Ascent of the A-Word

by Geoffrey Nunberg

  ALVY: Yeah, two more chairs and they got a dining-room set.

  ROBIN: Why are you so hostile?

  ALVY: I wanna watch the Knicks on television.

  Alvy slips off to watch the game in the bedroom, where his wife finds him and asks him what he finds so fascinating about a group of pituitary cases trying to stuff the ball through a hoop. “It’s physical,” he answers, “you know, it’s one thing about intellectuals, they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.” This is no less of a setup than in Dirty Harry—the odds of finding a roomful of West Side academics who are all indifferent to the score of the Knicks game are no better than those of finding a San Francisco police captain who would set a known serial killer loose on a legal technicality. But Allen’s pseuds and show-offs are so airily pretentious and self-infatuated that they become easy foils for his derision, which might come off as obnoxious if its targets were drawn more three dimensionally. In his own way, Allen is as much an anti-asshole as Clint Eastwood—and the vicarious pleasure in watching him malign the assholes is equally satisfying.27

  In one or another form, the asshole is a motor force in most of the movie comedy subgenres of this period. There’s the smarmy or officious boss in office comedies like Nine to Five and later Office Space and The Office; the martinet teacher or administrator in Animal House, Old School, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High; the stuck-up frat boy in Revenge of the Nerds and, again, Animal House; the arrogant star athlete or coach of the opposing team in triumph-of-the-underdogs sports movies like The Replacements, The Bad News Bears, Wildcats, and Major League. Each type legitimates a corresponding anti-asshole, like John Belushi’s Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House, Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack (tagged “The Snobs against the Slobs”), or Sean Penn’s Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—characters whose exaggerated grossness or disrespectfulness is justified by the humorless assholism of the comic villain. You think of Dangerfield in Caddyshack hitting the pompous judge played by Ted Knight in the rear with a golf ball (“a bum shot”) and running his yacht into the judge’s boat, or of John Belushi, in an unforgettable gross-out scene from Animal House, stuffing his mouth with a hard-boiled egg, then punching his cheeks together to spray it onto the fraternity and sorority jerks at the lunch table (“I’m a zit!”). Ultimately, the asshole receives his comeuppance when he’s exposed to a public humiliation that makes his delusions and pretensions transparent even to himself. That was the repeated fate of Dabney Coleman, who made a career out of playing the self-important asshole in movies like Tootsie, Modern Problems, and most notably as the smarmy, exploitative boss in the office comedy Nine to Five—“a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot,” as the Jane Fonda character calls him—who winds up trussed and swinging from the ceiling attached to a garage-door opener. Comeuppance is a word made for assholes, with its suggestion of someone being brought face-to-face with his own vanity or presumption.) Or in a gothic version of the genre, the asshole is the jerk who’s the first to get chopped up in a slasher film or the first to be chomped up in one of the Hannibal Lecter movies. But Lecter himself is the furthest thing in the world from an asshole. Whatever else he may be, he’s scarcely self-deluded.

  Insincerity and Inauthenticity

  Nobody would be tempted to describe the humor of Caddyshack or Animal House as a comedic breakthrough. Humiliating the overbearing and self-important of the world has been a sure-fire comic staple from Aristophanes to the Marx Brothers. Yet something changes when the pseuds and snobs are reclassified as assholes. Their behavior may not be greatly different, but the rediagnosis casts it in a different light.

  A generation earlier, many of those foils would have been called phonies, at the time a ubiquitous epithet for people who manufactured their public selves—people who “appeared cynically to conform to codes of behavior for social approbation or advancement,” as Abigail Cheever puts it in Real Phonies. The obsession was given its definitive expression in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield’s world bristles with phoniness, which could come in the form of insincerity, snobbery, callousness, or calculated self-promotion. He discerns it in his teachers, in the fake-humble bow of the black piano player in a Greenwich Village club frequented by preppies, in the hammy acting of the Lunts, and in prep-school ministers (“. . . they have these Holy Joe voices . . . I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk”). He hears it in the conversation between his girlfriend Sally and a friend she encounters at the theater intermission: It was the phoniest conversation you ever heard in your life. They both kept thinking of places as fast as they could, then they’d think of somebody that lived there and mention their name. I was all set to puke when it was time to go sit down again. I really was.

  In his revulsion for phonies, Holden was speaking both for and to the fifties generation. Phony was the standard rebuke for the postwar preoccupation with appearance and status, the culture of William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, at the moment when status symbol and status seeker made their appearance in the language. It gave voice to a current of truculent individualism which was never far from the decade’s superficial conformism, and which invigorated the Beats and other cultural rebels (the United States is “a rule of phonies,” Allen Ginsberg wrote in his journal in 1960). A decade later those qualms evolved into the counterculture’s rejection of the polluted, superficial mainstream, as “plastic” became an all-purpose epithet for the synthetic values of consumer culture that replaced authentic experience (as Frank Zappa put it: “I’m sure that love will never be a product of plasticity”).

  But denunciations of phonies and phoniness tailed off after 1970, at the same moment asshole was being incorporated into the American moral vocabulary, as Figure 4-3 shows. Phony persists, of course, as a label for an imposter, a fake (a phony ID) or a sham (a phony issue). And of course a lot of assholes have nothing to do with phoniness—that’s the least of Donald Trump’s issues—and not everyone who misrepresents himself is an asshole on that account. But as an indictment of character, phoniness is no longer the fixation it was in the postwar decades, and the rise of the asshole clearly helped to nudge it aside.

  FIGURE 4-3. Phoniness v. Assholes

  The move from phony to asshole reflected a sharp shift in moral focus. Phoniness is strictly a matter of behavior. The charge has no particular psychological significance—phoniness can reflect cynical manipulativeness and self-infatuation, as it did for Holden’s roommate Stradlater, or insecure defensiveness, as it did for Sally. Or sometimes it simply suggests the absence of an inner life, which is why the word is so often paired with shallow and superficial. Whereas calling someone an asshole suggests that his behavior comes from a distorted self-perception that feeds his obtuseness and sense of entitlement. That’s why the asshole is not just contemptible but pathetic—not in the sense that he arouses our sympathy, but in the sense that he’s ridiculous and miserably inadequate. (In Google Books, pathetic modifies phony just II times and asshole 147.) Recall Gregory Marmalard, the smug, handsome president of the Omega house in Animal House, sitting in his convertible with his girlfriend, unable to achieve an erection despite her perseverance (“Is anything happening yet? My arm’s tired”) . It’s an affliction that’s no more than his due as an asshole, but irrelevant to his being a phony.

  chapter five

  Men Are All Assholes

  FERRIS: Would you want to get married? I mean if I wasn’t an asshole?

  —Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986

  “Men Are All Assholes”

  The moral force of asshole rests on a connection between self-perception and social behavior, the idea that people who are deluded about their own importance are apt to be insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. Or to put it in other words, the asshole’s sense of entitlement goes hand in hand with his lack of empathy. So it isn’t surprising that empathetic, too, advanced in lockstep with asshole over t
he second half of the twentieth century, as Figure 5-1 shows.

  It was that connection between entitlement and insensitivity that gave rise to a new use of asshole, as a label for men who behaved cluelessly or callously towards women. The new use of the word owed a lot to the rise of second-wave feminism, which had its cultural moment in the early seventies—the era of Ms. magazine and “I Am Woman,” Judy Chicago and Germaine Greer, Billy Jean King and Sisterhood Is Powerful. It was then that “Men are all assholes” took wing as a stereotypical characterization of the program of feminism. Allusions to sexist assholes and chauvinist assholes became common, sometimes coming from feminists and sometimes from their derisive critics—the description of a feminist panel at the 1975 Modern Language Association meetings in Change began, “In the room the unattached women came and went and Michelangelo was an asshole.”

  FIGURE 5-1. Empathetic v. Asshole

  But Jacobins and bluestockings weren’t the only women who were referring to men as assholes. Women were generally more comfortable using vulgar words by then, and not just among themselves. In 1971, The Cosmo Girl’s Guide to the New Etiquette reassured its readers that “unless you have been wearing blinders and earmuffs for the last ten years, there is not likely a four-letter expletive a nice girl has never heard or even used.”28 And women didn’t require the urging of Kate Millett or Shulamith Firestone to see that a word aimed at people with an overinflated sense of entitlement might be a suitable label for men who were exploitative or high-handed in their relations with women. In a pivotal scene in the landmark cinema verite documentary An American Family, filmed in 1971 and shown on PBS two years later, Pat and Bill Loud are arguing in a crowded restaurant as their marriage is disintegrating. “I think that you’re a goddamn asshole,” she tells him—not something a woman would have said to her husband or lover a few years earlier, even in a John O’Hara novel. But by the 1970s the word was quite rapidly being adapted to the way men acted in relationships:What a pig! He must know that this has been an exhausting week and here he wants to come over and fuck me some more. What an insensitive asshole. (Nancy Weber, Life Swap, 1974)

  Elsa:You’re really unbelievable, Will. You were an unbelievable kid and you ran away and saw the world and grew up and now you’re back here. . . . what a stupid little asshole you turned out to be. (Israel Horovitz, Hopscotch and the 75th, 1974)

  It was Amy’s friend Cecilia, who’d had a terrific fight with her boyfriend and who was coming over to spend the night. . . . telling Amy she would never again see that no-good, low-down, you should pardon the expression, asshole again. (Lee Leonard, I Miss You When You’re Here, 1976)

  This was a powerful semantic maneuver. When you call a man who behaves callously towards women an asshole you accuse him of coming up short by the very standards that men themselves invoke to malign those who abuse their position in other ways—and in fact suggest that behaving that way is unmanly. I don’t mean by that that asshole in general carries an implication of homosexuality, as some Queer theorists have suggested. There’s no obvious homophobic cast to using the word of George C. Patton, Donald Trump, or an officious boss.29 But even so, using it of a man who behaves badly towards women is more or less literally a low blow: it makes him seem small and cruddy, and more than that, pathetic.

  Heel Replacement

  Like other uses of asshole, this one involved a rediagnosis of an old condition and the dislocation of older terms. Before they were assholes, men who exploited women were variously scoundrels, bounders, rotters, cads, and more recently heels. Those words all faded with the rise of asshole, as you can see in Figure 5-2, which depicts the changing frequency of sentences of the form “He’s a ___” in Google Books between 1910 and 2000. Cad was already on the way out early in the century, along with the Victorian notion of gentlemanliness that it was opposed to. But heel is a more recent word that belongs to popular American slang, and its gradual eclipse after World War II reflects modern changes in the way people think about relationships rather than about class.30 It was originally an underworld term for a rat or a double-crosser, but by the 1930s it was extended to a man who treated women cavalierly or heartlessly, exploiting them for sex or money. As Dinah Washington sang in 1946 in Jeanne Burns’ “That’s Why a Woman Loves a Heel”:You know that he’s a phony, more or less,

  But when he meets a lady in distress,

  He handles everything with such finesse,

  That’s why a woman loves a heel!

  He knows just how to get beneath your skin,

  He holds the aces, you can’t win!

  He gets a lot of goodness out of sin,

  That’s why a woman loves a heel!

  Figure 5-2. He’s a Cad v. He’s a Heel v. He’s an Asshole

  The forties and fifties were the halcyon age of literary and cinematic heels. John O’Hara’s 1940 novel Pal Joey, about a nightclub MC who seduces a rich socialite into backing him in his own joint, became a musical play with Gene Kelly in 1940 and a movie with Frank Sinatra in 1957. There were Kirk Douglas as an unscrupulous producer in the 1952 The Bad and the Beautiful, Laurence Olivier as a womanizing music hall performer in John Osborne’s 1952 The Entertainer, and at the end of the era, Paul Newman as a Texas rancher in the 1963 Hud, “insolent, appetite-ridden, but . . . terribly attractive” as the director Martin Ritt described him.ALMA: Don’t you ever ask?

  HUD :The only question I ever ask any woman is “What time is your husband coming home?”

  In a class of his own was the suave Zachary Scott, with his wavy hair and trim moustache, the arch-heel in Ruthless, Her Kind of Man, and most famously in Michael Curtiz’s 1945 Mildred Pierce, in which Scott played the playboy Monte Beragon, who marries the self-made businesswoman Joan Crawford to keep himself in monogrammed shirts and then has an affair with her spoiled and selfish nineteen-year-old daughter, Veda. After Mildred discovers the affair, Veda tells her that she and Monte are in love and getting married, then later shoots Monte in a fit of rage after he disabuses her about his intentions with quintessential heelishness: “You don’t really think I could be in love with a rotten little tramp like you, do you?”

  Many of those characters would be described as assholes today, but heel and asshole depict their object very differently. Like the phony, the heel is seen only from the outside. He has no internal life that we care about and rarely gives any signs of conscience. He’s indifferent to the pain he inflicts: he’s simply “a cold blooded bastard,” as Patricia Neal describes Paul Newman in Hud. Unlike the asshole, he’s rarely described as insensitive—when you’re dealing with a heel, questions of sensitivity simply don’t come into the picture. Actually the heel doesn’t miss much: “he knows just how to get beneath your skin,” as Dinah Washington put it, which implies an acute sense of what’s going on in a woman’s mind. But that understanding doesn’t lead to empathy, nor do we expect it to. The heel may or may not perceive what a woman is feeling, but he doesn’t give a damn about it one way or the other.

  The heel’s stock in trade is to betray a woman’s trust, by being unfaithful or by simulating affection for mercenary reasons. His sexual power puts women at his mercy even though they “know that he’s a phony”—an effect that was definitively described by Lorenz Hart in the racy original lyrics to “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” which was written for the 1940 stage version of Pal Joey to be sung by Vera Simpson, the jaded wealthy socialite infatuated with the low-rent entertainer Joey Evans:Men are not a new sensation;

  I’ve done pretty well, I think.

  But his half-pint imitation

  Put me on the blink . . .

  In the face of the heel’s sexual allure, even a strong woman like Mildred Pierce or Vera Simpson is helpless. Those disparities in sexual power animated a whole constellation of dramatis personae in this period, such as the vamp or siren, the tramp, and particularly the sap, who was the heel’s opposite and sometimes foil, as either the cuckold or the victim (I think of Edward G. Robinson in Frit
z Lang’s Scarlet Street as a uxorious husband brought to ruin by Joan Bennett and her heel boyfriend, Dan Duryea). Indeed, the disparities didn’t always favor the man, though the victims of the heel and the vamp were depicted differently. The sap demonstrated an unmanly weakness in allowing himself to be manipulated by a woman’s wiles, whereas the woman who yielded to the heel’s attractions, while not exactly blameless, wasn’t acting counter to her feminine nature—the sap had no female equivalent.

  Men have never ceased doing the things that had earned them the label of heels, of course, but cultural depictions have changed. The noirish heel played by Zachary Scott or by Dan Duryea has been replaced by the slightly ridiculous ass-man of teen comedies, like Matt Damon in the 2004 Eurotrip or Ben Affleck as Shannon Hamilton in Kevin Smith’s 1995 Mall Rats: SHANNON HAMILTON: You see, I like to pick up girls on the rebound from a disappointing relationship. They’re much more in need of solace and they’re fairly open to suggestion. And, I use that to fuck them someplace very uncomfortable.

  BRODIE: What, like the back of a Volkswagen?

  And the rotter of sophisticated mid-century show tunes survives musically only in retro country songs like Carrie Underwood’s “Cowboy Casanova”:He’s like a curse; he’s like a drug,