it into the postmodern “economy” of Al-
phaville's corrupt nostalgia and romantic anguish; by a parallel logic, the green-
house-effect London of Split Second (1992) self-consciously recalls Blade Runner,
down to the reverse casting of Blade Runner's Rutger Hauer as the film’s protago
nist. The visual and aural futurity of 2001 has instead been relegated to such
parodic instances as Pink Floyd The Wall's opening sequences, which slowly
tracks past elegant, mysterious white-on-white shapes—they turn out to be the
walls of a hotel hallway—with all the stately grace of 2001's ballets between space
crafts. Or the entrance of Who Framed Roger Rabbit's human detective into Toon
Town—the gateway’s Looney Tune curtain reflects across Eddie’s paralyzed face
like the Jupiter Stargate upon the astronaut Poole’s, only Eddie encounters not a
cosmic light show but a gaggle of dancing, singing, mugging cartoon animals. Or
Rhoda’s white-on-white, unlivable re-decoration of Lou Grant’s apartment on The
Mary Tyler Moore Show. Or Homer’s slow motion dance with a bag of potato
chips aboard the space shuttle in The Simpsons.
Such futurity has faded into parody, lingering half-glimpsed like the ghostly
streamlined reminders of a futuristic past in William Gibson’s ‘ The Gemsback
Continuum.”52 2001 and its would-be successors remain as an English-like re
minder of both the past and defeat: the influence of 2001 upon the futures of THX-
51 Quoted in Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990) 73.
52 William Gibson, “The Gemsback Continuum,” Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology,
ed. Bruce Sterling (New York: Ace Books, 1986) 53-92.
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340
1138 (1971), Rollerball (1975), and other such attenuated, visually stylized Ameri
can science fiction films give them a strangely English accent.
A terminal beach for the high art “evolutionary mutation” of British Pop Art
and science fiction film, or a dated artifact of the American space program—but
there may be more to 200Vs significance. While 200Vs technical polish and lavish
production does place it as a prosperous heir to the tradition of special effects films
represented by George Pal’s production of Destination Moon (1950), 2001 also
shares a heritage, however ambivalent, with the half acknowledged domestic Other
of British New Wave literary science fiction: as the last chapter argued, during the
1950s and 1960s, science fiction and horror experienced an influential period of
growth on British television and in low-budget filmmaking. Just a year before
2001, this tradition produced what was then recognized as one of the film’s more
important predecessors,5 3 Quatermass and the Pit, adapted from the earlier BBC
television serial; known as Five Million Years to Earth in the US, Quatermass and
the Pit also gave Greil Marcus’ history of punk, Lipstick Traces, his primary, ex
tended means of representing the intertwined liberation and ruination offered by the
Sex Pistols on stage.54 Even more antithetical to the visual and narrative elegance of
Kubrick’s imagery, Doctor Who and its signature Radiophonic Workshop theme
had made its Saturday evening debut five years before 2001. The four-part “An
Unearthly Child” began the series, presenting time travel back to a primitive past
through a phone-booth sized police call box, sometimes framed in the same low-
angle, perspective-exaggerating shots, strangely enough, that Kubrick would later
use for the monolith. And as the titular, extraterrestrial charge of the Doctor, “An
53 Geguld21-2.
54 Marcus 85-88.
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341
Unearthly Child” presented Susan, the sort of Star Child (a female Star Child) who
no doubt would soon turn from Richard Strauss to Ziggy Stardust.
But by the early 1970s, the Londons of Bond, Blow Up, and New Wave
science fiction had burnt out—no more New Worlds. The migration of artists like
Hockney to the US gave the period its ironic documentary epitaph, Hazan’s A Big
ger Splash (1974): pointing toward punk aesthetics with its mixture of matter-of-
fact gay sex scenes, Warhol-like blankness, and the drag performance art of Lo
gan’s Alternative Miss World Competition, Hazon’s first film presented Hockney’s
turn away from London to the poolside life of Los Angeles within a matrix of ho
moerotic desire. Only a few years earlier, Reyner Banham had gone on the road
with his idea of Pop Art—a “firing squad without mercy or reprieve”—and instead
discovered in Los Angeles’ freeways and low art worldview the cause for the gen
eral pardon postmodernism has bestowed upon the city ever since. Los Angeles:
The Architecture of the Four Ecologies provided what Mike Davis has cited as the
new local boosterism of Baudrillard and company, while the BBC’s Reyner Ban
ham Loves Los Angeles (1972) spread the word at home.55 While former expatri
ates like Aldous Huxley had refigured Bloomsbury in the psychedelic dress of the
West Coast’s New Age, by the middle of the 1970s Bowie had locked himself in an
L.A. apartment to prepare for The Man Who Fell to Earth, and to pursue cocaine,
art, and politics—”1 could have been Hitler in England,” he told Rolling Stone, “ ..
. I wouldn’t mind being the first English president of the United States, either. I’m
certainly right wing enough.”56
55 Davis 73-4.
56 Hopkins 146-47.
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342
But better than leading the nation, Bowie led a television equivalent, MTV.
The cable network gave the short pop promos he had made in the 1970s (“D. J.,”
“Ashes to Ashes,” among others) a sudden 1980s currency, and exposure on the
network helped to give his American career its final commercial knockout, 1983’s
Let's Dance. That album’s complex, full-dress music videos, “Let’s Dance” and
“China Girl,” pushed the form toward the narrative and visual conventions which
soon defined its most idiosyncratic practice. Bowie, it turned out, wanted his MTV
more than either sexual subversion or world domination. In the next chapter, I will
discuss MTV’s version of those desires in the 1990s context of punk and The Real
World.
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CHAPTER 10
“that’s rock and roll for you”
343
A hesitant bisexual the first season. An out lesbian the second. And when
the series moved to San Francisco for its third season, an articulate gay Person
With AIDS, Pedro Zamora, whose death in 1994 momentarily gave the title’s con
ceit a serious epistemological spin: The Real World’s sexual others have energized,
by their very inclusion, the cinema verite conventions MTV cloned when it decided
to document the “real life adventures” of its target demographics. After all, how
could San Francisco really have been San Francisco without a gay male, and what
could be more verite than a gay male PWA? President Clinton and others posthu
mously hailed Zamora as a hero, a heroism somewhat more centered around his
death than his highly open life.
But when publicity for season four rolled out in 1995, no gay or lesbian
identity casually popped out from the first-name only bios printed in feature side
bars or displayed on Web pages. Closeted teens feeling marooned in small-town
America would presumably have to find other fantasies of urban escape and accep
tance.
However, The Real World did choose to underscore MTV’s growing inter
national ambitions by selecting London for its fourth season, and gender difference
not so much disappeared as simply reappeared in an odd (and queer) new register.
The first three series had presented casts of young adults designed to chafe against
one another according to clearly preordained boundaries of race, sex, ethnicity, as
well as sexual preference and one other area of difference, regional disparities.
Midwestern farm girls and born-again southern cowboys cohabited with would-be
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3 4 4
rappers and rockers from the coasts. Predictably, the London season largely ig
nored regional American differences, and instead featured nationality as the domi
nant difference. Even The Economist considered the possibilities of this predictable
shift, not noticing that MTV’s choice might not be that out of step with Holly
wood’s special affection for Englishmen in the 1990s:
Distressingly, America, by all signs political and cultural,
has been losing its Anglophilia lately. Whitehall and White
House remain at odds over the UN rapid-reaction force in
Bosnia. America’s movie screens show nothing but English
villains: wicked Longshanks persecuting the Scots in Brave-
heart, and imperialist Englishmen despoiling the unsullied
American environment in Pocahontas. And one hardly dares
speak of l’affaire Hugh Grant. Is there no relief?1
Beside the bewildered faces of the three Americans, seemingly younger, paler, and
less self-assured than any earlier group, The Real World introduced a German DJ
and an Australian model, as well as two natives to represent England, Sharon, a
jazz-funk singer, and Neil, an Oxford Ph.D. student in cognitive psycholinguistics.
The Economist was optimistic.
But MTV’s packaging of the series quickly made clear that the nationality
these two represented was not based upon the same England as The Economist's
mourned American Anglophilia. Overweight—by MTV standards, at least—and
lacking the compensating self-assertion of a Queen Latifa, Sharon’s “role” in the se
ries easily merged with the image of the soulful, compliant backup singer given to
other non-glamorous British women of color in Peter Gabriel’s, Sting’s, and a
thousand other music videos.
In turn, Sharon’s racial and physical distance from the figures of femininity
imagined by traditional American Anglophilia gave even greater focus to Neil’s
1 ‘The (Hip) Old Country,” The Economist, 8 July 1995: 27.
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3 4 5
iconic significance. Patrician, conventionally handsome, and as white as the playing
fields of Eton once were, Neil Forrester (so publicity for the series identified him)
embodied England by more than simple process of elimination. Yet in practice—
and by design—the England that Forrester embodied was not quite a green and
pleasant land, but more the despoiled and despoiling England The Economist found
in the queer villains of Braveheart and Pocahontas: he made his disdain for Ameri
cans clear from the start, and, sounding precisely like the villains of ‘90s Holly
wood, crisply announced himself as “xenophobic and misanthropic.” Through the
ideas of nationality and gender which Forrester’s accent spoke, The Real World’s
Englishman recalled how Zamora’s soft Cuban accent had been intertwined with his
sexuality and his disease—two “elsewhere”s by MTV’s usual standards.
Instead of a lesbian or another Zamora, The Real World’s fourth season in
troduced . . . an Englishman with an attitude.
Just as San Francisco has been often coupled with AIDS in the American
imagination, London has geographically grounded punk, and so Forrester, with his
Billy Idol-era bleached, spiked hair, pierced nipples, and a glib professional goal of
becoming a “piss-taker,” filled the requisite role of masculine Other and helped to
power the series’ reality engine. Regardless of punk’s death nearly two decades
earlier, as well as Forrester’s level of education, class, and, at 24, relative old age,
punk still served a purpose for The Real World. Its name provides a sign system by
which English culture may be made familiar for MTV and not entangled in the som
ber vocabulary of high culture, even though Forrester’s education and class still
implicitly signaled that same vocabulary.
As may be seen in all the Anglo-American intersections examined earlier,
the exports English culture offers Americans commonly arrive with already tangled
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346
and incestuous histories. Punk offered a future which was the product of a cargo
cult based, in large, part upon seemingly inconsequential American exports. Lou
Reed and the Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the politically-
minded MC5, and the New York Dolls, queer glam rockers, assumed the status of
forefathers, as had American rock and roll and blues artists in the 1960s. Musically,
the Sex Pistols’ crude, purposely amateurish approach produced recordings
strangely similar to the more angry and dissonant songs Charles Ives composed and
performed in early 20th century America.
This intertwined history lurks just beyond the frame of MTV’s screen.
Rather than the Little Englands of either Olivier’s Henry V or The Beatles Anthol
ogy, The Real World signaled another generational strand of American Anglophilia,
its images set by the hip, dystopic London of Sid and Nancy, The Face, Hanif
Kureishi, and The Crying Game. And while Los Angeles police were wondering if
Hugh Grant’s pick-up were a transvestite, the US watched one of The Real
World's Americans almost play The Crying Game, mistaking a London drag queen
for the real thing in the series’ very first episode.
That mixture of confusion and sexual danger distinguishes the new Anglo
philia; for one age group, a chaotic mass of raves, Ecstasy, and kinky sex, and for
another, slightly older one, the “Parents: They Fuck You Up” issue of Granta, a
publication advertised in the US as both “Britain’s best selling literary magazine”
and one “edited by people who don’t like literature.” Although raves spread south
from Manchester, and today Portabello Road is much too touristy for Granta, the
London they both represent has long been signified geographically by the sur
roundings of Notting Hill Gate—the always fashionably faded, multicultural neigh
borhood of Colin Maclnnes’ Absolute Beginners, Performance, Absolutely Fabu
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347
lous, and, not surprisingly, The Real World’s London townhouse, 18 Powis Ter
race.
Yet if this Anglophilia is somewhat different from that of The Economist’s
favored form, its imbrication with the past thirty year-plus history of British popu
lar music and film can hardly mean it is that new: the epistemology of that imbrica
tion’s history is what gives significance and force to Forrester’s evocation of punk
as well as (or possibly as a result of) queer desires. The very confusion surround
ing his signs of punk and homosexuality suggest the extent to which they have been
shorn of real meaning at the level of identity or practice, and incorporated into the
dystopic sign systems of contemporary English masculinity and American Anglo
philia.
Tongueless
Forrester came complete with his own band, Unilever. While he described
its music as “techno-sleaze,” in the poorly-miked, dimly-lit performances recorded
by The Real World, punk seemed fairly distant from the band’s art rock preten
tious. But whether the term is historically suitable or not,2 the lingering commercial
signs of punk still frame an incident which MTV featured heavily in the promotion
of the series—an incident which must have given both hope and pause to those
2 It’s not suitable, not exactly. Forrester’s status as a punk might seem meaningless within
the historical contexts considered by such works as Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of
Style (London: Methuen, 1979), Greil Marcus’ lipstick Traces: A Secret History o f the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), or David James,
“Poetry/Punk/Production: Some Recent Writing in L.A.,” Postmodernism and its Discontents, ed.
Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988) 163-86.
Yet as I will argue throughout this chapter, the visual iconography he presents signifies sev
eral important permutations in the history of punk both before and after its purported demise in the
late 1970s. For an example of how Forrester was named as punk, see his biography at a popular
unofficial Real World W eb site. The Real World, online, Internet, 5 February 1996. Available:
http://ucsu.coIorado.edu/~burtonb/rw4bios.html.
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348
viewers still waiting for 1995’s Zamora. Forrester broke the boundaries of Dy
nasty, An Early Frost, Philadelphia and the music video policies MTV uses to pre
serve its young male demographics: he kissed a man.
During the course of a Unilever performance recorded by The Real World,
he surprised a rowdy member of his small, otherwise fairly sedate audience by
abruptly clamping his lips to the man’s mouth and sticking his tongue down his
throat Although it would be hard to understand the event on the basis of the dark,
confused visual footage alone, Forrester’s twin-like, equally-peroxided girlfriend,
Chrys, narrated the incidents to the other cast members: the unidentified man, in
turn, had bit down, partially severing Forrester’s tongue, and, following stitches
and therapy, possibly permanently impaired his speech. “This isn’t a scene from the
latest teen-rock movie. It’s real life,” TV Guide enthused in “London Calling,” a se
ries profile titled to evoke a neatly approved image of punk. (That is, the Clash’s
appealing “London Calling,” approved by Rolling Stone as the best album of the
1980s.) Forrester became the season’s break-out star, just as TV Guide predicted.
Even though Forrester’s kiss occurred seven episodes into the run of 22 episodes,
it became an otherwise uneventful season’s defining event3
Despite, or perhaps because of Chrys and Forrester’s stressed heterosexu
ality (with his early, tantalizingly half-denied fling with the cast’s American
woman, Kat, thrown in for good measure), this tongue kiss retains a considerable
charge. Like the much earlier, but similarly aggressive male-to-male act in A View
from a Bridge, Forrester’s assertion of power seems intended to claim his own
masculine authority, and forcibly feminize his “victim’ ”s viewing position, implic
itly labeling his desires (more so than Forrester’s) as homosexual. But while the
3 Joe Steeples, “London Calling: MTV’s ‘Real World,”’ 7V Guide, 24 June 1995: 26.
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349
social excess of the kiss is enough to destroy the subject and the object of the kiss
in Miller’s overwrought play, The Real World presents a “real life” world of rock
theatrics which even TV Guide can recognize as distinct from sexual identities such
as gay or straight.
By biting back, however, the object of his obscure desires provoked more
than the specter of violent homophobia, which evaporated from the series as
quickly as the unidentified man. The series’ dual repression of the biting man’s
identity4 and its emphasis upon Forrester’s subsequent physical impairment bring
into question the meaning of both Forrester’s punk affectations, and his symbolic
representation of English masculinity. Forrester is effectively silenced, just as,
strangely enough, the series’ other English cast member, Sharon, is silenced when
she undergoes throat surgery.
But while Sharon’s silence resonates through the difficult negotiations black
Britons are forced to make between race and nationality, Forrester’s voice would
seemed to have represented the race, class, and sex through which English privilege
usually speaks. The difference lies in his simultaneous connotation of both that
privilege and punk’s lingering value as its violent, if contradictory negation.
Although Forrester’s ringed nipples (and his desire to have his penis
pierced) may have helped to ensure his selection for the series,5 his fondness for
body modification bears little resemblance to the safety pin the Sex Pistols put
through the Queen’s lips in an infamous 1977 flyer’s graphics.6 There is a differ
ence between the stitched-up and silenced Forrester or the pinned-up and silenced
4 A legal necessity no doubt, still his absence is remarkable in narrative terms.
5 Neil Forrester, homepage, online, Internet, 5 February 1996. Available:
http://cogscil.psych.ox.ac.uk/~naf/al.htm.
6 Reproduced in Marcus 35.
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3 5 0
monarch (“GOD SAVE THE QUEEN/SHE AIN’T NO HUMAN BEING”), and
the ecstatic, apocalyptic masochism which once led Iggy Pop and Sid Vicious to
mutilate themselves publicly with broken glass and razor blades, or Adam Ant to
display a “FUCK” seemingly carved across his bare back—these acts gave them a
voice.7 Without the suicide of Joy Division’s lead singer in 1980, the transmutation
of punk into post-punk’s gothic gloom might have lacked the narrative through
which Americans heard the next wave of British music, and Thatcher-era discontent
would have lacked its distinctive, complaining soundtrack. Their self-destruction
allowed them to speak, or at least allowed a generation of rock critics, awed by the
spectacle, to speak for them.
Crash
Nor did Forrester’s injury provide a Real World parallel to the drive toward
self-destruction blankly described in one of punk’s most striking literary precur
sors, J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973)—the inspiration for the Normal’s enduring in
vitation to perversion, “Warm Leatherette” (1978), and what its author called “the
first pornographic novel based on technology.”8 Crash uses not only the first per
son but Ballard’s own name, as well as the vocabulary from his own past experi
ence as editor of a medical journal, techniques which deliberately situate the novel’s
events with a documentary-like dryness. Just like The Real World and its Oxford
grad punk, Crash illustrates the middle and upper class roots journalists repeatedly
revealed behind the working class affectations of the Sex Pistols or the Clash: the
novel narrates a TV director’s growing obsession with car crashes, the impassive
7 Savage 376.
8 J. G. Ballard, introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974), included in Crash (London:
Paladin, 1990) 9.
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351
physician he accidentally widows, and Vaughan, a suicidal stuntman whose infec
tious sexuality revolves around Elizabeth Taylor and the injuries he choreographs.
But even if Forrester would seem to have little of “Ballard”’s drive toward
annihilation, The Real World and Crash share more than a fascination with under
stated upper-crust decadence. Like Forrester’s violently returned kiss, Crash
reaches an explicit and minutely detailed climax (“of a long punitive expedition into
my own nervous system”9) with the violent intersection of male flesh. Ballard,
freed by LSD, gently opens Vaughan’s leather jacket, “exposing the re-opened
wounds that marked his chest and abdomen, a deranged drag queen revealing the
leaking scars of an unsuccessful trans-sexual surgery,” and finally fucks Vaughan
in the front seat of his Lincoln.1 0 While David Cronenberg’s 1996 version retained
much of the novel’s more difficult material, the film’s cross-Atlantic transplantation
lost the novel’s most enduring strength—not its blank description of aberrant sexu
ality, but its ability to summon up the hung-over ugliness of Ballard’s perversely
appealing England.
Conenberg’s inclusion of the final climactic coupling has been the exception
to the rule, positioning the film within a triptych of films which blur the boundaries
between straight and gay, including his adaptations of Naked Lunch (1991) and M.
Butterfly (1993). As a novel, however, Crash has been positioned somewhat dif
ferently: in its most interesting parallel to Forrester’s kiss, Ballard’s novel has
mysteriously avoided attention as a text concerned with homosexuality. While The
Real World carefully deflects the connection between Forrester’s act and his own
sexuality (to rephrase the Elastica hit used on the series’ sound track, “the connec-
9 Ballard 148.
10 Ballard 154.
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352
tion is not made”), Crash's emphasis upon the sexual direction of “Ballard”’s
transgressive thrust would seem to demand acknowledgment.
Nonetheless, Crash's critical history outside Britain has so escaped: the
novel has captured Jean Baudrillard’s attention as the quintessence of postmodern
science fiction, and served as the primary text for a special issue of Science-Fiction
Studies devoted to Baudrillard, Ballard, and postmodernism; it has illustrated Scott
Bukatman’s science fictional reading of Georges Bataille in Terminal Identity, and
been excerpted in RESearch's punk-minded 1984 Ballard volume—all without a
mention of the novel’s labeled climax.1 1 “Seductive because it has been stripped of
meaning, a simple mirror of tom bodies,” Baudrillard writes of Crash. 1 2
Also missing in these responses, for that matter, has been any acknowl
edgment that the novel’s science fiction status is itself problematic. Syntactically,
the novel provides a narrative similar to the ones Ballard employed in earlier 1960s
science fiction novels such as The Drowned World or The Chrystal World—a pro
tagonist walks into, rather than away from the chaotic destruction refiguring the
world. But semantically, the novel lacks any science fiction terminology or novum
(a catastrophic climatic change, a space virus ...) to explain the narrative’s trajec
tory toward death and transfiguration; only the tensions and conflicts of early 1970s
English culture may be singled out as an explanation. Crash, therefore, may be de
scribed as science fiction only if the genre is described not according to the dictates
11 Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash," trans. Arthur B. Evans, in “Science Fiction and Post
modernism” special issue, Science-Fiction Studies 183 (November 1991): 313-20; Scot Bukat-
man. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1993) 292-93, and in passing; “J. G. Ballard,” RESearch 8/9 (1984).
12 Baudrillard 315.
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353
of such traditional science fiction theorists as Darko Suvin, but as a general field.1 3
That designation may be determined, in this case, by the author’s previous science
fiction novels, the strange sexuality described in unusually dispassionate and clini
cal vocabulary, and the depressed, drably modernistic environs of the Shepperton
film studios and Gatwick Airport concrete flyovers. Taking as inspiration the suici
dal state of the British film industry, Ballard presented a then-contemporary Eng
land in terms which may still describe a present/future apocalypse. It is the same
science fictional, nuclear winter England that the Sex Pistols and the Clash sang
about, that Derek Jarman dramatized in his own gay punk project with the punk ce
lebrity Jordan, Jubilee (1977)— and that Margaret Thatcher promised relief from
when she ended two decades of Labour misjudgments in 1979. In Crash's
“semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, and wounds” Baudrilliard found that
“the entire body becomes a sign which offers itself in the exchange of body lan
guage,” and punk opened itself to a similarly transgressive reading: with the cry of
“Oh Bondage Up Yours!” and a disregard for any usual criteria of musical ability,
punk momentarily offered pleasures that denied the distance Pierre Bourdieu in
sisted is central to the bourgeois economy of the body.14
Forrester overstepped that distance. The violent, mosh-pit jouissance of his
French kiss is the horror of punk or Crash when viewed from outside, when For
13 See Darko Suvin’s structuralist explanation of the novum in Metamophoses o f Science
Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1979); for a discussion of science fiction as a field, see Nicholas Ruddick, Ultimate Island:
On the Nature of British Science Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993) 1-15, and
Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British "New Wave’ ’ in Sci
ence Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) 13-14.
14 Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979) 569-70. Translated and
quoted in Colin Mercer, “Complicit Pleasures,” Popular Culture and Social Relations, ed. Tony
Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woolacott (London: Open University Press, 1986) 59.
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354
rester nurses his stitched together tongue and experiences Bourdieu’s “loss of the
subject in the object, from the actual submission to the immediate present. . . .”’1 5
Such submission may be, as Ballard (and Leo Bersani, as discussed earlier) makes
clear, a shattering pleasure which sometimes lead male subjects to queer positions.
Those positions, however, may be insufficient or different from a fixed sexual
identity. Baudrillard’s enthusiasm for Crash—or TV Guide's for Forrester—would
even seem to exclude that level of meaning.
In this sense, the extreme pleasures of Crash, as boundary-breaking as they
may seem, still have policed borders, ones which name the text as a postmodern
science fiction, rather than homosexual novel. But perhaps insisting that a false di
chotomy has been set up between sexuality and science fiction, as the critical
sources above suggest, might also lose sight of the degree to which Baudrillard and
company are signifying homosexuality under the rubric of postmodernism and sci
ence fiction. The two fields may not be mutually exclusive but actually overlap in
certain important aspects. Certainly AIDS has made sexuality fantastic or science
fictionalized in general, and homosexuality in particular, as works from the Angels
in America play cycle to William Gibson’s Virtual Light suggest.
Falling to Earth
But practices like punk and novels like Crash seem far removed from these
fantastic or science fictional works and their sentimental, poignant presentations of
suffering and death. As Vivian Sobchack has written in response to Baudrillard, his
“techno-body is a body that is thought always as an object, and never as a lived
subject." What Baudrillard misses is Ballard’s emphasis in his introduction to the
15 Mercer 60.
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355
novel that what follows is cautionary rather than celebratory.1 6 Pain, Sobchack in
sists, hurts, and unlike “Ballard” or Vaughan, Forrester was simply hurt, a state
The Real World conveyed by emphasizing not the actual altercation, but its glum
aftermath, as a petulant Forrester and Chrys return to the Notting Hill flat There
Baudrillard’s techno-body emerges under somewhat different conditions than in
Crash. Before a computer set up on the group’s dining table, Forrester and Chrys
faced The Real World’s Betacams side by side like a bleach-blond redux of The
Man Who Fell to Earth’s games with the similarly androgynous faces of David
Bowie and Candy Clark.
For several reasons, this 1976 British science fiction film presents a possi
bly more meaningful context for The Real World than either punk or Crash alone.1 7
Bowie’s space alien, adrift in American, could complain that television could show
one unlimited pictures of everything but tell nothing about them; The Real World,
as television, relays its critical attention to yet another interloping technology, the
computer. Forrester (the only cast member to establish his own independent site on
the Web) placed his poetic account of the kiss upon the computer’s monitor, and a
computer generated voice reads in the same synthetic, unexplained American inflec
tion given to the handicapped British physicist Stephen Hawkins in another docu
mentary, A Brief History o f Time. The computer speaks while sync bars roll past
the typed-in text:
so here i am.
tongueless.
speaking with a [matted-out] american accent
that’s rock and roll for you.
16 Vivian Sobchack, “Baudrillard’s Obscenity,” Science-Fiction Studies 18 (1991): 327-28.
17 Mirroring The Real World’s move to London, this was the first wholly British-backed film
to be shot in the US.
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356
A decade earlier, Fredric Jameson had called Bowie’s television-absorbed alien,
Thomas Newton, an evolutionary mutation, a model of how the postmodernist
viewer grasps relationships through “the vivid perception of radical difference”—
television’s inability to tell as inherent to its power. Rather than linear, causal logic,
collage has become the cognitive pathway of culture in the Americanized era.1 8
Now, no doubt, Newton would be absorbed not by television but the still-on-going
evolutionary mutation television has undergone courtesy of the PC and the In
ternet—Newton merges with the name of an earlier Englishman Apple chose for a
line of small (albeit remarkably unpopular) handheld computers. Forrester even
signals the influence of Jameson’s evolutionary mutation by decorating his Oxford
Web site with a familiar post-structuralist call to “DESTROY LINEAR
NARRATIVE.”1 9
Yet Forrester is aware that, as techno-bodies, both he and Hawkins have
lost the English grain of their voice, their accent, when they speak through the latest
mutations of technology. This loss of voice and national identity has a considerable
history no doubt meaningful to Forrester’s ambitions: British musicians from
Sheena Easton to Oasis have invaded America dressed in the colors of English pop
culture but singing with American accents; The Beatles Anthology's (1995)
“authorized” emphasis upon the group’s reliance upon Elvis Presley, The Wild
One, and other American icons provides only the more recent mapping of the na
tional interface. That’s rock and roll for you: if causal logic is out, anyone can be an
18 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left
Review 14 (July-August 1984): 76.
19 Forrester.
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357
American, just as Crash's coldly dystopian view of England can be considered sci
ence fiction.
However, neither Forrester nor Newton seem particularly enthused by their
positions as synthetic American techno-bodies or Jameson’s evolutionary mutation.
Jameson ignores the sentimental regret in Bowie’s voice as he describes television’s
inability to explain the world; the scene in which it occurs draws implicit connec
tions between this sense of loss and the perception of difference audible in the ver
bal difference between the “collaged” American and English cultures. The only par
tially-comprehending American to whom Newton speaks begins to question him
concerning his nationality. Despite his insistence that he is what he claims, English,
the employee, Dr. Bryce, clearly suspects something else—this wealthy business
man and inventor speaks with what sounds like an English accent, but which may
(and does) signify instead a difference much more radical. Dr. Bryce’s suspicions
rest upon a confidence that English culture is inseparable from the traditions and
images last reinforced during the Second World Wan he discovers that Newton
cannot even recognize the motto of the Royal Air Force, “ Per adua ad astra, ” as
Latin, let alone translate it as ‘Through difficulties to the stars.”
Yet even if Newton is not an Englishman as he claims (or of the class Bryce
assumes), but some space alien exploiting a technology no Englishman could sin
gle-handedly develop, Bryce fails to understand him. He, like Jameson, ignores
Newton’s regret and sees instead an ambition.
Rather than a science fictional model of postmodernism, Newton is the nar
rative’s supreme victim of postmodernism, condemned by the Americans’ crass
machinations. He can never return to his home, presented as a far more advanced
civilization now dying on a barren and water-less planet Following Bryce’s be
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358
trayal, Newton even becomes trapped in the male bodily disguise he has assumed,
his contact lenses, hair, and male genitals becoming irreparably attached to his body
by the X-rays and other tests performed to determine his “difference.” Although he
may not be either English or a man, literally, Newton’s accent takes on a chain of
associations which renders English masculinity the sum of the difference by which
American masculinity knows its phallic power. Bowie’s emaciated, androgynous
body, the corporeal site of Newton’s difference, provides the iconic evidence of
this English difference; because The Man Who Fell to Earth (like The Real World,
with it missing tongue-biting man) lacks any other English male characters to pro
vide contrast, Bowie/Newton’s symbolic status would seem to encircle English
masculinity in general. Its impotence is underlined when Newton’s captors’ finally
tire of trying empirically to identify this alien Otherness and casually allow their
captive to wander back into the world. Without much purpose, Newton becomes ..
. a musician, in the hope that his album {The Visitor) will be broadcast and received
on the dead planet to which he can never return.
Forrester’s position is somewhat similar, complete with a subsequent re
cording contract for Unilever. Without much recourse to the familiar psychoanalytic
vocabulary of upward displacement and castration, his partially severed tongue in
advertently dramatized the already existent distance between two competing but in
tertwined signs: Forrester’s spoken Oxford accent, imbued with that which Ameri
cans have repeatedly recognized as cultural and historical authority; and that ac
cent’s physical embodiment in the imperiled form of contemporary English mascu
linity, the difference which Newton’s captors could never quite quantify. In other
words, Forrester’s phallus was already in trouble before he ever bore a strange
man’s teeth marks.
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359
Our Future
In a similar manner, punk itself may be viewed not simply as a symptom of
a national political, class, and gender crisis, but as a perversely eroticized rehearsal
of that crisis’ final conclusion, when English masculinity has ceased to be an inter
esting difference and is simply left to wander an indistinguishable American land
scape, like Newton, in a numb stupor. The Last of England, Derek Jarman called it,
speaking of “my generation’s trip to America” but borrowing the title from a Ford
Madox Brown painting of emigrants leaving for the New World.20 AH of the fig
ures of (official) English masculinity examined so far—the actor, the gentleman, the
villain, the spy—have been so involved in the task of negotiating a relation between
the past and present, British and American, homosexual and heterosexual, that the
third chronological portion, the future, has been (with the partial exception of James
Bond) largely ignored in the first two sections. But the very last figure cannot be fit
with such a simplified label as Jean-Luc Picard, Quatermass, and David Bowie
suggest. This figure draws upon a nexus in which punk coexists with other fields
of meaning such as science fiction, nationality, and gender, and proposes the fu
ture. This figure of the future, so to speak, is the final millennial Anglophilia, the
moment when “England’s dreaming” gives its accent to America’s dreaming and the
boundaries are abolished with Baudrilliardian enthusiasm:
We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in your human machine
We’re the future
Your future2 1
20 Derek Jarman, The Last o f England (London: Constable, 1987) 189-207.
21 Reprinted in Jon Savage, England’ s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Be
yond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) 282h.
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360
The sentiment might as well describe the future relation between the US and UK
Orwell imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but these lyrics (from “God Save the
Queen”) adorned a 1977 Warner Brothers poster advertising the American release
of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols, the formal introduction of
punk rock as a commodity in America. Of course, as San Francisco learned in
1978, the Sex Pistols’ American invasion would not exactly be successful.
But by staging its death drama while on tour in the US (as well as its reun
ion in 199622), the Sex Pistols may have left behind a bastard reincarnation. British
music following punk successfully spread from college to the alternative format
during the 1980s, fueled by the early MTV popularity of Duran Duran, Bowie, and
Eurythmics, yet despite repeated crossovers onto the American mainstage, British
New Wave and post-punk remained typified by the critical respect and commercial
disregard given Elvis Costello and the Smiths. An analogue to the Channel Four
and the New British Cinema of the early 1980s, British music remained within the
art house category.
Then, in the early 1990s, punk made a peculiar return to the American
charts with the attention given Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) and the sudden public
discovery of Northwestern grunge. Subsequent self-proclaimed punk groups have
followed in the group’s punk sales arc, such as Green Day, Hole, NoFX, Off
spring, and a Bay Area group with a Clash-obsessed Brixton accent, Rancid. In the
early 1990s, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and other so-called Riot Grrri bands briefly
gave the media a vision of real live punk politics rephrasing feminism’s vocabulary,
but then deliberately retreated, ostensibly to ward off the double disappointments of
22 “We have found a common cause,” John Lydon announced in London, “and it’s your
money.” The group’s tom would include an extended stretch in the US. “The Morning Report,”
Los Angeles Times, 19 March 1996: F2.
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361
English punk and Los Angeles punk of the early 1980s.23 Pansy Division and Ex
tra Fancy have played off of queer politics, and benefited from Cobain’s and Green
Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong’s gay-friendly public stances. Armstrong’s own an
nounced bisexuality and choice of Pansy Division as an opening act in 1995 cur
rently constitute the most open gay friendly presence in mainstream American mu
sic.
While punk may have been reborn in the US, this once patently false culture
has become a sign of muscular, masculine authenticity, crowned by Kurt Cobain’s
suicidal anguish over stardom and the hubris of Courtney Love for desiring it as
well. 1991: The Year that Punk Broke (1992), a rough, Super 8 tour documentary
theatrically distributed in the wake of Nevermind’s commercial breakthrough, out
lined the national transference with surprising accuracy: whether or not 1991 was
the year punk “broke” (an Offspring live recording uses its title to claim that punk
“broke” in 1994), and whether or not punk broke through or just broke, the film
provides a counter history of post-Pistols punk, positioned against a litany of Motly
Crile covering “Anarchy in the UK” and retro-punk fashions a Conde Nast staple.
Perhaps because punk’s drive was to be broken, Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the
other bands the film follows must break it again. Consequently, 1991 ’ s only men
tion of Britain is simply a question asked by an interviewer dressed in what once
was punk garb— and which now, next to the studied casualness of grunge, simply
looks like the gay leather and bondage wear from which it borrowed. He asks
23 Ann Japenge, “Grunge ‘R’ Us: Exploiting, Co-opting and Neutralizing the Countercul
ture,” Los Angeles Times Magazine 14 November 1995: 26+.
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362
Sonic Youth how they are viewed in Britain, and gets no response. The future
would seem to be ours.24
Whether distributed by a major label, or by a slick, aggressive independent
that challenges the difference (Offspring and Rancid’s Epitaph, founded by Bad
Religion guitarist Brett Grewitz), alternative music has become American rock’s
dominant commercial force, and, with the exception of the grunge-sound-a-Iike
Bush, British music now constitutes an alternative to alternative receiving negligible
airplay. As Warner Brothers’ Sex Pistols poster promised, their future has become
our future, if only in popular music. Suede, P. J. Harvey, and Elastica each have
taken turns as American critical favorites this decade, and the general field of trip-
hop, jungle, and Brian Eno-influenced ambient has begun to emerge as the fashion
able soundtrack for the coming millennium. Taking American hip-hop and refract
ing it back through the British history of dub, ska, and the tropes of entropy,
techno alienation, and cutting-edge drugs, music by Tricky, Goldie, Jungle, Sky-
lab, and Massive Attack point to yet another generational exploration of science fic
tional iconography.25 Among black popular musicians, Sade’s adult-contemporary
work has managed to find mainstream acceptance the US and still retain British
identity as part of her appeal, while Soul II Soul and Desiree offer a sharp contrast
24 It seems fitting that Nirvanna’s cover of Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” at first
appeared to be an odd choice, but eventually became a widely played epitaph for Cobain following
his death in 1994:
I thought you died alone, a long long time ago
Oh no, not me
I never lost control
You’re face to face
With the Man Who Sold The World
From Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, compact disc, 1972, reissued 1990.
25 See Simon Reynolds, “Entropy in the UK,” Village Voice 9 May 1995: 47+.
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363
to the trip-hop generation by blending almost seamlessly into the registers of the Af
rican-American music industry.26
Yet compared to grunge and its MTV Unplugged, easier-listening spin-offs,
the relatively complex or unfamiliar concerns with gender and race of Tricky and
company leave them pretenders to the reborn cult for aggressive American authen
ticity. But the future is another matter in 1995, Strange Day’ s choice of P.J. Har
vey, Deep Forest, and Skunk Anasie for its soundtrack, and Tricky’s use in Virtu
osity, suggest how these American virtual reality films imagined the near cyber
future through the language of current British music. Like a National Review car
toon come to Hollywood life, what could better sum up the Strange Days ahead
than Skunk Anasie’s bleached-blond, punked-up, black British lesbian screaming
the heavy metal lyrics of “Selling Jesus”?
But American film has also used contemporary British music to reject such
millennial paranoia. Backed by a soundtrack led by Nine Inch Nails, but dominated
by Jesus and Mary Chain, Lush, the Cure, and other British groups, The Doom
Generation’s 1995 final violent equation of patriotic Americana and murderous ho
mophobia implicitly recognizes and employs the music’s overt marginality: it is
both a symptom of alienation and an alternative aural space apart from the narra
tive’s unhappy teen chronicle of polymorphous perversity. As the film’s initially
heterosexual economy begins to shift, the soundtrack wraps around the characters’
increasing sexual difference, equating (sexual) marginality with (national) margin
ality. That equation may be used successfully in the film, but it is also a well-used
one, as familiar to American ears as the Smiths’ whining gay complaints were to
26 Another example is British television comedian Lenny Henry, who slipped smoothly into
his role as an African-American leading man in his ironically titled US film debut. True Identity
(1991), the story of an American who must disguise himself as white.
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364
1980s radio fans of the “cutting edge” alternative rock format. In the 1990s, Nine
Inch Nails may ride the grunge-led “alternative” invasion of the American charts,
but British music still remains a sexual and national Other.
As one result, the widely reported competition between the groups Blur and
Oasis in 1995 for the British pop crown finally translated (in 1996) into mainstream
American popularity—for the Beatles-esque Oasis, but not the unmistakably Lon
don accents of Blur’s more English-sounding pop. Yet Blur as well represents a
backward-looking Britpop that has appeared in Britain as a reactionary, purposely
“little,” Merchant Ivory-like retreat to the past formulas for American commercial
success. To British ears, their sense of Little England, however, seemed crafted for
the American-led mainstream, not the Smiths’ hip ghetto.27
Even David Bowie’s ambitious 1995 would-be comeback project, Outside
(the first of a projected 5 album “non-linear Gothic drama Hyper-cycle” millennial
countdown, created in collaboration once again with Eno), steals from American
culture in a manner possibly more desperate than audacious. In Bowie’s written
narrative, his new New York persona, Detective Professor Nathan Adler, of Art-
Crime Inc., draws a web of performance art references (from the suicidal Viennese
body modifications of the 1970s to the AIDS-era rituals of gay Los Angeles pierc
ing and tattoo celebrity Ron Athey) in order to explain and solve the “art-ritual mur
der” of a 14 year old girl named Baby Grace Blue. Prime suspect—and most sug
gestive of Bowie himself: a mid 40s, ‘ Tyrannical Futurist” named Ramona A.
Stone who appears, in the accompanying photo-montages, dressed unmistakably in
the apparel, hair, and angry smirk of late 1970s British punk. By either posing,
costumed, for other characters (such as Baby Grace or the elderly Algeria Touch-
27 See Mark Fisher, “Indie Reactionaries,” New Statesman, 7 July 1995: 31.
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365
shriek), or by digitally mixing his features with another model (for the “racially
mixed,” prodigiously pierced, and mohawked contemporary punk Leon Blank,
who bears Bowie’s famous, permanently dilated left iris), Bowie visually under
lines what the lyrics’ multiple “I”s makes obvious. He is all the characters, the en
tire cyberpunk cast of the approaching millennial mutation and apocalypse; while
2001 may have drawn upon British Pop Art for its elegantly sterile view of the next
millennium, Outside performs a reverse operation, appropriating an American mask
which constantly slips to expose the English skeleton of narrative supporting it.
Yet because American groups such as Nine Inch Nails had already popular
ized this post-punk synthesis of SM practices, conceptual art, and sexual provoca
tion, Bowie’s entire effort feel upstaged and derivative, as did his public enthusi
asm for American music like Nine Inch Nails which had become “bold and muscu
lar again.”28 Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor acknowledged Bowie’s influence by
opening for him on his 1995 tour, but the contrast between Bowie’s elegant re
straint and a bare-chested and hysterical Reznor, massaging his crotch while
screaming that “the Devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car,” led mostly to a
repeated pattern of walkouts during Bowie’s elegantly non-muscular half.29 The
grisly thriller Seven, playing simultaneously with the tour, reinforced the compari
28 Richard Cromlein, ‘“Music [Has] Started to Become. . . Bold and Muscular Again,’” Los
Angeles Times, 26 September 1995: FI.
29 “Hallo Spaceboy,” Bowie sings in an Outside single recalling the Ziggy Stardust era: “Do
you like boys or girls?/It’s confusing these days, I know/. . . and this chaos is killing me.” While
the power of contemporary rode acts like Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson may rely upon the
pleasures of perversely shattering the boundaries of heterosexual propriety, their evocation of ho
mosexuality as transgression may share a common perception of repression with Outside. But
Bowie’s polite, very "English”-seeming stiff-upper lip in the face of visceral degradation produces a
sense of decadent elegance quite distinct from the “bold and muscular.” In the end, it would seem
that Outside’ s central narrative describes Bowie’s horror at that “chaos,” while Reznor’s desire is to
jump in the back seat with it
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366
son by placing a Nine Inch Nails song, “Closer,” over the film’s opening titles, and
Bowie’s first Outside single, “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” over the closing credits:
despite Bowie’s claims at authorial power over this post-punk confluence, that
power has shifted to its commercially more friendly, if still provocative American
practitioners.
Under the Skin
What these practitioners practice, exactly, blends into a more general 1990s
rock iconography of greater or lesser seriousness. Heavy metal has long drawn
upon a fantasy vocabulary of black leather and gender-fuck frills: in 1984, This Is
Spinal Tap’s choice of an SM harness for Harry Shearer’s cucumber-packing
rocker summed up a generation of Led Zeppelin-inspired British imports. But early
on in the 1990s, the juxtaposition of hyper-priapic heterosexuality and otherwise
gay-identified imagery appeared a little naive, a little more worn, and ready for
transformation. Drawing upon the older tradition, Axel Rose bared a pierced nipple
and repeatedly appeared in the leather chaps and cap uniform of gay SM, even
while his band, Guns N’ Roses, sang the gay-baiting, AIDS and race-heavy lyrics
of Guns N ’ Roses Lies and prepared The Spaghetti Incident, an album of punk
covers: the leather was old, but the piercing might truly shock. Like Patty Smith’s
record of Robert Mapplethorpe’s date with the needle two decades earlier {Robert
Having His Nipple Pierced), Rose’s display could shock through both the physical
modification involved and the perverse eroticization of the male body it suggested.
But by the time Aerosmith’s Get a Grip album cover zoomed in on a cow’s
pierced nipple in 1994, the shock had become a joke: Lollapalooza began to carry
along a piercing tent (nothing below the waist, please), Sunday supplements pro
duced cheerful essays on “The ‘90s Nose Job,” and a comic strip by Mimi Pond
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367
presented Bill and Hillary Clinton trying to connect with Chelsea by volunteering
“to pierce the homeless together!”30 By the time Forrester stripped off his shirt to
show The Real World his multiply-pierced nipples, his rings were as common as,
say, the piercings displayed in the London bus ads for an album by Right Said
Fred, or the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ music videos, or the hyper-bondage science
fiction of MTV’s Aeon Flux. Or, for that matter, The Brady Bunch Movie (1995),
complete with body piercing as an initial visual symbol of Los Angeles’ 1990s
identity, and as a final plot point Just a “passive rebellion thing,” the Sunday sup
plements shrugged, “for a very passive era.”3 1
But in a time when a needle passing through the skin has taken on an omi
nous health potential, piercing and other body modifications carry with them an
erotically charged but horrific subtext Regardless of the aesthetic grace of a film
like Seven, its narrative of Christian guilt, physical destruction, and the body’s vul
nerability is meant to horrify as well as fascinate: the body of horror, the films of
David Cronenberg led Tania Modleski to argue a decade ago, is a ruptured body.
The pleasures she ascribed to the body of horror are not so much “pleasure”
(Lacan’s jouissance sexuelle, associated with the female body in horror) as we rec
ognize it but jouissance (Lacan’s jouissance phallique, associated with the male
body’s actions) as Barthes would recognize it—’’’gaps,’ ‘wounds,’ ‘fissures,’
‘splits,’ ‘cleavages’ . . . ,”32 Such “male” jouissance is hardly safe—if not then,
hardly now. Instead, jouissance is the language of death, literally, and the male
30 See Jonathan Gold, “The ‘90s Nose Job,” Los Angeles Times Magazine 20 September
1992: 10, and Mim Pond, “Chelsea’s Angst ‘92,” Village Voice 5 January 1993.
31 Gold 10.
32Tania Modleski, "The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Rim and Postmodern
Theory," Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Modleski
(Bloomington: Indiana University. Press, 1986) 159.
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368
body seems to speak it most clearly when it is most vulnerable to penetration by
HIV—when it opens its own self to the jouissance of sexual penetration.
However much American culture has actually incorporated piercing and
other body modification into the ever-changing canon of harmless fads may be de
batable, given the 1994 congressional uproar over Ron Athey’s partially NEA-
funded scarification ritual33: Axel Rose’s pierced nipple may have become pedes
trian to some Americans, but when such practices no longer suppress, or even an
nounce (like Athey’s work) the porous boundaries of body and identity, desire and
disease, then they do possess at least some modicum of both danger and subver
sion. As the drug user knows, the piercing or tattooing needle may be clean, and
Athey, who suffers from AIDS, may have used another subject for his rituals (and
even then not exposed the audience to the blood drawn). But risk, as well as per
manent alteration, is still present, even if primarily as a fantasy. In the song “Hurt,”
the conclusion to Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral (1994), Trent Reznor’s
lyrics sketch the logic of this fantasy whether the needle carries heroin, HIV, or a
surgical steel piercing post:
i hurt myself today
to see if i still feel
i focus on the pain
the only thing that’s real
the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but i remember everything34
Like Ballard’s projection of “Ballard” into the disfigured and disfiguring desires of
Crash, Reznor’s emphasis upon the ontological force of pain occurs upon a fantas
tic plane which demands the physical penetration of the body’s surface; and like the
33 See Guy Trebay, “Ron Athey’s Slice of Life,” Village Voice 1 November 1994: 38.
34 Nine Inch Nails, “Hurt,” The Downward Spiral, compact disc, 1994.
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369
pun upon jouissance in Julia Kristeva’s work (j’ oui's sens, “I heard meaning”),
meaning is created through its own obliteration.35 Destruction might seem to “kill it
all away”—the album begins with the sounds of someone being whipped—but the
subject does still feel, does still remember everything, because of the pain: as Judith
Butler has argued, drawing upon the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche and
J.-B. Pontalis, fantasy not only postures as the real, fantasy constitutes a “psychic
reality” which includes the real, and, according to Jacqueline Rose’s terms, “haunts
and contests the borders which circumscribe the construction of stable identities.”36
The fantasies represented by Forrester’s modified nipples—and the other
fantasies which may have helped to win him the role—were, until recently, at least,
signs which would truly haunt the construction of a stable heterosexual identity. As
recently as 1991’s The Silence o f the Lambs, a close-up of a male pierced nipple
could still signify the unspeakable: a thin, hoop earring-like nipple ring dances
quickly across the screen in a key sequence, attached to the chest of “Buffalo Bill,”
a man who pursued a fetish for female skin in order, it seems, to replace that which
he lacked. This moment threatens to rupture the narrative skin of the film with the
display of his body directly, eyes locked with the camera, as if it were a mirror. For
several horrifying moments the camera pieces together the modifications this Buf
falo Bill (a wearer of skins) had made on his own body, some permanent, some
not; besides the nipple, the camera bares a rocker’s touch of eye and lip makeup on
35 See Leon S. Roudiez’s discussion of this pun in his introduction to Julia Kristeva’s Desire
in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed Roudiez (New York: Columbia Uni
versity Press, 1980) 16.
36 Judith Butler, "The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess,”
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2.2 (1990): 6.
The album on which “Hurt” appears. The Downward Spiral, opens with the sound of someone
being whipped: this Freudian scenario initiates Reznor’s narrative.
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370
the face, crude, scattered prison-style tattoos across his chest, and thighs clamped
tightly where his genitals might have appeared. But the pierced nipple of this film’s
monstrous killer—his nipple unstretched, undistorted, unruptured essentially (a
prosthetic nipple?)—seems almost discreet next to the Forrester’s casually dis
played multiple piercings in The Real World. The special effects of The Silence of
the Lambs dutifully presented the creations of its skin tearing, ripping, stitching
“artist,” but The Real World presents human skin punctured, and re-made, not via
plaster casts and latex, but via scar build-up and MTV.
Yet Buffalo Bill’s identity is no different from this fantasy of bodily trans
formation: as the film’s makers constantly insisted at the time of the film’s release,
Buffalo Bill was not meant to be gay or transsexual, despite the nipple ring, the
makeup, the transvestitism, the penis-tucking, the poodle, the sewing, the former
male lover. . . .37 In other words, despite Michelangelo Signorile’s, Larry
Kramer’s, and others’ recognition of a gay stereotype older than Norman Bates,
Buffalo Bill’s fantastical attempt to change his skin could not add up to an identity,
however homophobic. His obscene fantasies, according to director Jonathan
Demme, had therefore so successfully haunted and contested those borders through
which stable identities are constructed that identity had become impossible. Unlike
the process of remembrance which Reznor’s needle brings, here history itself be
comes impossible.
No S k in o f f M y A ss
Yet the system of meaning recognized by Signorile and Kramer does have a
history to remember. Above the November 12,1991, cover, just to the right of The
37 See Larry Kramer, Martha Gever, and others, “Writers on the Lamb: Sorting Out the Sex
ual Politics of a Controversial Film,” Village Voice 5 March 1991: 49+.
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Village Voice's banner, appeared a rectangular, black and white photograph cap
tioned only by “(Guy Trebay, P.37).” A shiny, round metallic horseshoe-shaped
ring with two little knobs at the bottom shares the center of the composition with the
bit of flesh it pierces and stretches; around the flesh, which has the proportion, col
oring and small erectile pug of a nipple, swirls what might otherwise be taken for a
doodle. Coiling around like pen and ink worms, these fragments of some larger de
sign are too close, too limited to guess at what their design would represent This
tattoo, however, almost disappears behind the brightness of the ring, its heaviness,
and the distorted flesh which holds the ring in place.
Surrounded by the Voice's carefully blaring headlines and explicitly cap
tioned photographs, Ron Athey’s nipple appeared only with a name and a page
number—a composition deliberately mute and mysterious, squarely organized by
the image’s potential “outrageousness.” The caption, as it is, promises data and
analysis (“P.37.”), but postpones the accurate dimensions of those pleasures. In
stead the image, for all its connotations of the grotesque, promises not the plaisir of
distanced contemplation, but the jouissance of a vulgar seduction to what Colin
Mercer has identified as “the realm of recognition of a field of forces, tastes, influ
ences—in brief, to history.”38
The history of Athey’s nipple occupies a place in a grid bordered by AIDS,
the anarchic politics of Queer Nation, Jeffrey Dahlmer’s freakshow of homosexual
ity and necrophilia, and, on the last, probably most friendly side of this square,
homocore, a generationally-defined hard-core punk sub-subculture drawing self
38 Mercer 59.
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consciously upon the strategies of both punk and other fan-active cultures.39 As
used in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Bruce LaBruce and G. B. Jones, the re
spective “fag” and “dyke” editors of the seminal Toronto zine/. D.s, homocore
was, roughly, a synonym for Athey’s and Trebay’s “new homo underground.”
Homocore described a more traditional textual system of Canadian and US fan-
centered magazines (or zines, of which Dennis Cooper counted about 20 in
199Q40), and such short films as Boy/Girl and Sexbombs (from J. D.s, both
1988), as well as the anarchic, Warholian, but West Coast-ruled world of fashion,
club life and personalities. With its bondage and domination performances at clubs
like Fuck! in Los Angeles, homocore worked hard to define itself against an older
generation of pre-AIDS SM images: Walter Kehr’s short 1994 documentary of the
then-passing Fuck! scene, Miguel, records its overlapping margins with the Los
Angeles Latino community. In the early 1990s class also became a way of rephras
ing the underground’s generational opposition to their elder “leathermen” of polite,
assimilationist West Hollywood gentry, an opposition which may be read in the
flowering displacement of “gay and lesbian” by the reclaimed homo, queer, fag,
dyke, and so on.
But it is still the AIDS body, particularly the male body and the pleasure
which may be taken from it, that formed the central focus for both homocore and
this loosely defined West Coast “underground” during its late 1980s and early
1990s peak. From the pages of the zines to their spin-off films, homocore provided
a space to question the power invested in the representation of the body, debating
39 See Matias Viegener’s comprehensive but now dated “Gay Fanzines: ‘There’s Trouble in
That Body,” Afterimage 19 (January 1991): 12-14.
Dennis Cooper, “Homocore Rules: Gay Zine Makers Bust a Move,” Village Voice 4 Sep
tember 1990: 92.
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the fandom desire the zines and their contributors invest in the often homophobic,
misogynistic and racist punk culture outside of the commercially polished spheres
of Nirvana and Green Day. In J. D.s, LaBruce weighed the effects of “worshipping
the oppressor” when the object of lust wears a skinhead’s often fascistic uniform—
a scenario which promptly shows up LaBruce’s breakthrough feature, No Skin off
My Ass (1990, released theatrically 1991-92). ‘The tender love story,” in the di
rector, writer, and co-star’s words, “of a punk ex-hairdresser obsessed with a
young, silent, baby-faced skinhead,”41 No Skin off My Ass is WarhoI-does-Afy
Beautiful Launderette, with a nod to Blonde Cobra, and slowly grew from a night
club, festival and film society hit to a long-running midnight movie in both New
York and Los Angeles art houses; it remains a key film in the generational transition
from the positive-image concerned gay films of the 1980s {Parting Glances, Long
time Companion) to the queer-er 1990s images of Poison, Swoon, Go Fish, and
Frisk. With its obvious erotic investment in the tattooed, punk-adomed body, No
Skin off My Ass provided a parallel to the commercial explosion of piercing and
tattooing storefronts, situated first, like The Gauntlet, in the gay ghettos of Los An
geles, San Francisco, and New York, but by the mid 1990s, throughout a wide
range of boutique zones. And contra The Silence of the Lambs, the rhetoric of
Athey, LaBruce, and others placed this culture securely within the debates and ten
sions of explicitly queer culture.
More important here, No Skin o ff My Ass obsessively questions the rela
tion between gay desire and the remnants of British identity left behind by the con
tinuing popularity of works like Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of
Style—what is the meaning of the punk or the skinhead once their fetishized forms
41 Quoted in Cooper 93.
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3 7 4
drift from their ostensible historical contexts? Subculture stressed the racially con
tradictory history of the skinhead, and presented its nostalgic desire for Britain’s
white, proletariat past side by side with other subcultural styles like the mod, punk,
and glam rock, all under the rubric of its singular title but multiple divisions.42 De
spite their many intersections, these subcultures cohered mostly by the fiat of the
book’s chronological focus on the events of the late 1970s. Yet even in the UK,
Subculture has been treated as a pattern book from which the present may be mixed
and matched. As a pseudonymous essayist in Critical Quarterly recently charged,
Subculture's seminal status to cultural studies has allowed the text to be used as if it
were describing a contemporary culture, a mistake which wraps such attention in a
fundamental error.43 But LaBruce’s film asserts that the punk or skinhead may
certainly have no more meaning than what we imagine for it, yet that pattern book
of styles may still patch together the contours of our desires.44 When LaBruce’s
character picks up an illustrated history of British skinheads and reads aloud, that
history no longer fits, yet it does suggest other alternative histories, past and pres
ent
No Skin o ff My Ass begins with jump-cut, surveillance-like footage of
skinheads, including the soon-to-be central character, passing along a street. The
camera’s high, presumably concealed vantage point suggests both the intrigue of
watching the skinheads and the threat they potentially represent Violence, or the
promise of violence, instigates the narrative: mutilation and sadism, quite conven
42 Hebdige 54-9.
43 The Artful Dodger, “Used Books: Subculture: The Meaning o f Style by Dick Hebdige,”
Critical Quarterly37.2: 120-21.
44 See Kobena Mercer’s elaboration on the racial semiotics of the skinhead in “Black
Hair/Style Politics,” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York
and London: Routledge, 1994) 123, and in passing.
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375
iently, are two of the fag-bashing responses tangled up in these skinhead’s stereo
typical right-wing return to “traditional” proletarian culture and patriarchal norms.
These are the skinheadsof countless television documentaries and news reports, as
well as the shadowy margins of the mid-1990s subcultures of Oklahoma City and
the militias.
To gaze at the spectacle of a skinhead’s theatrical presentation of working
class masculinity is safe then, in a curious way, just as watching Buffalo Bill was:
the implicit violence provides the excuse, and the theatrical spectacle may seem to
mute the politics. The skinhead’s aesthetically “un-aesthetic” uniform—shaved
head, glum expression, suspenders, rolled up jeans over work boots—and Oi, his
harsh, blunt brand of music, asserts that the body and its pleasures are beyond
reach, that there can be no more than the invitation of that mutilation and sadism that
Stephen Neale described: they are the necessary narrative requirements if the male
body is to be treated as an erotic spectacle and if homosexuality is to be suppressed
from describing the (presumed to be male) spectator.45 As long as our look is thor
oughly mediated by fear or hatred, we (and he) are safe; it is a familiar strategy, one
shared by much of gay English culture’s fetishization of the skinhead, a turn which,
by the mid 1990s, has not only shown up on stage during Morrissey concerts, but
transformed the bars of Soho into crowds of skinheads dressed just a shade too
neatly.
But No Skin off My Ass ’ narrative strategy does not play so meekly with
image. To the beat of “Skinhead Guys Just Turn Me On (Slamdance, Baby),”
LaBruce crosscuts between the skinheads on the street and his tattooed but lonely,
45 Stephen Neal, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,”
Screen 24:6 (Nov.-Dee. 1983): 8.
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376
post-punk-dressed hairdresser (played by LaBruce), watching the beginning of No
Skin o ff My Ass' narrative inspiration on television: Robert Altman’s obscure
Sandy Dennis vehicle, That Cold Day in the Park (1969), an odd-ball mixture of
“woman’s film” and psychological horror set in Canada. Made following her role
as a lesbian in The Fox (1968), also set in Canada, Dennis played her usual aging,
neurotic spinster. This time around she notices a young hippie shivering in the park
outside her home and invites the “mute” young man in to warm-up; soon she is
locking him in the guest bedroom, he’s escaping for incestuous rendezvous with
his sister, and Dennis is out scrounging for a prostitute to keep him happy. As an
object of spectacle, the young man’s erotic appeal is once again excused for the
spectator by both his own explicitly manipulative motives and by Dennis’ increas
ingly unhinged obsession. He exists so that she may come apart It all ends with a
knife, a dead body, the windows nailed shut, and the young man a permanent
guest.
The only part LaBruce directly incorporates into No Skin o ff My Ass, how
ever, is the film’s lengthy title sequence, Dennis’ stroll through the park and obser
vation of the young man, shot directly off of a TV screen. From crosscutting be
tween the skinheads and That Cold Day, LaBruce shifts to crosscutting between the
film and shots of his own young man, one of the skinheads, shivering in a very
similar park. On the music track, “Skinhead Guys” begins to be interrupted by and
then begins to compete with That Cold Day's orchestral score. Finally, as the two
overlap each other, That Cold Day's final title appears, “Vancouver, B. C.,” fol
lowed by LaBruce’s ‘ Toronto, 1990,” and That Cold Day disappears, visually and
aurally, at least, from No Skin off My Ass. In its place, LaBruce’s hairdresser ap
pears in the park, dressed in a long dark coat recalling Dennis’; in a breathy, campy
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377
voice-over, the hairdresser describes inviting the skinhead in to warm up, and the
transplant procedure between films is complete. Like the young man of That Cold
Day, this skinhead is also adopting muteness as a con, and, like his forerunner, the
skinhead will be locked in the guest room—but only after a nice, warm, everything-
bared bubble bath, presided over by his compulsively babbling host.
Just as The Real World's Forrester is not where (or when) he belongs
when he plays punk and thrusts his tongue down the throat of his audience, neither
is the skinhead where he would seem to belong—masturbating in a Canadian punk
queen’s cozy bubble bath? His silence therefore seems to be more than simply a
faithfulness to That Cold Day. In part it is a structuring effect of LaBruce’s mar
ginal film practice here and in the subsequent Super 8 h ( 1994); LaBruce shoots si
lent on Super 8 and then dubs what dialogue is necessary in the same sloppy, arch
manner as the Kuchar brothers did. The skinhead has no language, except that
which LaBruce chooses to give him; silence is what protects the skinhead, what al
lows him to remain a skinhead and masturbate for the hairdresser.
The skinhead is also not where he belongs in terms of genre. LaBruce’s/the
hairdresser’s desire (“Skinheads Guys Just Turn Me On”) begins by interpolating
the skinhead into the initially melodramatic space of That Cold Day, and then, with
out a pause, into hard-core pornography. Along with horror, Linda Williams has
described these as “body genres,” genres which are based upon the expression of
bodily excess, such as weeping and sexual arousal, both diegetically and, synchro
nously, on the part of the spectator.46 Recalling Mercer’s adaptation of Kant’s dis
tinctions, these “low,” popular body genres may also be described in terms of
46 Physical comedy, on the other hand, often requires the spectator to react in a manner dia
metrically opposed. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly
(Fall 1991): 4.
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378
jouissance: the pleasure they give disregards the space of the subject by breaking
down the distance between representation and the thing represented, often leaving
us aware by the physical evidence of our involvement
No Skin o ff My Ass, however, makes a significant alteration: instead of
formulating these genres’ body spectacles through Williams’ “sexual saturation of
the female body,” No Skin o ff My Ass self-consciously poses the male body as
erotic spectacle for what is still presumably the male-identified spectator. The hair
dresser occupies Dennis’ former place, and within the film’s pornographic element,
it is the skinhead who assumes the passive position; it is the punk hairdresser, the
director (no skin off his ass), who provides the moneyshots.
That Cold Day, however, also veers off into another body genre, horror,
and concludes with Dennis wielding a plainly phallic knife. In Altman’s film, how
ever, the victim is not the young man but the prostitute she had provided for him. In
a curious manner, No Skin o ff My Ass recreates only part of its inspiration’s end
ing, suggesting horror but recognizing it only as an ecstatic form of jouissance, in
somewhat the same way Athey might re-negotiate the violent bodily excess of Buf
falo Bill as valid means of bodily pleasure: like That Cold Day's object of desire,
No Skin Off My Head's skinhead escapes to visit his sister, but this time around
she is a lesbian filmmaker and piercing fan (played by J. D.s co-editor G.B. Jones)
who wishes her brother would grow up and become gay. “Skinheads are stupid,”
she instructs him, “queers are smart.” She is also the one who wields the weapon in
this film: in tight close-ups, the skinhead receives a safety pin through his nipple.
This needle allows him, like Reznor in “Hurt” to remember everything, to find re
lease from the violent code of the skinhead, but still practice the erotic “forces,
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379
tastes, influences” of its history—unlike the safety pin the Sex Pistols gave the
Queen’s lips, this pin opens his body sexually, and allows him to speak.
Hairdressers, however, were not what Greil Marcus had in mind when he
described punk as a patently false culture—“its very unnaturalness, its insistence
that a situation could be constructed and then, as an artifice, escaped.” What Marcus
chose to see instead was Malcolm Mclaren’s influence at its beginning, pushing
punk toward the glib fashion notion that “sado-masochistic fantasies might lead the
way to the next big thing,” and Johnny Rotten’s influence at the end, pushing punk
through the social realist sieve of 1970s English despair, and making “real culture.”
That last step clearly makes it all worthwhile.47 An easy three steps—recognize the
decay, re-construct it as unmistakable artifice, escape to the real.
Perhaps this final step explains the desire to not only honor punk, but de
clare it good and dead as well: for punk to have succeeded in Lipstick Traces or the
pseudonymous Subculture essay above it must have forsaken its angry sense of ar
tifice and returned to the real, just as Johnny Rotten resumed life as John Lydon
after the end of the Sex Pistols.
But “real culture” is not really an option for LaBruce, or at least not a very
attractive one, and as a result, neither he nor his narrative take the third step Marcus
maps out As a filmmaker, LaBruce’s nationality as an English-speaking Canadian
places him between British and American film, while his hairdresser finds the real
situated with neither the skinhead (whom he could desire to be like, rather than de
sire) nor his filmmaker sister (who he could desire, rather than desire to be like).
The hairdresser’s punk affirmations leave him distanced from both “real” main
stream gay culture (which not only excludes punks but the effeminate as well), and
47 Marcus 69.
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380
Marcus’ heterosexual image of “real” punk culture. Each of these triangular patterns
refuse the resolution of Marcus’ three simple steps: as a queer punk Canadian
queen, both LaBruce and the hairdresser remain ironically sequestered from the
authenticity granted by the punk strategy of deliberate artifice. LaBruce chooses to
read his skinhead history incorrectly— just as Bowie chose to call his music plastic,
rather than real soul.
Like Forrester, LaBruce is a fake punk, playing off of the signs punk’s arti
fice but refusing its closure: perhaps their actions, regardless of their identities,
seem so steeped in a gay sensibility because of this aspect. Not that there exists
anything so specific as a gay sensibility—as Jonathan Dollimore puts it so well, if
there were such a thing, his single criterion would be the connection between per
versity and paradox Foucault found in the idea of sexual deviance, “if only because
it suggests why that sensibility does not exist as such.” Because normative sexual
ity “constitutes a ‘truth’ connecting inextricably with other truths and norms not ex
plicitly sexual,” sexual deviance threatens by its choice of perverse paths and para
doxical connections—it departs from the “nature” underpinning such a truth.48
To consider this a sensibility ignores that it is simply transgression by an
other name; when made strange again by national or other difference, punk’s his
torical paths of transgression therefore seem to make the paradoxical connections
normative sexuality finds in homosexuality. Marcus’ desire to find “real culture”
heads back toward nature, while punk’s remnants, the lipstick traces found on For
rester and LaBruce, remain signs of English fantasies unrecouped and still sugges
tive.
48 Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford;
Garendon Press, 1991)308-9.
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381
CHAPTER 11
Beyond
Joseph Conrad’s Marlow sits cross-legged at twilight, gazing back across
the river just before it drains from the Thames into the sea at Gravesend. Behind
him the gloom stretches back toward the West, where Kent, Essex, and finally the
lights of London lie. “And this also,” the Buddha-like Englishman says, “ . . . has
been one of the dark places of the earth.”1
Of course he and the passengers aboard the cruising yawl were headed out
beyond the light of Britain’s colonial heart, toward the darkness which that Empire
illuminated and Conrad recorded. Waiting for the tide to turn so that H.M.S. Nellie
might finally depart the river, Marlow tells his listeners the story of an earlier trip
into much more exotic and dangerous shadows. But the seaman also remembers the
way in which he first imagined that darkness through the maps which taught him
curiosity about the world: as a boy, Marlow’s fascination was drawn not toward the
filled-in names and colors of these maps, but the great white spaces left uncharted.
It was “the biggest—the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.”
Even at that time Africa was not really such a blank, Marlowe admits, but an al
ready growing network of
. . . rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank
space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to
dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.2
Conrad’s Heart o f Darkness momentarily reverses the pattern of imagery which will
govern the remainder of the work. Through the process of naming, the West con-
1 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Nor
ton, 1988) 9.
2 Conrad 11-12.
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382
structed both Africa’s darkness as well as its power to undermine the civilized ve
neers of men like Marlow and Kurtz. Yet England itself was also once a place of
darkness, Marlow pointed out, even before Rome’s tiremes mapped its coasts
“nineteen hundred years ago—the other day. . . .”3
Marlow’s yesterday is now another hundred years ago. As a new millen
nium approaches for the second time, England’s map seems heavily stained with
the darkness of naming, especially from the shores of America. It is difficult to
think of a better dark heart for us: while Marlow had Africa and his voyage up the
Congo River, the US may have an equally disturbing map of racial conflict and
violence, but our history has repeatedly sought out the inks and the dyes of its co
lonial composition 200 years ago, “the other day.” (Or in Pat Buchanan’s words:
“if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen,
and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would
cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”4)
Marlow’s knowledge of what lies before England’s history came from trav
eling beyond its borders. Beyond those borders Kurtz had discovered not only the
hoiror of Africa, but a more fatally alienating horror within his own desires and ac
tions, his own self. That is the knowledge which Kurtz shared with Marlow, and
which Marlow took with him as later he sat aboard the Nellie’ s deck at twilight, his
cheeks sunken, his complexion yellow, his physical bearing ascetic—a replication
of Kurtz’s own shrunken, ivory-like body.5 This corporeal communion between
the two men places Marlow outside of his own culture, just as Conrad, who spoke
3 Conrad 9.
4 Pat Buchanan, 1991 newspaper column, quoted in “Buchanan Quote Hie,” Los Angeles
Times, 25 February 1996: A21.
5 Conrad 1,49.
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383
and wrote English as his fifth language, viewed Britain from the outside. Under
standing another culture, M. M. Bakhtin asserted, is not a matter of erasing your
difference from it, just as understanding your own culture depends upon recogniz
ing the construction of all cultures:
In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor
in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that
foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. . . . A
meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and
come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they en
gage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness
and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cul
tures.6
Paul Willemen builds upon Bakhtin’s words to call for a double outsideness in the
practice of cultural analysis. Not only must the analyst view his own context as
Other, but the other’s own contexts, its group identities must also be resisted if
what Benjamin called the socio-cultural constellation is to be recognized.7 Yet Kurtz
called such a place “the horror, the horror,” some final vision of what lies beneath
the facades of civilization.8 Heart o f Darkness presents an instance of Bakhtin’s and
Willemen’s outsideness generated outside the bounds of “natural” reproduction, an
6 M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other late Essays, trans. Vem W. McGee (Austin: Uni
versity of Texas Press, 1986) 7.
7 Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press and BFI Publishing, 1994) 216-17.
Willemen (whose work this project has repeatedly drawn upon) has quoted more extensively
from this passage to argue against the “populism” characterizing current cultural studies; while he
offers a critique of 1970s Screen theory, his position is much the same as it was then. Inadver
tently, Willemen’s text omits, without mark, the sentence which immediately precedes the portion
above: “For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no
mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people,
because they are located outside us in space and because they are others." Willemen would take this
as a call to concentrate once again on such idealized and now temporally remote moments as Third
Cinema’s Latin American practice. Nevertheless, Willemen convincingly argues that “outsideness-
othemess is the only vantage point from which a viable cultural politics may be conducted in the
UK”—English closure must be opened by fraying its racial and sexual borders. See “The Third
Cinema Question,” Looks and Frictions, 176,199,201.
8 Conrad 68.
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3 8 4
outsideness which passes its knowledge along in a physical sense; re-shaping
Marlow’s body, his “ascetic” pose, the very way in which he looks across the Eng
lish landscape and finds traces of its dark pre-history, Marlow’s outsideness places
him beyond his place as a decent English gentleman. Without Kurtz’s horror, with
out even his second-hand knowledge of it, Marlow will still be lost within his
place.
But for all the terror that Conrad builds around the knowledge of that hor
ror, Marlow still functions as part of his culture, still tells the necessary lies, or at
least the important ones: when Kurtz’s fiancee asks his final words, Marlow duti
fully replies, slowly and with difficulty, “your name.” Kurtz’s final words belong
to him, Marlow seems to feel, and rather than pass that “horror” on to a woman (“it
would have been too dark, too dark altogether”), he effectively equates the two.9
His refusal to name “the horror” truthfully nonetheless names the horror, and gen
ders it as female, even though it arises from the homosocial bond between men. As
Heart of Darkness' narrator blandly mistakes it, seeing only the cross-legged figure
on the deck before him, ‘The worst that could be said of him was that he did not
represent his class”10—he has done nothing of the sort Marlow may travel beyond
his place and bring back an outsideness, yet what he discovers still lies at the inter
sections mapped by his culture’s own racism and misogyny.
For T. S. Eliot, who sought an insideness through an immersion in English
culture, this horror gave ‘The Hollow Men” its bitter, minstrel-show epigraph—
’ ’Mistah Kurtz—he dead.”11 “Every nation, every race, has not only its own crea
9 Conrad 75-76.
10 Conrad 9.
11 T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971) 56.
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385
tive, but its own critical turn of mind,” he wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent.”1 2 Eliot’s interest lies in claiming his place, his English “turn of mind,” not
the outsideness, however contradictory, that Marlow brought back from beyond
their green and pleasant land.
Despite Eliot’s Anglophilic model, this attraction of the “beyond,” Homi
Bhabha has noted, has been the dominant trope of our millennial times. Marlow’s
voyage beyond has become a familiar form of knowledge. It belongs to a genre
which includes not only Apocalypse Now and the questions of racism which now
follow Heart o f Darkness, but the road trips represented by the persistent post pre
fixed to most every critical -ism. Writing of this “shiftiness” of the post, Bhabha
suggests that
The “beyond” is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind
of the past. . . . Beginnings and ending may be the sustain
ing myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siecle, we
find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time
cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity,
past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclu
sion.1 3
There, Bhabha argues, “the intersubjective and collective experience of nationess,
community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”14
These interstices have been the location of this study. Like the claims of so
many Hollywood films, it hasn’t really been about either homosexuality, or even
Englishness. Instead I have followed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s admonition and
tried to make a national body visible:
I don’t think any of these accounts will be simple ones to
render—even to render visible. But we need to do so lest we
12 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932) 3,7.
13 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) 1.
14 Bhabha 2.
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386
continue to deal numbly around and along the eroticized bor
ders of this apparently universal, factitiously timeless mod
ern mapping of the national body.1 5
Or rather, considering the range of English masculinities embodied in Jaye David
son, Olivier, Bond, Neil Forrester, and that skinhead in Bruce LaBruce’s bathtub-
national bodies. But like Marlowe’s darkness, these bodies have been, largely, a
product of our looking outward (or back) across the Atlantic; not a darkness dis
covered but one mapped and constructed.
This process of making visible was predicated upon (and eroticized by) my
own outsideness as an American. Yet hopefully it has been apparent, if only by the
constant invasion of American film and television, that this outsideness or alterity
does create with a double edge. To construct Englishness as such a self-conscious
fetish demands that attention must be paid to the alienated, often racist dreams of
both American Anglophilia and its flashier Anglophobic twin. Whether Ralph Lau
ren or shaved and pierced, America’s Dreaming has repeatedly represented a retreat
from the very sort of arguments presented by Rushdie, Kureishi, Bhabha, and the
hybrid beats of trip-hop. In a widely reprinted essay, the Nigerian novelist Chinua
Achebe called for the silencing of Heart of Darkness in order that African voices (an
idea surely beyond Conrad) might instead be heard16; by the same logic, one might
reject the pleasures of imagining English masculinities as sites of Anglo difference
and transgression—silence this accent in favor of the much more real, pressing
speech of the local.
15 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Age of Wilde,” National
isms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker and others (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) 244.
16 “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness'' included in Conrad 251-
262.(AIso see, for contrast, David Denby, “Jungle Fever, “ The New Yorker 6 November 1995:
118+.)
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387
What constitutes the local, however, is another question when the play of
connotation is addressed, and homosexuality is the subtext: connotation, D. A.
Miller notes regarding homophobia’s persistence, has the “inconvenience of tending
to raise the ghost all over the place.”1 7 And as Jean-Luc Godard has Eddie Con
stantine mumble before the fallen Berlin Wall, “Once I crossed the frontier, the
phantoms came out to meet me.” Germany Year 90 Nine Zero may only be quoting
an intertitle from Mumau’s Nosferatu, but perhaps the undead do make a suitable
final metaphor for nationality’s strange postmodern transfusions. Kurtz, he may be
dead, and we who remain beyond T. S. Eliot’s hallowed borders may be only
“Hollow Men.” Still, frontiers have been crossed, and the ghosts of connotation
float out across the screen’s dark map ....
“I just closed my eyes and thought of England.”1 8
17 D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope," Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss
(New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 125.
18 Peter Finch, on kissing another man in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). Quoted in Vito
Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New Yoik: Harper and Row, 1981)
214.
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388
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Creator Dickinson, Robert James (author)

Core Title Anglo agonistes: English masculinities in British and American film

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,literature, English,Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

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Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member)

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