Joe Queenan takes a historical approach to solving the mystery of why so many contemporary American films contain scenes in which the private parts of the hero or villain are threatened, damaged or altogether done away with.
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One night this past spring, I rented White Men Can't jump, that elegant, understated plea for racial harmony starring Wesley Snipes, from my local video store. Toward the end of the film, in which Woody Harrelson quite convincingly portrays a Caucasian basketball player who isn't very smart, the flaxen-haired "Cheers" veteran is apprehended by a pair of vicious-looking gamblers he has been eluding for most of the movie. Dragged to a deserted area and stripped to his Marky Mark undershorts, Harrelson kneels helplessly at the feet of the sinister Stucci brothers as they prepare to do him irreparable bodily harm.
Begging for one last chance to come up with the thousands of dollars he owes them because of his failure to tank a basketball game, Harrelson looks on in dismay as one of the Stucci brothers inserts a shotgun into his underpants and warns him what will happen to him if he fails to come up with the money.
Shortly thereafter, the gamblers get their money.
The very next night, I rented Honeymoon in Vegas, the quirky 1992 comedy in which Nicolas Cage quite convincingly plays a Caucasian who isn't very smart. Warned what will happen to him if he does not come up with the many thousands of dollars that he owes sinister gambler James Caan after an ill-advised poker game, Cage persuades his fiancée (Sarah Jessica Parker) to spend a weekend with the odious dirtball in exchange for the complete cancellation of his debts. In a winking aside to the audience, apprising them of what might happen to Cage should he fail to live up to his part of the bargain, Caan very early in the movie grabs the testicles of a hotel manager who has been foolish enough to tell him that his usual suite is not available, and proceeds to squeeze them with great dexterity, force and, apparently, delight.
Shortly thereafter, Caan gets his room.
The very next day, I went out and saw El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez's quirky, elegantly understated $7,000 movie, in which the unknown Carlos Gallardo quite convincingly plays a Mexican who isn't very smart. About halfway through the film, the nightclub proprietress in whose bathtub Gallardo finds himself plunges a sharp letter opener into the water between his spread legs and tells him to take out his guitar and perform a traditional mariachi song. If he plays the song with the gusto and panache one has long associated with practitioners of this colorful idiom, it will prove that he is a harmless mariachi musician and deserves to live. If he does not play the song with traditional elan, it will prove that he is the hit man who's known to conceal his weapons in a guitar case. In that case, she will cut off his balls.
Shortly thereafter, the woman gets her serenade.
Robert Rodriguez has garnered a lot of kudos in the past few months, first by winning the coveted Audience Award at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival, then by getting signed to a two-year "first look" deal with Columbia. Much of the media attention has focused on the director's maverick road to stardom. But the bald truth about El Mariachi is that it is just a low-budget, formulaic comedy about a dimwitted male who keeps getting himself into trouble and then at a certain point gets threatened with having his nuts disabled or removed.
I think Hollywood will suit Mr. Rodriguez just fine.
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The fact that it was possible for an ordinary moviegoer like me, a person with no ax to grind, no hidden agenda to promote, no soapbox to fulminate from, to view three films on three consecutive days that all dealt in graphic fashion with a direct threat to the male reproductive organs suggests that there is something disturbing going on in the national Zeitgeist that we should all be paying attention to. Or at least that all men should be paying attention to.
My suspicion that testicular paranoia was loose in the American subconscious was further strengthened in the next few weeks, when I noticed that there was a direct threat to the organ that I hold most dear in every single movie I attended, with the single exception of Howards End. In The Dark Half, a man's balls are cut off and stuffed into his mouth--the last place anyone would think of looking for them. In Three of Hearts, Tony Amendola threatens to cut off Billy Baldwin's nuts and use them for a necklace. (Actually, given that the rodent-faced Baldwin is sharing an apartment with Kelly Lynch, who plays an unsuccessful lesbian, this is not such a bad idea, since Lynch obviously has no use for Baldwinic balls.)
The final vindication of my theory about balls on the brain occurred when I saw the trailer for Lost in Yonkers and realized that even in a hopeless morass of ethnic hokum like this, there is nevertheless a groin-threatening scene: Richard Dreyfuss stuffs a revolver down his trousers and then jokes that if it should accidentally go off, he'd be turned into a ballerina.
Tickets are still available for the 9:20 showing.
The idea of depicting penises and testicles getting chopped off, blown into smithereens, pummeled by direct kicks, or transmogrified into offbeat jewelry is not a new concept in the movies, or, for that matter, in life. What is new is the fact that moviegoers are now being exposed to a veritable tidal wave of misfortune involving the male reproductive organ. The simple fact of the matter is this: the menacing of the malleable male member has now become as much a cinematic cliche as the cloying Motown soundtrack and the close-up shot of shoes descending from a parked car. (The generic shot of the 1990s is of somebody named Baldwin or Quaid dropping his feet out of a car and getting kicked in the balls while Aretha sings "Chain of Fools" in the background.)
How did we arrive at a point in our history when virtually every film made in this country contains at least one scene in which the male member is bent, folded, spindled or mutilated, or at least threatened with such indignities? And what does it say about the American psyche that our most popular art form now routinely depicts severe mistreatment of the human cock? And that men have to pay the same price as women to see it? To answer these questions, we must first go back and survey the history of ball-busting films.
Until the 1950s, Hollywood tried to pretend that the penis did not exist. This was, it must be remembered, the postwar era of wholesome entertainment, and the penis, whatever its other charms, can hardly be described as wholesome. Also, it was easier for Americans to forget that penises existed in the era of Pat Boone and Danny Kaye.
It was not until Goldfinger (1964) that riveting images of the jeopardized male member could actually be used in film stills to advertise a movie. The famous scene in which a spread-eagled Sean Connery is threatened with penile bifurcation by an overhead laser beam is a pivotal moment in the history of film, because it was the first time that a motion picture had addressed, in a meaningful cinematic fashion, the most deep-seated male fear: The terrifying realization that if someone as resourceful, virile and cool as James Bond could have his nuts cut off, then anyone could have his nuts cut off. Meaning no more pussy galore.
Connery is perhaps the only movie star in history to have his genitals directly threatened in two different films (though Woody Harrelson is still young enough to eclipse this dubious record). Halfway through Never Say Never Again, the somewhat portly Connery is menaced by the hyperactive Barbara Carrera, who forces him to sit on the ground and spread his legs, then points a gun at his crotch and sneers, "Guess where you get the first one?"
Real tough question, Babs.
In discussing the subject of penis-threatening motion pictures, it is important to distinguish between films in which one or more penises play a major role in the thematic development of the motion picture, and films in which people get kicked in the balls or castrated purely for the sake of amusing the audience. In the first category are films as varied as Sudden Impact, In the Realm of the Senses, Stealing Heaven, The World According to Garp, Born on the Fourth of July and History of the World--Part I, a movie in which the penis plays such a large part (eight distinct scenes involve castration, circumcision, kicks in the balls, or urination) that it ought to get mentioned in the credits right below the words "Madeline Kahn."
The second category consists of films such as Last Rites, A Prayer for the Dying, The Evil That Men Do and The Dark Half, in which genital misfortune is merely one more revolting element thrown into an already revolting motion picture to make sure that the audience doesn't come away with the wrong idea. Thus, one can readily imagine the producer of Last Rites peeking at a rough cut of the film and telling the director, "Look, asshole, you've already got mob priests, incest, drug dealers and women who murder their own spouses, so the least you can do is have the bitch ice him with a bullet right in the cock. What kind of a picture do you think we're making here?"
For similar reasons, one has no difficulty visualizing the director of A Prayer for the Dying reading the riot act to the scriptwriter after looking at his shoddy first draft.
"We've got blind girls, bad Irish accents, affable child murderers, terrorists masquerading as priests, crucified funeral directors, a whore with a heart of gold, and Liam Neeson all in one film," the director would point out, "so I think that if you forget to include a scene where somebody gets his nuts menaced by a sawed-off shotgun, the audience is going to get a little antsy. As convicted Watergate conspirator Charles Colson once said: 'Once you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.'"
To which the scriptwriter would almost assuredly reply: "What's Watergate?"
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to argue that every movie containing gratuitous attacks on the crown jewels is automatically a worthless, mindless film. One of the most memorable kicks in the balls in the history of cinema occurs in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, an entertaining movie that is otherwise devoid of gonadal mayhem. And the mere fact that a jazz musician ends up with his penis stuffed into his mouth halfway through Angel Heart does not automatically ruin the movie; Lisa Bonet's acting does that. In fact, after forcing the audience to sit through a couple of scenes involving Robert De Niro with a ponytail and Charlotte Rampling trying to act, Alan Parker may have included the scene about the man with his penis stuffed into his mouth as some kind of black comic relief. Personally, the thing I most enjoyed about Angel Heart was the possibility that the fate of the jazz musician might eventually befall Mickey Rourke.
Turning away from movies which contain gratuitous assaults on the male privates, let us now turn our attention to films where a brooding element of gonadal peril dominates the proceedings from beginning to end. Here, it is possible to distinguish three basic types of nutcracking films: those where the male organs are tormented at the very beginning, those where they are subjected to immense physical pain at the end, and those where the damage to the penis or testicles continues pretty much throughout the film. In the first category are such films as The Evil That Men Do, a very bad Charles Bronson movie that opens with a journalist in a South American torture chamber having electrodes applied directly to his nuts. The clear intention of the director in kicking off his film with this nauseating scene is to first traumatize his audience, to shock them, to paralyze them with revulsion, and then to reassure them by letting them know that nothing they will witness throughout the remainder of the film will be anywhere near as disgusting as the opening scene, including Branson's acting.
In the second category can be found films such as Lipstick, The War of the Roses and The World According to Garp. In each of these movies, the big, climactic scene involving the mutilation or potential mutilation of the male organ is a payoff that the audience has been looking forward to from the get-go.
In Lipstick, Margaux Hemingway plugs Chris Sarandon right in the cock in retribution for his having raped her earlier in the film. In The War of the Roses, Kathleen Turner first lulls her schmuck hubby, convincingly played by Michael Douglas, into a false sense of security by agreeing to suck his cock (nicknamed "The Bold Adventure"), then takes a big bite out of it. Only then, two hours into the film, does he realize that Turner is no longer his friend. Finally, in The World According to Garp, Mary Beth Hurt accidentally bites off the cock of her overly aggressive young lover while giving him what proves to be the final blow job in their up-and-down relationship. The calamity wrought by the appropriately named actress is a sort of metaphor for Garp's entire existence, though I have no idea what that metaphor means. But it does inspire John Lithgow, convincingly cast as a transsexual who used to play tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles, to remark: "I had mine removed under general anesthetic. But to have it bitten off in a Buick--oh, it's a nightmare."
Salvador falls into a somewhat different category than these other motion pictures, in that it is the only film in recent memory in which an American actor almost gets his balls cut off in a foreign language. This near-disaster occurs toward the end of Oliver Stone's powerful 1986 film, when an uncharismatic El Salvadoran death squad leader wearing--what else?--an Oakland Raiders T-shirt and brandishing a sharp machete tells the unbelievably annoying James Woods, "Me gustan los huevos rancheros"-- which is Deathsquadese for "I'm going to cut off your balls." The man's failure to do so remains, for my money, the single most disappointing finale in any movie made in this country in the past 50 years. With the climax of Angel Heart a close second.
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.