THE LONGING OF THE WEAK

One of these days I'd like to see a compilation of references to Sigmund Freud and his theories in popular culture. I don't imagine I'll attempt one myself, but here's a curious entry for such a list.

In preparation for a review on the NUM blog, I re-watched the 1952 musical SHE'S WORKING HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE, in which star Virginia Mayo is a burlesque performer who only bumps and grinds so that she can earn the money to get her college degree. I remember that whenever I first saw COLLEGE, I happened to have seen the film adaptation of James Thurber's play THE MALE ANIMAL, and thought it interesting that this musical-ized version of Thurber's play more or less reversed Thurber's meaning. I assume that the movie version of the play fairly reflected Thurber's theme, since I've seen other Thurber works in which he was rather scathing toward the fetishization of visceral entertainments like sports and sex-games. COLLEGE is just the opposite, exulting in the world of the senses (with musical numbers that celebrate, among other things, Madame Du Barry, royal mistress of King Louis XV). It's an extremely lightweight film, though the Mayo character is interesting given that she's trying to escape her (rather high class) burlesque past by becoming a playwright, and she ends up writing a play about how great sex and love are.

All of the songs by the well-heralded Sammy Cahn are lightweight too, except for one section of a song entitled "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of." Here's a link to the full lyrics, but the only section that interests me here is Cahn's curious take on Freud:

I’m sure that Mister Freud
Would really be annoyed
If I presumed to contradict him
To him all dreams are explainable
As the longing of the weak for the unattainable
Admitting Mister Freud was very, very wise
My personal dreams I alone can analyze

I'm not sure if there are any big Freudian references in the original Thurber play, but it's a distinct possibility that Cahn was building on something Thurber wrote, given the statement from this site:

Thurber's first book, Is Sex Necessary?, came out in 1929. It was jointly written with the fellow New Yorker staffer E.B. White. The book presented Thurber's drawings on the subject, and instantly established him as a true comic talent. Thurber made fun of European psychoanalysis, including Freud's work, and theorists who had been attempting to reduce sex to a scientifically understandable level. In 'The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism' (1929) Thurber claimed that "in no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America." (Writings and Drawings by James Thurber, 1996, p. 3) According to Thurber, baseball, prize-fighting, horse-racing, bicycling, and bowling have acted as substitutes for sex. The female developed and perfected the "Diversion Subterfuge" to put Man in his place. "Its first manifestation was fudge-making."

Regardless of Thurber's reasons for dismissing Freud, I would certainly also dismiss the psychologist's tendency to view all dreaming-activity in terms of "the longing of the weak for the unattainable." At the very least, this attitude certainly appears in Freud's interpretations of his Oedipus complex, in which a child feels sexual possessiveness toward his/her opposite-sex parent, and takes refuge in fantasies that satisfy that repressed desire.

I've given multiple reasons on this blog for rejecting Freud's views of fantasy, so I won't repeat any of those. But curiously, before Mayo and Gene Nelson sing the "Dreams" duet, the professor character played by Ronald Reagan-- who is very close to the one in MALE ANIMAL-- listens to a stodgy authority figure complain about seeing a play that he thought was "dirty," and the professor objects that this philistine has just talked crap about the Greek classic "Oedipus Rex." This may be a line in the original Thurber play. But whether it is or not, this tip of the hat to Sophocles seems to be at odds with Sammy Cahn's determination to dispel Mister Freud's logic regarding fantasy's origins in "the longing of the weak."

And all this in a film which loosely addresses the conflict between sexuality and the intellect, yet really has no significant Oedipal conflict between its characters...

DUCK SHOOT AT THE ANTI-EMBODIMENT CORRAL, PART 1

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I said:

As discussed in EMBODIMENT, it's stunningly inaccurate to assume that male characters are less sexualized simply because they are dominantly "covered from head to toe."  What I believe Thompson truly objects to is the *feeling* of greater exposure for the heroines; the sense that they are always being subjected to the "male gaze" as promulgated by Laura Mulvey.

And in QUICK SEX-COVER-UP REMARK I noted this offhand comment by one Charles Reece:

"I don’t have any stats on any of this, but just based on the gals and guys I know and see, for the most part, the former prefer wearing more revealing clothing than the latter. Superheroes just kind of replicate that tendency in a more exaggerated manner. The men who walk around in cutoffs or with their shirt open to the navel or in half shirts tend to be gay or aging rockers."

While Reece and I are miles apart in most if not all ideological stances, I would agree, purely on an observational basis, that men tend to cover up and women tend to reveal, however strategically, as per the example I mentioned before:

If Kelly Thompson surveyed Hollywood musicals the same way she surveyed superhero comic books, would she come to the conclusion that they too are guilty of objectification and hyper-sexualization purely in terms of that one element:  how covered men are and how uncovered women are? 

That would be an unfair question were I asking it in more than a broadly comparative sense.  Clearly Thompson's essay indicts current American superhero comics for more than just the covered/uncovered dichotomy.  Nevertheless, because Thompson is busy assailing the forces of objectification in the superhero comic, I find it a fault that she does not consider that there might be other factors at work in the way comic book professionals portray male and female characters.  I suggest that in American culture it's typical to identify "maleness" with a process of concealment, in which one dons a Brooks Brothers suit as a knight dons his suit of armor, and "femaleness" with a process of partial revealment, wherein the female, when making a display of herself not only for men but also for other women in her immediate society, must strike a balance between showing her appearance off to best effect without showing off too much and thus being "slutty."

Sometimes comic books actually get the balance of sexual representation correct, as per this fan-favorite scene from BIRDS OF PREY #104:

  

The above scene, in my opinion, would not be an unfair depiction of male and female tendencies of dress, as it's based on current cultural imperatives as to how males and females dress at social affairs.  By extension, I don't necessarily regard it as a vile male conspiracy simply because none of the male members of the X-Men dress as revealingly as Storm, much less the White Queen. I make no bones about the fact that most superhero comics are written to a male audience, which means that they are likely to remain more heavily invested in cheesecake than in beefcake.  That said, some of the disparity may not be attributable PURELY to the likelihood that heterosexual male readers don't want to look at beefcake.  It may also be attributable to the cultural fact that men think that other men in revealing duds look unmanly, if not outright gay.  I mentioned in FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 1 that there had been male heroes that showed a lot of skin without seeming unmanned, as with Hawkman and Sub-Mariner.

But should a counterexample be needed, here's Cosmic Boy from some 1970s LEGION tale:

More to come in Part 2.