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Abstract
In this essay I argue that the popular baseball film/romantic comedy Bull Durham works against heteronormative viewing by infusing its scenes with an ironic sensibility that is both feminist and key to a gay male understanding of gender paradox. I rhetorically analyze the ways in which the film both reinscribes masculinity and encourages spectators rhetorically to identify with the female lead, Annie Savoy, thus modeling new possibilities for characters and viewers to understand sexuality.
The author would like to thank Julia Reimer, Alison Aurelia Fisher, and Sara McNeece for assistance in gathering materials; and Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, Sirriya Din, Nathan Stucky, Cindy Griffin, Kristin Slattery, Wayne McMullen, the Communication, Gender and Sport class, and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful conversations during the writing and revising process. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Organization for the Study of Language, Communication, and Gender, St. Louis, Missouri, October 2006.
Notes
Glitre establishes that this convention satisfied the ratings “code.” Getting the couple together too early would lead to sexual behavior that was considered inappropriate for public viewing.
Writer-Director Ron Shelton calls Annie a “High Priestess” in his commentary on the DVD, and Susan Sarandon invokes the phrase in an interview: “‘Annie's not a groupie,’ Sarandon insists. ‘She's definitely a high priestess. Anyone who goes with Annie has the best year of his career’” (Mills 5).
Mulvey summarizes Freud's theory of scopophilia, or pleasure in looking, as active when it takes “other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (8) and as narcissistic when the watcher sees “the glamorous impersonat[ing] the ordinary” and identifies with the characters on the screen (10).
As soon as the specter of lesbianism is raised, even obliquely, Radway dismisses it as an impossibility because of women's psychology (140).
Other oppressed groups display similar layerings of awareness and identity. Snodgrass concludes that “women's intuition” could be called “subordinates' intuition” because oppressed people within a group learn to attune to the nuances of those in power. As Collins notes, African American women who do domestic work often have a unique perspective that she terms the “outsider within” because of their position in the White families who employ them. This harkens back to what DuBois called the “double veil of consciousness” of Africans in White society, “always looking at one's self through the eyes of others” (3), and previews the concept of “third space” that postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha use to describe hybridity: people identifying somewhat with the land of their ancestors and somewhat with the colonizing culture that helped shape the world they know. And this paradox also arises in Burke's “four master tropes”: “True irony, humble irony, is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is indebted to him, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with him” (514).
Homosexuality, Pronger writes, “is the eroticization of basic gender equality, whereas heteroeroticism is the incarnation of basic gender inequality” (70). “By definition, homoeroticism emerges out of the gender myth—a man could not eroticize men if there weren't such a gender category…. The essence of manhood lies in its difference from womanhood; the eroticization of gender affinity violates the preeminence of difference and therefore manhood…. Because it both embraces and violates masculinity, homoeroticism is paradoxical eroticism” (71). Because the gender myth has so devalued women, “they are not often perceived by men as worthy…. So the paradox of orthodox masculinity is that the hierarchy of gender difference compels men to find satisfaction in one another. One of the ways they do so is in sports” (178–79).
In his final scene with Crash, after thanking him “for everything,” Nuke playfully adopts the term to address his former mentor. Invoking his power to see Crash as a “mere” commodity or plaything, Nuke displays the evolution of their relationship, his own maturity, and his increased sensitivity to irony and queer gender politics.
It is a truism in communication that when verbal and nonverbal messages conflict we tend to believe the nonverbal.
Years later, Brown's The Da Vinci Code would educate millions of readers to the archetypal feminine symbolism of the rose.
Crash's heavy alcohol use may in fact serve as a marker of his masculinity, a liquid alibi that, despite his difference from other ballplayers, he is no “sissy.” Notably, once he has achieved access to Annie's heart, he sets aside the drink she brings him.
Interestingly, his nightmare directly follows the “rainout” scene, in which Crash, Nuke, and a few teammates spray one another with hoses and run, slide, and pile onto one another in the mud, images ripe with homoerotic potential.
Lyman observed that young men in fraternities (which, like sports teams, involve male bonding) define “the male bond as intimate but not sexual (homosocial), and relationships with women as sexual but not intimate (heterosexual)” (177).
Sedgwick explains that in 19th-century England, feminization was less threatening to aristocrats than to men of the lower classes because aristocrats derived power from social and economic privilege rather than masculine style and behavior (206–07).
Seeing him throw several perfect pitches in a row, Skip exclaims, “Jesus! What's got into Nuke?!” and Larry answers enthusiastically, “He's wearing garters. And he's, uh, breathing outta his eyelids like a lava lizard. It's an old Mayan deal.” We notice Skip's look of alarm, which invites our laughter. So the patriarchal rejection of Annie's feminine methods remains internal, rather than public, and the disapproval has no teeth, no consequences for unconventional gender construction.
Ardolino concludes, “Crash and Annie exemplify the value of experience [and] unconventional living” (46). Pronger interviewee Eilert Frerichs says, “Being gay is a part of my experience…of equal importance, to my having been raised in Germany and having a third culture. All human beings live in a whole variety of cultures all the time and move with relative ease (at least the healthy person) from one culture to another. It's a sign of integration and personal wholeness that one can do so” (91).