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If a penis were simply a penis — what then? That is, what would we make of a situation where ideas that previously could be allowed into the representational realm only under symbolic disguise suddenly appeared in their own form? At such a juncture, interpretation would seem to have reached an impasse, its powers no longer of any use, except perhaps to help position the newly emerged content in its current context.
Such an instance is the fantasy of male maternity, a notion that can, at least retrospectively, be seen as having been gradually working its way to the surface of our collective (cinematic) consciousness in the recent past. One of its early adumbrations, perhaps surprisingly, can be found in the recent Clint Eastwood film In the Line of Fire. In that film — which focuses on a male triangle of president, assassin, and secret service agent, and whose conflict centers first on whether the agent will step between the president and the assassin, intercepting the latter's phallic bullet, and then on whether the agent will succeed in, instead, placing the assassin in the receptive position — there is a brief shot, twice repeated, of the assassin (John Malkovich), stripped to the waist, pushing his belly out as far as he