Abstract
The first and the last chapters of Men Beyond Desire explicitly beg the question of a blow to the head. On some level, the fear of losing one’s one head— yielding to the power of another, essentially—has been the dominant theme of the works we have examined.
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The blow to Claggart’s forehead may have caused unconsciousness and serious brain injury, but not instantaneous death. Trauma to the brain underlying the forehead could lead to coma and death, but only after a prolonged period. Even a frontal skull fracture and massive hemorrhage and brain injury would require hours before death came about, and it would not cause bleeding from the nose to the ear. The injury and sudden death of Claggart are plausible, however, if caused by a basilar skull fracture in which head is forced down by a blow from above. Intense force caused by Billy’s “superior height” could have made the bones of Claggart’s cervical spine displace the base of the skull into the skull and brain, with gross disruption of the brain stem, which may be associated with bleeding from the nose and ear, as well as instantaneous death.
—Richard Dean Smith, Melville’s Complaint
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Notes
Daniel Mendolsohn, “The Passion of Henry James,” The New York Times Book Review, June 20, 2004, 10–13.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1954). All references from this work are from this edition and are noted parenthetically within the text. This novel offers a dazzling array of male types; also especially interesting is Hemingway’s depiction of an tormented Jewish manhood in the figure of the boxer Robert Cohn, whom Jake also appreciates in an almost erotic register.
J. Hoberman, The Magic Hour: Film at Fin-de-Siècle (Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 2003), 198–99. I deeply admire other Zinnemann films, but High Noon has always struck me as hollow American agitprop, even though conceived as an anti-McCarthy statement.
Bradford D. White, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 209.
Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 28. I am quoting Doane out of specific context, but I think I am employing her general point. She discusses the problem of the female spectator in Classic Hollywood in such films as the 1946 Humoresque and the 1949 Beyond the Forest in the section from which I quote her.
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© 2005 David Greven
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Greven, D. (2005). Coda. In: Men Beyond Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977113_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403977113_10
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