Cool Men and the Second Sex

Susan Fraiman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780231503327
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Academic superstars Andrew Ross, Edward Said, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Bad boy filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, and Brian de Palma. What do these influential contemporary figures have in common? In Cool Men and the Second Sex, Susan Fraiman identifies them all with "cool masculinity" and boldly unpacks the gender politics of their work.

According to Fraiman, "cool men" rebel against a mainstream defined as maternal. Bad boys resist the authority of women and banish mothers to the realm of the uncool. As a result, despite their hipness—or because of it—these men too often feel free to ignore the insights of feminist thinkers. Through subtle close readings, Fraiman shows that even Gates, champion of black women's writing, and even queer theorists bent on undoing gender binaries, at times end up devaluing women in favor of men and masculinity.

A wide-ranging and fair-minded analysis, Cool Men acknowledges the invaluable contributions of its subjects while also deciphering the gender codes and baring the contradictions implicit in their work. Affirming the legacy of second-wave feminist scholars and drawing as well on the intersectional work of third-wavers, Cool Men helps to reinvent feminist critique for the twenty-first century.

1

QUENTIN TARANTINO: ANATOMY OF COOL

Jules (to Pumpkin): “Tell that bitch to be cool!

Say, bitch be cool! Say, bitch be cool!”

—Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994)

When I began to write about Quentin Tarantino, I was right away confronted by coolness. With his white-Negro persona; his appeal to insiders through arcane allusions (if not plagiarisms); his stylish, matter-of-fact handling of appalling violence; and his youthful cult following, Tarantino, especially the Tarantino of Pulp Fiction (1994), has an undeniable aura of cool. A self-advertised bad boy, Tarantino gets off on aggressively flouting formal and thematic conventions. What happens if we push out the borders of a gangster film to include some slowed-down chitchat lifted from a situation comedy? What happens if we borrow a lowbrow story and deconstruct its linear plot beyond all recognition? What happens if we show a woman being stabbed in the chest and make it funny as well as therapeutic? (OK, so the weapon is a hypodermic needle.) Puckishly raising such questions, Tarantino aligns himself with a risky, defiant expressivity, making his critics appear timid and prudish by comparison. The age and gender dynamics of Tarantino’s reception as “cool” was brought home to me by a University of Virginia panel on Pulp Fiction that, tellingly, attracted a larger audience and many more undergraduates than most such scholarly events. During the discussion period, someone referred, with eye-rolling impatience, to “our mothers,” and the phrase quickly became audience shorthand, passed along from one young fan to another, for those outside the movie’s magic circle—those probably too uptight to see it in the first place, and too unhip to “get it” if they did. To dissent from Tarantino’s project was apparently to be discredited, in a very specific way, as maternal, and realizing this, I began, in the antinomy of cool men and mothers, to find the topic of this book.

COOL MEN, ORDINARY WOMEN

More than just an aspect of Tarantino’s directorial mystique, within the world of his films coolness is a state either lived or coveted by virtually all his male characters; it is also, I will be arguing, a state whose masculine rhyme and reason is dramatized by the plot of Pulp Fiction. For Tarantino’s heisters and mobsters, the hallmark of coolness is steely self-control, its payoff control over others. “I need you cool. Are you cool?” says Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) to a ranting Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) in Reservoir Dogs (1992). And though Mr. Pink responds, “I’m cool,” his skeptical partner suggests he splash water on his face. “Take a breather,” Mr. White advises him evenly (20). Likewise, in the tense finale of Pulp Fiction, Jules (Samuel Jackson) instructs “Pumpkin” (Tim Roth) to calm the hysterical Yolanda (Amanda Plummer): “Tell that bitch to be cool! Say, bitch be cool! Say, bitch be cool!” (181). “We’re gonna be like three Fonzies,” Jules continues. “And what’s Fonzie like?” “He’s cool?” poor Yolanda guesses through her tears. “Correct-amundo,” Jules replies. “And that’s what we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be cool” (182).¹ In his streetwise black masculinity, Jules is head teacher in the school of cool, and the pale, volatile Yolanda is at the bottom of the class. Offering her the example of Fonzie, good-hearted, white ethnic greaser of Happy Days, he dumbs down coolness to a level she can grasp. For if Jules is the real thing, then between him and the white woman on the spectrum of cool characters lies the white man, in particular the white hipster emergent in the 1950s whose putative coolness derives from an impersonation of blackness.²

But black and white are not the only terms underwriting the cool/uncool binary in Tarantino. As the lines above demonstrate, a failed relation to coolness is further signaled by “pink” and by “bitch,” confirming what we have already seen to be the specifically masculine character of Tarantino’s ideal. The race and gender politics of white male coolness prove, indeed, to be closely intertwined. Take the previous example of Mr. White. Insofar as cool hinges on assumptions about race that are never explicit in Reservoir Dogs but strongly implied by the men’s code names (various colors), Mr. White’s pallor marks him as uncool and thus, by analogy, as “feminine.” In a male homosocial subculture parsed by race, Mr. White would seem to be as lowly and vulnerable as the incarcerated Mr. Blonde, pictured by Nice Guy Eddie with “black semen… shootin’ up his butt” (51). All this changes, however, in the pseudo-hetero context created by his admonitory relation to Mr. Pink, which conveniently enables Mr. White to regain his maleness and his coolness, even to acquire a degree of “blackness.” We might, in short, imagine Mr. White leaving behind a racial schema in which he is uncool; entering a gender schema in which, compared to “pink,” he crosses over into the cool; and finally reentering the racial schema as, if not black, then considerably blackened and passably cool. Coolness for Tarantino, and those enraptured with him, thus involves a distinctly masculine desire for mastery, in which domination of the feminine is tied up with white male anxiety about, among other things, black masculinity. One of my primary goals in what follows is to localize Tarantino’s allure by exposing its inextricability from white male need. Pulp Fiction’s violence, I will argue, is driven by an interest in exploring male vulnerability, along with an only partly self-conscious compulsion to restore men to a state of cool imperviousness.

Unlike in movies by Brian De Palma or David Lynch and Hollywood fare generally, the object of violence in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs is rarely the body of a woman within the diegesis. Female bodies are, in any case, few and far between in the first two movies directed as well as written by Tarantino.³ Instead, as the moniker “Mr. Pink” suggests, he is more preoccupied by the aspect of manhood repudiated as “feminine,” and this, not women per se, is what he courts and what he tortures. But the scarcity of female characters in Pulp Fiction does not mean that women are entirely absent or spared. For my purposes, the precise quality and function of their presence is figured by a moment in the motel room of Butch and Fabienne (Bruce Willis and Maria de Medeiros) when the camera closes in on a TV screen bursting with bombs (104–6). As in most of Tarantino’s films, the landscape on the tube is a war zone and ostensibly all male. In the foreground, however, shimmers Fabienne’s reflection as she stands there brushing her teeth, half attentive to the killing fields. This coupling of the daily and banal with the horrendous occurs often in Tarantino, who typically rhymes “burger” with “murder” to produce both comic and sinister effects. Perhaps less intentional, however, is the way he relegates women, and Fabienne in particular, to an “ordinary” that for him is essentially unnarratable. The story of men mutilating each other disturbs Tarantino, but it alone has the power to make his camera whir and his film reel turn. Unlike the harmless things women do—standing, brushing, watching—male violence counts as “action,” and, as I elaborate below, it is what counts in movies like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs as the “real.” Tarantino’s women, by contrast, may serve as origin and destination of plot for an action figure like Butch, but (as in western narrative generally) they themselves are largely outside of plot. At best, they are like Mia (Uma Thurman), whose role in Pulp Fiction is as short-lived as her role in the doomed television pilot; Tarantino too gives her a single joke before she is dropped (17–18, 57). More frequently they are Fabiennes, devoted to small gestures made within small spaces, spectral presences hovering just offscreen.

My project in this chapter is to claim Fabienne as not only a spectral but also a spectatorial presence. By insisting on a female subject position outside Tarantino’s frame, by legitimating, as it were, the scorned perspective of “our mothers,” I hope, first, to explicate violence in Pulp Fiction as part of a logic constitutive of “cool” white masculinity; and second, to observe that a “realism” based on this logic serves to discount other possible realisms. Tarantino, I will argue, invokes a narrative idiom appreciative of the ordinary and intimate, only to nullify this along with the women who represent it.

THE ADRENALINE SHOT

One means of getting at Pulp Fiction’s violence might be to count its bodies and inventory its weapons. Following Butch, who goes through a hammer, bat, and chainsaw before choosing a samurai sword to unzip Zed (128), we could enumerate ways of getting whacked in Tarantino. I want, instead, to offer a trope that makes violence a matter of form as well as theme. As a figure for the syntax of violence in this movie, I propose the adrenaline shot. Literally, this is the shot that Vincent Vega (John Travolta) stabs into Mia Wallace’s heart, jolting her out of her overdose (78–81). The overdose occurs at the climax of a long sequence involving Vincent and Mia that promises, in countless ways, to end in sex (48–69). The nervous jealous-husband jokes, Mia’s coked-up pouts, and Vincent’s narcotized sermons to himself all point in one direction. At Jackrabbit Slim’s, his body defamiliarized by heroin, Vincent samples Mia’s five-dollar shake and does the twist in his stocking feet with a kind of slow-motion, sensual amazement. No less than Vincent, we are astonished to find ourselves on a dance floor at all in a movie such as this, and the resulting pleasure of this musical interlude has lowered our guard by the time we get back to Mia’s.⁴

But then, suddenly, instead of sex we get death, or something very close to it. One minute Mia is sultry with anticipation, the next she’s a bloody mess, sexy as an emergency room. The effect on the audience is jarring, to say the least. Has the foreplay quickened our pulses? Have our hearts opened in expectation of intimacy? Tarantino throws the switch and gives us a face turned inside out. All narratives rely to some degree on suspense and on surprise. Most place obstacles between lovers. But this body-jolting extremity of disappointment, this violent injection of antithesis, is what I call narrative as adrenaline shot. Violence in Pulp Fiction is thus not only a signature motif but also a narrative rhythm or mode, and the adrenaline shot is not only the jab Vincent gives Mia but also the director’s cinematic method, a way of organizing visual materials.⁵

Porn films splice together a series of mininarratives, each one building to a climax known in the industry as the “money shot.” Tarantino, I am suggesting, replaces this with a series building again and again to the adrenaline shot. It is not always, as with Mia and Vincent, a case of coitus interruptus; elsewhere we get simply coitus superfluous. For example, in the motel sequence featuring Butch and Fabienne, the two make love, but instead of peaking here the narrative climaxes with the eruption of Butch’s violence over his father’s gold watch. In one frame his childlike lover is completing her toilette and planning her breakfast; in the next she is cowering in the corner while Butch destroys the furniture (108–13). The whole idea of this scene is to smash its domesticity with the spree of murder, torture, and rape that immediately follows.

Before the credits even roll, Tarantino gives us a proleptic instance of this pattern (7–13). A young man and woman (Roth and Plummer) who call each other “Pumpkin” and “Honey Bunny” are seated in a diner. He speaks energetically while she humors him, and the mood is comfortably conjugal. The woman smiles a lot in a lazy, purring, postcoital kind of way and at one point puts her head down on the table. They are talking about robbery, but the scene is more about being a couple, waking up side by side, drinking coffee, making plans. Then Tarantino sets up his adrenaline shot. The man and woman lean across the table and kiss; next they murmur endearments; and finally, in a flash, they leap to their feet with guns drawn and faces contorted: “Any of you fuckin’ pricks move and I’ll execute every motherfuckin’ last one of you!” (13) The camera freezes on the woman yelling this—an image of murderous rage—before cutting to the credit sequence.

Tarantino shows us the diner couple agreeing to rob the restaurant, preferably without bloodshed, so their explosion into threats shocks us less than Fabienne’s ruined morning, pains us less than Mia’s near death and horrifying revival. Still, the essential logic of this opening episode may be seen to anticipate the other two insofar as all involve a burst of violence that works to disperse heterosexual closeness and ironize the little things that lovers do and say.⁶ Pumpkin and Honey Bunny’s pet names for each other, Butch and Fabienne’s baby talk, Vincent and Mia’s awkward flirtation all seem lightweight, if not absurd, faced off with death, as if the stuff of Harlequins were put in the ring with Homer. Intimacy apparently puts coolness at risk, and the director responds with a paradigm swerve designed to break up and disparage it. One effect of the adrenaline shot is thus to establish a hierarchy valuing disruption over connection, unexpected crisis over daily ritual—a hierarchy in which, as it were, a heroic mode displaces and subordinates a domestic one. Needless to say, these modes are gendered.

As for the gay male desire that is everywhere in Tarantino, this desire generally represents not only another stay against heterosex but also, in turn, a threat to the heroic mode. Here too the adrenaline shot intervenes to dispel the dangers of intimacy. Take the early scene, for example, in which Vincent and Jules stroll down a dark hall together, their large bodies overlapping in the narrow space. Their talk drifts from fondling the boss’s wife to foot massages between men, until they find themselves in front of a closed door (19–21). Here everything stops for a beat. Then the gangsters resume walking, the conversation rewinds to adultery, and when Vincent and Jules return to the door a moment later, they come not to pleasure but to shatter the bodies of four men.⁷ In this foot massage–turned–massacre, the adrenalizing jolt comes when a dialogue full of wit, affection, and fine discriminations about the everyday pulls up short, and we find ourselves in a room certain that only death will get us out of it. Inside the death chamber, moreover, the pairing of these extremes is parodically replayed, the endearing details of daily life forced into company with high-tech weaponry. But while before we were asked to enjoy the way different cultures package their beef patties, perceiving at the same time that we are all God’s children in consumption, now discussing the relative merits of Big Kahuna Burger becomes a way of taunting men about to die. In this new situation, the reassuring normalcy of days hung on cholesterol and corporate logos, which Tarantino often appears to value, is made suddenly irrelevant and even despicable. My point, once again, is that his lurch from the daily to the deadly, from closeness to separation, works finally to trivialize the former. Everything becomes banal in contrast to the high meaningfulness of butchery, and this banality is implicitly labeled “feminine” or, in this case, “effeminate.”

John Travolta and Samuel Jackson keeping cool in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).

The precedence of a murderous “male” economy over a “female” one of desire and domesticity is comically inverted by the section called “The Bonnie Situation” (135–70). Here Vincent and Jules, who must be the first gangsters in history to clean up after themselves, pull off the road and attack their bloody car with all manner of household cleaners. “Get the Windex, do a good job,” Harvey Keitel as “The Wolf” admonishes them (155). In this suburban topography of garages and gourmet coffee, bedroom sets and linen closets, hit men worry about bloodstains on a white towel and shrink in fear from the nozzle of a garden hose. Deadliness is next to cleanliness on Bonnie’s turf, and the worst fate imaginable is divorce. For a moment, intimacy threatens to outrank mastery, and for once a woman coming home is more eventful than a man going off to war. Finally this section is funny, however, precisely because it so ludicrously upsets the norm. Like people pulling carts in which animals ride, men scrubbing frantically before the wife gets off work belong to a topsy-turvy world that, by definition, cannot be sustained; indeed, dependent for its humor on continual reference to the conventional order, in the end it may simply reinforce this. Predictably, neither Bonnie nor her story actually materializes, and our heroes, freshened up and victorious in the fight against dirt, soon reclaim the road.⁸

GONE/THERE

It is true, I acknowledge, that Vincent and Jules leave Bonnie’s house deprived of the black suits Tarantino likens to “suits of armor.”⁹ It is also the case that this section sets up the movie’s epilogue, which returns to the diner of the opening scene and proceeds to illustrate Jules’s conversion to nonviolence. We might be tempted, therefore, to think that Tarantino’s crooked tale goes straight after all—his bad dudes trading in their armor for sandals, guns for diplomacy, coolness for gentle dorkiness—and more than one critic has asserted as much. Charles Deemer, for example, hails Pulp Fiction as a subtle departure from Tarantino’s earlier screenplays, because for the first time “redemption is possible” (82). Cynthia Baughman and Richard Moran likewise argue for an accent on redemption not only in Jules’s choice of charity over tyranny but also in directorial manipulations of time that, on a formal if not moral level, interrupt a robbery and (by concluding with events before his death) bring Vincent back to life. Yet the irony of Baughman and Moran’s elegant reading is that it actually devotes far more space to figures like Butch and Vincent, who are not redeemed, than it does to Jules, who ostensibly is. These critics also admit that the character who engages us most is probably not the reconstructed Jules but rather his doomed friend, Vincent (109)—in part because Jules reforms himself right out of a role in those middle sections (2 and 3) presumed to occur after he exits the criminal life (110). Much as Pulp Fiction would imagine an alternative to violence, its narrative idiom is such that it cannot pursue the story of a character like Jules once he lays down his gun.¹⁰ This idiom, organized by what I have called the adrenaline shot, is motivated not by the possibility of redemption but ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. Quentin Tarantino: Anatomy of Cool
• 2. Spike Lee and Brian De Palma: Scenarios of Race and Rape
• 3. Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism
• 4. Andrew Ross: The Romance of the Bad Boy
• 5. Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Figures in Black Masculinity
• 6. Queer Theory and the Second Sex
• Postscript: Doing the Right Thing
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index