After the Phallus

Most American filmgoers will remember the critically acclaimed “gross-out” comedy There's Something About Mary for the harrowing scene in which the awkward adolescent played by Ben Stiller painfully entangles his genitals in his fly. The image is memorable not only because of its gruesome detail, but because it provides a particularly hysterical instance of the American film industry's more general recent preoccupation with the penis. A new breed of young male directors has collectively assaulted the traditional protocols of how the male sexual organ is represented in mainstream film, thereby helping to inaugurate an entirely new sex/gender system in American public culture. Examples abound. American Pie, director Paul Weitz's affectionate send-up of contemporary teenage romance, opens with its male protagonist caught masturbating in front of the television by his parents; later in the same film, the same teen miraculously finds himself cavorting with a Swedish exchange student while his entire high school watches through a video-internet link-up: the young man ejaculates prematurely not once, but twice. Earlier in the same film, the same boy, after being told that “third base” feels like “warm apple pie,” is caught by his father with his mother's homemade pie impaled on his penis. Boogie Nights, director Paul Thomas Anderson's lengthy retelling of the rise and fall of the porn film industry in the seventies, ends with Mark Wahlberg exposing his lengthy prosthesis; Happiness, Todd Solondtz's groundbreaking exposé of the psycho-sexual conflicts beneath what remains of the American nuclear family, includes not one but two ejaculation scenes; American Beauty, director Sam Mendes's brilliant study of suburban anomie, opens with its failed father-figure Kevin Spacey masturbating in the shower; Alexander Payne's savvy high school satire Election features an abject history teacher—played with eloquent emasculation by Matthew Broderick—masturbating