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Introduction Masculinity in Contemporary German Culture MU R IEL COR MICAN/ GA RY SCHMIDT Univ ersity of We st Georgia / We stern Illinois Univ ersity In his introduction to a 2008 special issue of Seminar (44.1) devoted to representations of masculinity in German texts and films from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, Michael Boehringer writes: «[T]he much-discussed ‹crisis of masculinity› that is purported to have taken its beginning at the turn of the twentieth century can be identified as a crisis of masculine hegemony, a crisis that continues today and finds its regressive expressions in the mythopoetic men’s movements of the 1990s or in the homophobic policies of movements of the religious (and political) right both in Europe and North America» (1-2). Five years later, this special issue of Colloquia Germanica also focuses on the concept of a hegemonic masculinity, most prominently on the textual and filmic evidence of its gradual erasure. The multitude of depictions, interpretations, and performances of masculinities circulating in German language texts and the German-speaking world today point to an opening up of possibilities, an embrace of difference, and a series of important cultural interventions in discourses on masculinity that might have a very real influence on how a German-speaking public deals with the intersection of the concept of hegemonic masculinity with concepts of homosexuality, transsexualism, femininity, feminism, ethnicity, transnationalism, nationalism, and the professions. The collection of essays in this special issue aims to demonstrate both the existing breadth of creative depictions and constructions of masculinities in contemporary German culture as well as the continued necessity, both textually and actually, of presenting, negotiating, and defending diverse interpretations and performances of masculinity. All essays in this collection focus on pop-cultural products of the last twenty years and together constitute a discussion and wide-ranging inventory of the kinds of questions asked and issues posed in literary and filmic texts about gender roles and performances in the contemporary German-speaking world. Molly Knight’s essay opens the collection with a discussion of male protagonists and psychopathy in Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995), Benjamin Lebert’s Der Vogel ist ein Rabe (2003), and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games 2 Muriel Cormican/ Gary Schmidt (2007). She considers what the commonality of a psychopathic masculinity across genres might tell us about a tacit cultural agreement that traditional markers of a renegade masculinity (toughness, self-sufficiency, resistance to society), taken to their logical conclusions, are becoming aligned with psychopathy in a way that «normalizes psychopathy» and «encourages the viewer or reader to excuse the character’s violent behavior as a product of his damaged masculinity.» These representations, she suggests, lament the erosion of masculinity’s place in society and the demonization of masculinity in that they focus on young men with no outlet for «masculine» behaviors other than violence and indifference. Taking the cinema of Fatih Akin from 1998 to 2009 as an example, Muriel Cormican examines the intersection of discourses of transnationalism and masculinity over the course of Akin’s career as a filmmaker. Cormican’s readings do not shy away from criticizing covert and overt misogynous moments in the six films that she examines. She does not ignore, nor does she fail to appreciate, Akin’s critique of extreme examples of hegemonic masculinity but notes at the same time the tendency towards a restoration of a heteronormative masculinity in his films, even if in an ostensibly kinder, gentler form. Cormican’s feminist intervention into the reception of Akin’s cinematic œuvre offers an important addition to scholarship and criticism that has largely focused on the transnational aspects of his work while marginalizing the heteronormative masculinity that very often informs their transnational moments. John Blair demonstrates how femininity functions as a foil in Stölzl’s Nordwand (2008), serving to highlight the relationship between a culturally accepted and validated masculinity and political and commercial cooption. Challenging critical readings that see Nordwand as an updated embrace of the Heimatfilm, Blair argues that Stölzl uses the traditional locale of the Heimatfilm and many of its standard dichotomies to reflect on the varied and contradictory constructions of masculinity thriving in cultural discourses prevalent in the early years of the Third Reich. He makes a case that Toni, the film’s protagonist, is often feminized by other masculine discourses in the film and is essentially overtaken and crushed by definitions of masculinity that he attempts to evade. Stölzl’s return to a particularly fraught era emphasizes the residues that continue to exist today in another politicial climate. Kyle Frackman’s thoroughgoing discussion of the intersection of transsexuality and masculinity in Sabine Bernardi’s film Romeos (2011) relies theoretically on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between confession and power. He argues that the film points to the confession (to oneself, to others, on the internet) of one’s desire to be other as the first step toward Introduction 3 access to the medical technologies that aid one in becoming other. His analysis of the film brings to the forefront the value that a transgender perspective has for understanding the complex relationship between the body, body image, sex, and gender. The film’s presentation of the gendered body as a work in progress for the female-to-male transgender subject can be interpreted as offering both subversive and affirmative representations of masculinity. In an insightful comparison of Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall (2013) to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Gary Schmidt focuses on, among other things, the relationship between a hegemonic, heterosexual masculinity and changing notions of homosexual masculinities. Pointing out how both films «frame homosexual liaisons as the expression of a kind of raw, unfettered sexuality» and literally locate the homosexual act outside of traditional social structures (on a mountain peak or in the woods - in untamed nature), he concludes that in Freier Fall we can detect Lacant’s wrangling with a perceived conflict between male and female desires and spheres of activities that enables a rapprochement between gay and straight male sexuality in the form of a «queer masculinity» that remains an enigma to the female characters of the film. All of the essays here, then, home in on textual details and moments that illuminate the varied masculinities in the German-speaking world (and hopefully beyond) today. Such details and moments exist, to be sure, in almost any cultural product because of the larger-than-life role that an individual’s gender, sexual orientation, and self-identification play not only in common conceptions of identity and humanness but also in practical, dayto-day interactions in all walks of life. Drawing attention to, discussing and analyzing these details and moments are in the end, we hope, not just isolated academic acts of textual criticism but also acts - however unspectacular - of intervention in political and ideological discourse. Both the cultural products analyzed and the analyses themselves have implications for our very real understandings of «truths» about gender, sexuality, sex, the body, identity, sympathy, empathy, and our humanity in general. (L)earned Monsters: Psychopathic Masculinities in Contemporary German Film and Fiction MA RY L . KNIGHT Wa k e For e st Univ ersity In the summer of 1991, the young Swiss-German reporter Christian Kracht sat down with the newly notorious American author Bret Easton Ellis to discuss Ellis’s most recent novel, American Psycho, for Tempo magazine. When the two met for beers at Ellis’s New York apartment, they must have been struck by how much they had in common. Both men were born in the mid-1960s to affluent parents, and both came of age at elite New England colleges (Kracht studied at Sarah Lawrence, while Ellis attended Bennington). As an author, Ellis, an ingénue who first published at the age of twentyone, was nearly a decade ahead of Kracht, who would not write his breakthrough novel Faserland for another three years. Yet the published interview provides evidence of a shared vision of violence as a response to threatened masculinity: by the end of the piece it is unclear which observations are Ellis’s, and which are Kracht’s own. Their respective comments merge into one seamless statement on life in late capitalism: both authors suggest that consumer culture, transcending national boundaries, flattens and negates individual (masculine) identities and warrants a violent response. Kracht begins the interview with a summary interpretation of American Psycho, which offers a glimpse into the mind of an all-American boy cum serial killer who spends his days at the office or the gym and his nights hacking people to pieces in his luxury apartment: «Bateman ist eine Art Dr. Jekyll, der keinen Mr. Hyde braucht, der keine Maske aufsetzen muss, weil das Grauen untrennbar mit seiner Welt verbunden ist» (Kracht, «Psycho» 166). Ellis agrees. Thus, Kracht and Ellis present Bateman as perfectly in sync with the «horror» of his milieu, which is affluent New York society in the late 1980s. He is as smooth as Dr. Jekyll, and as brutal as Mr. Hyde: a hybrid who fits right in among the powerful elite of Wall Street. Curiously, Kracht and Ellis characterize Bateman - and his real-life counterparts Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer - as a powerful wake-up call for a sickened society. Kracht paraphrases his interview subject: «Was hat er [Ellis] denn Furchtbares getan? Er, der Chronist eines Jahrzents, hat es gewagt, einen sehr genauen Blick auf die Wirklichkeit zu werfen. […] (L)earned Monsters 5 Diese Monster, sagt Ellis, hätten wir verdient» (168). Noting that the word Monstrum is related to the Latin verb monere, «to warn,» Kracht sees Bateman as «nicht nur … eine Warnung in einer aus den Fugen geratenen Welt, sondern auch ein Vollstrecker: der Teufel im Fegefeuer der Banalität» (168). More than just a «warning,» Bateman reigns as judge and executioner for the society Ellis aims to indict, and in this way he almost resembles a psychopathic Übermensch: omnipotent, righteous, infallible. The obvious admiration both authors show for this murderous character highlights their shared conception of their protagonists’ masculine personae as a rigid shell which must contain and subdue a roiling core of fear, desire, and rage which threatens to emasculate and corrupt masculine identity. The target of that rage, society, is consistently embodied by misogynist feminine tropes, such as the prostitutes and vacuous «hardbodies» Bateman chooses as his victims, whose hollowness underscores the narrator’s struggle to define himself. Though Kracht’s work is for the most part less violent (though perhaps no less controversial), he has since acknowledged the great debt he owes to Ellis and to American Psycho in particular (Poschardt, Mertens). This article therefore examines three instances of psychopathic masculinity in German-speaking film and fiction in the 1990s and early 2000s. Masculine psychopaths are made to represent punishment or vengeance for cultural evils in the three examples I analyze: Christian Kracht’s 1995 novel Faserland, Benjamin Lebert’s 2003 novel Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, and Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games. These three are, in fact, merely a small sample in a large pool of texts which reflect this pattern, but I have chosen them in order to demonstrate a range of intensity - from the obvious psychopathy of Michael Haneke’s serial killers to the more subtle psychopathic characteristics evident in Christian Kracht’s narrator - and a clear similarity of vision across media and genre. I argue that the authors’ use of psychopathic characteristics in their construction of male protagonists normalizes psychopathy and encourages the viewer or reader to sympathize with the male character’s anger and even excuse his violent behavior as a product of his damaged masculinity. In fact, the works in question present psychopathy not as a mental illness with complex origins, but as a brand of contemporary masculinity which has directly resulted from a social system that embraces narcissistic materialism and trivializes empathy. At the same time, when analyzed together, these texts offer up the inherently misogynist suggestion that society’s real «crime» worthy of punishment - the sin which summons «the devil in the purgatory of banality» - is the erosion of masculinity’s place within society: the demonization, as it were, of masculinity itself. 6 Mary L. Knight The word «psychopath» inevitably conjures images of infamous serial killers such as Fritz Haarmann or Ted Bundy, and certainly there are copious representations of psychopathic killers in contemporary film and fiction. But psychopaths are not always killers, as Canadian psychologist and psychopath expert Robert D. Hare is careful to point out. And as British journalist Jon Ronson demonstrates in his 2011 book The Psychopath Test, in some ways the psychopathic personality can thrive in contemporary culture, often in the upper echelons of the business world, where successful CEOs must exhibit the ruthlessness and manipulation innate to a psychopath (189-222). British psychologist Kevin Dutton even suggests in his 2012 book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, that we could all learn a thing or two from this way of behaving, in which one’s own needs are put before the needs of others, which is a sure-fire way to get ahead in a cutthroat capitalist economy, for example. According to Hare, who developed a widely used diagnostic questionnaire for psychopathy (the PCL-R), the disorder is characterized by impulsivity, narcissism, lack of empathy, and the ability to manipulate or abuse others for personal gain without guilt. Psychopaths tend to have great success at charming other people in the short term, but find it impossible to foster long-term reciprocal relationships - they do not achieve true intimacy because they ultimately cannot feel deeply for others (Hare 4-12). In The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson describes an early experiment of Hare’s in which diagnosed psychopaths and a control group were repeatedly subjected to electric shocks after a countdown. The control group’s brains exhibited a fear response after the first shock when the count neared zero, in anticipation of the next jolt of pain. But the psychopaths had no fear response, leading to the conclusion that the psychopathic brain’s true abnormality is an inability to experience fear-based emotions, including guilt, which involves fear of judgment (Ronson 98). Recent popular interest in the psychopathic mind has focused on the apparent symbiotic relationship between psychopathy and the cultural hegemony of late capitalism. On the surface, observations like Dutton’s and Ronson’s offer psychopathy as a rather charged metaphor for the greed, shamelessness and cruelty of our own capitalist culture, much the same way Ellis presents Patrick Bateman as the embodiment of 1980s New York. But Bateman can also be read as the consequence of that time and place: the monster earned through American culture’s own petty cruelty and vacuity, the starvation of the American soul. A similar dynamic courses through the works discussed here: German-speaking society’s materialism and hypocrisy are figured as the corrupting forces which engender psychopathy in young men. (L)earned Monsters 7 In an interesting correlation between scientific study and popular gender role stereotypes (which dictate that men be fearless and women be empathic), an overwhelming majority of diagnosed psychopaths are men, and even psychopathic women tend to score lower on the PCL-R. Hervey Cleckley’s seminal 1941 study of psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, refers only to male case studies and uses the male pronoun exclusively when describing the disorder. Some have attempted to explain away this imbalance: the PCL-R, for one, was based on Hare’s study of exclusively male prison populations, and some of Hare’s critics have wondered if the checklist is biased toward masculine manifestations of psychopathy. Some researchers speculate that women simply express psychopathy differently, and we have yet to formulate a test that will accurately identify female psychopaths (Skeem et al. 107-9). Of course, this begs the question whether different symptoms might not indicate a completely different condition; such attempts to find balance between male and female psychopathy may in fact construct a façade of equality which further cements notions of gendered behavioral expectations. In any event, the general public notices only that the vast majority of known psychopathic serial killers are white men. Western culture has adopted the view that violent psychopathy is a masculine affliction, a notion defined at least in part by the sensationalized reports of male serial killers in Germany in the Weimar era and the subsequent release (in both Germany and the US) of Fritz Lang’s M, a cinematic exploration of a serial child killer based on the infamous «Vampire of Düsseldorf,» Peter Kürten (Tatar 153-72). In Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer, Richard Tithecott suggests that, in fact, «we assume masculinity’s presence and femininity’s absence» (156) in the specter of the serial killer, for «power as masculinity […] is a meaning with which we make sense of our world» (157). While often thought of as a mental illness, psychopathy does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and is instead more or less subsumed by Antisocial Personality Disorder, which exhibits many of the same traits but does not take hard-to-measure personality traits like «empathy» into account (Ronson 239-40). Thus, psychopathy remains a nebulous, mutable label, an uneasy sort of non-identity itself: it is widely diagnosed and studied as if it were a mental illness by psychologists in prisons and mental institutions, and yet not included in the DSM and not considered insanity by criminal law. There is ongoing debate as to whether the condition results from a physical abnormality, a biochemical imbalance, or is the result of environmental factors such as childhood trauma. Psychologists debate whether or not psychopathy is treatable; many, like Robert Hare 8 Mary L. Knight himself, do not think there is any way to reform a psychopath. The other complicating factor is that psychopathy is diagnosed on a spectrum, much like autism, with various possible combinations of characteristics at varied intensities. Kevin Dutton argues that, in fact, certain levels of psychopathy - or certain combinations of psychopathic traits, as long as they aren’t too severe - can actually be seen as «functional» or even beneficial to a person’s success (Dutton). In these ways, psychopathy - much like masculinity - has become a malleable concept in both the popular and the scientific imagination, and indeed, psychopathy and masculinity have become symbolically linked. Peter and Paul, the young serial killers who terrorize a family in Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, exemplify our popular understanding of the psychopath. Dressed in tennis whites and flashing mega-watt smiles, the two are at once charming and aggressive, manipulating their prey into inviting them inside and toying with them for hours before finally killing them and moving on to the next house. Both young men are conventionally attractive and clean-cut, and create a first impression on both viewers and victims of benign, polite banality. For instance, when Peter comes to the door, ostensibly to ask Mrs. Schober for some eggs, his choice of words is exceedingly polite and formal, and he speaks in a soft, shy voice. Paul, on the other hand, comes off as boyishly exuberant: he immediately steps past Mrs. Schober and picks up one of Mr. Schober’s expensive golf clubs, then asks if he can give the club a try. Within minutes, though, it becomes clear that Peter and Paul have constructed a very thin façade to cover their true intentions. Both make nearconstant careless errors with detail: they call the neighbors by their first names, indicating a familiarity that doesn’t make sense with the story that they are the children of the husband’s business associate. Paul introduces Peter to Mr. Schober, and then immediately refers to him as «Tom» - in fact, he calls Peter «Tom» so often that one might assume this is Peter’s real name, until Peter calls Paul «Jerry,» suggesting that the two have a series of code names for each other and these are just two sets of them. Their politeness and decorum are also clearly a façade, and quickly twisted around to ensnare the Schobers. For instance, when Mrs. Schober becomes uncomfortable and demands that they leave, the two young men act profoundly offended, as if they cannot believe she would be so rude: «So etwas is mir noch nie passiert,» says Paul. They use this tactic to manipulate Mr. Schober, who hesitates to throw them out of the house despite his wife’s obvious fear and anger. This talent for manipulation is highly suggestive of psychopathy. Peter and Paul’s jocular attitudes and over-the-top sadism - the «funny games» in the title refer to a series of torturous and degrading games the two (L)earned Monsters 9 men put the family through - indicate that the killers have no conscience, and indeed no clear reason for their violence other than their own amusement (when asked why they are doing these terrible deeds, Paul answers simply, «Warum nicht? »). Indeed, the two remain eerily calm throughout the film, becoming upset only when Mrs. Schober momentarily gains the upper hand. After killing the family dog, they force Mrs. Schober to search for it as if playing a schoolyard prank, leaving her to wander through the yard as they yell, «heiss! » or «kalt! » to indicate how close she is to the body. More than just «textbook» psychopaths, Peter and Paul share many characteristics in common with their literary counterpart Patrick Bateman. All exhibit not just a self-centered brutality, but also a social standing as privileged outsider - that is, they are affluent white men who nonetheless feel victimized by their sociocultural surroundings. The killers Peter and Paul, like true devils in the purgatory of banality, have come to make bourgeois society pay for its insularity, weakness, and hypocrisy. They exact this vengeance from within, as they ensnare their victims by adopting upper-class manners and appearances and appealing to the family’s sense of good manners. The family fears rudeness more than strange men in their home, and this belief in the surface of things, and the implicit discrimination that belief represents in the logic of the film, elicits a violent response (Wurmitzer 166-76). The family we watch suffer and die serves as a scapegoat, a symbolic representation of the society which encourages inequality and superficiality and deserves to have its illusions about the world shattered. Peter and Paul playfully hint at social factors which could cause them to be so damaged. Paul tells the Schobers multiple versions of Peter’s troubled life story, suggesting first that he was born into desperate poverty, his father drank, and his mother sexually abused him. This, though, is a joke, as he notes that no one would believe that Paul grew up deprived. Eventually he shrugs and says that Paul is simply a spoiled kid plagued by «Überdruss und Weltekel» and the «Leere der Existenz.» Thus, it is not that Paul has been harmed in any tangible way by the dysfunctional sociocultural system in which he lives; rather, the vacuous superficiality - and hypermediality - of his world has presumably corrupted his soul. In this way, Peter and Paul are not presented to us as simple villains, but indeed as earned monsters, come to teach us a lesson about the banality of bourgeois evil. Of course, Haneke’s film also serves to indict the viewer in the act of watching violence for entertainment - a form of participation in the culture on trial (Laine 3-5; Falcon 10-13). Haneke hammers in this critique of media violence with a heavy hand: Paul turns to the camera and winks as Mrs. Schober searches for the dog’s body, drawing the viewer into complic- 10 Mary L. Knight ity. And when Mrs. Schober manages to grab the rifle and shoot Paul, Peter rushes to find the TV remote and actually rewinds the film to the moment before she prevails, so that he may change the outcome. This wielding of control over both victim and viewer speaks to a masculine fantasy of omnipotence. Indeed, Michael S. Kimmel defines hegemonic masculinity as «a man in power, a man with power, a man of power» (125). To Kimmel, hegemonic masculinity revolves around, is in fact defined by, power - an obsession echoed in the psychopath’s penchant for manipulation and egotism, not to mention the high percentage of psychopaths in positions of power in business and politics. This psychopathic lust for complete control may well be hegemonic masculinity taken to its logical extreme. Ben Knights describes twentieth-century hegemonic masculinity as «an imaginary community […] its borders require constant policing, the floodwalls which surround it a scene of increasing activity to protect it from the encroaching sea» (5). Indeed the relationship between psychopathy and mainstream masculinity does not begin in the 1990s. All of the young male characters discussed here struggle to define themselves against a threatening flood of pop-cultural refuse: consumerism, sexualization, and the ambivalent and ultimately unsuccessful quest for a deeper connection with another person. These characters must isolate themselves and build up a metaphorical masculine armor which keeps out the threat of dissolution by the flood, but also dams in the fear and desire which threatens them from within. The notion that armoring or damming up represents functional adult masculinity echoes patterns explored by Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien in the work of fascist «soldatische Männer»/ «soldier males.» Theweleit noticed a pattern in these narratives by «soldier males»: they all maintained a hardened, soldierly façade and viewed any sort of internal messiness - whether bodily fluids (literal messiness) or emotions - as threatening and disgusting. It was clear that the external façade of the crisp uniform, the stiff upper lip, the apparent impassivity, served as a dam to hold something in - a flood of corporeality, shame, fear, and desire. Floods also threatened from the outside world in many forms: floods of sex, gender, class struggle, political adversity, racial difference. The barrier between the soldier male and the filthy flood thus spans a range of sectors which become symbolically linked. The flood comes to represent any threat of self-dissolution and takes many forms, from the communist horde to the sexual woman. All of these fulfill a paradoxical purpose for the soldier male; they threaten to penetrate his rigid borders and unleash the chaos within, and yet in doing so they provide him with a background of difference against which he must define himself. They give him a test one must pass to achieve true manhood. This strict di- (L)earned Monsters 11 vision between the Self and the Other is, in a metaphorical sense, the same division which separates the psychopath from his fellow man. One might even cast the psychopath as the purest and strongest of masculine identities in this model since he is completely self-contained and uninvolved with the outside world, except as a dominant force bent on manipulating others for his own purposes. Of course, if this divide is breached or if the power structure shifts, then the chaos within him escapes with dire consequences. This recurring representation of masculinity in 1990s German fiction, like Theweleit’s soldier male, requires such a contentious dynamic. The threats the male characters face are similar. The protagonists seem to want nothing more than to connect with another human being and yet, it seems to be impossible for them. This state leads inevitably to a violent breakdown. The characterization of Peter and Paul in Funny Games echoes Theweleit’s pattern. Peter and Paul respond to their «empty» and «tedious» surroundings with numbness and an egotistical drive for amusement and power. Their carefully crafted outfits, down to the white gloves they wear to avoid leaving fingerprints, and close-cropped hair present them as both conformist and completely self-contained (no hair out of place, no trace of their existence left behind). Their cool demeanors persist until they feel threatened by their female victim, and in that moment, as Peter lies dying on the floor, Paul loses all composure, screaming and tearing the room apart until he finds the remote, a symbol of his utter control over the narrative. In a strange way, Peter and Paul are also lonely. The two remain anonymous since they do not use their real names, and even their relationship with each other is obviously unequal, evidenced by the fact that Paul continually mocks Peter’s chubbiness and gives all the orders. Their only interactions with people in the film are geared toward deceiving, controlling and killing; one wonders if they are at all capable of even the most basic intimacies with another person. Their intimacy, like that of Theweleit’s soldier males, is the penetration of knife into flesh, the letting of blood, the destruction of another person’s identity for the protection of one’s own. This violent intimacy plays out somewhat differently in the novel Der Vogel ist ein Rabe. Author Benjamin Lebert weaves a subverted comingof-age tale in which three young men who see themselves as outsiders violently clash with the societal forces that make them feel worthless. The problem is that these forces are embodied in the text by two young women, who are beaten or killed for their superficial rejection of the young men’s advances. Paul, the narrator, spends most of the novel listening to his fellow train traveler Henry’s story. Henry describes the ill-fated love triangle which develops between himself, his cousin Christine, and their friend Jens, 12 Mary L. Knight whose rage at the media and especially women for stoking his insecurity about his obese frame eventually leads him to «snap» and beat Christine. Christine escapes, but at the end of Henry’s story, as he and Paul disembark from the train, we learn that Paul has actually just killed his own beloved, an ethereal (and very expensive) prostitute named Mandy who rejected his earnest advances. Police await him on the platform, and he submits to them willingly. Both Henry and Paul suffer from rejection and disappointment at the hands of idealized women, which makes them feel profoundly outcast. Henry directly identifies his greatest problem as «Mädchen» and describes the painful experience of watching girls at a school dance as a voyeur excluded from the enjoyment of their perfection: «Und die Mädchen sahen alle so toll aus. Als ob sie leuchten würden. Und ihr Geruch war, als wären sie kurz bevor sie auf den Ball kamen, in einem anderen Universum, in einer anderen Welt […] ich stand immer da und war dem allem so fern» (Lebert 17). His response to this otherworldly unattainability is hatred; at once the celestial creatures become base ones, ridiculous, promiscuous and cruel. Ausserdem wurde ich zornig auf die Mädchen. Ich sah sie vor mir, tanzend und blöd kichernd, während die Armen ihrer verdammten Tanzpartner sie umschlingen und Brüste quetschen. Ich dachte, die Mädchen sind gar nicht die wunderbaren Geschöpfe, so wie ich sie mir vorstellte, so zart und feinfühlig und weich und verletzlich. Um die man sich immer gut kümmern muss und alles. Die Mädchen sind Bastarde. Die genau wissen, was sie einem antun. (18) His anger hits a fever pitch when Henry confides in Paul that he longs for girls more than anything else in the world, and yet «dass ich sie gleichzeitig auf die brutalste Weise umbringen möchte. Alle» (70), a statement that will prove ironic when we discover that Paul has done exactly this to a woman who rejected him. In a way, Paul’s story functions as an intensifier of Henry’s, an exaggerated version of the same tragedy in which a man glorifies a woman to the brink of deification, only to discover, as she rejects him, that she is but flesh and blood, and will provide no redemption from his isolation and fear. For Paul, this happens as he professes his love to Mandy, the prostitute of whom he had previously said, «Wenn ich mit ihr zusammen bin, wird die Dunkelheit nie wieder bedrohlich sein. Und ich wollte sie auf der Stelle ficken. So ficken, bis es nichts mehr zu ficken gab» (122). Already there is a dangerous confusion between redemptive love, sex, and violence. «Fucking,» i.e. penetrating the woman’s body so violently that she is literally annihilated, is the immediate response to a feeling of excessive attachment and the possibility of redemption. The female love-object inspires desire, but in the end that (L)earned Monsters 13 desire is not just to possess or even dominate the woman; rather, the woman must be destroyed in order for the man’s sense of himself, of his place in the world, to be clarified and redeemed. This pattern of behavior may initially read more as a crime of passion than psychopathy, for our collective imagination generally conjures up an image of a smooth-talking, impervious egomaniac like Hannibal Lecter, who does not care enough about other people to let their judgments affect his own self-esteem. However, this is a fallacy. Psychopaths are absolutely capable of feeling deeply - about themselves - and may well have difficulty controlling emotional outbursts when their desires are thwarted. What distinguishes Henry’s, Jens’, and Paul’s sentiments as figuratively psychopathic is their utter objectification of the beloved woman. To all three men, a beautiful woman represents social acceptance and personal triumph. She is a trophy, a concept, a goddess, until she rejects the man, at which time she morphs into an evil force deserving of destruction. There is no room in this construction for female personhood, and whether or not they actually lay hands on a woman, all three men see no problem with taking her life. In fact, this set-up produces echoes of the interwar Lustmorde described by Maria Tatar, in which the annihilation of the female body figures as a key part of masculine identity formation, particularly when the woman can be made to embody societal ills like decadence and capitalist exploitation. The copious representations of dead or diseased prostitutes in German Expressionist art underscore this argument (Tatar 3-19). Der Vogel ist ein Rabe restates the critique found in Funny Games and American Psycho, in that Henry, Jens, and Paul are presented as victims and products of contemporary consumer culture. The young men feel that because they do not fit the physical and temperamental requirements suggested to them by the media, they are rejected by the women they long for, and so their despair quickly turns to rage. It is, after all, not the young men’s idea to objectify women and position sex as the ultimate test of a man’s virility and success. Jens suggests that they have learned this behavior from film and television, from advertising, and of course from young women, who, he claims, reinforce these harmful messages about both genders and exploit the sexual power they hold over men. As Jens puts it, «Ich kann diese Bilder einfach nicht mehr ertragen» (49). According to the men who tell the story, the women themselves, and not just the forces of culture, seem to orchestrate this torment. Throughout the text, Henry mentions various aspects of Christine’s character that hint at her imminent betrayal of her admirers. He sees her as arrogant and vain, mentioning the hours she spends in front of her makeup mirror and 14 Mary L. Knight the high-heeled shoes she totters in. She has an active sex life, and seems to relish telling Henry and Jens all about it: «Sie berührte die eine Seite ihres Gesichtes mit der flachen Hand, als wolle sie sich fühlend der Schönheit ihres Gesichts vergewissern. […] Sie genoss es sichtlich, wenn sie an einem bestimmten Punkt ihrer Erzählung bemerkte, dass uns praktisch der Speichel aus den Mündern tropfte» (57-8). In this way, the objectified women are made to take on the blame for inciting the young men’s violent transgressions, and yet the men present themselves as pure, blameless victims of a brutal system. This placing of blame echoes the justifications often made by real-life killers, such as Elliot Rodger, the mass shooter who killed six people near UC Santa Barbara in 2014 because, he claimed, he was unfairly rejected by superficial women. Blaming the female victim also underlines the potential misogynistic link between sexual murder and certain fantasies of contemporary masculinity in general, in which the attainment of masculinity hinges on the transcendence of a threatening, feminized society. Tithecott describes the masculinist/ misogynist allure of the serial killer as emanating from the «dream of transcendence,» which is «both a dream of transcending materiality […] and a dream of transcending society to untainted and liberated individuality. The two dreams merge in the figuration of society in material/ corporeal terms» (158). The victimized female body is made to stand in for the «body politic,» and in this way «[t]he negation of the female body symbolizes the transcendence of society […]. When the social body is figured as female, criminality is an affirmation of one’s masculinity» (Tithecott 159). In Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, Lebert draws a clear line of causality between adolescent male suffering at the hands of feminine culture and acts of violence. Though they are not as well-defined as psychopaths as the killers in Funny Games, Jens, Henry and Paul nonetheless demonstrate that modern masculinity requires either complete self-isolation or a blood sacrifice. The lonely, wounded young men in the text search for human connections that won’t threaten their fragile masculine armor, but much like the killers in Funny Games, they find that such relationships are only possible over a woman’s bruised, dead body. The masculine identities presented in the novel are indeed somewhat psychopathic in their lack of empathy, their impulsivity and in Paul’s case, coolness under pressure, but perhaps more importantly, Lebert’s men unconsciously aspire to psychopathy as they strive for a secure masculine identity. They yearn for the psychopath’s hard impenetrability, his cold ruthlessness in the face of adversity, and for his resolute belief in himself - the truly self-made man, constructing and reconstructing his own identity at will. (L)earned Monsters 15 The quest for a self-made identity is the central concern of Christian Kracht’s Faserland, in which a nameless protagonist wanders through Germany in an attempt to find himself through what Kracht himself has called an «Abgrenzungsversuch» (Poschardt 2). This means of identity formation, as in Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, requires a certain level of narcissism, as well as an Other to define oneself against. Consequently, Faserland’s protagonist exhibits several behaviors associated with «functional» psychopathy, most notably his profound self-involvement and apparent inability to empathize with others. Indeed, his very namelessness can be read as not just a lack of personal identity, but as a symbol of his isolation from others. Over and over in the novel, the narrator fails to understand other characters’ reactions and motivations. He is confused, for example, when his sudden decision to leave Sylt doesn’t sit well with Karin, his possible love interest whom he has just kissed for the first time. When people disappoint or unsettle him, as they often do, he obeys his first impulse to walk away and start over someplace else. As a result, none of his relationships are as deep as he claims they are, and like many psychopaths, the narrator is a social butterfly who is nonetheless ultimately disconnected from others. As he describes it, «es gibt so bestimmte, völlig ineinander verschachtelte Muster, die ich anwenden muß, um mit Menschen umzugehen» (Kracht 101). In fact, this difficulty in interacting with other people and ultimate refusal, in many cases, to accept any kind of conflict or negotiation with others, might even be termed sociopathy - a pattern of anti-social and narcissistic behavior often interchanged with the more ominous label of psychopathy. The self-centeredness of the narrator of Faserland also creates troubling consequences for his so-called friends. After recalling his own violent tirade against his former friend Alexander’s girlfriend that ended the two men’s friendship, the narrator spots Alexander at a bar and, instead of speaking to him, waits until his back is turned and steals his pricey Barbour jacket. The narrator has already burned his own Barbour jacket in the middle of an airport terminal because he had spilled yogurt on it. Neither of these actions inspires a feeling of guilt or apprehension in the narrator, whose focus is entirely on his own needs. Indeed, the narrator’s great «crime» in the text, if he has one, is that he walks away from his despondent and drugged friend Rollo, who stands on a dock and may be contemplating suicide. The narrator even thinks to himself that Rollo needs friends who would put him to bed and comfort him, take away his pills and alcohol, yet still he walks way - and steals Rollo’s sports car in order to leave town. Clearly aware, at least, that this is a punishable offense, he leaves the car at the Zurich airport and wipes his fingerprints off the steering wheel, even before he learns from a newspaper article that Rollo has indeed drowned in the lake. 16 Mary L. Knight Though not openly malicious, Kracht’s narrator exploits and abuses others in his aimless quest to find self-satisfaction. Most often it is his inaction or else the sum of his tiny, thoughtlessly controlling acts - such as stealing Alexander’s jacket or showing up at Nigel’s house uninvited - which causes trouble for others. In this sense, a phrase the narrator uses to describe Rollo provides an apt description of himself: he is marked by an «innere Leere.» This apparent emptiness at the center of the narrator’s being echoes Tithecott’s description of the serial killer as masculine hero. Tithecott posits that the «indifference» of the psychopathic killer - the nothingness in his gaze, the meaninglessness of his crimes - is masculinity taken to its logical extreme, since masculinity is characterized by subjectivity, power, and unspeakability. Ben Knights describes masculinity as «so taken for granted as to be invisible» (1). Tithecott asserts: «The ‹mindless,› ‹meaningless,› and ‹motiveless› acts of the serial killer are the acts of a figure who is also represented as achieving ‹ultimate› selfhood […] a state defined as the dead end of the continuum of behavior which we in the twentieth century have experienced to horrifying degrees» (166). Thus, even though he is not actively violent, Kracht’s narrator exhibits the sort of magnetic vacuity which makes the psychopath not only utterly masculine, but also emblematic of contemporary Western culture. Faserland is perhaps best known and was initially controversial because of the narrator’s excessive attention to brand names and surfaces. He judges people based on the kind of shirts they wear, or which color Barbour jacket they favor. He denigrates a group of business travelers by suggesting that they all wear Swatch watches from the duty-free shop, for example. On the other hand, his recollection of fact and history is vague at best, and he seems to stumble through life with absolutely no goals or concerns outside of his wardrobe and the parties he attends. This characterization (the «innere Leere») presents the narrator as a sort of cipher, a non-entity, and it is in this portrayal that one can see the marked influence Ellis had on Kracht’s first novel. For like Patrick Bateman, Faserland’s narrator sees himself - and encourages us to see him - as a product of a sick and decadent culture, and his deficiencies as inevitable symptoms of that sickness, a situation over which he has no control. The narrator’s lack of conscience and egotism are simply reflections of the values that surround him. They are Germany’s flaws. The narrator insinuates as much in a speech late in the novel, as he imagines what he would tell his children about Germany, which in his vision for the future seems far away from his new life in Switzerland: Ich würde ihnen von Deutschland erzählen, von dem großen Land in Norden, von der großen Maschine, die sich selbst baut […]. Und von den Menschen […] (L)earned Monsters 17 die gute Autos fahren müssen und gute Drogen nehmen und guten Alkohol trinken und gute Musik hören müssen, während um sie herum alle dasselbe tun, nur eben ein ganz klein bißchen schlechter. Und daß die Auserwählten nur durch den Glauben weiter leben können, sie würden es ein bißchen besser tun, ein bißchen härter, ein bißchen stilvoller. (153) This Germany, Kracht insinuates, is responsible for the narrator’s shortcomings, indeed has victimized him and caused him to suffer, and so Germany is in fact the true perpetrator of his crimes. Of course, his description of Germany as competitive and mechanical, a hallmark also of masculinity in capitalism, according to Arthur Brittan, underscores the text’s depiction of the narrator’s own masculine (and psychopathic) self-image as Dandy, connoisseur, and impenetrable «machine» beyond the reach of corporeal concerns (16). The protagonist of Faserland fits Theweleit’s «soldier male» model astonishingly well in several key aspects. The man Theweleit describes is obsessed with maintaining the boundary between himself and others, and between himself and the outside world, which can be seen as a serious manifestation of the supposedly German insistence that «Ordnung muss sein.» Theweleit describes a kind of exoskeleton or body armor erected as a makeshift defense against anything perceived as invasive, uncontrolled, or feminine, which is associated with flowing, messiness, and boundary transgressions. The exoskeleton keeps these forces, which both seduce and repulse the man, at bay, while simultaneously holding in the seething mush of his own insides, the flood of emotions and desires that also threaten his well-controlled world internally. Letting out this turmoil is dangerous, both for the man and for those around him; as Theweleit writes, «wenn der Mann selber fühlt […] dann ist alles andere vernichtet» (I: 207, emphasis in original). Faserland’s narrator shares the very same simultaneous fear and desire to connect with others, to lose his carefully forged external identity, and to let out the mess inside of him. The novel is fraught with examples of the narrator’s insides literally coming out, for example when he blacks out and vomits just after «accidentally» calling his former best friend from his hotel room. He also recounts a mortifying memory of the time he drank too much and then defecated and vomited in the guest bed of his girlfriend’s parents. These instances of corporeal messiness inevitably occur just at the moment when the narrator is poised to reach out to another person and «let them in,» but of course intimacy is impossible for him. Instead of soldierly rigidity, his exoskeleton is a Popper’s mask of cool composure, carefully chosen ensemble and helmet of gelled-back hair. This armor, like that of the «soldier male,» lends the narrator a sense of belonging: everyone around him is enveloped 18 Mary L. Knight in a Barbour jacket, a Triumph or Porsche, a well-tailored suit. Everyone has a set list of conversation topics based on a shared history that include the boarding school Salem, certain clubs and bars like Traxx and Odin, the same music, the same fashion designers. So in a way, the system in which our narrator has developed is just as rigid as a military academy. He knows that to break ranks, he would have to suffer the consequences. Intimacy of any kind, though coveted, threatens to breach this barrier of coolness and superficial perfection, and so it becomes not only a torturing desire but also the root of the narrator’s greatest fear, which is the dissolution of his armor and thus of his very identity. Consequently, the narrator behaves in a way which recalls the psychopath Patrick Bateman and the Funny Games killers: he proceeds numbly through his life, easing his anxiety with petty cruelty and delusions of grandeur. In fact, this anxiety about the construction of identity forms the true link between Theweleit’s soldier males and the protagonists of Faserland, Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, and Funny Games. In all of these works, there exists a tension between the individual and his oppressive culture. The tortured protagonist barely exists, in a way, as a cipher who is part human, part indictment - and part purgatory devil. We see this phenomenon represented in imagery of self-identification. In Faserland, for example, the narrator finds it impossible to look at himself in the mirror, but rather scans the edges of his reflection: «Die Mitte von meinem Gesicht, die will ich gar nicht mehr sehen, nur noch die Umrisse» (128). This moment echoes a similar one in American Psycho, in which Patrick Bateman faces his reflection and confesses, «there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory […]. I simply am not there. […] Myself is fabricated, an aberration» (Ellis 377). Paul in Der Vogel ist ein Rabe sees a «Geschichte» in the mirror, represented by a brown spot which has appeared on his eye since he murdered Mandy, the story he cannot bring himself to tell his new acquaintance Henry. As he is led away by police, Paul turns back to Henry and says, «Ich bin eben kein Erzähler wie du» (140). And in Funny Games, Peter and Paul are more fictional than real from the very start, from their fake names to Paul’s list of possible backstories to explain their murderous behavior. When Paul speaks during the extended scenes in the Schobers’ living room, he is almost always shown in shadow, so that we cannot see his face, just a silhouette of his head. This adds further drama to the final shot of the film, a close-up of Paul’s face as he looks into the viewer’s eyes. This image is reminiscent of mug shots and other photos of accused serial killers on reality television programs, which generally zoom in on the killer’s face and invite the viewer to gaze into the eyes in search (L)earned Monsters 19 of some indication that the person is «off» or evil. The viewer is meant to feel a chill run down her spine from the emptiness she sees in the killer’s gaze. Paul, like all the male protagonists discussed here, embodies this emptiness. These are the men who are «not there,» who possess a non-identity which is both guiltless (since how can a non-person be guilty of human crimes? ) and terrifying. I would argue that this non-identity is in fact the essence of psychopathic masculinity; the masculinity that isn’t there. Tithecott sees Jeffrey Dahmer as this self-negating masculine type, «in possession of a self with no other and therefore no meaning, someone who has destroyed his sense of difference and consequently destroyed his own sense of self,» a death that is in fact a triumph, a «release to omnipotence» (Tithecott 164-5). In the fictional realm, psychopathy is what happens when Theweleit’s soldier male launches his quest to isolate and maintain his rigid masculine identity. When such masculinity goes unchecked, especially in response to a perceived threat from feminized, corrupt and damaging culture, all hell breaks loose. That the masculine type represented in these recent works is just as rigid and loath to adapt as Theweleit’s fascist «soldier males,» however, suggests that far less has changed in the course of the past century than we might have hoped. The implication of all these texts is, ultimately, that our culture is in crisis. Ellis says, that «we have earned these monsters.» Like Ellis, Kracht, Lebert, and Haneke cast young men, young everymen, in fact, as «devil(s) in the purgatory of banality,» who serve alternately as canaries in the mine and as executioners sent to teach us a lesson. And like American Psycho, the three works examined here thus construct a metaphoric link between psychopathy and masculinity such that the psychopathic male protagonist becomes an emblem of modernity. Works Cited Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Cleckley, Hervey. The Mask of Sanity. St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 1941. Dutton, Kevin. The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. New York: Scientific American, 2012. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991. Falcon, Richard. «The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeoisie.» Sight and Sound 5 (1998): 10-13. Haneke, Michael, dir. Funny Games. Wega Film, 1997. Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Pocket Books, 1995. 20 Mary L. Knight Kimmel, Michael S. «Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.» Theorizing Masculinities. Ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. London: Sage, 1994. 119-41. Knights, Ben. Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Kracht, Christian. Faserland. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995. -. «Psycho.» Interview with Bret Easton Ellis. Tempo (Nov. 1991): 164-48. Laine, Tarja. «What Are You Looking At and Why? » Kinoeye 4.1 (2004): n. pag. Lebert, Benjamin. Der Vogel ist ein Rabe. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003. Mertens, Mathias. «Robbery, assault and battery: Christian Kracht, Benjamin v. Stuckrad-Barre und ihre mutmaßlichen Vorbilder Bret Easton Ellis und Nick Hornby.» Text + Kritik. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Ludwig Schäfer. Sonderband Pop-Literatur. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. 201-17. Poschardt, Ulf. «Wer sonst soll die Welt verbessern? » Interview with Christian Kracht. Welt.de Die Welt, 17 July 2009. Web. 12 April 2013. Ronson, Jon. The Psychopath Test. London: Picador, 2011. Rosin, Hanna. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012. Skeem, Jennifer L., Devon L.L. Polaschek, Christopher J. Patrick, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. «Psychopathic Personality: Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy.» Psychological Science in the Public Interest 12.3 (2011): 96-162. Tatar, Maria. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Theweleit, Klaus. Männerphantasien: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1977. -. Männerphantasien: Männerkörper - zur Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1978. Wurmitzer, Gabriele. «‹What Goes without Saying›: Michael Haneke’s Confrontation with Myths in Funny Games.» New Austrian Film. Ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. 166-76. Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms: The Cinema of Fatih Akin MU R IEL COR MICAN Univ ersity of We st Georgia Fatih Akin’s work as a whole has been very positively received by academics, praised for its transnational vision and its examination of questions of nationality, ethnicity, and identity. 1 Most readings of his cinema address ideological issues of some sort and focus on identity politics and its relationship to cultural, linguistic, musical, biological, and political heritage. Undoubtedly, Akin has left an indelible and unique mark on the German Cinema of the last fifteen years, perhaps especially in his use of music to comment on plot elements and to offer transnational imaginings of geographically German spaces. Many critics have elucidated Akin’s imagined transnational community as one that goes beyond a notion of existing «between» cultures and incorporates interesting and progressive ideas about urban spaces, music, ethnic identities, creativity, and multi-ethnic neighborhoods. Few critics who address issues of ethnicity and transnationalism have spoken at length, if at all, about the intersection of these phenomena with gender except in the case of Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite. In the case of these two films, productive debates about Akin’s representation of gender have occurred both formally in academic articles and informally in listserv discussions (WiG, for example). In analyses of films such as Im Juli, Soul Kitchen, and Solino, however, gender tends to be absent as an analytic category. Thus a relatively retrogressive treatment of gendered identity goes uncommented, and a hegemonic heteronormative male experience becomes universalized in developing discourses on a transnational urban reality and aesthetic, intentionally or not. 2 In fact, with the exception of Auf der anderen Seite, all of Akin’s films would fail the Bechdel test. That is, one would have to answer «no» for them if asked whether in these films two women ever talk to each other about something other than a man. 3 This essay will focus on Akin’s men. Analyzing his representations and explorations of the construction of an urban, transnational masculine identity, I want to suggest that we can group his six big feature films to date, all of which rely to some degree on gender (and other) stereotypes, into two categories: those that explore questions of gender in an open-ended, analytic manner and contest traditional masculinities in some way even when they 22 Muriel Cormican invoke and naturalize stereotypes (Kurz und Schmerzlos, Gegen die Wand, and Auf der anderen Seite) and those that reaffirm and invite a consensus about the immutability of the heteronormative sex-gender system (Im Juli, Solino, and Soul Kitchen). 4 The primary purpose of the essay is to inject gender as a more prominent analytic category into the critical discourses surrounding Akin’s cinema and in particular into discussions that celebrate his transnational achievement and vision without acknowledging that masculinity as defined within a traditional heteronormative sex-gender system emerges as the fundamental foundation of the same. 5 Whereas there exists a tendency to distinguish between a «cinema of consensus» (Rentschler) and an art or resistance cinema along auteur lines, one that has resulted in Akin being cast primarily as a director of the latter, his body of work includes some films that can be squarely placed in the category of an updated cinema of consensus, even as they appear to query concepts of ethnic identity and national identification. 6 Akin’s representations of masculinity are primarily representations of an ethnically diverse urban masculinity. In Kurz und Schmerzlos, we encounter Greek, Serbian, and Turkish men struggling to adapt to life in Hamburg Altona’s crime milieu. Im Juli focuses on Daniel, a German student teacher whose life is depicted as boring because he is single and «respectably» middle-class in Hamburg. Solino deals with men of Italian origin trying to make a life and a living in Duisburg. Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite deal primarily with the plight of Turkish-German men (and to some degree women) between Hamburg and Istanbul or Bremen and Istanbul, and Soul Kitchen offers a mix of ethnically German, Greek, and Turkish men trying to make it in Hamburg in the business and culinary worlds. In all cases, the main characters are men who struggle within their milieus and with their social status. But in all cases one thing is clear: they are all solidly masculine in the terms defined by the heteronormative sex-gender system, i.e., masculinity and femininity represent binary opposites that complement and attract each other. 7 It is clear that Akin’s films investigate questions of national and ethnic origins in a way that encourages viewers to encounter them critically as complicated conundrums. Here, I shift the emphasis of analysis to gender, examining the construction of masculinities in Akin’s six best-known feature films to date in order to show how a predominantly conservative depiction of masculinity and a fatalistic understanding of the sex-gender system undergird heteronormative sex-gender and patriarchal paradigms throughout. In Kurz und Schmerzlos (1998), Im Juli (2000), Solino (2002) Gegen die Wand (2004), Auf der anderen Seite (2007) and Soul Kitchen (2009), Akin de- Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 23 picts ethnically Turkish, Italian, or Greek men as men first and foremost, relying on a complementary depiction of women that foregrounds their sexuality and sensuality and their status as the object of a male heterosexual gaze. Nothing makes Akin’s men more masculine than their sexual attractions and relationships to women. We need only think of Nejat as the exception that proves the rule. A character who may well represent a self-critical intervention on Akin’s part, Nejat is the least patriarchal, most rational, educated, and middle-class Turkish-German male in Akin’s films. He appears to exist beyond, or to be completely unconcerned with, the issues of the heteronormative sex-gender system that lead other male characters such as Cahit, Gabriel, Costa, Ali, and Giancarlo into conflicts, personal and internal or other. In trying to create filmic worlds in which he can challenge the marginalization and negative stereotyping of ethnic minorities in Germany, in which he can suggest that a Turkish-German, for example, has as many potential points of intersection with a German-German as the latter has with another German-German, Akin resorts to a cinematic treatment of women that harkens back to the Hollywood of the fifties and sixties. In short, his construction of masculinity, even in those films that include interesting and important complications, is one that shores up cisgender and heterosexual imperatives. Kurz und Schmerzlos (1999) depicts a milieu in which stereotypes of a criminal, underworld masculinity thrive and reads as a translation of the Italian male in the American context onto the immigrant in the German context. 8 The stereotypes are complicated by the interjection of critiques of male behaviors by the two main female characters, Ceyda and Alice. Although the men, in particular Gabriel, are shown to have a soft side that comes out generally in their interactions with women and occasionally in domestic spaces in their relationships to each other, they nonetheless define themselves primarily in terms of their loyalty to each other as tough guys. Even Gabriel, who represents a site of negotiation between the hard, urban, sexist discourse preferred by Bobby and the correctives to that discourse offered him by Ceyda, his sister, seems unable to break from the performance of masculinity demanded of him by Bobby. In the end, he chooses a criminal, homosocial loyalty to Bobby over a conventional, heterosexual loyalty to Alice. In fact, the latter relationship contributes to his sense that he must privilege the former since, by sleeping with Alice, formerly Bobby’s girlfriend, he believes that he has betrayed Bobby. To avenge Bobby’s death and pay for his own betrayal, to reestablish the primacy of male-male over male-female relationships, Gabriel feels compelled to kill Bobby’s killer. He is therefore 24 Muriel Cormican forced to flee Germany for Turkey and to forfeit the promising relationship to Alice. The narrative structure points to Gabriel’s entrapment, despite his ability to understand alternatives, in a series of expectations, traditions, and behaviors that ultimately drive him away from his Altona Heimat. The film emphasizes that although he can comprehend intellectually that a woman is more than her boyfriend’s property, he is emotionally tied into patterned behaviors that deny that understanding. Newly released from jail, Gabriel has resolved to stay on the straight and narrow but gets drawn back into criminal behaviors because of his friendships and an exaggerated insistence on a masculinity defined by both the sexual availability of random women and the ownership of one’s own woman. Bobby and Costa celebrate Gabriel’s release by buying him time with a prostitute, and his first physical fight occurs because he finds Ceyda, Costa’s girlfriend until recently, kissing another man. The performance of masculinity demanded in this circle forces Gabriel to distinguish between two categories of women, each of which sustains that performance differently. Either a woman is paid for explicitly and is exchangeable or she is owned implicitly and is untransferable. Bobby’s attempt to shame Costa («Deine Frau! Willst du dir das gefallen lassen? ») leads Gabriel to senselessly attack Sven, Ceyda’s new boyfriend, and when he almost immediately regrets his actions and storms off, Costa has to explain Gabriel’s behavior to Bobby: «Er will erwachsen werden und wir hindern ihn daran.» Even Costa, who embraces his environment and its demands, demonstrates by his word choice that the concepts of masculinity and brotherhood that dictate their life choices and relationships depend on the enactment of a childish and destructive masculinity. He sympathizes with Gabriel’s frustration and recognizes that a break from these behaviors would inevitably involve a break from Gabriel’s friends. The male characters emerge then, like the women, as victims of the problematic gender expectations that dominate in their milieu. Akin depicts the misogyny of the milieu in a manner that points to it as endemic but that also makes this misogyny visible as an ideology that, though mutable, shores up honor codes and loyalties - with all their attendant systemic violence - and makes change difficult. Interestingly, in Kurz und Schmerzlos, Akin does not resort to the very predictable camera work associated with the heterosexual male gaze in his depiction of women - shot-reverse shot showing the man’s perspective of a woman who then appears in soft focus, slow motion or a pan-up to emphasize her beauty and sexuality - as he does in both Im Juli and Soul Kitchen. Thematically and formally, he invites us here to see how traditional and harmful constructions of masculinity could be different but maintain a fierce grasp both socially and individually, whereas in Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 25 Soul Kitchen and Im Juli, he invites us to consent that a happy end involves a heterosexual union in which the roles are clearly and traditionally defined. The tragedy of Kurz und Schmerzlos lies precisely in the fact that a crack appears in the façade of masculinity upheld in Gabriel’s milieu and offers hope that he might manage to relinquish the concept of masculinity that has defined him and his relationship to others and thereby escape its negative effects. Gabriel stands strong against Bobby’s attempts to involve him with the Albanian mafia and opts for the less exciting job of taxi driver. Although he attacks Sven in the frenzy of a male bonding moment, he later concedes Ceyda’s right to choose her own boyfriend when she admonishes him. Attempting to defend his actions, Gabriel tells her that she can’t just kiss some other guy on the street of the neighborhood and that she needs to go back to Costa because he needs her. But her subsequent question («Soll ich mich aufopfern? ») changes his perspective, and he tacitly acknowledges that he has asked for more than he has a right to. Gabriel’s ability to empathize with others results in his falling in love with Alice too, something that promises a new beginning for them both, and it is therefore all the more tragic that he is unable to break free of a destructive ideology of masculine loyalty, murderous brotherhood, and homosocial bonds. Akin’s narration seems to at once acknowledge and lament the persistence of a problematic and underlying architecture of gender. In Gegen die Wand, the main character, Cahit, drives his car into a wall in a fit of self-destructive depression that requires love, manslaughter, and a prison sentence to cure. Like so many of Akin’s other male characters, Cahit inhabits a kind of urban underworld in which people live unhealthy lives, are frequently exposed to violence, and take comfort in alcohol and aggressive or violent heterosexual sex. Like Illias, Zinos (until the end), Ali, Gabriel, Bobby, and Costa, Cahit has no stable financial footing in this urban center, no career, and nothing to anchor him other than an exaggerated but threatened masculinity. Everything implies, in fact, that it is the death of his wife, and thus the loss of a traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationship, that motivates Cahit’s suicidal rage. Though it has more complicated twists and turns than traditional Hollywood melodramas, Gegen die Wand is essentially an updated melodramatic story of a good but extremely troubled man saved by the love of a good, if also very troubled, woman. To that extent, the character representations here are neither particularly liberating nor radical but are rather echoes of mainstream filmic reproductions of the sex-gender status quo. Even the basic concepts of identity construction circulating in the film tend toward uncomplicated models, but, as in Kurz und Schmerzlos, Akin leaves open the possibility that human beings’ entrapment 26 Muriel Cormican in gendered expectations severely limits their possibilities. If Bobby, Costa, and Gabriel fail to escape the confines of a violent urban masculinity and brotherhood in Kurz und Schmerzlos, then here it is Sibel who proves unable to escape a narrow definition of femininity that revolves around sex, reproduction, domesticity, and masculinity as its polar opposite. One particularly binding expectation for Sibel is the mother-daughter relationship. Early on, she explains to Selma that she couldn’t simply leave Hamburg to escape the life she despised because she couldn’t leave her mother. And in the end, the mother-daughter tie and a reasonably comfortable domesticity keep her in Istanbul. Although she has spent two days in a hotel rekindling her relationship to Cahit and packs a suitcase with the intention of leaving, the sound of her daughter’s voice from the next room interrupts her preparations and she chooses to stay. Sibel’s and Cahit’s journeys suggest that interpellation into prefabricated social structures, including a gendered architecture, is a survival strategy and that in general, it is simply a matter of where, when, and how, not if, that interpellation, with its necessary renunciations, occurs. To some degree then, these representations reproduce the ostensibly «natural» reality of the very sex-gender system Akin otherwise laments in both Kurz und Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand. One particularly ugly sequence supports the argument that Sibel, despite herself, is trapped both discursively and physically in the heteronormative sex-gender system. After she loses Cahit to a prison sentence and migrates to Istanbul to wait for him, Sibel descends again into a self-destructive phase, taking drugs, drinking too much, and eventually, after being raped while in a semiconscious state, attempting suicide by provocation. Although the men in the backstreet initiate this violent encounter, directing sexist comments at Sibel, she pushes all the right buttons to escalate them into a misogynist frenzy. As a result of asking them why they don’t go home and «fuck their mothers,» she suffers her first brutal beating. A low-angled camera emphasizes Sibel’s blood on the street in the left foreground while, in the right background, she struggles back to her feet and calls them «Hurensöhne.» After a second attack and a warning from the men («Mädchen, zieh Leine! »), a mid shot of Sibel’s bloody and battered face, and her final insult («Ihr Schwuchteln»), one of the men stabs her and leaves her for dead. To incite the men and thus perhaps resist in the only way she knows how as a woman in this context, Sibel challenges their masculinity, resorting to the most stereotypically fraught phrases about women and gays that we can imagine. She insults their mothers by making them into a potential object of the men’s violent sexual desires («ficken»), then by implying the promiscuity of their mothers and its negative reflection on them («Hurensöhne»), and finally by calling their Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 27 heteronormative sexuality into question. This confused, violent, and repulsive scene offers a kind of caricature of the dilemma that is masculinity in the narrow confines of a persistently patriarchal world. Although «she was asking for it» is generally used metaphorically to impute guilt to an attacked woman who doesn’t conform to the societal expectations of the «nice girl,» it is rendered literal in this sequence as the stabber’s final address to Sibel suggests: «Verdammte Scheiße! Ich glaube wir haben die Kleine getötet. Ist es das, was du wolltest? » (my emphasis). His question suggests a compulsion to defend their masculinity, as if without it they would be nothing. The characters here become mere ciphers for a system of roles and expectations, losing their humanity. Given that this scene follows directly on the rape of Sibel by an acquaintance in an empty club, Akin might be seen to criticize a predatory masculinity that continues to exist (as in Kurz und Schmerzlos) because of conflicting cultural messages that make women both things to be revered in private (home: mother, sister, daughter) and to be reified in public (city: object of sexual desire, property, Other). And yet the end of the scene with the man’s sympathetic reference to Sibel as «die Kleine» seems to both rehumanize her attackers and diminish and infantilize Sibel. It reestablishes their masculinity (she is the little one) at the same moment in which it seems to exonerate the men for their role in the affair (the man shows remorse and transfers at least some blame to Sibel). This violent attack is then simply absorbed without further comment into the narrative by a significant temporal jump, suggesting a fatalistic understanding of the sex-gender system that regularly generates violence in mundane and innocuous as well as spectacular form. It is worth lingering for a minute on the construction of femininity in Gegen die Wand since, as the other side of the essential sex-gender binary that Akin repeatedly invokes throughout his work, it offers insight into his construction of masculinity as well. Akin relies on the centrality of sexuality, sensuality, and emotion in the depiction of Sibel and of women in general. His female characters are either foils for the depiction of masculinity (Solino, Soul Kitchen, and Im Juli), mothers, women driven by their sexuality to self-sacrifice, suicide attempts, self-destruction, and death (Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite), or some mixture of these characteristics. Sibel exists as a female double of Cahit, a «wild thing,» trying to escape the conditions of her existence through an active nightlife and sex. Confined to a traditional Muslim home and policed by her parents and brother, she even plays with suicide as a possible escape. What escape means to her, however, can be boiled down to one thing: sex whenever, wherever, and with whomever she wants. In her essay «Turkish Delight - German Fright. Migrant Identities in Transnational Cinema,» Deniz Göktürk criticizes the tendency in early 28 Muriel Cormican Turkish-German cinema and in German cinema to depict the «ghetto» and the misery of the life of the marginalized and imprisoned immigrant, and to focus on the problems and confinement of women in these marginalized communities: Many films centred [sic] around the problems of Turkish women who were oppressed by their patriarchal fathers, brothers or husbands, excluded from the public sphere and confined in enclosed spaces. Helma Sanders’ Shirins Hochzeit/ Shirin’s Wedding (1975), for example […], is a black and white film about Shirin (Ayten Erten) who leaves her Anatolian village, to search for her fiancé Mahmut in Köln. […] Shirin ends up on the street as a prostitute and is killed by her pimp in the end, her fate being commented on elegiacally by Helma Sanders’ voice-over, somewhat universalizing the suffering of womanhood. (7) Göktürk is critical of what she reads as Helma Sanders’s (whether intentional or unintentional) affirmation of a widespread Western notion that women in traditional Muslim families are oppressed and confined, implying that Sanders merely solidifies an already pronounced sense of Western superiority. Akin’s depiction of Sibel from almost thirty years later does not seem that different except perhaps in its reduction of the confined woman’s struggles with these traditions to issues having to do solely with restrictions to her ostensibly natural, heteronormative, sexual desires. Although complex in a variety of ways and certainly strong, independent, and rebellious, Sibel is ultimately a sexual creature whose primary struggle after escaping the parental home is to learn to contain her naturalized sex drive. Despite its compelling and thought-provoking twists and turns and Sibel’s and Cahit’s varied experiences and mindsets, Gegen die Wand does not ultimately question the heteronormative sex-gender system but merely the expression of masculinity that includes violence and intolerance. The depiction of Sibel in Gegen die Wand serves in part to simply distinguish Cahit from other men who appear domineering, base, crude, and entrenched in patriarchal ideologies. His difference becomes clearest in comparisons to characters such as Sibel’s father and brother, the barman who rapes Sibel, and the three men who brutalize her in an alley, but even someone like Seref, Cahit’s mild-mannered friend, serves to help differentiate Cahit. Seref blames Sibel for Cahit’s imprisonment both privately to her and later to Cahit and implies, when he chastises Sibel, that if women would simply toe the line (a parallel admonition to that of the three men who beat Sibel), problems such as those that Cahit is now facing could be avoided. He later tells Cahit too to forget about Sibel because she has done him enough harm. Cahit, however, like Gabriel in Kurz und Schmerzlos, signifies an updated masculinity and sets off for Istanbul to find her. Like the other men in Gegen die Wand, Cahit Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 29 has a rough surface, but his despair over the death of his wife, his desire to help and understand Sibel, and his annoyance at the other Turkish-German men in Sibel’s circle who talk about bordellos and take insult when he asks them why they don’t «fuck» their own wives set him apart. But setting Cahit apart in this way ultimately provides a kind of excuse for a heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity as long as it is gentle and for patriarchal structures as long as violence plays no role in them. If the problems of masculinity (violence, superiority over women, suppression of women, etc.) can be limited to just some males and primarily those who are older or have not «thrown away their Turkish,» to draw on a phrase used by Cahit when he asks for Sibel’s hand in marriage, then the heteronormative sex-gender system as a whole remains unchallenged. We are invited to identify with Cahit and to see in him a masculinity that is more acceptable, one that hides a soft core underneath a rough exterior. Gegen die Wand recuperates a relatively conservative masculinity and points to the possibility - even the fatalistic necessity perhaps, to which the discussion of Nejat in Auf der anderen Seite below lends credence - of finding a still clearly identifiable cultural masculinity (a set of behaviors including heterosexual desire) that resides in a clearly identifiable physical male body (the material) that self-identifies as male (the ideal). In Auf der anderen Seite, viewers encounter a world in which there is no originary root (biological, cultural, political, geographical or other) that is not illusory. The characters eventually abandon their ties to geographical, biological, and cultural roots, becoming free to shift about and to commit to each other in terms that are deliberate and reflective rather than predetermined and unmindful. As Claudia Breger notes in «Configuring Affect: Complex World Making in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite,» the German title of the film points to, among other things, the existence of multiplicities, to other sides, spatially, intellectually, ideologically, culturally, and politically speaking. In a nice twist in this film, for example, Turkey becomes the space of liberation, a place where Nejat, Susanne, Ali, and Ayten can find more satisfying and less judgmental relationships to themselves and others. Each makes a conscious decision to open up to the Other in this space, to «tak[e] up the problems of the Other» (Glissant 18). Recalling his father’s placing of his relationship to his son above that of his relationship to God when he was a child, Nejat decides to try to find him again and rebuild their relationship. Ali cries after reading Selim Özdegan’s novel The Blacksmith’s Daughter, gaining, we have to assume, new empathy for a woman whose life is determined and rendered desolate by a man and thus some insight into Yeter’s plight. Stricken by the connection between her actions and Lotte’s 30 Muriel Cormican death, Ayten invokes her right to remorse and seeks out Susanne who, for her part, enters into a mother-daughter relationship no longer based on a shared biological and cultural heritage. Susanne and Ayten choose each other. Auf der anderen Seite, then, is a film marked by «errantry» in the sense developed by Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation. «Errantry,» he argues, is that phenomenon which «silently emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities that yesterday were still triumphant and, at the same time, from difficult, uncertain births of new forms of identity that call to us» (18). Interestingly, it is within this context that we see Akin’s first developed representation of a same-sex relationship, suggesting, also for the first time in one of his films, the «destructuring» of compact sex-gender identities. Exploring cultural, geographical, and even biological essentialism, Auf der anderen Seite points to the possibility of an existential nomadism. Despite its investigation of this existential nomadism and its more satisfying range of feminine identities, a range that at least partially undermines the heteronormative sex-gender system, the film’s two primary representations of masculinity (Ali and Nejat) neither challenge nor threaten traditional understandings of masculinity. Ali, the working-class, older Turkish immigrant to Germany, understands masculinity to involve toughness and a relationship to women based on conflicting desires to honor, protect, control, and own them. When Yeter praises him for having raised Nejat so well - Nejat is polite, discrete, willing to do house work and wait on Yeter at dinner - Ali responds that he raised him «like a girl,» revealing both his entrenchment in a set of strictly gendered identity discourses and at least a vague disappointment with his son. 9 The terms of Ali’s relationship to Yeter consolidate his attitudes toward gendered identity for the viewer. Masculinity for him is intimately tied to a misogynist heterosexuality, so much so that when he returns from a few days in the hospital, he cannot imagine that his son has not slept with his girlfriend during his absence. Emotionally wrought and attempting to reassert his dominance over, and ownership of, Yeter, Ali accidentally kills her when she resists. Nejat’s emotional reserve, by contrast, is emphasized in his relationship to the literature to which he has devoted his life and his logical decision to fund Ayten’s education after Ali kills her mother: if his father killed her mother, then he must atone for the sins of the father by trying to replace that mother, at least in deed. The first crack in Nejat’s aloof exterior - he communicates primarily about practicalities throughout the film - appears when he and Susanne look out the window of his apartment in Istanbul at the men heading to the mosque and he recalls his father’s devotion to him as a child. Clearly moved by an all-male religious occasion and the memory of his father’s promise that he would choose Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 31 to make an enemy of God before conceding to sacrifice his son, Nejat decides on the spur of the moment to go find him. Like Daniel in Im Juli, he sets off on a real road trip that becomes the metaphor for an internal odyssey that, as viewers, we experience as a flashback narration. 10 Nejat and Ali represent the two fairly extreme poles of masculinity between which all of Akin’s other male characters fall. On the one hand, we have the emotional, hypersexual male who indulges in the pleasures of the flesh - alcohol and sex - and believes he owns Yeter whose exclusivity he has purchased, and on the other we have the intellectual, unemotional, and seemingly asexual male who gives himself over to the life of the mind - books, logical decisions, and moderation - and takes in women who pay him for their accommodations. While Nejat’s rational, unemotional, sensitive brand of masculinity, his Victorian gentlemanliness if you will, contrasts with Ali’s and puzzles Ali, the polarization of the two characters combined with the evacuation of all sexuality from the character of Nejat offers, in the end, no disruption to the heteronormative sex-gender system and leaves the range of potential masculine identities limited and limiting. In fact, Nejat comes across as a hollow shell without a real identity, hardly offering a viable alternative to traditional masculinities. In the end, inspired by the story of the sacrifice of Isaac and his own father’s rejection of Abraham’s obedience to God, he has traveled toward the father, a traditional manifestation of masculinity, but is left waiting on the shore, unsure if what he is looking for will return. Akin’s treatment of masculinity in these three films suggests the often unfortunate but de facto persistence of gender stereotypes within and across cultures even as it allows for some plurality arranged along a continuum from Ali to Nejat. In «A New Kind of Creative Energy: Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin and Fatih Akin’s Kurz und Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand,» Petra Fachinger concludes: «In all of Akin’s films, his male protagonists struggle with their masculinity because of a lack of suitable role models. The traditional patriarch has lost his legitimate function, and American pop culture heroes send them on a path of (self)destruction» (258). Fachinger’s emphasis on the «traditional» patriarch’s loss is important because the representations in these films neither particularly challenge nor threaten patriarchal structures as a whole. Akin’s characters represent, Mine Eren concludes (quoting Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick), «existential nomads ready to leave a past of stifling conventions behind» (Eren 175). But the stifling conventions these characters seem ready to leave behind do not, in most cases, and particularly in the three comedies I will discuss below, include gender conventions. Whereas the elderly men appear at home in their performances of masculinity (at least until something goes very wrong), the younger gen- 32 Muriel Cormican eration is often adrift in a world in which the external expectations of masculinity seem primarily defined in terms of finance capital, independence, and career or class, and the internalized expectations continue to be issues of sexual desire, dominance, and honor. By displacing the problems of the patriarchy onto an earlier generation’s violence and intolerance toward women, however, Akin provides an accounting for patriarchy that locates its biggest problems in just a few bad seeds who are either of a bygone era or the vestiges of that bygone era. Against this backdrop, the younger generation tends to represent an acceptable form of patriarchy - softer, less rigid, and more sensitive - but the fundamental architecture of gender and the heteronormative sex-gender system remain largely intact. Given Akin’s intriguing, if ultimately fairly conventional, treatment of gender in Kurz und Schmerzlos, Gegen die Wand, and Auf der anderen Seite, it is difficult to imagine the trajectories that led from Kurz und Schmerzlos to Im Juli and from Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite to Soul Kitchen. The dominant conceptualization of a new masculinity emerging from Akin’s comedies is one that combines elements of an intellectual, middleclass but rigid white German masculinity and a creative, working-class and flexible ethnic German masculinity. Whereas Kurz und Schmerzlos, Gegen die Wand, and Auf der anderen Seite acknowledge questions of intersectionality - how ethnic and gender issues intermingle and both block and build on each other - and explore, it could be argued, masculinities (plural), Im Juli, Solino, and Soul Kitchen establish a kind of masculinity (singular) that, while ostensibly progressive because of its consideration of class and race, seems utterly retrogressive in its construction of the relationship between masculinity and femininity. These films invite viewers into a consensus about a kind of immutable masculine/ feminine binary. They depict a new man who needs the attitudes, grit, and urban toughness of the working-class, ethnic German but the economic resources, professional recognition, and the control over his own destiny of the middle-class white German. In Im Juli, Solino, and Soul Kitchen, the central male’s quest is for control. He must arrive at a position where he has power over himself, his partner, and his business or career. Akin’s body of work, then, cannot be seen to be as homogenously challenging of narrow identity structures as it appears when he is listed among the German directors who do not make «cinema of consensus.» My goal here is to provide an alternative perspective to readings within transnational discourses that see Soul Kitchen, Solino, and Im Juli as just more of what we get in Kurz und Schmerzlos, Gegen die Wand, Auf der anderen Seite. 11 Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 33 Randall Halle argues, that «[t]ransnationalism entails a reimagining of community,» and points out that «[w]hile it affords new possibilities of belonging, it also entails new techniques of exclusion; it is a redefinition of borders, not a removal of them» (10). And, like many, he lauds Fatih Akin’s works for offering something complicated and intricate in terms of this reimagining. In his article «Großstadtfilm and Gentrification Debates: Localism and Social Imaginary in Soul Kitchen and Eine flexible Frau,» Halle discusses Richard Florida’s concept of the «creative class» and applies it to the two films he analyzes, concluding in the case of Soul Kitchen that Akin pits two kinds of gentrification against each other and celebrates one, namely the kind where someone who is committed locally, personally, and culturally is behind that gentrification. Halle’s analysis does not include gender, but in her essay «Beyond the Class Act: Gender and Race in the ‹Creative City› Discourse,» Brenda Parker demonstrates the gendered nature of the discourse on the creative class, arguing that it «forwards a seemingly soft, contemporary version of hegemonic masculinity. Sometimes subtly and often opaquely, the discourse reflects and reproduces a number of gendered ideologies and practices. In doing so, it helps ‹fix› and ‹naturalize› a raced and gendered order in which privileged men have the most unambiguous access to and power in the creative city» (202). Soul Kitchen’s representation and celebration of the creative class similarly «reflects and reproduces gendered ideologies and practices» and naturalizes a «gendered order,» and the critique Parker levels at «the Creative Class discourse» extends to discourses on transnationalism as they surface in many discussions of Fatih Akin’s cinema because gender often proves absent as an analytic category and masculinist positions come, by default, to stand at the center of human experience. If the obviously gendered representation of foreigners’ successes in, and integration into, a creative urban class in a particular body of films goes unaddressed, then discourse here too forwards, unwittingly or not, a «soft, contemporary version of hegemonic masculinity» (Parker 202). My interest, then, is in tracing some of the exclusions that Halle alludes to in the introduction to his book German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic in Akin’s films. Soul Kitchen has received a lot of praise both in reviews and in film criticism. Halle’s article mentioned above reveals the film’s interesting commentary on the process of gentrification, and Hillman and Silvey highlight the creative and intelligent way in which music is used in Soul Kitchen. My argument that the gender politics of the film remain questionable, condoning male sexual aggression and universalizing a dominating heterosexual and partially violent masculinist perspective, ought not be taken as a contradic- 34 Muriel Cormican tion of Halle’s, Hillman and Silvey’s arguments but rather as an addition to them. The film focuses on Zinos’s struggle to become a successful man and suggests that in order to do so, he must assert his masculinity more forcefully. At the beginning of the narrative, Zinos is in a relationship with Nadine, and his own career is suffering. He attends a party with her family because she wants him to, feels outclassed, seems unable to stand up for himself among them, and so steps outside to take a break from the stress. The qualities of the cook at this restaurant, however, who ignores the normal dictates of his job and the upper-class milieu, intrigue Zinos. Rather than feel somewhat intimidated by the environment (as Zinos appears to be) and allow the wealthy German customer to impose his understanding of soup onto gazpacho, Shane confronts the customer, violently jabbing the knife into his table and denying his right to redefine a traditional Andalusian dish. When Shane is fired for his actions, Zinos follows him outside, compliments his work, and eventually hires him. At the end of the film, Zinos has shed Nadine and is now together with a woman who has nursed him back to health, is closer to his class origins, and who is softer and allows him to take control. Soul Kitchen’s focus is clearly on Zinos and his personal odyssey, but it offers us depictions of four women, all of whom are cardboard figures important for what they tell us about the male characters: Nadine, Zinos’s girlfriend; Lucia, the waitress in his restaurant and later Illias’s girlfriend; Frau Schuster, the tax woman; and Anna, the physiotherapist and Zinos’s romantic interest at the end of the film. Zinos’s masculinity is tied to a fundamentally misogynist architecture. Nadine is a problematic girlfriend because she makes demands on him that interfere with his restaurant plans and travels to Shanghai for her work, thereafter being only accessible in virtual fragments when they skype (her face, her eyes, her torso and breasts during a failed attempt at virtual sex). Later, she is the disloyal, spoiled, rich girl who cheats on him but fails to tell him so that on his way to his flight to join her in Shanghai, he sees her walking through the Hamburg airport with another man. She functions negatively in his life, primarily because she puts her career as a foreign correspondent and her own wishes and desires above his and asks that he adapt somewhat to her familial and class environment. Nadine undermines rather than props up his masculine self. In contrast to her, he is economically and professionally unsuccessful, and even his attempts at sexual intercourse all fail: she falls asleep when he tries to have sex with her in person and when he hopes for virtual satisfaction, he knocks the camera off the laptop and ruins his chances then too. Nadine is only partially rehabilitated toward the end of the film when she lends him the money he needs to buy back his restaurant, a defining element of his masculinity. Lucia is sexu- Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 35 alized from the beginning, the object of Illias’s (Zinos’s brother’s) gaze and can only be truly integrated into the community in which she works when she concedes to Illias’s advances and eventually becomes his lover. Anna, a foreign physiotherapist to whom Nadine refers Zinos when he has trouble with his back, is first and foremost the sexualized Other who causes Zinos to have an erection during a physiotherapy session, who, in other words, presides over the revitalization of his masculinity. Unlike Nadine, his first girlfriend, Anna accepts a more traditionally feminine role and conveniently understands Zinos from the first time they meet. She nurses him back to health, abandons another patient to help him, and is the only member of the «geschlossene Gesellschaft» invited to his restaurant for a special Christmas feast that he prepares himself. Whereas Nadine makes him laughable, Anna heals him, makes him strong, and cedes control to him. In order to assert his masculinity, Zinos must break from the more dominant and successful Nadine, find a nurturing woman who meets him in his environment rather than demanding that he come to hers, get his own back on the woman in a position of authority, and take control of the narrative. Thus in his investigation of masculinity in Soul Kitchen, Akin resorts to a series of banal, tired, and crude stereotypes: the cold and unfeeling blond career woman whose only saving grace is that she can be guilted into lending Zinos some money after having formerly undermined his masculinity; the dark-haired alternative would-be artist who sees past the criminal, gambler, womanizer to the nice guy inside Illias’s rough exterior; and the gentle, caring, non-German mother figure who understands, supports, and prioritizes Zinos and his needs. Economic integration combined with a personal, emotional, and sexual segregation makes Zinos a satisfied and whole man in the end. He goes from having a relatively unsuccessful business and a German girlfriend to a happy ending in which he has a promising business and a migrant girlfriend. Though obviously interesting and original from some perspectives, Soul Kitchen’s exploration of the emerging transnational urban and creative class obscures the fact that belonging fully to this class seems to require that one be a cisgender male. The fourth and most disturbing of the crude stereotypes of femininity (with its implied relationship between masculinity and femininity) is to be found in the depiction of Frau Schuster, the blond woman in a position of authority - she is the tax collector - who can be put back in her place and humiliated through sex. Soul Kitchen includes a scene with Frau Schuster that is violent in its implications, grotesque, and misogynist and yet a scene that has received little or no critical attention in readings or reviews of the film. Given that this film follows Gegen die Wand by five years, it is hard to see 36 Muriel Cormican Akin depict another scene similar to the rape of Sibel (woman being taken with force of some kind from behind) as comedic, and it is perhaps because it simply does not fit our reading of the trajectory of Akin’s oeuvre that the scene in question has gone uncommented. In the latter third of the film Neumann «fucks the tax office,» to use Zinos’s language, during Zinos’s goodbye party. Frau Schuster had come to his restaurant earlier to collect taxes owed and had taken his music system because he had no money to offer. Zinos’s revenge when she returns this night is to give her a dessert laced with an aphrodisiac - and she is, importantly, the only person to whom he directly hands such a dessert - and watch as she spirals down into a sexual frenzy. Although others too consume this aphrodisiac dessert, they do so independently and not because Zinos hands it to them in an ostensibly friendly gesture. Eventually we see Frau Schuster bent over, hands against a pole, with Neumann penetrating her from behind, pulling on her hair like on a horse’s mane with one hand, and taking photos of her in a compromising situation with a smart phone in the other hand. Though conscious and standing, she is in an altered state and is, at best, a passive, possibly an unwitting, recipient of this sex act. A discussion in the parking lot the next morning emphasizes Frau Schuster’s diminished capacity the night before. She walks out of the restaurant to find Neumann and Zinos laughing at the photos, discussing her «tits,» and agreeing enthusiastically about how «geil» it all was. Frau Schuster’s sense of having been wronged is evident, especially when she asks for Neumann’s name, implying that she will seek revenge. Despite all of this, Zinos’s final comment to her is a tongue-in-cheek, «Gut geschmeckt? » Zinos intentionally offers Frau Schuster an overdose and takes pleasure in her sexual humiliation both during and after it. The narrative arc is one in which the viewers are placed in an identificatory relationship with Zinos. We are expected to feel his pain, see through his eyes, and celebrate his victories even if one borders, as in this case, on the reprehensible. I read this scene, in fact, as a trivialized rape narrative. 12 At the very least, we are dealing with a kind of sexual assault, compounded by the photographing of the act and the circulation of those photographs to which Frau Schuster did not consent. 13 There is little doubt but that Frau Schuster’s bodily sovereignty has been violated. In fact, the comedy in operation here would not work at all if it weren’t for the existence of a violation. Presumably the act can be seen as humorous because of what Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren elucidate as the benign violation theory of humor in their article «Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny.» According to them, humor is elicited by benign violations: «moral violations that simultaneously seem benign elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust» (1141). They argue that three Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 37 conditions must coexist to elicit humor: «A situation must be appraised as a violation, a situation must be appraised as benign, and these two appraisals must occur simultaneously» (1142). The authors acknowledge that some violations are less clearly benign than others. Complications occur when «one norm suggests that the behavior is wrong but another simultaneously suggests that it is acceptable» (1144). Psychological distance from the violation also matters, the authors explain, as does the strength of one’s commitment to the violated norm (1145-47). With regard to the sexual act itself represented here then, we would have to assume that Akin’s comedy would not function if there were not at least some implication that Frau Schuster is not completely conscious of what she is doing. This is Zinos’s revenge, after all, so if she were simply engaging completely consciously, entirely of her own volition, and with no external influence in a public, sexual act in which she would have engaged anyway, regardless of drugs, the orgy atmosphere, etc., there would be no potential to see a violation and thus no potential to celebrate Zinos’s payback. The laughter Akin attempts to elicit depends precisely on the fact that Zinos, by personally administering an aphrodisiac to Frau Schuster in the guise of a friendly dessert offering and against her knowledge, creates the conditions for a public, sexual humiliation of this woman. Even if rhetorically this is «just» a mechanism used to undermine the ethnographic gaze, employed to demonstrate how a member of an ethnic minority «sticks it to the man» (with, curiously, a woman having been chosen to represent that «man»), asserts himself, bonds with an ethnically German man who represents a business threat, and thereby becomes part of a more transnational fabric of masculinity, a masculinity which in late capitalism has more to do with economic interests and the heteronormative sex-gender system than national or ethnic origins, Akin’s contribution to the discourse is, in this instance, still misogynist. Even as it works to promote a new understanding of marginalized minorities who can be more organically tied to and interested in the development of the Hamburg Heimat than any purportedly more German German, Soul Kitchen becomes part of a cinema of identification that makes misogyny something for viewers to coalesce around and laugh at. Because Zinos is redeemed, shown in the gentle relationship to Anna to be nothing like Neumann with whom he shares this misogynist moment, his culpability is erased and this misogynist act is trivialized - just an understandable attempt on the part of the struggling nice guy to settle the score. Akin appears here to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. He implicitly critiques the kind of misogynist positions into which someone like Zinos could fall in order to avoid alienating the wealthy, white, successful businessman who is after his building but also 38 Muriel Cormican promotes that same misogyny in the name of a comedic sympathy for the underdog. Halle’s analysis of the characteristics of Heimat in Soul Kitchen offers a further productive springboard for an analysis of the film’s conservative construction of masculinity: «Historically the term Heimatfilm has designated a sentimental film with a regional background. Heimat, home, is typically connected to an idyllic landscape and a German community rooted in ethnicized soil. Akin in effect turns the ‹home film› into a ‹hometown› film […]. With Soul Kitchen, Heimat is de-ethnicized and generalized to become simply that place wherever one lives, works, and loves» (175). What remains unspoken here is the fact that the «one» who «lives, works, and loves» is a cisgender male. In terms of gender paradigms, Soul Kitchen reproduces and reifies traditional conceptualizations. Gender is not a contested site in this rewriting of the Heimatfilm but rather a site in which the familiar is affirmed. Gender serves as a constant across national and ethnic boundaries. The film may suggest that migration and the emergence of a new urban, ethnic, creative class promise positive shifts and changes that will not undermine but rather add strength and diversity to the Hamburg Heimat, but the gendered relationships intrinsic to its representation of successful masculinity return us to a very traditional notion of Heimat and the Heimatfilm. Indeed, the essentialism of soil and ethnicity seem transferred to the gendered body: in a film representing a world in which it is no longer possible or desirable to maintain traditional boundaries - ethnic, cultural, class, and other - gender provides a familiar cartography. While, as Halle concludes, «a narrative attempt to negotiate urban development and renewal» is central to Soul Kitchen’s plot and we can «understand the film itself, with its chaotic fast-paced narrative and comedic disruptions, as a part of this uncontrolled social imaginary that envisions a particular structure in urban space» (176-77), this particular narrative and its negotiations are not merely male-centered and male-driven but misogynous, depending, especially for its comedic disruptions, on a relegation of women to traditional sexualized and subordinate roles. So while Soul Kitchen may represent, in Halle’s words, «a de-ethnicized, de-racialized conception of Heimat/ home,» it does not represent a de-gendered one (179). Because I agree wholeheartedly with Randall Halle’s insightful conclusion that «[i]maginative communities made possible by film offer important interventions in quests for alternative social and economic organization,» I believe it is essential that, while recognizing and praising Akin’s films for their alternative imaginings in a variety of senses, we also remain open to a critical discourse that exposes those important aspects of an alternative social and Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 39 economic organization that are being overlooked, omitted, or even directly undermined (190). In her essay «Cosmopolitan Filmmaking: Fatih Akin’s In July and Headon,» Mine Eren summarizes Daniel’s physical and mental odyssey in Im Juli as follows: «As Daniel abandons his preconceived ideas and belief in rationality, he finds both his true love and his true identity» (180; my emphasis). As Eren’s summary suggests, the film reads as an adult Disney film. The very idea that a character has a submerged but authentic masculine identity that emerges over the course of a European odyssey leads one to suspect that the representation of masculinity in the film might not complicate questions of identity and its relationship to gender, ethnicity, and/ or transnationalism. Indeed, Im Juli depends on an incontrovertible understanding of masculinity as the complement to femininity, as one side of an essential human binary that, among other things, overrides manifestations of class and cultural difference. Despite Daniel’s fundamental uncoolness, Juli falls for him, but her attempts to flirt with him fall flat because he appears hopelessly alienated from his basic drives and desires. Flashing forward to the conclusion of his journey in Istanbul, we encounter the confident, relaxed Daniel who has experienced the «real» world and to whom appropriate heterosexual flirtation is second nature - he pretends to not hear her when she says «Ich liebe dich,» so that she will have to repeat it a number of times and increasingly loudly. The factors that have brought about this seismic change in one week seem a bit puerile: a trip in which Daniel learns to fight, to spoon, to smoke pot, in which he is seduced, drugged, robbed, shot at, and forced to survive with nothing but the shirt on his back, all, of course, in order to get the girl. In this accelerated, heterosexist coming-of-age story, Daniel learns to be a man by casting off all of the middle-class, intellectual, uptight, asexual prissiness that makes him appear socially and professionally inept. He even gets rid of - apparently without any real consequence - the glasses he presumably needs to counteract his myopia since he wears them all the time in Hamburg. This return to a reliance on his own eyes can be read to symbolize his emergence from an overly corrective cocoon of civilization that, like the clothes, wallet, passport, habits, and affectations he loses, limits rather than supports his natural instincts and stunts his masculinity. In both Soul Kitchen and Im Juli, German hegemonic masculinity is transformed from an upper-class intellectual model to a working-class ethnic model, but the fundamental heterosexual paradigm whereby identity is defined by a series of masculine and feminine binaries goes unquestioned. As a «disnification,» Im Juli offers pleasure in the form of easily digestible solutions rather than insightful questions about transnationalism or conundrums of identity and its relationship 40 Muriel Cormican to ethnicity, nationhood, gender, and/ or sexuality. It promises viewers that despite difficulties and twists and turns, if one persists, everything will work out right in the end within, of course, the hegemonic heterosexual paradigm. While not invoking traditional narrative pleasure and problematically gendered binaries on quite the same misogynist level as Soul Kitchen, some of the same problems exist in Im Juli. Daniel’s masculinity, the masculinity of a young ethnic German, is what is at stake here, and it is ultimately won and affirmed by means of a journey east and south to unexplored territories in which he becomes the struggling Other until he manages to tell his story of heterosexual desire to another man. Although he is drawn out of his comfort zone, away from Hamburg and his Spießer existence, he is drawn not by an interest in other culture, but by the promise of heterosexual gratification. The exoticization of the Europe east of Germany occurs through the lens of Daniel’s heterosexual gaze, in particular his gaze at Melek. In the first scene in which we see her, the camera repeats, without irony, the objectification tactics associated with the male gaze so astutely analyzed by Laura Mulvey in the mid-seventies and, as this and other cases bear out, still relevant today. As Melek approaches Daniel for the first time, she is shown in fragments, rendered in soft focus and slow motion, and sexualized. It is not insignificant that the film is essentially Daniel’s narrative to Isa, one in which foreign countries are rendered difficult and treacherous and their men dangerous and corrupt. When Daniel does manage a transnational connection to another male, namely to Isa, it is because of a mutual understanding of a basic heterosexual male drive. Melek and Juli attract Daniel, not Turkey or any of the countries between Germany and Turkey. His primary Other is woman, and his quest has little to do with the pursuit or achievement of transnational understanding, an openness to difference and a variety of European cultures as some critics and reviewers have claimed. Instead, he is on a conventional, normative, and heterosexually inflected quest. That the principal Other in this film is a gendered rather than ethnic Other is borne out by the bridging of Isa and Daniel’s differences by a hegemonic, heteronormative desire that diminishes all their other differences - it doesn’t even occur to either of them that they might be competitors. Once Isa understands that Daniel is in pursuit of a woman, he does all he can to help him get to the Bosphorus Bridge on time. The final pairings of the film emphasize the prominence of masculinity in the single transnational understanding that appears to occur between Isa and Daniel: a German travels across Europe and endures a variety of hardships in pursuit of a Turkish- German woman but realizes just in time that he is destined to be with Juli, a German woman, and that the Turkish-German woman is already in a rela- Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 41 tionship with his new Turkish-German friend. The end of Daniel’s exploring, to invoke T.S. Eliot, is that he arrives where he started but knows that place (Juli and his masculinity) for the first time. The journey across Europe has not educated him about other cultures and peoples. It has «made a man» of Daniel, returning him to the roots he had, ironically, lost track of at home in Hamburg, namely to his instinctive masculinity and native culture, expressed as his always already predetermined role in this heterosexual German-German coupling. Like Soul Kitchen, though «fun and entertaining» in accordance with the benign violation theory of humor and with cinematic archetypes created in the Golden Age of Hollywood, the film relies for its comedy on fairly stale fairytale structures and on both ethnic and gender stereotypes. Solino also deals with displacements, transnationalism, and masculinity, offering the usual male suspects in the form of the older man (Romano) who is entrenched in his patriarchal ways, the younger man (Gigi) who is soft, gentle, understanding and indicative of the positive possibilities of an otherwise conservative masculinity, and the younger man (Giancarlo) who is a chip off the old block, still a patriarch, and only able to relate to women as objects of his sexual desire and props for his performance of masculinity. Gigi is malleable and, unlike his brother Giancarlo, subordinates his own needs and desires to familial responsibilities. He serves as an example of the positive patriarchal demand that one honor one’s mother. Like Zinos and Daniel, Gigi too arrives at a sense of fulfillment through a return to and acceptance of modified origins. In Gigi’s case, the return to origins is most explicit. He finds himself when he commits to his mother, his motherland, his first love, Ada, and the small-town structures his father and Giancarlo (both seemingly dissatisfied at the end) fled. There are few heterosexual female characters in Akin’s films (even in those three films discussed earlier that I would not classify as among his consensus films) who are not excessively sexualized, not depicted as either driven primarily by their own sexual desire or as the receptacle for straight male sexual desire, and the female characters in Solino offer no deviation from this pattern. As in Soul Kitchen, they are hollow, cardboard figures, representing the opposite pole to masculinity in the heterosexual paradigm and complementing, shoring up, and/ or highlighting the difference between Gigi’s sensitive and Giancarlo’s insensitive inhabitance of a heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity. Although Gigi, like Cahit in Gegen die Wand, departs from the other negative performances of masculinity around him, even he relates to women, with the exception of his mother obviously, based on the principle that for men, women exist primarily as objects of desire who, ideally, subordinate their needs and wishes 42 Muriel Cormican to those of their male partner. The only woman who is fleshed out at all in Solino is Rosa, Gigi’s mother, who, despite her foundational work on and commitment to the family business, turns out in the end to have been the longsuffering, self-sacrificing wife of the Italian philanderer and paterfamilias and more or less disappears after her return to Italy - although she does not die immediately of Leukemia as predicted. The problems of a depiction that singles Gigi out as the good, updated, gentle instantiation of a persistent, immutable, and practically universal masculinity have been discussed earlier in the case of Gegen die Wand and do not need to be repeated here. In short, the gender discourses and to some degree the discourses on transnationalism circulating in these three comedies are hackneyed, conventional tropes, and the films, much more so than the three films discussed earlier, naturalize male dominance, power, narrative control, and the idea of roots. These three films, I would therefore argue, fall into the category of an updated «cinema of consensus.» Akin is not a one-sided filmmaker with a constant political or ideological agenda, I would argue, but a filmmaker whose films run the gamut from mainstream conventional to unorthodox radical. The transnational imagining of community that emerges from Fatih Akin’s work, then, is one that tends toward the universalization of a masculine, heteronormative position. In the article cited earlier by Göktürk, she praises a 1993 film, Berlin in Berlin, for offering a new approach by depicting a German man finding refuge inside a Turkish-German home. This little space in Kreuzberg becomes the safe haven for Thomas, and the external world is the limiting and threatening space. In her discussion of the innovative things this film does, however, Göktürk is forced to focus on the lives of the male characters. As she discusses Thomas, the German’s, adjustments to life in the Turkish family, she focuses on the relationships between and among the men living inside the apartment. And so while she can conclude that the film shows «more potential in exploring the pleasures of hybridity than previous attempts to portray German-Turkish encounters» and that the «reversal of the asylum situation and the resulting symbiosis open up possibilities of mutual humor and reflection, of traffic in both directions,» the new possibilities seem to be possibilities for heterosexual men (13—14). That is, except for when Thomas saves the sister-in-law in the family by leaving with her after the family begins to suspect her of having a role in her husband’s murder, it is only possible to call the traffic in both directions «German-Turkish» if we are satisfied with a universalization of the heterosexual male experience. The same goes for the discussions of Fatih Akin’s contributions to transnationalism and his ostensibly progressive exploration of the possibilities of Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 43 new ethnic identities. There is little in his films that helps us imagine what a transnational imagining would offer for women, gays, or others. In fact, his entire transnational project seems predicated on the existence of a fundamental gender binary that informs identity at a more basic level than any other aspect of culture. With this essay, I hope to have added to the valuable and necessary discourses of appreciation of Akin’s cinema a critical element that pushes for the acknowledgement of some of the significant omissions Halle alludes to when he explains that transnationalism redefines but cannot remove borders and thus includes as well as excludes. A more intersectional approach, one that incorporates elements of gender, feminist, and sexuality studies reveals that the redefinition of borders in Akin’s cinema does not include gender borders. Adding such discussions to the growing corpus of critical literature on Fatih Akin’s considerable cinematic contributions might aid in a further and positive complicating of transnational approaches to film analysis. It will at least help ensure that the reproduction of crass gender stereotypes in the service of a cinema that asks us to do the important work of thinking about the position of ethnically other men in contemporary Europe does not go uncommented in its promotion of a naturalized heteronormative sexgender system. If, as Leslie Adelson proposes in The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature, Turkish-German narratives have become an increasingly large part of discourse in German history, culture, and politics, then it is important to examine what contributions, positive and negative, those narratives might be making to, among other things, discourses of gender and sexuality and their relationships to identity. The cinematic gaze Akin proposes in several of these films is one that returns to an objectification and sexualization of women, making them the object of the gaze, the locus of visual pleasure, and a threat, if not contained, to masculinity. In his comedies especially, but also in part elsewhere, Akin asks us as viewers to adopt the male gaze, to privilege the universal male position, and to align our sympathies with the male characters even when they commit misogynist acts. Rather than just celebrate the achievements of Akin’s films in certain areas, it is important to see them more completely and to point out shortcomings and blind spots. «Various scholars have suggested that the conventional structure of the melodrama requires a reading beneath the surface to unmask the hidden ideological tensions and contradictions in society,» Eren advises us (182). In the case of Akin’s films, I suggest that we need to reread the surface in order to remind ourselves of the ideological tensions and contradictions being ignored in plain sight. 44 Muriel Cormican Notes 1 To name but a few, critics who have praised Akin’s transnational aesthetic, his complications of issues of identity, and his injection of a refreshing twist on Turkish-German relations into German cinema include Barbara Mennel, Randall Halle, Mine Eren, Roger Hillman and Vivien Silvey, Kerry Dunne, and Petra Fachinger. 2 See, for example, discussions by Roger Hillman and Vivien Silvey, as well as by Randall Halle. 3 The Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel/ Wallace test, is common in popular feminist culture as a kind of gender bias litmus test for a piece of fiction, film or other. Alison Bechdel first introduced the idea in one of her comic strips entitled «The Rule» (from Dykes to Watch Out For) in 1985. In this strip, a character says she has three basic requirements of a film. It has to have at least two women and they have to talk to each other about something other than a man. 4 For important discussions of the construction of masculinity in Kurz und Schmerzlos, see Barbara Mennel’s «Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akin’s Short, Sharp Shock» and Joanne Leal’s «American Cinema and the Construction of Masculinity in Film in the Federal Republic after 1945.» 5 This is not to say that discussions of gender are wholly absent from interpretations of Akin’s cinema. Critics such as Claudia Breger and Gözde Naibolgu, for example, have addressed gender in some amount of detail in the films Auf der anderen Seite and Gegen die Wand. 6 See, for example, Berna Gueneli’s review of Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood’s edited collection New Directions in German Cinema. She argues that Akin «would most certainly fall outside of a ‹consensus› category.» 7 Gary Schmidt has pointed out that this issue is complicated for the character of Nejat in Auf der anderen Seite, as I discuss a little further on, observing the interesting extra-diegetic fact that the same actor who played the gay Murat in Lola and Billidikid is cast here as Nejat. 8 Even the film Gabriel, Costa, and Bobby watch together is Scarface, indicating Akin’s conscious invocation of ethnic identity and integration in the American context. See Mennel for a more detailed reading of Scarface’s role here. 9 We see this disappointment too when Ali tries to discuss Nejat’s sex life with him outside the train station in Bremen only to have Nejat reject his inquisitiveness and rush off to catch a train. 10 Nejat bears further resemblance to the Daniel of the beginning of Im Juli. He is intellectually rather than sexually active, somewhat oblivious to women, clean-cut, and solidly middle-class. Im Juli makes clear that Daniel’s journey away from these things makes him more of «a man.» It remains unclear whether this will be the case for Nejat. 11 It is almost certainly the case that in trying to address a more general audience and make a film with wider appeal, Akin invoked a lot of common comedic tropes in Soul Kitchen. It seems to have worked. Soul Kitchen grossed over $10 million in Germany in 2009. Both Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite grossed just over $5 million each in their release years. 12 Some may object to the use of the word «rape» in this context. For a detailed discussion of rape, its definition, and the relationship of that definition to questions of con- Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms 45 sent and lucidity, see «Feminist Perspectives on Rape» in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 13 At the risk of being called humorless (and anyone who knows me knows that I am not that), I feel compelled to add a personal anecdote here about how this scene summons aspects of the Steubenville High School rape and how I was troubled when I first saw this scene - shortly after the first reports on Steubenville emerged - with a group of about thirty young Americans (men and women) who guffawed and nudged each other in hilarity as we all watched. Of course, the film seeks to stimulate laughter, and everything frames this as comic. It is hard, therefore, to pass judgment on people for falling into the trap, but it does seem that we ignore something very fundamentally misogynist when we fail to question why and how this scene can be perceived as funny and when we fail to recognize the fundamentally flawed real and representational contexts that make this acceptable as just another funny little incident in Zinos’s life. Works Cited Adelson, Leslie A. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Akin, Fatih, dir. Auf der anderen Seite. Perf. Baki Davrak, Nursel Köse, Hanna Schygulla, Patrycia Ziolkowska, and Nurgül Yesilcay. Corazón International, 2007. Film. -. Gegen die Wand. Perf. Sibel Kekilli and Birol Ünel. Universal Pictures Germany GmbH, 2004. Film. -. Im Juli. Perf. Moritz Bleibtreu and Christiane Paul. Euro Video, 2000. Film. -. Kurz und Schmerzlos. Perf. Mehmet Kurtulus, Aleksander Jovanovic, and Adam Bousdoukos. Wüste Filmproduktion, 1998. Film. -. Solino. Perf. Barnaby Metschurat, Moritz Bleibtreu, Gigi Savoia, and Antonella Attili. Wüste Filmproduktion, 2002. Film. -. Soul Kitchen. Perf. Adam Bousdoukos, Birol Ünel, Moritz Bleibtreu, and Anna Bederke. Corazón International, 2009. Film. Bechdel, Alison. «The Rule.» Dykes to Watch Out for, 1985. < dykestowatchoutfor. com/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2014/ 05/ The-Rule-cleaned-up.jpg>. Breger, Claudia. «Configuring Affect: Complex World Making in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite.» Cinema Journal 54.1 (2014): 65-87. Dunne, Kerry. «Side by Side: Depicting Semblance and Difference in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite [The Edge of Heaven].» Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 60.1 (2013): 34-48. Eren, Mine. «Cosmopolitan Filmmaking: Fatih Akin’s In July and Head on.» Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens. Ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel. New York: Berghahn, 2012. 175-85. Fachinger, Petra. «A New Kind of Creative Energy: Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin and Fatih Akin’s Kurz und Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand.» German Life and Letters 60.2 (2007): 243-60. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Gueneli, Berna. «Is Contemporary German Filmmaking Beyond a ‹Cinema of Consensus? › Rev. of New Directions in German Cinema, eds. Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood. H-Net Reviews (Sept. 2013): n. pag. Web. 2 July 2013. 46 Muriel Cormican -. «The Sound of Fatih Akin’s Cinema: Polyphony and the Aesthetics of Heterogeneity in The Edge of Heaven.» German Studies Review 37.2 (2014): 337-56. Göktürk, Deniz. «Turkish Delight - German Fright: Migrant Identities in Transnational Cinema.» Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper Series 99-01 (1999): 1-14. Halle, Randall. German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2008. -. «Großstadtfilm and Gentrification Debates: Localism and Social Imaginary in Soul Kitchen and Eine flexible Frau.» New German Critique 40.3 (2013): 171-91. Hillman, Roger, and Vivien Silvey. «Remixing Hamburg: Transnationalism in Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen.» Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens. Ed. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel. New York: Berghahn, 2012. 186-97. Isenberg, Noah. «Fatih Akin’s Cinema of Intersections.» Film Quarterly 64.4 (2011): 53-61. Leal, Joanne. «American Cinema and the Construction of Masculinity in Film in the Federal Republic after 1945.» German Life and Letters 65.1 (2012): 59-72. Martin, James P. «Crossing Bridges/ Crossing Cultures: The Films of Fatih Akin.» South Atlantic Review 74.2 (2009): 82-92. McGraw, A. Peter, and Caleb Warren. «Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny.» Psychological Science 21.8 (2010): 1141-49. Mennel, Barbara. «Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akin’s Short, Sharp Shock.» New German Critique 87 (2002): 133-56. Mulvey, Laura. «Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.» Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Naiboglu, Gözde. «‹Sameness› in Disguise of ‹Difference›? Gender and National Identity in Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite.» German as a Foreign Language 3 (2010): 75-98. Parker, Brenda. «Beyond the Class Act: Gender and Race in the ‹Creative City› Discourse.» Gender in an Urban World. Ed. Judith N. DeSena and Ray Hutchison. Spec. issue of Research in Sociology 9 (2008): 201-32. Rentschler, Eric. «From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus.» Cinema and Nation. Ed. Mette Hjort and Scott McKenzie. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 260-77. Whisnant, Rebecca. «Feminist Perspectives on Rape.» Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013. Web. 2 July 2013. Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology in Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2007) JOHN BLAIR Univ ersity of We st Georgia Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2007) depicts a man’s world, whose more successful inhabitants dangle in the sublimely dangerous alpine air thousands of meters above gawking, cake-eating tourists in luxurious hotels. Part of the attraction of such lonely heights is perhaps the illusion that they are beyond ideology, that, as Toni Kurz first maintains, one can be independent of accolades and expectations, far above the discursive currents of the rest of the world. Both the director and the film viewer know better. Nordwand references the Bergfilm of the 1920s and 30s; in fact, it has been both celebrated and criticized for its engagement with its predecessors. Either Stölzl «hat […] das Genre des Bergfilms wiederbelebt - als solides Actionspektakel, das den historischen Kontext nicht außer Acht lassen will» (Kammerer) or he fails miserably in his attempt to sidestep the ideological baggage attaching to the genre: «Völlig unkritisch käut man zudem die Nazi-Ideale von Kraft, Freude und deutschen Heldenmut, von Opferbereitschaft und Durchsetzungswillen gegen alle Vernunft wider, und der Berg erscheint als Metapher für den Endsieg» (Suchsland). The connection between Nazi ideology and the early Bergfilm has been well established. Kracauer’s interpretation in From Caligari to Hitler has attained almost canonical status: The Bergfilm is «rooted in a mentality kindred to Nazi spirit» (Kracauer 112), a judgment that Susan Sontag echoes in her famous essay on the fascist aesthetic (Sontag 76). Stölzl is well aware of the problem; he admits that «die Bildwelt des Bergfilms ist ideologisch kontaminiert, seit die Nazis sie für sich vereinnahmt haben» (qtd. in Schmundt). Even without Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien, we can parse this context - Bergfilm, «Actionspektakel,» «Kraft,» «Heldenmut,» and «Durchsetzungswillen» - as a discursive arena in which Nazism and masculinity orbit one another like the twin strands in the double helix of DNA. Besides the very real physical risks of filming in the mountains, then, the director of a Bergfilm in contemporary Germany must navigate a host of problematic cultural and political currents, which include a minefield of gender issues. Both the period and the genre exhibit a masculinity that projects its anxiety onto women and depicts them as dangerous to men. Stölzl, however, consciously reflects on fascist discourses and dichoto- 48 John Blair mies his film might otherwise run the risk of reaffirming/ reinscribing. He fulfills the generic requirements of the Bergfilm, but he displaces the Bergfilm’s traditional threat from the feminine Other onto the masculine by personalizing and humanizing the feminine. Problematic representations of femininity and masculinity are, of course, unavoidable in the world of film, but the Bergfilm, sometimes compared to the Western (von Beier), faces a number of special associational and discursive issues. The mountains are seen as a distinctive male realm where «je höher der Raum [ist], desto ausschließlicher männlich» (Ott; qtd. in Giesen, «Bergfilm» 14). Mountain climbing men seem to belong to an elite group: strong, brave, hard, but also loyal, honest, and capable of self-sacrifice - perfect fodder for National Socialist ideology. As Eric Rentschler and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey convincingly argue, masculinity in the Bergfilm is defined against the corruption and effeminacy of the city, a locus that in the Weimar Republic was increasingly seen as a den of iniquity seething with intellectuals, Jews, and new women. This dichotomy between the mountain and the city precedes, perhaps prefigures the official National Socialist ideological discourses of the 1930s. The Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein (DuÖAV) introduced an «Arierparagraph» already in 1922, after which Jewish tourists in the Alps were sometimes attacked, and yet earlier, in 1900, the Wandervögel claimed «mythische und ‹tiefgründige› Naturerfahrungen zum exklusiven Privileg ‹Germanisch-stämmiger› […] in Opposition zu einem städtischen jüdischen Intellektualismus» (Giesen, «Bergfilm» 9). Although these documents refer to race, their resonance also excludes the feminine, since Jews and urban space have been coded feminine against the hyper-masculine space of the mountain. In this discursive context, it is little wonder that women entering the mountains become erotic disturbances and urban others, and that the «drive to tame, harness, and neutralize the inordinate power exercised by women» becomes part of the narrative logic of the Bergfilm (Rentschler 155). Stölzl’s revitalization of the Bergfilm redresses the gender dynamics of the Bergfilm through the introduction of a frame. The frame is not the part that sells the movie, but it does change the focus of the narrative. Indeed, despite the fact that this massively dramatic film is dominated by thrilling climbs and large-scale mountain cinematography, the frame makes the flashback story it contains into a kind of Bildungsroman for Luise Fellner, an ambitious country girl attempting to make it in the world of urban journalism. In contrast to the two climbers Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser, she exists only in the fictional world of the film, which makes her prominence all the more telling. The film is structured by her struggles, compromises, and Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 49 temptations in an arena dominated by men. The depiction of her struggle in Berlin represents a complete inversion of the dominant ideological narrative of the 1920s and 30s. Instead of men struggling heroically against the decadent femininity of the city, a woman works to climb in a world that is clearly coded masculine. And masculinity is defined in terms of control, manipulation, and status: the men of the newspaper are completely co-opted, enthusiastically engaged in feeding the ideological machinery that defines, in turn, their masculinity. Luise brings culturally defined masculinities into focus in two ways: in addition to struggling against a masculine world that views her as a transgressor, she also partially undergoes the process of co-option, subscribing at least tentatively to the values necessary to that world. The frame story (set in a much later time period than the flashback narrative, long after Luise’s ambitions to succeed in the male-dominated world of the newspaper have imploded) opens with a reflection on reflection, moving in and out of focus on rolls of Kodachrome film. A less than completely youthful hand clutches a cigarette while paging through a journal that seems to document both the process of climbing mountains and a number of relationships. Hindsight allows us to identify these figures as our narrator, Luise Fellner, and the two friends she had grown up with in the village, who had climbed their way to a prominence that is in no way accompanied by financial or material gain. It is not surprising that the voice-over is also reflective, since Luise is remembering events long past, and reflecting on a largely masculine world which she has had to flee. However, the sentiments she offers the viewer are Toni’s: Wenn du unten stehst, hat der Toni einmal gesagt, ganz unten am Fuß der Wand und hinaufschaust, dann fragst du dich, wie kann jemand da hoch? Warum soll es einer überhaupt wollen? Aber wenn du oben bist, Stunden später und runterschaust, dann hast du alles vergessen, bis auf den einen Menschen, dem du versprochen hast, dass du wiederkommst. This quotation is rich and multivalently suggestive. It explicitly emphasizes the difficulty of the undertaking and the strangeness of the compulsion that leads to such achievements, i.e., seems to characterize Toni and Andi as members of a special group of highly motivated, perhaps oddly obsessed athletes, and gestures toward Luise’s loss of a truly loved one, something of a romantic trope. It also ambiguously and ambivalently qualifies the independence that Toni otherwise so adamantly espouses. Why indeed should one climb so high and far away from the hearth, from the woman to whom one had promised to return, if not to first forget that woman, only to conveniently remember her again when she is completely inaccessible? Finally, it contains a contradictory characterization of reflection. Looking down from 50 John Blair a mountain that one has climbed is also looking back in time, and despite the fact that the frame depicts Luise remembering and a variety of media that function as the scaffolds of memory - the climbing log, photography - the quotation suggests that the individual forgets everything but the most personal and intimate. In addition to suggesting that memory is limited, i.e., suspect, the quotation also describes the act of existing in and of itself, of acting in the world, as something one is not fully in control of. Toni describes the motivation to climb as incomprehensible. The idea that one acts in accordance with contexts one doesn’t understand or reflect on is a perfect image for ideology, and in this case, for a particular masculine interpellation: engaging in extremely dangerous and challenging feats without considering why one does them, and then perhaps, at least in this quotation, associating these feats in contradictory fashion with one’s love interest. The film, however, wants to help the viewer with both issues by providing additional historical background and making ideology as visible as possible. It is a flashback film, i.e., all about remembering, and the flashback starting immediately after this quotation is a newsreel rather than a personal memory. The newsreel describes the Eiger massif and the groundswell of Aryan youth aching to validate themselves, their race, and their nation by climbing it and achieving Olympic laurels. Again, this specific reference to 1936 and to mountain climbing would seem to be the introduction of the two male mountain climbers, but it is once again about Luise and about media. The newsreel itself is a film about the mountains, already cinematographically ambitious and the camera cuts back and forth between the audience and the newsreel, commenting on effects of its ideological message. Stölzl makes the National Socialists’ «Ideologisierung des Alpinismus zum Thema» (Stölzl, «Bergdrama») with this explicitly ideological newsreel, but his shot of Luise’s rapt visage (with many others in the theater) also suggests just how seductive such messages can be. A shot down a row reveals seven illuminated male visages, and then the camera pans right to a close-up of Luise as spectator, finishing with a cut to a full screen frontal head shot, face lit up by the reflected light from the screen, with the glint of tears in her eyes. In accordance with Laura Mulvey’s theory, film is a medium made primarily by men for male viewers, and in this specific case, the ideological content of this newsreel clearly targets a male audience, since it portrays men in an exclusively male context, competing for status in an international arena that is also figured as masculine. Ironically, the positioning of viewers as the passive receivers of ideology would seem to feminize them. Luise and the men around her in the theater are leveled. The depiction of receptive and vulnerable viewers in the darkened theater, a testament to the power of film, Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 51 also constitutes an implicit self-reflexive warning on the part of the director. Stölzl, too, has made an emotionally moving film. Can a film that explicitly depicts National Socialism’s exploitation of mountain climbing and film for its own ideological mission fall prey to the same narrative and aesthetic tendencies that made the Bergfilm so attractive to fascist ideologues in the first place? Stölzl attempts to forestall this possibility by explicitly referencing Nazi ideology in the context of mountaineering and media. After the newsreel, we see Luise linger longingly in front of a shop window eyeing camera models, particularly the Kodak Retina, a shot that recalls a number of similar scenes in Fritz Lang’s M. With this reference to M, the stakes go up in this series of self-referential reflections on media and film. Why would Nordwand refer to M? Both films are concerned with the media in Berlin and with human needs that shape the reception of that media at about the same time. M’s famous leveling action makes human appetite into the issue - the appetite for toys, fruit, cognac, cigarettes, but especially psychological appetites: Schaulust, the desire for recognition, and the need for sensation and sensational narratives. In fact, selling the sensational becomes a major theme in M, from the extra editions about the murders to the «sensational» next chapter of the serialized novel that Frau Beckmann purchases while waiting anxiously for her daughter Elsie to come home for lunch. Pandering to our desire for the sensational becomes an element in an economy that indirectly supports Hans Beckert’s murders. In Nordwand, the media culture in Berlin, at least the way Henry Arau, a managing reporter, depicts it and is representative of it, is not just complicit in the crimes of National Socialism; it actively promotes and sustains the attitudes and needs that make such crimes possible. And both Hans Beckert and Luise Fellner are attracted to the press. They actively seek recognition, want their big story. Beckert writes directly to the newspaper because he wants recognition from the public. In fact, his somewhat pompous letter contains the words Öffentlichkeit, Presse, and ich; the latter two are doubly underlined. For her part, Luise is medially situated in a number of ways. She is the uncritical receiver of ideological discourses as part of the rapt audience in the theater; she is a trainee at the newspaper and hungers for access to a more active and productive role in the creation of discourse; and she exhibits a strong object hunger for a new camera, one of the tools of production. Her relationship to various media also suggests a shifting relationship to gender. She wants to leave the feminized position of passive viewer and enter into the man’s world of production and manipulation, with its prerogatives. Her position predisposes her to willing integration in the dominant ideology, and to achieve her goals, her complicity, at least initially, suffices 52 John Blair for her to encourage her friends to undertake a dangerous, potentially fatal mission. In the city, viewers of both M and Nordwand gain access to the private and personal spaces where ideological discourses attach to bodies. Tight closeups of wistful, longing faces and pursed lips abound in both films, suggesting social needs and hunger for the objects that can help achieve them: cameras, knives, and toys. Compensatory orality is emphasized in both films through fruit, cigarettes, and alcohol. In M, group scenes focus on the unruliness of crowds; in Nordwand, we see Luise in crowded areas, but small and isolated, in need of contact, integration, praise, recognition, and warmth. Roman Giesen criticizes Nordwand for locating motivation in private and personal spheres (Giesen, Nordwand 4), but it is precisely in the personal and private where the viewer can see the effectiveness of ideological discourses. At the movies, viewers absorb what masculinity is; social and professional advancement depend on engaging and replicating that definition. And ambitious young women like Luise are also tempted in this context, since they too long for advancement, self-realization, and status, all of which are only accessible though engagement in a system determined by masculine values. In Nordwand, just as in the traditional Bergfilm, the city is a problem, but the details are very different. Rüdiger Suchsland, an early reviewer, notes the fact that the city is vilified in Nordwand and comments sarcastically: «Ja, das muss es wohl sein. Hier kann der Mensch des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts andocken. Irgendwie sind die Medien eigentlich an allem schuld. Und die Großstadt. Die Großstadt, ja.» But the city in Nordwand is no longer the one that the National Socialists were able to utilize so readily. Luise’s ambition forces her to leave her village and brings her to the city. But it doesn’t seem to be the dangerously corrupt and effete city of new women, Jews, and leftist intellectuals, and we are not seeing the city from the perspective of an endangered and threatened masculinity, but rather through the eyes of an ambitious new woman, one with whom we are encouraged filmically to identify and empathize. Since the new woman was one of the most prominent Others of the city, figuring strongly in male anxiety projections, this shift in perspective shakes things up, because we see Luise as a victim of the city on several levels, and the city to which she falls victim is gendered masculine. She struggles for self-realization against sexism, misognyny, gender expections, and glass ceilings, and even if she initially falls for a kind of Faustian contract, we see the contexts that make it tempting and we understand that her position as a woman in a man’s world makes it very difficult for her to realize her professional and aesthetic goals. Nordwand inverts the traditional gender economy of the Bergfilm. The men do not fall victim to an emasculating Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 53 femininity associated with the city; rather, a sensitive young woman is the victim of a city that has been gleichgeschaltet by the overwhelming power of a dominant culture’s masculine ideology. The regendering of the city against the traditional Bergfilm’s orientation is also true to Nordwand’s reference to Fritz Lang’s M. In M, every prostitute is a mother at heart, and the real power and dangers of the city are all male. All of the police and crime bosses, not to mention the murderer himself, are men, and the film makes every effort to avoid blaming women for the problems of the city, despite the fact that M appears during an intensely misogynous period, during which famous artists could paint self-portraits of themselves as serial sex murderers, with whom reporters could empathize publicly. 1 Nordwand emphasizes the power structure of the city as masculine. Luise works in the newspaper office taking notes, making coffee, and turning red at the frequent double entendres; she secretly uses the darkroom after work and dreams of producing front page material. The mise-en-scéne repeatedly shows her in the margins as the only woman in the room, and when she offers information, she has to repeat herself multiple times because the men in the room are not used to listening to a woman at all. Her vulnerability is her desire to play a more important role in this man’s world. Henry Arau notices her talent and interest, and would like to use her personal connection to the mountain climbers who may become important to the newspaper, so he sends her home to the foothills to interview and photograph her now somewhat prominent childhood friends. She admits her ulterior motives to them. Andi sympathizes and sums it up: «Wir sind auf der Titelseite und du musst nicht mehr Kaffee kochen.» This formulation suggests both her desire for recognition and her struggle to escape gendered domestic expectations. In Luise’s world, success and masculinity are defined in very similar terms. She slides into a masculine role when she succumbs to the Faustian temptation and attempts to use her friends for her ambition. Faustian agreements are always implicitly homosocial and the additional pole is feminine, so Luise ironically feminizes Toni and Andi, but her initial plans are thwarted by Toni’s resistant, somewhat alternative masculinity. He declines to climb the Eiger and claims a lack of ambition to Andi: «Ich muss niemand was beweisen. Ich kletter’ für mich […] nur für mich.» His terse and adamant denial of ambition and affirmation of a core identity does call to mind John Wayne and the Western. This is slightly different from the masculinity criticized in articles on the Bergfilm. In a discussion of a number of Bergfilme from the 1920s and 30s, Ingeborg Major-O’Sickey notes that «[n]otions of hyper-masculinized heroes, who follow a mountain ethos of loyalty and 54 John Blair self-sacrifice are recycled in a new Bergfilm, Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand» (Major-O’Sickey 380). Giesen’s discussion of the Bergfilm also highlights these characteristics: Mit einer so gearteten Inszenierung ‹männlicher Tugenden› lässt sich dann gerade anhand der Genderthematik auf die ideologiekritischen Ansätze von Siegfried Kracauer zurückweisen. Denn es gehört bekanntlich zu den Merkmalen faschistoider Ideologien einen heroisierenden Männlichkeitskult einhergehend mit dem Willen zur unbedingten Treue bis zur Todesbereitschaft zu propagieren. (Giesen, «Bergfilm»15) There can be no question that Toni and Andi are «hyper-masculine,» that they are ambitious, stubborn, resistant, and capable of self-sacrifice under the right circumstances. Toni is quick and brusque in his defense of his own masculinity: «[I]ch hab vor gar nix Schiss.» But the John Wayne Western style of masculinity that Toni evinces also introduces a kind of resistance to expectations of all kinds. He is an unwilling hero. He rejects Luise’s proposal, disagrees with Andi’s arguments, and refuses to supply Arau with background material. The quotation about mountain climbing, motivation, and memory that Luise renarrates at the beginning of the film is uncharacteristically long and reflective for Toni. Gloomy, grumbling reticence constitutes his general modus operandi and suggests that he is not quite comfortable with the social contexts that determine his sense of self and implied masculinity. He seems self-aware of the difficult and problematic interpellations of masculine identities available to him and resents them. One must assume that the mountains are a kind of flight for Toni, away from the necessity of communication, away from the complexities of gender, and away from the implicitly feminine position of the unavoidably passive consumption of ideology. These indices of masculinity - loyalty and self-sacrifice, as well as stubborn reticence - are common to many adventure and action films in all national cinemas. Stölzl is correct when he maintains that one has «ja auch keine Probleme mit solchen Helden, solange sie aus Amerika kommen. In Deutschland, und dann noch in so einem historischen Kontext, hat das eine andere Konnotation.» He distances and distinguishes Nordwand from the «auf Helden ausgerichteten Stilisierung des alten Bergfilms wie bei Luis Trenker und Arnold Fanck» by attempting to realize a «halbdokumentarische Ästhetik,» focusing on the details of climbing and using original equipment, down to the hemp ropes. Stölzl also suggests that the ending is horrific enough to function as a deterrent: «[D]as Ende in Nordwand ist ja wahnsinnig grausam. Alles was die Jungen an Heldenträumen im Rucksack mit sich schleppen, zerbricht ganz-schrecklich» (Stölzl, «Bergdrama»). Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 55 One of Giesen’s main criticisms of the film turns on the positive depiction of Toni and Andi, «deren historische Vorbilder mit Sicherheit keine Systemgegner waren.» From a director’s perspective, according to Giesen, it makes sense to put as much distance between the two male protagonists and Nazi ideology as possible, but the «Hintergrund der Kulturgeschichte des Alpinismus in den 30er Jahren» (Giesen, Nordwand 5) makes this narrative choice highly problematic. Although this objection is convincing, Stölzl’s film does suggest that masculinity per se parallels fascist ideology during the period so well that no major adjustments were needed. The Bergfilm and fascism were well matched in the 1920s and 30s. Nordwand depicts a broad consensus within the dominant culture; Henry Arau, the staff of the newspaper, Toni and Andi’s colleagues in the military, and the two Austrian mountaineers are highly integrated into fascist culture, and only passive resistance appears in the film, and not much of that. In fact, National Socialism’s success in ideological terms depends on its ability to control the spectrum of desirable interpellations for both men and women, and Nordwand suggests that many of the available masculine interpellations are tied to National Socialism. Within this context, the dialogues Emil and Elisabeth Landauer, an Austrian businessman/ tourist and his wife, have with Henry Arau prove telling. Herr Landauer is pointedly unimpressed by Arau’s Nazi-infused purple prose and evinces an exclusively Austrian patriotism. In response, Arau suggests that the Austrians will come «Heim ins Reich […] zumindest die Arier unter Ihren Landsleuten. Da weiß ich nicht, inwieweit das auf Sie zutrifft.» This constitutes a discomfiting undermining of Landauer’s status and masculinity, since other groups are feminized in this discourse. Landauer also pointedly prefers the city over the mountains. He is further compromised by his wife’s emphatic approval of Arau’s formulations. That this insinuation carries so much power demonstrates the ubiquitous influence of Nazi ideological currents. Luise’s dilemma and almost successful temptation - her advancement, status, the realization of her social and aesthetic goals depend on her integration - also corroborates this dominance. Toni and Andi’s passive rebellion, responding «Servus» to the occasional «Heil Hitler» - a trope of rural resistance - doesn’t mean that their own masculinities are not somehow tied to problematic ideologies, only that they struggle to maintain identities outside of the party. In fact, even if their resistance seems to ring false in a cultural context that is characterized by a highly successful «Gleichschaltung» of alpine discourses, it suggests the generally overwhelmingly dominance of Nazism. Other figures in the film can illustrate just how dominant and ubiquitous Nazi ideology is. Willi Angerer, one of the Austrian climbers, and Henry 56 John Blair Arau, an editor for the paper where Luise works, are perfect examples. Willi’s position seems amoral and self-serving. He announces his and Edi’s arrival with a loud «Heil Hitler» and they proceed to invite themselves to dinner. He brags about their new equipment and that it had been paid for by the NSDAP. Willi also brings a «win at all cost» attitude to the party. From the moment he arrives, he tries to cheat, to ferret out Toni’s plan, and he eventually follows them up the mountain when they leave at 2 a.m. to attempt a new route. Despite his transparent cheating, he maintains a continuous narrative about his own superiority, even after Andi’s spectacular traversal and his own head injury. He refuses to turn back, despite the seriousness of the injury and descends into a kind of mad obsession as he slowly dies. His partner is rehumanized and works together with Toni and Andi, showing sympathy when they find the corpse of Max Sedlmeyer. Willi’s self-destructive madness - his adamant refusal to back down - mirrors Hitler’s unrelenting war effort; part of the problem is that Willi is able to assert himself, to lead from a position of madness, which Edi allows and later regrets. This is a masculinity that is egotistical, self-seeking, blind to its own faults, and dangerous to others. This constellation of characters - two almost rabidly fascist Austrian mountain climbers versus two more personally motivated and anti-fascist, or at least apolitical German climbers - comes across as a bit artificial and clichéd, and it is with some justification that Giesen criticizes the film for its failure, «differenzierte Charaktere zu entwerfen» (Giesen, Nordwand 6). Giesen’s research into the problematic ideological tendencies of Alpinism - see, for example, his discussion of the Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein and the Wandervögel (Giesen, «Bergfilm» 8-9) - does suggest the need for a more complicated depiction of Toni and Andi. On the other hand, perhaps this particular historical inaccuracy is worth the additional audience appeal and the broader reach of the film. Nordwand does encourage reflection on the way that ideological contexts valorize particular interpellatory positions. Within this context Toni and Luise are paired. Both have a lot to gain from integration into fascist culture, and Luise’s understandable flirtation with it is foregrounded throughout the main story line. Toni’s taciturn and ill-humored resistance is a commonplace that viewers understand, both as a stock masculinity and as part of the story. If Toni and Andi are unrealistically positive in the film, this is perhaps a necessary concession to an audience that generally consumes a diet of almost exclusively American films. Despite conceding to the demands of the adventure genre and its audience, Nordwand effectively communicates its critique of Nazi ideological discourses, gender issues in the 1920s and 30s, and masculinity, includ- Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 57 ing that of the two heroes. The extent to which Luise’s story becomes the dominant narrative in the film defines the viewer’s reflection on ideology and makes forgivable the overly positive depiction of the cowboy climbers, particularly since the hotel context illustrates the extensive saturation Nazi ideology has achieved and the danger of failing to affirm it. Henry Arau is also a climber, if only in social circles. It is not clear if he believes the positions he espouses or if he has chosen the only route that leads upwards. It is clear, however, that he embraces both National Socialism and media sensationalism with competitive fervor. When he launches into purple prose replete with fascist imagery, it is clearly to impress the table with his eloquence or to compete with the other men at the table: «Genau das ist es. […] Der deutsche Bezwingergeist, der sich so eindrucksvoll in dem Kampf mit dem Berg manifestiert. In der Seilschaft, verbrüdert auf Leben und Tod, träumt der Bergsteiger vom Eis und Fels.» Arau’s statements, according to Stölzl, are historically accurate, and are taken from the public speeches of Nazi official and head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley. His interest in the conquest of the Eiger seems tied to the need for German/ National Socialist heroes, and that stems from his desire to be a successful journalist. When he is about to give up on the story, he suggests that there would have been problems writing it anyway: «Die Beiden haben sowieso kein Interesse an der Bewegung. Es wäre schwer gewesen, aus ihnen deutsche Siegertypen zu basteln.» The pragmatism of his decisions becomes so crass towards the end of the movie that multiple characters comment on his lack of humanity, which he blames on his profession. In terms of identity formation, however, his profession is clearly tied up in his sense of self, and in his masculinity. His need to succeed mandates adherence to National Socialism, and a pragmatic and inhumane observance of crass media aesthetics. Although his character is also exaggerated, it provides an exemplar of the interpenetration of gender, ambition, and ideological apparatus. The dominant culture, now and in the Third Reich, has privileged access to the Mephistophelean mechanics of gender interpellation, a powerful motivational or manipulative lure that strongly influences behaviors. Masculinity, in its entwinement with profession and status, is harnessed, consciously or not, to entice «buy in.» This functions quite well even when the person who might be buying in isn’t a man at all, as Luise’s flashback about her temptation by the intensely urban and masculine world of the newspaper, and indirectly, by fascism, clearly indicates. The traditional love triangle from the Bergfilm is also reconfigured in Nordwand to foreground ambition. The woman traditionally comes from the corrupt and feminine city and represents a temptation and a danger to 58 John Blair the men of the mountains, indeed often causes the death of one or both of the men. As I argue above, the city is gendered masculine in Nordwand. Although Luise is now a new woman, she has left the mountains for the opportunities the city offers, and both the barriers and the temptations in the city are masculine. The city is dense with discourses of male privilege and advancement possible only to those who support the dominant culture, i.e., National Socialism. When Luise is positioned in a love triangle between Arau and Toni, Arau becomes attractive to her because he understands her ambition and is in a position to encourage and promote it. Luise wants to be like him, one of the creators of powerful and influential narratives, i.e., she wants access to the male world where ideologies are channeled. Nordwand makes no concessions to the idea of a potentially dangerous mystical and/ or mythical female power. The city, the hotel, the mountains, power, influence, status: all of these are part of the world of men, and Luise can climb in it only to the extent that she espouses and acts on its values. The fact that Luise has always had a bit of a chip on her shoulder makes her especially susceptible to the rewards that integration can offer, an easy mark. She admits to having competed with Toni since they were children: «Das habe ich auch immer gemacht, als ihr am Berg wart, […] dir nachlaufen.» It is this ambition, this need for recognition that has taken her to the big city. Luise has traded in her tomboy past in the village to struggle in the masculine world of jaded media professionalism, which seems to require some level of pragmatic narcissism, manipulation, dishonesty, and the objectification of human beings. Even before her bombastic attempt to sell the dangerous climb to Andi and Toni, the film illustrates her fall from plain, honest, and unpretentious local customs during the photo shoot of Toni’s father. He complains about its lack of authenticity - «Die Jacke trag’ ich sonst nicht bei der Arbeit.» She replies: «Das macht nix. Das wirkt fescher für die Zeitung.» This emphasis on the desires of the reader or viewer is already on the one end of the slippery slope that Arau’s condescending remarks embrace wholeheartedly as the bottom line: «Ich will dich nicht belehren, Kindchen, aber sie brauchen entweder einen strahlenden Triumph oder eine grausame Tragödie. So ein Umkehren interessiert keinen Menschen; höchstens ein paar Zeilen auf Seite 3.» Luise’s flirtations with Arau, or his with her, are an index of her infatuation with success. He offers her praise and opportunity when she needs them, and his attention is reciprocated. During the celebration prior to the climb, she and Andi stay for the party, and Toni comes across as stubborn and inflexible. Arau sees Luise as someone like himself, for whom a sensational story trumps all personal considerations and loyalties: «Ich wusste, Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 59 dass ich mich nicht in dir getäuscht habe. Du bist genau wie ich. Du riechst die Geschichten, bevor die anderen Wind davon kriegen. Hier, hier, hier! Das werden die Aufnahmen deines Lebens! » Although she craves recognition, and is vulnerable to co-option, she turns away from him and the paper and affirms the primacy of personal relations and values over pragmatic power plays and the valorized ideology of the dominant culture. Arau makes a number of last appeals which include professional, personal, and ideological elements. She rejects him, specifically rejects Berlin as a collection of people like him, rejects the claim that Germany is a völkisch community that will not forget Toni, and finally rejects a particular historically located masculinity. Luise’s moral awakening, or the disintegration of her various attempts at success in a man’s world, bring a number of implicit characteristics of masculinity into stark relief, especially since she wants to become a photographer: the primacy of profession; the location of success, authority, and respect within professional development; the privileged position as the looker and the maker of images, particularly manipulative ones. Limits are set for her, and she herself sets limits during the course of the narrative. Arau, for example, doesn’t let her look through the telescope, and he sets the terms of the various conversations, but she rejects the tenor of his narratives. She modifies, for example, his toast lionizing heroic conquest of the Eiger to one focused on the climbers’ safe return. To a large degree, Luise is the only character in the film who actually changes much. Despite heroic mountain climbers and action sequences, the film is about the individual’s choices when confronted with opportunities that include negative ideological riders. This is tied thematically in the film to the production of narrative. The film depicts the production of narrative primarily as the co-opted echoing of ideologemes from the dominant culture, i.e., fascism. The newspaper is an example of a co-opted media, as is the newsreel at the beginning of the film. The editors are instructed to follow the Eiger story as the story of German heroism, but since they are already co-opted on an individual level, their attitudes were already clear, as Arau’s depiction as a conduit for fascist images shows. He is completely conscious of his role in the creation of fascist narratives when he complains, for example, of the difficulty of crafting «deutsche Siegertypen» from material such as Toni and Andi. Co-option is historically and traditionally a provenance of masculinity, and functions primarily through male ambition. Luise’s attempt to break into a male profession brings with it the requisite temptations, both to succumb to co-option and to create narratives that co-opt others. Because recognition and pecking order are its dominant currencies, masculinity is easily integrated into any social order, and is generally valo- 60 John Blair rized within the dominant culture because it is easily manipulated by conservative forces. If one sees Luise as the protagonist of the film, she becomes a foil that makes such masculinities visible. She is tempted by the rewards participation in masculine structures offer, and flirts with full co-option, but her breakaway after Toni’s death makes choices and implications clear. Her decision is not necessarily based solely on any insights into morality. She witnesses Toni’s abject demise. A man for whom masculinity implied independence is stripped of all dignity and power, completely emasculated and isolated. His fate functions as a parable about the dangers of masculine illusions of power and independence. Arau sees Luise as having a nose for stories, and suggests that she would return to Berlin with the pictures of a lifetime, pictures that would contribute to the fascist narrative he is creating, in this case a «Heldentod,» and make her career. Toni has already criticized Arau’s narratives as inauthentic, as below the dignity of human beings. When Arau asks for humaninterest elements for the story, for tales «von eurer gemeinsamen Jugend in den Bergen,» calling it «tolles Futter für die Geschichte,» Toni responds: «Futter kriegen bei uns eigentlich nur die Tiere.» He resists participation in exchanges that threaten his humanity. Through the traumatic events of the film, Luise has also become sensitized to these ideological economies and rejects them. Within this metaphoric context, she proves unwilling to «feed» the machine with images and narratives. In the epilogue, the continuation of the frame that introduced the long flashback that constitutes Nordwand as an action film, Luise is in New York, not creating narratives for a newspaper, but rather photographing a black musician in a private studio. This underscores her rejection of her national Heimat, a rejection that includes both the city and her mountain village origins. The inclusion of an African-American emphatically denies the context that allowed the rise of National Socialism, and softens the general critique of media as consumer or viewer driven. Since this critique includes film, certainly the Bergfilm and the action film genre in particular, so the director is also giving himself a pardon after his own self-reflexive move. This pardon can, however, only be partial; Luise buys herself space through repudiation of any role in the competitive masculine world of sensational mass images, and he himself has produced a film in a popular genre for a mass audience. The frame also suggests that Luise has affirmed her own marginality, i.e., as a woman, and feels solidarity with other marginalized groups. This affirmation of marginality is also an act of renunciation and a flight to the personal. In the frame, the focus is on more private media, on a journal and personal photographs, on studio photography as opposed to high-profile newspaper Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 61 work. She has failed in entering the masculine world of public discourse. On the other hand, one must assume that this allows her some level of independence. For this reason, perhaps, the film’s final images show her smoking a cigarette on the top of the building paralleling the mountain climbers on the peak, symbolically allowing her distance from the ideological currents in the city, a welcome illusion. The frame points to Toni’s climbing log as an example of a more authentic narrative, and he clearly sees it as such. He gives it to Luise before his final climb, although as she remarks, he normally always takes it with him. He suggests that it would be a shame if it were lost, since everything he has ever done is in it. It is the narrative of his life and identity, and it is not empty words or fantasy images of nationhood or masculinity, but rather the journal of actions. Naturally this journal is not free from ideology, since it is the product of an adventurous and ambitious male and the culture in which he was raised. Like Luise, however, it has been effectively marginalized. At least within the film narrative, it has been withdrawn from contexts where it could provide «Futter» for ideological discourse. The action of the film - the actual climbing scenes that Stölzl attempted to make as authentic as possible and modeled on Kevin McDonald’s 2003 docudrama Touching the Void - are meant to function in much the same way, as a reality check and as a contrast to the luxury of the hotel, where fabulous national narratives are crafted and images of the Eiger are eaten as cake. In fact, the mountain climbers themselves are consumed, as fondant cake decorations, when the film pointedly cuts from the men in a blizzard to the hotel celebration. The actual climbers are also consumed, as part of a national narrative they have little control over. The cake reminds the viewer once again of the themes of consumption and sensationalism that M so pointedly broaches. In fact, as an explicitly consumable representation of narrative, eating cake becomes a symbol of the incorporation of ideology. Frau Landauer, a woman from the city, who participates in undermining her husband in an affirmation of Nazi ideology, specifically requests one of the climbers for her portion of cake. In the traditional depiction of women in the city from the Bergfilm of the 1920s and 30s, one might be tempted to interpret this as symbolic castration, or see her as a «man-eater,» but within the context of this film, she is literally consuming ideology, and in so doing, is at least partially one of the victims, i.e., she inhabits that normal space in which we are all simultaneously perpetrators and victims. In Luise’s epilogue, during her voice-over, the camera pans over Toni’s climbing log to focus on her while she is adjusting the camera to photograph the African-American musician. Her narration circles around the meaning 62 John Blair of life, or rather, what it means to live: «An den meisten Tagen spüre ich, dass ich lebe.» The verb «spüren» emphasizes a sense of direct, unmediated, authentic experience, experience we hope transcends the gendered and often politically problematic narratives that structure our identities. As a photographer, and a woman who climbed mountains, Luise becomes a double to Leni Riefenstahl, who successfully competed with men for almost a century. She not only acted in the Bergfilme that constitute the ideological problems with which Nordwand is forced to contend, but also gained immense status during the Third Reich for supporting, or at least failing to contradict, National Socialist ideology, rhetoric, and practices, for providing the Third Reich with images and narratives that she describes as good aesthetic choices. Riefenstahl’s life illustrates the Faustian offer on the table for Luise, and the events of Nordwand cause her to reject this offer, for a life that we are encouraged filmically to view as more authentic. For Luise, this involves renunciation, a particularly feminine move, and insofar as this suggests a taming of the shrew, our affirmation of her at the end of the movie is also an affirmation of the gender norms of the dominant culture. Conversely, it was perhaps Riefenstahl’s indomitability, her complete unwillingness to conform to, among other things, our gender expectations, which caused us to demonize her for over half a century after the end of World War II. Such aporias remind us that even our sense of authenticity is illusory, like an elevation beyond ideology. It is inescapably ironic that dangerous endeavors such as mountain climbing that engender such a sense of direct and unmediated connection to nature, become a mainstay of filmic narratives that can so easily be ideologically exploited. Notes 1 On this subject see Lewis and Tatar. Works Cited Giesen, Roman. «Der Bergfilm der 20er und 30er Jahre.» Medienobservationen. www.medien-observationen.lmu.de. 2008. Web. 2 July 2013. -. «Nordwand. Ein kritisches Resümee zu einem ‹Neo-Bergfilm.›» Medienobservationen. www.medien-observationen.lmu.de. 2009. Web. 2 July 2013. Hales, Barbara. «Dancer in the Dark: Hypnosis, Trance-Dancing, and Weimar’s Fear of the New Woman.» Monatshefte 102.4 (2010): 534-49. Haque, Kamaal. «From Der Berg ruft to The Challenge: Adapting a Bergfilm for the English Market.» Seminar 49.4 (2013): 414-27. Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology 63 Kammerer, Dietmar. «Der Berg ruft nicht, er brüllt.» taz.de. taz, 23 Oct. 2008. Web. 2 July 2013. Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler - A Psychological History of German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Lewis, Beth Irwin. «Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis.» Women in the Metropolis: Gender und Modernity in Weimar Culture. Ed. Katharina Ankum. Berkeley: U California P, 1997. 202-32. M. Dir. Fritz Lang. 1931. Criterion, 2004. DVD. Majer-O’Sickey, Ingeborg. «The Cult of the Cold and the Gendered Body in Mountain Films.» Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Ed. Norbert Otto Eke, Martha B. Helfer, and Gerd Labroisse. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 75. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 363-80. Nordwand. Dir. Philipp Stölzl. 2008. Music Box, 2010. DVD. Ott, Michael. «Die weiße Hölle. Gender-Konzepte im deutschen Bergfilm um 1930.» Vortrag in der gender-Ringvorlesung im Februar 2006. Soziologisches Institut der LMU (unveröffentlichtes Skript) München: 2006. Rentschler, Eric. «Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm.» New German Critique 51 (1990): 137-61. Schmundt, Hilmar. «Bergsteiger-Tragödie ‹Nordwand›: Star aus Stein.» spiegel.de. Der Spiegel, 24 Oct. 2008. Web. 2 July 2013. Sontag, Susan. «Fascinating Fascism.» Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays. By Susan Sontag. New York: Picador, 1972. 73-105. Steiner, Gertraud. «Vom Bergfilm zum Neuen Heimatfilm. Wie idologisch ist der Heimatfilm? » Modern Austrian Literature 30.3/ 4 (1997): 253-64. Stölzl, Philipp. «Bergdrama: Szenen eines Schnee-Martyriums: Regisseur Philipp Stölzl über seinen neuen Film «Nordwand» und die «Ideologisierung des Alpinismus.» Interview with Fritz Göttler. sueddeutsche.de. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17-May 2010. Web. 2 July 2013. Suchsland, Rüdiger. «Der Berg stöhnt. Stalingrad unterm Gipfel - wenig überzeugendes Bombast-Kino.» artechock.de. artechok, 23 Oct. 2008. Web. 2 July 2013. Tatar, Maria. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Touching the Void. Dir. Kevin McDonald. 2003. Arthaus, 2004. DVD. von Beier, Lars-Olav, and Hilmar Schmundt. «Der vertikale Western.» spiegel.de. Der Spiegel, 3 Dec. 2007. Web. 2 July 2013. The Reality of the Body: Transgender, Transsexuality, and Truth in Romeos KYLE FR ACK MAN The Univ ersity of British Colu m bia In the film Romeos (2011), director Sabine Bernardi returns to a topic that she originally explored in her 2005 documentary short film transfamily, which featured two transmen discussing their preand post-transition biography and daily lives. 1 In the more recent film, which made its debut before enthusiastically welcoming audiences at the 2011 Berlinale (Schoor), 2 we meet protagonist Lukas (played by Rick Okon), a 20ish transitioning female-to-male (FTM) transsexual (born Miriam) who is starting his new life on his own in Cologne. Unfortunately, Lukas has been assigned not to a dorm for men completing their soziales Jahr, which would apply to his situation, but rather to one for young female nurses, where, as a trans man, he occupies a unique and unsatisfactory position. Through his best friend, Ine (Liv Lisa Fries), Lukas makes a number of new acquaintances, among them Fabio (Maximilian Befort), an Italian-German macho gay man, to whom Lukas is immediately attracted. Other plot elements include Lukas’s struggle, albeit briefly portrayed, against the bureaucracy controlling his dorm room assignment (which is shown as powerful but frustratingly clueless), the difficulties Lukas faces to hide and/ or construct his bodily truth, Ine’s frustration with what she perceives as Lukas’s self-centered fixation on his transition and ability to pass, Lukas’s eventual move to the men’s dorm room next door, his interrupted and quarrelsome sexual encounter with Ine’s gay friend Sven, and the on-again/ off-again flirtatious and romantic interactions between Lukas and Fabio, who maintains a semi-closeted life. This brief list of major plot points already makes clear some of the generic and customary devices that might be represented in romantic comedies or coming-of-age films. Romeos partly depends on the viewer’s feelings about a pairing of Lukas with Fabio, one of the two apparent goals toward which the film’s plot progresses. The other is Lukas’s lasting and successful transition - that is, reaching what we will see is a Foucauldian self-technological goal of happiness - or perhaps the making permanent of his fleeting bodily comfort. I will discuss the corporeal discomfort below. In an examination of the body in Romeos and its relation to gender and sexuality, and the particular kinds of masculine and/ or feminine presentations we see in the film, I will mention The Reality of the Body 65 two types of techniques, some of which overlap in various scenes: first, the film’s depiction of Lukas’s own body; second, the comparison or contrast offered by other figures. The figure of Lukas, both internally in the diegesis and externally in the film production, is a work in progress - a figure who illustrates and literally embodies the need to confess one’s status, especially in the case of one’s presentation of sex or gender. My goal is to elucidate some of the filmic techniques that bring about part of the protagonist’s transition and, simultaneously, participate in a discourse of truth and confession that appears in discussions of mutable gender-sexuality. Moreover, my discussion here aims to add to scholarly examinations that expand understandings of masculinity, which is not exclusively confined to «men» or «male-born people» (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 13). Importantly, however, the film offers stark contrasts in its depictions of gender, particularly versions of masculinity. I feel compelled to treat the subject somewhat gingerly, not wanting to resort to the kind of supreme arrogance that Foucault called «impos[ing] one’s law on others» («For an Ethics of Discomfort» 137). I am aware of the topic’s sensitivity and appreciate, for example, Dean Spade’s criticism of non-trans scholars writing about trans topics («Mutilating Gender» 316). While this essay will, out of necessity, discuss the motivations that trans-identified individuals have for initiating their transition, it will examine primarily the second-hand or discursive understandings of these processes and then, of course, how these perceptions may emerge in cinematic portrayals. My analysis will exclude or only touch upon a range of topics related to the subject of transsexuality and transgender, including but not limited to the medicopsychological diagnosis of related conditions, the treatment of said medically diagnosed conditions, legal standing and rights, the prevalence of certain kinds of gender non-conformity, the historical presentation of the phenomenon, a bio-political imperative in the assignment of sex/ gender, intersex, and many others. 3 Many of these discursive elements, however, including many trans-identified individuals’ own awareness of their subjectivity and its relationship to gender-sexuality, revolve around ideas of truth and confession. Michel Foucault’s theories can illustrate the by-now - in an age of «outing» and closets - familiar link between confession and gender and sexuality. 4 For Foucault, we live in a world that comprises a steady release of information, especially previously closely-kept knowledge: «[W]e belong to a society which has ordered sex’s difficult knowledge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but around the slow surfacing of confidential statements» (The History of Sexuality 62-63). He posits that confession, having slowly disconnected itself from solely pastoral objectives, calcified follow- 66 Kyle Frackman ing the involvement of «medicine, psychiatry, and pedagogy» (The History of Sexuality 63). One had to announce pleasures or behaviors, often renounce them, and then perform acts of penance. Sex (i.e., behaviors and, I would argue, understandings of gender) was increasingly a way of speaking the truth about oneself. «We,» via the post-nineteenth-century explosion of sexual sciences and discourses, «demand that sex speak the truth […] and […] that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness» (The History of Sexuality 69, emphasis added). This method of confession, or speaking our truth, whether aloud or internally to ourselves, seems so natural now, Foucault argues, that «we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth […] ‹demands› only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down» (The History of Sexuality 60, emphasis added). Indeed, this is the thrust behind the pervasive drive (and pressure) to «come out of the closet» in all aspects of our lives (e.g., as gay, as bi, as trans, as conservative, as vegan, as fat, as disabled, etc.), as this metaphor has become wildly pervasive. 5 To make this a little less abstract, we can examine the process involved in the metamorphosis of transgender into transsexuality. More specifically, how can one bring about an external intervention in one’s presentation of sex/ gender? How is it possible for one to gain access to the medical or surgical procedures that many transgender individuals seek? In short: through confession. With recourse to what Foucault called «technologies of the self,» individuals must make fundamental, personal disclosures with the goal of convincing empowered authorities of the viability of one’s proposed transformation. The confessional act and its subsequent «penance» effect a kind of destruction or removal of the (one) self that is in the position to make the disclosure, moving on to or releasing another subjective identity. The medical mode of this kind of showing of the self (what Foucault called exomologēsis) required «show[ing] one’s wounds in order to be cured» («Technologies of the Self 42-43). We will see below that Romeos offers the viewer literal examples of this - indeed, ones that point to stages in Lukas’s transitioning life. In other words, the film does not only talk around Lukas’s bodily reality and the alterations being made; it shows Lukas’s transitioning sex characteristics as well as other individuals’ YouTube-style confessionals that reveal medical steps in the process. Classification becomes a central concern in this discussion, for Lukas and the film as well, as the biological, social, cultural, and individually personal meanings of terms like «sex,» «gender,» and «sexuality» interact in a The Reality of the Body 67 sometimes bewildering constellation of divergent and simultaneously interdependent definitions. This complexity is especially relevant in the area of transgender and transsexual phenomena, a realm in which individual identification and self-classification are usually of primary importance, leading to a vast array of possible matrices of sexes, genders, affections, and sexual behaviors. At issue in much of the scholarship and dialogue on these issues is the nature, in multiple senses of the word, of the rubrics that often seem so fundamental to human existence. In her introduction to the influential Transgender Studies Reader, gender theorist Susan Stryker uses three terms that are the most salient. First and foremost is «sex,» which variously refers to «chromosomal sex, anatomical sex, reproductive sex, morphological sex» or the basic «materiality» of the body (9). In other words, «sex» is the supposed biological and physical reality of the body. Second among these rubrics is «gender,» the assembled characteristics that are thought or presumed to reflect that (same) materiality of the body in a social sense. Made more problematic and nuanced (and mutable) in the wake of Second and Third Wave feminist thought, «gender» supposedly communicates - again, to varying individual degrees - the underlying reality of one’s sex. Third among these rubrics is the less frequently used «gender identity,» the subjective and individual identification with some permutation of «gender» and/ or «sex.» A normative understanding of the way in which these three would interact is, for example, «a (biological) male is a (social) man who (subjectively) identifies himself as such; a woman is similarly, and circularly, a female who considers herself to be one» (Stryker 9). Thus, Stryker explains, «[t]he relationship[s] between bodily sex, gender role, and subjective gender identity are imagined to be strictly, mechanically, mimetic - a real thing and its reflections» [sic] (9). A fourth rubric (interestingly not mentioned in Stryker’s introduction to transgender studies) could be «sexual identity» or «sexual orientation.» This last classification concerns itself with how, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, «the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another» (Epistemology 8). Even if one conceded a strong or uncontested basis for «sex» (which can no longer be taken for granted), the remaining categories in this gender-sexual matrix make for a large number of possible permutations. In short, given the shifting possibilities of these identificatory categories, another way to observe all of this might be Foucault’s remark that «[i]dentities are defined by trajectories» («For an Ethics of Discomfort» 141). 6 We enter Bernardi’s film and the protagonist Lukas’s life somewhere around the middle of the character’s identity trajectory in this cinematic 68 Kyle Frackman world. We arrive in one of Lukas’s «confessions,» but we proceed to learn where he is on the transitioning continuum. Bernardi begins Romeos with a kind of coming out, one that will set the stage for later disclosures and elements in the plot. Evoking real-life shows like MTV’s True Life, for instance, the film opens with a close-up shot of Lukas. He is addressing the camera directly, part of a ritual and mode of communication for him that connects him to the wider online community of transitioning individuals. After a few on-screen titles, the film’s first image shows Lukas engaging in one kind of confession that promises access to the personal truth of both himself and others at various points throughout the film. A smaller box within the space of the screen, surrounded by black, encloses Lukas in what we can infer after the first few minutes of the film is his bedroom at his family’s house. Sitting in boxer shorts and two layers of shirts, his face glistening, Lukas directly addresses the camera and holds up a syringe: «This is my T, my testosterone. I’m on 250 milligram [sic] right now. Guys, today, it’s my twenty-fifth shot. Mein Fünfundzwanzigster! That’s why I wanted to share it with you.» He then describes the injection process as he administers the shot. In those first sentences of Lukas’s monologic video, we learn about his status via his dosing of testosterone - although at this moment it is not clear why he is administering this hormone. Because he is addressing a «you,» we do know, however, that he is sharing this experience with someone else, the «guys» of his address; that is, this is not a diary for his own personal recording of his experience, rather part of a conversation with other members of the online community of transitioning FTMs, some of whose videos are excerpted later. The narrative, then, starts after Lukas’s transition has begun, but it is far from his complete and final goal (which would include removal of his breasts and, we can infer, genital surgery). Following this scene, we see an animated sequence of credits in which the transitory or incomplete quality of Lukas’s current status is disembodied. That is, unlike the subsequent images of other actors with their names, Rick Okon’s name accompanies an image of the actor’s face torn in half. This one bookend of the film eventually pairs with the film’s final images, those that offer a contrast: home-movie-like footage captured by an unknown videographer showing a happy Lukas after apparently having completed his sexual transition, rushing off toward a beach. Still boxed inside the screen’s frame, this latter sequence is visible in a larger widescreen letterbox, however. We partake in Lukas’s ecstasy, as he removes his shirt, showing his breastless chest. His transition is complete, and he has reached the goal of happiness or «purity,» buttressed by his newfound relationship with Fabio - regardless of whether this consists of only the one sexual pairing that occurs near the end The Reality of the Body 69 of the film or continues, perhaps making Fabio the unseen cameraperson in the film’s final moments. Relating to ideas of confession, transgender and transsexuality have had to operate within a regime of truth, in which individuals must make expected or prescribed declarations if surgical intervention is desired. 7 Indeed, much medico-psychological discourse following high-profile sex reassignments in the 1950s and ’60s has focused on whether an individual is in the «right» or «wrong» body (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 143). Although the American Psychiatric Association published a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 2013, the 1994 version, the now obsolete DSM-IV, includes the diagnosis of «Gender Identity Disorder» (GID). The diagnosis of GID has been required in addition to therapy, counselling, and consultations, in order for individuals to access care and procedures related to transgender. With the new DSM-5, the GID diagnosis will transition to «Gender Dysphoria,» which will be based on an individual’s experienced «distress» and its effects «in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning» (Fraser et al. 83). Thus, the previous classification or diagnosis has now been replaced. In the German context, treatment has been partly defined by the Transsexuellengesetz (1980, revised 2011), which governs the legal ramifications for changing sex. 8 The treatment guidelines (Becker et al.), established by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung, were published in 1997, and are in revision with a scheduled publication date of December 2015. The current guidelines, though, as in the American case, call for therapy and medical consultation and raise questions about an individual’s agency in the process. In both of these cases, the German and the (North) American, an individual must declare a particular kind of truth in order to reach the desired result, constituting a complicated relationship between patient and psychiatrist or psychologist, a relationship on which many scholars have remarked. 9 It is helpful to specify which definitions we are using here to examine this topic. Largely because of their relationship to questions of identity and self-expression, the categories or labels that arise in the context of this essay - i.e., «transsexual,» «transgender,» «transvestism,» and «drag» - often have shifting meanings that vary according to the speakers and audience. In this form, «transsexual» usually refers to «those who have undergone some form of gender-related surgery»; «transvestite» is «an older term for a person who cross-dresses» 10 ; following calls for social and political organization, «transgender» has been used as an «umbrella term that may be used to describe people whose gender expression does not conform to cultural norms and/ or whose gender identity is different from their sex assigned at birth» 70 Kyle Frackman (Erickson-Schroth 620). «Drag» turns out to be much more complicated; because it is not crucial for my reading of Bernardi’s film, I will only mention it briefly here. Drag practice involves temporary «role playing,» usually via costume in order to impersonate another or «the other» gender, often as part of a public performance (Erickson-Schroth 613). 11 Conceptions of gender, transgender, and transsexuality that concede the multiplicity of genders and their capacity to shift allow us to draw connections between theorizations of masculinity and those of transgender. Judith Kegan Gardiner, for example, has drawn connections between current discussions of masculinity (like the analyses offered by influential scholar Michael Kimmel) and earlier (outmoded) psychoanalytic beliefs about the psychological foundations of familial behavior, for example, that persist (113). Newer (including queer) theories of masculinity, and gender more broadly, reject the pathologizing model that nonetheless continues to define sex-gender change because of its dependence ipso facto on empowered medical practitioners. Debates and discussions across disciplinary boundaries - expanding among cultural, psychoanalytic or psychological, medical, and sociological theories - frequently continue to revolve around the issue of «nature versus nurture,» that is, whether gender identity and/ or sexual orientation are innate. The conclusions drawn remain contradictory, which supports the focus on transience seen in many portrayals. Lukas remains an exemplar of this transition and «work in progress» as he sees himself. Films that deal with themes and topics related to transsexuality and transgender typically rely on certain discourses, sometimes on a particular filmic vocabulary. 12 Thus, even the disclosure of truths, the confessional technique, with which Bernardi’s film begins, operates within this cinematic idiom. The gender-sexual transitions that are explicitly or implicitly involved in these narratives usually make obvious appeals to interpretation, utilizing a number of metaphorical devices of widely varying complexity and subtlety; these devices often heavy-handedly cross borders and illustrate transition after obvious transition (Kraus, «Screening the Borderland» 17). One common approach is to involve relevant characters in some sort of journey, often a road trip which frequently includes characteristics of the road movie; examples include The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Transamerica (2005). 13 While they fall in line with respect to certain questions of genre or subgenre and may accomplish some didactic or empathic work, these films will rarely problematize the dimorphic system of gender and sexuality that actually constructs each film’s meta-universe (Kraus, «Screening the Borderland» 18). «If films flush out new ideas lurking in the cultural underbrush,» film scholar Carolyn Kraus observes, «they The Reality of the Body 71 also reveal what we’re stuck on: they provide a mechanism for working out acceptable explanations for the inexplicable» («Screening the Borderland» 19). Judith Jack Halberstam has also discussed the three main conventions of (non-transgender) depictions of transgender phenomena: «stabilization,» «rationalization,» and «trivialization» (In a Queer Time and Place 54-55). In these approaches, the transgender narrative, that is, a challenge to «gender normativity,» is made less offensive to gender hegemony in that the provocation becomes, respectively, highly unusual or pathological, temporary, or inconsequential (In a Queer Time and Place 55). In his book Transgressive Bodies, Niall Richardson discusses two other stereotypical portrayals: the «pathetic» and «deceiving» transsexuals (128-29). While there have been many English-language films that have addressed the transsexual (and/ or transgender) topic (the two most frequently cited being The Crying Game [1992] and Boys Don’t Cry [1999]), the German-language context is more sparsely populated. In contrast, cinematic and scholarly treatments of drag and transvestism have been far more numerous. 14 Transsexuality as a primary theme, however, occurs in at most seven German feature films (depending on one’s definition of «German» and «primary»), as far as I have been able to determine. 15 The appearances in these films range from the essential to the incidental, and from the tragic to the comedic. In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), transsexual Elvira (Volker Spengler) is a tragic character who changes sexes not because of the individual’s inner truth, but rather in order to further a romantic relationship - a choice which turns out to be an unfortunate mistake. By contrast, in Kutluğ Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid (1999), aspiring transsexual Kalıpso (Mesut Özdemir) is looking for a sugar daddy who will pay for the operation she desires. Ataman’s film also features the two title characters’ conflict over Lola’s potential willing or unwilling sex change. Like Sabine Bernardi’s film Romeos (2011), both of these films include certain kinds of confessions about personal history, wishes and desire, designed to explain the complete or developing transition. Bernardi’s film, however, differs from many of these other portrayals in that we meet a stable character whose transition is arguably more normalized within the filmic world. Nonetheless, Lukas is formed and presented as an individual who views himself as incomplete or unfinished in both a corporeal and a psychic sense. The journey that Lukas makes in the film comes across as healthy, natural, and possible, as opposed to the other characters mentioned above. If we did not already know, one of the observations we can make or the conclusions we can draw from viewing a film like Romeos is that perceptions within, through, and of the body are crucial for subjective identity development and 72 Kyle Frackman presentation, especially since the characters at hand will embody the need to depict this status of (a lack of) finality. Anticipating this, in his essay «Das Ich und das Es» (1923), Freud explained, «Das Ich ist vor allem ein körperliches, es ist nicht nur ein Oberflächenwesen, sondern selbst die Projektion einer Oberfläche» (253). Indeed, continues Freud, «Der eigene Körper und vor allem die Oberfläche desselben ist ein Ort, von dem gleichzeitig äußere und innere Wahrnehmungen ausgehen können» (253). As it exists within the world of the film, main character Lukas’s identity - and, by extension, his body (or vice versa) - must interact with, respond to, and internalize representations of identities and bodies around him. The confession of his personal truth is requisite, has already begun, and leads to what Foucault would see as the goal of these techniques, namely to «reach a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power» («Subjectivity and Truth» 180-81). The film is possessed of a vigorous corporeal awareness that commences in its first frames and is evinced through its steady focus on and consumption of characters’ bodies, all of which contributes to the film’s presentation of gender, often via direct contrasting juxtapositions. Repeatedly in the film, Lukas is shown in his dorm room lifting weights and then measuring his body, keeping track in a logbook how much his muscles have grown. Quick cuts alternate between medium close-ups of Lukas and close-ups of the book, in a sequence that becomes familiar to the viewer. Lukas talks about his success to Ine, who also expresses surprise at how much Lukas has changed in appearance and personality since his existence as Miriam. Fabio, whom we first meet when he drives Lukas, Ine, and others to a party, becomes a scopophilic object within the first fifteen minutes of the film. In one of numerous scenes with music and dancing, a shirtless Fabio with low-riding pants changes the party’s stereo to play a thumping song before moving out to the center to dance with a few men. Ine sees Lukas watching Fabio and says sarcastically, «Ein Platzhirsch. … Was du an Männlichkeit zu wenig hast, das hat er zu viel, nicht? » In medium range, the camera pans up and down Fabio’s body, showing us what Lukas is admiring for the dual reasons of attraction and admiration. A rather contrasting scene happens in the nightclub that appears multiple times in the film, following spats between Lukas and Fabio and between Ine and a girlfriend. Instead of concentrating on dancing, half-naked bodies, the film delivers a melancholy scene in which the main lights go down, the dancers stop, and the club is bathed in surreal blue light. A performer, either a drag queen or a trans woman, lip-syncs a haunting rendition of «I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger» by countertenor Andreas Scholl. With their backs to the camera and shown mostly in shad- The Reality of the Body 73 owy silhouette, the formerly-dancing clubgoers are silent and transfixed by the performance. Close-ups show Lukas also pensively fixated on the performer, before he glances to Fabio, and the image cuts to Lukas in bed, still immersed in the blue light and still accompanied by the wistful music. With little on-screen action, the scene highlights the trope of the difficult corporeal journey in the folksong’s lyrics and comes at another stage in Lukas’s cinematic transition, right before his move to the men’s dorm. Indeed, bodily presentation is one of the ways in which Bernardi’s film moves in a different direction from Fassbinder’s, for example. In the catalogue for the Berlinale film festival, Bernardi says of the film: Transgender hat meinen Blick auf Identität sehr verändert, und so wollte ich mit Romeos von dem Mut eines jungen Menschen erzählen, so zu leben, wie es ihm entspricht. Emotional ging es mir dabei weniger um dessen innere Zerrissenheit, sondern vielmehr um seine Sehnsüchte und Bedürfnisse, als Mensch glücklich zu werden. («Filmdatenblatt: Romeos») Bernardi’s concern for these elements of reality thus becomes visible in the film’s narrative, much of it relying on a communication of Lukas’s desire for social recognition of what has been called «cultural genitals» (Kessler and McKenna 173). The viewer perceives Lukas’s wish through the repeated emphasis on the character’s physical transition as well as his confessional videos, which reveal his understanding of his own progress and challenges along the way. In the case of these non-biological or «attributed» genitals, a viewer or other individual assumes the existence of either a penis or a vagina, depending upon the outward, bodily presentation of the person in question. Therefore, this is not based «on actual knowledge of a person’s physical equipment» (Plis and Blackwood 187). Interestingly, especially in the case of transsexual and/ or transgender persons, cultural genitals show that the attributed or perceived gender and sexuality - i.e., what has not been confessed or disclosed - are crucial in our understanding of the ways in which sex works. Kessler and McKenna are in line with other gender theories and build on Harold Garfinkel’s work on «passing,» when they maintain that a genital organ - primarily the penis - can be culturally, even if not physically, present «if the person feels entitled to it and/ or is assumed to have it» (173). Secondary and tertiary (including nonverbal) sexual and gender characteristics play a role in the successful attribution or reading of gender (174-75). In these cases, the success of a gender presentation stems from the receiver’s ability to understand denotations and connotations of sex and gender in a flexible process of give and take, but with the result that doubt about the perceived/ presenting person’s gender disappears (176). In using 74 Kyle Frackman social and cultural rules for distinguishing sexual and gender traits, Kessler and McKenna argue, individuals must negotiate a significant number of variables, adjusting for context and taking into account the relevant rules. In their research, Kessler and McKenna offer an organizational schema in an attempt to explain how people are categorized according to sex and gender in Western society. They maintain that someone must be seen «as female only when you cannot see them as male» (176). In other words, only an absence of «male» characteristics can warrant a «female» categorization. «The relative ease with which female-to-male transsexuals ‹pass› as compared to male-to-female transsexuals underscores this point» (176). This understanding of how one reads (and «writes») gender provokes a certain critique of Romeos, especially of Rick Okon’s presentation of Lukas. One can also then evaluate Lukas’s success and attainment of the goal based on these criteria. The viewer’s reception of this film and the director’s construction of it are partly dependent upon, in this case, the deployment of a male («cisgender») actor to play the FTM character, Lukas. As Michele Aaron has shown in her discussion of the popular Boys Don’t Cry (1999, dir. Kimberly Peirce), the focus on the actor playing the transgender or transsexual character in question can contribute significantly to the reception of the film as a whole and how the film is discursively treated (189-90). Bernardi has spoken about this, somewhat contradictorily, in interviews, stating that it was more important to her and for the film to select a talented actor, regardless of that person’s gender-sexual reality; moreover, showing «a male actor was the only really honest way to portray the character in the film. I didn’t want a female actor because then it is all about gender swapping and I really wanted to tell a story about a trans guy who isn’t transitioning. I wanted someone who was male and with a male body» (Waygood). In effect, Bernardi’s choice represents the end result of the gender-sexual transition; the other directors chose the starting point of it. Regardless of her intention, however, the film’s construction of the character and the cinematic devices’ delivery of the plot nonetheless depict a gender-sexual transition that is gradually disclosed. The film’s depiction of the protagonist’s body displays preand post-transition characteristics that show Lukas’s body as a site of contestation and development. Other films, like Boys Don’t Cry, have offered reminders that original bodies can persist and that gender is not coterminous with anatomy - that these sites are «(contested) arbiters of identity» (Aaron 190). In that film, Brandon Teena’s genetic body persisted in the form of his breasts as well as menstruation. In Romeos, the viewer is not explicitly told or shown the status of Lukas’s genitals and Bernardi does not engage that usual source The Reality of the Body 75 of preoccupation («What exactly is down there? »). Showing his own fascination, however, Fabio eventually asks the question («Was hast du denn eigentlich da unten? ») shortly after his unexpected discovery of Lukas’s identity when the latter’s little sister blurts it out in a fit of petulant anger. The film offers other sights that allow us to suspect and then know what Lukas’s truth entails, that is, a process that is, from his own perspective, incomplete. 16 To turn Rick Okon into Miri/ Lukas, the figure we see on screen, the actor had to don body suit components and false breasts, all of which were supposed to contour his body («Medien»). The former’s height vis-à-vis Liv Lisa Fries, who plays Ine, led to the latter’s needing to stand on a platform when they were filmed next to each other, thereby avoiding the concern that Lukas might seem too masculine by contrast of height. The body suit adjusted the appearance of his hips, shoulders, and waist, while prosthetic breasts shaped his chest and made selected appearances in a couple of scenes. This transition as a part of the film’s production augments one of the contradictory elements of the film, namely Bernardi’s selection of Okon to play Lukas and her understanding of how Okon needed to be shot in these scenes with Fries. The film, which otherwise frequently engages in a sophisticated way with expectations of gender and sex, remobilizes standard expectations in its manipulation of certain realities. Instead of relying on the narrative and the actors’ portrayals to create a world of diverse and multiple possibilities that contravene gender stereotypes, the film at least in part makes use of those stereotypes, ostensibly in this case to avoid confusing the viewer. In one instance of the appearance of the prosthesis, we see Lukas examining his progress and simultaneous stasis. Sitting topless in front of a fan below his window in the women’s dorm, Lukas uses a mirror to examine the hair growing on his chin and then fingers the hair on his stomach before prodding his still-present breasts. Again, truth - here, Lukas’s bodily truth - is complicated, as he embodies his transition. Although the film does not reveal Lukas’s genital status, this scene in which Rick Okon’s convincing breast prosthetic makes an appearance is surprising to the viewer. In one of the two instances of nudity (the other mentioned in the next paragraph), Lukas’s body - or one of the future sites of desired surgical intervention - appears uncovered and is visually connected with Ine’s femaleness, which appears in the next scene. Echoing the confessional videos that Lukas watches online that show transitioning/ post-operative transmen, Lukas’s appearance makes a bodily confession to the viewer of the kind that he does not make to the online FTM community. At certain points, however, Lukas does confess facts related to the effects of his testosterone and steroid injections, namely disturbing dreams and periods of constant sexual arousal. 76 Kyle Frackman Following the scene of self-examination under the windowsill, the group of friends (Lukas, Ine, Fabio, Sven, and Sven’s boyfriend) make their way to the beach. Lukas stands out in his refusal to remove his clothing, appearing uncomfortably warm in the juxtaposition to Fabio, who wears only shorts. The shots emphasize their different states of dress as the two wrestle on the grass. Again, Fabio’s toned body, which continues to be a focus of the film’s gaze, particularly as a counterpoint to Lukas’s, captures the camera’s attention. Highlighting more similarities and differences, Ine sits next to Lukas and takes off her bikini top. They watch the others swimming while Lukas hides his chest by holding his jacket close to him, resuming his regular posture from most of the film. The conspicuous display of Ine’s breasts next to Lukas, all of which we see in a medium shot, provokes him to say disgustfully, «Noch elf Wochen. Dann kommen die Dinge endlich ab! » The dialogue adds to the explanation for Lukas’s attire and behavior; components of his original female, feminine body persist, much to his disgust. 17 The viewer is aware throughout the film that the story takes place during a warm Cologne summer. Sunshine and wide-open windows combined with scantily clad characters, tightly occupied spaces (like packed gay clubs), glistening skin, and visits to the beach foster such recognition. In fact, one of our first glimpses of Lukas shows his entry into his room in the women’s dorm carrying a duffle bag and an oscillating fan. Lukas’s body exudes the warmth of the summer in that he is almost constantly shown to be sweating, including in these early shots. Regularly covering himself in deodorant spray, Lukas gleefully replies at one point to his friend Ine’s observation that he reeks of sweat by exclaiming affirmatively, «Männerschweiß! » The summery scene at the beach purposefully lays bare many of the characters’ corporeal qualities and simultaneously presents uncovered glimpses of part of each individual’s body. Lukas remains isolated yet also in contact with all of the characters around him. The film accentuates the presence of his hidden truth, continuing to make him a contrasting figure in that, in this moment like others, the confession and display of his own corporeality must be deferred to another filmic moment. This scene makes clear the various juxtapositions among Lukas’s relationships that remind the viewer of his own reality. In a way, the other displayed bodies provide a glimpse of the continuum on which Lukas and his gender-sexual presentation are placed. A masculine exemplar is Fabio; a feminine one is Ine. Even more than Ine, we the viewers are aware of Lukas’s vulnerability and the deeper aspects of his true reality, having been present for his online confessions as well as his private moments alone. The Reality of the Body 77 Not only did the actor playing Lukas require tools in the execution of this role, but the character Miri/ Lukas himself also uses common products that help individuals to be «read» as men. As one of the most common sites of technological and surgical intervention, breasts remain «a site of deep bodily discomfort for most transmen, making the use of breast binders a key aspect of helping them craft a masculine identity» (Plis and Blackwood 197). Transmen’s methods of concealing breasts include wrapping themselves in some sort of elastic bandage that makes their chests look flatter and wearing a tight spandex undershirt with layers that de-emphasize the breast area (Plis and Blackwood 197). Lukas uses the latter technique, supplementing it by adopting a hunched-over posture, crossing his arms, or holding things in front of his chest. Lukas’s presentation of himself in this way is a steady reminder of his bodily discomfort, reiterating his current transitory status. Some other trans tools include devices for sexual acts or for urinating while standing (Plis and Blackwood 189-97). 18 Early in the film, Lukas enters a bathroom at a party in someone’s apartment and proceeds to remove a prosthetic penis from his pants, before placing it next to him on the bathtub and sitting on the toilet. The device is almost immediately discovered, much to Lukas’s initial horror, although this part of his own truth is not yet revealed. (Someone who had been in the bathtub behind the shower curtain the whole time finds the device and takes it into the apartment’s main room.) This scene has a tragicomic quality that reminds the viewer of Lukas’s status in his transition. The laying bare of this small yet important aspect of gender-sexual presentation serves the purpose of connecting us to transmen’s experiences while also providing an instance in which Lukas’s truth, what he has been gradually revealing, is momentarily exposed to an uninitiated audience - although, in this case, when the prosthesis is paraded around in the party for everyone’s amusement, it is not linked to Lukas himself, thus allowing his hidden reality to remain intact and undisclosed. At three points in the film, the viewer sees a recurring motif, a number of video confessionals or diaries that point to developments in Lukas’s transition and in the narrative. Each instance includes a sequence that features Lukas alone, and each also marks a momentary diversion in the film’s style. These segments take the film back to a smaller field, boxed in on the screen. Both Lukas and the other subjects address the camera directly. Only the last sequence differs. In the first sequence, Lukas confesses briefly in a close-up that he has been having strange dreams, which he attributes to his hormone injections. Appearing after Lukas’s failed meeting with a bureaucratesespeaking administrator (a recurring motif in trans-film narratives), the sec- 78 Kyle Frackman ond sequence expands to include intercut clips that Lukas is viewing online and in which post-operative transmen speak and/ or display their bodies for the camera. 19 Evoking Foucault’s aforementioned idea about «showing one’s wounds,» one clip shows the surgical drains connected to the person’s body; another features a man showing the viewer the surgical scars remaining after his double mastectomy; yet another shows a man who takes his shirt off, revealing a developing muscular physique. Lukas completes that sequence in his own online post, speaking to the FTM community about the sexual effects of his hormones. The third and final sequence is different in that we see via a medium long shot Lukas lying on his bed and staring at his computer. A transman with a black eye addresses the camera in the by now familiar style. He says «they» found out about him, about his «situation.» Gesturing to his bruised face, he says, «So now I will look like this.» His despair is palpable as he expresses his desire to get away from all of this trouble, saying, «I don’t want to go on like this. I just want to make a break. Just want to be free.» At this point, Lukas engages with the online community differently from earlier, in that he offers encouragement to the struggling man in a positive response. This scene precedes Lukas’s reconciliation with Ine and, eventually, his first sexual encounter with Fabio, the depiction of which takes place in the last five minutes of the film. Film scholar Patricia Erens has examined the use of imitation «home movie footage» in narrative films, arguing that these excerpts serve an important purpose as «bearer[s] of truth» (99). The confessional clips included in Romeos are not typical home movies but they do deliver certain truths. That is, they are neither third-person depictions of domestic events nor do they serve a nostalgic goal of pointing to a character’s pre-diegetic life or evoking some kind of loss. 20 The confessional videos do, however, present a reverse departure in style and form, as they show the confessing individual in a stationary shot; the rest of Romeos is filmed with a handheld camera. Home movies would usually offer what the final sequence of Romeos does, specifically the feel of improvised, amateur footage. In Romeos these confessionals resemble «vlogging,» the kind of video-blogging that became popular after the late 1990s and allowed interaction with a wider community via amateur documentation of reality and personal «journeys.» 21 Laura Horak has argued that these vlogs, many of which are posted on YouTube, have been phenomenally important for acknowledging transitioning individuals’ personal truths and the vicissitudes of their changing bodies, especially in the absence of physical, «real-life» support networks (572-73). Beemyn and Rankin’s extensive and pioneering sociological gender-related survey of trans people also confirmed the importance of the Internet for, first, knowing what they might The Reality of the Body 79 be experiencing and, further, allowing them to connect to new friends and supporters (57-59). 22 Interestingly for an interpretation of Lukas’s development, these videos deliver a truth as they point the way toward Lukas’s future, and give him an idea of where he might be headed in his transition. Unlike the (pseudo) home movies included in other films, which may elicit associations with the past that are often manipulated through the use of music/ soundtrack, these confessionals offer stark breaks with the third-person realism that, along with Lukas’s own confessions, disconnect from the narrative on either side, both allowing the viewer to eavesdrop on Lukas’s dialogue with the online community and putting the viewer in the position of the second-person addressee. 23 Moreover, it is possible to include them in an overall assessment of the film’s narrative, seeing them as «confessional markers» of Lukas’s progress or transition. In the first, Lukas is alone, presenting fleeting observations of his dreams. In the second, post-operative transmen present themselves followed by Lukas’s presentation of his aroused state - both of which point to transition per se. In the third sequence, Lukas offers encouragement to a struggling transman, shortly before reconciliation with Ine, the romantic encounter with Fabio, and Lukas’s contented appearance at the end of the film. Foucault writes early in one of his examinations of «truth» and its relationship to the «hermeneutics of the self» («Subjectivity and Truth» 184), that «one of the main moral obligations for any subject is to know oneself, and to constitute oneself as an object of knowledge both for other people and for oneself» (177). Thus, descending genealogically from the well-known ancient directive to «know thyself,» self-understanding and self-presentation become necessary in the drive to make bodies and selves intelligible and legible within wider social relations. Butler, in her analysis of processes of body materialization, has argued that a kind of bodily «reiteration,» like what we see in Romeos, also demonstrates «that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled» (Bodies That Matter 2). In other words, repeated reiteration and renegotiation will be necessary, especially in the case of a «truth» that requires technical strategies of compliance. Combining an examination of these confessional videos with the other displays in the film, we can make out more clearly what some effects of the film’s techniques might be. As the narrative progresses, we witness Lukas’s development as a result of his confessional behaviors: to his friend Ine, to love interest Fabio, and to the video diary community on the Internet. Insecure uncertainty and discomfort become assured encouragement and contentment through reinforcing revelation, a process which at least approximates 80 Kyle Frackman the Foucauldian goal described above. Responding to an interviewer’s question about the film’s material, Bernardi corrects him, saying «[E]s ist nicht so, dass ein Mädchen beschließt, ein Junge zu werden. Sondern es geht um einen Jungen, dessen Geschlechtsmerkmale noch weiblich sind, und die er deshalb angleichen muss. Man spricht heute nicht mehr von Geschlechtsumwandlung, sondern von -angleichung» (Schmidt). 24 For a number of reasons, we can see Bernardi’s film as a presentation of this need for Angleichung. The film presents not only this «alignment,» but also demonstrates the «power of self-definition» and what it means for the creation and transmission of «truth.» In Romeos, Lukas’s conception and exhibition of his developing maleness and masculinity are reactive, active, and proactive - broadly speaking, dynamic. His case is an example of the ways in which sex and gender presentation may be conceived internally and how they do not exist in a vacuum. The character’s physical transformation accompanies the simultaneous psychic one, making visible and also more cumbersome the same kinds of personal development that everyone experiences. In his interactions with Ine, Fabio, and the institutional bureaucracy, Lukas manages his gendered expectations and gendered behavior partly based on the situations he encounters. Again, this is part of regular interpersonal communication, but Lukas’s transformations are then productive for the revelations in the video diaries. There are many more potential moments in this and other related films that can be revelatory for this topic, but from this discussion we can see that presentations of transsexuality in film have implications for our perceptions of gendered «truths.» Just as other narratives problematize and question our understandings of gender and sexuality, Romeos explores the shifting nature of these conceptions. Indeed, external expectations can also dominate that flexibility, as do the kinds of demands of masculinity or gay sexuality. Radical reworkings of gender and sexuality, like those that would point to the impossibility of absoluteness within that system, can leave us with residue - or even reinforcement - of the fixed qualities they had the potential to subvert. Notes 1 I thank director Sabine Bernardi for her assistance in my research and the issue’s editors for their helpful feedback. 2 While Romeos was positively received by critics, it faced an obstacle in its early age rating of 16+ by the FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle), later surmounted with a lowering to 12+ (Wrusch; Sandmann). Indeed, according to the FSK, «Die Schil- The Reality of the Body 81 derung einer völlig einseitigen Welt von Homosexualität im Film könnte zu einer Desorientierung in der sexuellen Selbstfindung führen» (qtd. in Wrusch). 3 Examples of useful sources related to discussions of these topics include Beger et al.; Billings and Urban; Bland and Doan; Bockting, Benner, and Coleman; Büchler and Cottier; Fausto-Sterling; Fraser et al.; Hausman; Klöppel; Kolbe; Loeb; Sigusch. 4 Björn Krondorfer, arguing that confession is a gendered activity per se (because of, for example, decisions of what to reveal and under what circumstances), has made an intriguing study of the relationship between masculinity and acts of confession. These acts can render the speaker/ writer vulnerable, but they also grant that confessant the power of what to disclose and what to hold back. Moreover, the privilege required to deliver one’s «confession» in certain media - be they autobiographies or vlogs - often remains overlooked. 5 Rasmussen, for example, offers one examination of the «coming out imperative.» See Sedgwick on the drive toward «knowingness,» especially about sexuality (Tendencies 222-24). For more on the idea of revelation and proclamation as it relates to trans identity, including with respect to a normative gender system, see Gagné, Tewksbury, and McGaughey. Eribon’s fascinating study of creating the self also connects the idea of affirmation to transsexuality (e.g., 126). 6 I am unable to engage with them sufficiently here, but Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself ) and de Villiers offer fascinating analyses of (sometimes gradual) revelations of the self both in terms (in varying ways) of a subject’s «opacity.» 7 First-hand accounts offer illuminating details on the intrusive and sometimes absurd nature of prescribed declarations (see Prosser). 8 One can read the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung’s position statement on their website: http: / / dgfs.info/ wp-content/ uploads/ SN01_TSG_2009_091104. pdf. 9 See Billings and Urban; Burke 60-66; Butler, «Doing Justice to Someone» 191; Butler, Undoing Gender 79ff.; Spade, «Mutilating Gender.» Sohn and Exner, for instance, offer a medical perspective and include historical background on the diagnostic and surgical procedures, including European examples. Jay Prosser has introduced a critique of some of these discussions, arguing that they can reduce transsexual subjects to pure products of the medical establishment’s power (7). Garrels et al. have examined the historical prevalence of FTM and MTF transsexuals in Germany. Becker details evolutions in the clinical conception of transsexuality. See also Weitze and Osburg as well as Büchler and Cottier 118-21. 10 The definition continues, «Has fallen out of favor and been replaced by the term cross-dresser, though some people continue to use it as a derogatory term for transgender people» (620). 11 Reading Esther Newton’s pioneering study of the US drag scene, Mother Camp, is instructive for an understanding of the term’s historical development (esp. 1-19, 97-110). Constantina Papoulias offers a general and more recent introduction. Because drag concepts are most often theorized in their relationship to gay men, see also Halberstam for an analysis of these concepts and the difference appearance/ use of drag in lesbian communities (Female Masculinity 236ff.). This relates to, but is different from, the «ethnic drag» theorized by Katrin Sieg. 12 An incomplete list of related films would include Glen or Glenda (1953), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), Des- 82 Kyle Frackman perate Living (1979), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Crying Game (1992), Orlando (1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Lola und Bilidikid (1999), Boys Don’t Cry (2000), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), All About My Mother (2002), Transamerica (2005), Agnes und seine Brüder (2004), and Romeos (2011). For more films and commentary, including on some listed here, see Kraus («Transsexuality in Film») and Kuzniar (The Queer German Cinema). 13 Romeos, too, approximates this trope at two points in the film: first, following the title sequence, Lukas is riding in a car to his new home at the school; second, Lukas is shown in a handheld-filmed «home movie» at the beach in the film’s final scene. 14 See, for example, Benbow; Berghahn; Clark; Frackman; Giersdorf; Kılıçbay; Kuzniar, «Zarah Leander and Transgender Specularity»; Mennel; Prosser. In these subjects the reader is also well served by consulting Kuzniar’s The Queer German Cinema. Benshoff and Griffin engage questions of labeling and categorization in the section «What is Queer Film? » (9-12). 15 The films that feature transsexuality as a primary theme are: In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978), Stadt der verlorenen Seelen (1983), Ein Bayer in New York/ My Father is Coming (1991), Lola und Bilidikid (1999), the American but Germanthemed Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Agnes und seine Brüder (2005, which borrows material from Fassbinder’s 13 Moons), and Romeos (2011). Other films, like Romeos director Sabine Bernardi’s documentary transfamily (2005) and Rosa von Praunheim’s Vor Transsexuellen wird gewarnt (1996, focusing on the United States), naturally also exist. Monika Treut’s Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities (1999) is perhaps German by association. 16 B. Ruby Rich discusses one of the more famous revealing trans «money shots» (in The Crying Game, 1992), a cinematic device that aimed to «contravene (heterosexual) audience expectation» (272-73). 17 There are numerous depictions of self-hatred, disgust, or anathema. Indeed, this topic often appears in scholarly analyses of transgender and transsexuality. Examples include Meyerowitz’s historical study of the transsexual movement and its connection to medical procedures (and agency) (see, e.g., 130-67), and, for another aspect of the discussion, Nataf’s examination of the fraught relationship between lesbians and transsexuals (36-47). Some of this also emerges in Billings and Urban’s discussions of the early treatment of individuals wishing to alter their sex/ gender. The chapters in Kane-Demaios and Bullough’s and Nestle, Howell, and Wilchins’s collections, for example, also include many instances of the desire to change oneself as a result of self-dissatisfaction. See Hausman’s discussion of transsexual autobiographies (141-74) as well as Judith Halberstam’s observations, including a critique of Hausman (Female Masculinity 154-56, 168-72). See also Prosser. Von Mahlsdorf’s autobiography offers a narrative with a different kind of emotional trajectory than many of these others. 18 A scene in Bernardi’s short documentary transfamily also and more explicitly focuses on the kinds of technical devices that transmen can use to simulate male genitalia. 19 According to Bernardi, these clips are based on, and made to resemble, original documentary material, but were acted out by transmen whom Bernardi met as part of her 2005 project, the documentary short film transfamily, with the excep- The Reality of the Body 83 tion of one clip, which came from YouTube and was included with the poster’s permission (Bernardi). It is interesting that these segments are the only ones in the film, to my knowledge, featuring trans-identified individuals. 20 For a discussion of the nostalgic use of these videos, see Hallas, for example. 21 Birchall has discussed the main characteristics of what he calls online documentary, two of which are for community and for diaristic access into people’s private lives (esp. 279, 281-82). Young and Burrows have conducted an intriguing study, relevant for this discussion, of women’s vlogged experiences following weight loss surgery. Holliday’s study connects video diaries to understandings and explorations of sexuality in particular. 22 See also Beemyn’s chapter (esp. 528-29) in the landmark resource guide Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (ed. Erickson-Schroth). Another study of strategies of resilience in trans adults found that online communities were important for «identity formation and support systems» (Singh, Meng, and Hansen 217). 23 On the use of home movie footage, see Erens (100). 24 The German usage here mirrors, too, the change in standard English terminology for sympathetic speakers, that is, from «sex change» operation/ surgery to sex/ gender «reassignment» or «realignment.» Works Cited Aaron, Michele. «The New Queer Spectator.» New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader. Ed. Michele Aaron. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 187-200. Becker, Sophinette et al. «Standards der Behandlung und Begutachtung von Transsexuellen.» Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 10 (1997): 147-56. -. «Transsexuelle Entwicklungen.» PiD - Psychotherapie im Dialog 10.1 (2009): 12- 18. Beemyn, Genny. «US History.» Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community. Ed. Laura Erickson-Schroth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 501-36. 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Queer Masculinity in Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall GA RY SCHMIDT We stern Illinois Univ ersity Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall (2013), released in the United States as Free Fall,- was billed as Germany’s answer to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), a cinematic adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story. Certain sequences offer sufficient similarities with Lee’s film to suggest they be read as an homage to Lee or as allusions that enter into dialog with their North American counterpart. In both films, outdoor settings provide the scene where male-male sexuality comes to fruition, and both frame homosexual liaisons as the expression of a kind of raw, unfettered sexuality, which, although being «a force of nature» is a «non-reproductive pleasure» that can find expression neither within a sex-gender system in which the patriarchal law equates homosexuality with castration and the evacuation of masculine authority nor within the feminine-coded domestic sphere that is itself produced and reproduced by the patriarchy. 1 In the case of Brokeback Mountain it is the eponymous peak that provides the idyllic setting where Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), referred to sometimes as «gay cowboys» but more accurately described as sheep herders or shepherds at the time of their initial liaison, become lovers. In Freier Fall, the woods just outside an unnamed southern German city are the setting where police officers Marc Borgmann (Hanno Koffler) and Kay Engel (Max Riemelt) engage in subversive masculine bonding that eventually leads to sex. 2 «Nature» and the «natural» obtain concrete values only in specific contexts, for example when they are juxtaposed to ostensibly opposing terms in binarisms such as natural/ artificial or natural/ unnatural. In pairings such as these nature is equated with the authentic or the real and given a positive valence, whereas in other pairings nature becomes the negative term in opposition to civilization or culture. The opposition of unrestrained, untamed nature to the domesticating forces of culture or civilization can also take on gendered qualities, for example in Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life (2011), in which a «state of grace,» is associated with the nurturing maternal figure in contrast to both the more punitive father and the gratuitous cruelty of the narrator-son. The reciprocal contamination of the semiotics of gender and nature is no less evident in Brokeback Mountain and Freier Fall, for both Queer Masculinity 89 films grapple with the question of whether male sexuality in its apparently natural state is to be valued for its authenticity in opposition to the masquerades and shackles imposed by civil society, or negatively for the very threat it represents to the heteronormative order secured by this civilization. It is precisely this threatening element that comes to the foreground in Lacant’s film, whereas the setting for Ennis and Jack’s romance in Brokeback Mountain has been referred to by some critics as a homosexual idyll or gay Arcadia where the two lovers escape from social opprobrium to a kind of prelapsarian innocence threatened only by the intrusion of Joe Aguirre, interpreted by Henry Alley as a Satan figure: The very nature of the Arcadia developed in the story and film is defined somewhat by those who exist outside it. In one of the masterstrokes of Paradise Lost, we do not get a full description of Eden until we enter into Satan’s point of view. In similar fashion, every early on [in Brokeback Mountain] Joe Aguirre watches Jack and Ennis’ dalliance, […] later issuing the accusation, «you guys wasn’t getting paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose» (SS14). (Alley 7) Alley’s analysis identifies at least two cultural faultlines that are addressed explicitly in the representation of male homosexuality in Freier Fall: the conflict between sexual self-realization and duty, specifically those identified with the men’s role as protectors, as well as the notion of gay men as insiders or outsiders. While Alley claims that Proulx and Lee create an inside status for Ennis and Jack in an idyllic setting removed from society and its judgment, whereas the two men’s return to society means the reversal of this status, Freier Fall negotiates the boundaries between inside and outside in a very different fashion that also precludes any clear identification of homosexual men as simply victims of social prejudice. Rather than conforming to pastoral conventions or invoking a gay idyll, the backdrop for gay sex in Freier Fall evokes instead an anarchic nature that mirrors how the male libido bursts the constraints imposed upon it by «feminine» civilization. Marc, married to Bettina (Katharina Schüttler), and soon to become a father, finds in his homosexual liaison with Kay a sphere in which he can pursue his own pleasure, have sex whenever he feels the need, and at the same time break the rules of the law enforcement body he represents. In its focus on Marc’s double life, Freier Fall links its portrayal of male homosexuality in the German police force with broader cultural discourses on gender and sexual orientation, with a special lens directed at masculinity, specifically its relationship to both homophobia and «feminine» domesticity. Both Lee and Lacant offer characters whose homosexual acts and affinities do not align neatly with their self-presentation as cisgender males, i.e. an- 90 Gary Schmidt atomical males whose gender expression corresponds to the requirements of hegemonic masculinity in their respective cultural milieus: the post-frontier American West and a contemporary German police force. In other words, both films present non-heterosexual males who are visually indistinguishable from their heterosexual counterparts and who move within professional circles traditionally defined as masculine but who through their homosexual acts concretely endanger their position in these male-dominated spheres. Yet, in spite of many similarities in theme, setting, symbolism, and even storyline, important differences between the two films are to be noted. For example, whereas Lee’s film plays upon genre conventions of both the American Western and romantic melodrama (Cohan 237-39), Lacant eschews all such conventions, choosing an indie film aesthetic with sparse dialogue and minimal non-diegetic music or sound that would stimulate an emotional response from viewers. Further, Brokeback Mountain offers a temporal and cultural displacement of same-sex viewer identifications, inscribing a story of repressed sexuality and homophobia onto a past that is neither entirely recent nor completely forgotten but nevertheless one in which the icons of masculinity are those of a frontier that has long since ended and whose values most likely will not correspond to the sensibilities of many American moviegoers. Freier Fall, in contrast, presents viewers with a setting that will be familiar to most Germans - the contemporary «Kleinstadt» - and to a group of individuals visibly present in everyday life, police officers, whose function in society exceeds that of the merely symbolic or iconographic, and who are the subject of regular discussion and debate regarding, for example, excessive use of force, surveillance, and freedom of speech and assembly. In general, Brokeback Mountain is more closely aligned with a Hollywood aesthetic that has inspired blockbuster historical dramas that have sometimes been referred to as «German heritage film» (Cook et al 8), whereas Freier Fall adheres to stylistic elements more closely akin to that of the directors collectively labeled under the rubric of the «Berlin School,» which is described by Marco Abel as a «counter-cinema» (10). According to the authors of Berlin School Glossary, «Berlin School» cinema exhibits a dearth of communicative dialogue, minimalizes plot and character development, and focusses on a contemporary middle-class milieu (2). In contrast, the German historical blockbusters are «touristic returns to the past in the form of costume dramas» (Cook et al. 8) that offer little to no challenge to mainstream aesthetics and dominant ideologies (Abel 8). Given the imbrication of sexgender ideologies in narratives of national history and in aesthetic programs, in particular those related to the arrangement and organization of space and perception, any comparative analysis of the treatment of masculinity and Queer Masculinity 91 homosexuality in Brokeback Mountain and Freier Fall must take such programmatic and generic elements into account. A central question becomes not only which icons and codes of masculinity are invoked and/ or subverted but to what extent do the films resist imposing an interpretation on viewers within the culturally accepted and cinematically reinforced framework of meaning? To what degree do they make viewer responses possible that do not fall neatly into pre-existing categories of identity? The world of American cowboys and that of the German police force have a symbolic relationship to male bonding, male friendships, and the myth of masculine strength. An important distinction, however, is that while the American cowboy invokes the myth of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency, what Michael Kimmel analyzes as «Marketplace Manhood» undergirding the notion of the self-made man (122-23), 3 the German police force symbolically links masculinity with the rule of law and the maintenance of order. The cultural fault lines addressed by Freier Fall are thus significantly removed from the fantasies and anxieties surrounding masculine phallic wholeness central to Brokeback. While Brokeback encourages us to dream of a potential future (albeit utopian) domestic bliss for Jack and Ennis in which they might nevertheless retain their masculine self-images, Freier Fall raises questions regarding the very compatibility of male homosexuality with domesticity and a family structure that appears always already to be heterosexual. In Lacant’s film, the sexual self-sufficiency allowed for by male homosexuality appears as a threat to procreation and the family, and in the end there appears to be the possibility of a continued queer existence for Marc within the male-dominated police force, while his relationship to his wife and child remains in question. In this regard, the film harkens back to early twentieth-century discourses that link male homosexuality with statebuilding functions in distinction to heterosexuality as the cornerstone of domesticity and the family. 4 As Cohan notes, publicity related to Brokeback Mountain and the film’s reception tended to reinforce the idea of a largely female audience that had to coax heterosexual men to accompany them to the movie theaters, a conceptualization of the audience that aligned with the film’s billing as a romance, which by dint of its two lovers both being men could be «instructive to men» regarding the importance of emotion over sex (Cohan 237). Indeed, the melancholic loss that saturates in particular the end of Brokeback Mountain displaces sexuality almost entirely onto romantic love. The theme of male redemption, perhaps even through same-sex love, in Brokeback Mountain, is completely absent in Freier Fall, which eschews all sentimentalization of the relationship between the two male protagonists, in spite of a gesture to the 92 Gary Schmidt idea of loss at the end of the film. While Brokeback Mountain follows a tragic emplotment (Alley 11), leaving viewers with a sense of loss and «what might have been» if gay domesticity were possible and the two protagonists were able to overcome their own internalized homophobia, Freier Fall avoids closure altogether, refusing to draw clear boundaries regarding sexual identity and victimization. It does, however, squarely situate its exploration of male homosexuality within a framework of masculinity, and the portrayal of the liaison between the two officers raises questions regarding masculine vs. feminine roles, male vs. female sexuality, and the relationship between homophobia, hegemonic masculinity, and feminine domesticity. In particular, the two male lovers of Freier Fall occupy a unique position both concretely and figuratively: as men, they are insiders in the power structure that maintains law and order but as sexual nonconformists they undermine this very order and gesture towards a new form of masculinity that turns the verbal taunts and physical violence inflicted by homophobic heterosexual men back against these same men. Yet, if there is a lesson for heterosexual men implied in Freier Fall, it has little to do with the ability to feel or to sublimate raw sexuality into romantic love, which certain critics who interpreted Brokeback Mountain as a romantic melodrama or «chic flick» attributed to Lee’s film (Cohan 237). In contrast, the queer masculinity 5 embodied by Marc by the end of Freier Fall remains strictly within the parameter of spheres of activity and behaviors associated with traditional masculinity, while adding the element of gay sex and its charged implications for male dominance and invulnerability. This essay explores the transformation of themes, motifs, and plot elements from Brokeback Mountain in Freier Fall and the ramifications of these for the representation of male homosexuality and masculinity. Of central importance are the association of male-male sexuality with raw nature, the presentation of anal intercourse as the apparently quintessential gay sex act, and the tension between domesticity and lawlessness present in both cinematic works. In certain ways, both Lee’s and Lacant’s protagonists are homeless, sexual outlaws, but their real and imagined relationships to the patriarchal phallic order are very different. Lee’s «gay cowboys» are primarily the victims of this order, which rejects all forms of homosexuality as the evacuation of masculine authority and power; they are disempowered by their low socioeconomic status and live at the margin of the heterosexual family structure, while not really posing a threat to it diegetically or symbolically. Ennis and Jack’s masculinity consists largely in the two men’s outward adherence to the external trappings of the American West and their imagined relation- Queer Masculinity 93 ship to this ideal. In contrast, Lacant’s queer cops appear in no way to have relinquished their position in society. In the end, they successfully defend themselves against the vestiges of heterosexual patriarchy on the police force - a force that incidentally also contains at least one female officer, a fact that further destabilizes the one-to-one relationship between hegemonic masculinity and heterosexual male bodies. The defense waged by Lacant’s protagonists against the domestic sphere of wives and mothers is, however, not as successful. In this regard, Freier Fall seems to suggest that deeper chasms separate men and women, whether gay or straight, than those that divide gay and straight men. Lacant’s use of setting, dialogue, editing, and mis-en-scène aligns the symbolic space of male homosexuality firmly with non-domesticity, even lawlessness, as the title itself suggests with its reference to bodies subject only to the force of gravity and whose movement is thus unrestrained by any other factors. 6 Male homosexuality occupies a space in Lacant’s film that appears antithetical to the heterosexual family because it unleashes men from domestication as husbands and fathers and allows them to pursue unbridled pleasure. Yet the film is not unsympathetic to its two male protagonists and even allows them to perform an alternative, queer masculinity. In the idyllic fields on Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack become freed from the constraints of heteronormative masculinity enough to «stem the rose,» but once they have returned to society they never free themselves from the need for external and internal conformity to their environment’s expectations of «real men.» Ennis and Jack are thus never able to integrate the freedom they experience on Brokeback Mountain with the expectations of heteronormative masculinity in their everyday lives, although Jack actively seeks to do so. We sense that such an internal act of liberation would require their conscious decision to leave the very environment in which they have been constructed as heteronormative masculine subjects, since Ennis envisions the only possible outcome of male-male domesticity (Jack suggests they settle down together on their own ranch) as death by lynching. The possibility of escape beyond the borders - that is to say, beyond the reach of the long arm of the law that enforces the sex-gender system in a post-frontier Wild West - flickers only briefly when Jack asks Ennis if he has ever been to Mexico, the destination of outlaws in traditional Hollywood Westerns, not to mention in more subversive treatments of the genre such as Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) and Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991). Jack’s admission to having «been to Mexico» brings upon him a threat from Ennis to inflict the very punishment on Jack that others might have enacted on the two of them had they chosen same-sex domesticity. In this manner, Ennis adamantly rejects a gay identity equivalent to self-branding as a sexual outlaw. 94 Gary Schmidt The sexual outlaw motif is taken up In Freier Fall in a setting far removed from mid-twentieth century rural Wyoming, but nevertheless one in which the often contradictory expectations that hegemonic masculinity places on individual men are examined and the possibilities of its subversion from within are explored. Lacant’s protagonists, who meet at an advanced training course for police officers, are situated squarely within the law, hence functioning as both insiders and outsiders, i.e., subversives. Kay and Marc eventually overcome initial inhibitions, first in the woods, and then in Kay’s high rise apartment, the key of which Kay offers to Marc so that he can «get away from things.» Kay seems, in fact, to be deliberately seducing Marc into a homosexual affair and more general rule-breaking at the same time. Jack’s longing for escape beyond the bounds of the law is paid homage to in a discussion between Kay and Marc when they share a cigarette on the balcony of Kay’s high rise apartment after having slept together in his bed. The camera positioning, with the two men in the foreground on the balcony, allows the viewer to see past Kay and Marc to the sun on the horizon, which in turn evokes an atmosphere that combines a feeling of transcendence above everyday concerns with a sense of longing for a more permanent escape. What Alley refers to as Jack’s desire for a Schillerian idyll, his need to «link the ideal with the actual and have the experience on a sustained basis» (14), is given an American «twist» in the pastoral landscape. In Freier Fall, the viewers never actually experience the idyll, there being no setting that corresponds in symbolic meaning or plot significance to Ang Lee’s mountaintop, but instead one catches glimpses of Kay’s longing for a self-reinvention in an entirely new setting. The possibility of escape, however, is preempted before it can even erupt into the kind of altercation portrayed in Brokeback between the two male lovers, for when Kay asks Marc if he ever considered just taking off for the unknown and starting over, a taciturn Marc quickly responds, «Nicht wirklich.» Moreover, notably absent in Freier Fall is anything equivalent to Jack’s suggestion of a gay domesticity - his vision of their settling down on their own ranch - nor does Kay look backward nostalgically or regretfully to a lost family of origin. Indeed, he appears as a freefloater without ties or roots, there being no mention of parents or relatives of any kind. Marc’s response to Kay is far less emphatic than that of Ennis to Jack, but the soon-to-be-father’s «nicht wirklich» foreshadows his refusal to relinquish the place and role that has been defined for him as a husband and father. His rejection of the label «schwul,» much like Ennis’s insistence that he is not «queer» is backed up later with his fists. Brokeback Mountain and Freier Fall frame homosexual bonds as both congruent and incongruent with hegemonic masculinity, to the extent that Queer Masculinity 95 hegemonic masculinity does or does not remain tethered to a heteronormativity that is associated with a feminine domestic sphere. In other words, both films sexualize male-male relationships that are not ipso facto feminized. Kay himself is representative of both the affirmative and subversive potential of gender-conformist male homosexuality: while he calls Marc a «Pussy,» taunting him to run faster, he uses the same gibe in order to push him to break the rules that as police officers they are sworn to enforce, for example by jumping into a swimming pool after hours fully clothed, or smoking marijuana. When asked by Marc how he ended up with the police force, Kay asks him if he has never heard of «Systemunterwanderung.» One need not take literally Kay’s claim or Marc’s astonished query whether Marc is perhaps an «Autonome» - a reference to members of loosely-organized anarchist groups that are «widely regarded as left-wing extremists and have been investigated as a terrorist and criminal organization» (Kopp 30) - to ascertain that Kay’s subversiveness lies precisely in the contradiction between his outward adherence to the expectations of heterosexual masculinity and his self-definition as gay, as well as the contradiction between his role as enforcer of societal rules and one who enjoys breaking them. No one on the police force suspects that Kay is gay until he is discovered in a gay bar during a raid, and he even plays it straight by appearing with a female date at a bowling alley where many of the officers hang out. The references to «Systemunterwanderung» and «Autonomen» suggest a possibility for male homosexuality and its representation that is not fully explored in Brokeback Mountain. In Lacant’s film, the suggestion of a utopian escape into outlaw status is alluded to in the couple’s visits to gay bars, where they take ecstasy, dance ecstatically all night long, and have sex in the bathroom, which one might read as nothing more than a stereotypical representation of gay subculture or more charitably as an evocation of mainstream stereotypes about gay men in a context in which the gay bar represents both the stereotype and the liberation from the constraints of society that weigh heavily on both men as police officers and on Marc in particular as young paterfamilias. In this context, homosexuality is the refusal inwardly to conform to the rules of the heteronormative sex-gender system by men who are otherwise invested in the maintenance of this system. Whereas Ennis and Jack never have the authority or status to act as actual enforcers of the sex-gender system on anyone other than themselves, the same cannot be said of Kay and Marc. Yet, although Kay manages to negotiate the contradictions between his role as police officer and his nonconformist identity by creating a private sphere to which he admits only the initiated, for Marc there is no such possibility, because the private sphere of 96 Gary Schmidt middle-class family life requires his absolute adherence to heteronormative masculinity. The focus of the film thus turns to Marc’s negotiation of the parallel lives between which he now finds himself switching back and forth as a kind of twenty-first century Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray, or Caligari (Kiss 51). While Ennis and Jack must remain in the closet for fear of death and as a couple cannot escape to Mexico due to Ennis’s rejection of sexual outlaw status as a viable life option, it appears that in post-gay-liberation Germany Marc can live in both worlds, as a husband/ father and a sexual outlaw, and even that he would have been happy continuing to do so if his mother had not witnessed him kissing Kay in a hospital corridor. Even after this, the film does not become a coming out story, and Marc never embraces a gay identity, ultimately leaving the viewers to answer the question for themselves posed by Marc’s wife, Bettina: «Was bist du denn? » Thus, for those viewers, whether gay, straight, or other, who wish to see the complexities of attraction and behavior clearly resolved in a narrative that culminates in a clear statement of identity, Freier Fall shares the «Berlin School» aesthetic that denies «the spectator what it is that they [sic] want or expect to see» (Cook et al. 8). In Freier Fall, homosexuality is not only tied to victimization and abjection in relationship to hegemonic masculinity, it also appears to be enabled, if not produced, by the practices and institutions of hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity. As a theoretical insight, this is anything but new, of course; one need only cite Eve Sedgwicks’s now famous hypothesis in her seminal work Between Men of «the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual - a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted» (1-2). Sedgwick deploys the term «homosocial desire» precisely in order to render visible the continuity between purportedly non-sexual relations (the homosocial) and those involving sexual desire. The precise referent of «our society» is open for question, but this much is clear: Sedgwick posits a distinction between modern Western arrangements of sexuality and that of the ancient Greeks, for whom homosexual relationships and the maintenance of patriarchy went hand in hand. The notion that relatively fixed paradigms of male homosexuality followed one another chronologically has long since been discarded, as one has come to understand various arrangements and expressions of sexuality as co-existing in time and space. Sedgwick’s emphasis on the necessary relationship between cultural arrangements of homosexuality and the power relationships between men and women is critical for our current analysis of Freier Fall and Brokeback Mountain, since both set their stories of male-male love in mas- Queer Masculinity 97 culine-coded spaces that at least in part represent escapes from the femininecoded spaces of everyday life. Lacant teases out some of the contradictions between «feminine» domesticity and «masculine» desire for escape from domestic restraints implicit in Lee’s film. In both, however, sexual relations between males come to represent a free space outside of the sphere of domesticity, outside social norms, roles, and definitions, a «Wild West» if you will, in which what the films themselves appear to define as specifically masculine passions can flow unrestrained, whether these are erotic, aggressive, or both. Furthermore, this «queer Wild West» appears to suffer explicitly from both the misunderstanding and disapproval of wives and mothers, as well as the male enforcers of hegemonic heteronormative masculinity, who reject any expression of homoerotic desire as «queer» or «schwul.» One example of the blurring of the homosocial and the homosexual in Freier Fall is seen in the athletic competitiveness that frames the entire narrative. The film begins with an establishing shot in which a group of police officers wearing shirts clearly marked as «Polizei» run around a track. Kay, not yet identified as gay, is clearly in the lead, and Marc attempts unsuccessfully to catch up with him, eventually stopping completely and bending over in apparent pain. The final shot of the film repeats the situation, this time with Marc pulling ahead of the rest of the men in the group, essentially occupying the position held at the beginning by Kay, with the viewers now knowing that even if Marc still does not embrace a gay identity he has at least embraced another man with affection and desire. The possibility for agonistic malemale relationships to flip over into erotic ones or to be revealed as masks for libidinal attractions is further underscored by two practice combat situations between the two men in which Marc displays excessive zeal, his aggression appearing as an obvious outlet for his increasing erotic attraction to Kay. The contrast between the police space in which homosocial bonding coexists with subversive homoeroticism, and the feminine-coded domestic sphere is made evident in a cut from a scene in the woods in which Kay blows smoke into Marc’s mouth and then steals a kiss from him to a dark bedroom scene in which Marc’s wife straddles him and states «We missed you,» as the camera pans down to reveal her pregnant state. This begins a sequence in which Marc’s parents use a camcorder to create a video for the baby, interviewing family members and literally interpellating the unborn child as the product of the heterosexual family structure. This home video introduces the baby into the heteronormative family, but it also reveals Marc’s awkwardness when being called on to speak to his unborn child, his need to resort to pat phrases and formulaic expressions. In this manner, we see that not merely the child, but Marc himself is being molded as a husband and father 98 Gary Schmidt in the heterosexual matrix and that the existence of this heterosexual family as an unquestioned reality is dependent on the still unborn child. This scene, in spite of its foregrounding of the construction of the familial imaginary, is not at all stylized: the apparent realism of the visible camcorder is mirrored in the realist aesthetic of the unseen movie camera. Such techniques call attention to the cultural production of Marc’s role as husband and father within the extended family: visual realism is revealed to be staged reality, and Marc’s production as father within the existing heterosexual familial paradigm is rendered even more explicit by the fact that he and Bettina are literally living in his parents’ house. Lacant uses repeated jump cuts from scenes featuring Kay and Marc to scenes with Marc and Bettina, suggesting commonalities between the homosexual and heterosexual relationships as well as differences. The jump cutting is more severe and hence more suggestive than that of Brokeback Mountain, but Lee’s film also pushes viewers to reflect on similarities and differences in the heteroand homosexual relations of the protagonists, for example when Ennis’s wife reminds him that his preferred sexual act will never produce a baby and the camera shows him turning her over to be penetrated anally as he did to Jack in the tent on a cold night in a scene that some viewers perceived as violent, even as a rape (Patterson 42). A comparison between the two films’ framing of such scenes is productive to the extent that one can read these framings as constructing differences between ostensibly male and female expressions of sexuality within the films’ broader treatment of masculinity and femininity. The equivalent scene in Freier Fall has Marc unsuccessfully - in contrast to Ennis - attempting to initiate and control sex with Bettina in a manner he is able to with Kay. When Marc oversleeps after a night of ecstasy-induced dancing in a gay club, Bettina begins painting the baby’s bedroom without him. In response to her anger at his failure to fulfill his obligations, Marc grabs her roughly from behind to initiate sex, a move reminiscent of how he first penetrated Kay against the car. Unlike Kay, Bettina vehemently rebuffs Marc, ultimately pushing him down and spilling the bucket of paint. If sex is the glue that bonds Marc and Kay together, it is for Bettina insufficient compensation for Marc’s failure to live up to paternal and spousal obligations. The focus in both films on anal penetration suggests an overdetermined link between this particular sexual act and the cultural meaning associated with male homosexuality. The camera leaves little to the imagination regarding who is doing what to whom, and the absence of foreplay or tenderness in the initial sex scenes between the two men in both films frames the act in terms of dominance and submission. Further, the framing of the scenes fore- Queer Masculinity 99 grounds the non-procreative nature of the sexual act that has just been portrayed. In Brokeback Mountain, the initial physical liaison between Ennis and Jack occurs in a tent on a cold night, after the two have shared a bottle of whiskey and conversation (Jones 20). While they are huddled close together to stay warm, Jack reaches over and places Ennis’s hand on his penis. The tent scene proceeds rapidly (in less than two minutes) from Jack’s initial move to a stunned reaction from Ennis, an attempt from Jack at a face-to-face intimacy, to Ennis’s forceful placement of Jack into the receptive position for anal intercourse. As he penetrates Jack, the camera pans back and forth from Ennis, whose face expresses a kind of tortured urgency, to Jack, who attests more to a gentle but pained submission; never do we see their two faces together in the frame. Freier Fall offers an equally quick trajectory towards anal penetration. The two men meet in the forest in pouring rain; Marc kisses Kay passionately on the lips before quickly turning him around to penetrate him as he leans against his car. Different than in Brokeback, the camera shows both Marc’s and Kay’s faces together in the frame: Marc’s expression is urgent, while Kay’s seems to oscillate between mild pain and blissful submission. Equally important to the editing and composition of the shots from which these scenes are composed is their respective framing. As Alley notes, Lee sets up psychological intimacy between Ennis and Jack prior to sex (12), whereas Lacant shows increasingly aggressive encounters between Marc and Kay. And while Jack’s concern for Ennis’s welfare, for example when he brings him a blanket and then invites him into the tent to stay warm, attests perhaps to his yearning for a same-sex domesticity openly voiced later in the film and his acceptance of a «feminine» role in such a partnership, no such element is present in the relationship between Marc and Kay prior to their first sexual encounter. A similarity between the two films lies in the fact that in both it is the «passive» participant who actually initiates sex, who acts as «seducer.» Perhaps the equivalent act to Jack’s placement of Ennis’s hand on his genitalia is Kay’s stealing of a quick kiss from Marc while blowing smoke into his mouth, which prompts the same stunned defensiveness the viewers see in Ennis. The shots immediately following these scenes of anal penetration are also significant in both films. In both, the character who was originally resistant to the act and is portrayed throughout as more rigidly masculine/ heterosexual leaves quickly and silently afterwards to return to duty only to discover he has been negligent, lacking in his role as caretaker: in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis discovers the mutilated carcass of a lamb, in Freier Fall, the negligence of duty in pursuit of pleasure is more explicitly linked to the abnegation of the parental role. Marc arrives late to a child-birthing class and must face accusa- 100 Gary Schmidt tions from his wife that his absence made her feel like «eine alleinerziehende Mutter.» Again, while Brokeback offers a kind of redemption and hope that the subject positions of man-desiring-man and father can indeed be reconciled, for example in the final scene in which Ennis’s love for his daughter is juxtaposed to his posthumous acceptance of domestic bliss with Jack in the symbol of the two shirts, Freier Fall offers no such optimism. While I hope in the preceding analysis to have demonstrated that Freier Fall participates in a transnational dialog on homosexuality and masculinity, it is also important to situate the film within a particular national media culture and cinematic tradition. Whereas many, perhaps even a majority of German viewers of Freier Fall will be familiar with Brokeback Mountain, many will also have seen one or more German films that address these issues. Freier Fall cannot be easily placed in a tradition of German films dealing with homosexuality. As should be evident based on the plot summary provided above, it shares little with «coming out» films, which, as Les Wright writes in his article «The Genre Cycle of German Gay Coming-Out Films, 1970-1994» contain a narrative progression [that] will lead the (soon-to-come-out) gay viewer to an authentic knowledge of what it means to be gay. The narrative will lead the viewer past the false stereotypes and thus negotiate the internalized (self-)hatred the viewer has to overcome as the first step in the process of coming out. So, step by step, the narrative accompanies its viewer/ participant, as the latter achieves her or his desired goals of self-discovery, self-acceptance, social engagement, and a socially meaningful life as a self-identified lesbian woman or gay man. 7 (314) In fact, Freier Fall plays upon the expectations (perhaps primarily of gay viewers) that the narrative will ultimately lead to Marc’s coming out, with Kay being the vehicle. Kay functions then both as the character who would trigger the coming out if Freier Fall were to be classified in this genre and as a vehicle to offer the traditional «coming out» interpretation to both Marc and the viewers, in his insistence that Marc admit that he is gay. Ultimately, there is no coming out enacted in the film, since protagonist Marc repeats to the end «Ich bin nicht schwul» and refuses to answer Bettina’s screamed query, «Was bist du denn? » Nevertheless, Freier Fall does share certain aspects of German coming out films, which in the tradition as described by Wright differ from their Hollywood counterparts in their emergence from the politicization of cinema by the Generation of 1968 and share a common lineage with the New German Cinema. While not being a coming out film in the strict sense of the word, Lacant’s treatment of homosexuality responds to the genre expectations by exploding them; its refusal of closure, however, and lack of Queer Masculinity 101 a celebratory aspect can in one sense also be seen as a return to the critical perspective of filmmakers like Rosa von Praunheim and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who directed their critiques not only at gay men’s oppressors but at gays themselves for their complicity in the system that oppresses them. As Wright reminds us, for Fassbinder and Praunheim, gays are as susceptible as straights to the «corruptive nature of capitalism and how economics shape human relationships» (326). For Lacant, the focus is less on economic exploitation and more on the social expectations of German, middle-class, provincial family life; his cinematic and narrative techniques lack the didacticism of Praunheim and the melodrama and Verfremdung favored by Fassbinder, but share Fassbinder’s dark mis en scène. One should further add that while gender-transgressive behavior is a major component of the representation of male homosexuality in the German cinematic tradition following Praunheim and Fassbinder, this element is completely absent in Freier Fall. The few brief shots of Kay and Marc in a gay bar do not offer the inevitable drag performances that would accompany such scenes in, for example, Heiner Carow’s Coming Out (1989) or Kutlug Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid (1999). 8 In Lacant’s film at least, male homosexuality is, using the language of Eve Sedgwick, a «gender separatist» rather than a gender-transgressive phenomenon (Epistemology 10). While in Brokeback Mountain the gender separatist aspect of male sexuality in two straight-acting «cowboys» is tempered by the gender transgressive element of a domesticated and perhaps therefore «feminized» masculinity that, while never fully lived by the couple, is nevertheless the longed for, unattainable, and ultimately mourned object, Freier Fall makes no such gesture towards gay men as building a bridge between masculinity and femininity. Given the absence of drag, cross-dressing, or indeed any gender-nonconformist behavior other than homosexuality, it might also seem counter-intuitive to look for connections between Freier Fall and what scholars such as Alice Kuzniar have analyzed as the «Queer German cinema,» although the indefinability of protagonist Marc, either by others or by himself, and the split between his two lives suggest a kind of monstrous schizophrenia that Kuzniar has identified as part of this tradition (Kuzniar 30-31). If there is a «queer project» to be identified in Freier Fall, it seems to be restricted to a subversion of the category of «sexual orientation» rather than «gender» and in the implications of the film’s open-endedness regarding Marc’s sexual «identity» (if he even has one) and future development. Strangely enough, Freier Fall seems to enter into dialog with one of the most successful genres of what Eric Rentschler first dubbed the post-reunification «cinema of consensus»: the sex comedies of the 1990s, specifically 102 Gary Schmidt Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann (1994), which was highly successful at the box office in Germany, but not in the United States (Rentschler 263). In fact, both films specifically address relationships between gay men and ostensibly straight men, raising questions of whether heterosexual men can be «turned» to homosexuality but also making parallels between the sexual appetites of straight and gay men and hence creating a possibility for identification between the two in opposition to women. On the surface the situation is similar - a gay man appears to wish to seduce a straight man; he, however, remains unsuccessful. Wright describes it as follows: Maybe … Maybe Not alleges to be the story of a straight man possibly coming out as a result of his encounter with gay culture. In fact, this assertion is specious, on the one hand nothing more than a gay fantasy, and on the other no more than a teaser to draw the consumer into the movie theater. The bewegte Mann of the original title is the intractably heterosexual Axel […]. (332) While Der bewegte Mann is dependent on maintaining clear boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual identities, Freier Fall allows an ostensibly heterosexual man to be «seduced» by a gay man while making evident that Marc has not been «recruited» to homosexuality but rather was responding to a potential for homoerotic attraction already within himself (although for Marc’s parents Kay is clearly to blame for breaking up the new family). And while the viewers of Der bewegte Mann were denied the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing straight sex symbol Til Schweiger in a love scene with another man, instead being treated to the farce that lands him in bed with his gay friend and the mere appearance of a homosexual tryst, the audience of Freier Fall is allowed to witness two up-and-coming, self-proclaimed straight, German male actors in a love scene. 9 Freier Fall challenges the boundaries between straight and gay not by claiming that straight men can be turned; rather, it reframes the question to ask to what degree attributions of identity such as those of gay and straight are applicable and what the relationship is between both identity regimes and that of hegemonic masculinity. While it shares some of the anxieties about male (hetero)sexuality evident in Der bewegte Mann and other films of the «German Comedy Wave,» the «crisis of heterosexuality» described by Randall Halle in the 1990s German comedies was consistently resolved through the structure of the «temporary-gay narrative,» in which a straight protagonist comes into contact with gay men, experiences a kind of pseudocrisis of sexual orientation and is restored to heterosexual wholeness in the end (12). Halle describes the generic elements as follows: The narrative necessity for contact with a gay man; the simultaneous ambiguity of the character’s sexual preference to the film’s other characters and its clarity Queer Masculinity 103 to the film’s audience; the construction of the straight man as object of desire for both women and gay men; the insistence on the biological or fixed explanation for sexual preference; the temporary-gay character’s sensitization to the conditions of women and gay men; heterosexual desire thwarted by the perceived ambiguity; a coming out as straight followed by a heterosexual coupling. (12) Whereas in this genre, Marc would have filled the role of the «temporarygay character,» he cannot do so in Freier Fall, for while he indeed functions as object of desire for women and gay men and becomes sexually ambiguous to his wife Bettina, he is not restored to unambiguous heterosexuality at the end, nor is he domesticated in a way that makes his male sexuality more palatable to a female partner. In this manner, Lacant’s film plays not merely upon tensions related to the discussion of homosexuality and masculinity in Germany, but also to programmatic and aesthetic discussions regarding the relative role of mainstream and independent cinema. Germany’s contemporary cinematic landscape can be characterized as a fractured terrain with, on one side, the proponents of successful international blockbusters that, paradoxically, have been criticized for pursuing a normalizing project of national identity even as they focus primarily on Germany’s totalitarian past (Rentschler’s «cinema of consensus»), and on the other side, the «counter-cinema» (Marco Abel) identified primarily with what has been designated as «The Berlin School.» Scholars have noted that the homogenization of cinematic form associated with the post-reunification cinema of consensus very often also entails a restoration of traditional sex-gender hierarchies, which is to say that the project of normalization carried out in these films is often post-feminist, if not anti-feminist, heteronormative, and even masculinist (Sell 2ff.). One can identify cinematic features of Freier Fall that distance it both from the dominant German cinema (i.e., of consensus and normalization) and from the Hollywood models it draws from and that also enabled the success of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. Hence, the «Germanization» of themes and topoi found in Lee’s film consists not only in contextualizing the issue of clandestine male homosexuality in a contemporary German allmale setting, but also in utilizing cinematic techniques that hearken more to an independent, counter-cultural German cinematic tradition. Unlike the treatments of male homosexuality in the cinema of consensus (largely comedies) and in Lee’s acclaimed film, which maintain clear identity boundaries (and hence protect the sanctity of male heterosexuality), Lacant’s treatment leaves more questions unanswered and refuses to subjugate male-male desire to identity politics, which for Kuzniar is indeed a central difference between Germany’s queer cinematic tradition and Hollywood coming out films (18- 104 Gary Schmidt 19). The question posed so urgently by Bettina to Marc - «Was bist du? » - continues to resonate in the viewers, suggesting that we might ask this of all heterosexual males, or indeed of hegemonic masculinity itself. Lacant’s refusal to label Marcus and to create a closed narrative of identity-formation resonates with Marco Abel’s understanding of the cinematic project of the Berlin School, which he defines in part through its emphasis on de-familiarization and «primacy of the object» (Abel 17). Films such as Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen (2009) offer a critique of masculinity and a much more open-ended exploration of gender/ sexuality than mainstream blockbusters like Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006), or even, as Muriel Cormican notes, certain films of the acclaimed director Fatih Akin, celebrated by critics for his contributions to the discourse of transnationalism. 10 Abel’s description of Berlin School films seems appropriate to the treatment of masculinity and homosexuality in Freier Fall: «Instead of catering toward the familiar, these films present their audiences with new, non-preexisting images of Germany. But this imaging of novelty proceeds by intensifying their look at reality rather than by avoiding it» (Abel 19). The sparse dialog, long takes, and jump cuts of Freier Fall go hand-in-hand with the refusal to name, the refusal to provide comfortable answers to the question of how an apparently heterosexual police officer and young husband and father can suddenly become engaged in a homosexual relationship that he continues parallel to his domestic heterosexual life. Abel’s description of the Berlin School as turning away from history to the present rather than fleeing from the present into history as in the mainstream blockbusters is also highly relevant for a comparison between Freier Fall and Brokeback Mountain, for the latter film’s tragic ending promotes viewer identification with loss rather than reflection on the need for change in the present. Finally, Brokeback’s assumption of same-sex domesticity as the desirable, yet unattainable object predetermines both the teleology of desire and the failure to reach the telos. While Brokeback viewers might easily leave the cinema mourning with Ennis the loss of «happily ever after» that might have been, viewers of Freier Fall are more likely to leave wondering precisely what exactly was, what might have been, and what might yet be. If one allows a reading of Marc as Lacant’s manifestation of Ennis, it is consistent for Marc to experience the same loss of his love object and to bear a similar ethical responsibility for this loss. Both Kay’s disappearance and Jack’s death follow their respective partner’s refusal to imagine anything other than an affair in secrecy behind the façade of heterosexual masculinity. Marc, however, while not embracing a gay identity, nevertheless appears to Queer Masculinity 105 make a deliberate decision to iterate a masculinity that is not strictly heterosexual, one that eschews homophobia, and one that also is willing to experience and receive pain rather than merely inflict it. This queer masculinity, as it were, comes to the foreground in the police locker room when Marc refuses any longer to participate in the gay-bashing engaged in by his colleague Limpinski, who earlier in the film attacked Kay in the cafeteria after accusing his recently outed colleague of groping him. Marc himself had been implicated in the homophobic masculinity of which Limpinski is the most extreme example, since Marc’s earlier disavowal of his own queerness expressed itself more than once in physical attacks on Kay. In the locker room, Marc admits to Limpinski that he had a sexual relationship with Kay; then, in response to being called a «Schwuchtel» by Limpinski, he kisses him directly on the lips. When Limpinski physically attacks Marc, rather than responding in kind, Marc willingly receives the blows and goads his colleague to strike again, calling him a «Pussy» just as Kay had done to Marc. Only the intervention of another colleague stops Limpinski from mercilessly beating Marc. Thus, while not umabiguously embracing a gay identity, Marc has taken on Kay’s subject position by using Kay’s very words and actions - the stolen kiss and the taunt of «Pussy.» This fact is reinforced in the final scene of the film, which returns full circle to the group of jogging police offiers, this time with Marc pulling ahead rather than Kay. These two scenes unite two central elements of Michael Kimmel’s critique of homophobia and manhood, which he describes as «the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men» (131). Marc’s earlier aggressive acts against Kay attested to precisely this fear. Marc now turns the situation around. As an insider who knows the homophobic male’s fear of being «outed» as «not a real man,» he breaks the silence with which he and even Kay earlier accepted Limpinski’s sexist and homophobic locker room jokes, which for Kimmel go hand and hand with «the fear of being seen as a sissy [that] dominates the cultural definitions of manhood» (131). Yet to what extent can one read Marc’s reversal of positions as simply taking on the active role, of forcing Limpinski into the passive role that is the source of homophobic, straight men’s fear of evacuation of masculine power and authority - what Leo Bersani pointedly called «the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman» (8) - rather than exploding the framework of the active/ passive, dominant/ submissive binarism? While Marc’s move into Kay’s subject position performs a rapprochement between a formerly homophobic masculinity and a straight-acting homosexuality, the viewers are left with still no clear explanation or label for Marc’s new sex-gender identity; from a theoretical perspective it remains 106 Gary Schmidt queer, unknowable and uncategorizable, and viewers may well identify with Bettina’s incomprehension of her husband’s sexual desires and practices. This incomprehension is most acutely expressed in a shower scene, in which Bettina enters the shower and grabs Marc from behind and asks him, «Willst du es von hinten? » Further, her assertion, «Ich kann nicht richtig eifersüchtig sein,» suggests that her husband’s homosexual liaison must always remain a mystery to her, for it involves practices that she cannot engage in as a woman. In such moments, while Freier Fall explodes the boundaries between gay and straight male identity, it reinforces a male/ female binarism particularly in regard to sexuality. Significantly, while Marc’s father expresses a vague and perhaps disingenuous tolerance for gay men - «Wir haben nichts gegen Schwule …», his mother is unforgiving and states clearly that she sees her son’s homosexual acts as a deviance from familial norms: «Wir haben dich nicht so erzogen,» she laments. Returning to the construction of masculinity in Freier Fall and Brokeback Mountain, both films carve out a distinctly masculine space for homosexual relations, yet these spaces are inflected by their self-positioning in response to specific national cinematic traditions and movements, as well as to homophobic discourses informed by specific national dialogues on masculinity, femininity, procreation, and the family. Whereas Lee’s film focusses more on the abject relationship between male homosexuality and patriarchal masculinity and encourages viewers to embrace an affect of tragic loss, Lacant’s film places obstacles to viewer identification with the two male lovers, specifically through the attention given to the concerns of heterosexual women. Ultimately, it is Bettina’s position that is irreconcilable with Marc’s queerness, whereas the sexist homophobes of the police force appear to lose in the end. And finally, melancholic loss is shifted from the «sad, lonely gay man» that Halle identifies as being central to the history of queer representation in German cinema (18) to the ambiguously sexual Marc. Kay, who has clearly embraced his homosexuality, has disappeared from the narrative, whereas both Marc and Bettina remain as a broken heterosexual couple. Notes 1 Brokeback’s tagline, «Love is a force of nature,» has been interpreted along these lines, for example in Wojtaszek’s Deleuzian reading (130). On the relationship between homosexuality, non-procreativity, and the death drive, see Lee Edelman’s No Future. Luke Mancuso builds upon Edelman to discuss the semiotics of anal intercourse in his analysis of the scene of «coitus a tergo» between Ennis and his wife (99). Freier Fall inserts itself into this discourse by foregrounding a visual contrast between procreative heterosexual intercourse and anal homosexual intercourse. Queer Masculinity 107 2 Freier Fall was filmed in Ludwigsburg, a small city on the commuter train line to Stuttgart. 3 That this is a myth is central, for the cowboy has very little power in the capitalist economy. 4 The central text in this discussion was Hans Blüher’s Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (1919-20). See Geuter, Widdig, and Hewitt on the relationship between male-bonding, homosexuality, the state, and ostensible masculine and feminine spheres in the writings of Blüher and others. 5 Since Freier Fall, particularly in the portrayal of protagonist Marc, resists the conventions of gay coming out narratives while at the same time undermining the firm alignment between strict heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity, queer seems to me to be a more appropriate term than gay. 6 The metaphor of free fall suggests an analogy to Ennis’s proclamation, «There ain’t no reins on this one! » 7 Since the publication of Wright’s article there have been a number of films that more closely approximate the Hollywood coming out genre, for example, Marco Kreutzpainter’s Sommersturm (2004), a feel-good drama about a Bavarian teenager’s coming of age and coming out after encountering a group of openly gay youth from Berlin at summer camp. Ironically, Kreutzpainter’s most recent film subverts the coming out genre in a very unsubversive way. In the comedy Coming In (2014), Kreuzpainter invokes almost every stereotype imaginable of gay and straight men to tell the story of an ostensibly gay hair designer’s discovery of women’s romantic appeal. 8 Wright notes the centrality of the drag ball in Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Kloh (1980) as well. 9 Max Riemelt appeared in Napola (2004) and Die Welle (2008) and Hanno Koffler in Der rote Baron (2008) and the television movie Nacht vor Augen (2008). 10 See article in this volume. Works Cited Abel, Marco. The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Ade, Maren, dir. Alle Anderen. Komplizen Film, 2009. Alley, Henry. «Arcadia and the Passionate Shepherds of Brokeback Mountain.» Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film. Ed. Jim Stacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 5-18. Ataman, Kutlug, dir. Lola und Bilidikid. 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