Myra Breckinridge

An American Epiphany

by Douglas Milburn

The rape-scene as cultural watershed. (Movie as social experience; we get it In the presence of other people.)

The rape-scene: the public execution of Louis XVI.

The rape-scene; the public execution of Jesus Christ.

The rape-scene: the public execution of Hiroshima/Dresden.

The rape-scene; the public execution of Giordano Bruno.

The rape-scene: the public execution of Kent State.

The rape-scene: Socrates' death was not a cultural watershed precisely because it was private. And if Rusty's rape had stayed within the covers of a book it would mega-culturally be no more (or less) important than, say, The Lyrical Ballads, or The 120 Days of Sodom. But transferred to the movie screen, Rusty’s rape becomes a public, a political act, witnessed thousands of times by millions of citizens. It is probably abhorrent to most—but then one imagines that most French citizens repressed the bloody reality as well as the political fact of Louis' real execution.

Nonetheless, it happened. And things are never the same again.

Time:
The thought has even occurred to Vidal that it could make a movie. "I showed Myra to Jane Fonda," he says. "She read it four times, and then said, 'I don't think I know how to play it.'"

Chapter 29.

Myra knows it is a mythic act:

In 1967 the children, in the vanguard of the sexual political revolution, threw down the gauntlet: the girl puts a flower in a Berkeley rifle. What could we adults do but rise to the occasion:

Normally at moments of great victory, there is a sense of letdown. But not in this case:

The rape-scene as cultural watershed.

It is no mere coincidence that America experienced the rape of its manhood in MB/2 in the same year that Sexual Politics appeared. In the same year that the Presidential Commission on Obscenity released its anti-censorship findings. In the same year that fuck films were openly displayed for the first time in public theaters in most of the major cities. In the same year that the full range of sex photographs went on public sale. In the same year that Rags published a codpiece pattern. In the same year that The Christine Jorgensen Story circulated as a film (& indeed in at least one city played as part of a double-feature with MB/2— at a drive-in, a situation so richly evocative of the entire culture that one could only wonder whether Marshall McLuhan had not gotten together with George Leonard, Fritz Perls' shade, Masters & Johnson, The Fugs, & Gordon McLendon to arrange the event). And in the same year that Fellini released a powerful but hopelessly sublimated Satyricon, showing how Europe continues to lag behind.

British book reviewers had to cope simultaneously with MB/I & Candy. While American film reviewers had to cope simultaneously with MB/2 & Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Huck Finn! Huck Finn! Fuck him! Fuck him!

Myra, break in rigid!

Scatalogical aside. Hollywood continued to progress even here. We see Rusty's yellow-warm urine (& Raquel passes it unnecessarily close to her nose at one point). And of course there's always the problem of the anal thermometer, which upon removal flashes briefly before the camera (cf. the urinal/shower scene in The Christine Jorgensen Story).

Rex Reed in Playboy:
The whole experience turned into an absolute nightmare. Sarne would have done anything with us if we hadn't been protected. There was a scene in his script, for instance, in which I was supposed to run naked down Wall Street at midnight, chased by the entire New York police force. When I get to the foot of the Stock Exchange, I look up and, instead of the lady with the scales, there is Raquel with a machete in her hand. She proceeds, of course, to castrate me In front of thousands of people—but instead of blood and genitalia, out come rhinestones, pearls, rubies: and sapphires. Rather understandably, I said, "No power on earth could get me to play that scene."

Before her headlong lunge for security as embodied in Mary-Ann, Myra knows:

Myron/Myra as Oedipus Rex/Regina. Oedipus & Jocasta, Myron & Myra (Vidal's vision is then a dramatic economy—the application of Occam's Razor to the Oedipal paradox: Myron knows his mother by becoming his mother). But the acting out of lost childhood sexuality with adult parental surrogates on a scale to match the enormity of our frustrated needs requires a large does of hubris, a quantity of inordinate pride so intoxicating that once the goal is reached—the forbidden act committed—the actor is likely to fall into a swoon from which he/she may not recover. Once-blinded Oedipus. Twice-blinded Myra. For at the end she is at last victim herself: "Where are my breasts? Where are my breasts?" she calls from the hospital bed.

Brigid Brophy in The Listener:
The book's artistic toughness is hers personally. Her camp draperies, such as her erudition about old films, are not wisps but precise cutting edges. She swishes them in majestic scythe-strokes of scorn, meanwhile hissing in near Nabokovian vituperative pedantry, against the stupidity, Philistinism, intellectual pretentiousness and superficiality and conformism of our society.

Paul Zimmerman in Newsweek:
The book is a put-on, a sexual game, but one in which Vidal too often succumbs to the erotic fantasies he has created.

The costumes in MB/2 unintentionally obscurantist. Myra's especially. Raquel appears in each scene clothed in a different & striking example of the fashion of the 30's & 40's. The verisimilitude is so strong that it switches us into the late-show mode of thought, that being the context in which we encounter such outfits now. And it switches us out of contemplation of just what Sarne was up to.

(Thackery knew of this danger. When Vanity Fair, which is set at the beginning of the 19th century, was published, Thackery gave explicit instructions to the illustrator to clothe the characters in the fashion of contemporary, 1850's England. He realized that to put them in the authentic dress of the earlier period would distract readers from the contemporary points he was trying to get across.)

Chapter 29.

My sweating stallion.

While Sarne has to communicate the basic, dildo-enters-anus fact of the rape through symbols, he turns the necessity to advantage. The pictures he chooses are of a piece with the other film inserts. The pictures we watch during the rape—the battering ram & castle gate, the bursting dam, the soaring glider, the roller coaster, Myra as witch on a broomstick, and so on—illuminate the Hollywood cliches, make the cliches so clear that the critics could not, as it were, swallow them here. American public symbolism is stretched to new form & function just as surely as is Rusty's anus. What the Fugs did to rock and roll & to American popular music generally, MB/2 does to Hollywood.

In MB/I, Vidal takes us all the way with Myra & Rusty, through all possible detail (a send-up on the nouvelle roman, Vidal told Time). The dildo is two inches wide at the head and nearly a foot long:

Bronco-buster busted. So much for John Wayne.

Richard Nixon to a woman amidst a group of hard-hats on a Chicago street(as captured By CBS newsfilm):
"I don't know about Women's Lib... I don't want to wake up in the morning with a pipefitter."

Myra as rapist. Her outfit, the red-whlte-&-blue bikini: the final travesty of Uncle Sam. U.S. as trans-sexual. The dildo she must wear, the big stick he must carry, swishing softly through the jungles of Southeast Asia and the deserts of the Middle East, plunging finally into the virgin hillocks of Rusty's ass. If Mailer told us why we were in Vietnam, Vidal tells us how to avoid going there ever again.

Myra as rapist. "I'm coming, Scarlett! I'm coming, Lana!" The last tribute to the dying gods. She does what Vivien & Lana & all the rest only evaded doing one way or another—either by being frigid on-screen or by making it off-screen.

Eternal sublimation is the price of vigilance.

Myra as rapist. Woman at last unashamedly & openly orgasmic: the battering ram, the bursting dam (Rusty may be full of holes but after 500,000 years of anal constriction the crucial orifice is tight as hell), then the break on through to the other side: and peace & the glider soaring, the Cinerama roller coaster (strangely distorted by the CinemaScope lens), and release: the Bomb and paean to Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and the premiere danseuse bowing low.

MB/2 acts out, makes real the movie reality which Myra espouses throughout MB/I:

Paul Zimmermanm in Newsweek:
Myra herself is a dazzling, darkly humorous and horrifying creation. She is at once the prototypical castrating female... a calculating adventuress. But most of all, she is a cruel sex joke.

Brigid Brophy in The Listener:
Classicising, classifying intellectual activity is very likely the psychological successor of the first great intellectual feat of getting the sexes correctly sorted out. In that case, it must be a baroque work which re-confuses them and brings back that tang of infantile uncertainty. For baroque is the art of wreaking an explosion deep inside the classical structure and re-assorting the classical elements into an incongruity grotesque, ironic, comic, barbarically majestic or all at once, but always—by virtue of the discipline which creates a new form to hold the lurching elements together— beautiful. The baroque incongruity of pediment and dome juxtaposed on the same structure is equivalent to finding Myra's (artificial, plastic-surgeon-made) breasts on Myron's torso.

Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic:
Raquel Welch, the Myra, would please any pasha but is a bore out of bed—particularly on the screen.

Oedipal reality: the compulsive, unwitting acting out of the fantasy on other. The sublimation is sexual.

Myronic reality: the compulsive, unwitting acting out of the fantasy on self. The sublimation is of role.

The actor in both cases is destructive. Jocasta & Rusty are both demolished. But where Oedipus is blinded, Myron is rendered finally sexless. Thus in Myronic reality the repression is both stronger & weaker than in Oedipal reality. Stronger, in that it in the end brings about a total cessation of even the possibility of sexual-political behavior: Myron is reduced both mentally & physically to a non-sexual creature, while Oedipus loses only his mind—and with it his eyes which had seen the mother naked & fucking. Weaker, in that a displacement upward has clearly occurred: Myron knows that the big cultural problem is sexual, & he acts overtly on a sexual level to do something about it.

Myra as rapist.

Not so much the dominant woman as simply, and at last, the human being of female sex whose opinion must be asked, and respected:

Exeunt world males,now-males-no-more, write finis to Male History, which is as much as to say: write finis to History for till now there has been no other. For the male, loss of face always (implicitly) = loss of ass. And so with Rusty, our stand-in. Barefoot boy with cheeks of white now stained forever crimson.

Objectify & penetrate: As men do to women, so too does Myra do to Rusty.

Myra as rapist.

The dildo, the tool, the organ, the Instrument is all. Rusty can see nothlng else. He is even blinded to Myra as New Woman.

It is so big. The Fear about the size of Daddy's dick confirmed.