Throughout history, people have attempted to polarize their cultures into two distinctly opposite camps. These attempts often assign people to unrealistically narrow worldviews, while an abstraction of any given point in a culture’s history reveals a spectrum between those who align themselves strictly with the dominant culture and those who remain firmly against it. Realistically, most people fall somewhere in between these poles. However, literary authors often favor the opposition because their artistic temperaments result in alienation; they find themselves at odds with the demands of the dominant culture, and their art is a product of that tension.[1]
The same can be said of certain people involved with the art of film, such as directors, screenwriters, and actors. But in the case of film, it is often more difficult for iconoclasts to project their unique visions onto the screen when they are faced with practical considerations, such as adhering to the tested precepts of Hollywood’s moneymaking machine. During one brief period in Hollywood history, however, several factors converged to allow for unique opportunities for expression. The 1970s were a period in which Hollywood, which was formerly restrictive toward individual expression in its films, began to accept the auteur, the director whose artistic vision is allowed to dominantly shape the movies he or she makes. The demise of both the production code and the studio system in the late 1960s allowed for an increase in sex, crime, and violence on screen. As a result, films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Midnight Cowboy (1969) delivered content that had been previously taboo. The success of Easy Rider in 1969 ensured that the independent film would have a place at the box office, and during what Robert Phillip Kolker calls “a brief freedom . . . to be alone within a structure that momentarily entertained some experimentation,”[2] Hollywood began to relax its restrictions on individual creativity, providing an autonomy to its filmmakers that was unheard of only a few years earlier.[3] As a result, filmmakers were no longer forced to create films that reflected dominant ideology. Instead, “their films sometimes [carried] on an ideological debate with the culture that [bred] them.”[4] One area of this ideological debate developed around ideas of gender. Instead of presenting sexual relationships with male and female characters that conformed to hegemonic norms of representation, filmmakers subverted audience expectations not only by including multiple representations of masculinity and femininity but also through the tone their films took toward their subject matter. Thus, many 1970s films cast a scrutinizing eye on traditional sexual arrangements and overly socialized male and female characters and invited their audiences to do the same. One such critique arose because white male artists who felt alienated because of the discrepancy between their authentic selves and prevailing norms of manhood experienced a creative outburst during this period of freedom, and the works they produced drew attention to their artifice in a way that challenged cultural ideologies about hegemonic masculinity. This period, which lasted roughly from 1967 to 1980 and is known by various names—the Hollywood Renaissance, the New Hollywood, the American New Wave—provided an avenue for many American auteurs to express their counter-hegemonic visions of America.
The notion of an “author” in film emerged with a group of French critics who wrote for the journal Cahiers du Cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s and who then became filmmakers themselves. This vibrant, innovative group, known as the French New Wave, was led by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette. They were obsessed with classic Hollywood films that they felt contained strong authorial visions despite the collaborative nature of the studio system. As a result of this obsession, their own films not only included numerous allusions to the films of American directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Howard Hawks but also reworked such classical genres as film noir and the musical, providing a fresh, experimental approach to antiquated techniques and formulas. Their heavily self-conscious work, in turn, inspired American filmmakers such as John Boorman, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, and Alan J. Pakula, who infused their works with definite “authorial” imprints.
The notion of one, unifying artistic vision permeating an entire film presents a number of problems. The authorial vision is almost exclusively attributed to the film’s director, despite the frequent contributions of screenwriters, producers, cinematographers, and actors. However, in many cases the director’s vision competes with these other artists for thematic dominance, and the end result can be confusing for viewers. In the case of Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), for instance, two contrasting artistic visions—Scorsese’s and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s—compete for control of the film’s meaning. The resulting confusion causes an interpretive gap, wherein viewers struggle between Scorsese’s condemnation both of main character Travis Bickle as a dangerous vigilante and of the media for elevating Bickle to heroic stature, and Schrader’s celebration of Bickle’s spiritual transcendence.[5] Such conflicts of vision are not confined to directors and screenwriters. Cinematographers may contribute certain nuances of meaning to films, and actors may bring baggage from previous roles developed from both their star personae and composites of all their previous roles. If, for instance, a particular actor brings with him a preexisting persona that interrupts the director’s vision in any way or becomes strong enough to outweigh the director’s authorial control, then a similar interpretive gap may occur. Or, if the actor’s composite persona mixes with the director’s vision in such a way to augment the film’s overall effect, then the interpretive gap is diminished and the unifying vision remains largely unadulterated.
Such a marriage between persona and vision exists in Jack Nicholson’s 1970s films. More than Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, or Robert De Niro, Nicholson is the most representative actor of the 1970s. He has won three acting Oscars, which trumps all other male performers in Hollywood history. Already in 1971, reviewer Vincent Canby wrote that Nicholson “may be setting the acting style for the 1970’s.”[6] Biographer Dennis McDougal calls him “the American film actor who seemed to express the very essence of what it meant to be a man of his time.”[7] He feels that Nicholson’s “roles consistently reflect the tumultuous times in which we live.”[8] This reflective quality stems from the actor’s innate rebelliousness, which offered a blueprint of resistance that many directors and screenwriters of the 1970s used in their efforts to challenge the dominant culture. Ever since his secondary role in Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), Nicholson came to express Americans’ growing feelings of disillusionment during the Vietnam and Watergate eras. Nicholson said in a 1972 interview, “We were probably among the first group of people who weren’t buying the American Dream.”[9] McDougal contends that Nicholson, above all others, defines the twentieth-century man’s alienation and disillusionment.[10] Since many of the filmmakers of that era were also questioning traditional forms of authority, some of them used Nicholson’s persona (and the audience expectations that came with it) to reflect their subversive material.
Nicholson’s face came to represent the attitudes and gestures associated with his characters, subsequently creating a “Jack Nicholson” persona. The rebellious persona Nicholson created in Easy Rider was perpetuated in Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970) and cemented in The Last Detail (Ashby, 1973). When Americans viewed Jack Nicholson on the screen, they were simultaneously seeing the character he portrayed and the attitudes he had come to represent. In an interview for Playboy, Nicholson echoed this conflation as he expressed frustration that women took his role in Carnal Knowledge so seriously that he had trouble connecting with many women—“For [them], I become that character.”[11] “When I played Carnal Knowledge,” he told Ron Rosenbaum, “I knew that women weren’t going to like me for a long time. That was a given.”[12] In an article for Rolling Stone written in 1981, Tim Cahill claims that fans of that period yearned for Nicholson to repeat the persona he created in films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown, and The Last Detail.[13] This craving indicates the cultural impact of Nicholson’s constructed persona on audiences, who went to the theater hoping to see on display the traits associated with the characters of these films. They were not disappointed. By the end of the decade, spectators walked into the theater to view The Shining, an adaptation of a Stephen King novel, with a set of expectations about the subject matter, the style of presentation, and the persona of the lead character. They were not only viewing Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance but also Jack Nicholson as “Jack Nicholson” (the star persona), George Hanson (Easy Rider), Bobby Dupea (Five Easy Pieces), Jonathan Fuerst (Carnal Knowledge, 1971), “Badass” Buddusky (The Last Detail), Jake Gittes (Chinatown, 1974), David Locke (The Passenger, 1975), and R. P. McMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975).
Because the audience-constructed persona that Nicholson brings with him greatly prefigures viewers’ interpretive frameworks for Nicholson’s films, the “author” of a Nicholson film is open to debate. Sometimes, “actors’ presences are so strong that they themselves can be auteurs whose styles and personas transcend the mise-en-scène, even if they are technically inside it.”[14] In this way, a film’s “author” is not necessarily an individual but an abstracted personality with whom the audience identifies. Michel Foucault asserts that the “aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.”[15] While Foucault’s commentary centers on authors of written texts, he admits that the “author function” also pertains to “other arts.”[16] In the way that a film is a certain type of discourse, albeit one of images and dialogue rather than of text, Foucault’s “author function” applies particularly well to the “Jack Nicholson” persona. Audiences abstract “Jack Nicholson” from his body of work, creating a persona separate not only from the individual characters depicted in each film but also from the actor’s unique personality. Viewers then apply their understandings of “Jack Nicholson” to each successive Nicholson role, which in turn reshapes the existing persona.
In this way, a recursive process is formed between the iconic “Nicholson” construct and the Nicholson films, wherein the two constantly shape and reshape each other. Viewers force certain interpretive operations onto these films based on their understandings of Nicholson’s composite persona; they make connections between scenes from previous Nicholson films and current ones (the famous diner scene in Five Easy Pieces wherein Nicholson clears the table with a sweep of his hand because the waitress refuses to serve him plain toast connects to the scene in The Last Detail wherein he pulls out a sidearm and aims it at a bartender because the bartender refuses to serve his friend a drink); they establish certain rebellious traits as pertinent to Nicholson’s films and discard other more docile traits (consider his passivity in many parts of Five Easy Pieces and throughout The Passenger); they recognize continuities from one character to another (Bobby Dupea bleeds into David Locke; Jonathan mutates into “Badass” Buddusky); and finally, they exclude certain Nicholson films from the general cache (The King of Marvin Gardens, The Passenger, The Fortune, Goin’ South, and The Missouri Breaks are rarely included with his “best” 1970s output). One interviewer, writing in 1971, already recognized the development of a consistent persona in Nicholson’s “performances as [the] restless, predatory, self-destructive antiheroes of ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge.’”[17] Along with these characteristics of Nicholson’s films that correspond to Foucault’s criteria for authorship, McDougal claims that Nicholson is aware of the power that movie stars possess to “anticipate and shape the times in which they [live].”[18] This power grants them as much or more influence on history than authors.[19] As a result, Nicholson’s constructed persona often trumps directors’ authorial influences.
Nicholson’s construction of this persona was a conscious decision on his part to create a cohesive output of films. In 1981, Nicholson told an interviewer, “I designed my career to be in the European model. Europeans tend to look more at an actor’s body of work.”[20] Rather than focusing on one film at a time, Nicholson held a holistic view of his filmic discourse of the 1970s. According to Rosenbaum, “He’s also capable of confiding in an interviewer that he believes ‘the actor is the litterateur of his era,’ meaning that the actor is capable of ‘writing,’ even shaping the inner history of his age through the choice of roles and how he plays them.”[21] When producers offered him scripts that failed to fit within this vision (The Godfather, The Sting), Nicholson turned them down, despite their potential commercial success. Nicholson told an interviewer that he passed these films up even though he had an idea of their commercial worth because he felt they “were not worth [his] time” creatively.[22] Neither The Godfather nor The Sting centrally features iconoclastic male protagonists typical of Nicholson’s other 1970s work; the former is a depiction of organized crime in America featuring Italian-American characters, and the latter is a fairly clear-cut caper film. Consequently, Nicholson’s decision to omit them from his oeuvre makes considerable sense. “By paying laserlike attention to the roles [Nicholson] chose and the manner in which [he] interpreted them,”[23] Nicholson constructed a consistently rebellious persona that reflected the disillusionment of the 1970s.
Alternatively, Nicholson’s commentary in an interview from 1984 reveals the actor’s frustration at becoming a cliché. He discussed the need to “de-Nicholsonize” a part: “Once you’re a known entity . . . this is the beginning of disaster. . . . You’re in some kind of declining creative vitality when they [screenwriters] start writing to suit what they imagine your talent is.”[24] Thus, Nicholson realized his own constructed persona had become a hindrance to him by the early 1980s. By that point, Nicholson’s popularity and critical acclaim dwindled somewhat due to his increasingly modernistic, stylized performances in The Missouri Breaks (Penn, 1976), Goin’ South (Nicholson, 1978), The Shining, and The Postman Always Rings Twice (Rafelson, 1981).[25] In an attempt to break away from his constructed persona of the early 1970s, Nicholson adopted a less naturalistic acting style and pushed himself toward the expressionism found in these later films. “I wanted to be bigger,” Nicholson told Jamie Wolf, “I wanted to attempt the affectation of style within cinematic acting, which is something the audience heavily penalizes you for . . . they’re only interested in naturalism.”[26] Along with the audience’s proclivity for naturalism, Nicholson’s rejection of audience expectations for his roles put off theater-goers. Wolf recognized that Nicholson’s best roles, such as Bobby Dupea and Jake Gittes, resulted from the screenwriters’ awareness of Nicholson’s persona, and that the “de-Nicholsonized” performances actually “have a sameness to them, that seem in many ways like parodies of themselves.”[27]
Despite Nicholson’s later attempts to “de-Nicholsonize” his roles, the actor’s self-reflexive creation of a cohesive body of work in the early 1970s drove several filmmakers to select the actor for their works. While Nicholson chose roles that reflected his sensibility, directors, producers, and screenwriters sought him out specifically to reflect their particular subject matter. For instance, screenwriter Robert Towne wrote The Last Detail for Nicholson,[28] and producer Robert Evans thought of Nicholson for the lead in Chinatown.[29] Additionally, because of Nicholson’s iconoclastic persona in The Last Detail, Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, the producers of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, chose Nicholson to perform the role of R. P. McMurphy based on a screening of The Last Detail.[30] Both Nicholson and the “Jack Nicholson” persona had a symbiotic relationship with Carol Eastman (screenwriter of Five Easy Pieces), Robert Towne, and Bob Rafelson.[31] In fact, the impetus for Five Easy Pieces was a mental image Rafelson had of Nicholson playing an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck.[32]
Bob Rafelson claims to have gotten the idea for Five Easy Pieces from a mental image he had of Nicholson playing an upright piano in the middle of a traffic jam. The scene subsequently plays a prominent role in the film. Columbia/Photofest © Columbia Pictures.
These filmmakers specifically sought Nicholson for their films because of the pervasiveness of the actor’s constructed persona. Nicholson brought a set of traits and attitudes with him to these roles that the actor and the filmmakers variously inflected: at times, his rebelliousness was celebrated as an act of self-expression against an oppressive system (Five Easy Pieces, The Passenger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest); at others, it was revealed as an absurd masculine fantasy (Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, Chinatown, The Shining). In both cases, the actor and the filmmakers played upon audience expectations of “Jack Nicholson” to challenge prevailing attitudes about masculinity and power.
Nicholson’s body of work in the 1970s was predominantly concerned with questioning patriarchal authority. In 1974, Nicholson told one interviewer, “I was a feminist long before women’s rights became a fashionable topic for discussion.”[33] He also identified Bobby Dupea (Five Easy Pieces) and Jonathan Fuerst (Carnal Knowledge) as “legitimate representations of male attitudes of our time [the 1970s], attitudes which result in crippling negativism.”[34] By reproducing these attitudes on screen, Nicholson not only makes these characters conform to the expectations of the time but also reveals the monstrosity of those expectations.
Working with Nicholson, a group of filmmakers produced a body of separate works, largely independent of each other, that, when taken together, explore the meaning of white manhood in America during the 1970s. These progressive filmmakers of the American New Wave came to view the stultifying pressures placed on white males to conform to a certain image of masculinity as a form of domination. Society placed a set of expectations on every middle-class white male to ensure that the cycle of patriarchy would persist; this set of expectations can be known collectively as the “white man’s burden.” These filmmakers challenged the notion of a racially specific manly duty to carry civilization forward into a new millennium. While actors like Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman starred in films that confronted white male hegemony, none came as close to establishing a consistent, subversive persona as Nicholson. The persona Nicholson created through his 1970s films persistently challenged the “white man’s burden” more than any other actor of the period.
Nicholson accomplishes this challenge to the “white man’s burden” through his dislocation technique. The dislocation technique is a unique feature of Nicholson’s acting style that captures the white male’s feelings of dissonance, caused by his conscious or subconscious awareness of the role he is forced to play in society. Nicholson embodies an inherent tension in white males between a desire to make authentic choices and a pressure to conform to societal expectations of manly behavior. The “white man’s burden,” a hydra-headed, historically and culturally specific ideological construct, imposes certain dictates on male behavior, including emotional asceticism, breadwinning, pragmatism, patriotic military service, benevolent paternalism, heterosexuality, and so on. At the same time that males perform these gender-specific duties, they yearn to make authentic choices irrespective of their prescribed roles. Concurrently, the dominant ideology constructs the masculine ideal as autonomous, nonconformist, and individualistic, and the male subject’s quest for authenticity essentially binds him to the very ideology he rejects. This dialectic between authentic choice and conformity to expectation results in a dislocation: white males dutifully perform their male roles but feel disconnected from their autonomous selves. Nicholson embodies this dislocation by showing how white males go around playing parts that unsettle them. He exhibits gestures that capture the disaffection males feel from being constantly surrounded by social forces that seek to contain them within a sphere of accepted behaviors.
The famous diner scene in Five Easy Pieces epitomizes this disaffection and the nuances and gestures Nicholson uses to convey it. Nicholson’s character, Bobby Dupea, orders a side of wheat toast with his plain omelet and asks for tomatoes instead of potatoes. When the waitress responds, “No substitutions,” indicating that he cannot have a side of toast, Dupea attempts to use his ingenuity to maneuver his way around the restriction by ordering a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast but asking the waitress to hold the mayonnaise, the butter, the lettuce, and the chicken and to bring him only the wheat toast. When she tells him he needs to leave, he clears the table with a sweep of his arm. Here, the dislocation technique manifests itself in two forms: nuanced expressions and exaggerated outbursts. Throughout the actor’s delivery of his lines, he conveys a carefully controlled tension seething under the surface through a series of nuances in both his facial expressions and his tone of voice. As Nicholson utters the famous line, “I want you to hold it [the chicken] between your knees,” spectators recognize the tone of condescension and tension in his voice. The tension then explodes with the affected gesture of his arm sweeping the table. The waitress’s insistence on following the rules typifies the social forces of containment that constantly surround white males, and Nicholson/Dupea’s violent reaction captures the white male’s response to these forces. Consequently, Nicholson’s performance resonates with white males who also feel an inner tension because of the burdens ubiquitously placed upon them. In sum, an irreconcilable tension exists at the heart of Nicholson’s acting, and through gestures and nuances of performance, he incorporates that tension in a way that audiences recognize.
Perhaps Nicholson’s combination of nuance and affectation results from his training with two separate acting coaches—Jeff Corey and Martin Landau. Corey instructed Nicholson in the method approach to acting, in which the actor searches within to find empathy with the character he portrays, then experiences the character’s emotions on screen. A famous example of method acting is Brando’s performance in a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley Kowalski (Brando) is eating dinner with his wife, Stella, and sister-in-law, Blanche, when Stella tells him that he is eating like an animal and needs to wash up and clear the table. Brando/Kowalski reacts violently by throwing a glass against the wall and saying, “Now that’s how I’m gonna clear the table.” While the scene predates Nicholson’s performance in the diner scene from Five Easy Pieces by nineteen years, clear connections can be made between the two moments. What differs is the level of nuance in the moments leading up to both actors’ explosions of temper. While Brando clenches his jaw throughout the scene like an animal preparing to pounce on its prey, Nicholson conveys his underlying tension more subtly through nuanced expressions, thus making the affected gesture more unexpected and explosive. This discrepancy results from the difference in the types of characters they are empathizing with; Kowalski is a monstrous antagonist and Dupea is a disaffected antihero. After his instruction in the method technique, Nicholson moved to Martin Landau’s classes, which “favored the ‘sense memory’ approach to acting.”[35] Landau contends, “How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. . . . No one shows their feelings. I mean, anger—the clenching of the teeth, the gripping of the hand is holding back anger; that’s not anger. Bad actors run to all that crap.”[36] By combining Corey’s method training with Landau’s “sense memory” approach, Nicholson develops his own dislocation technique that features both exaggerated outbursts (affected gestures) and hidden tensions (nuanced expressions).
This dislocation technique participates in constructing Nicholson’s 1970s persona, which consistently challenges the “white man’s burden” in assorted ways. When audiences of that decade went to see a Jack Nicholson film, they intuitively anticipated that his characters would embody the same inner tension as Bobby Dupea. Nicholson’s performances subsequently played upon those expectations to construct a unique, iconoclastic persona that variously interacted with the “white man’s burden” throughout the decade. As audiences encountered a new Nicholson character, they incorporated him with the existing “Nicholson” persona and consequently reshaped it. This process of reconstruction continued through the 1970s, but the dislocation technique remained intact by the end of the decade in The Shining.
The extent to which Nicholson emphasizes the dislocation varies from film to film, depending on his character’s relative position to hegemonic masculinity. Consciously reacting against the “white man’s burden,” the persona in Five Easy Pieces exists outside hegemonic masculinity and rejects the predetermined roles society imposes on him. The dislocation is less obvious than in later films of that decade because the character is less immersed in the dominant culture than the late-1970s characters. Conversely, in Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson moves deeply into hegemonic masculinity with his character, and the actor’s emotional outbursts simultaneously increase in frequency and intensity. Since his character unknowingly participates in carrying the “white man’s burden,” Nicholson intensifies the dislocation technique to highlight the alienating effect of the male masquerade. Nicholson thus dons hyper-masculinity to expose it as a monstrous construction. Similarly, in The Last Detail, Nicholson amplifies the hyper-masculine performance and concurrently intensifies the dislocation technique. This dual magnification reveals the connection between socialization and dislocation; as white males try harder to act masculine, they distance themselves further from authentic choices. Consequently, the tensions within them are stronger, and they erupt more frequently and explosively.
Nicholson takes a detour in The Passenger and returns to the disaffected persona embodied by Bobby Dupea. In effect, his performance as David Locke returns to the subdued, nuanced manner in which he captures Dupea’s inner tension before his explosion in the diner scene. Nicholson punctuates his performance of Locke with short outbursts recalling the sweeping of the hand when he fails to get his wheat toast from the waitress. These moments of intensity foreground the character’s exasperation at his inability to make authentic choices, but they occur intermittently as opposed to pervasively. Like Dupea, Locke attempts to separate himself from the “white man’s burden” by making authentic choices, but his inability to do so provokes violent eruptions.
After the detour away from hegemonic masculinity in The Passenger, Nicholson combines elements of the Five Easy Pieces/The Passenger antiheroes and the Carnal Knowledge/The Last Detail misogynists in Chinatown. Existing in the middle of the spectrum, Jake Gittes possesses the brooding sensitivity and intellectualism of Dupea and Locke while evincing much of the compensatory chauvinism and posturing of Jonathan Fuerst and “Badass” Buddusky. This conflation of polar opposites continues in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein Nicholson brings together the individualism of the antiheroes existing outside hegemonic masculinity and the conformity of the hyper-masculine characters unwittingly embedded within the dominant cultural discourse. R. P. McMurphy’s rebellious opposition to the effacing influence of the mental institution depends upon his assumption of an overly masculine persona resulting in McMurphy’s participation in the dominant discourse.
Coming at the end of the decade, The Shining recapitulates the “Nicholson” persona of the early decade and carries it to a frightening extreme. Jack Torrance acutely embodies the white male alienated from authentic choice by societal constraints. As a result of the increased separation between the autonomous self and the prescribed role (breadwinner, benevolent patriarch), Nicholson’s performance reaches an unprecedented level of theatrical affectation, punctuated by outbursts of extreme violence that symbolize the character’s inner tension erupting through the surface. Taking the dislocation technique to its zenith, Nicholson thus highlights the destructive effect of carrying the “white man’s burden” on the male subject who dutifully upholds his predetermined position in society.
Nicholson participates in the discourse of the “white man’s burden” because he personally embodies the dislocation; his background in the 1950s instilled the tensions that play out through his characters. Nicholson’s adolescence in the 1950s was fraught with inhibitors of individuality. In an interview given in 1981, Nicholson discusses the restriction of self-expression that permeated his teen years: “The environment [in the 1950s] was so tough on self-expression that if you came out of school with any creativity at all, you’d be creative for the rest of your life. It was a good era for an artist to grow up in. It toughened you.”[37] Due in part to the stifling environment of his youth, Nicholson developed an inner tension between personal expression and restrictive socialization that bubbled over during moments of extreme duress. Carol Eastman, Nicholson’s close friend and the screenwriter of Five Easy Pieces, witnessed the actor threaten a waitress that he would kick in her pastry cart if she said another word.[38] This moment drawn from real life inspired the famous diner scene in Five Easy Pieces.[39] In a similar moment of explosive tension, Nicholson asked a bartender at a country club (to which he did not belong) for a glass of water. When the bartender refused because Nicholson was not a member, the actor shouted, “Are you trying to tell me that as a human being you’re refusing to give me a glass of water?”[40] This instance, predating The Last Detail, foreshadows Nicholson’s emotional attack on a bartender in that film who refuses to serve his friend a drink because he is underage.[41] In both cases drawn from life, the actor responds explosively to people who act as cogs in society’s machine by obstinately following apparently arbitrary rules. The actor’s anger in these real-life experiences emerges as a backlash against artificial constraints on human behavior, and Nicholson channels that anger into powerful performances that resonate with audiences. Since moments from Nicholson’s life inspire the actor’s onscreen antics, he embodies the dislocation of the “white man’s burden” in ways that no other actor approaches.
Jack Nicholson’s 1970s works are not the only films of that decade to challenge hegemonic masculinity; several film critics theorize about the interactions between 1970s films and the dominant culture. One group of critics claims that some films of the decade challenge the dominant culture but fail to construct alternative ideologies. For instance, Kolker argues that while these films debate with their culture, “they never confront that culture with another ideology, with other ways of seeing itself, with social and political possibilities that are new or challenging,” and they simply “perpetuate the passivity and aloneness that has become their central image.”[42] Alexander Horwath concurs that the 1970s embody cinema that pushed political and aesthetic boundaries but that “could not help internalizing these boundaries.”[43] While they depicted the setbacks of the era, 1970s films failed to provide any alternatives to the crisis.[44] Like Kolker, Horwath claims that the films of this period fell short in constructing alternative perspectives to the dominant ideology that they so blatantly challenged.
Another critic claims that some films of the 1970s do construct alternative ideologies. While Peter Lev agrees with Kolker’s assessment that the films of the 1970s “constitute a dialogue or debate about the nature and the prospects of American society,” he also contends that some of these films “express conflicting positions on the question of social change.”[45] Although some stress “paternalistic authority and traditional morality,” others advocate that “American society move toward openness, diversity, and egalitarianism, welcoming such new developments as the counterculture and the anti–Vietnam War movement.”[46] While Kolker and Horwath argue that the films of the Hollywood Renaissance fail to pose alternatives to the ideology they challenge, Lev believes that some of those films do progress toward a less reactionary vision.
Rather than constructing alternate ideologies, the films of Jack Nicholson critique the dominant ideology either overtly in the films’ narratives or ironically in the tone they take toward the dominant culture; while they do not move toward the progress Lev envisions, they still manage to critique the dominant order. Chapter 1 provides a cultural history of post–World War II American manhood as a foundation for much of the discussion throughout the book and uses Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969) to reflect challenges to white male hegemony occurring during that period. Concurrently, Nicholson’s rebellious persona (on the cusp of the establishment and the counterculture) surfaces in Easy Rider. Chapter 2 analyzes the male breadwinner role and its rejection by many white males, as reflected by Nicholson’s persona in Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970) and The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975). Nicholson carries the persona established in Easy Rider further away from the dominant culture in these films and explores the white male’s ability to make authentic choices outside society’s influence; simultaneously, the actor’s dislocation technique first emerges in Five Easy Pieces to capture the character’s inner tension. Chapter 3 examines Nicholson’s depiction of masculine bravura and its alienating effect on the male personality who performs it, particularly in Carnal Knowledge (Nichols, 1971) and The Last Detail (Ashby, 1973). In these films, Nicholson’s persona moves deeply into hegemonic masculinity, and the actor subsequently amplifies the dislocation technique not only to unmask the artificiality of gender constructs but also to reveal the increased tension within the hyper-masculine male subject. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Nicholson’s position between individualism and hegemonic masculinity in Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, while chapter 6 studies Nicholson’s complete immersion within hegemonic masculinity in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) and discusses the monstrous effect of that immersion on the main character, Jack Torrance, who carries the “white man’s burden” more fully than any previous Nicholson character. To convey the character’s heightened inner tension, Nicholson magnifies the dislocation technique to its most exaggerated position, which creates a highly affected, stylized performance that perplexed audiences and critics of the time. After positioning Nicholson’s characters with relation to hegemonic masculinity, each chapter typically examines Nicholson’s use of the dislocation technique, the impact of the new Nicholson characters on the “Jack Nicholson” construct, and the overall structure of the films examined within the chapter.
The films of Jack Nicholson during the 1970s challenge prevailing norms of masculinity that were in a state of tremendous flux during the 1970s. The resulting gender malaise left many American men in a state of anxiety about their identities. For the first time in American history, a broad cultural movement—the men’s liberation movement—was working toward the breakdown of all gender stereotyping, and many men were redefining themselves through authentic choices rather than accepted beliefs. At the same time, many men rejected the men’s liberation movement and held fast to traditional notions of masculinity. As these conflicting approaches indicate, what it meant to be a white man was under deep scrutiny, and Nicholson’s films of the 1970s reflect these cultural trends.
The 1970s was a period of unprecedented social criticism in film that was as ephemeral as it was brilliant. David A. Cook argues that 1970s films offer “a degree of self-examination extraordinary for this country in any medium at any time.”[47] However, this period of introspection was usurped by the “blockbuster mentality,” which spread through Hollywood after the success of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977).[48] He portrays the Hollywood Renaissance as “a richly fruitful detour in the American film industry’s march toward gigantism and global domination.”[49] In addition, Noel King writes that the ephemeral new cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s was influenced by “the stylistic innovations of European art cinema.”[50] Both Cook and King share the sentiment that this period of film contained a tremendous amount of experimentation and innovation in technique as well as an unparalleled examination of dominant culture. Most critics agree that this period of creativity was usurped by the restrictive, conforming trend of the high-concept blockbuster of the late 1970s that came to typify the films of the 1980s and to align itself with the conservative ideology of an America dominated by the Reagan administration.
Within this fleeting creative window, however, two opposite poles developed. As with any given moment in history, both radicals and reactionaries of the 1970s expressed their attitudes toward the dominant culture. Robin Wood establishes a spectrum between films that subvert hegemony and those that reinforce it:
One can imagine two poles: to the left, films whose relation to the dominant discourse is purely oppositional and which have totally purged themselves of all contamination by it; to the right, films that limply reiterate it, without producing any disturbances or contradictions whatever. . . . The concept . . . allows us to envisage all actual films as existing on a continuum between the poles.[51]
Wood asserts, however, that “mainstream cinema has been dedicated—in its overall assumptions and surface forms—to reinforcing the bourgeois ‘reality.’”[52] In Kolker’s discussion of the relationship between film and cultural ideology, he agrees that film is both a “carrier” and a “reflector” of the dominant ideology.[53] Along with those films that carry and reflect the dominant ideology, some films actually resist it, questioning the underlying assumptions of the dominant culture, and one strain of 1970s films took advantage of greater freedoms in the Hollywood system to do so.[54] Belonging on the left of Wood’s continuum, these films are reflectors of cultural changes in gender normalcy.
The reflectors reacted to a loss of confidence in the patriarchal order and to Americans’ “self-doubt about ‘liberty and justice for all’ in those years.”[55] They “registered the moral malaise” of American culture and “reflected [it] in a spate of movies that often enough were as unsuccessful with the mass public as they were audacious, creative and offbeat, according to the critics.”[56] Conversely, those to the right of Wood’s continuum, the resistors, reacted to the moral malaise in an opposite way: instead of reflecting changing attitudes toward gender, they held firmly to traditional gender constructs. While Kolker identifies this group as “carriers,” the more forceful term resistor is appropriate for socio-historical reasons. In any other time in American history, these two terms—reflector and resistor—would be in reverse positions, with the resistors providing the counter-discourse and the reflectors complacently idling along without a hint of subversion; but the 1970s were a time when people were questioning dominant assumptions and attempting to liberate themselves from stringent socialized roles. Thus, the resistors of the 1970s attempted to reassert challenged masculine hegemony while the reflectors, voicing the attitudes of a generation disillusioned by the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and Watergate, sought to subvert it.
In Nicholson’s films, this subversion often targets the heterosexual couple, the symbolic foundation for the patriarchal order. Marriage invariably enslaves both male and female in a system of predetermined roles established by the dominant ideology. These roles are not only derived from the dominant ideology, but they also perpetuate it. For instance, by entering into matrimony, a couple agrees to abide by society’s dictates of behavior appropriate for husbands and wives, and the couple, therefore, serves as an example of appropriate gendered behavior for their children. Wood identifies “the monogamous heterosexual couple, legal marriage, the family, the ideal of sexual fidelity, romantic love, the strict organization of gender and gender roles, homophobia, racism, [and] the horror of miscegenation” as the “concrete embodiments” of “dominant ideological norms,” and applauds films that resist these institutions, “social/sexual arrangements,” and “methods of containment and repression.”[57] A Marxist interpretation of film asserts that “what the camera in fact registers is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out world of the dominant ideology.”[58] While realistic films pass off linear narratives that reflect the dominant ideology as “real,” self-reflexive films question the dominant ideology by making viewers aware that cinema is a constructed representation of dominant cultural attitudes and beliefs. Clarifying this dichotomy between films that register the dominant ideology and those that self-reflexively subvert it, Wood writes:
The cinema that I am interested in is not one that attempts to transcend or eliminate the basic structures and conflicts of our culture, but one in which they are dramatized, made visible: to dramatize something inevitably involves reproducing it, but not inertly. Many films merely reproduce, and thereby reinforce, but there are also many—the interesting ones, the complex ones, the distinguished ones—that, in reproducing the social and psychic structures of our culture, also subject them to criticism.[59]
The auteur-produced films starring Jack Nicholson provide examples of the type of film Wood describes in that they critique hegemonic masculinity by replicating it at its worst. While they do not construct alternative ideologies, these films reproduce the sexual arrangements of American culture in the 1970s to expose them as stultifying and mutually destructive to men and women.
Along with thematic reproductions of sexual arrangements, Nicholson’s acting often replicates the process that males undergo in constructing masculinity and reveals the tension that this process creates, thereby exposing masculinity as both artificial and detrimental to the male who performs it. One major study, Dennis Bingham’s Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, places Nicholson’s portrayal of masculinity alongside Stewart and Eastwood at the forefront of the construction of masculinity in Hollywood cinema. Bingham claims that Nicholson not only constructs male bravado but also incorporates Brechtian “epic acting” to criticize hegemonic masculinity and to expose masculine posturing as self-alienating. In “epic acting,” the actor establishes an “alienation effect” to separate himself from his character, thus providing the necessary distance between actor and character for social commentary. This style denaturalizes masculinity by presenting it as performance rather than essence. Nicholson’s rebelliousness of the 1970s, however, gives way to conformity in the 1980s. Apparently, Nicholson falls victim to the same fate as Hollywood overall in succumbing to the influence of the dominant ideology. This book builds and expands on Bingham’s ideas to include the broader cultural basis of a changing gender climate. This analysis will incorporate acting strategies with screenwriting (character development/psychology), editing (juxtaposition, innovative jump cuts), direction (destabilization of genre conventions), and Nicholson’s constructed “author” persona, all within a cultural framework that presupposes hegemonic masculinity as an effete, limiting, and destructive cultural construct.
The films of Jack Nicholson in the 1970s were made by middle-class white males who, in the spirit of the counterculture movement, attempted to subvert the hegemony of which they were a part. White male hegemony, however, is a juggernaut that has had millennia to define itself, to sprout multiple incarnations and modes of expression, to create the symbols by which it could be recognized and perpetuated, and to entrench itself thoroughly within Western consciousness. Therefore, none of the filmmakers examined here, nor elsewhere, could fully transcend its ubiquitous reach. Even in their attempts to erode the dominant forms of expression and their ideological underpinnings, they ultimately fell victim to indoctrination and helped to perpetuate the archetypal images of manhood that came to typify Hollywood of the 1980s. Nevertheless, we must applaud them for their attempts and recognize their shortcomings as a necessity of any art form created by flawed individuals working within a system whose primary concern is capitalistic. We must rejoice in their idiosyncrasies and find within them the contradictions that help us see ourselves for what we are so that we can find room for improvement or, at the very least, difference. Most important, we must celebrate them as one small insurrection, one gorgeous ripple in the placid sea of conformity, one lone howl of dissent among a throng of complacent voices, all clamoring for the time-honored righteousness of the “white man’s burden.”
1. For an excellent discussion of the flight of American male writers from the competitive American marketplace, see David Leverenz’s book Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
2. Robert Phillip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 9.
3. See Kolker’s introduction to A Cinema of Loneliness and David A. Cook’s Lost Illusions (Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979, History of American Cinema [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000]) for a complete history of the breakdown of the studio system and the rise of the auteur.
4. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 10.
5. Robin Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 45.
6. Vincent Canby, “‘A Safe Place’: Work by Henry Jaglom Stars Tuesday Weld,” review of A Safe Place, performed by Jack Nicholson, New York Times, October 16, 1971, accessed December 17, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art94.html.
7. Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), vii.
8. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 2.
9. Jack Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation with the Funky Star of ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge,’” interview by Richard Warren Lewis, Playboy, April 1972, 83.
10. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, xii.
11. Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation,” 90.
12. Ron Rosenbaum, “Acting: The Method and Mystique of Jack Nicholson,” New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1986, 3, accessed April 23, 2012, LexisNexis Academic.
13. Tim Cahill, “They Used to Hang People for Having This Much Fun,” Rolling Stone, April 1981, 16.
14. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 143.
15. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 110.
16. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 113.
17. Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation,” 75.
18. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 3.
19. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 3.
20. Cahill, “They Used to Hang People,” 16.
21. Rosenbaum, “Acting: The Method and Mystique,” 2.
22. Guy Flatley, “Jack Nicholson, Down to The Last Detail,” New York Times, February 10, 1974, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art100.html.
23. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 3.
24. Jamie Wolf, “It’s All Right, Jack,” American Film (January-February 1984): 36.
25. Wolf, “It’s All Right, Jack,” 36.
26. Wolf, “It’s All Right, Jack,” 36.
27. Wolf, “It’s All Right, Jack,” 36.
28. Bingham, Acting Male, 119.
29. Philip Simpson, “Chinatown,” in Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten, ed. Mikita Brottman (London: Creation, 2000), 65.
30. Tim Cahill, “Jack Nicholson: Knocking Round the Nest,” Rolling Stone, December 1975, paragraph 31, accessed December 16, 2007, Rolling Stone Archive.
31. Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation,” 83.
32. Jay Boyer, Bob Rafelson, Twayne’s Filmmakers Series (New York: Twayne, 1996), 36.
33. Flatley, “Jack Nicholson.”
34. Flatley, “Jack Nicholson.”
35. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 35.
36. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 35–36.
37. Cahill, “They Used to Hang People,” 14.
38. “The Star with the Killer Smile,” Time, August 12, 1974, paragraph 40, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art102.html.
39. Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation,” 80.
40. “Success Is Habit-Forming,” Time, November 30, 1970, paragraph 9, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art103.html.
41. While the article, written in November of 1970, does not give the exact date of Nicholson’s encounter at the country club, it does indicate that the incident was recent.
42. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 10.
43. Alexander Horwath, “The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967–1976,” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 12.
44. Horwath, “The Impure Cinema,” 12.
45. Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), xi.
46. Lev, American Films of the 70s, xi.
47. Cook, Lost Illusions, xv.
48. Cook, Lost Illusions, xvi.
49. Cook, Lost Illusions, xvii.
50. Noel King, “‘The Last Good Time We Ever Had’: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema,” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 20.
51. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 49.
52. Wood, Sexual Politics, 47.
53. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 14.
54. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 14.
55. Thomas Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema: The Last—or First—Great Picture Show,” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 37.
56. Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema,” 37.
57. Wood, Sexual Politics, 9.
58. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1: 26.
59. Wood, Sexual Politics, 23.
If one of them hippies lays down in front of mah car when Ah become President, that’ll be the last car he lays down in front of.[1]—George Wallace
In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement provoked a widespread questioning of accepted beliefs in America. Among these beliefs were traditional notions of middle-class manhood. Teenagers and young adults rejected their parents’ values and customs at levels unheard of the decade before. Simultaneously, Hollywood was spiraling to all-time lows in ticket sales due to the increased popularity of television, and the studios responded in part by shifting the personnel and the subject matter of the films they presented away from the status quo and toward countercultural actors and sensibilities. When the low-budget counterculture film Easy Rider revolutionized American cinema in 1969 by ushering in the New Hollywood, it was following a tradition of exploitation films dating back to the 1950s.
From the late 1950s through the 1960s, executive producer and director Roger Corman spearheaded a production company—AIP (American International Pictures)—that thrived on making exploitation films quickly and cheaply to increase profit margins. He hired relatively unknown actors, screenwriters, and directors to throw together film after film in short periods of time. Shooting for a project often lasted anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. The subject matter was frequently taken directly from sensationalized accounts in the newspapers of teen robberies and murders (The Cry Baby Killer, 1958) and sometimes capitalized on recent political headlines, such as the Bay of Pigs scandal (Thunder Island, 1963). By 1966, AIP started producing a slew of biker films, beginning with The Wild Angels. These films followed the tradition of the American western, filtered through a contemporary perspective. Instead of a horse, these modern-day cowboys rode gas-powered motorcycles across America’s vast, expansive highways. One film from 1954—The Wild One—served as a template for the biker films of the late 1960s. In it, a young Marlon Brando mounts his Harley and speeds away from society and adult responsibilities, leaving all conventional attitudes in his wake. Jeremy Slate, veteran actor of exploitation pictures, claims that biker films blend “two basic elements of the true Western: the lone hero against the world” and speed.[2]
Brando captures this first element—the lone hero against the world—particularly effectively in The Wild One. Brando’s angst, which results mainly from his refusal to accept authoritarian standards of conduct, inspired the young Jack Nicholson, who looked up to Brando as an acting god.[3] Nicholson appeared in two biker films just prior to Easy Rider: Hell’s Angels on Wheels (1967) and Rebel Rousers (1969). In both films, Nicholson is the consummate countercultural icon, but neither film received extensive acclaim from audiences or critics. This fame would come, however, in Nicholson’s next biker film, Easy Rider, in which he portrays a southern lawyer on the cusp of both the establishment and the counterculture movement.
In a revealing scene from the film, George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) sits around a campfire in the woods with Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper). Hanson, who has agreed to abandon temporarily his respectable position in a small southern town and to embark on a spontaneous journey with Wyatt and Billy to New Orleans, attempts to explain why the establishment reacts so negatively to the countercultural bikers. “They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to ’em,” explains the southern lawyer to the two long-haired hippies. “What you represent to them is freedom.” Billy responds, “What the hell’s wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about,” to which Hanson answers, “That’s what it’s all about all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it, that’s two different things. I mean it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace. . . . Oh yeah, they gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual it’s gonna scare ‘em.” That night while he sleeps, Hanson is beaten to death by an irate southern lynch mob.
Hanson’s subversive comments about the lack of freedom within competitive capitalism in Easy Rider mark the beginning of Jack Nicholson’s appearance in a string of popular countercultural films in the 1970s. While the role of George Hanson is a minor one in the film, it nevertheless establishes Nicholson’s persona as an iconoclast, a persona that he would perpetuate in such films as Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dennis Hopper, the director and co-writer of Easy Rider, included Hanson in the film because Hopper wanted the audience to identify with “this short-haired lawyer who is part of the establishment” who is killed for “associating with a couple of people who are long-haired.”[4] Hopper’s commentary reveals one of the major undercurrents running through the film: the challenges that the hippie counterculture movement posed to hegemonic middle-class assumptions about masculinity. While Hanson belongs to the establishment, he also associates with the figures who challenge middle-class attitudes. Nicholson captures the inner tension of George Hanson, who no longer wishes to conform but cannot bring himself to reject his middle-class background completely. By associating with long-haired men, however, Hanson distances himself from middle-class values, and Nicholson effectively embodies the character’s inner tension from having one foot in both worlds.
The long-haired, androgynous appearance of hippies destabilized many Americans’ ideological assumptions about masculinity. The film foregrounds this destabilization in a scene just prior to Hanson’s speech about freedom, when Hanson, Billy, and Wyatt walk into a diner in Louisiana and draw considerable attention from the local white men and women. One of the men says, “Check the one with the long hair,” and another responds, “I think she’s cute.” The first one replies, “Isn’t she? Guess we’ll put ‘em in a woman’s cell.” This exchange reveals the antipathy that many American males felt toward individuals whose appearances challenged traditional notions of masculinity. As a result of the feminine image that hippies projected, many men associated them with homosexuals, and since men had to put up a strong public appearance of hatred toward gays to preserve their own images of masculinity, they often lashed out violently toward effeminate men. Even without this association with homosexuality, hippies presented an image that ran contrary to prescribed notions of masculinity, an image which violated the ordered world of masculine and feminine that dominated Western culture. Since many American men desperately sought to preserve that hegemony, the counterculture movement created a backlash against nontraditional gender roles. Thus, the men at the diner and the lynch mob prove their manhood and dominance by verbally and physically attacking not only Billy and Wyatt for what they represent but also Hanson for associating with them.
In addition to lashing out against Billy and Wyatt to preserve their own masculine image, the men at the diner react in this way because of the cultural climate of the 1960s. The counterculture movement’s attack on hegemonic versions of masculinity created a chaotic version of reality that many white, middle-class males were not ready to accept. Several forces were converging in post–World War II America to challenge white male hegemony in America. Not the least of these forces were the civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements. After World War II, middle-class white males reasserted their dominance over social, political, and economic power, which they felt had been usurped by women who entered the work force during the war. As a result of men “reclaiming” their dominance, the 1950s epitomized conformity to an image of America that consisted of suburbia and the nuclear family, with the father as breadwinner and the mother as domestic housewife and nurturer. This paradigm was shaken, however, by books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and court cases like Brown v. Board of Education; consequently, “ideas of normality were enforced with a desperate passion.”[5] One possible reaction to these challenges to normality was for white males to reaffirm their natural strength to uphold their rightful place in the social hierarchy. As this reaffirmation suggests, the all-white male lynch mob murders Hanson in a desperate attempt to maintain its hegemony through physical aggression.
One final reason for Hanson’s murder pertains to his speech about the difficulty of attaining freedom in an increasingly mechanized marketplace. Hanson’s assertion that “it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace” refers to the contemporary condition of men in American society. With the rise of industrialization in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, culminating with the growth of large corporations in place of small businesses, “modern corporate capitalism had transformed a nation of small entrepreneurs—Self-Made Men—into a nation of hired employees,”[6] who felt sterilized by their inability to distinguish themselves within their organizations. According to historian E. Anthony Rotundo:
These patterns of employment [in post-industrial America] marked a dramatic change from the ones that had prevailed through most of the [nineteenth] century. The clerk . . . was now a service worker with little chance of making it to the top. The route upward was much longer, and the barriers along the way were largely insurmountable. . . . The mark of success had once been prosperity as an independent owner; now it was victory in the struggle of executives for the top spot. Ultimately, the winner was still an employee. In the new order, every businessman had to submit—the successful one was the man who submitted to the fewest orders.[7]
In this new model for manhood, individuals lost autonomy as they became part of “middle management, both supervising and supervised, belonging to the company rather than its belonging to them. They were ‘not their own men.’”[8] This new corporate hegemony replaced the myth of self-made manhood perpetuated by historical and fictional figures like Benjamin Franklin, J. P. Morgan, and Horatio Alger and subsequently eroded many men’s self-images of masculinity.
Along with this shift away from self-made manhood to corporate employment around the turn of the century came a pressure to conform to company expectations, a pressure that largely remains in corporations today. Individuality was overwhelmingly suppressed by the 1950s as people “were expected to accept the company line. . . . What followed was a further erosion of individualism and the establishment of a conforming and standardizing atmosphere.”[9] As a result of this standardization, “the new social ethic was breeding normalcy and sterility—in effect, a robot man.”[10] This condition of corporate manhood that suppresses freedom and forces men to adhere to certain precepts of accepted behavior provokes Hanson’s criticism when pontificating to Wyatt and Billy. By completely disavowing those precepts and embracing a nonconformist lifestyle filled with the freedom of the motorcycle and the highway, Wyatt and Billy represent a challenge to oppressive corporate manhood. Since “the counterculture, populated largely by the sons and daughters of the white middle class, challenged the illusions of suburban comfort and security,” the hippies’ physical appearance also served as a rejection of the corporate paradigm.[11] Even though this corporate hegemony stifled many middle-class males, it also gave them a sense of an ordered universe, while the nonconformity of the counterculture movement presented the possibility of chaos that often accompanies freedom. Subverting the lynch mob’s sense of meaning, the nonconformist lifestyle of Wyatt and Billy creates an unsettling destabilization that Hanson acutely points out.
By existing on the cusp of mainstream society and the counterculture movement, Hanson presents an even greater threat to white male hegemony than Wyatt and Billy. The hippies pose a frightening enough challenge to corporate manhood and its emphasis on order and confinement, but Hanson’s association with them is even more upsetting to the conforming white male. Showcasing his acceptance of the freedom from gender roles that Wyatt and Billy represent, Hanson becomes an accomplice in their crusade. Since Hanson, as a southern white lawyer, belongs to the establishment, he signifies a growing cultural acceptance of gender nonconformity that marks a possible trend toward a total revolution of the masculine-feminine dichotomy. To be part of the establishment means to reject anything that does not fit within its cultural ideology; thus, Hanson violates the code of corporate manhood and poses a greater threat to white male hegemony than the hippies themselves.
Hanson’s placement in this shot reflects his position between the law and the counterculture movement. Not quite belonging to either, Hanson embodies the growing acceptance of nontraditional gender roles. Columbia Pictures/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures. Photographer: Peter Sorel.
These challenges to hegemony typify a string of films released in the late 1960s. Easy Rider was part of a trend of counterculture films produced during this era—including Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1968), and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)—that demystified certain American myths, such as the affirmation of capitalism, the sanctity of marriage, and the rugged masculinity of cowboys. In 1969, a film critic for Film Quarterly wrote that “all these films share—the urge to make some major revaluations of America. All of them deal with American myths . . . as they try to come to terms with the desperation they feel about modern America.”[12] Taken together, these films debunk the myths of gender roles that arose out of the nuclear family paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s.
An examination and revaluation of cultural ideologies during the late 1960s began to overturn the nuclear family paradigm. Following World War II, the development of this paradigm established the rigid gender roles that subsequent filmmakers so inexorably questioned. Since many women deferred their dreams of a family during the war, when the men returned, couples immediately started having children. One indication that Americans were quickly marrying and starting families involves the boom in marriage license bureaus in 1946.[13] Consequently, the birth rate increased at an unprecedented rate as couples who graduated in 1944 more than doubled the birthrate of their parents’ generation.[14] Not only had these couples deferred their dreams of having children during the war, but they also had to postpone material acquisitions. Consequently, the desire to have children brought the equally pressing need to acquire material possessions: a new house, new car, and fine new furnishings.[15] The pursuit of happiness became the quest to build the nuclear family, complete with its stereotypical house in suburbia with a white picket fence.
As Americans overwhelmingly strove to attain the 1950s version of the American Dream, they also clung to specific gender roles to protect the Dream from perceived attempts to subvert it. The dominant cultural discourse enforced the stringent gender roles of the nuclear family to mollify the anxieties caused by the Cold War.[16] Elaine Tyler May argues that both the government and the psychological community advanced the nuclear family as a means of “containment” of the communist threat abroad.[17] Since communism posed a threat to the American way of life, embodied by the nuclear family and its material acquisitions, the logical way to combat communism’s influence was to erect strict gender ideologies as a “bulwark of security—‘a psychological fortress’—on the home front.”[18] Providing security from threats abroad, these gender roles were perpetuated by prevailing images of affluent domesticity:
At the center of this family is a hardworking husband-father and wife-mother for whom the most important commission is the propagation and education of children who grow up to be like their parents—property-owning husbands and housewives living a life of affluence and abundance. In an increasingly anxiety-producing and dangerous world, the nuclear family provided a refuge, the one sphere in which ‘people could control their destinies and perhaps even shape their future.’ The preferred setting for the nuclear family is, of course, the suburban ranch house.[19]
This nuclear family paradigm consists of a masculine/feminine dichotomy between the marketplace and the home.[20]
In the era of McCarthyism, the nuclear family established models of appropriate gender behavior, and the government enacted institutions, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee, that reinforced these models through intimidation. Subsequently, anyone who attempted to subvert these prescribed roles either personally or politically became targets of the FBI. “When the architects and administrators of the Cold War turned their attention to policing the American body politic,” writes Savran, “they aimed precisely at Communists and homosexuals in the conviction that both groups were plotting to undermine and destroy the American way of life.”[21] As McCarthy’s witch hunt targeted homosexuals as well as communists, government officials labeled homosexuals within the government as “security risks” because they feared that homosexuals would readily succumb to blackmail from Soviet agents.[22] At the same time, homosexuals in the private sector faced arrest in such public places as bars, restrooms, parks, and beaches.[23] Robin Wood argues that white male hegemony depends upon the repression of “abnormal” sexualities:
The repression of bisexuality (through “socialization”) and the oppression of gays are necessary for the perpetuation of heterosexual male dominance, the rule of the symbolic Father, which entails among other things the rigid definition of what is “masculine” and what is “feminine” so that what is designated “feminine” can be subordinated as dependent and inferior, and what is “masculine” celebrated and nurtured. It is through the repression of bisexuality that the heterosexual male is constructed as potential fascist. The social acceptance of bisexuality, gayness, and other forms of what the Nazis termed “social deviancy,” would seriously undermine the central unit of our society and the breeding ground of its inherent tendency to fascism, the patriarchal nuclear family.[24]
In short, as a result of Cold War politics, the American government attempted to contain Americans within a sphere of prescribed gender roles with the father as breadwinner and the mother as domestic homemaker because it saw any attempt to undermine those roles as an infraction against hegemonic white manhood, the fortress against communist subversion.
In addition to serving as a dike to hold back the threat of communism, the nuclear family also arose out of a need for middle-class white males to reassert their hegemony, which was challenged by the erosion of individualism in corporate America. In the pre-industrial Victorian model of the family, a dichotomy was established between the home and the world.[25] Within this new paradigm, known as the “separation of spheres,” the domestic sphere was relegated to women while men dominated the public realm of the marketplace.[26] Since the public sphere “was the emerging marketplace of competitive trade and democratic politics, the arena of individualism,”[27] it was naturally assigned to the men, as they possessed the necessary traits: aggression, greed, ambition, competitiveness, and self-interest.[28] In contrast, women were deemed more fit for the home because they were pious, pure, and morally superior to men. The traits associated with masculinity began to change, however, with the postindustrial rise of corporate manhood around the turn of the century. Instead of aggressiveness and individualism, the rapidly increasing corporate obligations encouraged unprecedented subservience from business men.[29] Essentially, the traits originally associated with masculinity in the thriving marketplace of entrepreneurship were superseded by traits denoted as feminine, such as subservience and cooperation. The aggressive individualism associated with robber barons was replaced by the “feminine” “soft arts of personnel relations.”[30] To be a man in the early part of the twentieth century “required subordinating one’s heroic vision to a dull routine” of breadwinning that “remained the centerpiece of middle-class masculinity.”[31] The more possessions a man could procure for his family through conforming to company expectations, the greater his sense of manhood. In sum, men in postwar America were feeling increasingly less dominant in the workplace and needed a place to assert their hegemony; therefore, they emphasized their role as breadwinner in the home as opposed to self-made entrepreneur in the public sphere.
While the replacement of self-made manhood with corporate manhood detracted from men’s sense of dominance, women’s changing roles also affected the postwar masculine image.[32] Since the turn of the century, women had been entering the public sphere at a rate alarming to the white male seeking to hold tight to his gender role. The percentage of women in the labor force rose from 16 percent in 1890 to 29 percent in 1950.[33] As women entered the workforce, they began asserting themselves financially, as the years between 1954 and 1958 saw a 35 percent increase in women who owned securities with their companies and billions of dollars in stocks.[34] These figures indicate trends that challenged American males who measured their happiness according to their dominance over women.[35]
Because women were encroaching upon the traditionally male-dominated public sphere, men felt the need to remind women of their rightful place in the home. Magazines, television, and other media of the 1950s reinforced the image of the domesticated woman, and sociologists and historians warned women of the dangers of feminist thinkers.[36] These social trends “pointed to a rather remarkable recovery of man as the head of the household, the boss once again after several decades in which his role in the family and the image of manliness had been confused.”[37]
These three factors—the threat of communism, the feminization of corporate manhood, and the challenge of women—combined with other factors to precipitate a widespread cultural movement to reinforce conformity to traditional gender roles in the 1950s. This movement gave rise to a temporary relapse to the Victorian model of the separation of spheres, in which the man entered the marketplace to procure his family’s means for comfortable living and the woman managed the house and nurtured the children:
The ideology of familialism and the theory of “sex roles” conceived the distinction between men and women as a binary opposition that set the aggressive, “go-getting” businessman and father against the “warm, giving,” and “expressive” housewife and mother whose responsibility it was to embrace domesticity and contain her sexuality. Simultaneously, this ideology severely disparaged and marginalized those who did not fit the prescribed molds.[38]
Ultimately, this stultifying arrangement resulted in pressures on both sexes to conform to societal expectations. Men were measured by their abilities to provide status-securing material possessions, and women were deemed fit when they kept a clean and orderly house and provided discipline and moral guidance for their children. If members of either sex failed at their obligations, society viewed them as inadequate. As normative gender models imposed severe pressures on men, women, and the nuclear family as an institution, the stage was set for cultural rebellion.
One rebellious group that arose to challenge these rigid gender codes was the motorcycle gang. This group, personified by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, attacked “the drone of self-made masculinity, the relentless pursuit of happiness through material possession.”[39] These men rejected the prescribed breadwinning role and saw the road as a modern-day allegory for the mythic West that was inhabited by such larger-than-life icons as Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo, who had sought the wide-open space of the frontier to escape societal norms. The motorcycle gang also subverted the cultural construct of the separation of spheres and defined the home in terms of its relation of confinement to the world, which represented freedom. Celebrated by such beat writers as Jack Kerouac in On the Road and Allen Ginsburg in Howl, this desire for freedom from the stultifying pressures of the home, coupled with a rebellion against the feminization of America, is perfectly captured in The Wild Ones, wherein Brando typified a “teenage rebellion against a society that obviously had lost the respect of the teen generation”[40] —a respect that had been lost because the teens saw their fathers emasculated by corporate manhood. As a result of this emasculation, “the leather jackets, switch-blade knives, [and] motorcycles . . . were evidence of a new, hard-shelled masculinity among many youths.”[41] To reclaim masculinity in a materialistic, postindustrial age, these early rebels struck out for the freedom of the road and adopted a rough-edged, stoic definition of masculinity inherited from cultural icons of the mythic West.
Concurrent with this free-rolling flight from respectability was the rise in popularity of westerns, films that perpetuated the archetype of rugged individualism. Social historian Michael Kimmel notes:
Over 10 percent of all fictional works published in the 1950s were westerns, and eight of the top ten television shows. . . . Fifty-four western feature films were made in 1958 alone. Westerns provided the re-creation of the frontier, the “meeting point between civilization and savagery,” where real men, men who were good with a horse and a gun, triumphed over unscrupulous bankers and other rogue versions of Self-Made Manhood.[42]
Men flocked to the theater for these vicarious adventures to escape the sterility of middle-class existence in corporate America. They craved the savagery of the western archetype, who inhabited a partially savage world because he himself was partially savage. This primal savagery, almost exclusively attributed to men, was prohibited from expression in the corporate world, where cooperative men excelled. According to Martin Nussbaum, “The western hero is characterized by his restlessness and freedom of action. . . . He is a drifter; a vanishing symbol of individualism in an age of togetherness and conformity.”[43] Wistful for that disappearing archetype, some middle-class white males watched westerns to experience primal masculinity vicariously because they were forced to subsume their aggressiveness under a veneer of cooperativeness and passivity in their everyday lives.
Along with serving as an escape from the drudgery of corporate America, the West was a land historically perceived as solely masculine. In fact, “many of the early stories issuing from the West described it as a man’s place, full of danger, in which a woman would be at worst a nuisance, at best . . . an outlet for crude sexual vitality.”[44] Because men were feeling feminized by corporate manhood and the encroachment of women on the public sphere, they spent a great deal of their leisure time reminiscing about a time when men supposedly dominated a chaotic land where women served only as sexual objects. Even the language of literary critics from the period used sexual rhetoric to suggest that the West was untouched by the hands of civilization and ready to be conquered. [45] In sum, as a reaction against the perceived feminization of males in contemporary society and the threat that women posed to white male hegemony, men viewed westerns in order to celebrate the primal characteristics that emphasized their differences from women.
The western genre reached its apotheosis in the persona created by John Wayne. Middle-class men could empathize with Wayne’s alienated persona in such films as The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) because they felt their own estrangement from a contemporary society that continued to propagate the myth of self-made manhood but at the same time failed to allow this manhood to exist. As Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Wayne’s lone walk into an uncertain future in the final scene personifies the existential hero who can “vanish into the setting sun” whenever “the pressures and monotony of life become depressing and wearisome.”[46] Nussbaum marks this pattern of flight from convention as a “temporary escape” for average American men “who lead lives of stifled routine,”[47] while Stearns claims that “the steady stream of tough-guy movie heroes from John Wayne through Rambo—could reinforce a beleaguered masculinity” that felt the challenge of corporate feminization.[48] As this fascination with John Wayne’s persona indicates, American males who felt the stultifying effects of corporate life on their manhood—and the challenge that feminism posed to their hegemony—resorted to the western archetype, with its emphasis on primal masculinity, to escape feminization.
Epitomized by Brando and Wayne, the male antiheroes of the 1950s splintered into two separate categories in the late 1960s and early 1970s: resistors and reflectors. The resistors carried the tradition of rugged masculinity and disgust with corrupt, “feminized” society, while the reflectors expressed disillusionment with traditional male roles. For the resistors, society was “feminized” because it was too liberal, and the political climate made the law powerless to prosecute criminals. The reflectors, on the other hand, reacted to the changing gender climate by exposing the stultifying pressures placed on white males to conform to accepted modes of behavior.
The resistors exhibited many reactionary, masculine traits associated with Clint Eastwood. As the challenges to hegemonic white manhood intensified with the rise of the feminist, civil rights, and gay liberation movements in the 1960s, white males yearned for a new star to adopt Wayne’s persona as the new reactionary hero. Espousing conservative social values that countered the liberal, countercultural films of the 1970s,[49] Eastwood replaced Wayne as the reactionary male icon of the 1970s.[50] “A silent, solitary man with a gun” with “the vigilante proclivity for violence,”[51] Eastwood’s violent persona resembled Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down (Shlesinger, 1993),[52] who railed against “the corrupt values surrounding him” with “implacable single-mindedness,”[53] along with “a studied indifference to the rights of minority groups and other social outsiders,”[54] reminiscent of Ethan Edwards’ hatred of Native Americans. Serving as conduits through which emasculated men could reclaim their manhood, resistors like Eastwood and Douglas in Falling Down personified angry, displaced white males lashing out against a world careening chaotically out of their control. Possessed of a masculine image more primal perhaps than anything seen in American cinema to date, Eastwood’s roles in the conservative cop thrillers of the 1970s perfectly capture this reactionary masculine impulse:
If violence, whether physical or emotional, is the defensive gesture of the self-alienated male in a society he does not understand and over which he has no control, then the affirmative mode of the cop thriller, and all other forms of strongly dramatised narratives, is evidently also a subjective, compensatory reflex, responding to a felt lack, a gap and an absence.[55]
Enacting the dominant myth of masculine self-actualization as a means to compensate for beleaguered masculinity, the narrative structure of the cop thriller places its reactionary protagonist in control of his circumstances.
The protagonists of Clint Eastwood’s films, then, are permutations of the disaffected youths of the motorcycle films and the alienated wanderers of the westerns. However, while the motorcycle films and westerns of the 1950s rebelled against conforming gender roles, Eastwood’s films are resistors to cultural changes in gender norms, including the perceived feminization of males in contemporary society. The difference is due to the cultural climate surrounding the films; in the 1950s, feminization was viewed primarily as a threat to the social fabric, whereas in the 1970s, it was embraced by the men’s liberation movement. As a result of these differences in perception, the films of Clint Eastwood provide a counterpoint to the films of Jack Nicholson, as they attempt to dam up the waters of change while Nicholson’s films strive to unleash them. For instance, the reactionary protagonist of Dirty Harry (1971), Harry Callahan, views “society as diseased and corrupt, but [sees] radical liberalism as the problem,”[56] whereas Nicholson’s George Hanson attributes society’s ills to a standardizing gender climate.
Along with Eastwood, a number of popular male actors from the 1970s also served as resistors to ideological change. Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson gained stardom by adopting a rough-hewn masculinity. In Death Wish (1974), for instance, Bronson plays Paul Kersey, an architect who takes justice into his own hands after his wife is killed and his daughter is raped by a group of thugs. Like Callahan before him, Kersey lashes out against the criminals the law is powerless to control. These films—Dirty Harry and Death Wish—foreground a system that “is undone by the legal restrictions placed on law enforcement to protect society, thus rendering the police impotent and the criminals empowered.”[57] This “impotence” further underscores the emasculating effect of the feminized, liberal society that these right-wing films rebel against. Colin Gardner also argues that Eastwood’s and Bronson’s protagonists “proselytize the need for a strong individual hero to stand up to the bad guys in light of the ineffectual fence-sitting on the part of the liberal-humanist legal system.”[58] In reaction to this perceived liberalization and feminization of America, Eastwood, Bronson, and McQueen became resistors to cultural attempts to redefine hegemonic masculinity.
Several critics, including Thomas Elsaesser, Christian Keathley, and Gardner, contrast these goal-oriented action heroes with the “unmotivated” antiheroes of more liberal films. For example, Gardner categorizes Dirty Harry and Death Wish as conservative right-wing films, whereas he lumps Five Easy Pieces, with its shiftless protagonist, as leftist.[59] Elsaesser also establishes a dichotomy between reactionary cop thrillers and liberal counterculture films:
A Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry or a Charles Bronson in Death Wish, both so purposive and determined, so firm and single-minded, nonetheless appear powered above all by the negative energy of resentment, frustration, and spite, seeking to vent its destructive rage under the guise of a law-and-order morality. These coldly determined heroes featured in excessive, violent plots are the reverse side of the unmotivated heroes in the liberal films.[60]
While the hyper-masculine denizens of the cop thrillers were projections of a challenged masculinity attempting to reassert its hegemony through violent fantasies, the noncommitted antihero constitutes a more objective position from which to analyze American society of the 1970s. Consequently, the kind of unmotivated antihero depicted by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces captures more of an objective realism than the reactionary vigilantes of the resistor category.[61]
As George Hanson, Wyatt, and Billy in Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda, along with Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Gene Hackman, and Robert Redford, constituted a group of actors that emerged in the late 1960s along with the “New Hollywood” cinema. These actors carried on a tradition started by method actors like Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Montgomery Clift, whose techniques provide challenges to cultural norms of masculinity. This new wave of reflectors of cultural changes in gender normality came to the forefront of Hollywood during the years between 1967 and 1971 when a “massive generational turnover, the likes of which had not been seen since the coming of sound, took place.”[62] This turnover coincided with a shift in public tastes from Hollywood musicals and love stories to independent, counterculture films. Younger audiences began to reject established Hollywood personalities, including writers, directors, and producers whose careers spanned several decades, and Hollywood reacted by hiring younger talent in their place.[63]
Along with this shift in taste came a generational transition in acting talent. The reflectors, with the addition of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the 1970s, “displaced a generational cohort that . . . lost the bankability many of them had owned two decades or more.”[64] Such recognizable names as Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, William Holden, Marlon Brando, and James Stewart were discarded in favor of the iconoclasts of the “New Hollywood.”[65] Not only had these actors lost their ability to draw at the box office, but with the possible exception of Lancaster and Brando, they also represented the very establishment that the reflectors were rebelling against.
The resistor/reflector conflict also takes political shape in the cultural dichotomy between hawks and doves. To ensure patriotism and support for the Vietnam War, the administrators of the establishment invoked cultural ideologies about gender to stigmatize those who did not fit prescribed roles. Thus, a dichotomy was created between “hawks” and “doves,” resistors and reflectors, those who supported America’s involvement in Vietnam and those who did not, the “good ole boys” and the “commies and queers.” Whereas the delinquent adolescent biker of the 1950s was attacked for failing to adhere to the patriarchal nuclear family role as responsible breadwinner, the dove was pigeonholed as totally emasculated for his unwillingness to support America’s involvement in the war.
The reflectors in Easy Rider—Fonda/Wyatt and Hopper/Billy—embody the challenge that doves posed to hegemonic masculine culture in the 1960s, and Nicholson/Hanson reflects the white bourgeoisie’s growing acceptance of this changing gender climate. To use George Hanson’s words, what Wyatt and Billy represented to the figureheads of masculine hegemony—people like LBJ, Nixon, Agnew, and their ideological followers—was a mirror through which they could see their own inadequacies as men. Fearing that they would fall victim to the discourse of masculinity that they took a part in creating, these men continually employed overly masculine rhetoric to emphasize their hawk status. As a result, they saw any opponent to their ideology as an equal threat to their masculinity. For example, “Johnson appears to have been so deeply insecure that his political rhetoric dripped with metaphors of aggressive masculinity; affairs of state seem to have been conducted as much with the genitals as with political genius.” Significantly, Johnson also adopted the common tendency to question the manhood of his opponents.[66] Johnson’s compensatory rhetoric was matched by Nixon. Constantly fearing public criticism for taking a soft stance on communism, Nixon “resolved to ‘overcome the weakneed [sic], jelly backed attitude’ of Congress and to press ahead escalating the war in Vietnam.”[67] Vice President Agnew also invoked the discourse of masculinity when a Republican senator reversed his position on the war from hawk to dove. Implying that the senator emasculated himself by becoming antiwar, Agnew called him “Christine Jorgensen,” a renowned transsexual of the era.[68] By linking manhood with patriotism, political figures of the Vietnam War era were able not only to undermine their antiwar opponents but also to reinforce their own fraught masculinity. When the hawks gazed at the hordes of protesters marching on Washington, however, they saw their own inability to dominate paternally over their constituencies. This inability further emphasized the emasculating effect of the counterculture movement. As a result of these feelings of inadequacy, hippies and members of the counterculture movement became compounded reflections of the hawks’ worst fears; the hippies looked feminine and made the political leaders feel powerless, even impotent.
One scene in Easy Rider echoes this powerlessness. When Wyatt, Billy, and George enter the Southern diner, a table of teenage girls flirts with them. The southern males respond by attacking them because they “threaten the patriarchal order of the town.”[69] Foreshadowing the attack and death of George Hanson, the southern bigots repeatedly mention that the three will not make it to the border, and since Johnson and Wallace were from the South, viewers possibly saw the ending, in which Wyatt and Billy are killed by southerners, “as, among other things, a response to the political rhetoric of the time.”[70]
Political figures of the late 1960s were not the only ones threatened by what Wyatt and Billy represented. Middle-class white males also felt their share of challenges to their masculinity, not the least of which was the dove. However, the middle-class white male spectator’s only conduit into the world of Wyatt and Billy is George Hanson. By associating with Wyatt and Billy, the feminized challengers of cultural ideology, George Hanson, who “belongs neither to disaffected youth nor to the indifferent middle class,”[71] becomes both a representative and a scapegoat for the insecure middle-class white male spectator. Like George Hanson, this spectator identifies himself with Wyatt and Billy because he labels his own insecurity about his masculinity as a feminine trait. Just as Johnson and Nixon must have had doubts about their involvement in Vietnam, the spectator might also empathize with the dove’s desire to flout the establishment; however, he is reminded of the discourse of masculinity whereby opponents of hegemonic ideology are stigmatized as feminine or, at the very least, unsexed. Because the white male spectator fears being labeled a dove, he becomes a resistor instead of a reflector, lashing out at Hanson vicariously through the lynch mob to reinforce his own unstable masculinity. The lynch mob, then, serves the same function as the Clint Eastwood persona in Dirty Harry and the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down. The white male spectator simultaneously becomes Hanson and the lynch mob, delighting in a ritual wherein his intrinsic doubts and femininity die alongside George Hanson, killed by his own primitive, aggressive male impulses. This ritualistic killing gives Hopper’s commentary, “I wanted us to kill one of our own,” particular clarity.[72]
Despite this scapegoat effect, Hopper probably did not want his audience to delight in a symbolic murder of their dovelike feminine sides. Instead, he likely wanted the spectator to be appalled by Hanson’s death and to see the white lynch mob, symbolic of America’s reactionary right, as the epitome of what had gone wrong in America. To illustrate this point, just prior to his death, Hanson laments the passing of a more noble America and expresses feelings of exasperation at his inability to understand what has gone wrong. He states, “This used to be a damn good country; I can’t figure out what happened to it.” By juxtaposing Hanson’s comments with scenes of violent white bigotry, the film invites the spectator to draw a connection between the downfall of America and the ritualized killing. Realizing that the mainstream American audience would identify more with Hanson than with Wyatt and Billy, Hopper dramatized Hanson’s death to propel his point; by viciously attacking nonconformity, Americans are only killing themselves and all that is good about their country.
Not only was Nicholson, performing the role of George Hanson, a representative for the middle-class white male in Easy Rider, but he also became the single most representative actor of that dominant culture in the 1970s. Easy Rider marks the onset of Nicholson’s reflection of a major shift in the dominant culture’s attitudes toward traditional gender roles. Because Hanson does not fully abandon the establishment, he must continue to act the part of the appropriately socialized middle-class white male. Nicholson thus makes the spectator aware of Hanson’s masculine posturing, which increasingly becomes a source of alienation for Nicholson’s characters. Effectively, through Nicholson’s performance, Hanson transcends the simple function as audience conduit that Hopper intended.
Hanson/Nicholson’s masculine posturing results in a separation between the character’s constructed identity and his ability to make authentic choices—a separation that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs masculinity and destabilizes the spectator’s assumptions. In Acting Male, Dennis Bingham argues that Nicholson exemplifies “the male masquerade in myriad ways. Nicholson . . . often [foregrounds] a man playing the role of ‘Man,’ while projecting the pose as . . . virtually constituting the male identity.”[73] While Bingham contends that Nicholson’s masculine posturing composes nearly his entire identity, Nicholson more accurately reveals the pose as a mask to hide his sensitivity. Nicholson portrays not only Hanson’s masculine posturing but also his sensitive “feminine” side.
An example of Nicholson’s masquerade technique occurs when Wyatt and Billy first meet Hanson as he wakes up after a night of drinking. When the deputy enters the jail cell, he obviously admires Hanson, despite the fact that Hanson has spent the night in prison (he offers George an aspirin to alleviate his hangover and practically gushes over him). His admiration arises partially from Hanson’s ability to consume inordinate amounts of alcohol, a traditional sign of manhood that Hanson performs as a signifier of his masculinity. Hanson also dons a football helmet to wear on the trip to New Orleans, and he includes a description of a whore house he has been dying to get to in his conversation with Wyatt and Billy outside the prison.
The audience first meets Hanson after he spends a night in jail for consuming an inordinate amount of alcohol. The shadow of the prison bars suggests the confines that masculinity imposes over individuals who do not fit the mold. Columbia Pictures/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures. Photographer Peter Sorel.
However, Nicholson reveals the artifice of gender by depicting masculine construction as a veil over “feminine” sensitivity, thus destabilizing spectators’ ideological assumptions. Nicholson undercuts Hanson’s masculine posturing by wearing glasses, a traditional sign of overcivilization and feminization; by wistfully discussing an imaginary Venusian society that eliminates leadership and competitiveness and instead promotes egalitarianism and solidarity; and by associating himself with “a couple of long-hairs” who flout traditional masculinity. Accustomed to viewing masculinity as an essence rather than as a received set of traits, spectators find their attitudes challenged by Nicholson’s performance of gender, which exposes masculinity as a cultural construct rather than as a fundamental nature.
Along with revealing the sensitive underbelly of his characters, Nicholson also captures men’s alienation during the late 1960s and early 1970s by “[displaying] the consequences of male privilege and the void that it obscures.”[74] Nicholson’s characters are so consumed with appearing masculine that their identities become wrapped up in an alienating masquerade. Hanson, for instance, belongs to neither the dominant culture nor the counterculture movement, rejecting the ideology of the former but still opting to exist within it, and his resulting existence on the fringes of each culture alienates him from both of them. Because he does not fully commit himself to the counterculture, he must continue the male masquerade despite his disapproval of hegemonic masculinity, thus alienating himself from his own beliefs.
This dialectic between masculine posturing and “feminine” authenticity and the alienation that accompanies it reveals the contemporary feeling of malaise surrounding gender roles in the late 1960s. Concurrently, Nicholson’s masquerade technique reveals both his character’s artificiality and Nicholson’s artifice as an actor. In other words, by constructing masculinity and commenting on that construction through his performance, Nicholson captures the tension that many American males felt when they recognized the masquerade within themselves. Subsequently, Nicholson’s acting style resonated with American men who felt pressured to construct their own masculinities according to society’s accepted modes. By pinpointing cultural anxieties among white males who no longer wanted to conform to stultifying gender norms but felt pressured by relentless hegemonic ideologies, Nicholson became a reflector of contemporary ideological challenges.
Another aspect of Nicholson’s charm as well as his representative capacity was his innate rebelliousness, which appealed to the audiences of the time who felt estranged from their government’s involvement in Vietnam. Since moments of social and political turmoil often inspire outbursts of creativity, the Vietnam War, which polarized society into “hawks” and “doves,” had this effect on American film.[75] The Hollywood Renaissance that began around 1967 emerged at a time when American audiences were ready for a challenge. Unfortunately, as quickly as it came, this renaissance passed with the onset of the Hollywood blockbuster, beginning with Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). Formula directors like Spielberg and Lucas became surer bets at the box office than auteurs like Bob Rafelson, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman. Finally, Michael Cimino’s disastrous financial failure, Heaven’s Gate (1980), sealed the fate of the independent Hollywood film.[76] During this brief interval, the exuberant creative energy remains unparalleled in American cinema. Nicholson’s rise to stardom in this era, propelled by an intrinsic iconoclasm that mirrored society’s frustrations with the contemporary political and cultural malaise, coincided with an equally rebellious spirit running through the strain of “American New Wave” directors and made him a logical choice for those directors’ ideological messages.
Along with Nicholson’s rebelliousness and his dislocation technique, his conscious attempt to go beyond the immediate character to a broader representation of men in general contributes to his status as the epitome of the middle-class white male. Bingham asserts that Nicholson adopts Brechtian “epic” acting, in which “the actor presents himself and his characters as actors of ideologically assigned roles.”[77] In the epic style, the actor distances himself from the character to emphasize that the individual is “a product of ideological construction and cultural subjectivity.”[78] “By performing ‘masculine’ aggressiveness, rituals, and self-presentation,” writes Bingham, “Nicholson turns an individual man into a representation of ‘Man.’”[79] Nicholson does foreground the ideological construction of his characters to reach a broader representation; however, he does not adopt a purely epic style. The epic style requires the actor to establish a distance between himself and the character, which Nicholson does not fully attempt. Instead, he infuses his characters with a tension caused by the competing forces of authentic self-expression and ideological identity construction to reveal the detrimental effect of that tension. While Nicholson “[extends] classical notions of an actor playing a man to implicate man in general (or at least white heterosexual American man) in his performance,”[80] he accomplishes this representation not through pure epic acting but through his dislocation technique, which incorporates elements of method acting.
Method acting is diametrically opposed to the epic style. Developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, the method style requires the actor to search within to experience empathy with the character then portray the resultant emotion with an element of “truth.” The epic style conflicts with method acting in the former’s emphasis on the masks that all individuals wear on a daily basis, masks that foreground a process whereby every individual projects an image outward to society; thus, actors adopt the epic style to explore not only the kinds of masks that hegemonic masculinity forces men to wear but also how men cope with the construction of identity based on cultural ideologies. Nicholson includes an element of this style when he highlights his character’s construction of masculinity based on gender ideologies, such as when George Hanson wears the football helmet or yearningly speaks of the whore house; however, he also incorporates the method style in two ways: first, when he displays the emotional outbursts that result from his characters’ inner tensions, which often stem from the authentic/artificial dichotomy; and second, when he reveals the sensitivity that lurks underneath his characters’ ostensibly hyper-masculine veneer. By combining elements of epic and method acting, Nicholson poignantly captures not only the process of masculine gender construction but also the resulting turmoil that process imposes on the male who undergoes it.
Nicholson’s representative qualities provided Americans with a mirror through which they could examine the transitional state of the white male in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. The orderly world of the 1950s, complete with the pristine nuclear family, was being replaced by a chaotic world filled with bloodshed overseas and social movements at home. White male hegemony was under fire, and men were feeling displaced from their normative means of self-definition. In this transitional period, Nicholson’s questioning face emerged from the chaos to reflect the dissonance of a nation whose most cherished dreams had turned into nightmares.
Despite Nicholson’s small role in Easy Rider, the film catapulted him to stardom, and he was nominated for an Academy Award and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor. As these accolades indicate, the “Jack Nicholson” persona of the 1970s was already forming in 1969, since viewers like Vincent Canby already associated certain traits with Nicholson’s characters. Canby saw Nicholson as “the only person in the movie [Easy Rider] who seems to have a sense of what liberation and freedom are.”[81] These two traits are central to Bobby Dupea’s quest to make authentic choices in Five Easy Pieces, and since that film sprung from Rafelson’s mental image of Nicholson in a liberating act, playing music on the back of a flatbed truck, Nicholson’s persona was clearly forming as early as 1969.
1. Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 11.
2. Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), 67.
3. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 66.
4. Dennis Hopper, dir., “Director’s Commentary,” Easy Rider, 30th anniversary special ed., DVD, performed by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson (1969; Culver City, CA: Sony, 2002).
5. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 236.
6. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 240.
7. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 249.
8. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 185.
9. Joe L. Dubbert, A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 242.
10. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 246.
11. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 263.
12. Stephen Farber, “End of the Road?” Film Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1969–70): 5.
13. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 178.
14. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 178.
15. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 178.
16. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 182.
17. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (n.p.: BasicBooks, 1988), 13–14.
18. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 182.
19. David Savran, Communists Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 7.
20. Savran, Communists Cowboys and Queers, 7.
21. Savran, Communists Cowboys and Queers, 4.
22. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 179.
23. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 180.
24. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 22.
25. Rotundo, American Manhood, 22.
26. Rotundo, American Manhood, 22-23.
27. Rotundo, American Manhood, 23.
28. Rotundo, American Manhood, 25.
29. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 247.
30. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 186.
31. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 245.
32. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 249.
33. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 261.
34. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 255.
35. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 255.
36. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 252–53.
37. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 253.
38. Savran, Communists Cowboys and Queers, 8.
39. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 243.
40. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 258.
41. Dubbert, A Man’s Place, 258.
42. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 252.
43. Martin Nussbaum, “Sociological Symbolism of the ‘Adult Western,’” Social Forces 39, no. 1 (1960–-61): 26.
44. Peter N. Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990), 68.
45. Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land is the definitive account of the literary heritage and dominant myths associated with the American west (1950; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
46. Nussbaum, “Sociological Symbolism of the ‘Adult Western,’” 26.
47. Nussbaum, “Sociological Symbolism of the ‘Adult Western,’” 26.
48. Stearns, Be a Man!, 175.
49. Lev, American Films of the 70s, xviii.
50. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 2.
51. Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman, Flashback: A Brief History of Film, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001), 401.
52. Douglas plays William Foster, a white male who rails against society for marginalizing him and rendering him insignificant.
53. Giannetti and Eyman, Flashback, 401.
54. Lev, American Films of the 70s, xviii.
55. Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s” (orig. publ. 1975), in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 283. [AU: Does the 1975 refer to the year that the article was first written or published? If so, addition of “orig. publ.” OK?]
56. Christian Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s Post-Traumatic Cycle (1970–1976),” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 304.
57. Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image,” 304.
58. Colin Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” in Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten, ed. Mikita Brottman (London: Creation Books, 1999), 52.
59. Colin Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” 52.
60. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 283.
61. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 283.
62. Bingham, Acting Male, 7.
63. Lev, American Films of the 70s, xvi.
64. Bingham, Acting Male, 7.
65. Bingham, Acting Male, 7.
66. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 269.
67. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 270.
68. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 270.
69. Lev, American Films of the 70s, 6.
70. Lev, American Films of the 70s, 11.
71. Bingham, Acting Male, 109.
72. Hopper, dir., “Director’s Commentary.”
73. Bingham, Acting Male, 14.
74. Bingham, Acting Male, 6.
75. Lev, American Films of the 70s, xvii.
76. For an overview of the decline of the “Hollywood Renaissance” and the inception of the “supergrosser” blockbuster, see David Cook, Lost Illusions.
77. Bingham, Acting Male, 101–02.
78. Bingham, Acting Male, 102.
79. Bingham, Acting Male, 101.
80. Bingham, Acting Male, 102.
81. Vincent Canby, “‘Easy Rider’: A Statement on Film,” review of Easy Rider, performed by Jack Nicholson, New York Times, July 15, 1969, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art91.html.
Men cannot be forced to marry; once married, they cannot be forced to bring home their paychecks, to be reliable jobholders or, of course, to remain married. In fact, considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the “breadwinner ethic.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men
As Nicholson moved from Easy Rider to Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970), he carried his constructed persona with him. Audiences already expected to see a character torn between the establishment and the counterculture; consequently, Bobby Dupea solidified Nicholson’s persona as a man on the cusp of both worlds. But Bobby proceeds further away from the establishment than George Hanson, who simply embarked on an excursion with two drugged-out hippie bikers. Dupea, a musical prodigy born to a family of classical musicians, has abandoned the family compound on Puget Sound to escape his father’s unceasing attempts to conform Bobby to his expectations. When the film begins, Bobby lives with his girlfriend Rayette and works on an oilrig in southern California. Adopting a working-class lifestyle, Bobby frequents the bowling alley, has sexual escapades with flirtatious women, and pals around with his co-worker, a typical working-class yokel. Visiting his sister Tina during a recording session, he learns that his father has suffered a stroke. Partially to escape Rayette’s suffocating demands on his attention, Bobby sets off for Puget Sound to attempt reconciliation with his estranged father. Bobby’s flight from both Puget Sound and Rayette’s home symbolizes his rejection of prescribed roles; consequently, his movement away from these places constitutes a quest for the freedom to make authentic choices irrespective of outward pressures.
Along with this persona, Nicholson also brought his dislocation technique to Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson’s performance features both affected outbursts of anger heightening the pressures of the white man’s burden and nuanced moments of seething tension boiling under the actor’s surface features. For example, while his tension bursts forth at the end of the famous diner scene and during the physical fight with Spicer, his sister’s boyfriend, he conveys seething tension when Rayette smothers him with unwanted attention during a car ride. By alternating between quiet tension and violent eruptions, Nicholson embodies the white man’s burden of being surrounded constantly by external forces that seek to restrict personal autonomy.
Five years later, Nicholson resurrected this persona as David Locke in The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975), another character who runs from his past in search of the freedom to make authentic choices. Locke, a reporter making a documentary about a war in Africa, switches identities with an arms dealer, Robertson, who dies shortly after Locke meets him. When Locke notices that Robertson resembles him, he switches passports with the deceased and informs the authorities that David Locke has died instead of Robertson. He subsequently tries to adopt Robertson’s lifestyle by keeping the appointments written in Robertson’s datebook. Once again, Nicholson’s dislocation technique comes into play to highlight Locke’s disconnection from an autonomous self—despite his shedding of his old role as a documentarian, Locke still conforms to a ready-made identity by adopting Robertson’s way of life instead of making authentic choices.
Central to existentialism, the quest for authentic choices dominates Nicholson’s performance of both Dupea and Locke; similarly, Nicholson’s personal understanding of existentialism informs both his choice of roles and his acting technique.[1] The search for identity in both films resembles existentialist philosophy. A basic tenet of existentialism, the belief that no preordained meaning or order exists in the external universe, forces individuals to attribute meaning and order to their internal lives. Also central to an existentialist philosophy, the notion that individuals create their identities through their choices influences Nicholson’s understanding of Dupea’s and Locke’s attempts to forge authentic identities. In 1972, Nicholson told an interviewer for Playboy magazine about his days spent in coffeehouses with members of Roger Corman’s production company “talking about Camus and Sartre and existentialism and what going on the road would be like.”[2] During this time, he also wrote a screenplay adapting Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus into a western.[3] Camus’s essay examines whether an absurd life (that is, one in which man desires order and meaning in the universe but sees only chaos) entails suicide. Camus concludes that one must face the fundamental absurdity of human existence, which results in three consequences: revolt, freedom, and passion.[4] Dennis Bingham notes the similarities between Meursault, the antihero in Camus’s The Stranger, and Nicholson’s “motiveless” and “doomed” characters “stripped of control by existence itself.”[5] Since Nicholson’s role and performance in Five Easy Pieces establish his persona as an existential antihero, Nicholson becomes the logical choice for Antonioni’s film. Playboy magazine already labeled Nicholson an antihero as early as 1972.[6] Turning down roles in The Sting (1973) and The Great Gatsby (1974) to work on The Passenger,[7] Nicholson was drawn specifically to Antonioni’s work, which expressed a sensibility similar to his own. As Nicholson’s familiarity with existentialism prompted his choice of roles, audiences subsequently associated Nicholson with the antiheroes he portrayed, thus forming a “Jack Nicholson” persona.
Brooding and introspective, Nicholson (right) was drawn to such artful European auteurs as Antonioni (left). Nicholson’s early affinity for existentialists like Albert Camus prepared him well to play Antonioni’s moody, contemplative protagonist. MGM/Photofest. © MGM.
The antiheroic aspects of this persona take shape through the rejection of the male breadwinner role and the resulting angst of the protagonist in a state of existential limbo. Both films—Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger—reproduce the sexual arrangement of heterosexual couples to critique the breadwinner role as a stultifying societal institution that suppresses authentic expression. In this way, they reflect shifting cultural attitudes toward structures that reproduce ideological assumptions, such as family and marriage. Describing the unconscious process whereby individuals become conditioned by these structures, culture critic Dick Hebdige writes, “Social relations and processes are . . . appropriated by individuals only through the forms in which they are represented to those individuals. These forms are . . . by no means transparent. They are shrouded in a ‘common sense’ which simultaneously validates and mystifies them.”[8] By reproducing the roles men play when conditioned by marriage and family into being breadwinners, Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger demystify traditional gender roles. Once the protagonists realize the artificial, ideological nature of their roles, they reject them and seek personal liberation from societal constrictions.
Reacting against their predetermined places in society, Bobby Dupea and David Locke reject traditional behavioral constraints on sexuality and freedom of expression. Bobby’s rejection first manifests as impulsive sex with women other than Rayette, including a flirtatious tart he meets at a bowling alley and his brother’s fiancée. Bobby’s promiscuity resembles Camus’s Don Juan, who actively pursues his passions instead of diverting his attention to an afterlife.[9] Similar to Bobby’s rejection of his role of provider to Rayette, Locke fakes his death to escape his suffocating marriage. These controversial behaviors challenge traditional male roles and consequently call for an examination and denunciation of the anxiety-producing pressures surrounding males in the 1970s. Nicholson expresses his political intent to subvert middle-class roles in Five Easy Pieces: “I have a very strong political propagandist feeling about my work. If you can change the way people feel and think, then you're a long way toward solving their problems. [Five Easy] Pieces undermines traditional middle-class behavior."[10] Specifically, Nicholson professes that he is “iconoclastic about marriage.”[11] Nicholson’s choice to play Bobby Dupea and David Locke reflects this iconoclasm. By consciously rejecting the institutionalization of sexuality, Nicholson destabilizes commonplace middle-class assumptions about accepted behavior for males.
By abandoning their roles as traditional breadwinners, the “Jack Nicholson” of these films rejects the heterosexual union as a paradigm and fails to perpetuate the patriarchal order, thus undermining hegemonic masculinity. At the end of Five Easy Pieces, Bobby abandons Rayette, the woman with whom he has been living, at a gas station and hitches a ride on a logging truck heading for Alaska; in The Passenger, Locke discards not only his wife but also his entire identity. If the patriarchal order is sustained and perpetuated through heterosexual unions, then the actions of Bobby Dupea and David Locke subvert that order.
By rejecting the heterosexual union, the antiheros of these 1970s leftist films fail to adopt a “proper” male role and subsequently pose a challenge to the basic assumptions that underpin the patriarchal order. Traditionally, Hollywood tends to reflect the dominant myths of patriarchy through its narrative structure. Within this framework, Wood sees the discourse of popular cinema as “a patriarchal discourse, the discourse of the symbolic Father,” and he contends that “its mechanisms can be analyzed in the general movement of ‘classical’ narrative,” wherein:
The text begins by establishing an order; the order is then disturbed, threatened, even destroyed—the disturbance (dramatized as specific character or relationship conflicts) generally constituting the major part of the fiction; finally, the order is restored. . . . The order is of course patriarchal, organized in relation to the dominance of the heterosexual male, and typically embodied in marriage and family (think how many films culminate in variations on lines such as “I’ll take you home now,” “We can go home now,” “Let’s go home,”. . .).[12]
This formulaic structure encodes the basic assumptions of the dominant culture within its rigid confines and perpetuates the myth of the patriarchal family through its reestablishment of the dominant order.
Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger also subvert the dominant order by containing narrative structures that fail to restore the patriarchal order. Both films end without uniting their protagonists with women; Bobby Dupea heads for a solitary existence in Alaska without any trace of his past life with Rayette, and David Locke, mistakenly assumed to be the arms dealer he impersonates, is murdered by a band of mercenaries, precluding any possibility of a long-term union with a mysterious woman with whom he has been having an affair. In both cases, the protagonist could engage in a patriarchal union that would “perpetuate the traditional familial pattern,”[13] but in both instances he rejects this union. Instead of adhering to the typical ending of a classically structured film, Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger end without the promise of patriarchy’s continuation.
Dupea’s and Locke’s disassociation from normative values classifies them as antiheroes. Antiheroes often take two forms: those who “cannot accept the lives that have been planned for them or . . . are rejected by others whose values the audience is led to criticize,” and those who “overreach the bounds of morality and civilization or contemptuously reject the normative values of society and are left finally to stew in their own failure and bitterness.”[14] Associated with the budding antihero of New Hollywood who exploded onto the screen with Bonnie and Clyde, Bobby Dupea and David Locke combine these two types. Both flee from the ready-made identities that society provides for them because they reject the normative values of society; consequently, both experience alienation from society. In their rejection, neither Bobby nor David is able to create a new identity. Bobby ultimately resigns himself to a life of existential wandering, while David passively accepts a violent death.
In the 1950s or early 1960s, these antiheros—Dupea and Locke—would have been rejected by society. The mid-century dominant cultural discourse pigeonholed this type of antihero as both feminine and irresponsible for “contemptuously rejecting” marriage, which was considered a natural stage in male development. Barbara Ehrenreich writes, “By the 1950s and ’60s psychiatry had developed a massive weight of theory establishing that marriage—and, within that, the breadwinner role—was the only normal state for the adult male.”[15] The psychological discourse of the 1950s placed a tremendous amount of importance on “‘maturity’ and the ‘tasks’ which led to it”—terms that “quickly entered the psychologists’ vocabulary as professional code words for conformity.”[16] Conforming individuals embodied traits such as “wisdom, responsibility, empathy, (mature) heterosexuality and ‘a sense of function,’ or, as a sociologist would have put it, acceptance of adult sex roles.”[17] Such an acceptance invariably meant entering into marriage and adopting the gender-specific roles associated with it. In addition to being a proof of maturity, marriage also offered men an opportunity to implement and demonstrate their newfound maturity through certain “tasks,” such as securing employment and providing for the family.[18] Ehrenreich writes:
If adult masculinity was indistinguishable from the breadwinner role, then it followed that the man who failed to achieve this role was either not fully adult or not fully masculine. In the schema of male pathology developed by mid-century psychologists, immaturity shaded into infantilism, which was, in turn, a manifestation of unnatural fixation on the mother, and the entire complex of symptomatology reached its clinical climax in the diagnosis of homosexuality.[19]
Thus, it was not enough for men of the 1950s to marry. With their manhood continuously on trial, American males of the fifties had to adhere to the prescribed role of heterosexual breadwinner to avoid the stigmatization of homosexuality. By fleeing from the responsibilities associated with marriage, Dupea and Locke would not have engendered the sympathy of mid-century audiences.
By the mid-1960s, however, an unprecedented generational turnover precipitated a widespread denunciation of previously held societal values. Elaine Tyler May discusses the contrast between 1950s America and its emphasis on containing men and women within stringent gender codes and the more liberated baby boomer generation of the sixties:
[Containment] held sway well into the 1960s, on the diplomatic and the domestic levels, when it collapsed in disarray. The next generation abandoned the idea, shrugging off the obsession with security and the vision of the family in which their parents had placed their highest hopes. By the late 1960s, many among this new ‘uncontained’ generation had rejected the rigid institutional boundaries of their elders. They substituted risk for security as they carried sex, consumerism, and political activity outside the established institutions.[20]
Within this new social climate, the antihero who rejected normative values was no longer pigeonholed as homosexual or subversive. Instead, he reflected a growing cultural desire to flout the sexual arrangements of the previous generations that placed suffocating pressures on both men and women to conform to rigidly prescribed gender roles. Hence, Dupea and Locke embody the antihero who not only rejects his predetermined societal role but also is shunned by a society whose values no longer gel with a younger generation of filmgoers. In essence, the malaise that surrounds the antihero’s attempts to form an identity mirrors the frustration of many Americans who felt disconnected from their parents’ values but were unable to forge new gender ideologies.
The aimless protagonists of Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger are as unable to fashion alternative male identities for themselves as the American males they represent. These films appropriately define the beginning and end of an overarching thematic consideration: can the middle-class white American male replace existing artificial norms of masculinity with more authentic alternatives? The ending of Five Easy Pieces, while somewhat pessimistic, leaves the question of authenticity open to possibility; Bobby Dupea might still be able to make authentic choices in the wide-open spaces of the frontier of Alaska. By picking up where Bobby Dupea leaves off, David Locke continues Dupea’s quest for identity, but his death ultimately answers the question of authenticity in the negative: Man can only be liberated from societal constraints in death. In their quests for authentic identities, both protagonists fail to adopt “proper” male roles, thus undermining the patriarchal order. While the bookends pose and answer this question, the films contained between them—Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, and Chinatown, explored in chapters 3 and 4—examine the construction of male identity to expose hyper-masculinity as a masquerade constructed to conceal feelings of inadequacy. Structurally, both Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger reflect this subversion of hegemonic masculinity through the failure of the narratives to reestablish the sexual arrangements of heterosexual couples. In short, the narrative structures of the films mirror the plights of their antiheroes.
Nicholson’s frequent unwillingness to work within the confines of traditional Hollywood structures indicates how closely he aligned his own sensibility with the innovative techniques of the New Hollywood and their ideological implications.[21] Nicholson’s self-professed attempts to undermine traditional masculine roles coincide with his selection of roles in films with unconventional structures. Along with failing to present male protagonists who adopt a “proper” male role and with refusing to adhere to the classical paradigm of the male-dominated cinema, Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger subvert hegemonic masculinity by playing upon the conventions of the journey film. By disrupting the causal narrative structure traditionally associated with this genre, the films destabilize viewers’ expectations and create characters that lack the motivation commonly associated with competent, aggressive masculinity. The conventional Hollywood journey film is noted for its sequential, cause-and-effect narratives and its pragmatic, motivated protagonists. In an important article entitled “The Pathos of Failure,” Thomas Elsaesser contends that the classical narrative emphasized the plot, “which managed to transform spatial and temporal sequence into consequence, into a continuum of cause and effect.”[22] This narrative structure allowed the protagonist to master his surroundings fully, thus enabling him to take control of his destiny. Elsaesser argues that this sequential narrative not only developed order out of chaos but also “at a deeper level . . . implied an ideology: of progress, of forging in the shape of the plot the outlines of a cultural message, understood and endorsed by Hollywood’s audiences as the lineaments of a pragmatism in matters moral as well as metaphysical.”[23] This pragmatism was mirrored by the dramaturgy, which contained psychologically or emotionally motivated protagonists who mastered their surroundings to reach certain goals, such as investigating a case, clearing a name, or loving a woman.[24] This narrative, Elsaesser concludes, encoded an affirmation of America’s ideological position and its celebration of an individual’s ability to recognize the causality of his situation and ultimately to control his circumstances and, by extension, of the collective nation’s ability to understand and to dominate over its environment.
After working together on Head, Rafelson and Nicholson team up again for Five Easy Pieces. As much the auteur as Rafelson, Nicholson looks on as Rafelson prepares a shot at an oil rig where Dupea, born into a white-collar world, adopts a traditionally masculine role in the blue-collar world. Columbia/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures.
Embedded within this ideological message is the belief that American individualism—firmly engrained in the American consciousness since the onset of the marketplace—can and will triumph over the threat posed by collectivization during the Cold War. During the Cold War, communism challenged American individualism, and since “a culture’s ideological conflicts regularly find expression and resolution in its myths,”[25] Hollywood films carried the dominant cultural attitudes toward individualism. Those attitudes emphasized “American virtues of ambition, vision, drive: themselves the unacknowledged, [but] firmly underpinning architecture of the classical Hollywood action genres.”[26] In short, since the country’s inception, manhood has been associated with pragmatism, autonomy, and the ability to dominate successfully over the environment—the very traits encoded within the affirmative structure of the classical Hollywood journey film.
By undermining this affirmative structure through an elliptical rather than a causal narrative, Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger not only destabilize viewers’ expectations of the genre but also undermine the cultural ideology of active, autonomous manhood. Part of the reason that the cinema of the New Hollywood was particularly suited for subversion was that it “drew its impetus from . . . the ideological meltdown the United States underwent in the wake of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests.”[27] This meltdown of confidence caused a new generation of filmmakers to apply the experimental techniques popularized by French New Wave directors Godard and Truffaut and Italian neorealists Fellini and Antonioni to traditional Hollywood structures, thus creating the self-reflexive cinema of the Hollywood New Wave. By calling attention to themselves and their manipulations of classical genres, these filmmakers also called attention to and questioned the ideological assumptions that underpinned those genres.
Five Easy Pieces defies the conventional structure of the journey film, thus subverting the ideology of pragmatic, motivated masculinity. Elsaesser asserts that the causal structure and affirmative attitude found within the classical journey film becomes less frequent in 1970s journey films.[28] Instead, the filmmakers introduce the journey motif in an “off-hand way” that “specifically neutralizes goal-directedness and warns one not to expect an affirmation of purposes and meanings.”[29] Five Easy Pieces provides such an example when Bobby undergoes a road trip from California, where he lives in a trailer park with Rayette and works on an oil crew, to his family’s compound on Puget Sound. When Bobby and Rayette pick up two female hitchhikers along the way, the spectator accustomed to traditional narratives expects the new characters to impact the protagonists in some way or to affect the rest of the narrative, but the film denies these expectations by dropping them off as quickly and as offhandedly as it acquired them. Consequently, the film’s elliptical structure destabilizes viewers’ expectations, resulting in a questioning of received ideologies about American pragmatism.
Along with this elliptical structure, the film denies an affirmation of purposes—a denial that undermines the restoration of the patriarchal order. As a result of the overall journey, spectators’ assumptions lead them to expect both Bobby’s reconciliation with his father (the original intent of the journey) and his sexual union with Catherine, his newfound love interest. Despite these initial purposes, Bobby fails to reconcile with his father’s expectation that he “grow up to the life marked out for him by his middle name—‘Eroica’—a life of heroic musicianship,”[30] and he is unable to connect with Catherine because “she serves to show Bobby’s unsuitability for such a relationship; what he sees in the mirror she holds up is his own emptiness.”[31] In sum, the goals that prompted the journey—reconciliation (and identification) with the father and the development of a permanent heterosexual relationship (as a necessary contingency of the first goal)—are left unresolved, foregrounding the film’s unconventional approach to a traditional Hollywood structure.
Unable to reconcile with his father and to adopt a proper male role because of his resistance to a predetermined social identity, Bobby also cannot forge a separate, authentic self; therefore, the elliptical narrative structure mirrors the protagonist’s lack of goal-directedness and its accompanying emptiness. Bobby’s self-definition comes not from his “ego-driven agency” but from his resistance to occupying the role of an “already-formed subject.”[32] As a result of this resistance, the film subordinates Bobby’s ultimate destination to the journey itself, which stands for the process of identity-formation.[33] In essence, instead of a pragmatic man of action, Nicholson portrays an unmotivated dreamer with wanderlust who seems incapable of attaining the American Dream. The unmotivated protagonist thus subverts the myth of pragmatic masculinity, associated with archetypal figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Horatio Alger:
Rafelson thus deconstructs the myths that nurture the idea of the American Dream—the necessity of agency, mobility and the teleological search for an ultimate goal—thereby foreclosing the elements essential for the traditional Hollywood protagonist setting out to conquer the uncertain road ahead. Instead, this road often leads to impasse or nothingness, while the search more closely resembles an impossible flight. The resulting existential aporia reflects the protagonist’s often futile response to the imposition of identity or class conditions from without, and his fatal inability to generate individual agency.[34]
In short, the elliptical narrative, guided by the actions of its unmotivated protagonist, subverts the myth of pragmatic masculinity by denying an affirmation of purposes.
With its rejection of an affirmative, cause-and-effect narrative and a motivated protagonist, Five Easy Pieces epitomizes Hollywood films of the 1970s that expressed disillusionment in the American myth of pragmatic, can-do masculinity. Like other leftist films of the time, Five Easy Pieces “[rejects] personal initiative and purposive affirmation on the level of ideology” and “[renders] problematic the dramaturgy and film-language developed by classical Hollywood within the context of a can-do culture.”[35] This rejection ultimately underscored the New Hollywood’s dissatisfaction with the hegemonic masculinity that led America into the Vietnam War. The political leaders of the mid-sixties and early seventies feared that America’s can-do, hyper-masculine image would be undermined if the country failed to secure a victory in Southeast Asia. While the political leaders could not see past their own phallocentrism, the New Hollywood filmmakers identified the discourse of hegemonic masculinity that fueled the war and recognized the futility of continuing the conflict. American cinema of the 1970s thus underwent a “breakdown of ideological confidence in American culture and values.”[36] “The focus point for this breakdown of confidence” was the effect of the Vietnam War on the American consciousness,[37] which caused “a thematic discontent with the dominant order.”[38]
By drawing attention to their elliptical narratives, the leftist films of the 1970s not only questioned hegemonic masculinity but also the very order that sustained and perpetuated it. The filmmakers recognized the social institutions that undergirded male-dominance abroad—institutions that spanned back to Puritanical notions of benevolent patriarchy and Victorian ideas of paternalistic imperialism. Wood writes that the consequences of America’s disillusionment transcended the Vietnam War itself:
The questioning of authority spread logically to a questioning of the entire social structure that validated it, and ultimately to patriarchy itself: social institutions, the family, the symbolic figure of the Father in all its manifestations, the Father interiorized as superego. The possibility suddenly opened up that the whole world might have to be recreated.[39]
Recognizing the dangers of aggressive, pragmatic masculinity, these filmmakers identified the dominant culture’s medium through which it traditionally encoded that ideology—the “affirmative-consequential model of narrative” found in classical Hollywood cinema—and subverted it as a means to challenge its ideological foundations.
Despite its opposition to the ideology found within the journey narrative, Five Easy Pieces fails to construct an alternative to the ideology of affirmation it undercuts. While the filmmakers recognized the futility and destructiveness of ego-driven masculinity, they did not substitute it with a restructured masculinity stressing any other preferred values such as collectivity or solidarity. Gardner argues that the film does not adopt a Marxist filmic discourse but strives to capture the “archetypal conflict between seemingly irreconcilable cultures.”[40] “A more topical discursive framework,” he writes, “would have counterpointed Bobby’s solipsism with the alternative of collective action and a broader class movement that might supersede his egocentric individualism.”[41] Instead, the film’s ending emphasizes its protagonist’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of humanity. Bobby’s self-love supersedes his love of others; subsequently, he abandons his social responsibility to Rayette in favor of a selfish expedition into the unknowns of the Alaskan wilderness. By emphasizing the emptiness surrounding Bobby’s solipsism, the film creates a pessimistic tone that critiques excessive, narcissistic individualism. In effect, despite the film’s failure to construct alternate ideologies to American individualism, it nevertheless critiques hegemonic masculinity by reproducing the white man’s burden and subjecting it to criticism.
The film’s lack of an alternative to this egocentric solipsism does not preclude it from subverting the myths surrounding rugged individualism. American individualism requires men to possess some level of narcissism; otherwise, they would not consent to spend their lives in solipsistic isolation. Bobby’s narcissism might cause him to abandon Rayette, but it does not lead to the fulfillment of any American ideals. On the surface, the film appears to reinforce mythic individualism. By denoting Bobby’s destination as Alaska, the last remaining American frontier, the film invokes images of primitive masculine heroes such as Natty Bumppo, Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett, who struck out for the frontier to escape the confines of civilization. In calling forth these archetypes of frontier pragmatism, the film—at least on one level—inadvertently perpetuates the myth of “can-do” masculinity that it seeks to subvert. Despite the mythological implications of an individualistic journey into the final American frontier, the film’s solemn and downcast tone toward Bobby’s departure undermines the heroism of the journey. Bobby’s flight to Alaska suggests a shedding of old skin consistent with Bobby’s pattern throughout the novel. He leaves no indication that his latest attempt at renewal will yield a self-made man in the fashion of American archetypes and, in fact, dispels the notion of an existing realm of autonomous manhood. Consequently, the film’s invocation of the frontier serves not to augment archetypal myths of rugged individualism but to demystify them. This demystification further subverts the ideology associated with the journey-film structure.
Even though Five Easy Pieces drastically undermines pragmatic masculinity through both its elliptical narrative and its aimless protagonist, The Passenger outdoes Five Easy Pieces in its destabilization of viewer expectations of the journey-film structure and its subsequent erosion of that structure’s ideological underpinnings. Nicholson identifies The Passenger as “probably the biggest adventure in filming [he] had in [his] life.”[42] Ironically, Nicholson’s greatest adventure comes in a film that self-consciously denounces the classical notion of adventure—Antonioni refuses “to abide by the conventional genre of the suspense film.”[43] In an interview with Alberto Ongaro, Antonioni reflected on his decisions to restrict action:
The only certain thing [in this film] was my need to reduce the suspense to a minimum, even though there had to be some left—and I do think some has been left, even if it is an indirect, mediated element. It would have been very easy to make a thriller. I had the pursuers and the pursued; nothing was missing, but it would have been banal. That wasn’t what interested me.[44]
During the opening sequence, Antonioni immediately establishes the pace of the film, which runs counter to viewer expectations of the journey film. The film introduces Nicholson’s character, who seems to be looking for something in a country that appears to be somewhere in Africa. The spectator becomes immediately aware of the language barrier, as the character enters a dwelling in search of information but can only communicate through hand gestures. A man gesturing for a cigarette exits the dwelling without a word, and Nicholson’s character assumes he is to follow. A series of false starts and apparent dead ends proceed, leading the spectator to wonder about this man’s destination and whether he will actually get anywhere. For instance, a man leads Nicholson’s character, later revealed to be documentarian David Locke, to a vehicle with a boy in the passenger seat, but the film once again deprives the spectator of any clear exposition or narrative indications of the film’s direction; he asks the boy if he speaks English, and of course, he does not. Searching for a group of guerrilla fighters, Locke drives the vehicle into the desert, where the boy gets out and walks back on the trail on which they came. Once again, Locke’s confusion mirrors the audience’s derailed expectations. As another native rides by on a camel, Locke hopes he might be the elusive contact. He waves in a gesture of hello, but the man gives no indication of recognition. In the next shot, a man on a hill overlooking the scene watches the man on the camel ride by, and the next shot reveals that he is indeed the elusive contact. However, as the contact leads Locke up a treacherous slope toward whatever his destination may be, the two men spot a band of riders on camels below, and the contact quickly abandons Locke on the slope. Beyond frustration, Locke pounds his fist into a rock and faces the fact that he must trek back to his vehicle having been thwarted from making it to his destination. In this opening sequence, Antonioni undermines viewer expectations of the journey film by constantly denying an affirmation of his protagonist’s purposes.
Throughout the film, Antonioni continually defies audience expectations by depriving viewers of filmic conventions—such as pacing and music—to which they are accustomed. Nicholson discusses the unique approach of the opening scene: “The thing about this approach to filming is that it’s exactly the opposite of the 25 years cycle of melodrama wherein the audience of films is stimulated and I suppose you could say video-games oriented, so this kind of pace is to me still fascinating.”[45] He goes on to comment, “Antonioni is not melodramatic; he likes to observe in the simplest form. Let the time pass as it does, and you see things rather than hear them.”[46] For example, a lack of music accompanies pivotal moments in the film, such as when Locke discovers that his recent acquaintance, an arms dealer named Robertson with whom he soon exchanges identities, has died.
Antonioni’s manipulation of convention culminates in the final scene of the film, wherein an assassin working for a North African government murders Locke because he believes Locke has been dealing weapons to his government’s enemies. Antonioni had a special hotel built for the final shot so that he could have one continuous long take: the camera begins shooting in Locke’s hotel room where he lies dead on the bed, slowly pans away from Locke to the barred window looking outside, gradually zooms toward the window and eventually through the bars and into the courtyard, then pivots and pans back toward the exterior of the hotel and back through Locke’s window, revealing his dead body on the bed. The entire take is done in real time, without the accompaniment of music and with very few sound effects. Nicholson states that when Antonioni was asked why he shot the scene in this fashion, the director said that he did not want to film Locke’s death scene.[47] Simply put, Antonioni denies the spectator the viewing of the most crucial moment in the film and the point of greatest emotional intensity.
In addition to these formal manipulations, Antonioni also plays upon audience expectations of the journey film through the narrative. The pattern established in the opening sequence—Locke’s frustration at the ebb and flow of his trek into the desert in search of the war on which he is reporting—is repeated throughout the film as Locke attempts to follow the path indicated by Robertson’s agenda book to different locations at specific times when he is supposed to meet with various rebel contacts. Each time that he arrives at a specific rendezvous point, no one is there to meet him. This pattern culminates in a scene wherein Locke, sitting against a wall and waiting for an elusive contact, places a bug on the wall and smashes it with his open hand. Not only does this scene recall the earlier one in which he pounds a rock after his guide abandons him, but it also highlights Locke’s intense frustration and rage against the apparent meaninglessness of his circumstances. His quest for meaning has brought him no closer to the truth than his attempts to make a film about a rebellious uprising in North Africa. By foregrounding the protagonist’s inability to gain control over his environment and his circumstances, Antonioni subverts the affirmative-consequential model and calls into the question the can-do attitude associated with it. In sum, Antonioni’s formal and narrative manipulation of audience expectations simultaneously results in the questioning of the underlying assumptions of the classical structure of film itself and the erosion of its ideological underpinnings. These underpinnings predominately involve an affirmation and celebration of aggressive pragmatism, the linchpin of hegemonic masculinity.
While narrative structures implicitly critique hegemonic masculinity, the narratives themselves explicitly reject prescriptive gender roles, including the breadwinner. Whereas the dominant discourse of the 1950s stigmatized males who did not adhere to the breadwinner role as immature and homosexual, this discourse of immaturity was less pervasive in the 1970s. But despite the relaxation of societal expectations, a dominant ideological strain still advocated for adherence to traditional gender roles. Peter Filene emphasizes the role the family played in the dominant culture: “For those who founded their sense of order on a traditional family, the 1970s seemed an era of earthquake.”[48] Responding to their fears that moral chaos would ensue with the breakdown of the sacrosanct family unit, many reactionary American men and women pushed for a re-stabilization of the dominant order. This attitude found its greatest expression in the family values movement of the 1980s, which developed alongside the antifeminist reaction against the Equal Rights Amendment. Before then, even, “the typical middle-class men of the 1970s were still playing the ‘manly’ role they had inherited from their Victorian forefathers.”[49] Bobby Dupea and David Locke exist within a context of push and pull between those on the left who wished to liberate all men and women from the need to conform to outward expectations and those on the right who sought to preserve the time-honored paradigm of the separation of spheres.
Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger place this cultural climate at the center of their narratives. The men’s liberation movement that began in the early 1970s sought “to break down the compartment of their social conditioning.”[50] The resulting identity gap presented difficulties to those accustomed to normative gender models. “The heterogeneous answers [to questions of gender identity] of the so-called men’s movements,” Filene writes, “signaled the confusions and ambivalence felt by individual men as they struggled, in the postfeminist era, to define who they wanted to be.”[51] Since the colonial period, American men were consistently subjected to a socially imposed self-definition that subjugated authenticity and emphasized the need to perform a public role as patriarch, breadwinner, imperialist, and so on; therefore, generation upon generation of conditioning made the attempt to sift through the external baggage and find an authentic center hopelessly difficult. Within this context, Rafelson and Antonioni established their protagonists’ essential dilemma: the struggle for an authentic identity separate from all external forces of influence.
Both films present a dichotomy between deathlike socialization and life-giving authenticity. Socialization restricts life by imposing rigid constraints on creativity, impulse, and freedom, while authenticity inspires personal expression. In his denunciation of socialization, Wood establishes certain societal institutions as life-opposing forces:
The human race . . . has been the battleground for a continuously developing and shifting struggle between the forces for Life (creativity, freedom, spontaneous impulse, joy, love unconstrained by rules or limits) and Death (repression, denial, punishment, prohibition, authoritarianism, mechanization, possessiveness, greed, money values).[52]
The traits associated with death have solidified over time into societal institutions: repressive religions, patriarchal marriages, authoritarian governments, and so on.[53] Wood’s assertion contains an underlying emphasis on the way that the forces of Death condition individuals through the process of socialization into beings who lack autonomy. Bobby Dupea and David Locke react negatively to socialization—for them, heterosexual relationships promote conformity to hegemonic roles. Along with patriarchal sexual arrangements come the institutionalization of sex, the repression of impulse, and the denial of creative expression. By abandoning institutions like marriage, the films’ narratives reject deathlike socialization in favor of life-giving authenticity.
Rafelson critiques the socialization process through the Dupea family, which—with the exclusion of Bobby—channels its creative inclinations into classical music. Music becomes a symbol for the stultifying effect of rigid civilized structures on personal expression. Bobby Dupea, a musical prodigy, comes from a family of repressed and effete musicians. A virtuoso violinist, his brother Carl has recently injured his neck in a bicycle accident and no longer performs. Awkward and overweight, his sister Tina seems prematurely unsexed[54] and “sexually repressed, unable to cope beyond the safety and stability of the family’s island retreat.”[55] Most notably, his father, who has suffered two strokes, has been rendered paralyzed and dumb. Bobby feels totally disconnected from this world and its musical associations, as evidenced by his comment to Catherine that he feels “absolutely nothing” when playing a Chopin number for her. In contrast to this disconnection, Bobby displays his creative, artistic side in a famous scene at a diner wherein he challenges a waitress’s assertion that there are “no substitutions” to the menu, and in order to get his side order of toast, he orders a chicken salad sandwich and tells her to hold everything but the toast. While critics primarily focus on the rebelliousness inherent in this scene, it also showcases Bobby’s intrinsic creativity and ability to think outside the box, contrasted with the stifling atmosphere of the Dupea family compound on Puget Sound. The family’s effete qualities make perfect sense in this light, as they signify the debilitating result of sublimation.
Alongside the sublimation of creativity through classical music, the film’s relationships also highlight the negative effects of institutionalizing impulses. The mutually unfulfilling relationship between Bobby and Rayette emphasizes their inequality, which highlights the injustices of a male-dominated social, political, and economic structure. The film emphasizes unequal sexual arrangements through Bobby’s relationship with Rayette, a woman who epitomizes dependence (she even threatens suicide when she suspects that Bobby is leaving her). “Alternately pathetic and smothering,” Rayette “is a male nightmare vision of intimacy, manipulative and dependent,” and Bobby wants to evade her when she reveals her pregnancy.[56] It is not the intimacy that Bobby rejects, but the confining social arrangement that places her as an unequal partner, reliant on his role as breadwinner. Nicholson himself rejected this role when he left his wife, Sarah Knight, during the writing of the script for The Trip.[57] This gender standardizing system ensures its continual existence by relegating women to a subordinate role within the family, denying them equal pay if they choose to enter the workforce and stigmatizing them if they reject their “duty” by choosing a career over motherhood. By reproducing the detrimental effects of this sexual arrangement, Five Easy Pieces also subjects institutionalized heterosexual unions to criticism.
In contrast to the mutually unfulfilling relationship of Bobby and Rayette, the mutually pleasurable encounter between Bobby and Betty accentuates their equality, at least sexually. In a scene of extramarital bliss between Bobby and Betty (Sally Struthers), a woman whom he meets at a bowling alley, the two careen around a room in an embrace that culminates in simultaneous orgasm. By society’s standards, the encounter is illicit not only because it is not sanctioned by marriage but also because it is unattached to financial responsibilities. These responsibilities accompany the pressures on males to marry; a man’s obligation to provide security for a domesticated, dependent woman traditionally accompanies any sexual relationship, a cultural attitude reflected in the countless times in the movies or on television when a man said “I’m going to do my duty by her” when he impregnated a woman. While society disapproves of Bobby and Betty’s encounter, the film invites spectators to celebrate their sexual equality as a stark contrast to Rayette’s suffocating dependency on Bobby.
Bobby’s flight from both sublimated creative impulses and institutionalized sexuality highlights his rejection of culturally prescribed identities; however, his consequent search for authenticity yields little success. Rafelson’s characters often resist the burdens tradition brings to their lives.[58] Whether warding off the pressures of his father, who attempts to impose an identity onto him, or dismissing the breadwinner role imposed by Rayette, Bobby flees from his externally defined position. While Bobby resists these publicly inscribed identities, he cannot develop a recognizable sense of self apart from such roles; subsequently, he lacks a core identity.[59] Capturing the contemporary malaise of a transitional culture, Bobby fails in his quest “to sustain meaningful identities of his own making.”[60] Peter Lev also identifies this quest and its failure in the film’s two major themes: the search for authentic choices and the sense of the hopelessness of that search.[61] Lev concludes that while the audience empathizes with Bobby’s quest, his problems with identity are crushing, and he “may, in fact, be heading for death at the end of the film.”[62] In sum, Bobby’s flight from socialization results in a quest for identity that ends, at best, in uncertainty and, at worst, in his destruction.
If Bobby Dupea’s quest for authenticity ends ambiguously with the uncertainty of his future, then David Locke’s search ends unequivocally with his death. Just as Five Easy Pieces undermines socialization, The Passenger symbolically connects marriage, which socializes the male into the breadwinner role, with death. Following Locke’s transformation into Robertson, he wanders aimlessly into a church where a wedding is taking place. Just prior to entering, he follows a carriage led by a pale horse and walks through a cemetery. By juxtaposing these death symbols—the graveyard and the pale horse—against marriage, the film comments on the deathlike effects of matrimony. As the service ends, Locke remembers a time when he lit a fire in his backyard, and his wife features prominently in the memory. Nicholson comments on the subtext of Locke’s behavior: “In his marriage in England, fire in the backyard is an act of total antisocial behavior.”[63] Locke’s subjective memory connects this wedding with his own marriage, which provoked him to act out in antisocial ways. Along with this scene, the film further emphasizes marriage as life-denying after Locke’s death. The police ask both Locke’s wife and his lover if they recognize Locke’s body, and his wife says no while his lover says yes. This exchange implies that Locke’s wife does not know her husband’s authentic self, whereas Locke’s lover does. These scenes highlight the theme that relationships that exist within the rigid confines of societal institutions are empty, whereas those that take place outside those boundaries are meaningful. By showcasing the stultifying effect of marriage on personal relationships, Antonioni makes a thematic statement about the suffocating process of socialization.
Another way Antonioni attaches a negative connotation to socialization is by contrasting the desert with civilization. Like Bobby, Locke attempts to escape the deathlike trappings of his socialized identity to experience a liberated, more authentic self. Locke rejects socialization by renouncing his role as a reporter, itself a constricting profession that forces him to conform to his audience’s expectations. By casting off this role, Locke defies society’s attempts to define him. Antonioni explains that Locke’s “adventurous nature” and character, in shedding his identity, reflects Antonioni’s “need to escape, by means of the characters, from the historical context in which . . . they lived—that is, the urban, civil, and civilized context—to enter into a different context such as the desert or the jungle, where one could at least imagine a life freer or more personal and where this freedom could be put to work.”[64] In other words, the social institutions of civilization constrict Antonioni’s protagonist within a particular historical context, and the protagonist’s attempt to flee these institutions for the wide-open spaces of the desert reflects his desire for fluidity and liberation from his sociohistorical framework.
The remainder of the film, then, answers the question posed by the beginning (and the end of Five Easy Pieces)—whether Locke can succeed in liberating himself. Brunette sees Locke’s dissatisfaction with his inactive profession as an impetus to adopt Robertson’s “activist” life to “make him feel more fully alive.”[65] This attempt, however, proves unsuccessful because Locke cannot effectively inhabit Robertson’s world; he is as disconnected from the rebellion in which Robertson believed as he was alienated from his previous job as a documentarian creating the prepackaged image of a war. Despite this disconnection, Locke continues to adhere to Robertson’s schedule “merely because these appointments seem to provide a purpose or focus that is missing in his own life.”[66] Antonioni suggests as much in an interview:
[When Locke] finds out that the man whose identity he has assumed is a man of action—a man who takes an active part in life, and isn’t just a passive witness—he tries to take on not only his identity, but also his role, his political role. But this other man’s history, which is so concrete, so built on action, becomes too much of a burden to him. Action itself becomes problematic.[67]
Locke fails to inhabit Robertson’s goal-oriented world of schedules and appointments, resulting in his total exasperation (he squashes a bug against a wall in frustration). Locke’s inability recalls Elsaesser’s discussion of elliptical narrative structures wherein heroes evince “an almost physical sense of inconsequential action, of pointlessness and uselessness.”[68] Essentially, while the elliptical structure of the film reflects the powerlessness of its protagonist, the problematic nature of action calls individual autonomy into question. Locke not only fails in efficiently assuming Robertson’s pragmatic identity but also falls short in adopting his own authentic, liberated self.
Despite their quests to find more authentic selves, both Bobby Dupea and David Locke experience only fleeting moments of authenticity. For Bobby, one of these moments occurs during a traffic jam. Noticing an upright piano sitting on the back of a flatbed truck, Bobby springs from his friend’s car and begins to play a Chopin etude in the middle of the freeway. “In this instance,” Bingham writes, “music is subversive, celebrating freedom from social restrictions.”[69] While the act of playing classical music sublimates creative impulse into institutionalized forms, Bobby’s choice of music signifies his subversive irony. By playing classical music, associated with refinement and high society, on the back of a flatbed truck, Bobby simultaneously highlights and shatters middle-class assumptions about class differences. Significantly, the film purportedly sprung from Rafelson’s mental image of Nicholson playing the piano on the back of a truck in a traffic jam.[70] The origin of the scene indicates the extent to which Nicholson’s own personality affected the development of the film. Indeed, the other scene where Bobby expresses his creativity in the diner comes directly from an experience that the screenwriter, Carol Eastman, had with Nicholson when he threatened a waitress that he would overturn her pastry cart because she “refused to give him what he wanted.”[71] Nicholson’s innate rebelliousness contributed to the final characterization of Bobby Dupea, who in two scenes inspired by the actor foreshadows David Locke’s moments of liberation in Antonioni’s film.
Locke experiences two moments of liberation in The Passenger. The first moment occurs on a cable lift shortly after Locke has shed his identity. As the lift moves across the sky, the camera provides an overhead shot of Nicholson bending over the panorama below and spreading his arms as if to fly. Later, Antonioni mimics this scene in an automobile after Locke’s new love interest asks him from what he is running. Instead of answering, Locke tells her to turn around, and the resulting shot of Maria Schneider hanging out of the back of the car and “framed against the quickly moving field of trees” as if she is flying recreates the intense sense of freedom encapsulated by the previous scene.[72] Nicholson’s commentary on the 2006 DVD release supports the interpretation that the scene in the back of the car repeats Locke’s desire for the freedom evinced in the cable-car shot.[73] Regardless of these two brief moments of liberation, however, Locke remains primarily constricted within a limited subjectivity.
Outside the confines of marriage, Locke experiences freedom from traditional male roles in an automobile, the predominant symbol of men’s flight from the responsibilities associated with breadwinning. MGM/Photofest. © MGM. Photographer: Floriano Steiner.
With such brief and sporadic glimpses of authenticity, both films suggest that such an experience of complete liberation is nearly impossible to achieve in a world perpetually obsessed with establishing order. Both Bobby Dupea and David Locke discard their prescribed identities as breadwinners and socialized workers, but neither one is able to recreate himself with any sense of the authentic. Bobby rejects the place his family spells out for him as a musical prodigy, only to flee to a hyper-masculine, over-compensatory role as a breadwinner and worker on an oil rig, a role which he discards as readily as the first. As he tells his father, he moves around not because he is looking for anything but because he is “getting away from things that get bad.” Locke leaves behind his actual identity but finds little consolation in the cause-driven life of an arms dealer. Both characters, then, fail to establish authentic identities. Boyer sees Bobby as a failure and a self-absorbed sociopath “incapable of emotional commitment”;[74] Antonioni claims that at the moment of Locke’s death, the protagonist “no longer identifies with anything” and therefore a “desire to die has simply become nestled in his unconscious.”[75] The final image of Five Easy Pieces suggests that Bobby will continually run from his past, as he has totally abandoned all markers of his previous identity, foreshadowing Locke. The end of The Passenger, on the other hand, offers the possibility that liberation might come with death, as the camera moves through the bars of the hotel window and into the courtyard, seemingly indicating a movement of the spirit out of its prison. Therefore, The Passenger can be said to carry on the debate over identity that Five Easy Pieces started and to offer at least some resolution, where the original failed to do so.
In the early 1970s, Nicholson’s persona was that of the sensitive intellectual at odds with society but unable to find his place among a throng of ready-made identities. Fleeing from the role his family created for him, Bobby Dupea puts on the mask of working-class masculinity by working on an oil rig. Columbia/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures.
If Easy Rider established Nicholson’s persona as a man on the cusp of the establishment and the counterculture, seeking a more liberated identity but unable to discard fully his previous roles, then Five Easy Pieces solidified this persona and captured the contemporary malaise surrounding the transitory state of the middle-class white male. Audiences who saw Nicholson’s performances in both films began to abstract a persona from the two roles. This persona contained aspects of rebelliousness and self-conscious reflection that resonated deeply with American males of the 1970s who were sifting through societal pressures in search of authenticity. Just as George Hanson’s inner dissonance emerges in the interplay between authentic expression and masculine posturing, Bobby Dupea’s tensions materialize in the dialectic between emotional outbursts (the diner scene and when he attacks Spicer for massaging his sister) and self-contained introspection (the scene in the gas station restroom). Nicholson’s dislocation technique foregrounds this dissonance by simultaneously constructing and commenting on masculinity. Echoing the scene around the campfire in Easy Rider when Nicholson cracks a smile during his speech about Venusians, Nicholson’s self-conscious gaze at Bobby Dupea in the gas station mirror distances Nicholson from Bobby and highlights the actor’s construction of a persona. This constructed persona, in turn, reflects the audience’s abstraction of Nicholson’s persona from the two films.
As Nicholson’s rebellious persona developed through his next two roles—Jonathan Fuerst (Carnal Knowledge) and “Badass” Buddusky (The Last Detail)—audiences continued to bring predetermined expectations with them to the theaters, expectations that prefigured their interpretive frameworks not only for these two films but also for The Passenger. Subsequently, audiences encountering David Locke sift through Nicholson’s established traits in an attempt to interpret Locke’s character. Viewers thus dismiss certain characteristics of Jonathan and Badass, who were both more hyper-masculine than George and Bobby, in favor of other recognizable features from Five Easy Pieces, such as Bobby’s identity search and failure of individual agency. In this way, audiences abstract Nicholson’s persona from his range of films, forcing their prefigured interpretations on Nicholson’s characters and, in effect, reconstructing a new persona out of the previous and current roles. This symbiotic relationship between Nicholson and his audience continually shifts the “Jack Nicholson” persona as it is constructed and reconstructed through each 1970s film.
In this process of abstraction, audiences frequently dismiss certain Nicholson roles—such as David Staebler in The King of Marvin Gardens (Rafelson, 1972)—as incongruous with preexisting schemata, thus discounting those characters’ traits from the composite persona. Audiences consequently establish a range of accepted traits for Nicholson’s characters and place each role appropriately on the spectrum. This continuum spans from the disaffected, alienated wanderers on one pole to the hyper-masculine, alienated characters on the other. Those on the former extreme find themselves in an existential void because of their rejection of prescribed norms, while those on the latter extreme accept hegemonic masculinity too readily, overcompensating for feelings of inadequacy. Both types of characters critique the white man’s burden: the first by placing themselves outside the dominant ideology; the second by stationing themselves firmly within it.
By showcasing their rejection of prescribed gender roles, Bobby Dupea and David Locke subvert hegemonic masculinity. Their resulting quest for authenticity ultimately yields more alienation, foregrounding the difficulty of liberation within the confines of the dominant ideology. Even though Dupea and Locke place themselves outside this ideology, they cannot release themselves from it because of its ubiquitous reach. As a result of these characters’ failed quests, Bobby and Locke feel incapable of creating more authentic, liberating ideologies. The films pose these failures not as warnings against attempts at liberation but as critiques of a hegemonic system that prevents people from constructing their own ideologies. In featuring protagonists who place themselves outside the dominant ideology but who fail to construct alternative ideologies, Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger highlight the injustice of the white man’s burden.
As shown, Bobby Dupea and David Locke are ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to redefine masculinity. This fact, however, does not detract from the significant attempts of the filmmakers to undermine the classical film structures that encode hegemonic masculinity, nor does it diminish the importance of pointing out the stultifying nature of the restrictive, standardizing institutions that enslave men and women within gender-specific roles, such as supportive breadwinner and dependent housewife.[76] Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger did both these things.
In sum, after Easy Rider, Nicholson solidifies his persona as a man on the cusp in Five Easy Pieces. His use of the dislocation technique effectively captures the tensions surrounding the white male who feels constant pressures from society to conform to accepted masculine images. By combining nuanced expressions and affected gestures, Nicholson embodies the seething anxieties of a man seeking to redefine his identity according to a more authentic sense of self. Nicholson returns to this antihero type in The Passenger, but not before his persona moves into hegemonic masculinity to critique it from within in Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail.
1. For Camus, living the absurd entails a constant struggle between desire and reality, so Nicholson’s dislocation technique captures the tensions of the absurd life.
2. Jack Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation with the Funky Star of ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge,’” interview by Richard Warren Lewis, Playboy, April 1972, 83.
3. Tim Cahill, “They Used to Hang People for Having This Much Fun,” Rolling Stone, April 1981.
4. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (1955; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 64.
5. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 105.
6. Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation,” 75.
7. Bingham, Acting Male, 105.
8. Dick Hebdige, “From Culture to Hegemony” (orig. publ. 1979), in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 2453.
9. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 72.
10. “Success Is Habit-Forming,” Time, November 30, 1970, paragraph 8, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art103.html.
11. Jack Nicholson, “The Great Seducer: Jack Nicholson,” interview by Nancy Collins, Rolling Stone, March 1984.
12. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 49.
13. Bingham, Acting Male, 110.
14. Bingham, Acting Male, 110.
15. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983), 15.
16. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 17.
17. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 17.
18. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 19.
19. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men, 20.
20. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (n.p.: BasicBooks, 1988), 15.
21. Evidence of Nicholson’s unwillingness to work within a classical narrative structure can be seen in his rejection of roles in The Sting and The Great Gatsby and his affinity for innovative American auteurs, such as Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, and Stanley Kubrick, as well as European art film directors Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, and Michelangelo Antonioni.
22. Thomas Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s” (orig. publ. 1975), in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 280.
23. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281.
24. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281.
25. Christian Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s Post-Traumatic Cycle (1970–1976),” in The Last Great American Picture Show, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King, Film Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 298.
26. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 282.
27. Bingham, Acting Male, 104.
28. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281.
29. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281.
30. Bingham, Acting Male, 111.
31. Bingham, Acting Male, 113.
32. Colin Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” in Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten, ed. Mikita Brottman (London: Creation Books, 1999), 49.
33. Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” 49.
34. Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” 49.
35. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 281.
36. Robin Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 20.
37. Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image,” 296.
38. Keathley, “Trapped in the Affection Image,” 306.
39. Wood, Hollywood, 44.
40. Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” 53.
41. Gardner, “Five Easy Pieces,” 53.
42. Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., “Commentary,” The Passenger, DVD, performed by Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider (1975; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006).
43. Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133.
44. Quoted in Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 133.
45. Antonioni, dir., “Commentary.”
46. Antonioni, dir., “Commentary.”
47. Antonioni, dir., “Commentary.”
48. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 228.
49. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 229.
50. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 234.
51. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 246.
52. Wood, Sexual Politics, 10.
53. Wood, Sexual Politics, 11.
54. Bingham, Acting Male, 113.
55. Jay Boyer, Bob Rafelson, Twayne’s Filmmakers Series (New York: Twayne, 1996), 42.
56. Bingham, Acting Male, 112.
57. “The Star with the Killer Smile,” Time, August 12, 1974, paragraph 32, accessed December 16, 2007, http://www.jacknicholson.org/art102.html.
58. Bob Rafelson, quoted in Boyer, Bob Rafelson, 12.
59. Boyer, Bob Rafelson, 16.
60. Boyer, Bob Rafelson, 17.
61. Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 20.
62. Lev, American Films of the 70s, 20.
63. Antonioni, dir., “Commentary.”
64. Quoted in Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 128.
65. Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 136.
66. Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 137.
67. Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 136–37.
68. Elsaesser, “The Pathos of Failure,” 282.
69. Bingham, Acting Male, 115.
70. Boyer, Bob Rafelson, 36.
71. Boyer, Bob Rafelson, 17.
72. Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 137.
73. Antonioni, dir., “Commentary.”
74. Boyer, Bob Rafelson, 46.
75. Quoted in Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 144.
76. If Five Easy Pieces and The Passenger were not as successful in establishing strong female characters as they were in challenging dominant assumptions about traditional male roles and the masculine hegemony that precipitated America’s involvement in Vietnam, the fault can be attributed to the enslavement of their creators within an ideological framework deeply enmeshed in Western consciousness. Despite their overtly oppositional stance toward the dominant ideology, these filmmakers still could not escape the confines of a male-dominated framework for reality, instilled within Western thought since at least the inception of Christianity. In addition, with the exception of Eastman’s work on the script of Five Easy Pieces, the auteurs of these films are men, and, as such, the female characters are predominately filtered through their perspectives to become representatives of a man’s image of “woman.” Thus, a feminist critic could certainly find fault with the depiction of women in these films. But if this depiction points to flaws in the make-up of the women, then an analysis of the men could equally reveal imperfections in their characters.
Accordingly the change in Nicholson’s roles as he moves into mainstream film is not only that he now plays men who have completed the oedipal separation from the mother and identification with the father, but that—unbeknownst to them—the resultant male identity is a cage these men are now stuck in.—Dennis Bingham, Acting Male
After Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson’s persona progresses into a new mode before it returns to the disaffected antihero of The Passenger. Jonathan Fuerst (Carnal Knowledge, 1971) and “Badass” Buddusky (The Last Detail, 1973) emerge as hyper-masculine counterpoints to George Hanson and Bobby Dupea. While George and Bobby exhibit masculine posturing at times, their personalities are not dominated by the male masquerade. Jonathan and Badass, on the other hand, take the masquerade to the extreme, thus exposing constructed hyper-masculinity as alienating. These characters, in essence, position themselves firmly within the dominant culture, mimicking its gendered modes of expression. Because these characters adhere so dutifully to hegemonic masculinity, they unwittingly relinquish their autonomy of expression. As a result, their inner tension is exaggerated precisely because it is submerged within their subconscious and bubbles to the surface during moments of extreme duress. Nicholson consequently heightens the dislocation technique to reveal this division and conflict within the protagonists’ personalities. By entrenching their protagonists inside the dominant ideology and reproducing hegemonic masculinity at its worst, Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail subject the white man’s burden to criticism.
Carnal Knowledge follows the relationship between two college roommates—Jonathan (Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel)—through their twenties and into their thirties. In the beginning, Jonathan attempts to initiate Sandy into manhood by fixing him up with a woman named Susan (Candice Bergen) whom they meet at a college mixer. Through a series of probing questions and prurient suggestions, Jonathan pressures Sandy to first “feel her up,” then to move progressively toward intercourse. Sandy acquiesces to Jonathan’s persuasiveness, but Susan inadvertently falls in love with Jonathan instead. Jonathan, who secretly initiated an affair with Susan behind Sandy’s back, furtively counsels Susan to sever her relationship with Sandy. When she cannot bring herself to do so, Jonathan angrily breaks ties with Susan and begins his lifelong crusade against women, all of whom he now labels “ballbusters.” The film then jumps to Jonathan and Sandy in their twenties; Jonathan moves endlessly through empty relationships with women, and Sandy is married to Susan. However, Jonathan finally settles into a monogamous relationship with a woman named Bobby (Ann-Margret), and Sandy conversely yearns for an extramarital affair. When Jonathan introduces Sandy to Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal), a tall, masculine woman, the two couples begin to double-date, but Jonathan vies for Cindy’s attention. Eventually, Bobby grows tired of Jonathan’s philandering and neglect and overdoses on pills, barely escaping death.
After another jump in time, the film ends with Jonathan and Sandy in their thirties; Jonathan now holds an extremely contemptuous view of women in general, which is tied to his newly arisen problem with impotence, while Sandy is involved in a relationship with his “love teacher,” a woman named Jennifer (Carol Kane) who is much younger than himself. In the provocative, controversial closing scene, Jonathan enacts a mock encounter with a prostitute by asking his newest girlfriend to perform the assigned role. The only way Jonathan can become sexually aroused is to imagine himself in a male-dominating role that objectifies women. This role play reveals Jonathan’s descent into a monstrous, hyper-masculine representation of the male subject who has fallen victim to an exaggerated version of male power.
While Carnal Knowledge portrays the relationship between two college roommates as they age into their thirties, The Last Detail is a picaresque buddy film that follows the escapades of two navy “lifers”—Badass Buddusky (Nicholson) and Mulhall (Otis Young)—as they escort a young prisoner named Meadows (Randy Quaid) to the brig in Portsmouth. Throughout the journey, however, Buddusky comes to disapprove of the punishment bestowed on his prisoner, who has received a sentence of six years in the brig for stealing forty dollars from a charity fund. Positioning himself as a father figure to Meadows, Buddusky begins to initiate the naive criminal into manhood through a series of masculine rites, including asserting himself in restaurants and having his first sexual encounter. Despite Buddusky’s objections to Meadows’ sentence and his newfound affinity for the young man, he successfully fulfills his duty and deposits his prisoner in Portsmouth, where Buddusky suffers the humiliation of a superior officer chastising him for failing to fill out his paperwork properly.
After viewing both Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail, audiences reposition “Jack Nicholson” firmly within hegemonic masculinity because Nicholson portrays characters who adopt hyper-masculinity to compensate for feelings of inadequacy. As a result of their immersion, these characters desperately seek to validate their masculine behavior by proving their superiority over weaker males via vilification and competition. Along with this competitive overcompensation, they attempt to identify themselves symbolically as fathers by adopting the role of mentor to sexual novices (Jonathan adopts Sandy, his college roommate, and Buddusky adopts Meadows). By initiating them into manhood through a series of rites, Jonathan and Buddusky perpetuate the patriarchal order through heterosexual intercourse. Both films criticize this order in the tone they take toward the rites men must pass through to attain manhood as well as the perpetuation of it. The rites are revealed as absurd in both cases (for example, the scene where Meadows insists on having his cheeseburger done correctly and the moment when Sandy places his hand on Susan’s breast because he should be feeling her up on the fourth date). The films critique this perpetuation through the emptiness of Jonathan’s sexual encounter with a mock prostitute and the gap between Meadows’s newfound assertiveness and its lack of usefulness to him in the brig.
Carnal Knowledge clearly undercuts masculine hegemony through the contrast between Nicholson’s hyper-masculine performance and his character’s impotence. Nicholson depicts hyper-masculinity as an act to be performed by the insecure male, thus critiquing it as inauthentic and alienating. Social historian Peter Filene writes, “Like Jack Nicholson in the film Carnal Knowledge, most college men of the fifties still wore the cynical mask of the cocksman; to lower it would expose them to comrades’ wounding ridicule.”[1] Nicholson wears this mask so effectively that many women in real life assumed that the actor truly behaved in the same misogynistic manner as Jonathan.[2] In fact, feminists attacked Nicholson for several years because they felt he personified misogynistic behavior.[3] Perhaps the best example of this masklike construction is Nicholson’s leering gaze at the camera—which adopts the perspective of his fellatio-delivering mock-prostitute girlfriend (Rita Moreno)—during the final moments of the film. Nicholson also foregrounds Jonathan’s compensatory hyper-masculine construction by smoking a cigar, a stand-in for the phallus. When Jonathan informs Sandy of his impotence, he conspicuously smokes a cigar for the first time, linking the object to his newfound inadequacy. The cigar/phallus symbolizes Jonathan’s compensation: he feels emasculated by his inability to perform sexually; therefore, he displays a common symbol of masculinity as a stand-in for the phallus. While the dominant ideology constructs masculinity—symbolized here by the phallus—as the center of power, Jonathan’s impotence clearly undercuts that power and unmasks hegemonic masculinity as ineffective and inauthentic.
In Carnal Knowledge, Jonathan Fuerst wears the mask of a misogynistic, predatory male to hide feelings of inadequacy. In this shot, however, the true Jonathan reveals himself as a sensitive male much like Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces. AVCO Embassy Pictures/Photofest. © AVCO Embassy Pictures.
Nicholson’s hyper-masculine performance as Badass Buddusky in The Last Detail not only unmasks gender as a social construction but also implodes that construction by revealing its ineffectiveness for the male subject. The promotional still for The Last Detail presents Nicholson in a sailor hat, posing shirtless and donning a devil-may-care expression while smoking a cigar. This image, coupled with Nicholson’s reputation for iconoclasm established in the famous diner scene from Five Easy Pieces, prefigures the audience’s anticipations for the film; they enter the theater expecting to see a rebellious, rugged individualist character. However, the subversive quality of the film derives from Nicholson’s ability to don this mask of rugged individualism and to undercut it simultaneously. While Buddusky outwardly evinces a devil-may-care, rebellious personality, his decision to obey the line of naval command by delivering Meadows to the brig in Portsmouth clearly undermines this pretense. Additionally, when an officer at Portsmouth chastises him for failing to fill out his paperwork properly, Buddusky must submissively accept the officer’s criticism, despite Buddusky’s superior experience in the navy. This exchange reveals the powerlessness of rugged individualism against the institutionalization of contemporary society. By revealing the iconoclast’s inability to adhere successfully to his innate moral code in the face of restrictive, controlling institutions, the film debunks the myth of rugged individualism.
This famous movie still features Nicholson on the set of The Last Detail as he masquerades as a hyper-masculine male. The cigar, an almost stereotypical symbol of the phallus, appropriately completes this image of Nicholson’s most masculine character to date. Columbia Pictures/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures.
As in Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson’s use of the cigar in the movie still and throughout the film signifies Buddusky’s (and simultaneously Nicholson’s) construction of hyper-masculinity. Bingham contends that Nicholson’s portrayal of Badass Buddusky “reveal[s] the patriarchal masculine role itself as one that must be put on and performed.”[4] Implementing a Freudian analysis to substantiate this claim, Bingham asserts that “the oedipal complex of identification with the father is so fragile that the male subject repeatedly convinces himself of its efficacy by reenacting as drama the process by which manhood is earned and retained.”[5] In this mold, “Nicholson’s films express a loathing of oedipal identifications but demonstrate the male subject’s inability to get beyond them.”[6] The oedipal identification includes taking on the characteristics of the father to adopt a male role (usually symbolized by marriage), thus perpetuating the patriarchal order. Men must demonstrate their masculine traits outwardly to prove their proper socialization; effectively, Nicholson/Buddusky smokes the cigar as an outward signification of his manhood.
The outward signification of manhood includes not only physical signifiers but also repeated behaviors. Most notably, the mentor/mentee relationship regarding sexual indoctrination mimics the socialization process men go through. Carnal Knowledge highlights hegemonic gender construction by positioning Jonathan and Sandy as mentor and mentee and initially focusing on Jonathan’s efforts to turn Sandy into a man through heterosexual intercourse. However, the film’s tone toward this initiation reveals a criticism of the white man’s burden.
The film immediately establishes Jonathan as Sandy’s mentor during a college mixer. In the opening scene, Susan enters into a party and walks past Jonathan and Sandy. Jonathan says, “You like her? I give her to you.” He then coaches Sandy on how to proceed, instructing him to tell her a joke and to talk about his childhood. Sandy awkwardly approaches Susan, and the two have a conversation about the various acts that people perform in front of others. That night, Sandy discusses Susan with Jonathan and ostensibly seeks his approval to pursue her. When Jonathan responds that he “wouldn’t kick her out of bed,” he ostensibly encourages Sandy to pursue a sexual conquest with Susan.
As a result, Sandy pressures Susan to relent to intercourse not because he has an overwhelming, uncontrollable desire for her but because he feels he must pass the rite of heterosexual intercourse to ascend into manhood. The next several minutes of the film consist of scenes wherein Sandy pressures Susan into kissing him and letting him touch her breasts, juxtaposed with scenes wherein Jonathan coaxes Sandy to push Susan even further toward intercourse. For instance, after Sandy successfully kisses Susan twice on a date, citing the fact that it is their third date as justification, Nichols cuts to Jonathan and Sandy in the bathroom as the former asks, “You feel her up yet?” This question initiates an interchange between the two that results in Sandy acquiescing; he says, “Okay, okay. I’ll feel ‘er up.” In the next shot, Sandy and Susan are up against a tree kissing, and Sandy has his hand on her breast. When she asks him how he can enjoy touching her when he knows she is not enjoying it, he responds that he does not get pleasure from it either. She questions why he does it then, and he says, “Because the way we’re going, by this time I should be feeling you up.” The pressure to conform to masculine stereotypes supersedes sexual gratification as the cause for carnal relations within the dating ritual. This societal expectation presents itself in the opening dialogue between Jonathan and Sandy during the credit sequence, when Sandy expresses frustration at being “pressured into” heterosexual intercourse. The problem of “developing a satisfactory masculine image” through cultivating an active sex life to impress other males has existed since the 1920s.[7]
Despite Sandy’s attempts to conform to a culturally appropriate masculine mold, the film characterizes Sandy both as a sensitive intellectual and as a counterpoint to Jonathan’s hyper-masculine chauvinism. Nicholson plays an insecure male who wears the mask of a cocksman to hide his insecurity, which later in the film stems from his literal impotence. Believing he must behave in a sexually aggressive manner to impress other males, Jonathan pretends to be a sexual expert in front of Sandy and symbolically becomes his father figure, teaching his less aggressive “son” to assert himself with women. If Sandy follows the male pattern of engaging in heterosexual intercourse, impregnating a girl, doing the “right thing” by her and marrying her, and becoming a breadwinner, then Jonathan will have successfully perpetuated the patriarchal order. However, the tone that the film takes toward this role socialization leads to a subversion of the dominant ideology. This tone becomes obvious in Carnal Knowledge via the negativity surrounding Jonathan’s chauvinism.
Jonathan’s negative attitude toward women culminates in his self-created slide show, “Ballbusters on Parade!” Jonathan presents his show to Sandy and his new hippie girlfriend, Jennifer (Carol Kane). While a series of slides depicting various women in Jonathan’s life projects onto a screen, Jonathan provides a narrative revealing his attitude that all the women in his life have had the goal of emasculating him. Although this idea points to a cultural trend in American society of the sixties and seventies in which men viewed the feminist movement as an encroachment upon their male-dominated public arena, it also reveals the difficulty of successful heterosexual relationships within a polarized gender climate. Jonathan has imbibed the dominant ideology of masculine hegemony, which has caused him to view women as feminizing agents who act as repressive prohibitors of masculine energy to the extent that their influence has made him impotent. His impotence is spiritual as well as physical, for he winds up feeling empty and alienated in the end. By portraying Jonathan’s spiritual bankruptcy, the film not only criticizes the ideology of masculine hegemony that bred Jonathan’s chauvinism but also undermines the process of initiation that would pattern Sandy into a carbon copy of Jonathan.
The Last Detail also satirically critiques the mentor/mentee relationship. Even more than Jonathan, Buddusky acts like a “Badass” aggressive male to impress his companions, Mulhall and Meadows. Viewing aggressive sexuality as a signifier of authentic masculinity, Buddusky attempts to initiate boys into manhood by “setting up himself as ‘father’ to ‘sons’ whom he will ridicule and belittle (castrate) if they fail to cast themselves in his image.”[8] Buddusky cultivates Meadows into his own image by teaching Meadows the necessary hand signals associated with his own duties as a navy signalman, despite the pointlessness of the endeavor (these signals will be useless in the brig). Buddusky’s “adamant insistence reveals a desperate insecurity, the need to have his way of life validated.”[9]
As Buddusky molds Meadows into a reproduction of himself by teaching him the “badass” behavior that will prove his masculinity, he also initiates Meadows into manhood through certain rites of passage. However, the film highlights the triviality of masculine rituals, thus unmasking masculinity as an absurd construction rather than an essence. The rituals include “teaching [Meadows] how to assert himself, how to ask for and get what he wants (which in this case means insisting on having the cheese melted on his hamburger the way he likes it), getting drunk, holding his own in fights, and having his first sexual experience (with a prostitute).”[10] Despite the weight Buddusky gives to these rituals, their triviality “calls them and the ‘manhood’ they ostensibly signify into question.”[11]
Just as in Carnal Knowledge, the mentor/mentee relationship proves ineffectual, thus calling its intended aims of masculine socialization into question. In spite of Buddusky’s aggressive attempts to conform Meadows into a replica of virulent masculinity, Meadows ultimately winds up in the brig at Portsmouth; however, Buddusky is equally imprisoned within the confines of the military order, suggesting not only that he failed in making Meadows a man but that his entire purpose was absurd from the beginning.
The absurdity of carrying the white man’s burden in Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail is enhanced even more by Nicholson’s persona as a rebellious iconoclast. Audiences of these films expected to see on display the same traits evinced by Bobby Dupea, and in many ways they were not disappointed. But both films play upon those expectations and turn them back around on viewers by depicting this ostensibly iconoclastic persona as an unconscious carrier of hegemonic attitudes. As Nicholson’s persona moves into mainstream film, then, it replicates hegemonic masculinity but subjects it to criticism in the process. Compensating for feelings of inadequacy, Fuerst and Buddusky wear masks of hyper-masculinity. However, these constructed personae ultimately leave both of them powerless, symbolized by Jonathan’s sexual impotence and Buddusky’s subjection to the military order. This impotence and subjection undercuts the efficacy of masculine hegemony and unveils the absurdity at the heart of carrying the white man’s burden to an extreme.
Since both Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail construct hyper-masculinity to demystify its naturalness as well as its efficacy, Nicholson’s constructed persona works well with the films’ intents because his established traits, abstracted by the audience from George Hanson and Bobby Dupea, prefigure audience interpretive frameworks for Jonathan Fuerst and Badass Buddusky. Consequently, Nicholson plays on these expectations to subvert rugged individualism, a dominant cultural myth. Constructing overidentification with gender roles rather than existing on the cusp of the dominant culture and the counterculture, Jonathan and Badass exist on the opposite pole from Bobby Dupea and David Locke. As a result, the former characters’ tensions are much more exaggerated, and Nicholson amplifies the dislocation technique accordingly.
In Carnal Knowledge, Jonathan’s construction of the cocksman mask—a result of feelings of insecurity—enslaves him in an endless crusade to prove his superior virility. Nicholson highlights the alienating effect of this crusade by unmasking Jonathan’s inner tensions through violent eruptions. For example, Bobbie insistently pressures Jonathan to marry her, and during one such instance an argument breaks out. Since Jonathan reacts negatively whenever Bobbie brings up the subject of marriage, she begins to insinuate that he is having an affair with Cindy, Sandy’s girlfriend. When Jonathan replies, “You have to have a low opinion of me, thinking that I would do that to Sandy,” she sarcastically returns, “Oh, no. You wouldn’t want to cheat on Sandy. . . . He spends half his life over here.” Jonathan explodes, “Wait a minute. A second ago you had me screwing Cindy. Who am I screwing now? Sandy?” and soon after, “First Cindy. Oh, no, not Cindy? How ’bout Sandy? How ’bout Cindy and Sandy?” In addition to the comical effects of the scene, this moment reveals Jonathan’s deep antipathy toward the repressive institution of marriage. Accustomed to feeling his masculinity constantly on trial, Jonathan fears that a union with any “ballbuster” would permanently emasculate him. Through Nicholson’s dislocation technique, the actor reveals that even the mere mention of such a union provokes Jonathan to volcanic levels. Marriage serves as a potent symbol of society’s most repressive institutions even more than a waitress’s refusal to accommodate a guest’s request for wheat toast. Along with marriage come numerous ideologically assigned roles, including breadwinner, benevolent patriarch, submissive corporate man, faithful husband, and so on, all of which run contrary to the philandering cocksman image. Within the dominant ideology, several competing and often contradictory ideologies exist side by side, and Jonathan’s form of masculinity is at odds with his perception of the married man. He subsequently explodes violently toward these constant pressures to conform—even though he unwittingly conforms vehemently to another ideology—and Nicholson’s dislocation technique effectively captures this dialectic.
While Nicholson delivers a subtle and nuanced performance as Bobby Dupea, only erupting to violent levels during moments of extreme duress, his portrayal of Jonathan bursts onto the screen with increasing fury and hostility. Nicholson’s gestures and outbursts become more affected as his persona moves into hegemonic masculinity. Whereas the actor only explodes three times in Five Easy Pieces, he does so six times in Carnal Knowledge, and Jonathan’s diatribe against Bobbie’s plea for marriage lasts for two minutes and thirty-two seconds, during which Nicholson’s voice level and gestures vary in intensity from slightly agitated to outrageously affected. After he calms down for a few seconds and places his head in Bobbie’s lap, Bobbie triggers his anger once again when she says, “So what’s it going to be?” Jonathan stands up and responds, “You givin’ me an ultimatum?” He leans aggressively toward her and shouts emphatically and repeatedly, “I’m gonna tell ya what you can do with your ultimatum,” punctuating each successive repetition by thrusting his finger in Bobbie’s direction. His outburst rises in intensity until he grabs the blankets on the bed and whips them into the air, exclaiming, “You can make this goddamn bed!” Throughout this scene, Nicholson takes the dislocation technique to a new level of intensity and duration. Nicholson hinted at such heights of emotional concentration in previous roles, but never with such force and magnitude.
Nicholson further emphasizes his dislocation technique in The Last Detail. As a hyper-masculine male who subconsciously realizes his subjection within the military order, Buddusky’s explosive tension reaches new heights in Nicholson’s oeuvre. For instance, Buddusky decides to make Meadows into a man by introducing him to alcohol despite the fact that Meadows is underage. However, the bartender refuses to serve Meadows, so Buddusky pulls out his sidearm and aims it at the bartender’s head, threatening to shoot him if he does not comply. The gesture fails to yield the desired result, but it nevertheless elevates Buddusky’s spirits after Mulhall and Meadows extricate him from the bar. As Nicholson elatedly jumps up and down and cackles like the Joker, he seems unconcerned that his use of masculine aggressiveness ultimately proved ineffective. This discrepancy between Buddusky’s desired result and Nicholson’s elatedness illustrates Buddusky’s entrapment within the dominant ideology, which enfolds him in the belief that his “badass” behavior is enough to prove his superior masculinity, regardless of its inefficacy. This instance contrasts with the diner scene in Five Easy Pieces and highlights Dupea’s and Buddusky’s relative positions on the continuum between the rejection of the dominant ideology and the blind acceptance of it. While in both scenes the characters react against repressive forces that seek to contain them by imposing artificial and arbitrary rules on human behavior, the way each character deals with the outcome of his rebelliousness indicates his relationship to the white man’s burden. When the female hitchhiker congratulates Dupea on his ingenuity in the diner, he responds, “Well I didn’t get it [the toast], did I?” He realizes the inefficacy of his rugged individualistic actions. Buddusky, on the other hand, celebrates the rebellious act itself, despite his inability to achieve the desired outcome. Buddusky is thus revealed as an unwitting participant in the dominant ideology of rugged individualism and aggressive masculinity, and Nicholson’s explosions are more violent and affected precisely because of his character’s unsuspecting participation.
Recalling the famous diner scene from Five Easy Pieces, this scene from The Last Detail perfectly captures Nicholson’s dislocation technique. Interestingly, Nicholson may have drawn inspiration from a real-life experience in which he lashed out at a country club bartender for refusing to give him a glass of water. © Columbia Pictures.
Jonathan and Buddusky explode more frequently and more violently than Bobby Dupea and David Locke because they overidentify with dominant forms of masculinity. Whereas Dupea and Locke consciously sought to estrange themselves from the dominant culture and to create more authentic identities for themselves, Fuerst and Buddusky blindly participate in the construction of hegemonic masculinity. Contradictorily, the dominant ideology perpetuates the belief that the traits of masculinity empower the male subject when, in reality, the performance of those traits enslaves him in an endless masquerade without true autonomy. Subconsciously, Fuerst and Buddusky feel alienated from the ability to make authentic choices and subsequently explode with frequency and intensity, lashing out against the repressive forces that contain them within a sphere of accepted behaviors. As a result, incidents such as Nicholson’s (as Bobby Dupea) aggressive reaction to the waitress’s insistence that there are “no substitutions” become even more violent and occur with more regularity as Nicholson’s persona becomes an unreflective participant in the white man’s burden.
By simulating hegemonic masculinity through his performance and heightening the dislocation technique, Nicholson places Fuerst and Buddusky firmly within the dominant ideology and simultaneously criticizes that ideology. Similarly, by reproducing the representational narrative structure of the dominant culture—the classical journey-film structure—Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail subject the dominant ideologies contained within them to criticism. Film critics Comolli and Narboni categorize the relationships of five types of films to the dominant ideology. Within their system, the fifth category contains films that “at first sight . . . belong firmly within the ideology.”[12] This relationship to hegemony turns out to be misleading, as the “cinematic framework lets us see [the ideology], but also shows it up and denounces it.”[13] Such denouncing attitudes can be achieved through the tone the film takes toward the classical structures it adopts. While the Hollywood journey film typically restores the patriarchal order by ending with the marriage of its protagonist, the tone that a film takes toward this restoration can be ironic. Wood explains the ironic treatment of patriarchal restoration:
If a given narrative does move toward the restoration of the patriarchal order, what is the work’s attitude to that restoration? The order itself may, after all, have been called into question and undermined, its monstrous oppressiveness exposed. The attitude to its restoration, then, need by no means be one of simple optimism or endorsement: it could be tragic or ironic.[14]
The narrative frameworks of Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail capture the dominant culture’s form of representation, “reproducing things not as they really are but as they appear when refracted through the ideology.”[15] Through this reproduction, however, viewers become aware of the cracks and inconsistencies within the ideology. The films thus replicate hegemonic masculinity to expose it at its worst. Simultaneously, their linear narrative structures affirm the protagonists’ purposes—Jonathan enters a heterosexual relationship with a role-playing woman, and Buddusky and Mulhall reach their destination (Portsmouth) and accomplish their goal, despite the obstacles they face along the way (Meadows’s escape attempts). However, the goals themselves become problematic. While the protagonists effectively achieve their initial purposes and reaffirm their masculine abilities to maintain control over their lives and destinies, the films consistently undercut the affirmative structures they adopt by questioning whether the protagonists are truly autonomous and by turning a critical eye to the goals themselves. Just as Nicholson/Fuerst and Nicholson/Buddusky adopt hyper-masculine personae that are constantly scrutinized and undermined, the films themselves assume affirmative structures that are ultimately revealed to be corrupt. In both cases, the dominant ideology acts as a mask to be removed, and the hidden imperfections of the man and of the society he represents are exposed.
Carnal Knowledge adopts an affirmative, teleological structure wherein Jonathan’s initial purposes are realized. By initiating Sandy into manhood and entering into a heterosexual relationship to prove his own masculinity, Jonathan accomplishes the goals he implicitly set for himself in the film’s beginning. Due in large part to Jonathan’s goading, Sandy not only has intercourse with a woman but also marries her, thus taking on the white man’s burden. While Jonathan does not wed, he completes his journey toward masculine actualization by restoring the phallus in the final scene.
Despite the film’s goal-affirming ending, the results yielded by the protagonist’s success leave viewers questioning the goals themselves. Since both goals involve perpetuating the patriarchal order—the first through turning a sensitive, artistic young man into a chauvinistic one, and the second through carrying on the repressive, male-dominated heterosexual union—the questioning that the goals undergo provokes viewers to examine the validity of patriarchy. This questioning is evident in the relationships between Sandy and Susan and Jonathan and Bobbie. For instance, Sandy experiences dissatisfaction in his marriage with Susan because their relationship is unequal; Susan wanted to be a lawyer and a writer, but she has settled for the role of Sandy’s wife. Similarly, Jonathan’s relationship with Bobbie also deteriorates due to Jonathan’s refusal to allow Bobbie to leave the home. Both heterosexual unions leave much to be desired and prompt a scrutinizing glance toward the dominant sexual arrangements in American society.
The film’s cynical tone toward patriarchal heterosexual couples reaches its culmination in the film’s final scene, in which Jonathan ostensibly fulfills his goal—the successful enactment of masculine dominance, symbolized by the triumphant restoration of the phallus after a state of impotence. As a result of his impotence, Jonathan requires chauvinistic role-playing with a subservient woman to arouse himself to erection. The final scene of the film presents a highly pessimistic view of this unequal sexuality, epitomized by an act of fellatio wherein the woman receives no gratification and simply services the man’s needs. In response to Jonathan’s assertion that he is not kind, the “prostitute” delivers scripted dialogue that provides particular insight into his need for dominance:
I don’t mean weak kind, the way so many men are. I mean the kindness that comes from enormous strength from an inner power so strong that every act no matter what, is more proof of that power. That’s what all women resent. . . . It takes a true woman to understand that the purest form of love is to love a man who denies himself to her . . . a man who inspires worship . . . because he has no need for any woman . . . because he has himself. Now, who is better, more beautiful . . . more powerful, more perfect—you’re getting hard—more strong, more masculine . . . more extraordinary, more robust—it’s rising—it’s rising—more virile, more domineering . . . more irresistible—It’s up. It’s in the air.
Linking the phallus to domination, the woman’s appeals to Jonathan’s superiority and virulence restore his ego along with his sexual appetite. By positioning herself on her knees in a subservient arrangement while she massages Jonathan’s masculine self-image and reasserts his dominance, the woman also restores his phallus, along with the patriarchal order. However, the tone the film takes toward this restoration indicates the filmmakers’ attitudes toward that dominant order. Empty emotional attachment depends upon a constant, precarious act that could fall apart at any moment, as evidenced by Jonathan’s reaction when the woman botches one line and says, “The sky’s the limit” instead of “A hundred” in response to his question, “How much?” Along with this precariousness, Jonathan actually goes to the extent of paying her one hundred dollars as if he is indeed enlisting a prostitute to perform services, highlighting both the emptiness of the encounter and the need to dominate (in this case, financially, as the scenario replicates a system that requires women to submit their bodies to the use of men who have the money to pay for them, a system that reinforces the woman’s role as object and the man’s role as the subject who seeks them). By taking a satirical tone toward its own structure, which affirms the protagonist’s initial purposes, Carnal Knowledge criticizes the dominant ideology.
This scene from the end of Carnal Knowledge featuring Nicholson and Rita Moreno reveals the constructed nature of Jonathan’s masculinity, which is precariously balanced on an act involving a man soliciting a prostitute to perform fellatio. To overcome impotency, Jonathan requires her to perform her role flawlessly. AVCO Embassy Pictures/Photofest. © AVCO Embassy Pictures.
The Last Detail also undercuts the order it restores. This restoration occurs with Meadows’s incarceration at Portsmouth, the film’s final stop. Portsmouth represents the law, which embodies order within the film, as it “protects” society from the devices of one of its criminals. The law reinforces the patriarchal order, but the film adopts an overwhelmingly negative tone toward this reinforcement, evidenced by Buddusky’s and Mulhall’s demoralized exit from the institution at Portsmouth. For instance, Mulhall says, “I hate this motherfucking chicken shit detail.” Clearly, this restoration of the patriarchal order expresses the disillusionment of the counterculture toward the established ideology of male-dominated American culture.
Along with this ironic tone toward the patriarchal restoration, the ending offers no definite future for Buddusky and Mulhall and instead plays upon the conventional final line, “Let’s go home.” Buddusky asks, “Where are you going?” and Mulhall answers, “I don’t know. Stop off in Baltimore maybe. You?” to which he responds, “Back to New York, I guess.” The final line: “See you in Norfolk.” They are both heading for uncertain futures with the only certainty being their continued enslavement within the demoralizing naval institution (Norfolk is the location of their naval base). Thus, their only version of home is one that forces them to submit themselves to orders and to deny themselves of authentic expression and personal fulfillment. According to Wood, “the basic motivating premise of the 70s buddy movie is not the presence of the male relationship but the absence of home.”[16] Not only does the film’s negative tone toward the restoration of the patriarchal order undermine that order, but the very absence of home, symbolic of the heterosexual union and the perpetuation of the male-dominated separation of spheres, further subverts that order.
Working within the conventions of a classical Hollywood narrative, then, Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail are as potent in their subversion of hegemonic masculinity as the films that destabilize that structure by way of fragmentation, jump cuts, flashbacks, unconventional lighting and camera angles/placement, and other experimental implementations of the Hollywood New Wave. Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail not only reproduce the “reality” of the dominant ideology (hegemonic masculinity) but also represent this “reality” in a causal structure that affirms the protagonist’s purposes. While these narrative frameworks pretend to capture reality, their subsequent erosion of the dominant myths expressed within the films’ structures undermines those myths. The films’ structures thus “[show] up the cinema’s so-called ‘depiction of reality,’”[17] by “[throwing] up obstacles in the way of the ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course.”[18] Comolli and Narboni discuss films that deny the dominant ideology’s “independent existence” by presenting that ideology instead of passively carrying it.[19] In this vein, Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail reproduce the dominant ideology and its structural manifestation not to carry hegemonic myths but to subvert them.
These films, however, depend on the presence of “Jack Nicholson” to produce the required tone for ideological scrutiny. Nicholson’s constructed persona brought the traits of iconoclasm and rugged individualism to these films; subsequently, the filmmakers played upon viewer expectations of “Jack Nicholson” not only to subvert autonomous masculinity but also to denaturalize masculinity itself. As Robert Towne adapted a novel featuring a masculine protagonist who finds his autonomy undercut by military power, he and director Hal Ashby undoubtedly chose Nicholson because of the attitudes the actor had come to stand for. Subsequently, The Last Detail would not have the same thematic impact without “Jack Nicholson,” whose recognizable screen presence prefigures viewer expectations and ultimately undermines those assumptions, mirroring the way in which the film’s structure derails audiences’ suppositions about journey films. Similarly, Nicholson’s performance ironically comments on the absurdity of masculine action throughout the film, further undercutting the naturalness of Buddusky’s masculinity, just as the film’s structure undermines the ideological assumptions (namely, can-do individualism) associated with the journey film.
Nicholson (right) shares an off-camera moment with Otis Young (center) and Hal Ashby (left) on the set of The Last Detail. Without Nicholson’s established persona, Badass Buddusky would not have made quite the same impact on audiences who remembered the rebelliousness of George Hanson and Bobby Dupea. Columbia Pictures/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures.
Nicholson’s persona carries the white man’s burden more willingly than before as he moves into mainstream cinema, despite his characters’ outward displays of iconoclasm and rugged individualism. Essentially, Nicholson’s rebelliousness emerges as an anti-institutional alternative to hegemonic masculinity in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, and his persona takes on a life of its own as each successive role interacts variously with the white man’s burden. Nicholson’s roles thus constitute “Jack Nicholson” the persona, and each role he performs throughout the decade resituates that persona along the continuum of hegemonic masculinity. The one constant throughout George Hanson, Bobby Dupea, Jonathan Fuerst, Badass Buddusky, and David Locke, however, is a critical stance toward carrying the white man’s burden. Hanson, Dupea, and Locke critique the burden from without by recognizing the alienating masquerade and refusing to participate in it (at least in the case of the latter two). Conversely, Fuerst and Buddusky criticize the burden from within by unmasking the male masquerade and exposing both its inefficacy and the alienating effects on the male subject who performs it. In other words, as “Jack Nicholson” progresses through the decade, he increasingly carries the burden, and as he becomes a more willing carrier of hegemonic attitudes, his inner tension increases and his mental stability weakens due to the growing pressures of carrying the burden. In his next film, “Nicholson” would carry the burden back into the 1930s, when masculine nonconformists supposedly mastered their surroundings by solving crimes that eluded law enforcement officers, when moral certainty was as problematic as war-time ethics, and when doing as little as possible was the safest way to navigate the nebulous streets of a town without a compass and without a soul.
1. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 197.
2. Jack Nicholson, “Jack Nicholson: A Candid Conversation with the Funky Star of ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge,’” interview by Richard Warren Lewis, Playboy, April 1972, 90.
3. Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), 127.
4. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 117.
5. Bingham, Acting Male, 117.
6. Bingham, Acting Male, 119.
7. Joe L. Dubbert, A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 260.
8. Bingham, Acting Male, 120.
9. Bingham, Acting Male, 121.
10. Bingham, Acting Male, 120.
11. Bingham, Acting Male, 121.
12. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1: 27.
13. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 27.
14. Robin Wood, Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 220.
15. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 25.
16. Wood, Hollywood, 203.
17. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 25.
18. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 27.
19. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 27.
Not a man on Earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark.—Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
When Gerald Ayres, Columbia’s vice president for creative affairs, hired a former student of Jeff Corey’s acting studio, Robert Towne, to pen the screenplay for Daryl Ponicsan’s novel The Last Detail, Towne already had a reputation for doctoring scripts, the most notable being Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). While Towne was hired in 1970, the script sat on the shelf for two years due to its plethora of expletives, which threatened to procure the film an X rating.[1] During that time, Towne was offered screenwriting duties on Robert Evans’s much-anticipated adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Clayton, 1974), but he refused even to attempt bringing Fitzgerald’s lyrical prose to the screen.[2] Instead, after seeing about six photographs in a magazine article called “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.,” all of which were taken in 1969 but which recreated 1930s Los Angeles, Towne got the idea for Chinatown.[3] He envisioned his friend and collaborator Jack Nicholson as a hardboiled 1930s detective investigating corrupt water and power officials who were starving orange grove farmers out of their land.
Fresh off the set of Antonioni’s The Passenger in which he played existential wanderer David Locke, Nicholson prepared to tackle his first role as a romantic lead after numerous turns as countercultural antiheroes. Towne’s choice of Nicholson for the role of Jake Gittes is particularly interesting when examined in relation to the “Jack Nicholson” persona. While Nicholson had moved away from hegemonic masculinity in The Passenger and returned to the territory of Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown saw him combining elements of the Dupea/Locke antiheroes and the Fuerst/Buddusky misogynists. As a fallen idealistic knight whose attempt to save a woman in Chinatown inadvertently led to her fate, Gittes resembles the brooding, sensitive earlier males who hide their spiritual malaise underneath a veneer of toughness and sneering derision toward institutionalized sterility (such as his thinly veiled mockery of Yellburton’s secretary and the public records clerk). On the other hand, as a wise-cracking chauvinist who tells dirty jokes and knocks Evelyn Mulwray around when he thinks she is lying to him, he recalls the hyper-masculine protagonists of Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail.
Set in 1937, the year of Nicholson’s birth, Chinatown opens with Ida Sessions, posing as Evelyn Mulwray, soliciting private eye Jake Gittes to investigate her husband’s extramarital affair. After Gittes publishes photos of Hollis Mulwray with a younger woman, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) appears in his office with a lawyer carrying a lawsuit. Finding himself the victim of a set-up, Gittes sets out to find those responsible, only to discover that Hollis has been murdered, apparently drowned in a reservoir. Evelyn hires Gittes to investigate her husband’s murderer while Noah Cross, her father, also hires Gittes to find Hollis’s alleged mistress. During the course of his investigation, Gittes has his left nostril slashed by a henchman of the water and power company (played by Roman Polanski). Sporting a large bandage across his nose, Gittes learns from a phone call by Ida Sessions and a visit to a public records office that someone is using the names of diseased and elderly people to purchase several thousand acres of land in a valley outside of Los Angeles. A visit to an orange grove in the Northwest Valley where he is accosted by “Okie” farmers confirms Gittes’s suspicion that those responsible for buying land tracts are also trying to drive these farmers out of the valley. The culprit, whom we soon learn is Noah Cross, is also diverting water from the city’s reservoirs to irrigate the land he is purchasing. Hollis had found out what Cross was doing and was murdered for it. Concurrently with this investigation, Gittes’s search for Hollis’s missing paramour culminates in his discovery that she is not Hollis’s mistress but Evelyn’s sister/daughter, a product of rape. After confronting Cross about the water scheme, Gittes is held at gunpoint by Claude Mulvihill, one of Cross’s underlings, and led into Chinatown where Evelyn and her daughter are preparing to leave for Mexico. In one of the darkest endings of a major Hollywood studio film, Evelyn speeds away after shooting her father in the arm only to be shot in the eye by Loach, Escobar’s partner. Striving to expose the corruption of patriarchal institutions, represented by Noah Cross, Gittes unwittingly sets in motion the forces that ultimately destroy his love interest. Despite his rebellious crusade against the demoralizing juggernaut of Western hegemony, Gittes suffers defeat at the hands of an irrepressible power.
Accustomed to Nicholson’s iconoclasm in such films as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Detail, audiences anticipate the character’s composite traits before Jake Gittes even appears on screen. Charming toward women, sneering toward effete, socialized cogs in society’s machine, explosive at times but seething with repressed animosity at others, one moment exuberant and the next subdued and introspective, the “Jack Nicholson” of Chinatown did not disappoint. If, however, he was the champion of the rugged individualism and nonconformity that was sweeping a disillusioned, Vietnam War– and Watergate-afflicted society, then the character’s defeat at the end of Chinatown signals the futility of individual action. The pessimistic ending recalls David Locke’s death in the final moments of The Passenger, and periodically Nicholson’s performance in Chinatown resembles the brooding romanticism of his previous film. Nicholson punctuates this sensitivity with an element of machismo to depict the mask that males don due to the pressures of hegemonic masculinity. Adopting a structure to match its protagonist’s hardboiled persona, the film takes on the subjective point of view and circuitous, labyrinthine framework of the American film noir. Playing on the expectations of that genre, with its Bogart-inspired rogues and antiheroes at odds with a society out of joint, the film undermines the effectiveness of the hardboiled hero.
While the detective story began in the 1840s with C. Auguste Dupin and later Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the hardboiled detective emerged in the 1940s film noirs as a reaction to the fear and anxiety of a nation that saw its stability threatened by forces both outward (Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia) and inward (communism). Often existing on the cusp between law-abiding society and the seedy, immoral night life of the mean city streets, the private “dicks” inspired by authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler adopted their own moral codes to navigate the confusing ethical wilderness of modernity. Peopled with sleazy street thugs and police officers and city officials as corrupt as the villains they sought after, film noir blurred the line between good and evil like few other Hollywood genres or styles. Detectives like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe walked the line between social acceptability and a kind of moral utilitarianism, wherein ethical decisions were based on outcome, not inherent virtue. In such films as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), Humphrey Bogart, who played Spade and Marlowe respectively, personified the “tough guy” tradition that “was associated with a manly masculinity and used femininity as its opposite—as innocent, fragile, and dependent.”[4]
Nicholson self-consciously resurrects Bogart’s persona to underscore its artificiality. Citing two specific scenes that recall Bogart’s gestures, Bingham asserts that Gittes “idealizes himself as Bogart and has internalized some of his mannerisms.”[5] Gittes’s cynical, lackluster response to a client’s shock at seeing photos of his wife with another man and Bogart-like squint and lifting of the eyebrows when putting a cigarette in his mouth foreground the actor’s self-reflexive recollection of Bogart’s tough-guy persona.[6] These Bogart-like gestures combine with other moments of masculine posturing to heighten the sense of artificiality. When a bank official accuses Gittes of earning his living by exploiting those suffering from marital infidelities, Gittes springs from his barber chair and challenges him to “step outside” and settle the matter. Later, at Ida Sessions’s murder scene, Gittes responds to Loach’s jab about his ineffectualness by telling him that he got the scar on his nose when Loach’s wife got excited and “crossed her legs a little too quick.” Investigating a lead in the San Fernando Valley, Gittes physically attacks an orange grove farmer presumably for nothing more than appearing unintelligent. Perhaps the most striking example of Gittes’s posturing occurs after he finds a pair of bifocals in Evelyn’s pond and assumes that they are proof that she murdered Hollis. Violently confronting Evelyn with this accusation, Gittes slaps her repeatedly across the face demanding the identity of the woman locked upstairs. Rather than trusting Evelyn, Gittes mistakenly trusts his assumptions, which continually prove erroneous. These actions typify the hot-headed physicality of dominant males who leap into action before considering alternative options. By integrating hyper-masculine posturing with the mimicry of Bogart’s mannerisms, Nicholson highlights Gittes’s participation in the male masquerade.
Sporting the accoutrements of the 1930s-era hardboiled detective, Nicholson self-consciously performs the gestures associated with classic Humphrey Bogart characters. Paramount Pictures/Photofest. © Paramount Pictures.
Nicholson contrasts these affectations with scenes of sensitive introspection to undercut the authenticity of masculinity. After narrowly escaping Mulvihill at a retirement home where patients’ names are being used to buy property about to be worth a fortune, Gittes and Evelyn retreat to her home where they make love. Afterward, Gittes laments a time in Chinatown when, as he tells Evelyn, “I was trying to keep someone from being hurt, and I wound up making sure she was hurt.” Gittes/Nicholson allows his masculine bravura to lapse for a moment as he stares into Evelyn/Dunaway’s eyes, his vulnerability palpable to both his lover and his audience. He is lying on his back on the bed, shirtless and without a bandage for the first time since Polanski, as Cross’s hired stooge, sliced his nostril with a switchblade. The removal of the bandage, which has been masking his susceptibility, and the stripping of his suave suit and tie, the archetypal clothing of a smooth-talking, masculine detective, signal Gittes’s willingness to expose his soft underbelly to Evelyn’s nurturing entreaties. This scene anticipates Gittes’s devastation when he sees Evelyn’s dead body at the end of the film, a recurrence of the event he told her about from his past. As Gittes, speechless, stares at the gaping hole formerly occupied by her flawed eye, he wears an incapacitated expression, as if his inability to prevent her demise has made him aware of his entrapment within a perpetual loop of impotent spectatorship. Gittes’s helplessness to overcome this anticipated tragedy unmasks the hardboiled facade of the street-wise film noir detective.
Much like previous scenes from Five Easy Pieces and Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson reveals the sensitive underbelly to Jake Gittes’s hardboiled persona in this intimate scene with Faye Dunaway. Symbolically, Gittes removes the bandage and allows Mulwray to see his exposed wound. Paramount Pictures/Photofest. © Paramount Pictures.
Gittes’ powerlessness to rescue Evelyn underscores his subservience to a determinism that recalls Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. After his sexual encounter with Evelyn, Gittes informs her that he was once a police detective assigned to Chinatown, where nothing was as it appeared and any attempt to master one’s surroundings inevitably led to hopelessness, indicated by his failure to save the woman he loved. Similarly, in seeking to avoid his fate—killing his father and marrying his mother—Oedipus ran headlong into it. Gittes’s inability to rescue Evelyn from her incestuous father resembles Oedipus’s failure to escape his destiny involving patricide and incest.
Continually throughout the film, Gittes mistakenly believes he controls the investigation when in reality an institutionally corrupt force, epitomized by Cross, perpetually pulls the strings. Beginning with Ida Sessions, who poses as Evelyn Mulwray to dupe Gittes into taking incriminating photographs of Mulwray with his supposed mistress, the deceptiveness of a faceless, conspiratorial power structure instigates a series of events outside of Gittes’s autonomy. When pressed as to why he is pursuing the case, Gittes tell Evelyn that he does not enjoy being the victim of a set-up. As a result, he stubbornly “sticks his nose into” a situation he does not understand only to have it brutally disfigured in a violent cautionary act. In a visit to Noah Cross’s ranch, the Machiavellian despot admonishes Gittes, “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but, believe me, you don’t.” Giving a visage to the previously veiled features of corruption, Cross hires Gittes ostensibly to find Hollis’s mistress while furtively scheming to procure the whereabouts of his daughter/granddaughter, Katherine. The original agent of Gittes’s allurement to the case (while the film never makes this clear, presumably Cross hired Ida Sessions to impersonate Evelyn), Cross, who appears confident and dominating throughout the scene, anticipates Gittes’s every move and plans accordingly. Knowing that Gittes will engage in an affair with Evelyn, Cross acknowledges Gittes’s likelihood of finding his missing offspring. He also arranges for Mulvihill to be present when Gittes confronts him with his cracked bifocals, which Gittes has found at the bottom of Evelyn’s salt water pond. With Mulvihill’s revolver trained on Gittes, Cross forces the detective to lead him to his prize—his long-awaited meeting with Katherine. By manipulating Gittes into a false sense of mastery, Cross consummately achieves his desired ends.
Cross’s irrepressible dominance elevates him to god-like stature. Like Apollo in Oedipus, whose unequivocal declaration of Oedipus’s murderous, incestuous fate reverberates with finality throughout the tragedy, Cross’s prophetic warning that Gittes does not know “what he’s dealing with” foregrounds his omnipotence. With Old Testament wrath, Cross orders agents of the water department to plague orange grove farmers in the San Fernando Valley by poisoning their wells and demolishing their water tanks, thus creating a drought. He diverts water from its natural course to irrigate the land of his choice (“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” Cross sardonically explains to Gittes), performs the miracle of causing a man to drown during a drought (“We’re in the middle of a drought, and the water commissioner drowns,” quips the mortician), resurrects Jasper Lamar Crabb from the dead (“He passed away two weeks ago and one week ago he bought the land,” Gittes ironically remarks to Evelyn), and positions himself above conventional morality (“I don't blame myself,” he tells Gittes, “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything”). Establishing Cross’s incontestable hegemony over all aspects of life in L.A., the film removes from Gittes, Evelyn, and all others any semblance of free will.
This hegemony accentuates the ubiquitousness of patriarchal institutions in America. Towne’s impetus for the subject of a water scandal came from a book he had read called Southern California Country: Island on the Land. “After reading about what they were doing, dumping water and starving the farmers out of their land,” he told one interviewer, “I realized the visual and dramatic possibilities were enormous.”[7] The resulting screenplay, for which Towne won an Academy Award, highlights the power that wealth exerts over the lower classes. Initially, Cross owned the water and power company, but due to Mulwray’s influence, the utilities became public. Evelyn explains to Gittes, “Hollis felt that the water should belong to the public, and I don’t think my father felt that way.” Despite the socialization of utilities, Cross still reigns over the water works. But his power does not stop there. As Evelyn tells Gittes on the streets of Chinatown, “[Cross] owns the police,” and shortly before that Gittes tells Lieutenant Escobar, “He’s rich! Do you understand? He thinks he can get away with anything.” And he can. After Evelyn’s death, Cross soothingly covers Katherine’s eyes with one hand while slowly pulling her away from the vehicle. The implication is that, as her legal grandfather, he will become her guardian and repeat the incestuous relationship he had with Evelyn, thus perpetuating the cycle of sexual dominance by powerful adult males over innocent and virginal young girls (Evelyn was fifteen when she became pregnant with Katherine). Cross’s wealth protects him from social and legal ramifications and affords him the opportunities to continually dominate both women and lower-class males.
Cross’s reach extends to middle-class men as well. The typical hardboiled detective of film noir “is a relatively poor man who operates out of a seedy office and never seems to make very much money by his exploits; he is the most marginal sort of lower-middle class quasi-professional.”[8] While Bingham sees Gittes as a violation of this rule, citing his stylish suits and ties as evidence of his narcissism,[9] Towne’s own comments in an interview indicate Gittes’s relatively inferior social position:
Philip Marlowe would never do divorce work. He considered it beneath the dignity of a tarnished knight. His mode of dress was careless at best. And the kind of crimes that he dealt with were usually one way or another like The Maltese Falcon—there was nothing about public corruption, or almost nothing I can recall. I knew that detectives in the ’30s and ’40s that were successful did nothing but divorce work until they got to be successful. And they were flashy. They were clotheshorses.[10]
Despite being a budding matrimonial investigator, Gittes obsesses over his appearance not as an indicator of his upper-class position but as a desire for social mobility. Before achieving success as a private eye, Gittes must put in his time doing the work of a struggling detective while displaying the signifiers of material wealth. If Gittes violates any rule of the hardboiled detective, it is willingly submitting to divorce work, not occupying a higher position on the social ladder. As a member of the lower-middle class eagerly seeking social advancement, Gittes precipitously accepts Cross’s generous monetary offer to find Katherine. Because Gittes suspects Evelyn of Hollis’s murder, he botches her escape plan by leading Lieutenant Escobar to Katherine’s hideaway. Had he not accepted Cross’s offer, Gittes likely would not have persisted in his erroneous assumption that Evelyn was holding Hollis’s mistress captive. His mistake results in Cross’s victory over Evelyn. Finding himself unable to control the “evil and chaos” represented by “the social and personal depravity” of Noah Cross,[11] Gittes, indicative of the lower-middle class, ultimately falls victim to the same institutional corruption that consumes Evelyn, Katherine, and the orange grove farmers.
With Cross’s accomplishment of his goals—becoming Katherine’s guardian and creating a moneymaking enterprise in the San Fernando Valley—comes a sense that patriarchal hegemony will continue into at least the near future. This idea of white men leading civilization into the future existed long before Chinatown. Previously, however, millennialism had a much more positive connotation in American discourse, as it was traditionally assumed that wealthy, paternalistic white males were the rightful leaders of Western civilization. Initially, these males were Puritan ministers such as Jonathan Winthrop, William Bradford, and Cotton Mather, who waged a holy war against the evils of the wilderness and the “red men” of the forest who served the devil. This religious crusade was replaced in the nineteenth century by a more secular vision:
Discourses of civilization gave millennialism a Darwinistic mechanism. Instead of God working in history to perfect the world, believers in civilization described evolution working in history to perfect the world. Instead of Christians battling infidels, they envisioned superior races outsurviving inferior races. Eventually, perfect human evolution would triumph. The most advanced, civilized races—that is, the white races—would be perfected. . . . It was the duty of all civilized people to do what they could to bring about this perfect civilization, just as it had once been the duty of all Christians to take up the banner of the Lord.[12]
The successful advancement of civilization, then, implies the complete subjugation of both minorities and women. As the “agents of civilized advancement,” white males were “the chosen people of evolution and the cutting edge of millennial progress” just as the Puritans were God’s selective missionaries carrying out his divine mission in the new world.[13] As an arrogant, self-satisfied heir to his puritanical predecessors (he tells Gittes, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough”), Cross carries the torch of white male hegemony toward a new millennium. When asked what he could possibly gain from his scheme to divert water to his newly bought land, Cross replies, “The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.” By downplaying the monetary significance of his criminalistic endeavor and foregrounding his desire for civilization’s advancement, Cross invokes the pervasive notion that it is the duty of wealthy white males to carry civilization into the future.
The tone of Chinatown and its manipulation of the film noir genre subvert this dutiful adherence to patriarchal millennialism. Citing recent events such as the Vietnam War and Watergate, Philippa Gates describes the cultural climate that precipitated the neo-noir of the 1970s: “Internal disturbances, social unrest, and the loss of confidence in the government as well as law enforcement institutions undermined traditional images of masculinity—including those portrayed in the cinema.”[14] Because Cross “owns” the police, he represents corrupt governmental and law enforcement agencies in the United States in the 1970s—the same corrupt power structure that insisted on perpetuating white male dominance through the subjugation of African Americans (the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton), women (the opposition to women’s liberation by right-wing groups such as STOP E.R.A. and Right to Life), and the working class (Nixon’s censure of postal workers during the U.S. postal strike of 1970). Interestingly, Towne originally envisioned Jane Fonda for the role of Evelyn, but her recent success in the film Klute (Pakula, 1971) made her a much sought-after commodity.[15] If Evelyn, who suffers a fatal gunshot wound to the eye, were played by Fonda, the prominent anti-war and women’s rights activist, another layer of meaning would be added to this already complex film. Cross, as the symbol of white male hegemony, would be triumphant over Evelyn/Fonda, the celebrity icon of leftist politics in the 1970s. Such an ending would suggest the futility of dissent against America’s unassailable power systems. Even without Fonda, though, the film’s negative tone toward Cross’s triumph effectively criticizes the patriarchy he represents.
Gittes’s failure to save Evelyn also subverts the assumptions that underpin the film noir detective story. If Gittes had succeeded in rescuing Evelyn, then the film would ultimately have suggested not only that individuals still have control over their lives but that the traditional masculine hero, epitomized by the hardboiled detective, was as potent as ever. Significantly, producer Robert Evans argued for an optimistic ending in which Evelyn survives and kills Cross.[16] However, Polanski contended that if the film were to have any meaning at all, Evelyn had to die and Cross had to win.[17] Polanski, having recently suffered the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of Charles Manson’s gang of deranged ex-hippies, insisted that the film should reflect the world he had experienced ever since he witnessed the Holocaust as a child. The film’s pessimistic tone, created by the negation of individual agency by sinister forces, is an understandable consequence of Polanski’s personal tragedies. Michael Eaton contends that Chinatown is a story “which says that, sure, wrongs can ultimately be uncovered but the seeker after truth is not only completely incapable of righting them but his very search will only make matters worse.”[18] By failing to put right a time out of joint, Gittes despairs at his subordinate position to an overarching power structure.
In Chinatown, Polanski’s (left) dark vision, intensified by the recent death of his wife, Sharon Tate, combines with Nicholson’s commentary on Gittes’s vulnerability to create one of the greatest films of the 1970s. This picture from the set of Chinatown perfectly captures the collaborative nature of Nicholson’s 1970s films. Paramount Pictures/Photofest. © Paramount Pictures.
This ending self-consciously reverses the outcome of many of the 1940s film noirs, wherein the detective mastered his environment by restoring a semblance of order to a morally bankrupt society. John G. Cawelti defines the structure of the hardboiled detective story:
The established narrative formula of the hard-boiled story has as its protagonist a private investigator who occupies a marginal position with respect to the official social institutions of criminal justice. . . . His position on the edge of the law is very important, because one of the central themes of the hard-boiled myth is the ambiguity between institutionalized law enforcement and true justice. The story shows us that the police and the courts are incapable of effectively protecting the innocent and bringing the guilty to appropriate justice. Only the individual of integrity who exists on the margins of society can solve the crime and bring about a true justice.[19]
True justice does not exist in Chinatown. Evil remains unpunished and the hero walks back to his life with the renewed knowledge that he is powerless to effect change. Since masculine autonomy is encoded in the hardboiled structure in which the protagonist successfully solves the case, Gittes’s unsuccessful mission highlights the failings of rugged individualism in contemporary American society. Whereas classic noir “may have offered a resistance to paternal authority and the myth of hegemonic masculine dominance,”[20] Chinatown overtly criticizes the myth by depicting its protagonist’s inability to solve the mystery and defeat the powers of evil.
Those powers of evil are reminiscent of the white males in charge of American society in the 1970s. “The return of noir [in the 1970s],” writes Gates, “came about as a result of cultural associations with the genre as linked specifically to social critique and masculine crisis.”[21] The film noir of the past might have critiqued hegemonic masculinity,
but few noir films offered an outright rejection of dominant values since no noir-detective seemed to rise out of his position in defiance of the law or social order or to define himself as a type of masculinity that was both positive and deviant. Thus, despite its critique of 1940s and 1950s society, noir arguably remained rather conservative in its representation of a problematic society through troubled masculinity.[22]
Part of a new wave of neo-noirs, including The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973), Farewell, My Lovely (Richards, 1975), Night Moves (Penn, 1975), and The Big Sleep (Winner, 1978), Chinatown “doesn’t throw out the conventional contours of either the private eye hero or the classic structure of the investigation plot, but unashamedly parades its knowledge of and respect for them.”[23] While previous film noirs remained conservative by affirming their protagonists’ initial goals, Chinatown progressively subverts the social order. The film might not offer an alternative to the masculine image or present a solution to the corrupt system, but it undermines both the image and the system by giving both Gittes, the spectator of Evelyn’s death, and the viewer, the spectator of the film, a glimpse into the castrating power of systemic greed. Subsequently, viewers recognized their own subservience to a military-industrial complex that succeeded in causing war, scandal, and the assassination of foreign leaders, all in the name of maintaining white male dominance.
Gittes maintains white male hegemony by acting masculine and unwittingly doing Cross’s bidding. As a cog in Cross’s machine, Gittes represents socialized middle-class white males who feel in control of their lives but ultimately remain puppets in a larger ideological apparatus. Simpson sees Gittes “as a personified commentary upon ideological and cultural constructions of masculinity in particular and contemporary society in general.”[24] While he initially appears cocky and confident, Gittes “is unable to purge or punish the social evil he discovers.”[25] This inability undermines his self-confidence and competence, thus calling into question rugged, can-do masculinity. The disconnect between Gittes’s self-image and his subordinate position in society results in his unknowing participation in the white man’s burden; he acts overly masculine to compensate for feelings of impotence. At the same time, Gittes inadvertently leads Cross to Katherine and causes Evelyn’s death, thus allowing Cross to perpetuate his patriarchal dominance. Gittes’s participation in both the male masquerade and Cross’s scheme creates a tension that Nicholson accentuates with the dislocation technique.
Nicholson first displays this technique during a scene in a barber shop after Gittes’s illicit photos of Hollis with a presumed mistress have been published in the newspaper. A banker in the chair next to him questions his ethics for plastering other people’s lives so callously across the papers, and Gittes, infuriated, insists, “I make an honest living” and chastises the banker for putting families on the street by foreclosing their mortgages. Nicholson heightens Gittes’s emotional intensity by bounding from the chair and lunging toward the banker with a searing animosity, then challenging him to “step outside.” Audiences accustomed to Nicholson’s outbursts from previous films recognize the antagonistic rage toward institutional indifference (bankers are notorious for their apathy toward nonpaying customers) that typify Bobby Dupea and Badass Buddusky on such occasions as the diner scene in Five Easy Pieces or the bar scene in The Last Detail. On the other hand, Gittes’s anger may stem less from disdain for capitalistic cruelty and more from narcissistic effrontery due to an insult toward his means of making a living. This discrepancy between the previous Nicholson characters and the current one points to Gittes’s ignorance of social injustice at this point in the film. As an unsuspecting participant in the seemingly ordered universe of 1930s L.A., where Gittes feels on top of the world because his name is in the paper and his detective agency is becoming successful, he responds angrily to a personal insult rather than to a widespread network of oppressive institutions. On some level, though, Gittes resents corporate greed and its indifference toward those it puts on the streets.
Contrarily, Gittes’s second emotional outburst is directed toward a lower-class farmer. Considering the tongue-lashing he gives the banker for foreclosing mortgages on the underprivileged, Gittes’s aggressive attack on a farmer immediately following a derogatory remark (“You dumb Okie”) seems problematic. This altercation is especially confusing in light of Gittes’s recent discovery that the water department has been sending agents out to the valley to poison their wells and damage their water tanks. As the victims of an oppressive institution, Gittes should be sympathetic toward the farmers’ plight. However, his sense of superiority toward the uneducated farmer arises from an ambivalent attitude toward class warfare; he might chastise powerful banks for oppressing the working man, but his upward mobility causes him to dissociate himself from the lower classes by displaying his superior wit and physical strength. Since he is physically bested by the farmers, though, Gittes is proven inferior in this area, if not in mental prowess. Ultimately, Gittes’s position between the two classes creates the tension that fuels his tempestuous outbursts. The private eye, then, perfectly expresses white middle-class males’ disillusionment in the 1970s. Upwardly mobile themselves, their frustrations at being unable to achieve the Dream promised them was echoed by Gittes’s entrapment within the lower-middle class.
In the same way, Gittes’s physical attack on Evelyn toward the end of the film upon first glance results from his sense of besmirched pride at being outdone by a “broad.” Believing himself the victim of subterfuge, Gittes unleashes his indignant fury onto the woman he thinks is responsible for making him look like a fool. In his eyes, Evelyn assumes the role of the femme fatale, a vixen who lures him away from her secret guilt with her seductive wiles. Upset upon learning he’s been deceived, Gittes apparently lashes out to reclaim the upper hand. Upon closer inspection, however, the true reason for Gittes’s anger becomes clear. At this point in the film, he has learned about Cross’s scheme in the San Fernando Valley and his blind indifference toward the suffering of those killed by the previous dam he built. With this knowledge comes an inchoate understanding of Cross’s manipulation of all individuals involved, including himself. His antagonism toward the upper class society on top of which Cross sits surfaces soon after his nose is cut: “I don’t want Mulvihill,” he tells his partners, “I want the big boys that are making the pay-offs”; soon afterward, completely sure of himself, he cajoles Yellburton, “I don’t wanna nail you. I wanna find out who put you up to it. . . . Who knows? Maybe we can put the whole thing off on a couple of big shots.” Subconsciously, Gittes realizes that his roguish charms, smooth-talking machismo, and deductive powers are ineffectual in the face of the juggernaut of Noah Cross and all he represents, while consciously he suffers the delusion that he is mastering the case and getting revenge on the “big boys.” This realization causes him to physically dominate Evelyn, who is someone he feels he can control. His awareness on some level that no matter how tough and shrewd he is he cannot overcome Noah Cross creates the inner tension that fuels his emotional outbursts. Nicholson’s dislocation technique becomes the perfect vehicle for depicting this unbridgeable gap between willful action and involuntary participation.
Aware of Nicholson’s persona, Robert Towne envisioned Nicholson as Gittes from the moment he began writing the script. “I wrote the part for [Jack], in his voice,” Towne said, “We’d been close friends for a long time. . . . Jack was Gittes. I could not have written that character without knowing Jack. We had been roommates, and we’d studied acting with Jeff Corey for years, so he was, in a very real sense, a collaborator.”[26] Along with attending the same acting studio, Towne also starred in Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive He Said (1971). Much in the same way that Five Easy Pieces sprung from Rafelson’s vision of Nicholson playing an upright piano on the flatbed of a truck in the middle of traffic, Chinatown emerged from Towne’s conception of his friend in the midst of a corrupt plot wherein the upper echelons of patriarchal society exploit the powerless and the dispossessed.
Towne’s admission that he created Gittes for Nicholson reveals the extent to which Nicholson’s persona had been cemented in the American imagination by the time Chinatown was in production. Gittes combines elements of Nicholson’s previous characters and plays upon audience expectations to add a layer of commentary about American society in the 1970s. Without this pre-existing persona, Chinatown would lack some of its punch. The fact that “Jack Nicholson,” who had come to embody all the rebellious traits of the counterculture movement of the early seventies, is defeated by a corrupt patriarch whose influence extends to all areas of government and law enforcement signals the defeat of individualism and nonconformity at the hands of oppressive institutions. This fatalistic ending recalls Badass Buddusky’s subordination to military authority in The Last Detail and David Locke’s death at the end of The Passenger. In the latter, as well as in Five Easy Pieces, “Nicholson” butts against the institution of marriage and monogamous heterosexual relationships only to be defeated by other conforming influences of society. In the former, he begins to question the naval order to which he has given his life, only to find his voice inconsequential and his free will virtually nonexistent. In all of these films, “Nicholson” as the auteur creates a body of work that consistently scrutinizes societal constructs, only to be punished for not following the crowd. In his next film, “Nicholson” would be deemed mentally unsound and institutionalized for refusing to submit to the will of mainstream society.
1. Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007), 147.
2. Roman Polanski, dir., Chinatown, DVD, performed by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston (1974; n.p.: Paramount, 1999).
3. Robert Towne, “Forget It Bob, It’s Chinatown: Robert Towne Looks Back on Chinatown’s 35th Anniversary,” interview by Alex Simon, November 5, 2009, Robert Towne: The Hollywood Interview, accessed April 4, 2012, http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2009/10/robert-towne-hollywood-interview.html.
4. Philippa Gates, Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film, The SUNY Series: Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video (Albany: State University of New York, 2006), 35.
5. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 130.
6. Bingham, Acting Male, 130.
7. Towne, “Forget It Bob.”
8. John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 500.
9. Bingham, Acting Male, 129.
10. Robert Towne, interview by Sam Adams, October 13, 2009, A.V. Club, accessed April 4, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/articles/robert-towne,34009/.
11. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” 502.
12. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26.
13. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 42.
14. Gates, Detecting Men, 96.
15. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 158.
16. Polanski, dir., Chinatown.
17. Polanski, dir., Chinatown.
18. Michael Eaton, Chinatown, BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 21.
19. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” 499-500.
20. Gates, Detecting Men, 86.
21. Gates, Detecting Men, 98.
22. Gates, Detecting Men, 86.
23. Eaton, Chinatown, 21.
24. Philip Simpson, “Chinatown,” in Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten, ed. Mikita Brottman (London: Creation, 1999), 69.
25. Simpson, “Chinatown,” 71.
26. Towne, “Forget It Bob.”
It is the heart of American pietism that the individual is considered the single most competent judge of moral truth and that his judgment is to be respected even if it leads him into civil disobedience.—William McLoughlin
Existence precedes and rules essence.—Jean-Paul Sartre
Between the filming of Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson remarked, “I believe the real function of the artist is to undermine the institutions of the middle class.”[1] By the time he was selected to play R. P. McMurphy in Michael Douglas’s and Saul Zaentz’s production of Ken Kesey’s novel, Nicholson had undermined the assumptions underpinning marriage (Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The Passenger), the military (The Last Detail), and governmental agencies (Chinatown). However, he had yet to criticize the societal construct of the mental institution in the United States. Given Nicholson’s consistent subversion of American society and his established persona as the consummate nonconformist, the initial selection of Gene Hackman for the role of McMurphy, followed by Marlon Brando and Burt Reynolds, seems strange in retrospect.[2] At the time, Douglas felt that Nicholson’s “persona was sort of the sensitive young man, or the intellectual that was a ‘badass.’ It wasn’t R. P. McMurphy.”[3] Hal Ashby brought Nicholson to Douglas’s attention by showing him The Last Detail, which, being “the first picture where you really felt the size of Jack,” expanded Nicholson’s persona and placed him at the forefront of the discussion to play McMurphy.[4] The role would bring Nicholson his first Best Actor Academy Award and cement his status as a major Hollywood leading man. At the same time, it would self-reflexively recall all the previous Nicholson performances and subsequently become the epitome of what Bo Goldman, the screenwriter solicited to adapt the story from Kesey’s novel, calls “the Nicholsonian exuberance, that wildness, that wonderful mad cackle which is really kind of giving the finger to the world, which is in all of us, which was really very much at the center of the movie.”[5]
Embodying many Americans’ frustrations toward the systematic repression of individual expression in America, Nicholson, with his established persona as a rabble-rouser, was the ideal choice for the role of R. P. McMurphy. Audiences had come to recognize him as the everyman railing against conformity, corruption, and repressive societal constructs, the last of which was perfectly symbolized by the mental institution in Cuckoo’s Nest. “It was absolutely proper to have . . . Jack,” asserts Milos Forman, the film’s director, “because he represents us, our world, and we are entering the world of the unknown.”[6] As their entryway into Nurse Ratched’s totalitarian mental ward, audiences forgave Nicholson/McMurphy for his statutory rape charges, his constant carousing, and his deluded narcissism. Despite his aggressive sexuality, which positions him outside conventional American morality, Nicholson/McMurphy manages to elicit the audience’s empathy to become the film’s hero.
While many of Nicholson’s previous characters were sexually aggressive in some way, McMurphy’s motivations for sex distinguish him from Nicholson’s previous characters. Bobby Dupea’s sexuality emerged as a reaction to stifling societal constraints, Jonathan Fuerst’s as a misogynistic backlash against feminism, Badass Buddusky’s as a means to compensate for his subordination to a disempowering military order, and Jake Gittes’s as a momentary lapse in his tough-guy persona. McMurphy’s proclivity toward sexual encounters stems almost purely from hedonistic desires that threaten the monogamy and respectability of mainstream society. Unlike previous characters (Fuerst and Buddusky) who unwittingly performed masculinity as an act, McMurphy’s individualistic pleasure-seeking materializes out of impulse rather than masquerade. As a result, R. P. McMurphy places “Jack Nicholson” opposite of Fuerst and Buddusky and close to Dupea and Locke on the continuum, with one important difference. While Dupea’s and Locke’s rebellion against institutional dehumanization is intellectualized, McMurphy’s rebellion is intuitive. Given this change, Douglas’s initial failure to see Nicholson as McMurphy based on his earlier persona makes sense, while his recognition of McMurphy in Buddusky, another mad hatter who “gives the finger to the world,” is understandable, albeit somewhat misplaced.
Once chosen for the role, Nicholson’s larger-than-life presence interrupts the drowsy tranquility and anesthetized sterility of a state mental institution in Oregon when he enters as Randle P. McMurphy, relocated after trying to escape prison work detail by feigning mental illness. McMurphy’s liveliness and iconoclasm clash with the inimical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who reigns unchallenged over the primarily docile patients. When McMurphy’s boisterousness and charisma incite the typically tractable patients to protest their lack of autonomy, Ratched retaliates by tightening her grip on their freedom even more, refusing to allow the patients to watch the World Series or to give one inmate (Cheswick) his cigarettes. This latter refusal sparks a confused melee that escalates to a full-fledged brawl in which orderlies must reestablish institutional order by subduing both McMurphy and Bromden. In an effort to retain their control, the doctors administer shock treatment to McMurphy before returning him to the purview of Nurse Ratched, in whose hands his fate rests. Using her influence over the physicians, Ratched recommends that, rather than pass responsibility to someone else, they keep McMurphy at the hospital instead of returning him to the prison. When McMurphy realizes that Ratched, whose animosity toward him is palpable, holds the keys to his freedom, he enacts an escape plan by bribing Turkle (Scatman Crothers), the night watchman, to allow two sexually promiscuous women—Candy and Rose—into the ward. After a night of hedonism and debauchery culminates in Billy Bibbit’s (Brad Dourif) sexual encounter with Candy (Mews Small), McMurphy awakes the next morning to find his opportunity missed as Nurse Ratched arrives for duty and discovers the ward in complete disarray. Confronting Billy about sleeping with Candy, Ratched inadvertently causes Billy’s suicide. Unable to control himself any longer, McMurphy lashes out at Nurse Ratched, only to be restrained, labeled as a dangerous threat to society, and lobotomized. Acting as an angel of mercy, Bromden suffocates McMurphy with a pillow before launching a heavy marble shower unit through a barred window and escaping from the institution, leaving us with the ecstatic cries of Taber (Christopher Lloyd), who awakes to witness the event.
While Nicholson’s films after Five Easy Pieces (with the exception of The Passenger) expose masculinity as a social construct, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest posits it as a means of creating one’s existential identity. On the surface, this view of gender may appear conservative or even reactionary when compared to the subversive stance taken in previous films. Contrarily, by pitting existential individualism against repressive institutionalism, Cuckoo’s Nest equally subverts the bourgeois values typically embedded in mainstream American films. Influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, Bo Goldman infuses the screenplay with a thread of existential humanism by depicting McMurphy’s fight against Nurse Ratched as a quest to create his identity despite outside forces that attempt to define him. Matching Goldman’s humanistic portrayal of the film’s characters, Milos Forman adopts a naturalistic approach in his direction of the film, insisting that his actors deliver their lines and display their mannerisms realistically, not theatrically or in an overly stylized way.[7] The resulting film owes more to the social realism of 1950s American films and Italian neorealism than to the French, American, or Czech new waves.
Describing R. P. McMurphy, Bo Goldman remarks, “From the moment we’re born, we’re enjoined to become part of a system. And what are we on this Earth for, except to invent ourselves. And McMurphy, in his criminality, and in his madness, and in his obsession, understands that better than anybody.”[8] Throughout Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy constantly creates himself through the choices he makes instead of allowing outside forces to define him. In contrast, Harding, Billy, Taber, and Bromden—at least initially—allow Nurse Ratched to impose an identity of docile submissiveness onto them. Contrary to an essentialist view, none of these characters’ identities are inherently present at birth but created throughout their lives. McMurphy’s identity differs from the other patients’ because he does not allow it to be dictated by social forces. Instead, he consistently channels his intuition when making the decisions that create his identity, while the other patients stifle their impulses to avoid conflict with Nurse Ratched and the social norms she enforces. As a result, McMurphy epitomizes Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the individual in his assertion that existence precedes essence:
We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.[9]
McMurphy wills himself against the indomitable Nurse Ratched, who represents society’s attempt to impose its will over him. She tries to force him to take his medication by threatening to administer it anally if he resists, rigs a vote instigated by McMurphy to put the World Series on television, and silences him when he returns exultantly from shock treatment.
While Nurse Ratched tries to enforce an identity onto McMurphy—that of the docile follower of a strict, regimented routine—he constantly resists by asserting his autonomy in front of her and the other patients. Instead of swallowing his pill as he feigned to do in front of Nurse Ratched, he holds it in his mouth and spits it at Harding when he chides him for complying with her orders. Similarly, after McMurphy fails to solicit the required number of votes to put the World Series on television, he reacts to the patients’ blind acceptance of ward policy by spraying them with water and betting them that he can lift the heavy marble unit and throw it through a barred window. When he fails to make good on his bet, McMurphy mutters, “At least I tried, God damn it.” Implicit in his statement is a call to action. If the patients continue to allow Nurse Ratched to control their every move, they will cease to exist as individuals. McMurphy insists that they can maintain their individuality as long as they defy Nurse Ratched, even if their defiance is subtle. As if in display of this point, McMurphy pretends that the World Series is on the television after Nurse Ratched rigs the vote, and he calls her by her first name, Mildred, when she scolds him for interrupting group therapy after he returns from shock treatment. While none of these actions leads to a physical change in the oppressiveness of the environment, McMurphy insists on bucking back. By acting out against the forces that attempt to contain him, McMurphy asserts his individual identity.
The consummate nonconformist, Nicholson as R. P. McMurphy experiences a moment of liberation within the confines of Nurse Ratched’s mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Subsequently, he inspires Taber and Chief Bromden to seek their own moments of authenticity. United Artists/Photofest. © United Artists. Photographer: Peter Sorel.
Not only do these rebellious acts fail to incite change, but they also lead to McMurphy’s demise. When McMurphy finally lashes out at Nurse Ratched over the suicide of Billy Bibbit, he is labeled “dangerous” and “incurable” and subsequently lobotomized. Implicit in this act is the declaration that individuals who attempt to create an identity for themselves outside acceptable societal norms will be silenced so that Western hegemony can persist unchallenged. McMurphy’s refusal to play along with Nurse Ratched’s dominion over the ward and her dogmatic unwillingness to acknowledge their concerns and recognize their opinions results in a complete, symbolic eradication of his individuality. Because McMurphy does not allow Nurse Ratched to socialize him as she did, and continues to do, with the other patients, his ability to think for himself is surgically removed, an operation that symbolizes what society does to those who refuse to submit.
Despite McMurphy’s loss of cognition, his rebellion does not go unnoticed. In the film’s emotional final moments, Bromden, whispering “Let’s go,” suffocates McMurphy to release him from a life of mere unreflective existence. McMurphy’s rebellion, while causing his lobotomy, ultimately inspires Bromden to free himself from Nurse Ratched’s chains and break out of the institution. Taber, witnessing this moment of liberation, laughs in wild ecstasy, liberated himself, if only for an instant, from the constrictive walls of the mental ward. By acting according to spontaneous impulses in front of the other patients, McMurphy inspires at least two of them—Bromden and Taber—to begin their own journeys toward autonomy and self-realization.
While McMurphy successfully pushes Bromden and Taber toward their spiritual release from the deterministic influence of Nurse Ratched’s mental ward, his attempt to do the same for Billy Bibbit ends in tragedy. Cuckoo’s Nest revisits the motif of the mentor/mentee relationship first introduced in Carnal Knowledge and resurrected in The Last Detail. However, Cuckoo’s Nest adopts a far more positive tone toward this relationship than the previous films by presenting a different reason for the mentoring process than Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail. Whereas the earlier films denigrate the initiation as a rite that must be performed to ensure the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity, Cuckoo’s Nest lauds it as an attempt to perpetuate rebellious acts of self-expression toward a repressive institution.
Whereas the mentor/mentee relationships between Jonathan and Sandy, Buddusky and Meadows, and McMurphy and Billy all culminate in disaster (Sandy forces Susan into a sexual relationship that she is clearly resistant to, Meadows gains a newfound confidence and lust for freedom that will make life in the brig even more difficult for the next eight years, and Billy kills himself when Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother about his recent sexual encounter), the tone in Cuckoo’s Nest toward the mentoring process is somewhat positive, while the constraining influence of Nurse Ratched is criticized. Billy immediately latches onto McMurphy’s confident, charismatic manner. He stares admiringly at McMurphy during a blackjack game, carefully scrutinizes the exchange between McMurphy and Harding after McMurphy spits out his pill, laughs favorably when McMurphy bets that in one week he can “put a bug so far up her ass she won’t know whether to shit or wind her wrist watch,” and cheers jubilantly when McMurphy pretends to watch the World Series and announces a home run. Gradually, Billy begins to worship McMurphy’s self-confidence, so much so that he approaches him on the evening he plans to escape to Canada and inquires about Candy, on whom he has developed a crush. Jeopardizing his opportunity to escape, McMurphy postpones leaving the institution to allow Billy to “become a man” by having sex with Candy. Recognizing the repression of sexuality as the root both of Billy’s stutter and his inability to function outside the ward, McMurphy believes that an encounter with Candy will cure Billy of his psychosis and furnish him the confidence to leave the ward. Despite Billy’s protests, McMurphy has the patients wheel Billy into a room with Candy. McMurphy goads, “Billy, I got $25 that says you are gonna burn this woman down!” Ironically, this moment of selflessness eventually leads to McMurphy’s death; he falls asleep during Billy’s adventure and wakes up to find Nurse Ratched arriving for work the next morning. While the previous films adopted a negative tone toward the characters’ attempted initiation of Sandy and Meadows into manhood, Cuckoo’s Nest posits McMurphy’s initiation of Billy as a heroic, sacrificial act that unintentionally thwarts his escape plan when he falls asleep during Billy’s tryst. Consequently, Billy’s death is not attributed to his relationship with McMurphy but to Nurse Ratched’s repressive manipulation of Billy’s feelings.
Nicholson/McMurphy’s confident, tough-guy pose inspires the mimicry of Brad Dourif/Billy Bibbit, who adopts a similar posture. Unfortunately for Billy, McMurphy’s mentorship only leads to Billy’s death. United Artists/Photofest. © United Artists.
Since Nurse Ratched believes that Billy needs to channel his sexual impulses into a properly socialized male role, she solicits Billy’s guilt at being discovered in bed with Candy. Embarrassed at being caught by a woman so closely linked to his mother (Nurse Ratched indicates at one point that she speaks with Billy’s mother regularly), Billy runs out of the room and into the hallway, where the rest of the ward stands and cheers his conquest. Nurse Ratched sternly asks him, “Aren’t you ashamed?” His stutter noticeably improved, he responds, “No, I’m not,” to which the crowd once again bursts out in applause. Immediately, however, Nurse Ratched invokes Billy’s mother by worrying “how [she is] going to take this.” The destruction of Billy’s newfound confidence, instantly shattered by the prospect that his mother, whose disapproval toward male sexual urges induces Billy’s greatest shame, might learn of his indiscretion, reduces him to a stuttering, emasculated wreck who ultimately kills himself to avoid exposure as a sexual being. McMurphy’s subsequent strangulation of Nurse Ratched is a cathartic attack of masculine release against the puritanical repression of sexuality that inadvertently leads to guilt, shame, and self-destructive impulses.
This institutionalized repression ensures its perpetuation through a system of universal surveillance first described by Jeremy Bentham as the Panopticon. Starting with seventeenth-century measures taken to quarantine and keep watch over plague victims, Michel Foucault proceeds to argue in Discipline and Punish that “the constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected,” anticipates contemporary civilization.[10] The Panopticon, a central tower surrounded on all sides by backlit cells allowing an occupant of the tower to constantly observe the inmates, was first used in penitentiaries to guarantee strict adherence to discipline. By creating an atmosphere of omnipresent observance, the Panopticon achieves its greatest function: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”[11]
The implementation of the Panopticon as a means of social control extends beyond penal institutions to all areas of modern society, including mental hospitals. Defining its contemporary uses, Foucault writes:
It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used.[12]
The mental hospital, as a place where individuals are designated as “abnormal” and segregated from a properly socialized citizenship, functions as a normalizing agent in mild examples, a quarantining one in average cases, and a destructive force in the most severe instances. Its effectiveness depends upon making the patients feel like they are always being watched. In Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy points this effect out to the other patients after he spits out his pill. Expressing shock at McMurphy’s blatant disregard for rules, Harding chastises, “You know that wasn’t very smart. She could have seen that.” With characteristic sarcasm, McMurphy mockingly expresses fear at being found out before telling them, “God almighty, she’s got you guys coming or going.” By instilling a constant state of paranoia, Nurse Ratched achieves the same effect as the Panopticon, one in which the observed fear the observer so much so that they become docile followers rather than active agents inventing their own destinies.
Nurse Ratched’s use of panoptic strategies extends beyond the walls of the mental ward. During the patients’ outdoor exercise time on the basketball court, she keeps a silent vigil over them, barely visible through the somewhat darkened glass of a hospital window. Channeling his love of basketball, Nicholson as McMurphy tries to instruct Bromden in the art of his favorite sport by putting a ball in his hands and telling him repeatedly to “put it in the basket.” Sitting atop Bancini’s shoulders, Nicholson shouts, “Hit me, Chief! Put it in the basket!” The shot cuts to Nurse Ratched’s foreboding presence in the window as the camera slowly zooms in toward her disapproving gaze, followed by another cut, this time designating a lapse of time, as a record plays soothing music meant to put the patients into a complacent state of mind. The message imbedded in this sequence of cuts is clear: excessive boisterousness is disapproved of in favor of sterilized submissiveness.
The indoctrination of individuals into complacent followers suited the purposes of the dominant culture in the 1970s, as institutions reacted against changing attitudes toward white male hegemony. Nurse Ratched’s totalitarian leadership over the patients symbolizes “the Establishment, the combination of Big Government and Big Business which supported the Vietnam War and steadfastly blocked social change.”[13] Watching over McMurphy as he attempts to instruct Bromden in the art of basketball, Nurse Ratched affixes her gaze to compel her prisoners into behaving according to society’s dictates. By highlighting Nurse Ratched’s hegemony over the mentally ill, the film recreates the stifling atmosphere of American society in the 1970s, when the changing social climate produced an adverse reaction from the dominant culture. As the leaders of public and private institutions felt their hold on American society slipping, they reasserted their hegemony by employing an even tighter grip.
McMurphy symbolically rattles Nurse Ratched’s cage when he escapes from the courtyard and steals a bus full of mental patients. Like the bars over George Hanson in Easy Rider, this fence represents the confines of socially acceptable masculinity. United Artists/Photofest. © United Artists. Photographer: Peter Sorel.
Another method Nurse Rached employs to perpetuate the dominant culture is the confessional. During one of the group therapy sessions, Nurse Ratched asks Billy, “Did you tell the girl how you felt about her?” After a moment of thought, Billy stammers, “I went over to her house one Sunday afternoon, and I brought her some flowers, and I said, ‘Celia, will you marry me?’” Ignoring the laughter from the other patients, Nurse Ratched probes further by insisting, “Why did you want to marry her?” Responding that he was in love with her, Nurse Ratched asks why he never told his mother about Celia. When the mentioning of his mother silences Billy, Cheswick intervenes on his behalf by asking Nurse Ratched why they cannot move on to new business. Nurse Ratched replies, “The business of this meeting . . . is therapy.” In reality, Nurse Ratched attempts to coax a confession of sexual desire out of Billy in an effort to normalize his sexual urges. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault asserts that in the seventeenth century, a widespread cultural attempt to restrict the authorized vocabulary surrounding sexual discourse actually gave way to a veritable explosion of discursive practices concerning sex. These practices were centered “in the field of exercise of power itself” and reflected “a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it [sex] spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.”[14] The act of confession assumed the function of transferring the otherwise hidden sins of the confessor to a silent listener, who held a position of power over the speaker. In this case, Nurse Ratched assumes the role of the listener to the confessor, Billy, not as an example of her concern for Billy’s well-being but as an assertion of her power over him. With that power, she hopes to indoctrinate Billy into a socialized adult male who enters into a heterosexual relationship to perpetuate the dominant order through marrying and bringing up children in an appropriately gendered climate.
Nurse Ratched’s attempts to solicit confessions do not stop with Billy. During another group therapy session, Nurse Ratched probes into Harding’s relationship with his wife prior to his voluntary admittance to the ward. Nurse Ratched opens the session by reviewing Harding’s difficulties with his wife, whom he “thinks he may have given . . . reason to seek sexual attention elsewhere, but he wasn’t able to say how.” She then asks several patients, including Scanlon, Billy, Martini, and Cheswick, to offer opinions on Harding’s marital issues, but when none of them respond due to their reluctance to discuss sex, she asks Harding why he suspected his wife of infidelity. An attempt by Harding to derail the discussion into a pretentious, metaphysical rambling about man’s relationship to God spirals into an argument between Harding and Taber over the use of the word peculiar. Taber’s criticism of Harding’s diction prompts Harding to ask, “You trying to say I’m queer? Is that it? Little Mary Ann? Little Marjorie Jane?” Taber responds with surprise to Harding’s suggestion because Taber’s remarks stem not from homophobic ridicule but from annoyance at Harding’s pretentiousness. Harding’s immediate assumption that his sexual orientation is being questioned unmasks his latent bisexuality. Later, in the bathhouse, Harding’s altercation with Taber continues when Taber pokes Harding on the arm repeatedly while Harding ardently warns, “Just touch me once more!” Due to the ambiguity of this sentence (it could indicate Harding’s annoyance at Taber, repressed attraction toward him, or both), Harding’s repeated admonition sounds more like a plea than a warning. The combination of these two scenes casts a shadow of doubt over Harding’s heterosexuality. Presumably, then, Harding’s self-identified failure to satisfy his wife stems from his lack of sexual attraction toward her. This failure to adopt a “proper” heterosexual male role prompts Harding to admit himself into the ward.
To perpetuate hegemonic structures, ideological state apparatuses must convince individuals like Harding that their bisexual behaviors or inclinations are unnatural or abnormal, a feat which they accomplish through the confessional. Eliciting admissions of sexual behaviors so as to categorize them as “normal” or “abnormal,” the confessional resembles the Panopticon’s implementation of surveillance to instill a sense of omnipresent observance. However, whereas the Panopticon succeeded without the complicity of the observed, the confessional could only work if those being watched and studied agreed that such methods were necessary for their well-being. To convince these “patients” of the urgency of scientific probes into their sex lives, the scientific discourse had to persuade them of the teleological nature of deviant sexuality. Any anomalous sexual act, whether intentional or accidental, could entail “the most varied consequences throughout one’s existence.”[15] The only way to free oneself from such consequences was to subject oneself to scientific scrutiny. For Harding, those consequences range from social reprimands (Taber’s rebuke for Harding’s use of the word peculiar) to isolation from intimacy (Harding’s estrangement from his wife).
In order for Harding to submit to normalization, he must agree to a preexisting scientific discourse that categorizes his bisexual urges as deviant. According to Foucault, in the nineteenth century, the Christian sexual domain, situated along a line from sexual asceticism to transgression, was mapped onto a scientific range from the normal to the pathological. An altogether new scientific discourse began assigning various sexual actions to distinct categories along the spectrum of normality and deviance, and those acts along this latter pole required “experts” not only to discern them but also to diagnose and medically treat them as symptoms of a larger sexual pathology. As science identified these maladies in order to treat them, the discursive act of defining them contributed to the need for scrutiny since scientific terminology requires precision. An entire scientific discourse emerged not only to classify but ultimately to assign valuation to such “disorders” as homosexuality, bisexuality, onanism, and neurasthenia, and medical experts warned that the practice of such acts as same-sex relations and masturbation sapped vital energy and led to physical decay or death. Those patients deemed sexual deviants by the scientific community thus sought medical intervention, through the medium of confession, to rid themselves of their various pathologies.[16] While Foucault’s discussion focuses primarily on the nineteenth century, his theories extend to the mental institution in Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein Nurse Ratched, as an extension of ideological state apparatuses, relies on Harding’s acknowledgment of his need for sexual normalization before she can proceed.
Unlike Billy and Harding, McMurphy revolts against the symbolic bars that Nurse Ratched, acting on behalf of the dominant culture, tries to impose over his sexuality. During the therapy session that focuses on Harding’s marriage, McMurphy interrupts Nurse Ratched’s solicitations by shuffling a deck of cards containing pictures of naked women in provocative poses. As Nurse Ratched prods Billy to begin the meeting “just once,” the shot cuts to McMurphy shuffling, then back to Billy’s startled face, then to Nurse Ratched’s disapproving glare at McMurphy, until it finally rests on McMurphy, who returns Nurse Ratched’s censorious look with a defiant stare while flippantly shuffling the cards again. This sequence of cuts clearly communicates McMurphy’s intentions both to disrupt the relationship of power between Nurse Ratched and Billy and to make Nurse Ratched aware of his power to throw a kink into her discourse. The audience’s knowledge that the cards contain prurient images heightens the subversive qualities of the scene since McMurphy’s pleasure in these images reinforces his wanton sexuality, which exists outside the realm of acceptable monogamous relationships. McMurphy tries to further rattle Nurse Ratched when she gives him a pill presumably to suppress his sexual urges by telling Miss Pilbow, Nurse Ratched’s aide, “It’s just that I don’t want anyone to try and slip me saltpeter.” By alluding to the surreptitious injection of saltpeter into his diet and spitting the pill out when obscured from Nurse Ratched’s sight, McMurphy rebels against the emasculating influence of the institution.
Like Jake Gittes’s confrontation with Noah Cross in Chinatown, McMurphy’s rebellion against Nurse Ratched and the ideological state apparatus she embodies not only reflects American society of the 1970s but also knowingly submits that society to scrutiny. In both films, Nicholson represents the American everyman railing against institutional oppression. For hegemonic structures to continue, individuals like Gittes and McMurphy must be silenced; therefore, Escobar advises Gittes to “forget about” Evelyn’s death, and Dr. Spivey orders McMurphy’s lobotomy. Whereas Chinatown despairingly implies that the cycle of patriarchy will continue with Cross’s sexual domination over Kathryn, Cuckoo’s Nest offers hope not only that Bromden has escaped the bonds of oppression but that Taber will also be liberated, if not physically then mentally or spiritually.
The film’s liberating ending points to the underlying humanism that makes the film so powerful. Milos Forman accomplishes this humanistic portrayal of his characters through a realistic approach to filmmaking rather than a self-reflexive approach. Instead of trying to disrupt the illusion of reality with frequent jump cuts, extreme camera angles, interruptions in linearity, narrative voiceovers, and over-the-top performances, Forman augments it by insisting on naturalistic performances, letting the camera roll without telling the actors to capture the “reality” of the moment, and filming every scene sequentially (except for the scene on the boat).[17]
Due to Forman’s constant prodding, the actors in Cuckoo’s Nest deliver naturalistic performances that heighten the illusion of reality in the film. Describing Forman’s directorial style, Vincent Schiavelli remarks, “What Milos always wants is simple, uncluttered, direct. No nonsense. No acting.”[18] Danny DeVito agrees, “He just guides the actors through their work, and it’s really great because it allows you to go. . . . You’re trying to do it real; you’re trying to do it natural.”[19] Summing up Forman’s approach, Goldman quips, “At least three times a day that I met with Milos, these four words would come out . . . all the time: but Bo, it must be real.”[20] Seeking the reality of their characters, most of the actors spent nearly all their time at the mental hospital in Oregon where the film was shot studying the actual patients and getting the feel for their environment. In fact, some of the actors, including Sidney Lassick and Danny DeVito, began experiencing mental problems themselves.[21] Nicholson also “dipped so deeply into McMurphy’s pathology that Anjelica [Huston] feared she was sleeping with a sociopath, and she flew back to L.A. early.”[22]
Nicholson’s naturalistic performance in Cuckoo’s Nest contrasts somewhat with his previous performances in The Last Detail and Chinatown. In The Last Detail, Nicholson as Badass Buddusky overplays masculinity to demonstrate his character’s preoccupation with the gestures, expressions, and images that signify hyper-masculinity. Similarly, in Chinatown, Nicholson as Jake Gittes dons the accoutrements of the masculine private eye and displays the mannerisms of Bogart to evoke the classic star of film noir’s hardboiled persona. Contrarily, by immersing himself in the Oregon State mental hospital so much so that his partner at the time, Anjelica Huston, fears he is becoming a sociopath, Nicholson follows the prescribed formula of the Stanislavsky studio of method acting. Developed as a response to classical acting, method acting enmeshes the actor in the state of mind of the character by allowing him to bring his own emotions to the performance. Secretly injecting some of his own narcissistic qualities into McMurphy, Nicholson achieves a heightened sense of reality in his portrayal.
Along with insisting on naturalistic performances, Forman also let the camera roll before the actors were ready and filmed the scenes sequentially to heighten the sense of reality. When actors are not certain if they are being filmed, they are forced to be ready for filming at all times. As a result, the sense of theatrics gradually dies away as the anticipation of the director shouting “action” no longer factors into the actors’ thought processes. They begin to act naturally in front of the camera as if they are not actually in a film. Reinforcing this feeling of genuineness, the filming of the scenes sequentially creates the illusion that the events depicted in the film are actually occurring in reality. Actors can allow previous scenes to build on current ones as they organically allow their characters to take shape in front of the camera. Conversely, filming out of sequence forces actors to study the entire script thoroughly to understand their character’s state of mind at any given point in the narrative. The resulting performance may be less realistic since the actor must sometimes react to an event that he has not even performed yet (and therefore, if employing the method approach, has not experienced yet).
Forman employs these strategies not only to heighten the sense of realism but also to support his interpretation of Kesey’s novel. As a Czechoslovakian citizen under a communist government, Forman resented oppressive governmental forces that inhibited individual liberties. His attraction to Cuckoo’s Nest sprung from a deep-seated resentment of ideological state apparatuses, represented by Nurse Ratched, and a heartfelt affinity for nonconformity, personified by R. P. McMurphy. His style of direction, then, attempts to affirm McMurphy’s rugged individualism because it is an anathema to communism while an integral part of American competitive capitalism. Forman’s vision requires a realistic approach to capture the struggle between humanistic individualism and oppressive totalitarianism.
Dove-tailing nicely with Forman’s vision, Goldman’s screenplay reinforces the film’s humanism by creating empathy for McMurphy. “I think any great story, there’s no deviation from it,” muses Goldman. “There’s no choices. It has to come out that way. Like if a man lives a good and honest life, he’s gonna come out okay even if his career gets destroyed, if he loses his children, if he loses his wife, he’ll come out okay because he’s written the right script for himself. And that’s what McMurphy has done. And Bromden recognizes that, and he frees him.”[23] Echoing Sartre’s existentialist credo “existence precedes and rules essence,” Goldman views Nicholson as an existential antihero at odds with a hostile environment that attempts to enjoin him into a system of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Despite McMurphy’s tragic fate, he “comes out okay” because he has made authentic choices. According to Goldman, the audience recognizes this authenticity and empathizes with McMurphy’s pursuance of it.
Goldman’s interpretation of McMurphy fails to take into account the plethora of ready-made identities available to McMurphy as he constructs his identity. Categorizing three dimensions of identity, John D. Ramage acutely observes:
The most obvious aspects of our given identity include our genetic and family structure; the time, place, and circumstances of our birth; and our pasts. The readymade, meanwhile, includes those identities that we have not ourselves constructed, that have been prefabricated by others and are on offer through the workplace, the marketplace, and the cultural space we occupy. To varying degrees, these readymade identities may serve our interests, but not before they serve the interests of those who construct and exploit them—those who employ us, those who sell us goods and services, or those who have an interest in influencing and shaping the priorities of our larger culture. Our constructed identity, meanwhile, is as much a negative capacity as it is a positive one, insofar as none of us constructs an identity all on our own out of nothing. We construct our selves based on available models and within the limits of that which we’ve been given.[24]
While Goldman suggests that McMurphy writes a script for himself, McMurphy does not invent that script out of nothingness. He must choose among several available identities as he constructs his own, ultimately settling on the archetype of the rugged nonconformist. This identity only serves McMurphy’s interest long enough to rattle Nurse Ratched before it leads to McMurphy’s downfall, whereas it ultimately perpetuates the dominant cultural discourse of self-made individualism that fuels capitalistic ideology. Therefore, McMurphy’s choice of the ready-made identity of the rebellious individualist actually benefits the dominant ideology more than it does McMurphy.
Nicholson’s vision of McMurphy differs from both Forman’s and Goldman’s. Nicholson performs McMurphy not as an individualist fighting against an oppressive communist state nor an existentialist consciously creating his identity through the choices he makes but as a narcissist who believes he can seduce Nurse Ratched into relaxing her control over him and allowing him to leave the ward. Nicholson told one interviewer, “The secret of Cuckoo’s Nest—and it’s not in the book—my secret design for it was that this guy’s a scamp who knows he’s irresistible to women and in reality he expects Nurse Ratched to be seduced by him.”[25] After he returns from shock therapy, for instance, McMurphy teases Nurse Ratched, “Hot to trot. Next woman takes me on is gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars.” McMurphy’s sly grin and devilish twinkle in the eye are intended to charm Nurse Ratched into relaxing her tightly controlled sexual indifference toward McMurphy. Nicholson kept the seduction a secret from everyone except Louise Fletcher. “I discussed this only with her,” he told Rosenbaum, “That’s what I felt was actually happening with that character—it was one long, unsuccessful seduction, which the guy was so pathologically sure of.”[26] Nicholson’s infusion of this trait into McMurphy’s personality without the direction of Forman or the scriptwriting of Goldman highlights Nicholson’s function as the auteur of one of the film’s most important aspects—the psychological composition of McMurphy.
Ironically, McMurphy feigns one mental illness to escape prison work duty only to suffer a separate psychological disorder unknowingly. In Nicholson’s estimation, this deluded certainty in the irresistibility of his charms ultimately causes McMurphy’s downfall: “This is his tragic flaw. This is why he ultimately fails.”[27] McMurphy’s narcissism thus does the dominant ideology’s bidding. Requiring the support of the white male performance, ideological state apparatuses want McMurphy to be narcissistic so that he willingly carries the white man’s burden. White males must be somewhat narcissistic to pursue self-interest or else capitalism would not thrive, the economy would crumble, and many of the wealthiest Americans would lose their fortunes. Like Gittes, whose narcissistic belief in his superior intellectual prowess condemns him to repeat past mistakes, McMurphy tragically overestimates his ability to seduce Nurse Ratched.
While the film posits McMurphy’s masculinity as a positive force that combats the negative power of institutions, Nicholson’s performance actually reveals how the dominant culture absorbs that rugged individualism, processes it, and spits it out by playing into the narcissism that supports it. For instance, when McMurphy rides Bancini’s shoulders shouting “put it in the basket, Chief,” Nurse Ratched may display disapproval, but she does nothing to stop McMurphy from playing. Competitive sports tacitly reinforce male dominance by teaching men to dominate over each other. Embedded in this ritual is one of the major ideological underpinnings of American capitalism. While Nurse Ratched may object to McMurphy’s boisterousness, she condones the ritual to which he applies it. As long as males perform the rituals needed to perpetuate capitalism and the competitiveness that supports it, they are allowed to continue; however, they are given only enough space to practice their individualistic enterprises before the dominant culture starts to rein them in. McMurphy may appear to possess freedom, but he is still a prisoner in Nurse Ratched’s ward and therefore must check his impulsive energy. Similarly, individuals in American society may feel empowered by democratic processes, but they are still subject to inhibiting ideological forces.
Males especially suffer the illusion that their “rugged individualism” affords them economic superiority when in reality it hardly exists in a post–World War II marketplace, much less places them in a position to achieve social mobility. Since rugged individualism requires narcissism for its existence (if fictional characters and real-life individualists like Natty Bumppo and Daniel Boone were not self-absorbed, the frontier would never have been forged), the dominant cultural discourse boosts male egos by praising physical prowess in sports, masculine aggressiveness in business and politics, and vigilante justice in films, television shows, and video games; on the other hand, that same discourse denigrates excessive individualism by labeling overly outspoken children with disorders, pigeonholing anyone who expresses dissent against the dominant culture as either a socialist or a radical libertarian, and chastising athletes for showboating or hogging the ball. By massaging male egos while punishing excessive individualism, the dominant cultural discourse ensures that males exhibit just enough individualism to keep capitalism going but not enough to incite protest or to allow a disruption in the juggernaut of Western civilization. Because McMurphy’s nonconformity, fueled by his narcissism, takes him too far outside the level of rugged individualism allowed in society, the institution first tries to rein it in with therapy, then tries to shock it out of him, and finally excises it from him.
Nicholson’s contribution to the film, then, adds complexity to this allegorical fable of one man’s dissent against authority. Without the nuance of Nicholson’s narcissism, McMurphy would only be an archetype of individualism supporting Forman’s and Goldman’s thematic visions. With Nicholson’s performance, the film achieves a level of ironic commentary about hegemonic masculinity that Kesey’s novel, Forman’s film, and Goldman’s screenplay could not have accomplished alone.
Nicholson (left), Joel Douglas (center), and Michael Douglas (right) enjoy an off-camera moment on the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Michael Douglas chose Nicholson to play McMurphy due to his perfomance in The Last Detail. Nicholson’s knowing look at the camera recalls several self-reflexive moments in his films in the 1970s. © Photofest.
Nicholson achieves his ironic commentary in Cuckoo’s Nest through his dislocation technique, wherein he simultaneously plays not only a man divided between his desire to make authentic choices and the pressure to participate in the male masquerade but also the “Jack Nicholson” audiences had come to know as a devilish trickster who manages to “wink” at the audience during his performance. Nowhere is this effect more apparent than in the scene in Dr. Spivey’s office soon after McMurphy arrives at the hospital. Like Prince Hamlet, who feigned an “antic disposition” while he investigated the murder of his father, McMurphy pretends to be mad to escape prison work detail. Comparing McMurphy, a lazy statutory rapist, to the tragic hero of one of the greatest plays of all time heightens the absurdity of McMurphy’s situation. While Hamlet’s ruse serves a noble cause—the enactment of revenge to appease the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father—McMurphy’s subterfuge only serves his own indolence. Dr. Spivey immediately recognizes McMurphy’s ploy and simply humors him throughout the interview, during which McMurphy attempts to draw Dr. Spivey into a chauvinistic discourse involving the genitalia of an underage girl. While most viewers would be appalled by McMurphy’s obnoxious remarks and the reprehensible act that sent him to prison, Nicholson manages to deflect many viewers’ animosity by distancing himself from the character’s comments. Not only does McMurphy’s pretense diminish the abrasiveness of his comments, but Nicholson’s iconic smirk and knowing glint in the eye signals to the viewer Nicholson’s awareness of the absurdity of McMurphy’s comments.
By distancing himself from McMurphy’s comments, Nicholson reminds viewers that they are watching a film. Nicholson’s performance, while more naturalistic than in previous films, continues Nicholson’s ongoing commentary about the role of white males in American society. This commentary involves the function of narcissism in the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity. Even though McMurphy’s narcissism fails to seduce Nurse Ratched, McMurphy repeats the male masquerade because he wants the accolades for his performance. Ideological state apparatuses want this repetition to occur to ensure the perpetuation of the dominant culture that requires the support of the white male performance. Despite Forman’s realistic direction and Goldman’s humanistic script, Nicholson’s authorial influence breaks through and manages to critique the white man’s burden much as he did in previous films.
By the end of the decade, Nicholson evokes the “Jack Nicholson” persona of Carnal Knowledge, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest once again, and his frightening use of the dislocation technique harkens back to these earlier characters but reaches an apex of stylized, affected theatrics, revealing a disastrous case of one man carrying the white man’s burden too far.
1. Dennis McDougal, Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 167.
2. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, DVD (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002).
3. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
4. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
5. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
6. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
7. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
8. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (lecture, Club Maintenant, October 29, 1945), from Marxists.org, Jean-Paul Sartre, accessed April 12, 2012, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.
10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 2nd ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 199.
11. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.
12. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205.
13. Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), xx.
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 1: 18.
15. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 65.
16. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 53–91.
17. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
18. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
19. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
20. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
21. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
22. McDougal, Five Easy Decades, 176.
23. The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
24. John D. Ramage, Rhetoric: A User’s Guide (New York: Pearson, 2006), 42–43.
25. Ron Rosenbaum, “Acting: The Method and Mystique of Jack Nicholson,” New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1986, 4, accessed April 23, 2012, LexisNexis Academic.
26. Rosenbaum, “Acting,” 4.
27. Rosenbaum, “Acting,” 4.
White man’s burden, Lloyd, my man. White man’s burden.—Jack Nicholson in The Shining
Imitation is suicide.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The “Jack Nicholson” persona of the 1970s spans a continuum from characters on the left who exist on the cusp of the counterculture and mainstream society to characters on the right who are firmly entrenched within dominant forms of masculinity. Of the characters on this latter pole, Jonathan from Carnal Knowledge constructs the mask of the cocksman, while Badass Buddusky from The Last Detail adopts an aggressive, virulent pose of no-nonsense masculinity. Further to the right than even these two overly masculine characters is Jack Torrance, the main character of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), who dutifully fulfills his role as breadwinner to the nuclear family until the pressures of carrying the white man’s burden become too great for him to bear, and he plummets over the edge. Torrance’s inner tension between the restrictive role he is forced to play as breadwinning patriarch and his desire to express himself creatively through writing emerges through Nicholson’s heightening of the dislocation technique, which results in a highly stylized, theatrical performance that confounded critics and audiences of the period. Nicholson was the perfect choice for the role not only because of the “Jack Nicholson” persona, which was enhanced by his Oscar-winning performance as the iconoclastic Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman, 1975), but also because of the actor’s understanding of Torrance’s inner tension. Nicholson grew up in 1950s America and had felt the restrictive effect of that decade on self-expression.[1] Because a wide gap exists between Torrance’s desire (to be a creative person) and his interpellated[2] role (which imposes breadwinning over his desire), he experiences heightened inner tension; consequently, he erupts into violent outbursts toward his wife and son, whom he perceives as the sources of his alienation.
Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name but highly adapted for the screen, The Shining begins with ominous shots of the Torrance family car winding its way up a mountain to the Overlook Hotel, where Jack Torrance accepts a position as caretaker for the winter. Not long after the hotel staff vacates for the season and the family settles in, Danny, Jack’s prescient little boy, begins to see disturbing images not only of twin sisters who entice him to play with them but also of a torrent of blood flooding a hotel corridor. Simultaneously, Jack, who accepted the position so that he could work on his novel, develops writer’s block and becomes increasingly frustrated with his family. Suggesting that he is possessed by a malevolent spirit that envelopes the hotel, this frustration eventually causes Jack to venture along the same path as his predecessor, a man named Grady who murdered his family with an axe. By the end of the film, intending to follow in Grady’s footsteps, Jack completely succumbs to the influence of the hotel and maniacally lurches through the house wielding an axe. Danny and his mother, Wendy, narrowly escape with their lives, while Jack freezes to death in an outdoor maze, but not before slaying Hallorann, the hotel cook, who shares Danny’s prescience and comes to the hotel with hopes of rescuing the family.
While King’s book gives a psychological profile of each main character—Jack, Wendy, and Danny—and emphasizes the supernatural elements of the Overlook Hotel, Kubrick streamlines the film to a rather concentrated exploration of Jack Torrance. After careful deliberation, Kubrick ultimately concluded that the story should center on Jack and that all the other elements were secondary.[3] Kubrick’s positioning of Jack at the center of the narrative highlights the film’s thematic criticism of the detrimental effects of breadwinning on American males who dutifully carry the burden.
Jack Torrance perfectly embodies the tensions surrounding the white male who steadfastly upholds the roles of the nuclear family wage earner. His responsibilities within the family typify these roles. In the opening interview with Ullman, the hotel manager, Jack says that he formerly worked as a schoolteacher simply to pay the bills, but he now identifies himself as a writer. However, he has not had the opportunity to write because he has been too busy providing for the family, first by teaching and then by being the hotel’s “caretaker” over the winter. His duties as caretaker reflect those of a male sustainer: heating the interior of the hotel, repairing any damages sustained by the weather, and generally performing daily maintenance. Further emphasizing Jack’s typical masculine role, the word caretaker serves as a synonym for breadwinner. Dennis Bingham agrees that Torrance “instinctively puts on and takes off roles assigned to him as a male in society,”[4] and he identifies him as “a prototype of the husband/father in American capitalism.”[5]
Just as Jack typifies male responsibilities, Wendy conforms to the stereotypical image of the housewife. Staying home and taking care of Danny while Jack interviews for the caretaker position, Wendy apparently holds no job other than homemaker (the fact that she is able to pick up and move to the Overlook for the winter suggests that she has no obligations). Along with being a stay-at-home mother, she waits on Jack dutifully. When she first takes the tour of the hotel, the guide shows her the kitchen instead of Jack, as if there is no question of her domesticity. The kitchen, Wendy’s central location throughout the film, contains all the necessary supplies both for her family’s welfare and for the maintenance of a typical American home.[6] This separation of adult roles between Jack and Wendy positions them as the typical nuclear family.
Along with these differences in sex roles, Jack’s and Wendy’ relationships with Danny emphasize their “proper” enactment of fatherly and motherly behavior according to the nuclear family paradigm. While Jack preserves a distant, emotionally austere relationship with Danny, Wendy nurtures the boy and watches over him protectively. After Danny blacks out following one of his visionary glimpses into the future, Wendy stands over him anxiously while the pediatrician examines him. When the doctor tells Wendy that Danny will be fine, she breathes a clear sigh of relief, demonstrating her overwhelming motherly instinct. The film visually defines Wendy according to her motherly duties.[7] Jack, on the other hand, rarely interacts with his son, and when he does, his actions appear forced and contrived, as if he is putting on the act of the father instead of feeling genuine affection. The distance between Jack and Danny—and Wendy as well—is heightened in scenes where Jack is isolated within the hotel while Wendy and Danny play frivolously outdoors. In one such moment, Jack stands over an indoor model of the outdoor maze and stares down at two ant-size people—revealed to be Wendy and Danny—as they walk through the maze. Not only are they separated by the physical barrier of the hotel walls, but they now exist on separate planes—Jack the patriarch looming large and powerful over his insignificant family.
Jack’s distant relationship with Danny foregrounds his resentment toward the role he is forced to play. Prior to leaving for the hotel, Wendy informs Danny’s pediatrician that before the family moved to Boulder, Jack had dislocated Danny’s shoulder. As Wendy recounts the incident, she covers for her husband by emphasizing that the event was purely accidental and “just the sort of thing you do a hundred times with a child.” Significantly, this account reveals that Jack’s tension exists before the influence of the hotel. According to Wendy, Jack grabbed Danny’s arm when he saw that Danny had scattered Jack’s school papers all over the room. Jack’s explosion toward Danny is an outward manifestation of his frustration with a prescribed lifestyle that draws him away from his desire for creativity. His violent actions result from “an unconscious frustration with his position as an ‘ordinary’ male in society.”[8] According to David Cook, “Jack Torrance is in a classically defined position—that of an American male who both wants and needs to support his family and who, we soon learn, deeply if unconsciously resents the fact.”[9] By providing these details prior to the family’s seclusion within the hotel, the film diminishes the supernatural influence of the hotel and instead points to Jack’s preexisting tension, which has already erupted into violence on at least one occasion, as the root of his mental breakdown. The culprit of Jack’s violence, then, is not the paranormal but the white man’s burden, which forces him to adhere to an outward appearance of role performance that hides a seething inner tension.
Nicholson’s performance during a scene with Danny in the middle of the film further highlights the dichotomy between outward appearance and inner tension. Jack tells Danny to sit on his lap, and he asks him if he is enjoying his time at the hotel. During the scene, Nicholson “performs in a way contrary to what ‘Jack Torrance’ is saying.”[10] Jack tells Danny that he loves him and would never do anything to harm him, but he delivers the words mechanically and unconvincingly. His facial expressions and palpable coldness toward his son undercut his feigned affection. The viewer senses that Jack secretly wants to break Danny’s neck.[11] Jack’s rational will, formed by his immersion in the dominant ideology, still exerts its influence over his desire to act on underlying impulses; therefore, he continues to perform the part of the loving father dictated by his place in society.
Jack’s place within hegemonic masculinity demands that he repress “feminine” creativity to display the masculine traits needed for his societal role. Feminist psychoanalytic critic Nancy Chodorow argues that the male subject forms his sense of self through denying his initial connection with femininity. In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Chodorow argues that men must continually “re-earn” their masculinity by constantly performing masculine traits. Creativity must be repressed as a frivolous waste of masculine energy, which should be exerted in more practical endeavors.[12] The roles society expects men to perform, including breadwinner, patriarch, caretaker, disciplinarian, and so on, force the male subject into repressing certain traits designated by the ideology as feminine. Because Jack is wound up in the performance of manly duties, he loses touch with his creative impulse and develops writer’s block. This problem becomes evident after the family has moved into the hotel, and Jack resolves to get some writing completed. As Wendy and Danny explore the outdoor maze, Jack bounces a tennis ball off the wall instead of writing. Jack’s creative energy has been displaced into a pointless act of wasted energy.[13]
The stultifying effect of Jack’s repression manifests itself in the only line he is able to write: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Significantly, this line, which was added to the film, underscores one of the character’s basic tensions: the difficulty of expressing oneself while being interpellated into the roles associated with the white man’s burden. In Jack’s case, by repressing his “feminine” creativity to be the family’s (and the hotel’s) “caretaker,” he subsequently becomes “a dull boy.” Because he yearns to express himself yet struggles to release his repressed creativity, he ultimately lashes out at those he deems responsible—his family. Nicholson felt that the repetition of the line had “a particularly terrifying quality to it. Even though it involves nothing more than a handful of words written on a page, it’s one of the most effective scenes in the film.”[14] Nicholson’s reaction illustrates the extent to which he understood the surrounding pressures of being a family man while also trying to express himself creatively.
Jack’s violent behavior in the film’s later scenes stems from his resentment toward the role he is forced to play as the breadwinner. At one point, Jack tells Wendy that he thinks Danny injured himself, and Wendy says that they should remove Danny from the hotel. Jack reacts aggressively and snarls, “It’s so fucking typical of you to create a problem like this when I finally have a chance to accomplish something! When I’m really into my work! I could really write my own ticket if I went back to Boulder now, couldn’t I? Shoveling out driveways, work in a car wash. Any of that appeal to you? Wendy, I have let you fuck up my life so far, but I am not going to let you fuck this up!” Despite Jack’s creative stagnation, he manufactures a sense of artistic progression because he refuses to settle for a lifestyle of servile jobs in Boulder. Jack views his life prior to the hotel as enslavement to breadwinning responsibilities. Ironically, he cannot “write [his] own ticket” as the caretaker of the Overlook either, as the hotel has confined him to a repetition of its violent patriarchal history. However, rather than blaming patriarchy (symbolized by the Overlook) for imposing expectations onto the male subject, Jack lashes out at Wendy, who becomes the scapegoat for all the surrounding pressures the white man’s burden has placed upon him.
Jack’s tirade toward Wendy during the following scene on a staircase further sheds light on this connection to societal pressures. As Jack menacingly moves toward Wendy, gesticulating wildly and shouting madly, his dialogue demonstrates the pressures of a man trying to fulfill his social obligation while simultaneously rejecting that obligation:
Have you ever had a single moment’s thought about my responsibilities? Have you ever thought for a single solitary moment about my responsibilities to my employers? Has it ever occurred to you that I have agreed to look over the Overlook Hotel until May 1st? Does it matter to you at all that the owners have placed their complete confidence and trust in me and that I have signed a letter of agreement—a contract—in which I have accepted that responsibility? Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is? Do you? Has it ever occurred to you what would happen to my future if I were to fail to live up to my responsibilities? (emphasis mine)
The repetition of the word responsibilities highlights the burdens associated with white manhood. Furthermore, by referring to a broad contract that has moral and ethical implications, Jack implies that his concern about responsibilities transcends the bond with his employers to look after the Overlook Hotel and applies to an overall agreement with society. As an archetypal white male, Jack expresses anxiety over failing to fulfill his societal role as a male subject. Significantly, he lashes out at Wendy even while he steadfastly defends his obligation to the very forces that bind him to that role—in this case, his employers at the Overlook. Jack fails to see the larger picture of the ubiquitous forces containing him within a stultifying ready-made identity; instead, he blames Wendy for his suffocation because she offers a concrete embodiment of the institutions that enslave him, despite the fact that she is also a victim of the same powers.
In this terrifying scene, Nicholson exaggerates the dislocation technique to highlight Jack Torrance’s violent backlash to the role he is forced to play as a breadwinner in American society. Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance becomes the scapegoat for all his pent-up frustrations. Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest. © Warner Bros. Pictures.
By recognizing Wendy as this concrete embodiment and soliciting Jack to murder her and Danny (Delbert Grady pressures him to fulfill his pact with the hotel after Wendy locks him in the walk-in freezer), the Overlook Hotel symbolizes the history of patriarchy, namely in its oppression of women as a means to ensure its perpetuation. A consequence of the dominant ideology’s maintenance of male dominance is the scapegoat ritual; if men begin to perceive the ideology as the cause of their burdens, then they might reject it. To avoid this eventuality, the ideology poses women and the family as the restrictive forces in men’s lives—hence the continuing fascination with the all-male frontier (spanning back to Natty Bumppo, Daniel Boone, and Huck Finn) as a means to escape the responsibilities of the family. But ideology is never monolithic, and running simultaneously with the frontier ideology is the responsible breadwinner construct, which positions the male within the nuclear family and denigrates him if he fails to hold up his responsibilities. The Overlook Hotel continues the cycle of patriarchy not only by enslaving Jack as the caretaker but by enlisting him to assert his dominance over his family. Just as he fails to see overriding social forces operating in his life outside the hotel, he never questions the hotel’s usurpation of his autonomy and completely submits to its bidding, a blind performer of the ideological role he loathes so vehemently.
The Overlook’s origins also tie it significantly with patriarchal civilization. When Ullman gives Jack and Wendy a tour of the hotel on their arrival, he mentions that it was built on sacred Indian burial grounds. Kubrick added this detail to the screenplay, and according to Diane Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick, the director conceived of the idea before she joined the project.[15] While the addition could simply serve the purpose of heightening the hotel’s supernatural aura, Bingham offers a more complex interpretation: “the hotel’s (the country’s) past is built on the conquest of others, whose culture it then appropriates and assimilates into the mainstream. Similarly the fact of oppression is repressed and assimilated into an ordinary life (plain, unexceptional, according-to-the-order) as bland as the film’s conversations between people.”[16] For patriarchy to persist, the dominant culture must conquer and assimilate cultures deemed inferior, but at the same time it must collectively repress its domination to preserve its outward refinement and heightened civilized veneer. In addition to a division of sex roles, the white man’s burden entails maintaining a paradigm that positions the white male not only as the bearer of his family’s financial stress but also as the carrier of his culture’s repressed guilt.
The hotel’s oppressive past, consisting of “class oppression (‘all the best people’ stayed there, according to Ullman), murder, and violence, ultimately mirrors Jack’s violent tendencies, which seem based on an unconscious frustration with his position as an ‘ordinary’ male in society.”[17] It is impossible to untangle Jack’s anxiety over his role in society from his repressed guilt as a white, middle-class male. His position is complex and contradictory. He reacts against his burden as a family man yet feels inextricably bound to it by ideology. At the same time, maintaining that position requires the continual domination of women and minorities; thus, his nation’s collective guilt lurks in his subconscious, always ready to resurface in violent, abnormal ways—just as Jack’s repressed guilt over dislocating Danny’s shoulder emerges during the scene in the Gold Room.
By drawing a connection between the hotel’s repression of the nation’s collective guilt and Jack’s repression of his own violent past, the film confirms that patriarchal institutions inevitably result in a cycle of violence. As soon as Jack enters the patriarchal order of the hotel (probably when he says, in Faustian fashion, “I’d give my goddamn soul for just a glass of beer” right before Lloyd miraculously appears), his fate is to carry on for his predecessor Delbert Grady. Jack’s image in the haunting photograph taken in the Gold Room in 1921 further hints that his place among the patriarchal order is preordained—as Grady informs him, he has “always been the caretaker.” According to Bingham, “The hotel’s treatment of Jack rests on a process of getting him to remember repressed attitudes of resentment, hostility, and murder.”[18] This treatment involves drawing out both his long-repressed memory of the incident with Danny and his feelings of resentment toward Wendy for imprisoning him as a breadwinner. Both Bingham and Ciment note the key role repression plays in the film, and they cite the influence of Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” which Diane Johnson read in preparation for the screenwriting process.[19] In the essay, Freud identifies “the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts.”[20] Jack experiences this compulsion in his desire to repeat Grady’s gruesome axe murders of his family. Freud defines the “uncanny” as “something repressed which recurs,” and that the “something repressed” is neither new nor alien but that “which is familiar and old—established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”[21] Thus, patriarchal guilt over its violent past, when repressed for an extended period, invariably returns, and humanity’s instinctual compulsion for repetition ensures that patriarchal violence will continue.
This repressed and assimilated violence, surfacing at times, is part of the history of the white man’s burden. In 1899, Rudyard Kipling coined the term “White Man’s Burden” in a poem of the same name. Kipling described the white man’s burden as “the mission to civilize savage races.”[22] Kipling “used the term . . . to urge white males to take up the racial burden of civilization’s advancement.”[23] Since Kipling saw white males as the apex of civilized breeding, he believed that they had “the right and duty to conquer uncivilized races.”[24] Gail Bederman argues that at the turn of the century, “Anglo-Saxonist imperialists insisted that civilized men had a racial genius for self-government which necessitated the conquest of more ‘primitive,’ darker races.”[25] Thus, Kipling’s call-to-arms in “The White Man’s Burden” invokes a set of assumptions about the superiority of the white race that Americans used as a justification for imperialism at a time when the frontier was officially closed and Americans were looking for other ways to fulfill their manifest destiny. Since “civilized white men were the most manly ever evolved—firm of character; self-controlled; protectors of women and children,”[26] they were the natural torchbearers of civilization. It became the civilized white male’s duty to conquer and rule paternalistically over more “savage” races. While Kipling may not have intended for his poem to justify violent imperialistic endeavors, it nevertheless attached itself to the American consciousness as such. The concept of the white man’s burden thus assimilated the nation’s collective guilt over slavery and the annihilation of Native American cultures into its clean, innocent message of Christian charity and advanced, civilized breeding, just as the sanitized, highly civilized Overlook Hotel stands on Indian burial grounds.
Significantly, Kubrick’s screenplay retains the line, “White man’s burden, Lloyd, my man,” from King’s novel. In the novel, King immerses the line in several pages of dialogue between Jack and Lloyd, most of which Kubrick eliminates from the screenplay. The fact that Jack’s dialogue in the film reduces the line to a cliché ironically mirrors the dominant culture’s act of repression: it presents the juggernaut of white male hegemony as a hackneyed cliche, thus denying its potency. Jack says the line as an empty phrase akin to other mechanical dialogue between characters in the film, and his off-the-cuff manner illustrates the ideology’s function in flattening the term’s meaning to repress societal guilt, just as Ullman mentions the burial grounds in an offhand, emotionless fashion. The line also occurs in close proximity to the moment Jack seemingly consigns himself to the patriarchal order (in the Gold Room), thus binding Jack, the hotel, and the concept of the white man’s burden inextricably together. By retaining the “white man’s burden” line and positioning it at a crucial moment in Jack’s relationship with the hotel (the patriarchal order), Kubrick concentrates the three major strands of meaning into the film’s pivotal hinge.
Instead of the supernatural influence of the hotel, Jack’s relationship to the white man’s burden and the patriarchal order it supports become the focal point of the film. Kubrick and Johnson streamline a horror novel convoluted with narrative strands that go nowhere into a highly focused epic with archetypal significance. Their screenwriting decisions, including focusing the story on Jack, adding the detail of the Indian burial grounds, and incorporating King’s “white man’s burden” line, bring King’s long-winded tale to a precise, laser-focused storyline that carries cultural significance. Along with the screenwriting, Nicholson’s contributions to the film as an auteur, an actor, and a persona focus the meaning on the white man’s burden. His autobiographical inclusion of elements of his own failed marriage to Sarah Knight within the film helps to embody the pressures surrounding the white male trying to play the role of the family man. His dislocation technique effectively captures the gestures and tensions of the male subject who carries the burden. Finally, his constructed persona greatly prefigures viewer expectations for the film and brings a set of attitudes that, if removed, would largely diminish the film’s impact. All of these elements come together to produce a highly critical denunciation of monstrous, destructive patriarchy.
Just as the diner scene in Five Easy Pieces and the bar scene from The Last Detail relate to real-life Nicholson moments, Nicholson’s inclusion of incidents and emotional residue from his marriage to Sarah Knight in the film’s typewriter scene enacts Nicholson’s own frustration with societal pressures. The typewriter scene, which foregrounds not only Jack’s writer’s block but also his frustration and resentment toward Wendy, is a pivotal scene in the film because it emphasizes the social forces at work in Jack’s deterioration rather than the supernatural influences. Along with his performance, then, Nicholson brings an autobiographical element to the film.
As both a writer and a family man pressured to enact a prescribed role, Nicholson was the perfect choice to play Jack Torrance. Kubrick purportedly cast Nicholson in the role before he even finished reading the novel, indicating that he felt Nicholson was the right fit.[27] Nicholson told one interviewer that he could “understand this guy’s [Jack Torrance’s] writer’s block” because he used to write.[28] Having just finished the screenplay to Goin’ South and having written a number of scripts in the 1960s, Nicholson could empathize with Torrance’s struggles with creative expression.[29] In fact, Nicholson discussed the autobiographical element of the film during an interview with the New York Times:
That’s the one scene in the movie I wrote myself. That scene at the typewriter—that’s what I was like when I got my divorce. I was under the pressure of being a family man with a daughter and one day I accepted a job to act in a movie in the daytime and I was writing a movie at night and I’m back in my little corner and my beloved wife Sandra, [sic] walked in on what was [sic] unbeknownst to her, this maniac—and I told Stanley about it and we wrote it into the scene.[30] (emphasis mine)
Nicholson’s description of his wife’s entrance into the room mirrors the scene in the film when Wendy disturbs Jack while he is “working.” In fact, in Nicholson’s interview with critic Michael Ciment, the actor claimed that “a poetics of autobiography” always exists for actors and directors, and that during the performance of the typewriter scene, he recalled arguments with his ex-wife.[31] Nicholson’s understanding of the burdens associated with trying to balance creative expression with the duties of a nuclear family man informed his performance of this crucial scene in the film by creating a compelling tension. Since Nicholson wrote this pivotal scene, which foregrounds Torrance’s resentment toward his societal role, his contribution to the film greatly transcends mere performance. If another actor were chosen in his place, the typewriter scene would be missing, and the film would not carry such a potent indictment of the white man’s burden. By projecting his own experiences with the white man’s burden onto the character of Jack Torrance, Nicholson effectively captures its damaging effects.
Stanley Kubrick (left) pictured Nicholson as Jack Torrance from the moment he began pre-production on The Shining. Without some of Nicholson’s real-life experiences, the film would not be what it is today. Like Nicholson’s work with other 1970s auteurs, his collaboration with Kubrick was truly symbiotic. Warner Bros. Pictures/Photofest. © Warner Bros. Pictures.
To convey the damaging effects caused by his immersion within hegemonic masculinity, Nicholson effectively enhances the dislocation technique during the typewriter scene. As Torrance sits and types, isolated in the center of a vast, open room, Wendy enters and approaches with the intent of engaging in small talk. As soon as she speaks, he rips the paper out of the typewriter and abruptly answers her. When she asks, “Get a lot written today?” he leans his head backward, and with noticeable agitation he glares up at her and succinctly answers, “Yes.” Despite his obvious intimations to be left alone, she proceeds to chitchat about an impending snowstorm. In response, Nicholson fidgets his leg, arches his eyebrows, clears his throat, and grumbles, “What do you want me to do about it?” When she tells him not to be “so grouchy,” his sarcastic smile turns into a clenched grimace as he closes his eyes and jerks his head away from her, thrusting his hand toward the typewriter and snarling, “I’m not being grouchy; I just wanna finish my work.” His delivery of the line drips with seething tension: he slows down the space between words; he puts an exaggerated emphasis on the t in not, the st in just, and the k in work, and he stresses the second syllables in grouchy and finish. To augment these oral flourishes, the nuanced expressions (arched eyebrows, grimaces, clenched teeth, agitated blinking, and other subtle facial variations) blend with affected gestures (the thrusting of the hand, the jerking of the head away from Wendy) to reveal Jack’s building tension.
As the scene continues, Nicholson’s performance becomes even more affected as he brings Jack’s tension closer to the surface. After Wendy jovially offers to bring him a sandwich and suggests that he allow her to read some of his work, he stares up at her menacingly for a few moments, then launches into a tirade about interruptions, telling her that whenever she enters the room she breaks his concentration. During this diatribe, Nicholson’s facial expressions fluctuate dramatically and rapidly. He closes his eyes at length and then quickly blinks them repeatedly; he clenches his teeth in a wide contortion of a mock smile; he arches his eyebrows and squints his eyes threateningly; and he jerks his head in unison with the syllables in the word concentration. As in the diner scene from Five Easy Pieces, the tension then explodes to the surface as Nicholson smacks his forehead with his open hand and then tears up a piece of paper. Once again, the gestures punctuate certain words in the line he delivers: “It will then take me time to get back to where I was.” The forceful gestures accompanying certain stressed words or syllables is a Nicholson technique that goes back at least to Carnal Knowledge in the bedroom scene when Jonathan explodes on Bobbie.
As this scene typifies Nicholson’s performance from the midway point of the film onward, several critics have disparaged Nicholson’s exaggerated, stylized portrayal of Jack Torrance. Mario Falsetto writes that analyses of the film frequently focus on Nicholson’s “wild and extreme” performance, which “verg[es] on the hysterical” and “may strike some as overbearing, vulgar and just plain ‘too much.’”[32] In Douglas Brode’s overview of Nicholson’s films, Brode positions himself with the cavalcade of critics who “found the performance to be one of the least disciplined and most mannered ever delivered by Nicholson, usually a remarkably ‘realistic’ actor.”[33] Among the critics who panned Nicholson upon the film’s release were John Simon, Pauline Kael, and Colin L. Westerbeck.
Some critics have attempted to explain Nicholson’s reasons for delivering such an over-the-top performance. In spite of Falsetto’s negative comments, he believes that the over-the-top characteristics and physicality of the performance provide the most invigorating aspects of the film and reveal the fundamental duality of Torrance’s character.[34] Bingham, on the other hand, identifies this performance as Nicholson’s “most purely ‘epic’” in Brechtian terms, meaning that Jack Nicholson the actor distances himself from Jack Torrance the character to comment on the ideologically assigned roles that Torrance plays.[35] Nicholson thus goes “over-the-top” to establish a necessary space for scrutiny. Building on Bingham’s claim for a Brechtian aspect of the performance, Sharon Marie Carnicke argues that Nicholson’s nonnaturalistic style contrasts with Shelly Duvall’s naturalism to produce gendered meanings: the audience empathizes with Duvall instead of Nicholson, and the film therefore has feminist connotations. Carnicke analyzes two scenes from The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut and contends that in both, the male actors (Nicholson and Tom Cruise) create distance between themselves and the audience through Brechtian performances, whereas the females (Duvall and Nicole Kidman) engender empathy through naturalistic performances. Carnicke concludes that these contrasts of acting techniques result in a “feminist subversion of the narrative.”[36] While all three critics agree that Nicholson’s performance is extremely stylized and nonnaturalistic, Falsetto attributes this affectation to Nicholson’s attempts to capture Torrance’s tormented inner nature, which he hides under a highly civilized, artificial veneer. Bingham and Carnicke, on the other hand, see Nicholson’s approach as a means for the actor to distance himself from the character in an attempt not only to scrutinize the character he portrays but also to criticize monstrous patriarchy.
Through ironic detachment, Nicholson does indeed seem to “comment” on Jack Torrance. For example, during one particular scene the camera zooms steadily in on Nicholson’s face as he stares forward at some unseen vision and smiles knowingly, implying “the possibility of complicity between Jack [Nicholson] and the viewer.”[37] In addition, Nicholson’s self-reflexive, exaggerated reactions to Wendy during the typewriter scene break verisimilitude; they produce the effect that he is aware of being watched and subsequently “hams it up,” which was Pauline Kael’s initial criticism.[38] Yet, an ironic detachment does not necessarily preclude an accurate portrayal; in other words, Nicholson’s duality as actor/character mirrors Torrance’s division between conscious will and repressed desires. In a sense, Torrance’s behavior as a male subject performing the traits associated with masculinity reflects Nicholson’s manners and actions as an actor portraying a man. The resulting layering effect thus calls into question whether any “natural” masculinity truly exists.
Nicholson’s modernistic performance conveys much of the film’s subversion of “natural” masculinity. Through the dislocation technique, Nicholson highlights the constructed nature of Torrance’s character, who struggles between his duty to society to enact a male role and his duty to himself to make authentic choices. Contrary to notions that Torrance’s violence results from the hotel’s supernatural influence, Jack’s tension is immediately detectable in the beginning of the film. When Jack meets Ullman, the hotel manager, Nicholson highlights the artificial pose that Jack adopts in this meeting, immediately foregrounding Jack’s dual nature.[39] He tries to be excessively affable and accommodating, but he reacts grimly to Ullman’s description of Grady’s axe murders. While Ullman describes the murders lightheartedly, Jack’s features express genuine shock, mixed with lurid fascination. This combination subsequently reveals “the dark side of Jack’s character lurking below the surface.”[40] By creating a discrepancy between outward appearances and inner tensions, Nicholson immediately demonstrates not only Jack’s preexisting duality but also the artificial, constructed nature of the male subject.
Jack is not the only character in this scene to impose an affable, artificial veneer over a chaotic inner mind. Several critics note that the characters in this scene appear lifeless and mechanical. Ciment connects their “polite affability” and “stereotyped social relations” with the characters in the scenes on the moon in Kubrick’s earlier film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.[41] Both examples capture the effete quality associated with an overly civilized culture whose inhabitants have repressed their impulses to form the outward mechanisms of civilization. Already apparent at the outset of The Shining, however, is that “outward attempts at decorum cannot master [Jack’s] unconscious drives and responses”;[42] the nature of Jack’s personality seethes just under the surface.
Nicholson’s tension breaks through during the typewriter scene but begins to dominate the role after Wendy accuses Jack of injuring Danny. Wendy’s accusation reminds him of the previous incident when he dislocated Danny’s shoulder, and he feels like she refuses to forgive him for that moment, which he has consigned firmly to the past. To find respite from the family situation, Jack makes his way toward the Gold Room. Falsetto describes Jack’s movements as he moves through the corridor: “He punctuates the air with his fists, lost in his hermetic universe. Nicholson communicates the madness and seething anger of the character by the insistent thrusting of his arms down the sides of his body and into the air, as if striking at some unknown assailant.”[43]
When Jack reaches the Gold Room, Nicholson’s delivery of the conversation with Lloyd is even more frenetic than in the typewriter scene, highlighting Jack’s fractured consciousness. The scene begins, as Nelson and Falsetto point out, with a series of empty clichés, such as “hair of the dog that bit me,” “white man’s burden,” and “women . . . can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.” Jack’s dialogue, contrived and lacking depth, not only resembles the manufactured banter during the scene with Ullman but also betrays his attempt to suppress his true feelings toward Wendy and Danny. This pretense soon falls apart as Jack’s actions and forceful language belie his rationalization of the time he dislocated Danny’s shoulder. “[W]at emerges,” Bingham writes, “absurdly mixed up with the father’s expression of love and duty, is contempt—‘I wouldn’t hurt one hair on his goddamn little head. I love the little son of a bitch!’”[44] When he says that the incident was “completely unintentional,” his eyes look off to the side and a self-aware smirk brushes across his face for a moment. As he explains that “the little fucker had thrown all my papers across the floor,” he demonstratively thrusts his arm downward in unison with the word fucker and then whips it back up and across his body as he bellows, “All I tried to do was pull him up.” Throughout the exchange, his face contorts into grotesque configurations; he smiles wildly and grimaces luridly in quick succession; and he darts his eyes back and forth maniacally. By contrasting his language, gestures, and facial expressions with his words, Nicholson highlights the competing forces of will and desire operating within Jack.
Jack Torrance “sells his soul” to Lloyd, played by Joe Turkel (right), in the ballroom scene from The Shining. Nicholson emphasizes the dislocation technique to exemplify Torrance’s frustration toward his role as Danny’s father. Significantly, he off-handedly remarks, “White man’s burden” to Lloyd, who simply smiles in affirmation. Warner Bros./Photofest. © Warner Bros.
The end result of these competing forces is self-destruction. The tension, which was barely noticeable (but, thanks to Nicholson’s performance, detectable) in the beginning of the film, takes Jack over the edge. Nicholson’s kinetic, nonnaturalistic acting style—an exaggerated manifestation of the dislocation technique—dominates a scene on the staircase toward the end of the film when Wendy threatens Jack with a baseball bat. Carnicke discusses Nicholson’s “energetic use of face and fingers” in this scene, as well as his violent arm motions and emphatic voice projections.[45] Nicholson’s finger and arm movements spurt out from a fractured subconscious. The apotheosis of this effect occurs during the famous “Heeeeere’s Johnny” scene, when Jack smashes through the bathroom door with his axe and thrusts his face through the hole, smiling sinisterly and peering at Wendy out of the corner of his eyes. By choosing a modernistic acting style rather than a naturalistic one, Nicholson is able to convey not only the seething tensions of the male subject forced to perform certain roles but also the constructed nature of masculinity as an ongoing performance rather than as a natural essence. Through Nicholson’s performance, the white man’s burden falls under scrutiny as an inhibiting construct that inevitably leads to violent action.
The theme of the white man’s burden is also wound up with the “Jack Nicholson” construct of the 1970s. Audiences recognize “Jack Nicholson” as an iconoclastic figure who flouts traditional male behavior. He rejects marriage in many of his films (Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The Passenger), and in others he is simply a loner living on the outside of society’s conventions (Easy Rider, The Last Detail, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). But in The Shining, “Jack Nicholson,” with all his recognizable traits, is thrust into the middle of the role so many of his characters avoided and so many others coldly rejected. “Nicholson’s particular history as an actor,” Falsetto writes, “invests the role with additional meaning.”[46] It is impossible to extricate the composite persona from this figure who feels trapped in a societal role like many of Nicholson’s characters would feel if they were in a similar position.
To augment the connection, Nicholson amplifies the dislocation technique, associated with his persona since the famous diner scene in Five Easy Pieces. Bingham accurately argues that “Jack Torrance melds with a star persona and mannerisms that by 1980 are very well defined—the arching eyebrows; the smirking, electric smile; the insinuating, nasal voice. . . . Nicholson’s star persona is fully implicated in the character.”[47] Throughout the performance, Nicholson self-reflexively invokes the “Jack Nicholson” persona through his gestures and mannerisms, and subsequently, Jack Torrance becomes a “pastiche of Nicholson characters.”[48]
The film and the actor ironically comment on the dislocation embodied by “Jack Nicholson.” Audiences who felt drawn to the iconoclasm of Bobby Dupea in the diner as he rebelled against the rule-abiding waitress, and to the rebelliousness of Badass Buddusky in the bar as he flouted the law-abiding bartender, feel alienated by Torrance’s violent gestures toward his wife and son. As audiences incorporate the Torrance character with the existing “Jack Nicholson” persona, they encounter a discrepancy between the empathy established by the earlier rebelliousness and the distance generated by Torrance’s iconoclastic behavior. Instead of empathizing with Torrance’s resistance to forces of containment (namely marriage, which enslaves him in the role of breadwinner and isolates him within the nuclear family as the “caretaker”), audiences empathize with Wendy and Danny in their attempts to escape Jack’s murderous rampage. In some of the film’s most disturbing scenes, including the moments when Wendy confronts Jack about physically abusing Danny and when Jack first enters the Gold Room, Nicholson flails his arms about wildly and maniacally, jabbing into the air in ways that recall earlier Nicholson characters (Dupea in the diner, Jonathan in the bedroom with Bobbie, and Buddusky and Randall McMurphy frequently throughout their films). Audiences recognize these gestures as belonging to the “Jack Nicholson” persona, but instead of lauding Jack Torrance for his resistance to societal restraints, they feel pity and disgust toward this man who has succumbed to his inner darkness. By self-reflexively invoking “Jack Nicholson” in depicting a monstrous killer, Nicholson deconstructs his own unique persona and subsequently shows up the dislocation as a detrimental product of societal forces, not the rebellious manifestation of self-reliant individualism against mechanical conformity.
This deconstruction, coupled with Nicholson’s nonnaturalistic acting style throughout the film, unmasks the artificial nature of identity. Whereas previous audiences lauded Bobby Dupea and Randle McMurphy for their rejection of the artificial restraints society places on individual expression, The Shining reveals that the rebellious behavior of “Jack Nicholson” is not a natural materialization of the characters’ inner selves but a product of their inner tensions. In other words, if “Jack Nicholson” of the 1970s came to stand for the fight of rugged individualism against repressive societal forces, then Nicholson’s performance in The Shining implodes this construct by showing up the persona as a victim of societal forces, not a champion of the counterculture.
This implosion approach works even better than the authentic antihero approach (Five Easy Pieces, The Passenger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) at challenging the white man’s burden. Whereas the antihero persona attacked carrying the burden outright, The Shining does so implicitly through its rejection of “naturalness.” In the previous films, Nicholson’s naturalistic presentation of the characters, along with the films’ treatments of the authentic/artificial dichotomy, created an opposition between natural, authentic masculinity and the societal forces that sought to mold it. In contrast to this natural approach, Nicholson’s modernistic performance in The Shining and the film’s ironic tone toward Jack Torrance and the events depicted conflate the natural/artificial binary. Nicholson imbues Torrance with a dualistic nature, but the duality derives not from his authentic self versus society but from the tension between conscious and subconscious, expression and repression, and so on. While attempting to subvert the dominant order, the natural antihero approach inadvertently plays into the dominant ideology by perpetuating certain hegemonic myths, such as rugged individualism, self-made manhood, and nonconformity—the very myths that fuel the American capitalist ideology. The implosion approach, on the other hand, tears apart those myths and unmasks them as simply another product of ideology.
By imploding the “Jack Nicholson” persona, The Shining subverts not only the traits of autonomous masculinity associated with it but also the notion of any “natural,” essential masculinity. The film shows that one generation’s masculinity is simply a simulation of the previous generation’s representations of masculinity, which themselves were simulations of simulations. According to Jean Baudrillard, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.”[49] The models generated for masculinity are comprised of all the archetypes contained in literature, films, plays, advertisements, oral traditions, and so forth. Just as every new Jack Nicholson character resituates the “Jack Nicholson” persona, each successive generation builds upon its predecessor’s simulations of masculinity to produce its own simulations, thus creating an irreducible maze without a discoverable center or essential core.
Since simulations take precedence over corporal realities in The Shining, the film captures the irreducible nature of representation. For instance, the Jack Torrance of the narrative present simulates a hanging photograph that features Jack at a grand ball in 1921. Since the film’s final image is of the smiling Jack Torrance in the photograph, defying temporal reality by existing in both 1921 and the present, rather than of the frozen, corporal Jack outside in the maze, the film indicates that simulations supersede realities. This same doubling effect takes place with the two Grady characters in the film.[50] Jack recognizes a waiter in the Gold Room as Delbert Grady but then realizes that he is the same man as Charles Grady, the previous caretaker who slaughtered his family with an axe and killed himself. Neither of the Grady characters is a living corporeal being in current time, yet each appears as “real” as Jack, Wendy, and Danny through the conflation of the two figures in the waiter’s “body.” This conflation suggests that appearances have as much substance as concrete realities. In fact, the ambiguity and doubling in the film’s treatment of Jack and Grady questions the existence of a material certainty that exists prior to the simulations.
By including a maze as a major story element, the film mirrors the simulated nature of masculinity. While King’s novel features “an animal topiary (rabbits, dogs, lions) that keeps moving and guards the entrance to the Overlook Hotel,”[51] Kubrick replaces the topiary with a hedge maze that appears in prominent scenes throughout the film. Just as the maze requires its characters to navigate their way from an outward layer to an exact center, human experience demands that subjects sift through the layers of socially imposed artificiality to find an authentic core of identity. While Wendy and Danny are able to chart their ways to the center and back again in a scene early in the film, Jack cannot effectively navigate the maze when he chases Danny toward the end of the film. His failure to discover the “correct path” leads to his destruction, as he becomes frozen to death in one of the outer layers of the maze. Symbolically, each outer rim of the maze represents another level of artificiality that society imposes on human identity, and when the male subject moves endlessly through the artificial layers of simulated reality, he eventually stagnates. Since Jack becomes “frozen” to one of those rims, the film suggests that men who aren’t able to connect with their authentic selves ultimately destroy themselves through spiritual stagnation.
Nicholson’s “frozen” gaze as he trudges his way through the hedge maze encapsulates Jack Torrance’s entrapment within the performance of a predestined role. Warner Bros./Photofest. © Warner Bros.
Jack is doomed to become trapped within the maze from the beginning. Like a man staring into a funhouse mirror, Jack cannot find the center of the maze because the levels of simulation imposed by society are so dense that the beginning is beyond sight and identity cannot be reduced to an essential core. Symbolically, the film contains a model of the maze inside the hotel to suggest a maze-within-a-maze construction similar to the funhouse design.[52] Because Jack is unable to find the center, he inevitably winds up a simulation himself—a frozen mask of a dead man’s face in the present, mirrored by Jack’s “frozen” expression in the photograph from 1921. The image of the photograph ends the film because it is a simulation of Jack Torrance, who is also a simulation of Charles Grady because he attempts to repeat Grady’s murders. This layering effect suggests that simulations are all that exist. Similarly, the frozen expression on Jack’s corpse intimates not only the masklike construction of identity but also the “Jack Nicholson” construction, which can never be reduced to an actual, living human being. By fixing Jack’s corpse to the outer rim of the maze, the film symbolizes both the simulated nature of masculinity and the irreducible character of identity.
Kubrick mirrors this thematic maze through the film’s structure. The film begins on the outermost layer of the maze and moves inward toward the center through a parallel movement from linearity to temporal displacement. In the process, the film adheres to viewer expectations in the beginning but slowly tears them apart as it progresses.[53] In linear fashion, the film opens with a scene that provides the film’s exposition. The interview between Ullman and Torrance contains dialogue that establishes key plot points, such as Jack’s responsibilities as caretaker, the hotel’s history (including the story of Grady’s axe murders), and Jack’s aspirations to become a writer. The scene also foreshadows later events in the film (Jack says his wife is a horror-story addict; the axe murders hint at what’s to come). The film’s cause-and-effect logic continues as Jack’s interview with Ullman secures his position as the caretaker, thus prompting his family to move to the Overlook Hotel. The next segment of the film, entitled “Closing Day,” follows linearly in sequence from the first, showing Jack introducing Wendy and Danny to Ullman and Hallorann. During this section, a scene between Hallorann and Danny provides further exposition not only about both characters’ “shining” abilities but also about the hotel’s sordid past, which has left a spiritual residue. The scene also foreshadows later scenes involving Room 237, as Hallorann warns Danny never to go near it. By establishing a clear linearity and cause-and-effect logic in these early sections, Kubrick adheres to viewer expectations of film structures.
This adherence reveals the constructed nature of linear narratives. Just as human societies impose a set of simulated traits on males, they also construct artificial, teleological narratives over otherwise chaotic human experience. This artificiality constitutes the outermost rim of Kubrick’s maze and is the most visible layer to the human subject. Like the person entering into the maze, the spectator of The Shining proceeds through the outermost layer of linearity toward the maze’s core as the film progresses.
Kubrick disrupts temporal progression when Jack enters into the Gold Room after Wendy accuses him of harming Danny, thus subverting viewer expectations and exposing the underlying chaos of human experience. While the outermost layer of the maze hides the chaos with a veneer of temporal order, the inner layers begin to reveal the cracks in human artificiality as viewers move closer to the center of the narrative. Lloyd’s appearance in the Gold Room defies temporal laws because Jack obviously recognizes him from a previous encounter; in fact, his dialogue indicates a long-time, familiar acquaintance, as if the two were longstanding confidantes. Yet the film previously establishes that Jack has never been to the Overlook Hotel. Even if Lloyd is a ghost from the hotel’s past, his familiarity with Jack undercuts the temporal logic of the film.
The cracks in temporal sequence widen as the film moves inward toward the “center” of its mazelike structure. For instance, after Wendy entreats Jack to take the family away from the hotel, Jack violently storms out of the room and makes his way to the Gold Room, where he sees a 1920s ball in progress. Along with an obvious breach in chronological time, this scene contains further displacements. Jack’s clothing—blue jeans, a casual 1970s jacket, and a flannel shirt—stands out as blatantly modern compared to the formal wear of the other guests. Additionally, Jack meets up with a waiter who identifies himself as Delbert Grady, but Jack recognizes him from newspapers as Charles Grady, the man who murdered his family and committed suicide. When Jack confronts Grady about this discrepancy, the waiter claims that he has always been at the Overlook Hotel, implying that Delbert and Charles are the same person in different time periods. In response to Jack’s assertion that Grady had been the caretaker at the Overlook, Grady says, “I’m sorry to differ with you, sir. But you . . . are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker.” Throughout the entire scene, Jack is unaffected by these obvious contradictions and accepts them at face value. In fact, he appears perfectly comfortable in his surroundings, as if he has always been part of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick’s subversions of temporal sequence in this scene throw up obstacles in the way of filmgoers’ expectations for narrative, thus suggesting the mazelike nature of human experience as we move further away from human contrivances, such as linearity.
The film never reaches its “center” because such a locus of meaning is impossible to obtain in a world of multiple simulations. Instead, Jack’s frozen death within the maze mirrors the viewer’s entrapment in the film’s maze of meaning. Dislodged from their accustomed interpretive frameworks, viewers struggle to reconcile the ultimate temporal displacement—that of the main character, who somehow exists both in the narrative present and in 1921. The film defies both linear explanations and the neat, prepackaged wrap-up of a traditional Hollywood resolution by resurrecting its protagonist not in the future, but in the film’s past. The cyclical nature of reality implied by this ending resembles a never-ending mazelike construction in which the viewer will forever search for the film’s elusive core of meaning.
Along with subverting the linear and temporal structure of traditional film narratives, Jack Torrance’s death at the end of The Shining symbolically links the character’s demise to the implosion of the “Jack Nicholson” persona. This analogy works on at least two levels: on the first, Jack Torrance’s death signals the ultimate effect of the white man’s burden and also engenders pity for the failing white male antihero; on the second, the close-up of Jack’s frozen face puts a “headstone” on Nicholson’s 1970s output and almost ceremonially “closes the book” on this chapter of the actor’s career. In the first case, the final image laments the passing of a lost spirit in America—a spirit that was giving way to the restoration of ideological confidence that characterized the 1980s. In the second, it offers a chance for a new beginning for the actor, who, like many of the males he portrayed, was caught up in a societal construct (“Jack Nicholson”) as limiting and stultifying as the ideological roles he critiqued through his characters. In this light, the film’s self-reflexive, ironic detachment toward Jack Torrance makes considerable sense, as it invites spectators to take a similarly objective, scrutinizing look at all the surrounding societal constructs—the rugged individualist, the breadwinner, the corporate man—that they assume to be natural and universal. In sum, coming appropriately at the end of the decade, The Shining brings together all the elements associated with Jack Nicholson—the white man’s burden, the dislocation technique, the autobiographical element, the “Jack Nicholson” persona—and places them neatly into a time capsule, only to be opened in the new millennium with the release of Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt, which once again invokes the “Jack Nicholson” construct.
1. Tim Cahill, “They Used to Hang People for Having This Much Fun,” Rolling Stone, April 1981, 14.
2. The word interpellated in this sense derives from Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Althusser argues that individual subjects do not construct their own identities but choose from among a range of existing roles. To interpellate means to identify with one of these roles or identities.
3. Dan Rider, “The Shining,” in Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten, ed. Mikita Brottman (London: Creation, 1999), 110.
4. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 137.
5. Bingham, Acting Male, 138.
6. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 213.
7. Nelson, Kubrick, 213.
8. Bingham, Acting Male, 143.
9. David A. Cook, “American Horror: The Shining,” Literature/Film Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1984): 3.
10. Bingham, Acting Male, 136.
11. Bingham, Acting Male, 136.
12. This notion of creativity harkens back to the Puritans and is captured particularly well in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter, wherein Hawthorne imagines that his Puritan ancestors of Salem would chastise him for taking up the profession of a writer. In their eyes, he is an “idler,” a “degenerate,” and a disgrace. “A writer of story-books!” he imagines them to scold. “What kind of a business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”
13. Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 168.
14. Michael Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 299.
15. Ciment, Kubrick, 295.
16. Bingham, Acting Male, 142.
17. Bingham, Acting Male, 143.
18. Bingham, Acting Male, 147.
19. Ciment, Kubrick, 293.
20. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (orig. publ. 1919), in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 942.
21. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 944.
22. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 50.
23. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 187.
24. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 187.
25. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 22.
26. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 25.
27. Rider, “The Shining,” 108.
28. Douglas Brode, The Films of Jack Nicholson (1987; repr., Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1996), 211.
29. Rider, “The Shining,” 115.
30. Rider, “The Shining,” 115.
31. Ciment, Kubrick, 299.
32. Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 164.
33. Brode, The Films of Jack Nicholson, 207.
34. Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick, 164, 168.
35. Bingham, Acting Male, 107.
36. Sharon Marie Carnicke, “The Material Poetry of Acting: ‘Objects of Attention,’ Performance Style, and Gender in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut,” Journal of Film and Video 58, no. 1/2 (2006): paragraph 41.
37. Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick, 171.
38. Brode, The Films of Jack Nicholson, 207.
39. Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick, 165.
40. Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick, 165.
41. Ciment, Kubrick, 135.
42. Bingham, Acting Male, 146.
43. Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick, 169.
44. Bingham, Acting Male, 140.
45. Carnicke, “The Material Poetry of Acting.”
46. Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick, 172.
47. Bingham, Acting Male, 137.
48. Bingham, Acting Male, 138.
49. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulcra” (orig. publ. 1981), in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1732–33.
50. Nelson, Kubrick, 204.
51. Nelson, Kubrick, 200.
52. Nelson, Kubrick, 205.
53. Nelson, Kubrick, 208.