April 2003 | 25.3

Incredible Shrinkage: The Perils of Patriotism in 1960s Spy Films

In her study of postwar “returning soldier” films, Kaja Silverman argues that the trauma produced by the war was strong enough to pierce the insulating “dominant fiction” of classical film narrative and erupt through a series of popular movies dwelling on, instead of diligently disavowing, men’s own castrated condition. She examines William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with its disillusioned, disengaged veterans—as represented most vividly in the character of Homer, who has lost both hands in the war, played by Harold Russell, a real-life double-amputee. Homer’s obvious deficiency renders him helpless to provide for his family or initiate sexual activity with his girlfriend, turning him into a freakish, feminized “object of a probing social gaze” (121). In the 1950s, exploration of men’s traumatized, truncated state continued in the horror genre where “shrinkage” was of colossal interest to both male and female movie audiences, all of whom probably feared the prospect of an ever-diminishing free world, as well as shrinking American resolve to defend what non-communist turf remained and to conquer the immensities of both the Russian motherland and outerspace. Meanwhile, themes of reduction, diminution, and disappearance, with all of their subliminal Oedipal implications, surely hit male viewers especially hard, as is evidenced by the mood of high horror that permeates the high camp of films such as The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Fly (1958).

In the 1960s, a boom in espionage films opened the next chapter in this masculine struggle with diminution, disability, and disarmament. Returning to the themes of the immediate postwar period, the reduction that is a feminizing and a pathologizing is also the price a man paid to test and prove his patriotic mettle: no longer as soldier but now as spy. Through the continuing trope of shrinkage—now scientized into a top-secret, high-tech “miniaturization”—and the related themes of confinement, concealment, and disguise, the 1960s spy-hero was forced to undergo radically ego-threatening transformations—into the invisible, into the feminine, into the enemy—so as to preserve the ideology of the free world. The discomfort produced in watching male heroes contort themselves thus may have prompted a laugh-impulse that was gratified by the spoofing and satiric elements in multiple popular films such as the Flint series and stinging social commentaries like Our Man in Havana and The President’s Analyst. The sensationalized thrills of Saul David’s The Fantastic Voyage are now—and were probably even originally—inadvertently hilarious, while true thrillers such as The Ipcress File and Torn Curtain continue to examine the limitations of the mid-century hero, while taking their findings entirely seriously. Moving across the spectrum from silly to serious, I will survey here the multiple ways in which the spy film genre continued in the national project of scrutinizing, dismantling, and rebuilding definitions of manhood in that period but also the ways it, in typical Hollywood fashion, attempted and often succeeded in restoring old perceptions of both men and women by film’s end.

The Fantastic Voyage provides as useful an example as there is of the matrix containing reduction, pathology, and patriotism in espionage films of this era. A collection of cold war regulars—scientists, generals, and bureaucrats—gather for an excursion in a markedly miniaturized state through the arteries of a wounded foreign spy (shot by snipers on the night of his defection), to make the microsurgical repairs that will restore him to consciousness. Although not spies typical of this genre, these intelligence-gatherers do indeed move through “enemy territory” (the body of the Russian informant), as foreign bodies themselves, on a mission to ultimately protect America from invasion but risking exposure as invaders themselves. The impending shrinkage of the crew is associated with a feminization, with castration and a loss of identity, indicated through the female technical assistant’s easy but eager attitude toward the mission. Women’s status as diminished, as already-castrated, empowers the assistant (Cora Peterson as played by Raquel Welch) in this situation and enables her to respond to the men’s grousing about “being shrunk” with the quip, “You may learn to like it.”

Ironically, smallness is not an attribute that has ever attached itself to descriptions or images of Raquel Welch. In typical Hollywood fashion, her “bigness” is emphasized in this film by a tight jumpsuit, an even tighter diving suit for the underwater scenes, and camera shots which follow her movements so closely they are only the most subtle of her many second skins. Interestingly, coinciding with this feminine large-breastedness is a masculine largeness of mind, as Cora is knowledgeable, unafraid, and, as the film finally confirms, innocent of the sabotage plot afoot on board the ship. Meanwhile, the feminine “gap” is filled by the character of Doctor Michaels (played by Donald Pleasence, a favorite film creep throughout the ’60s and ’70s), at first thought to be the most patriotic and motivated of the crew members but revealed ultimately as a sissy and a saboteur. In fact, the film overflows with weak, dependent men. The military types hanging around the control room, watching the sub’s progress on radar, smoke like fiends and tank up on over-sugared coffee. By film’s end they are so overwrought by the fantastic voyage, the general cannot even kill an ant that frolics in the nervously spilled sugar. Pauline Kael ridicules “the medical and military men outside [the patient’s body] with their homey little ironies” in her review for The New Republic. She identifies government-man Edmund O’Brien’s line “What a time to run out of sugar” as sounding like “a housewife in a commercial” (34).While smallness is a near-insurmountable problem in The Incredible Shrinking Man, the characters’ inevitable return to normal size signals an equally assured return to heterosexualized norms: Cora is attacked by invading antibodies (with an odd propensity to adhere to her chest) and must be rescued by the men who claw at her in a rape-like frenzy. The feminized Doctor Michaels is treated to a similar ravaging: attempting to abandon the rest of the crew, he commandeers the ship and lodges in a gland where he is immediately overcome with mounds of oozing lymph. When the four surviving crew members are returned to normal size, they return to their normalized roles as well: Cora hangs limply on the arm of Grant, the male lead; the secondary males Doctor Duval and the skipper slump or sit at a slight remove, granting the heterosexual couple its position of primacy. Any equation between patriotism and heterosexual role-reversal is jettisoned at this point, with Cora’s scientific prowess forgotten, Michaels’s limp-wristed efforts to sink the voyage soundly punished, and the miniaturization undergone by the masculine heroes defined securely as a temporary, already-surmounted state.

The comic hijinx of the dashing hero Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1965) and In Like Flint (1967) go further to showcase the funny business undertaken by those in the espionage “game.” The svelte but gawky James Coburn, playing the irrepressible Flint, skitters across enemy beachfronts, employs elaborate judo-chopping against multiple adversaries, and interrupts his spy activities for a quirky dance number with a bevy of go-go girls. Flint’s quick, almost nervous moves are often accompanied by a bopping ’60s soundtrack, adding to the “lightness” of the story, the spy’s role, and Flint’s character. His many multi-use gadgets, all of which he himself invented, impress us with their cleverness yet function so well as to often displace and subordinate masculine native strength: he employs a mini-Geiger counter to detect radioactivity in a jar of cold cream, which he then proceeds to open and investigate anyway; later he uses a sonar pulsing mechanism to explode a series of glass walls he is for some reason unable to simply kick in.

His dual citizenship in the realms of the patriot and traitor, masculine hero and sissified mole, is underlined, especially in the first film, by his straddling of the dividing line between Occident and Orient. Coburn’s squinty eyes and toothy grin already replicate racist caricatures of Asians during that period, while his long frame in martial arts uniform executing karate kicks against enemies seems comically incongruous. Flint is an expert in mind control (evidently borrowed from Eastern philosophies), and in a men’s restroom he transforms himself from elegant diner into mad Arab. His reversible tuxedo converts to a Nehru suit, he fashions a turban out of paper-toweling, and he reddens his face by pinching his cheeks in a mirror. Additionally, Flint is fond of the kimono-style bathrobes and lounging pajamas popular in that era, and he begins the first film swaddled in silk sheets and a chaise-like bed, his New York apartment overdecorated bordello-style with classical and modern art. It is no wonder, as Joseph Litvak informs us, that “sophistication in fact means ‘perversion’” (3), and that most dictionary definitions of the term, whose etymological roots are in morally suspect “sophistry,” are negative.

These sophisticated, eastern flavors not only feminize but homoeroticize Flint’s character, as he is visited in his silken chambers by the contrite and solicitous Lloyd Cramden (played by Lee J. Cobb), his former boss who begs him to return to work. Flint waves him off like a spurned lover, with the blasé assessment, “You know it just doesn’t work between us.” In the seedy restroom where Flint transforms into an Arab, he first subdues a man attempting to kill him. In the exchange, Flint pulls his adversary into a stall while the point of view remains without—”privy” to only legs below and arms waving above in the frantic execution of their death dance. Almost predictably, the men fight intensely for possession of a glinting, phallic knife. Flint vanquishes his enemy, and sits him roughly on the toilet in a final act of humiliation.

In more overtly suggestive, though no longer orientalized, scenes from In Like Flint, both Flint and Cramden go undercover as women to infiltrate their female enemies’ headquarters: Flint transformed by the garish pink lights and filmy dressing room curtains of a cavernous women’s holding era, Cramden by comically matronly drag. In the climactic moments of that same film, an astronaut-gone-mad threatens the world with nuclear holocaust from the confines of his soon-to-be-launched space capsule. He threateningly fingers not the button of nuclear detonation but a feverishly red, phallically swollen lever, which he plans to pull when he is safely in orbit. With the nuclear unthinkable now subliminally defined as the homoerotic “unsayable,” Flint must pierce the madman’s sanctuary and use diplomacy or force to save the world. In a balletic confrontation, the men roll and float in and out of various clinches until Flint is able to explode the capsule just as he escapes it himself. Finally, Flint saves the world from nuclear destruction and homosexual innuendo—but only through deployment of a homoeroticism of his own.

Risking life, limb, and normative heterosexuality to make the world safe for democracy thus, Flint is himself saved from the effeminate, the ridiculous, and the impotent by the swarms of nondescript bimbos with whom both films obsessively surround him. Like a bikinied and evening-gowned Secret Service, Flint’s multiple female admirers float securely around him through elegant restaurants, scenes from Swan Lake, and the island strongholds of his enemies, shielding him from the least accusation of anything less than a hypertrophied heterosexuality. In both films—as in the Bond series from the same period—women are simply everywhere, on the flimsiest of pretexts, and function not only as a faux-Secret Service but a faux-U.N., as Flint will seduce and bed beautiful women of multiple racial and ideological backgrounds. Of course these nameless, clothesless women succeed best in their mission when they are complete failures: helpless, adoring, and ever-willing to step aside as another admirer expresses her breathless gratitude to Flint.

The biting satire of The President’s Analyst (1967) equates service to one’s country with still other modes of reduction as bureaucratic mindlessness and certifiable madness quickly dissolve whatever tenuous barrier might exist between the two. Sydney Schaefer (another star turn for James Coburn) is tapped by the federal government to serve as therapist for a stressed and overworked president. Flattered and excited by the commission at first, he is soon reduced to a quivering mass of paranoia. As the president’s paid “ear,” he is sanctioned to eavesdrop on sensitive national security secrets; yet this knowledge that has been thrust upon him has transformed him from loyal citizen, to potential defector/traitor, to a spy simultaneously for and against his own government. Kaja Silverman is of help here, as she describes the specific threat attached to such a burden. Reading the amputated stumps of the character Homer in Best Years, she argues that they “confer . . upon [the film’s] viewer an unwanted knowledge. His hooks function much like the female genitals within Freud’s account of disavowal; they too attest to an intolerable absence or loss” (120). Here, after the president has “talked Schaefer’s ear off,” the feminization brought about by this “unwanted knowledge” threatens not only madness and doom for the “amputee” himself but also for national security and the world-political arena it influences.

Sydney spends much of the last part of the film trapped “under glass,” in a phone booth transported to enemy headquarters, where he must be released by the very men plotting to kill him. Lest we “spy” a happy ending, however, a picture-perfect Christmas party reuniting Schaefer with friends and girlfriend is under glass once more, trapped on a giant TV monitor, which we see when the camera pulls back to include the dark corporate space surrounding the scene, and the rows of glassy-eyed bureaucrats viewing the show. Of course, the farther back the camera pulls, the smaller and more contained the film’s protagonists become. While they, as all TV figures, seem life-size against the background of their own environment, our environment in the final frames is that occupied by the new spies, the gazing bureaucrats, whose hidden cameras and darkened viewing studio are the only devices they need to conceal themselves from the spied-upon and from each other.

The madness of espionage is also the theme of the lighter and earlier, but still acerbic, Our Man in Havana (1960) as well. Like the president’s analyst above, the affable and guileless Mr. Wormold (played by Alec Guinness) is at first reluctant to play a role in national security, then takes up the call with relish, only to have the entire arrangement backfire disastrously on him. Yet like Flint’s, Wormold’s world of espionage and its attending absurdity is here essentially structured by the hint (or promise) of the homoerotic encounter. Meanwhile, Wormold’s daughter Millie and love interest Beatrice, the women destined by the narrative to rescue him from allegations of being anything less than a man, act on him as from behind a glass wall, never fully succeeding in (hetero)sexualizing the film’s hero.

Over the course of several early scenes, Wormold is recruited for his espionage mission by chief operative Hawthorne. Even had someone other than Noël Coward been cast in the part of Hawthorne, the homoerotics of such a scene are easy to discover. Before ever approaching him, Hawthorne has been “tailing” Wormold, sizing him up as the appropriate type and knowing, before even asking, that Wormold would agree to his proposition. In their first encounter, Hawthorne inspects Wormold’s Havana vacuum cleaner shop, which would be the front of his espionage operation, and finds it to have “a perfectly natural air.” Although Wormold himself concurs, somewhat defensively, that “it is natural,” the long, phallic tubing with its “snap-action coupling” and the large sucking heads surrounding the men in their first meeting suggest a most “unnatural” environment for both of them. Later, Hawthorne encounters Wormold in an otherwise deserted bar and decides “a bar’s not a bad place [to continue with the recruiting]. You run into a fellow-countryman, have a little get-together—what could be more natural?”

Finally, however, it is determined that “the gents” would be the best place to conduct their meeting, and even though Wormold protests that he “doesn’t want the gents,” he is ushered in by Hawthorne for more comic innuendo. Again Hawthorne, the authority on what is and is not natural-seeming, advises that they “just keep the water running. It looks more natural in case someone comes barging in.” Before the two can say much more, they are interrupted by approaching footsteps, and Hawthorne hustles Wormold into a stall. After the third party, a policeman with a bloody finger, washes up and exits, Wormold’s head appears above the stall. He asks if he can “come out now,” and Hawthorne replies, “Give me a minute to get away. There’s a policeman in the bar. May be a bit suspicious.” The two men’s hands are resting over the door of the stall, almost touching each other. With a hooded look, part-teasing, part-sincere, Wormold suggests, “He [the policeman] might recognize my legs under the door. Do you think we ought to change trousers?” With deadpan aplomb, Hawthorne returns, “Wouldn’t look natural. Still you’re getting the idea.”

“Picked up” for patriotism shortly thereafter, Wormold is then required to recruit agents of his own, and must act as the pursuer instead of the pursued in several comically failed encounters. At the country club, none of the Cuban power players he encounters in the men’s room will even “pick up” on the insinuations he tries to make; the engineer Cifuentes fears he is being stalked when, suggestively fondling a wad of cash, Wormold makes leering eye contact with him at the bank. Finally Wormold is advised by a cynical expatriate friend to make up agents, activities, and reports to the home office, so as to continue collecting his salary. Hawthorne catches on to Wormold’s scheme when drawings of a secret Cuban weapons installation suspiciously resemble an enormous vacuum cleaner; but afraid to admit to his own mis-typing of this “non-operative,” Hawthorne is now recruited to Wormold’s side—to wait out this escapade in silence and hope that real intelligence comes from it. Wormold’s ultimate failure at this queer and queering spy’s game does not necessarily spell his success as a heterosexual hero, however. The film ends with Wormold and Beatrice at nothing more than the hand-holding stage, Wormold’s grown daughter acting as their permanent chaperon.

The “real” thriller, in which the spy-hero is in “real” danger of losing his life through the protection or procurement of national secrets, refuses to gratify an uncomfortable audience’s impulse to laugh but instead intensifies this discomfort by drawing viewers forcefully into the spy’s constrained and claustrophobic world. Once more, Silverman’s reading of Homer’s stumps bears consideration here, as these, she argues, foreclose the possibility of disavowal for either actor or viewer: “As Wyler himself observes, the decision to cast an actual amputee for the part of the disabled sailor . . implicates the viewer more fully than usual in all visual transactions within which it figures” (121, emphasis added). Wyler, says Silverman, refused the audience recourse to the reassuring realization that “It’s only a movie.” In the genre of the espionage thriller also, as Martin Rubin explains (5-6), the viewer’s visceral response—sweating palms, tightened muscles, clenched stomach—matches the endangered spy’s own “fight-or-flight” impulses; the character’s lack is no longer his alone but a glaring reminder of our own, a realization that adds to the intensity of this visceral attachment to the film.

In a more seriously intended film, the British classic The Ipcress File (1965), Michael Caine stars as Harry Palmer, who moves in a world of men, all more or less identically dressed in bowler hats and gray trench coats, further complicating a convoluted intrigue plot. If the film overtly suggests an unnerving resemblance between international thieves and the cops at the home office, we must also consider the covert homoerotics of this all-male world. As with Hawthorne’s methods of recruiting agents above, the activities of intrigue itself resemble the classically gay activity of cruising in search of tricks: passed off notes in a deserted library, clandestine meetings and pregnant glances in a seemingly innocent park setting. Especially the homoerotics of the double-cross is an important element here; common English idioms for treachery, such as “sleeping with the enemy,” “strange bedfellows,” to “be in bed with” someone from the other side, point to the “shameful” secret that constitutes the sellout or betrayal, and when this illicit relationship is between men, suggestive undertones flare to the surface. Such a bond is eventually revealed between Dalby (Palmer’s boss at the Security Office) and Grandby (a killer). Nemeses in broad daylight, these two in fact conspire against the British government and specifically against Palmer, who is close to cracking the Ipcress mystery (an acronym for the brainwashing methods that disabled a valuable scientist). In a remarkable scene, Dalby takes a call from Palmer, who has just escaped a typically “reducing” ordeal—confinement in a tiny cubicle and subjection to the torturous Ipcress method. Someone is on the couch beside Dalby, but a garish red-shaded lamp obscures all but this person’s hands, nursing a cocktail. Dalby leans forward to receive the news, and a moment later, the man beside him, none other than Grandby, also leans into view, and the conspiracy between the two men is revealed for the first time. In fact they have been “next to each other” for the entire length of the film, and the audience is shocked and delighted to have caught the men “red-lighted” if not red-handed in this manner.

In the final scene, Palmer realizes the doublecross and shoots Dalby dead, yet understands a moment later that his original supervisor, Ross (a good bureaucrat, but indistinguishable from Dalby because of their identical dress) has in fact set Palmer up to do the dirty work of the killing. While the film, then, may equate its homoerotic undertones with treason against England, the inescapable atmosphere of treachery which structures even the film’s positive relationships, and the inescapable atmosphere of cruising and tricking that constitutes the spy game itself, dissolve this closed association between all that is queer and all that is evil and call into question the exact definition of a hero in these duplicitous times.

Above I described the red lampshade that obscures Dalby’s and Grandby’s faces until they are dramatically revealed during an important scene, and the clever placement of camera relative to actors and action throughout this film is one of its dazzling hallmarks. Finally, this film’s camera sneaks and peeks as stealthily as a spy, peering through the ornate grillwork of a jail cell, the crook of an arm of an actor in the foreground, the modicum of space between a telephone receiver and its cradle to perceive and misperceive the action as it unfolds. The red latticework between the panes of a phonebooth divide, obscure, and cinematically bloody a fistfight among Palmer, Grandby, and his thugs; Palmer’s myopia is recreated by blurred focus when he loses his glasses. Certainly this clever camerawork not only thrusts upon viewers the spy’s roles of confinement and surreptition but also must have constrained the actors themselves in interesting ways. Like the spies and detectives they were portraying, each was forced to “act natural” during the course of the scene while carefully maintaining a strictly constructed pose; the movement of the bent arm framing the lens, or the head viewed through a tiny circular window would have ruined the shot. Finally, both voyeuristic pleasure and anxiety are heightened through use of this spy’s-eye view; the camerawork combines with the film’s main theme of “getting caught for/while looking” to expose the viewer, to the viewer, in this same act, and the peeping tom’s “misdemeanor” is seemingly transformed into the spy’s own deadly risk-taking.

Seeing, being seen, and being exposed are also controlling themes in Alfred Hitchcock’s breathless and breath-taking Torn Curtain (1966), and are accompanied by the related tropes of talking (“blabbing”), being listened to, and being ignored or disbelieved. Interestingly, however, where Harry Palmer works, lives and nearly dies in a world of men, the protagonist here, Michael Armstrong, finds himself nearly suffocated by the skirts of multiple powerfully, frustratingly present women, and the interest is not in the homoerotics of the spy game but in the gender divide as it threatens national security and the holders and seekers of “top” secrets. Yet whereas the gaggles of women surrounding Flint support his narrative presence by creating an ever-enlarging need for him, Armstrong’s gauntlet of women are strong-willed, independently mobile, and in possession of entirely too much information. They threaten, usually with their staring eyes and speaking mouths, western democracy and Armstrong’s very life.

In a smart casting move, Hitchcock chose an actor who has surely found himself to be the object if women’s obsessive gazes for much of his life to play Armstrong: pretty-boy Paul Newman. En route to East Berlin to perpetrate a false defection (in fact he plots to steal important scientific secrets and return to the West), physicist Armstrong has his plan nearly thwarted by the arresting stare of his fiancee Sarah (Julie Andrews), who has trailed him onto this flight in spite of his efforts to keep her in the dark. He instructs her sharply to return home as soon as the plane lands, but Sarah’s gaze is more than a match for his harsh directives. As they alight from the plane, the eavesdropping passenger in the seat beside Sarah, a hard-looking woman swaddled in black fur, reaches the top of the steps and waves graciously to the cluster of paparazzi waiting with raised cameras below. In fact, however, it is Armstrong they have come to photograph, and the classic recipient of the gaze, a beautiful celebrity later revealed to be prima ballerina, is pushed roughly aside. The eyes of the world are now on Armstrong, and Sarah has begun to “see” everything, even though she has no idea of what she is actually looking at. Learning of his decision to “defect” at a press conference moments later, she continues to follow, seemingly senselessly, almost mindlessly, in his magnetic wake.

Throughout the film, Michael is aided by discreet and silent women who know and help him keep his secret, yet hindered or mortally threatened by loud and pushy women who gaze intently at him and call attention to themselves, and to him. The underground operatives Dr. Koska and the German farm woman, who remains utterly mute due to her lack of English, pass along vital information and assist him in either eluding or doing away with deadly adversaries. Meanwhile, a nervous female operative creates suffocating tension by refusing to sit down and cease her accusations against the “Americans” during an elaborately staged bus ride carrying Michael and Sarah from East to West Berlin. Due to multiple delays, the bus falls into the time- table of regular city transport and must stop for actual riders, specifically another woman. Old, disabled, and trundling a heavy shopping basket, she causes further delays. Finally, the scheme is uncovered, the operatives scatter beneath a hail of bullets, and the valuable bus decoy is confiscated by East Berlin authorities. Daffy Countess Kuchinska, in her “loud,” multi-colored scarf and eccentric hat, draws the attention of customers at a post office when she pushes to the front of the line in search of Albert, another operative. She interests a uniformed official who quickly summons the police. Sarah and Michael then make another hair’s-breadth escape, from both the authorities and the hindering countess.

Even Sarah herself poses grave danger to national security, and by extension to Michael, as she is his assistant and knowledgeable of his top-secret experiments, and is thus questioned at one point by a panel of communist officials regarding his findings. On the verge of giving away information Michael never had any intention of divulging, Sarah refuses her love for him by refusing to become his co-conspirator. The danger of her “blabbing” is, however, the direct result of Michael’s not having blabbed enough, of not having told her the truth about his counter-espionage, lest, as a woman, she “slip up” and tell some part of the real secret to the enemy.

Michael’s most dangerous nemesis, in the climactic scenes of the film, is the very ballerina whose spotlight he stole on the steps of the plane that first brought him to East Berlin. Awaiting a final assignation that will take place between acts at the ballet, Michael and Sarah are spotted by the ballerina from the stage, as she twirls and stops in multiple rotations, her eye fixed each time on that familiar, entirely-too-attractive face. Moments after she has left the stage, the authorities close in, and Michael can do only draw complete attention to himself by yelling “Fire,” then causing an episode of chaos that enables his and Sarah’s last escape. Yet even on board the ship to Sweden, they are exposed by the dagger-eyed, shouting ballerina when she witnesses their last handler whispering farewell as they are hauled, hidden in large wicker baskets, onto the docks. Finally, this moment is revealed to be part of a ruse. Michael and Sarah are “hidden” in the suspended baskets only so far as these are decoys hiding the couple’s true location, in two other baskets which are secretly abandoned so that Michael and Sarah can swim for and arrive safely on Sweden’s shore. Not surprisingly, it is only when the escape plan assumes the presence of the staring, screaming woman—and counters with an optical illusion and whispers sent in the wrong direction—that the couple can complete their flight to freedom.

Silverman singled out Wyler’s film for not only calling attention to men’s already-castrated state but for “openly eroticiz[ing] male lack” through the trope of enforced—therefore guilt-free—passivity, due to war injury. Certainly the cold war, while rife with traumas of its own, had pulled far enough away from the horrors of total war that the dominant fiction had begun to reassert itself in typical ways in all of the films considered here. Whereas women were a positive, supportive presence in the lives of Wyler’s returning wounded, and indeed played an essential part in the eroticizing described above, in the 1960s spy film “woman,” though also “the (homoeroticized) feminine,” has largely returned to its traditional narrative roles of either supporting the masculine through resinscription of sexual difference or threatening same through attempting to dissolve it. Silverman herself acknowledges that even in the immediate wake of such a traumatizing event as World War II, Wyler’s film constitutes a fairly rare example. Even more so, by the 1960s, in a genre capable of both reinforcing and sharply challenging the patriotic status quo, the sexual status quo is maintained through equation of the feminine with pathology, treason, and death. However, despite the happy return to the dominant fiction by the end of each of these films, much that happens before these endings continues to productively challenge and question men’s and women’s separated relationships to the symbolic order and the cultural realm. While “shrinkage” is not eroticized but in fact “thanatized” in most of the cinematic examples discussed here, it is associated with a patriotic, heroic, and most worthwhile form of death, and thus masculinized in ways that work to disrupt old dichotomies. Finally, both women and men are recognized as having access to this lack, as capable patriots, potential traitors, and castrated subjects of the symbolic, and the spy’s effort to recover (himself and his nation) from the trauma of history surely accompanies similar healing in the psychosexual realms of his audience.

Jacqueline Foertsch

Deprtment of English

The University of North Texas

Denton, Texas 76203-1307

Works Cited

Edelman, Lee. “Tea Rooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 553-74.

The Fantastic Voyage. Dir. Saul David. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1966.

Kael, Pauline. Rev. of The Fantastic Voyage. Dir. Saul David. The New Republic 8 Oct. 1966: 34-35.

In Like Flint. Dir. Gordon Douglas. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1967.

The Ipcress File. Dir. Sydney J. Furie. Universal, 1965.

Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1997.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Our Man Flint. Dir. Daniel Mann. Twentieth-Century Fox, 1965.

Our Man in Havana. Dir. Carol Reed. Columbia, 1960.

The President’s Analyst. Dir. Theodore J. Flicker. Paramount, 1967.

Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999.

Silverman, Kaja. “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity.” Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Torn Curtain. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal, 1966.

Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.