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In sharp contrast to Lipstick, Salvador and The World According to Garp, where the brutalization of the male member takes place at the very end of the movie, we have Clint Eastwood's 1983 film Sudden Impact, where cock fragments start flying all over the screen almost from the moment the opening credits have finished rolling. This fast-paced psychological thriller, which had a tremendous linguistic and philosophical influence on President Ronald Reagan, deals with a disoriented young rape victim, played by Sondra Locke, who methodically avenges herself upon her tormenters by luring them to out-of-the-way places and then emptying a concealed revolver into their privates, inflicting "a .38-caliber vasectomy."

The film is also noteworthy because of the disturbing scene toward the end of the film when Eastwood, reprising his Dirty Harry psycho-cop role from the early 1970s, offers Locke a can of Budweiser. Although it has become commonplace for manufacturers of fine consumer products to pay movie studios tens of thousands of dollars to have their goods displayed prominently in large-budget movies, it is impossible for me to believe that Anheuser-Busch actually paid to have Sondra Locke quaff a Bud on camera. Not unless the St. Louis brewery was trying to zero in on that fast-growing, twenty-something, beer-guzzling, female rape-victim market.

At this point in the article, the casual reader may find himself wondering aloud: "Gee, you seem to know an awful lot about movies where guys get their cocks shot off, but why are you telling me all this?" The answer is simple: This article is a response to voluminous inquiries from Movieline subscribers on the subject of penile-dominated films. Recently, veritable scores of Movieline readers have written in and said, "We're very interested in movies about castration and whatnot, and you guys seem to be pretty up on this stuff, so are there any recommendations you would make to a guy or gal who's trying to build a home library made up of nothing but the very best nutcracker films?"

The answer is a resounding Yes. Every cinephile interested in this particular genre positively must own a copy of Midnight Express, in which Randy Quaid loses not one but two testicles during a series of severe beatings in a Turkish prison. The Big Chill, where the appropriately named William Hurt can't harpoon Meg Tilly because of something that happened to him back in Vietnam, is optional, as is Born on the Fourth of July, but no serious student of cock-related cinema will want to be without the aforementioned Sudden Impact, Last Rites or El Mariachi, all of which contain impressive phallophobic footage, much less Caligula, the big-budget 1980 porno film in which a man's penis is chopped off and fed to a pack of dogs. (This is a metaphor for what happens to people in Hollywood when their movies don't turn a profit.)

Other must-haves already mentioned include Lipstick (buckshot in the balls), The Dark Half (balls stuffed in the mouth), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (good, solid kick in the nuts) and The World According to Garp (penis bitten off during ill-timed blow job; penis caught in trouser zipper; various other penile mishaps). More recent works you'll want in your collection include What's Love Got To Do With It, in which the long-suffering Tina, played by Angela Bassett, nails Ike, played by Laurence Fishburne, where it counts as they engage in mortal combat in a limo cruising through Los Angeles; and Total Recall, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger barely notices getting kicked and punched in the groin by Sharon Stone, which means only one of two things: either Arnold has steel balls or he's a eunuch.

Several readers have also asked, "Are there any good self-circumcision movies you could recommend for people who might want to practice at home?" The answer is again a resounding Yes. Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers contains an excellent scene where a boy named Smut is shown to have circumcised himself. For viewers who want to go one step further and explore the mysterious world of self-castration, there is Square Dance, the Winona Ryder vehicle in which Rob Lowe tried to expand his range by playing a retarded fiddle player with a pronounced Southern accent who cuts off his own dick after Ryder, cast as an impressionable adolescent, discovers him boning an oversexed hairdresser.

In addition to its electrifying story line and fine acting, Square Dance is also distinguished by its crackling dialogue. Particularly memorable is the scene where Rob Lowe beseeches Winona, "Read me a story, one about them bears, and they're eatin' their cereal." Even less forgettable is the scene where Jane Alexander, playing Ryder's long-suffering hairdresser mother, tells her daughter that she must clear out quickly, lest the police implicate her in the tragic demise of Lowe's penis.

"I got to get you outta here," rasps Alexander. "I gotta take you somewheres. . . Aggie [Alexander's fellow coiffeuse] take me in there and I just about got sick. Her hanging there like shoddy plumbing, and him laying here bleeding, and my haircutting scissors on the floor next to your Bible. Baby, you're in big trouble."

One final question remains. Are there motion pictures, readily available in VHS format, that would be of any use to a person interested in castrating or gelding a man? Again, the answer is Yes. Stealing Heaven, the 1988 Anglo-Yugoslavian film that deals with the most famous eunuch of them all, Peter Abelard, contains a very fine scene illustrating how to quickly, efficiently castrate a man (though you will probably need four or five strong men to hold the man down while you are doing it). Of course, nothing in Stealing Heaven could possibly compare to the final scene from In the Realm of the Senses, the 1976 Japanese-French film in which the leading lady, a prostitute appropriately named Sada, first strangles her lover, then hacks off his cock, and then spends four days wandering around the streets of Tokyo "resplendent with happiness."

This film probably has as much to say about female attitudes toward penises as any film ever made, and once seen will probably cure any American tourist of the desire to take up with a prostitute while visiting Japan.

What can the reader learn from this brief history of ball-busting, nutcracking movies? And what does Hollywood's current obsession with the vulnerability of the penis say about our society? Basically, this: As long as there are men who have cocks, there will be men who are afraid somebody might want to cut them off. What's more, many of these men will deserve to have their cocks cut off. But is the fear of castration primarily a fear that is limited to the serially emasculated men who live and work in Hollywood, or does this veritable geyser of films involving crushed testicles, mandatory gelding, and gunshot wounds that permanently shatter one's manhood reflect a wider, deeper fear on the part of all American men, a primal fear that our balls are right there on the chopping board with the blood-drenched meat cleaver poised directly above them? Probably the latter.

Films are direct reflections of society's deepest neuroses, and nothing worries the average American male more than the nagging fear that, when all is said and done, his balls are only out on loan and his cock can be repossessed at any time. Deep down inside, every American man secretly fears that someday, somewhere, someone is going to stick a shotgun down his jockey shorts and threaten to blow off his cock. He just has to keep hoping that the person with the shotgun will be one of the sinister Stucci brothers, and not his wife. At least they can be bribed.

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Joe Queenan wrote "Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler" for the August Movieline.

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