ABlog

After Ambrosio’s desire for Matilda cools, he turns his lascivious attention to the young Antonia, daughter of the proud Elvira, his confidante. Having employed occult arts by means of which to enter Antonia’s bedchamber and render her defenseless against his lust, Ambrosio is interrupted by Elvira, who challenges and accuses him. He responds by murdering her in one of the most brutal scenes of gothic fiction….At last he completes his task and gazes on her “a Corse, cold, senseless, and disgusting.”….[T]he reader is informed that the woman with whom Ambrosio struggles on the bed of his proposed sexual violation is in fact his own mother.”—George E. Haggerty in Queer Gothic (describing Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance [1796]).

I’m experiencing odd side effects from viewing the new Martin Scorsese film “The Departed” and the Iraq war documentary “The Ground Truth” plus reading Queer Gothic, all in the same week. Herewith, a sampler of symptomatic thoughts:

Women are so incidental
to the scheme
of the camera loving
the hard killing
bodies of men

or

There is this parallel between masculinity and murder:
masculinity (as shown by our favorite fictions) is so much about establishing
that you are male
(“I spell M-A-N,” the lyric goes)
(“man up!” they say on the sports shows)
by proving that the Other is not-male
by fucking the Other

while

murder is so much about establishing
that you are human
by proving that the Other is not human
by turning the Other into a “Corse,
cold, senseless, and disgusting.”

or

on the evidence of its mass amusements, its art, its economy, and its politics, our culture deems the highest authorization of the self to be the blotting out of someone else’s selfhood--the rendering of another’s humanity as null and void as though it had never been at all.


On one level, it is obscene to compare “The Departed” to “The Ground Truth” because the former is a mordant, sexy fantasy of hypermasculine mayhem, while the latter—without ever focusing explicitly on gender—portrays the “real” effects of gendered militarism: the men (and a couple of women) return from Iraq maimed in body and/or spirit, “heroes” no longer (if ever), routinely denied the support they need to make the transition back to civilian life, were such a thing even possible after what they’ve seen and done.

[An aside: I wonder if we should not in fact ban the phrase “civilian life” along with the phrase “collateral damage.” The latter disguises the reality that in modern warfare, the vast majority of the casualties are, inevitably, noncombatants. The former disguises the fact that America is all about war, every day, in every fiber of its social being. For me, the most upsetting moment in “The Ground Truth” was one veteran’s story of having a stranger come up to him in public and ask him how he lost his hand; at hearing he’d been wounded in the Iraq war, the questioner replied, “Oh, is that still going on?”]

“The Departed” is a queer film because its characters, particularly the rotten apple cop played by Matt Damon, are obsessed with homosexuality (“faggot firefighters—go save a kitten up a tree” is a typical endearment hurled at a sports opponent); because all the real involvements, the things that happen when you care enough to kill, happen between men; because the mirror dance between the Matt Damon character and the Leonardo DiCaprio character is mediated by a woman with whom both are romantically involved. The Nation’s film reviewer Stuart Klawans rather naively if wittily asks, “Can there be, in all of Boston, only one woman to soak up all this suffering?” What he sees accurately enough as a plot lapse and a strain on credibility is made necessary by the fact that for the screenplay to have included women as individualized characters would have interfered with the purity of the homoerotic dance of death. All that’s wanted is a sort of woman-function: an all-in-one receptacle, binder up of wounds, and pseudo-hetero mediation for the mad pursuit of one beautiful boy-cop by the other, as happens when the suffering, battered Leonardo chases Matt out of an adult movie house where his murky profile has been bathed in a chiaroscuro worthy of Matthew Gregory Lewis. This just after Matt nearly has a heart attack when a heavy-breathing crime boss brilliantly played by Jack Nicholson—an uncommon pervert gleefully disguised as a garden variety one—turns around from a neighboring seat, flings open the proverbial raincoat, and waves a gigantic (I think it was black, too) dildo in the face of the rotten cop who calls him by the code name “dad.” Which brings up the point that tormented relations between fathers and sons are predictably crucial to these erotic wargames.

I never, ever subscribed to the notion that women are inherently “nurturing,” that people who are mothers or have the biological ability to bear children would end the wars if we could just get organized. Women all over the world have a vested interest in the killing “their” men do—if for no other reason than our inclination to enjoy vicarious participation in the mayhem that our culture deems to be the highest expression of our humanity. (This, I admit, is one way “The Departed” works for me: I get to enter the realm of the all-male fantasy, and at the same time laugh at the bitter pleasure of watching them kill, kill, kill till they’re all dead, dead, dead. Take that, boys, if you won't give up your toys.) But I think it’s high time to get a lot more serious and systematic about looking at how gender works within all this killing.

I keep thinking about the woman veteran in “The Ground Truth” who recalls the lethal “cadences” chanted during basic training with the same vivacious, ingratiating interrogative note in her voice—the equivalent of an underdog exposing its soft belly in sign of fealty to a top dog-- that my 20-year-old female students use to discuss the assigned reading. I think about the wives and girlfriends talking about learning to help their men cope with their rages and depression in the wake of Iraq; I wonder who helps the women veterans cope. I’d like to know how many women veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder have stabbed a friend or shot up a shopping mall or committed an assault in a fit of road rage. I’m sure there are some. I’d bet the proportions would be instructive. I want to know how it is that the military has managed to add women to combat without sacrificing any of its macho excess, kind of like the Republican Party has managed to recruit a lot of gay men to be Capitol Hill staffers without ceasing to be the party of programmatic homophobia.

I’d like to stop hearing the phrase “innocent women and children”—a phrase that refers not to real human beings, but to the innocence-function indispensable for wars. I’d like to stop serving as that innocence-function.

I’d like to be an actor in history. (A different history.)

So maybe you’ll understand why I thought it was a good joke when I read the rave reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road. The situation, I gather, is this: in a post-apocalyptic landscape, a father and son wander, the only fully human figures in sight….the boy’s mother is dead; she killed herself long ago, unable to bear their world’s savagery.

The son is destined to be some kind of savior.

How bloody convenient.

War is always about the fantasy of a world without women.