The Strange One (1957) +

Note doodle executed during screening of film, 10.23.10.
Permanent ink on cotton bond paper, roughly 8.5" x 11".
Click to enlarge.

A controversial hazing incident instigates this fraught exploration of power, privilege and masculinity a Southern military college in the 1950s. With Ben Gazzara in the central role, the dialogue-driven film (adapted from a play END AS A MAN) is redolent with the neo-Freudian erotic subtext that so delighted denizens of the Actor's Studio. The film, most simply, offers a portrait of a dormitory bully with the unlikely name of Jocko De Paris.

Gazzara's Jocko is the bully who rules the school right under the noses of the actual military folk running the place (which is clearly modeled on The Citadel). He's basically Mary Tilford in college ROTC garb. The machinations of the plot are fairly simple. In the earliest scenes, Jocko stages an elaborate scene -- involving alcohol, gambling, and a fight -- all to implicate two vulnerable first year cadets in his actual vengeance scheme of getting the Major's son expelled from the academy. It's a complicated ruse, and the first third of the piece is devoted to unraveling Jocko's actual intentions (and also revealing how he staged the ruse to incriminate everyone but himself). The remainder of the piece follows one of the recruits as he struggles to reconcile what he's done with what he incrementally understands about Jocko, which all leads toward the requisite humiliation scene, wherein Jocko's own scheming machine mobilizes against him and ousts him from the academy. The piece is interesting to me for a three main reasons. First, the reason I got the dvd in the first place, is that Jocko De Paris and the boys-school hazing scenario is fraught with not especially oblique late1950s homoeroticism. Second, the film offers a really interesting pivot in the popular understanding of youth criminality/misbehavior, especially vis a vis the Red Scare. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the film really displays what was compelling about the American method, via Ben Gazzara's extraordinary performance as Jocko. They all blend together in some ways but I'll try to take them in turn.

First, the homoeroticism is WILD. There's an incredible secondary character Perrin "Cockroach" McKee, played here by Paul A Richman. Richman's Cockroach is a simpering sissy -- a self-proclaimed "creative writer" who worships Gazzara's Jocko and professes to using Jocko as the model for the hero of his own novel "Nightboy."

Jocko and Cockroach sustain a fraught flirtation, with Gazzara's Jocko realizing that Cockroach can bring him down. (Cockroach follows him and knows everything Jocko's done. Moreover, Cockroach has little allegiance to the institution that berates and belittles and excludes him at every turn.) Gazzara's Jocko strings Cockroach along, in part to cover his bases but also, it seems clear, because he actually enjoys being worshiped even/especially by someone he holds in contempt. It's a fascinating dynamic, nearly apologetic in its twisted sadomasochistic dimensions.

Richman's Cockroach is, quite simply, played as a simpering fag but -- strangely -- he's also depicted as somewhat strong, clear and confident in his identification as an outsider. He craves an intimate relationship with Jocko ("All I want is to have your confidence and your friendship") but he's also queerly confident as an outsider. Richman's performance is at times cringe-inducing, but there's an authenticity within the character and characterization that I found surprising.

THE STRANGE ONE's Cockroach is not that different than GLEE's Kurt Hummel or WEST SIDE STORY's Anybodys. The role is punctuated by humiliations but there's a resilience and an autonomy that I found curiously compelling in the character, which I did not suspect. I also did not expect the play to be so much like all the other "teen fabulist" stories I talked about in my Modern Drama article. I am relieved that this piece is set in a college setting, else I might have been anxious that i did not know to include it in the essay, but thankfully these guys are college age and therefore outside the perameters I set for my teen fabulists. But the story operates on many of the same levels, so typical of homsex stories in the McCarthy era, in that it pursues the knowability of truth and the ease with which malevolent figures can twist the truth of even the most transparently noble and worthy characters. The whole dramatic scenario is impelled by someone being cruelly punished for doing the right thing. What becomes interesting, though, is how this piece ends up moving toward a grassroots/vigilante reprisal against Jocko and how the narrative endorses the overthrow of Jocko as tyrant (notably by revealing Jocko's cowardice in a faux-lynching scene). The piece is really interested in conspiracy and that fascination shifts the register both of what Jocko's abuse means and what his extralegal expulsion from the community accomplishes. It's a really wacked out meditation on the operation of social power. Finally, Ben Gazzara. He is such an emblematic example of the possibilities and the limits of the American method. Gazzara's performance as Jocko is indelible and charsimatic, utterly believable and utterly captivating. Yet its also a cipher. Basically, what I learned about the method from Gazzara's performance is that it's not actually about revealing the character's motives at all. Rather those motives become the wave upon which the character -- as a compelling presence BEING in the moment -- rides through the script. I have no idea WHO Gazzara's Jocko is but I get an absolutely clear sense THAT Jocko is WHAT he is. Basically, the technique that Gazzara and Brando distilled in ways better than anyone invites us to be fascinated with these extraordinary creatures. Not characters we are to understand, but creatures we are to experience. And Gazzara is brilliant at that here, even though his work tells me little about Jocko's motives. I don't understand Jocko much at all but I do get an extraordinary experience OF Jocko from Gazzara's experience. I wish I could explain this more precisely but that's what I've got. Gazzara's utterly fascinating here, but I still don't think he's an especially interesting actor.

And that's the limit of the Method -- it's often fascinating but often less than satisfying, from an audience's point of view. (A quick aside: one of the devices the film uses to amplify Jocko's difference is to remind us that he's Italian which as it goes and goes serves to remind us that he's not normatively masculine, that his masculinity is not the sort of masculinity celebrated in the military traditions guiding this academy. This racialization of Gazzara's character is amplified by the piece's ending wherein, after leading him to believe that he's being "lynched" in a way, the vigilantes deposit him in the "colored" car of a passing train so that he might leave the community. Thoughout the film, there are incongruous moments when the absurdities of the military man-boys behavior is observed bemusedly by black women and children. And the film punctuates the fact of Jocko's expulsion from the fraternity of the school by having him "come to" in front of an older black woman who looks at him with a banal blank expression. This moment seems to underscore his expulsion from white normative masculine privilege in a particularly unsubtle way. All told, THE STRANGE ONE is indeed a strange one, but one that remains utterly fascinating as a document of all kinds of cultural and aesthetic trends on stage and screen in the 1950s. I sorta already love it and am so glad (after holding a netflix copy of it hostage for more than a year) that I finally forced myself to watch it.