Myra Breckinridge

An American Epiphany

by Douglas Milburn

Myra as apocalyptic therapist.
Myra’s vision extends far beyond the verbal placeboes of orthodox psychotherapy, beyond the behavioral placeboes of such "pioneers" as Fritz Perls and William Schultz into that shadow realm of ultimate treatment so rich with the chance of extensive malpractice litigation: intimate involvement with the patient.

Myra knows.

Myra as the ultimate behaviorist knows that standard-received masculine behavior can not be changed by suasion; she knows that psychoanalysis, T-Groups, sensitivity training, Gestalt therapy, inhibited Rolflng (with underwear on!), etc., all do little more than put a sugary coating over the noxious and furious programs governing all our perverse, internecine sexual-political behavior.

Myra knows.

She knows that Juliet is not really "cured" of her spirits just by having relived a repressed traumatic experience; she knows that Jake Horner falls because mytho-therapy is only an ego-imposed set of behaviors and is thus no match for the strength and momentum of the ancient & sick body ploys.

The inadequacy of the brave new behavioral techniques pioneered In the 1960's can be seen in the reactionary institutional petrification which Esalen, the chief purveyor of those techniques, underwent: promiscuity was permissible at Esalen but overt sexual behavior remained taboo. One "slept around" at Esalen just as in the world beyond the gates; and one did it behind closed doors or at night, just as in the world beyond the gates. So even in their most radical therapeutic institutions, men, like apes, still fuck in private & prattle in public. We still stand dumbly awe-struck before Mommy's & Daddy's closed bedroom door, fantasizing away about what's going on in there now that the 10 o'clock news is over.

As long as we continue to flee from and lie to our children about sexuality, theirs & ours, we are doomed either to the maddening disappointments of parenthood as presently experienced or to the catastrophic & tragic destruction of self which Myra experiences. The acting out of our fantasies, as Norman Brown pointed out so clearly, using surrogate parents later in life, at bottom always creates a surrogate reality—a reality which is thus wholly inadequate, since as children we ourselves were forced to lie about what our intuition told us about our own private sexual parts. And if, and when, as adults we go back & try to act out the fantasies, we are only acting out our child-self's already warped idea of sexuality. Myra as prime case in point.

Joseph Morgenstern in Newsweek:
"Myra Breckinridge" is merely a nightmare version of Hollywood's most recent dreams. It is the perfect picture of an industry that's down for the count, flat on its back and playing with its sorry self.

True, Myra is living out her fantasies (warped or not), but there's one so big that she only brushes it (is it perhaps the only healthy fantasy left to us?).

Vidal avoids it. But not Same. I mean the brief scene in MB/2 which begins with a shot of Mary-Ann morose before the Buck Loner statue (the Madame Butterfly love-duet is on the sound track), Myra & Rusty drive up. Rusty alights (the spots come on bright—in fact we see them). Rusty & Mary-Ann embrace, Myra comes into the frame, embraces them both simultaneously, & then exits skipping. Only David Crosby tried it so naturally, in his song, "Triad", recorded by the Jefferson Airplane.

The group grope, group love the still unattainable fantasy.

Kate Millett describes the three classic triangles:

1. The courtly triangle: the lady at the top, her lord & her troubadour at the bottom.

2. The chivalrous triangle: the bourgeois husband at the top, his wife & his mistress at the bottom.

3. The Lawrentian triangle (Women in Love): Rupert at the top, Ursula & Gerald at the bottom (read; Lawrence at the top, Frieda & an unknown Cornish farmer at the bottom).

Now we must add a fourth:

4. The Vidalian triangle: the man-woman (polymorphously perverse) at the top, with the pair of old-culture, homo sapiens lovers at the bottom.

Male celebration of male beauty.
Chapter 29: David essayed in words.

What the Greeks carried off in near-total sexual naivity, Michelangelo managed by the sheer force of genius; and Vidal— though his creation is similarly infused by that same strong spirit—is permitted his public performance only by the blind wealth-hunger of a capitalist printing establishment functioning as purveyor of porn to an incredibly horny society.

Chapter 29: The acceptance of male genital beauty:

Sarne could have surely gotten by with much more in the movie. Maybe he tried—who knows what was lost on the cutting-room floor. (See for example the male artist's model in What Do You Say to a Naked Lady.)

Malcolm Muggeridge in Esquire:
On the subject of pornography, how sad to see a writer as gifted and amusing as Gore Vidal turning in his latest work.... to this dismal pursuit. The book, as it seemed to me, lacked artistry, sensibility, and even a plot; a poor, poor work from so accomplished a hand.

....and the mind goes skittering off across alphabetical circles of resonance (could it be?): malcolmmuggeridge/myrabreckinridge....? No. That's not it. But something....

The major omission in MB/2: Vidal's fine extended appreciation of the male body, particularly the genitals. And it is an important omission. Because Vidal's novel, if it is anything, is a milestone in that complex process of liberation which among many other things includes a re-education toward acceptance and appreciation of the male body, particularly the genitals.

Time:
....in all conscience it can be reported that the key to Myra's sexual-identity crisis is about as crucial as the sound track to a stag film. Which indeed the plot resembles.

We are not allowed to see most of Chapter 29 (30 pages) in the film. Apart from the anal rape, the closest Sarne can came to Rusty's penis is letting Myra handle the warm bottle of bright yellow urine.

Over the opening of Red Garters:
Someone has said, "The movies should be more like life." To which a wise man replied, "Life should be more like the movies."

Watch it!
The movie as brief catalog of us as a nation of voyeurs. Buck has the acting academy wired with six closed TV circuits—and he watches much of what the cameras pick up... Interlarded throughout the film are a number of audience shots from old movies—Hollywood has been shameless here too: so sure of itself that it could show audiences in the very act of having their minds raped... And in the two crucial scenes between Myra and Rusty, Myron is seen eating popcorn and watching the events with approbation, as if at a movie.

Vidal quoted in Time:
"Without Bogart, there could be no Norman Mailer. Without George Arliss, there wouldn't have been me."

The dying society = a society of voyeurs. Our essential American reality is the reality we witness, not the reality we participate in (so pale somatically compared with the sensual intensity delivered by our over-trained retinas), hence the ease with which we maintain the national hypocrisy: "Freedom of speech? Why of course I believe in it! God damn, look at them National Guard git after them students—that's what we need more of!" we say, adjusting the color intensity and vertical hold with infinite sensitivity to the machine's needs (which are our own).

In both book and movie Buck communicates with us via dictation machine. What we get in the book Is a series of unedited transcriptions of the tapes—no punctuation, no paragraphs, etc. So Buck's words take the same appearance on the page as those of D.J. in Why We Are in Vietnam. Hardly surprising really since the content of their words is quite similar. Word-content = behavior semantics = the behaviorizatlon of words. Buck is merely an older D.J., and both characters are of course close relatives of the late Gerald Critch.

MB/2.The last whimper of the Old West and, hence, of American Manhood is not the dying whispers of the mortally wounded drifting clear across the Pacific to San Clemente. No, the last whimper of that dying god is Andy Devine playing bridge. With four Lesbians playing canasta on the nearby patio. One of whom is Buck's wife.

Rusty as rapee
Stand-in for us all, American males. Western males. Males. Patriarchs. And when it's over, we have only Laurel and Hardy at our wake, weeping the realer than real L&H tears, spilt so often over trivia, now hopelessly salving Rusty's (our) deflowered orifice.

Hollis Alpert in Saturday Review:
And, after all, the name of the author is supposed to have some class, as they used to say.

The destruction of American manhood.

In both MB/I & MB/2 we see the four ways the traditional masculine role is functioning today:

1. Buck Loner. The old patriarch, still faking it & still getting away with it, till Myra...

2. The elder Flagler (Buck's lawyer). Member of the generation which defeated Hitler(one generation younger than Buck, whose big rite of passage had been the Great War). The practical application of the old role in the bourgeois world of commerce, commonly known as real life. The cracks are already appearing: Flagler's frantic concern with fuck-films & queers. But the role is still functioning, till Myra...

3. The Young Flagler. The Korea generation.. The role now a travesty of itself. He falls all over himself & those around him trying to get to the bathroom (MB/2).

4. Rusty. Classically innocent American youth. Harmlessly, quietly playing out the old role, till Myra...

Then there's Irving Amadeus. Black/gay/Jewish/Bahai/Buddhist ad infinitum. A walking short catalog of minority-group oppression. Persons with various combinations of his minority orientations in the various categories of skin-color, sexual behavior, & religious belief have served as subjects for any number of Serious Hollywood Films. But in MB/2, poor old Amadeus (Gottlieb!) is relegated to the background as Myra/Myron strides front & center to prove to Buck & the rest of us that the problem is not Them. It is US, all us "normals." (Rusty has already conveniently defined "normal" as "what most people do".)

Chapter 29
Rusty's fear.

Rex Reed in Playboy:
...everyone thinks I sold out by doing this movie.

Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic:
The story has been reduced to a series of salacious scenes, disconnected and with no conclusion.

Rex Reed in Playboy quoting a 20th Century Fox non-entity:
"Well, it's a today picture."

Rex Reed in Playboy quoting Robert Fryer, the producer:
"Bullshit. Midnight Cowboy didn't have pubic hair and filth in it."

Chapter 29: The terror before the male genitals.

Myron the queer was long-suffering. Myra tells us he would endure endless discomfort for his partners. He can seek retribution through another only after he has worked retribution on his own body. By mutilating himself he frees himself to vent his hostility toward all males—as well as to liberate his profound appreciation of their (and his own, now lost) beauty. Thus the scene with Rusty vibrates with mind-splitting rapidity and force between the poles of love (gentle, fondling appreciation) and hate (brutal, tearing rape).

Paul D. Zimmermann in Newsweek:
The story breaks free of its moorings here [in concentrating on Myra's seduction of Rusty and Mary-Ann] and drifts into a cool, bleak world of inversion and onanistic fantasy, told with a passion for anatomical detail that Vidal's audience, conventional or cathode, is, in the main, unlikely to share.

Rex Reed in Playboy:
...I knew I was likely to be murdered when the reviews came out, so I wouldn't agree to do the movie unless the studio let me approve my part of the script before filming. Under no circumstances was I interested in playing a homosexual who has an operation to make him into a woman. They agreed to all my demands and assured me that the film would be like a Danny Kaye movie—a Walter Mitty fantasy: Myron, instead of undergoing a sex change, would be involved in an accident and dream that he was the alter ego of Myra Breckinridge, giving advice to her. The two of them would be living at Chateau Marmont and there would be lots of sex between them; I'd be a sort of carnal Jiminy Cricket to Raquel's erotic Pinocchio. I didn't object too strenuously to that.

MB/2. The roughly sketched-in dream framework is the Capitalist/Puritan equivalent of the Communist writers' reliance on animal allegory. In the case of MB/2 of course it is not a matter of some state censorship board demanding a softening of the framework of MB/I; it is rather Rex Reed functioning in the censors' stead, making a kind of citizen's arrest of Michael Sarne, telling him he (Rex) is not gonna have any of this for-real queer stuff attached to his name by God...

And just as in the-communist world, Sarne neatly undercuts the dream framework:
1. The other patients in the ward (all male of course) look with considerable hostility toward Rex's bed. One, incidentally, is reading the issue of Time with Raquel on the cover.
2. After Rex's last, sell-out line ("You don't understand the way I feel about Mary-Ann; why she's Donald Duck straws and Pepsodent toothpaste") the camera pans over magazines from the year when Raquel appeared on 84,000 covers throughout the world.
3. And under the closing titles we see (again) Myra & Myron dancing together. Nothing has changed.

Joseph Morgenstern in Newsweek:
Raquel Welch and Rex Reed, as alters of the same ego, offer a Hobson's choice of unprecedented unpleasantness. She, poor plastic dear, can't say the lines right and they don't even undress her to re-dress her wrongs. He, hapless wretch, gets to play with himself in a scene that will make strong men weep and weak women wretch.

The Myron/Myra doubled role a stroke of genius, perhaps the only place where the movie surpasses Vidal.

Rex Reed, the male bitch, versus Raquel Welch, Female.

William F. Buckley versus Gore Vidal.

Richard Nixon & John Mitchell versus Donald Duck Straws & Pepsodent Toothpaste.

Walter Lipmann versus Abbie Hoffman. (Myron sees right through Myra's much-rehearsed save-the-world lines—he's heard them often enough.).

Pseudo-sex versus bi-sex. When Myron masturbates he actually goes down on himself. For the count.