Oct. 26th, 2021 07:15 pm
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dogpackО да, Боб Форд хорош почти как талантливый мистер Рипли. Я всегда угорал от того, что сперва он подкатывает к старшему брату Джесси Джеймса с достаточно провоцирующими словами "let me be your sidekick tonight", а когда брат посылает его нахуй за крипотность, плетется к младшему. И вот младший... младшему, видимо, трудно устоять перед соблазном иметь такого самого преданного фаната. Или он находит Боба занимательным, не знаю.
Underscoring the performative aspect of gendered identity, Bob Ford performs bizarrely feminine counterpoints to Jesse’s performances of dominance and heteromasculinity. And if anything, Bob’s performances seem to be even more intentionally performances. When he introduces himself to his idol, Jesse, for the first time, he describes himself as a violence «virgin» (13). Later in the same conversation he makes a sex joke about castration (16). He thus rhetorically strips masculinity or sexual maturity from himself as he introduces himself to Jesse. In other instances, the narrator describes Bob in feminine terms. In his first train robbery, Bob slides down the embankment like a «girl in petticoats» (18). At the end of the novel, he is arrested and calls his father to ask for bail money, and his father insults him by calling him a girl (244). The significance of Bob’s performances of femininity—both those that are imposed by others or the narrator, and those performances he himself apes—lie in his relationship with Jesse.
The homosocial desire Bob expresses in his relationship with Jesse is underscored numerous times throughout the novel. When Bob begins to hang out around the James family more frequently, he imposes himself into their familial routine; shortly afterward, he is watching Zee as she cooks and he looks at her «spitefully» (74). He later fantasizes about being made part of the family (74, 80). As their relationship develops, both Bob and Jesse play at the binary gendered performances of their relationship. Jesse massages Bob’s shoulders sensually while planning the last (and destined to remain uncompleted) robbery with him. The sensuality of the scene is undercut by Jesse’s miming slitting Bob’s throat to illustrate a point (189). Shortly after that scene, Bob lies in Jesse and Zee’s marital bed. He imagines that he is in Jesse’s role, and then that he is in Jesse’s body, and imagines having intercourse with Zee. He touches himself with his fingers, imprinting Jesse’s scars onto his own body, and then imagines being dead—shot, as he intends to shoot and kill Jesse (200). The novel thus poses and answers the question about Jesse’s and Bob’s gendered performances. In the novel, Bob plays at feminine performance when he is with Jesse, encouraging Jesse’s performances of masculinity, in order to dramatize the relegated roles of the outlaw Western: Jesse as hero leaves Bob with few role options, save the roles of emasculated sidekick, virginal damsel, or the villain. Yet these roles are as artificial, as performative, as are Jesse’s performances of heroism.
The psychological complexity granted to the novel’s main characters thus exposes the artificiality of the constructed «hero» status for celebrity outlaws. It also suggests the novel’s underlying critique of the cause and function of the celebrity outlaw subgenre of the Western. When Jesse asks Bob Ford in some confusion, «‘I can’t figure it out: do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?’» (146), readers may share that confusion. Yet that confusion is precisely the novel’s point: because Jesse’s performance of celebrity outlaw status is so performed, that is, so constructed, he demonstrates the danger of that very status. Bob’s desire to be a celebrity like Jesse, to achieve that level of fame, is so great that he must become Jesse, or attempt to do so. Yet in becoming Jesse, he destroys the man and fails to embody the symbolic status himself. Bob’s failure, however, is not because he is «less than» Jesse; his failure is symptomatic rather than causal. At the end of the novel, Bob Ford is himself assassinated for precisely the same reasons that he killed Jesse: Deputy Sheriff Edward O. Kelly shoots Bob out of «a vague longing for glory and a generalized wish for revenge [against Bob for killing Jesse]» (302). The glorification of violent men in the celebrity outlaw subgenre thus turns on itself like an insatiable ouroboros.
In the character of Jesse James, the novel’s narrator initially sketches a vague allusion of a Christ-figure, complete with portentous narrative arc and a betraying acolyte. But this is a Christ who exists not just in the material world but is an actual part of it, a symptom of his own environment. The novel’s warning is sounded here: Bob’s transformation into a version of the man he destroys is a transformation played out in endless cycles, both on the stage and then in real life as he is himself assassinated. The world that hallows men of bloodshed is a world defined by its endlessly repeating cycles of bloodshed.
Underscoring the performative aspect of gendered identity, Bob Ford performs bizarrely feminine counterpoints to Jesse’s performances of dominance and heteromasculinity. And if anything, Bob’s performances seem to be even more intentionally performances. When he introduces himself to his idol, Jesse, for the first time, he describes himself as a violence «virgin» (13). Later in the same conversation he makes a sex joke about castration (16). He thus rhetorically strips masculinity or sexual maturity from himself as he introduces himself to Jesse. In other instances, the narrator describes Bob in feminine terms. In his first train robbery, Bob slides down the embankment like a «girl in petticoats» (18). At the end of the novel, he is arrested and calls his father to ask for bail money, and his father insults him by calling him a girl (244). The significance of Bob’s performances of femininity—both those that are imposed by others or the narrator, and those performances he himself apes—lie in his relationship with Jesse.
The homosocial desire Bob expresses in his relationship with Jesse is underscored numerous times throughout the novel. When Bob begins to hang out around the James family more frequently, he imposes himself into their familial routine; shortly afterward, he is watching Zee as she cooks and he looks at her «spitefully» (74). He later fantasizes about being made part of the family (74, 80). As their relationship develops, both Bob and Jesse play at the binary gendered performances of their relationship. Jesse massages Bob’s shoulders sensually while planning the last (and destined to remain uncompleted) robbery with him. The sensuality of the scene is undercut by Jesse’s miming slitting Bob’s throat to illustrate a point (189). Shortly after that scene, Bob lies in Jesse and Zee’s marital bed. He imagines that he is in Jesse’s role, and then that he is in Jesse’s body, and imagines having intercourse with Zee. He touches himself with his fingers, imprinting Jesse’s scars onto his own body, and then imagines being dead—shot, as he intends to shoot and kill Jesse (200). The novel thus poses and answers the question about Jesse’s and Bob’s gendered performances. In the novel, Bob plays at feminine performance when he is with Jesse, encouraging Jesse’s performances of masculinity, in order to dramatize the relegated roles of the outlaw Western: Jesse as hero leaves Bob with few role options, save the roles of emasculated sidekick, virginal damsel, or the villain. Yet these roles are as artificial, as performative, as are Jesse’s performances of heroism.
The psychological complexity granted to the novel’s main characters thus exposes the artificiality of the constructed «hero» status for celebrity outlaws. It also suggests the novel’s underlying critique of the cause and function of the celebrity outlaw subgenre of the Western. When Jesse asks Bob Ford in some confusion, «‘I can’t figure it out: do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?’» (146), readers may share that confusion. Yet that confusion is precisely the novel’s point: because Jesse’s performance of celebrity outlaw status is so performed, that is, so constructed, he demonstrates the danger of that very status. Bob’s desire to be a celebrity like Jesse, to achieve that level of fame, is so great that he must become Jesse, or attempt to do so. Yet in becoming Jesse, he destroys the man and fails to embody the symbolic status himself. Bob’s failure, however, is not because he is «less than» Jesse; his failure is symptomatic rather than causal. At the end of the novel, Bob Ford is himself assassinated for precisely the same reasons that he killed Jesse: Deputy Sheriff Edward O. Kelly shoots Bob out of «a vague longing for glory and a generalized wish for revenge [against Bob for killing Jesse]» (302). The glorification of violent men in the celebrity outlaw subgenre thus turns on itself like an insatiable ouroboros.
In the character of Jesse James, the novel’s narrator initially sketches a vague allusion of a Christ-figure, complete with portentous narrative arc and a betraying acolyte. But this is a Christ who exists not just in the material world but is an actual part of it, a symptom of his own environment. The novel’s warning is sounded here: Bob’s transformation into a version of the man he destroys is a transformation played out in endless cycles, both on the stage and then in real life as he is himself assassinated. The world that hallows men of bloodshed is a world defined by its endlessly repeating cycles of bloodshed.
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Кстати, читаю книгу, а в ней как раз братья Форд приехали в Нью-Йорк давать представления и как развратились там в атмосфере декадентства! Бедные сельские мальчики.
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