"Never Lose Control": The Technology of Postmodern Masculinity

Raymond J. Rice

One of the first films I remember seeing in theaters and struggling to process was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I recall feeling alternately exhilarated and confused by the film, and by two scenes in particular: the film’s concluding sequence (with its freeze-frame, fade-to-sepia-toned final image of the two archetypal American anti-heroes coming face to face with seemingly hundreds of interchangeable Bolivian militia men) and its introduction of the Sundance Kid—Etta Place romantic sub-plot. The former sequence has, of course, passed into theatrical lore, becoming a touchstone for so many men-on-the-run narratives, as well as more recent feminist re-visions (as in Thelma and Louise). The latter sequence, however, has received much less critical attention, even though it is far more problematic, even repugnant, in terms of its sexual politics and far more critical to the basic dynamics of the film itself.

So much criticism of the representation of gender in popular narratives (both literary and filmic) focuses upon John Berger’s now-classic dictum that "Men act and women appear" that notice is rarely given to the anxiety produced over the inevitable conflation of action and appearance. This initial sequence between Sundance and Etta operates by means of a subject’s exercise of power over another’s body, clearly establishing roles of actor (the subject imposing his will) and spectacle (the object of that will as a site to be seen and evaluated) as gendered positions. The sequence commences this gendering process with an apparently "objective" cataloguing of the routines that conclude Etta’s day as a schoolteacher—drawing water from the well, shutting up her home for the night, beginning to undress. Suddenly, however, the camera pans to reveal Sundance sitting in a chair, heretofore hidden from her (our?) view in the shadows of her bedroom, where he apparently has been watching her all along. This sudden intrusion of the male gaze is distinctly unsettling, not simply because of its undetected presence, but because it highlights the voyeurism inherent in the traditional cinematic experience. For as the camera cuts to Etta’s startled countenance, the film has not so much as shifted its governing perspective from Etta’s domestic activities to Sundance’s sexual aggression as it has simply exposed the camera’s intrinsically predatory orientation. The context of the encounter is so overdetermined by the audience’s knowledge of gender relations that at this early stage the scene can only be interpreted as a rape, replete with verbal ("keep undressing, schoolteacher"), symbolic (Sundance’s pistol), and physical threats. Etta’s eventual exclamation of impatience—"Just once I wish you would get here on time!"—although attempting to provide narrative reassurance (this is a lover’s reunion rather than an assault) ultimately proves only more disturbing. For this "clarification" indicates how the spectator has not just voyeuristically consumed this "assault," but, by means of the camera’s subjective orientation, actively participated in it. In fact, this final reversal exposes the truly sadistic nature not only of the sequence itself but of the subjective experience of the conventional cinema more generally: it demonstrates that the cinematic gaze looks not simply to see, but to assess, to control, and, if need be, to punish.

As the complexity of the emotional triangle between Butch, Sundance and Etta quickly establishes, these scenes encode the central dynamic of the technologies of gender that govern the film. Etta represents the material "Other" circulating between Butch and Sundance, a physical embodiment of and focus for their desire and sexuality. As an objectified site of desire, Etta allows the two men to remain scopophilic subjects, or forces controlling the cinematic narrative (or diegesis). Even more importantly, the film establishes the cinematic gaze—the imaginary perspective of the spectator—as inherently "male": aggressive, controlling, evaluative. In short, Etta’s "appearance" affords a bond not only between the two men, but establishes one between the men and the audience as well, a necessary illusion of a community based upon action, either self-directed or imposed upon others. Simultaneously, Etta’s positioning symbolically transfers the violence endemic to Butch and Sundance’s relationship as men onto the reified figure of the Other; by (re)enacting (in apparently endless repetition) a physical threat upon the Woman’s body, Sundance deflects the constitutional "truth" of his relationship to Butch. This "truth" returns us once again to the conventional construction of the spectator’s gaze within modern cinema as both voyeuristic and scopophilic, as an imaginary position of heterosexual male authority, one which not only looks, but looks with the ever-present promise of power, control, and violence over what it sees.

I have explored this particular scene in some detail as a prelude to the discussion that follows primarily because such representations of the (imaginary) nature of the heterosexual male community receive little critical attention even though they are represented with ever increasing regularity on screen. Indeed, most studies of gender technology focus on hyper-spectacular representations of male and female bodies. Susan Jeffords, for instance, almost exclusively examines the "hard bodies" of Hollywood icons like Arnold Schwarzenneger, Bruce Willis, and Mel Gibson in her study of Reagan-era masculinity, claiming that the "Reagan imaginary offered the public a cohesive image of national strengths, accomplishments, and possiblities," the emblem of which was "the hard body, whether of the individual warrior or the nation itself." Jeffords concludes that films such as these proliferated in the 1980’s (and continue to do so today) under increasingly "greater pressures for masculine success and appearance"— or through a cultural need to reproduce masculine authority and control. Yvonne Tasker takes such an analysis even further by asserting that the action films of the 1980’s and 1990’s "carefully orchestrate social problems, representing inequalities that will be overcome in fantasy form." Through the concomitant pressures of restraint and excess, the male (body) is disciplined to regain control of a threatened world. And in Male Matters, Calvin Thomas concludes that control, both narrative and iconographic, provides the "confines and imperatives" that shape masculinity’s (self) representation. We can thus gaze safely upon the naked (heterosexual) body of Arnold Schwarzenegger at the opening of Terminator 2 only because we know he will soon be beating upon other male bodies. Rather than functioning as a body to be viewed and assessed (like Etta Place), Schwarzenegger’s figure promises both control and the threat of violence as the principle means of maintaining that control. Moreover, the film promises that he will again be clothed after this teasing moment of vulnerability, concealing himself from the specular gaze and thus safely returned to his position of narrative authority.

A brief discussion of the immensely popular science-fiction/action film The Matrix illustrates just how ingrained such "spectacular" images of masculinity (and femininity) remain even in today’s ostensibly "postmodern" works. Ultimately, the story of Neo, a dissatisfied computer programmer/hacker who discovers that "reality" is just a computer-generated illusion, is disclosed to be an allegory of his discovery of physical and narrative control. As his body and intellectual potential grow ever more promising (infinitely so, as the film fetishistically reminds us), the promise of Trinity, the film’s only appreciable female character, becomes ever less so, ever less "in control." Simply put, the woman must give up her position of diegetic power and be transmogrified ultimately into a Woman who desires nothing more than to be controlled, to figure within the traditional narratives of marriage (to Neo) and procreation (for Neo and Society). Her role, although appearing in the film’s opening sequence to be a pseudo-feminist characterization along the lines of Sigourney Weaver’s in the Alien films or Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator 2, ultimately fills an position within the social order identical to that of Etta Place’s. Neo assumes his rightful place as narrative controller; the Woman becomes the (passive) site upon which his (active) identity is continually re-confirmed. Thus, a film promising narrative experimentation and subversion not only falls back into traditional discourses of gender technology but actively promotes and supports such discourses.

Although critical scrutiny of such spectacular imagery is important, attention to filmic "hard bodies" often comes at the expense of less "spectacular" scenes like the one between Sundance and Etta in Butch Cassidy. An unpacking of such scenes is crucial to analyzing modern and postmodern representations of heterosexual masculinity because these moments underscore the ideological presuppositions of "normative" masculine communities subsisting within global capitalist culture; or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, they expose the nature of the social "habitus" that in turn constructs the masculine subject. Such an unpacking can thus visualize what Michel Foucault calls the "economy of discourses"—the manner in which individuals are created as subjects within society through a complex web of "technology." It can de-mystify the process by which heterosexual "masculinity" is maintained as a "natural" subject position for "male" individuals. In such a technology of power, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s "hard body" serves as a site of spectacular attention, but it functions successfully only because more subtle dynamics like those depicted between Butch, Sundance, and Etta pre-exist it. Schwarzenegger’s naked body is thus the obverse of Etta’s; whereas the former poses a threat in its unclothed yet invulnerable and destabilizing potential to inflict pain upon the men that view it, the latter—by being ordered to disclose itself, thus rendering it vulnerable to pain and authority—serves to secure and cement the bonds between the men viewing it. Simply put, Schwarzenegger’s body promises narrative control; Etta Place’s provides a physical site upon which that control may be exercised and maintained.

In her highly influential book, Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis explains that gender "is not sex, a state of nature, but the representation of each individual in terms of a particular social relation which pre-exists the individual and is predicated on the conceptual and rigid (structural) opposition of two biological sexes." Expanding upon Michel Foucault’s discussions of sexuality, de Lauretis notes that gender is the product of specific socio-historical "technologies," or series of material practices that in turn inform our image of the body. Judith Butler calls such technologies "regulatory practices," or forces with the power to "produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls." Borrowing again from Foucault, both de Lauretis and Butler stress that the "mattering"—the gendering—of the body is a communal and contingent act. Subjectivity arises not only through the recognition of the body as gendered (or sexed), but as gendered through an adherence to or rejection of regulatory practices that in turn define an organism’s place within a specific community. For Butler, the body "is always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action." This production—and its subsequent misrecognition—is precisely what renders the above scene from Butch Cassidy so disturbing. For not only does the spectator’s subjective alignment with Sundance configure him as a voyeuristic/scopophilic conspirator, it also illustrates the process by which men and women are continually gendered—the former as active and controlling, the latter as passive and specular. Etta "knows" she is a woman only because the regulatory practice—the technology—of gender is continually reinforced as normative, a process in which all subjects must participate. This scene exemplifies Butler’s claim that sex is an effect of materialization, a product of reiterated social and discursive practices that are subsequently misrecognized as the cause of those practices. Or, as Slavoj Zizek might explain, such practices structure our symbolic reality, a vast network of ideological technology ensuring that we only understand our selves and our world through the interpretive interference of culture. Thus, the symbolic order—the social system structuring "reality" and granting subjectivity (that which defines us as "individuals")—operates as a series of injunctions that reiterates and consolidates notions of femininity and masculinity. Always mediated, never addressed directly, "reality" is invariably constructed in response to an internal impediment (in Zizek’s terminology the "kernel" of the Real) that must be repressed or denied—a denial that, paradoxically, engenders subjectivity itself. Although reality is, in fact, an effect, it must per course deny its causal foundations. As Foucault explains, we are presumed not to examine the concepts of sex and gender—we are simply to live them. In order to be fully "productive" in society, individuals must thus consider sex and gender to be "natural" deployments "that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility…to the whole of his body…to his identity."

Inherently modernist in their representation of these injunctions, films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid function within the Cartesian framework of a mind/body dualism, one which "invisibly" produces male and female bodies and subsequently erases the signs of their production. Equally modernist, for all of their postmodern computer-generated special effects and jump-cut editing techniques, are the Terminator films and their post-Reagan-era hyper-masculine fellows. Ultimately, both types of "male" genre films (the buddy movie and action-adventure) labor to mystify the very technologies of gender that in fact enable their production. Increasingly, however, filmmakers have begun to de-mystify such processes, particularly in their interrogation of the role the film spectator (or filmic subject) plays in constructing and maintaining culturally dominant gender technologies. Movies such as Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men consciously question the modernist and realist perspective of the detached, objective viewer, blissfully functioning within the confines of Metz’s "imaginary signifier." In the past, both the standard conventions of filmic realism (of which cinema verite is the most obvious example) and the hyperbole of high modernism and surrealism (such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil) effectively distance the viewer from an active acknowledgement in her participation in the construction of subject. Whereas realism labored to represent cinema as a "reflection" of "reality," modernism and surrealism (epitomized perhaps by Un Chien Andulou) were marked by their artistic self-consciousness. Thus, whether through extreme exaggeration or extreme documentary-style realism, both forms worked to alienate the spectator from a consideration of the conventions shaping film as a cultural product. Or, to paraphrase Foucault, audiences were presumed not to analyze the technologies of film, rather simply to "live" it.

Labute, however, foregrounds the process by which masculinity is constructed and disseminated as a technology by illustrating the spectator’s own role in the production of masculinity. In so doing, he consequently foregrounds the conventions that encourage us to experience film non-critically. Unlike Butch Cassidy, in which gender roles are always already naturalized, In the Company of Men illustrates how the maintenance of gender is always a matter of what Jacques Lacan calls a "forced choice": that, as men and women, we are given the "choice" of assuming a specific gender position on condition that we will make the right choice. Thus, Labute’s film demonstrates that, as Slavoj Zizek explains, assuming a gender role is "fundamentally the choice of ‘freely assuming’ one’s imposed destiny [my italics]." What makes a film like Company of particular interest is its insistence that we are all co-conspirators in the construction of dominant gender technologies—that there is, in effect, no external, objective position from which to examine such practices, that, in fact, we are always already embedded within them.

Much like Alfred Hitchcock’s later films, the ideological force of Company depends upon a structural crisis occurring well into the film’s diegesis, a crisis which afflicts not only the audience’s conception of the narrative subjects but, more critically, the conception of their own subjectivity. The penultimate sequence in Labute’s film recounts the final meeting between Chad and Howard, the two company men who have successfully carried out a misogynist scheme to befriend, seduce, and reject Christine, a deaf and emotionally vulnerable fellow office worker. Howard acquiesced to Chad’s initial plan out of the belief that both men had been jilted by former lovers, that their scheme to emotionally brutalize a woman would serve not only to re-establish a sense of manhood lost to the increasingly gender-sensitive corporate world of the 1990’s, but, more importantly, as a testament to their common subjectivity—to their individuality. Or, as Chad put it, no matter what else happens, no matter how many promotional pass-overs or professional set-backs, they would each always have this common experience to claim; they would each be able to tell themselves: "We got her."

But, of course, Howard is the one taken. In reaction to the revelation that Chad’s girlfriend had never left, that, in fact, Chad’s narrative construct had always figured him as an object rather than a fellow subject, the stricken Howard can only ask: "Why?" Chad’s response is dispassionate and somewhat amused: "Because I could." Howard’s sense of selfhood crumbles before this knowledge; dazed and physically ill (as, indeed, he claims to have felt ever since the conclusion of their "plan"), he retreats from Chad’s presence, nauseated at his sudden self-abjection, triggered by the breakdown of his symbolic reality. Our final vision of Chad, however, is pointedly different, an archetypal representation of patriarchal power: disinterested but presumptuous, he looks upward, off screen, as his girlfriend gently caresses his body, slowly descending to conclude in an act—presumably—of oral sex. "Never lose control," Chad advised Howard at the beginning of their journey: "That is the total key to the universe…trust me."

One of the intriguing aspects of Labute’s film is this persistence in dis-covering the construction and maintenance of the ideological underpinnings of both its characters and audience. For only at its conclusion does, as Slavoj Zizek might put it, the film’s letter finally arrive at its destination. Throughout, both Howard and the audience have mis-recognized to whom the misogynist plot has been directed. In Lacanian terms, this addressee is the big Other, the symbolic order structuring "reality" and defining the terms under which an act achieves signification. Like a traditional detective story or Hitchockian mystery, then, the film’s narrative defers the spectator’s complete understanding of the "rules of the game." This in itself establishes a radical difference between Company and more traditional films such as Butch Cassidy. For whereas the spectator is "sutured" into the narrative of Butch Cassidy—in which a seamless fantasy of wholeness hides the workings of gender technology—Company intentionally disrupts the suturing process. Howard certainly understands these conventions of narrative control; he automatically assumes his "place" as a masculine subject. And in its agreement to understand, the audience, like Howard, positions itself in the place of the letter’s receiver, a slot constructed by the big Other. Or, as Slavoj Zizek explains:

when I recognize myself as the addressee of the call of the ideological big Other (Nation, Democracy, Party, God, and so forth [I would supply the "sexual politic" in this case], when this call "arrives at its destination" in me, I automatically misrecognize that it is this very act of recognition which makes me what I have recognized myself as—I don’t recognize myself in it because I’m its addressee, I become its addressee the moment I recognize myself in it.

Hence the brilliance of the film’s concluding sequence, when Howard returns to Fort Wayne to find the "jilted" Christine. Howard’s slowly rising screech of "Listen to me! Listen to me! Listen…Listen…Listen to me!" addressed to the turned (and henceforth uncomprehending) face of Christine is endemic of his own self-horror. In fact, Howard’s cries are directed not to Christine, who has (finally) become to him solely a symbolic figure (occupying the place of Woman that Etta Place occupies throughout Butch Cassidy), but rather to the big Other, to the symbolic order itself, which has, in effect, turned a deaf ear upon him. The final image of the "silenced" Howard (as we view reality for the first time from Christine’s subject position) clearly illustrates to whom the film’s "letter" has been addressed all along. For Christine, as well as the seduction plot itself, is really but a Hitchcockian McGuffin, a token objet petit a that masques the true twin seduction: that of Howard and the audience. This explains why Christine has so clearly "moved on"—why only Howard is frozen within his "scream"—for she has realized that the letter need not have been meant for her. Thus, the betrayal Howard feels is but a mirror of the audience’s own discomfort: a dual horrifying recognition that the "letter" was meant for them both all along.

In one very crucial sense, Labute’s film, and Howard’s terrible realization, defines the separation between modern and postmodern subjectivity. As Zizek explains in Looking Awry, the postmodernist break "thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the real resists symbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product." The "hard kernel of the real" is thus the stumbling block, that which cannot be subsumed within the symbolic network that constructs subjective reality, but, simultaneously, that which also serves as the formal matrix, the kernel upon which all ideological formations are erected. The power of Labute’s film lies precisely in Christine’s status as a McGuffin; she appears to represent the stumbling block or threat to Chad and Howard, a physical embodiment of the Other (of Woman), which disrupts and threatens their masculine symbolic universe. If this were in fact the case, Company would be a much more modernist text, provoking interpretation rather than obstructing it. Such a film would present Christine as a mystery to be solved or an object to be desired (such as Etta in Butch Cassidy), and the seducers would, perhaps, come to a gradual realization of her own status to them as an objet petit a—as that which is something more in them than themselves. In such films, as is the case with Butch Cassidy, Woman functions as a point of narrative control, as an external threat to (or point of desire for) masculine authority. Simply put, mastering the Woman means mastering the narrative; controlling the Woman means controlling the (his) story. Labute’s film, however, denies Christine the status of object petit a—or, rather, it establishes her as just such a figure and then exposes Howard’s mistakenness in assuming such a role for her. Howard discovers that he has lost control, in fact never had it, and the collapse of appearing and acting that John Berger identified as defining the difference between women and men is utter and absolute.

Labute’s identification of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, a thoroughly modernist work, as a major influence upon his own film underscores this interest in exploring the collapse of binary constructions of activity/passivity and narrative control/controlled object. Both The Apartment and In the Company of Men depict a competitive sexual triangle between two male executives and a woman of an inferior economic status (in The Apartment Fran Kubelik is an elevator operator; in Company Christine is a temp worker). In both films the narrative drive is propelled by the tension afflicting the male bond between the two men arising from their attention to the Other. But whereas The Apartment depends upon the highly modernist and arbitrary subject positioning of C.C. Baxter within the signifying network of corporate America, Consolidated Life, Inc. (as exemplified by the fact that he is consistently identified as a "swinging bachelor"—a misogynist heel—solely because of his connection to his apartment), the impact of Company rests on its ability to reveal the trauma at the core of the symbolic order itself. Thus, the ideological force of The Apartment is grounded in Baxter’s ability to fix Fran Kubelik as his objet petit a, as a partner in dialogue, and, in so doing, to construct a narrative governed by his subjectivity in opposition to the men around him. Company, however, upends this conventional narrative quilting by representing how the real remains an incomprehensible (yet ordinary) object while simultaneously (and paradoxically) acting as that around which the symbolic network is structured. Chad’s response to the bewildered Howard’s demand for an explanation—"Because I could"—is thus a perfect embodiment of the paradoxical positioning of the postmodern subject within an incomprehensible system of regulatory practices. For meaning lies not in the system itself; in fact, the system is created upon a lack of meaning. Rather, meaning is created solely through the act of constituting the subject. Thus, Howard creates himself, along with the conditions that lead inexorably to his subjective destitution by simply agreeing to the forced choice of taking up a position within gender technology.

Whereas a modernist film such as The Apartment, or for that matter Butch Cassidy, is constructed around the recognition of an unnatural "stain"—what Zizek calls a "spot" disturbing the otherwise unified harmony of a picture—standing out against the symbolic order that must be identified and addressed, Company presents a decidedly postmodern perspective in which the subject himself occupies the anamorphic, or unharmonious, position. In such a narrative, the subject comes to recognize his own status as the "unnatural" stain of symbolic reality. In Wilder’s film, for instance, the apartment occupies the place of the "stain," the perverse element that signifies the disruption within the symbolic reality. It is thus no coincidence that the film’s traditional "happy ending" can only be achieved when the apartment is abandoned, simultaneous to C.C.’s abandonment of his own false ideological position as corporate rake. The apartment , like the ever-recurring Bank in Butch Cassidy, is the "little piece of the real" externalizing the impossibility of subjectivity—that the "self" is always predicated upon a carefully covered-up absence, a lack that must go unrecognized. The capitalized signifier "Bank," symbolic of an institution, is thus analogous to Etta’s representation as "Woman." For banks in Butch Cassidy represent the simultaneous presence and disruption of the big Other—of society. Like Etta, they serve to constitute the bond between Butch and Sundance as men (as objects to be robbed and thus mastered), yet they simultaneously threaten to dissolve that bond and destroy the subjects whom they serves. It is no coincidence, then, that the film opens (in black and white footage) with Butch inspecting a bank and closes with its fade-to-sepia image of their imminent (yet, via the freeze frame, eternally deferred) deaths—"vaulted" in, as it were, by the Bolivian militia. Butch and Sundance are here disclosed as men who need to be protected—valuable assets who, more powerfully than any coin, serve to establish and proliferate specific gender roles (and "American" ones at that). So, too, does C. C. Baxter’s apartment (or perhaps "Apartment" would be more appropriate)—as well as Fran Kubelik—give shape to C.C. Baxter’s "lack," a loss of power which calls for and ultimately legitimates his assertion of narrative control.

Tellingly, therefore, Chad’s advice to Howard "never to lose control" needs to be viewed as a warning of self-control, rather than control over an external reality (Zizek’s "big Other"). For only when the subject takes up a position of anamorphosis, of distortion, does it become a stain, stumbling over its own originating trauma. In other words, only when the subject recognizes the existence of that which it must exclude from its symbolic world does it become abject, excluded from the "harmony" of conventional gender technology. This loss of narrative control is precisely what dooms Howard, as Labute himself indicates in his commentary. Contrary to the conventional reading of Chad as an incarnation of evil driving the plot (although Labute doesn’t deny such a status to his character; if anything, Labute claims, Chad is much more than a racist, misogynist, and homophobe—he is "an American"!), it is actually Howard who precipitates the final narrative conflict. Howard, in fact, "loses control" long before the conclusion of the film itself: his attempt to "come clean" with Christine, far from being any sort of redeeming feature, leads only to his ultimate paralysis, his short-circuit within the representing system. Unlike C.C. Baxter, whose gradual break from the corporate world (the big Other) reconstitutes his moral imperatives, Howard’s relation of the plot to Christine merely severs his own ideological moorings.

For Howard there simply is no ideology, no symbolic reality, except that of the big Other. Whereas C.C. Baxter "conferred" subjectivity upon Fran Kubelik by recognizing the "stain" of his own symbolic positioning, and thus simultaneously severed Fran’s dependence upon her own abjection, Howard acts only to protect, yet ultimately destroy, his subjectivity. Christine never becomes the objet petit a—she remains instead for each man a non-subject. Ironically, then, the more Howard attempts to exert control the more he loses it.

Herein lies the film’s greatest irony, for it is not Christine who serves as the obstruction to interpretation, the stumbling block of the real (again, if this were The Apartment, Christine would "save" Howard from his misogyny, just as Fran’s service as the object petit a saved C.C. Baxter), but Chad. The film carefully documents Howard’s "lack" of control in every area of his life: he is equally unable to govern corporate meetings, successfully convey important information, and manipulate individuals. Moreover, in each area he is subtly undercut by Chad’s behavior. Howard, then, is a virtual catalogue of narrative failure. Curiously, however, Labute’s photographic and editing techniques cut against Howard’s frenetic activity; his animadversion toward establishing shots, camera pans (only two occur in the entire film), cross-cuts, and sound looping functions to convey the claustrophobic pressure of the symbolic reality of which Chad is such a frighteningly efficient subject. Labute’s unconventionally static style thus perfectly mirrors Chad’s behavior in that both serve to stabilize and control reality even as they expose the terrifying precepts of that reality.

More importantly, however, Labute’s static technique enables him to foreground the final symmetry between Howard and the audience, one epitomized by the soundless cries of the former that close the film. For the film itself is constructed around the lack in Howard’s control, his inability to regulate its narrative. This is precisely why we witness only Howard’s moments of unmediated interaction, why we view only his "raw" (non-symbolically ordered) reactions. Even more critically, Labute consistently begins scenes in which Howard is speaking without feeling the presence of an/other’s gaze (such as when he is on the phone with his mother early in the film), only to introduce an/other’s gaze in the course of the conversation, forcing Howard to demonstrate his "control" of a situation. This real (a lack of control) is precisely what Howard must not signify within his symbolic reality; it is also what the audience must misrecognize as the constitutive kernel behind the narrative itself. For when Howard finally realizes that he has been trapped by a narrative closure, Labute exposes the audience to what Zizek calls the "umbilical cord" linking what we have been experiencing as reality to its foundation which must remain unseen at all costs. Here is where the letter truly arrives at its destination, when both Howard and the viewer (the maintainer of the voyeuristic gaze who has, after all, been acquiescing to the construction of the film’s reality all along) assume their symbolic destiny by retroactively conferring meaning on the film’s contingent series of signifiers. It is the moment, in other words, when both recognize their place within the symbolic narrative as objects within another’s (Chad’s) subjectivity.

To compare Company once again to Butch Cassidy, the latter film scrupulously avoids the disruptive paradox of such a realization. For Butch Cassidy’s narrative power resides precisely in its ability to maintain the illusion that the spectator is, in fact, in control. Just as Butch and Sundance labor to maintain their own illusion of power via their relationship to Etta, so does the film provide the viewer his sense of authority, the power of author-ing the narrative itself, thus leading to the especially unsettling conclusion in which Butch and Sundance’s story with horrific and inevitable violence passes into mythology.

Company’s conclusion, however, documents the violence of subjectivity rather than narrativity. This violence is intimated by the jump-cut between the film’s final two scenes, knitting together a reaction shot of Chad’s stony and (obviously) controlled countenance as he receives oral sex from his girlfriend to the stricken visage of Howard as he lands in Fort Wayne, distastefully licking his lips. When viewed in light of the final exchange between the two men preceding it, the immensity of the gesture’s utter obscenity is clear. For an "obscenity" is precisely how both Howard and the audience have been (re)constructed: as a stain, the leftover of the Real serving as the kernel of Chad’s symbolic system—of the big Other. Our discomfort with the wrenchingly ironic ending of the film, as Howard acts out his voiceless horror over the ruin of his subjectivity, emerges precisely from our complicity with Howard’s ideological position. Thus the film’s final image shows us just how closely we approached, in Zizek’s terms, "absolute Otherness"; how we, like Howard, conspired in our own symbolic ruination by enabling, even legitimizing, Chad’s symbolic ascension (whom, lest we forget, epitomizes, in Labute’s words, an "American"—and I might qualify, an American male). Such is the essence of the postmodern in Labute’s art. Stripping away the ideological mystification of films such as Butch Cassidy, Labute brilliantly exposes gender technology as a "regulatory practice"—a purely structural signifying system in which the subject determines its "essence" solely through its placement within the symbolic order. Moreover, as Chad’s bemused response to our protestations illustrates ("Because I could"), such an arbitrary placement is one to which the big Other—our society—is wholly indifferent. It is all the more horrifying, therefore, that we make that place our own.

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