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Male masochism in eight cinematic double-features
BY CRAIG HARSHAWThe Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany, 1930)
Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1975)
Two German films that show men being ripped apart by their own romantic delusions. In Sternberg’s classic film, the erotic nightclub singer Lola (Marlene Dietrich) destabilizes a bourgeois academic’s (Emil Jannings) conservative life, while in Fassbinder’s a bourgeois playboy named Eugen (Peter Chatel) sweeps into the life of a working-class carnival worker (Fassbinder) who wins a major lottery and manages to drain him of his newly found economic resources as well as any level of self-respect he once had. Both films deftly explore their protagonist’s perverse attraction to their own social degradation. Both protagonists know from the beginning that their infatuation will bring about their ultimate downfall—and yet this very fact makes them all the more obsessive in their romantic longing.
Why do we seek out pain, and how does the pursuit differ in men and women? Filmmakers around the globe have mined for the answers. Here are eight double features with male protagonists who just can’t get enough pain, punishment, and self-destruction.
Illustrations by Austin Hughes
Devdas (Bimal Roy, India, 1955)
Shampoo (Hal Ashby, USA, 1975)
In the Bollywood classic Devdas the titular character (Dilip Kumar) is forced by his family to forsake the woman of his dreams because of her lower-class background and bitterly turns to alcohol as a form of passive suicide. In Hal Ashby’s political satire Shampoo Warren Beatty plays George, a popular LA hairdresser who everyone assumes is gay, giving him the ability to bed his married clients (played by, among others, Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie, Lee Grant, and Carrie Fisher). Social class plays a key role in both films: Devdas forsakes his love because he wants to remain wealthy; and George’s class status forecloses the possibility of ever having a public relationship with the women he has sex with. Both Devdas and George are also attracted to perverse levels of risk taking—an unconscious form of self-undermining. George, for example, sleeps with the wife, the mistress, and the daughter of a man he desperately needs financial support from. Devdas’s mercurial shifts in strategy—from writing a letter to his forbidden love Paro telling her he never had more than platonic feelings for her to then showing up at her door saying he is burning with romantic love—suggest he may be as much in love with his own self-image as the tragic lover as he is with her.
Noir et Blanc (Claire Devers, France, 1986)
Jungle Fever (Spike Lee, USA, 1991)
In Noir et Blanc Antoine (Francis Frappat) is a married accountant who gets a contract at a local gym, where he is encouraged to use the facilities including the massage services. Here he meets a muscular African immigrant masseur named Dominque (Jacques Martial) who begins to inflict real physical pain, which emotionally excites Antoine, leading to a dangerous escalation of violence during their sessions. Flipper (Wesley Snipes), the protagonist of Jungle Fever, cheats on his African American wife with his younger White secretary (Annabella Sciorra), endangering his relationship with his children, his wife, his family, and in some ways his entire community. In both cases, taboo interracial desire attracts the protagonists to their romantic object. Antoine and Flipper seem more attracted to the political danger of their relationships than they are to the individuals who ignite this danger.
Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, USA, 1967)
The Paperboy (Lee Daniels, USA, 2012)
Freely adapted from acclaimed novels, these two films explore masochism in the context of homosexual desire. Huston’s film, set on an Army base in 1940 in the American South, stars Marlon Brando as Major Weldon Penderton, married to the promiscuous Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor). Leonora is a sadist who taunts Weldon, often in the form of homophobic insinuations, for his failures at classically masculine tasks such as horseback riding, landscaping, and sports. Major Weldon becomes sexually infatuated with the young, free-spirited Private L. G. Williams (Robert Forster). His pained efforts to curb his homosexual longings lead to self-destructive and violent acts including attempts to ride the most dangerous horse in the military stable, engaging in punishing weight lifting, and inviting men into his home whom he correctly believes are having sexual affairs with his wife. We watch Leonora’s treatment of her husband become progressively more violent, climaxing in her beating him with a riding crop in front of all the other officers on the military base. In Lee Daniel’s subversive adaptation of Pete Dexter’s novel The Paperboy, Matthew McConaughey and Zac Effron play brothers in a small town in Florida in 1969. McConaughey’s character Ward, a civil rights attorney, fetishizes sexual encounters with heterosexual Black men whom he asks to physically assault and verbally degrade him. Daniels’s adaptation radically changes the narrator from the younger brother to the family’s African American maid (Macy Gray) and thus allows for a deepening of the analysis of Ward’s masochistic desires. As a man from a wealthy White family in the Jim Crow era south his laudable work on behalf of racial and economic justice is tangled with his desire to be humiliated and violated.
The transformation of sadism into masochism appears to be due to the influence of the sense of guilt which takes part in the act of repression.
—Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 1919
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, USA, 1976))
Bullet in the Head (John Woo, Hong Kong, 1990)
These radically different buddy films depict the dangers of masochism in a world where friendship means exploitation and self-sacrifice. In May’s film, the friendship between two partners in crime (John Cassavetes and Peter Falk) necessitates self-destructive choices. Nicky calls Mikey in the middle of the night claiming that he needs him even though he suspects that Mikey might have been contracted to murder him. In fact, his love for Mikey might be tied to the danger of being betrayed. Several times Nicky directly asks Mikey if he plans to betray him and then shifts to saying “I’m only kidding”—at one point even sharing that if the situation were reversed he would certainly betray Mikey—calling to mind Jacques Derrida’s suggestion in The Politics of Friendship that male friendship is a way of seeing oneself through another’s eyes based on the realization of mortality. Friendship contains dread because friends are constantly preparing to either outlive the other or to be outlived by him, an idea that is made explicit in Woo’s action thriller about a trio of close friends (Tony Leung, Jackie Cheung, and Waise Lee) who flee the police in their native Hong Kong for Saigon thinking they can become smugglers in a war zone. The three friends in Woo’s film all know that going into war torn Vietnam in 1967 is the worst possible option for their safety and security, but their love for each other creates a kind of siren’s call that makes them willing to forsake their female partners and families in order to remain the three musketeers. In both films, friendship often takes the form of cruelty, argumentation, needless risk taking, and physical violence. Each man knows that his friendships will only bring danger and tragedy, but is too wedded to the friendship to save himself.
Humpday (Lynn Shelton, USA, 2009)
Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 2020)
Two films about the way male ego opens itself up to emotionally and physically dangerous levels of peer pressure. In Lynn Shelton’s brilliant comedy, two heterosexual male friends (Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard) dare themselves to make a gay porn film together. The audience anticipates a theme of repressed homosexual desire undergirding male bonding, but neither friend really desires sexual contact with the other. Rather, they each masochistically follow through in order not to appear the weaker man. In Another Round, a quartet of friends in Denmark (Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, and Lars Ranthe) dare each other to remain constantly drunk while engaging in their professional and personal lives. As in Shelton’s film, Vinterberg’s suggests that none of the quartet of friends would have engaged in the experiment alone but throw themselves into it because of fear that if they didn’t their friends would judge them as cowardly.
All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, USA, 1979)
An Egyptian Story (Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1982)
Two films directly inspired by Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½ depict two different self-destructive film/theater directors whose overwork and commitment to their art gives them a life-threatening heart condition. Chahine nods throughout not only to Fellini but to Fosse, highlighting differences in sexualities, nationalities, and aesthetic strategies of the two men. What links them is a masochistic relationship to their own creativity. Their commitment to their art means that they will ruthlessly mine aspects of their personal and professional lives regardless of how painful this may be to themselves, their friends, their lovers, and their colleagues. While engaging in the harsh auto-critique that is a hallmark of artistic modernity, both films suggest that these men got a thrill out of the emotional danger and angry responses to their work.
Ganga Bruta (Humberto Mauro, Brazil, 1933)
Holy Smoke (Jane Campion, Australia/USA, 1999)
These are two of the strangest and most troubling romantic films ever made. Ganga Bruta is about a man who murders his wife on their honeymoon night when he discovers she is not a virgin, gets acquitted, and then moves to another city and becomes part of a love triangle. Jane Campion’s film tells the story of a cult “deprogrammer” (Harvey Keitel) who begins to be overpowered by the young woman (Kate Winslet) he is attempting to recondition. What disturbs in both cases is that the protagonists often confuse violence with intimacy and that both directors record this confusion without sentimentalism or moralism. The men in both films seem to have a compulsive attraction to situations where they will be critiqued, resisted, ridiculed, and humiliated—an attraction resulting from the guilt they feel for having gotten away with something that they believe they should have been punished for. In Ganga Bruta the murder of his first wife brings shame to the protagonist, who becomes the adulterous seducer of a married woman. In Campion’s film the deprogammer wonders if he has been getting away with brainwashing people himself, as his entire career is called into question by the resistance of the young woman he is supposedly “freeing.” ■
Craig Harshaw is a performance artist, cultural critic, and theater director. He has taught or worked for Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MCA Chicago. He hosts DIVISIVE, a live radio broadcast exploring cultural work and politics.
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023