ABSTRACT
The male subject's aspirations to mastery and sufficiency are undermined from many directions—by the Law of Language, which founds subjectivity on a void; by the castration crisis; by sexual, economic, and racial oppression; and by the traumatically unassimilable nature of certain historical events. This chapter considers the consequences for masculinity of a particular historical upheaval—that of World War II and the recovery period. It discusses films made during this period, films which adopt very different attitudes toward male castration. The film also emphasizes male castration at the expense of the dominant fiction. The inherited narrative paradigms which film most systematically demystifies are those which serve to construct the adequate male subject. Over and over again the film insists upon the equation, making the spectacle of Homer's Parish hooks something primal and traumatic, and stressing that to the civilian eye he is a "mutilated creature." The potentially very dangerous situation is cinematically contained through a "celestial" suture.
