Hard Bodies

Nickola Pazderic

University of Washington
nickola@u.washington.edu

 

Susan Jeffords. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 212 pp.

 

Peter Lehman. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. x, 237 pp.

 

In many ways the books of Peter Lehman and Susan Jeffords read well together. Both books are concerned with representations of the male body in popular media and how these representations become part of the prevailing ideologies of contemporary life. Both books are concerned with the implications of “hard” or the “phallic” representations of masculinity in particular. Both writers argue convincingly that the machismo which these representations reflect, encourage, and perpetuate, “work[s] to support patriarchy” (Lehman, 5). While the books share in this important fundamental concern, the books come to possess an interesting difference in their efforts to link popular representations with actual political and social conditions. This difference points to an important methodological implication for the study of masculinity in a patriarchal society.

 

Jeffords’s interpretive reading of Reagan era films chronicles the stunning confluence of cinematic representations of the masculine “hard body” and the official ideologies of the Reagan administration. Neither the films nor the ideologies evolved in an historical vacuum. One of the strengths of Jeffords’s work is its ability to bring the films and the ideologies into mutual focus by interpreting them as part of a broader historical narrative of postwar American triumphs and errors which both undergirds and is produced by the films and ideologies.

 

In brief, the narrative maintains that America in the 1950s experienced a glimpse of utopia which was soon eclipsed by lack of resolve during the later-Vietnam War period. The country came to a crisis of purpose which was marked by Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon. The Ford and Carter years were a period of anxiety and malaise in which indecision and femininity came to the fore in public life. The narrative maintains that this period of weakness came to an end with the election of Reagan and the imposition of his agenda of national restoration, individualism, and technological advancement. That this narrative is not unfamiliar to any American who has lived through the past decades is, in part, testimony to the power of movies such as those of the Rambo series (1982, 1985, 1988), which, as Jeffords reads, depict and reinforce a longing “that only a return of the ‘physical king’ could resolve” (11).

 

The “return of the ‘physical king'” in the guise of Ronald Reagan was both prefigured in the writings of people such as Richard Nixon and Robert Bly and reinscribed through such films as the Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989, 1991). For as Jeffords states: Ronald Reagan fulfilled “both Nixon’s and Bly’s desires for the United States and for men by restoring economic and military as well as spiritual strength” (11). While it is certain that Bly and Nixon would agree on few things, Jeffords’s reading tellingly reveals shared presuppositions about just what a male (and the state) is and should be: i.e., sharply delineated, assertive, tough, and, when necessary, violent — in short, a “hard body.” Once the “hard body” was in place, the narrative was reinscribed both on the literal body (through the survived assassination attempt) and on film, through such ideologically obvious films as the Robocop series (1987, 1990) and in less obvious films such as the Back to the Future series. Jeffords’s fascinating reading of the Back to the Future films illuminate how Marty McFly, when he returns to the past in order to save the present of the people of Hill Valley, actually mirrors the reworking of the past that was a part of political life during the Reagan era, thereby legitimating the practice and the narrative. In the first of these two films, McFly returns to the 1950s. By intervening on behalf of his wimp father, he alters the course of history, changing his family from dysfunctional to prosperous. This forgetting and reworking of the past, which was prefigured by Bly and Nixon, was central to Reagan’s ability to capture the public imagination through his often apocryphal (but never politically vacuous) recollections (e.g., Reagan’s public recollections of movie scenes as historical facts).

 

The looping character of historical prefigurings and recollections serves patriarchal predilections, yearnings, and practices in contemporary society. Following in the fashion and the analysis of poststructuralists, many critics have come to term this form of domination as it exists, especially in theory and in ideology, phallocentricism. Peter Lehman’s primary concern is to disconnect the theoretical and ideological presence of the phallus from the actual lived conditions of many, though surely not all, men. In order to disconnect representations from reality, Lehman posits a distinction between penises, which “are all inadequate to the phallus” (10), and the phallus itself, which “dominates, restricts, prohibits, and controls the representation of the male body, particularly its sexual representation” (9). By way of this distinction Lehman seeks to illuminate male subjectivities without ossifying sexual differences — a problem which is recognized to exist within some feminist writings. Lehman states: “men desire and fear, and sometimes desire what they fear, in ways that confound any simple notions of male subjectivity” (8).

 

Lehman’s book avoids the pitfall of pity by illuminating how the discourses of both men and women come to be influenced, if not determined, by preconceptions of “hard” masculinity. In chapter eight, “An Answer to the Question of the Century: Dick Talk,” Lehman analyzes the movie Dick Talk (1986). In this movie a group of women engage in a round-table discussion about female sexual pleasure. The conversation continually returns to the topic of the penis, its ize, its function, and its erotic potential. (Thus, the question of the century: What is the size of the average erect penis?). The irony of the film is that, however liberating and counter-patriarchal the women’s irreverant discussion may appear, its constant recurrance to the theme of phallus, penis, erection serves ultimately to reinscribe the very terms of a masculinist hegemony. Such an irony will be familiar to readers familiar with the anthropological literature on the role of hegemonic oppositions in the discourse of subdominant groups; in many instances, hegemonic groups serve as an other in relation to which the subdominant constitutes its own identity. There is a tendency as well for the hegemonic group to serve as something of a fetish for the subdominant. It is clear that the male penis has become something of a fetish for the women in the film, and that this relation to the penis limits the subversive potential of their “dick talk.”

 

Lehman’s book also addresses itself to representations of the penis in medical discourse. In this discourse Lehman finds a similar, though perhaps more thoroughly veiled, fetishization of the penis. Lehman points out that although modern medical journals have displaced the language of pleasure and desire in favor of the language of statistics, they preserve in all its urgency the “question of the century.” The journals’ statistics serve to call forth and rehearse, as well as to assuage in a “professional” and “objective” manner, men’s anxieties as to the normal and sufficient size of their penises. And in this way the medical discourse helps to preserve the special fetishistic allure, as well as the concrete social efficacy, of the phallus.

 

Lehman and Jeffords seem to share a hope that by bringing the prevailing narratives and conceptions of masculinity into examination, we can perhaps, one day, find a way to diminish their hold over our daily lives. The chief difference is that Lehman moves further toward unsettling the egregiously masculinist representations that Jeffords merely traces across the recent cultural scene. By marking some of the fault lines between the ideal of the “hard body” and the more ambiguous and unstable realities of lived male experience, Lehman helps us to locate points of potential resistance to the dominant ideology. Such potential is, of course, temporary, for the dominant ideology, and the representations that comprise it, are capable of rapid adjustment and transformation when challenged. But Lehman is right to locate the ground for hope on the plane of ordinary people, and in the spaces that open up between the lives these people actually lead and the socio-sexual ideals to which they can never quite measure up.