This post was inspired by the release of
My Super Ex-Girlfriend starring Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman. No, I haven't seen the movie, Nor do I plan to see it. But on my last outing to the movies, I was subjected to the preview of this dreck. The plot is boy meets girl, Boy breaks up with girl. Boy discovers girl is a superhero with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal girlfriends. Then she uses her powers to harass her ex-boyfriend. The inspirational moment in the preview was a scene of the superheroine flinging a Great White Shark into his apartment after discovering him in bed with another woman.
"Oh," I thought midway through the flight of the shark, "It's another vagina dentatus."
Vagina Dentatus is a psychological/literay term for the symbolic fear of immasculation. It literally mean "vagina with teeth." "Vagina" is Latin for "sheath," and was a common word as well as slang term for female anatomy. Thus, every Roman soldier had a vagina. Sorry, old Classicist joke... The idea for the vagina dentatus image is self-explanatory. It is a symbol of castration and immasculation; a manifestation of the male adolescent fear of women and the sexual act. Like most psycho-literary devices, it is best used as a subtle symbol. The maelstrom Scylla in
The Odyssey, which employs a running sub-plot of the tempatations of infidelity, is a subtle use of the image. Even the shark in
Jaws evokes the vagina dentatus as one of the many primordial fears it evokes.
Super Women flinging a Great Whites into the hot bed of an ex-lover is hardly subtle.
Perhaps the greatest movie exploring the vagina dentatus theme is
Predator. Yes, I'm serious.
On the surface, predator is the story of a commando team sent on a jungle rescue mission. After they complete their raid, they are hunted by a mysterious warrior who turns out to be an extraterrestrial big game hunter. Clearly it is an update of the short story "The Most Dabgerous Game" or perhaps
Beowulf.
Yeah, it's that too. But with a sexual horror subtext.
Our commando team are all buff, macho men belonging to an exclusive fraternity of men. They are all warrior archetypes, the quintessential masculine role. Among them are various sub-types: the mystic, the nerd, the leader, the rivel, the stoic, the braggart. We are given an initial view of them being very good at what they do, so long as they stay within their all-male world.
At the camp, in the aftermath of their scorched earth attack, they encounter a woman guerilla. They capture her ostensibly for her intelligence value, but we are never given any evidence that she knows anything of value, and they make no serious attempt to question her. But it is only after this woman is taken -- by force -- into the male group that trouble plagues the team.
There are three quick scenes after the woman's capture that mark the transition to the bulk of the story. in one scene, two commandos share a bawdy joke, tellingly the punchline of the joke is about female sexual anatomy. In the next scene, two commandos have a tense moment in which one believes for a split second he is about to be stabbed from behind-- a symbolically (homo-)sexual attack. Instead, one commando is killing a scorpion which had crawled onto the second commando. The scorpion is important, because as the commandos fade into the jungle, it provides an important image for the final transition scene.
This third trasition is the first time we encounter the monster, although we view the scene through the monster's heat-vision. The monster comes down into the devastated camp, replaying snippets of the overheard conversations. The monster then picks-up the dying scorpion. The monster's heat-vision, the outline of the scorpion resembles an x-ray view of a uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries and we watch it grow cold and black right in front of our eyes.
The first commando to die is the Geek. This is the one we would expect to be most vulnerable to a predatory female power. He is killed while chasing after the woman in an escape attempt. The next commando to die is the braggart, who carries the largest and most potent weapon (i.e. phallic symbol) in the squad. During this encounter, the monster is briefly seen, and the commandos manage to wound it while unleashing an otherwise futile "mad minute" of firepower.
The only person to realize the monster is wounded is the woman. She links herself to the monster by touching its strange blood trail, then wiping it on her pants. This act calls to mind the menstrual cycle.
Basically, the team is killed off one-by-one. They bring all their manly skills to the problem but nothing works. Big guns and knives come into play for more phallic imagery, but still the monster beats them. During a lull in this action, the woman reveals she knows something about the monster. Local legend recognizes the hunters as "the demon who makes trophies of men." This links the woman even closer to the monster, and even specifies the threat as being aimed at men.
Really, the last crucial thematic moment comes near the end of the movie and caps all that came before. The leader is alone in fighting the monster in primitive, hand-to-hand combat. The monster doffs the helmet/mask it has been hiding behind and reveals its most intimate self to the leader. The face is pale, the eyes are so small as to be inconsequential. The most prominent feature is its hideous, slash-like mouth -- it resembles nothing som much as a vagina with pointy teeth and grasping claws that pull things in and do not let go. The leader's words are classic and sexually charged: "You're one, ugly motherf*cker."
The leader, of course wins. Which could be viewed as the eventual triumph of mature masculinity over the adolescent fear of the sexual -- or it might be simple Hollywood storytelling. Regardless, Predator uses the vagina dentatus as the organizing principle. This is a fight between sexual roles and fears.
I know -- assuming you've read this far. You're thinkig there is no way this was intentional. You're probably right. But that is why it works. They couldn't set out to make a movie about the vagina dentatus and make it half as well. In fact, one of the reasons this theme pulls together so well is the design of the monster's face. In fact, the monster design wasn't finalized until near the end of shooting. The now familiar Predator monster was a compromise the production team was originally unhappy with.
Another clue that Hollywood didn't realize what it made is that the Predator monster -- which is objectively sexless -- became a masculine symbol of warrior power (exactly what it fought and mocked) in future incarnations. The last movie even pitted the masculine power symbol Predators against the feminine power symbol Aliens (which are an embodiment of a nightmare vision preganacy, birth, motherhood and family in the sickest of ways).
Jay Gluck was a young man trying to make a living as a writer and photographer in Post-World War II Japan. He sold an article on the exotic fighting art of Karate to True magazine and started looking for another equally exciting subject for men's magazines.
