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Masculine Interests First Edition. Edition Robert Lang
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Robert Lang
ISBN(s): 9780231505437, 0231505434
Edition: First edition.
File Details: PDF, 5.20 MB
Year: 2002
Language: english
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page i

MASCULINE
INTERESTS

f i l m a n d c u lt u r e
john belton, editor
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page ii

f i l m a n d c u lt u r e
A series of Columbia University Press
Edited by John Belton

What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic
Henry Jenkins

Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle

Martin Rubin

Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II

Thomas Doherty

Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy

William Paul

Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s

Ed Sikov

Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Rey Chow

The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman
Susan M. White

Black Women as Cultural Readers

Jacqueline Bobo

Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film

Darrell William Davis
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page iii

Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema
Rhona J. Berenstein

This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age

Gaylyn Studlar

Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond

Robin Wood

The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music

Jeff Smith

Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture

Michael Anderegg

Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934

Thomas Doherty

Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity

James Lastra

Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts

Ben Singer

Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture

Alison Griffiths

Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies

Louis Pizzitola

Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder

Michele Pierson
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page iv

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Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page v

MASCULINE
INTERESTS

HOMOEROTICS IN
H O L LY W O O D F I L M

robert lang

columbia
universit y
press
new york
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page vi

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lang, Robert, 1957–

Masculine interests : homoerotics in Hollywood film / Robert Lang.
p. cm.—(Film and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Masculine interests—Oedipus in Africa: The lion king—To “have known
ectasy”: hunting men in The most dangerous game—Friendship and its discontents:
The outlaw—Looking for the “great whatsit”: Kiss me deadly and film noir—
Midnight cowboy’s backstory—Innerspace—Batman and Robin—My own private
Idaho and the new new queer road movies—“The things we think and do not say”:
Jerry Maguire and the business of personal relationships.
ISBN 0-231-11300-5 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-231-11301-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Homosexuality in motion pictures 2. Men in motion pictures. I. Title. II. Series.

PN1995.9.H55 L37 2002

791.43'653—dc21
2002024705

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Credits: Portions of this book have appeared in different form in the following publica-
tions: The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge, 1997); Perspectives on Film Noir (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1996); American Imago 52.2 (Summer 1995); American Imago 47.3–4 (Fall-
Winter 1990); and Cinema Journal 27.3 (Spring 1988). The illustrations on pages 92, 103, 108,
115, 129, 131, 135, 136, 141, 145, 148, 152, 178, 196, 201, 270, and 290 courtesy of Photofest (New
York). All other illustrations are from the author’s collection.
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page vii

To my brother, Gordon
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page viii

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Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page ix

CONTENTS

preface xi

1. Masculine Interests 1

2. Oedipus in Africa: The Lion King 14

3. To “Have Known Ecstasy”:

Hunting Men in The Most Dangerous Game 52

4. Friendship and Its Discontents: The Outlaw 80

5. Looking for the “Great Whatsit”: Kiss Me Deadly and Film Noir 121

6. Midnight Cowboy’s Backstory 140

7. Innerspace: A Spectacular Voyage to the Heart of Identity 180

8. Batman and Robin: A Family Romance 206

9. My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road Movies 243

10. “The Things We Think and Do Not Say”:

Jerry Maguire and the Business of Personal Relationships 263

Concerning Happiness: An Afterword 303

notes 307
bibliography 353
index 369
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page x

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Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page xi

P R E FA C E

Those of us who are born male must at some point early in our lives start fig-
uring out what it means to be male. Although we are inscribed within cul-
ture from birth, and there is the question of the roles played by genetics and
biology, there is a sense in which we also make choices about how to inhab-
it our maleness. To become gendered, as one of the first requirements of be-
coming socialized, we both consciously and unconsciously learn the codes of
masculinity available to us—by observing Mom and Dad, brothers and sis-
ters, friends, strangers on the street, teachers, magazine advertising, televi-
sion, movies, and so on.
For a long time, after the advent of cinema as a mass form of entertain-
ment, movies played a significant role in the shaping of masculine behavior
and identity in American culture. They still do, even though television has
taken over as the dominant medium through which masculine subjectivities
are forged in the United States and the industrialized countries of the West.
The American feature film nevertheless remains, directly or indirectly, one of
the most powerful producers of images of what it means to be a man in late
capitalist society. The implications of this fact are central to the themes of
this book, in which I examine some contemporary masculinities in a hand-
ful of American genre films.
I begin with the uncontroversial observation that a mass cultural artifact
like the American genre film (particularly with its excessive sexual stereotyp-
ing) can tell us a great deal about the ideological underpinnings of the soci-
ety which produces (me as) a masculine subject, and I have chosen my films
for analysis accordingly. To be(come) a man involves looking at other men,
seeing them in dramatic, narrative contexts, identifying with them—which is
why I limit my investigation to films in which a male-male relationship is
central in the construction of a masculine identity. Although I look at movies
from almost every decade of the cinema, this is not a survey or history of the
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page xii

xii preface

American sound film nor even a study of American film genres, but a set of
critical essays in which I consider masculinity in social and psychoanalytic
terms as an ideological-generic construction, and explore some of the ways
in which men engender men. The constraints imposed by my methods of
psycho/textual analysis notwithstanding, there are many genres (and literal-
ly hundreds of films) I wish could have been included, and which the reader
could easily argue might have been better suited to the book’s purpose. In
the end, however, I have been guided by my desire, and my habit of queer
reading, to discover how Hollywood—insofar as it positions the spectator—
owns up to some contradictory dissatisfactions with the norms of masculin-
ity implied by its representations, particularly in those genres and films that
privilege the troublesome terrain represented by male-male relationships.1
Among the many people who have given me help during the writing of
this book I particularly acknowledge my gratitude to the following: Richard
Allen, Nemanja Bala, Marta Balletbò-Coll, Jennifer Barager, Maher Ben
Moussa, Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Sherry Buckberrough, Ellen Carey,
David Chenkin, Candace Clements, Steve Cohan, Paul Dambowic, David
Galef, Roy Grundmann, Julian Halliday, Ina Rae Hark, Cora Harris, Sumiko
Higashi, Henry Jenkins, Ann Kaplan, Alex Keller, George Lechner, Peter
Lehman, Mark Lilly, Susan LoBello, Greg Martino, Paula Massood, Laurent
Odde, Fred Pfeil, Tony Pipolo, Dana Polan, Jean Prescott, Susannah Rad-
stone, Peggy Roalf, Phil Rosen, Ed Sikov, Charles Silver, Candace Skorupa,
Bill Stull, Marge Sullivan, Roy Thomas (my superb manuscript editor), Ran-
dolph Trumbach, Kitty Tynan, Michael Walsh, Tom Waugh, Estela Well-
don, and Patrick Woodcock.
I thank my wonderful and wise publisher at Columbia University Press,
Jennifer Crewe, who knew how to get a manuscript out of me without seem-
ing to apply the slightest pressure. And for his confidence in the project, I
sincerely thank John Belton, editor of the Film and Culture series at Colum-
bia. I feel it an honor to be included in the series and am grateful to have re-
ceived encouragement and good counsel from him at several crucial stages
during the writing of the book.
To my family, scattered across three continents—June and Vic, Lesli-
Sharon, Alison, and Helen—I offer my love. Finally, my profoundest grati-
tude to Paul Scovill, whose love and understanding make it all possible.
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page xiii

MASCULINE
INTERESTS
Lang-FM 7/17/02 3:36 PM Page xiv

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Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 1

1
MASCULINE INTERESTS

In his memoir Screening History, Gore Vidal describes his childhood desire to
be a twin, which he remembers experiencing when he watched The Prince and
the Pauper for the first time.1 The prince and the pauper were played by Billy
and Bobby Mauch, identical twins who were the same age as Vidal, twelve: “I
thought [they] were cute as a pair of bug’s ears, and I wished I were either one
of them, one of them, mind you. I certainly did not want to be two of me.”2
Although an only child, Vidal was not a lonely one; rather, he was solitary,
wanting no company at all other than books and movies, and his own imag-
ination. Vidal notes that the star of the film was Errol Flynn, a swashbuckling
actor at the height of his beauty, and that although Flynn “is charming as an
ideal older brother,” Vidal had completely forgotten that he was in the movie:
“Plainly, I didn’t want an older brother. I was fixated on the twins themselves.
On the changing of clothes, and the reversal of roles” (25).
Vidal goes on to comment that this desire to be a twin does not seem to
him to be narcissistic in the vulgar sense: “After all, one is oneself; and the
other other. It is the sort of likeness that makes for wholeness, and is not that
search for likeness, that desire and pursuit of the whole—as Plato has Aristo-
phanes remark—that is the basis of all love?” (24). Elsewhere in his memoir,
Vidal reveals that as a boy he had for a fleeting moment once been a news-
reel personage, but what he really wanted to be was a movie star: “specifical-
ly, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney, and to play Puck, as he had done in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. . . . He was my role model, though he must have
been all of fourteen when I was only ten.”3
Much in these recollections and in Vidal’s assessment of their significance
is relevant to the themes of this book. And in case the reader objects that
Gore Vidal is a famously singular case and not emblematic of the norms of
masculine identity formation against which I read the films discussed in the
following pages, I hasten to point out that I might just as appropriately have
Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 2

2 masculine interests

begun my investigation with the example of Chuck Norris, who watched

John Wayne movies as a child and dreamed of becoming a screen hero such
as Wayne.4
Here we have the basic elements of what I call masculine interest—a male
interest in what it means to be male; an interest in masculinity—accom-
plished through looking at another male, in an act of identification.5 Vidal’s
remarks reveal that among the reasons people watch movies is the opportu-
nity the experience offers to observe and evaluate the possibilities of how to
“be” masculine or feminine. But he also insists that one enters the movie the-
ater as an already constituted ego (“After all, one is oneself; and the other
other”). Mickey Rooney/Puck may have been his “role model,” and the
Mauch twins were quite understandably objects of erotic identification, but
Vidal’s desire remains radically free—free to pursue the whole, wherever it
may take him.
While there is something to be said for the cinema’s powerfully reassur-
ing ability to confirm or encode the viewer’s sense of self, it must also be rec-
ognized that the conscious ego, which is formed mimetically (via models),
can be the enemy of desire, which is formed unconsciously. One of my chief
aims in writing this book is to put into play a number of analytical tools to
help the reader experience Hollywood cinema not only as a means of devel-
oping the ego self-consciously or critically through a series of imaginary
identifications or “role models”—if only to learn from the movies how to
perform gendered identities that are at least not misogynist or homopho-
bic—but as a means of achieving what Tim Dean calls “maximum subjective
and sexual freedom.”6 To the extent that this is possible, we need to under-
stand desire and sexuality both in terms of the unconscious and as a (self-)
conscious play within the symbolic—not, for example, in dominant culture’s
polarizing terms of gay or straight identities. Like the boy who wanted no
company at all other than books and movies and his own imagination,7 I be-
lieve in the power and value of fantasy, in the productive sense in which the
spectator constructs and is constituted by fantasy as the mise-en-scène of de-
sire.8 By becoming active, cinematically literate viewers, we can better equip
ourselves to create the conditions in which we might find happiness. If, like
Vidal, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to
the movies, I might analyze and tap into that desire, for desire is the uncon-
scious of all social productions and is behind every investment of time and
interest and capital, and vice versa.9 I am motivated first by the radical in-
sight of psychoanalysis, elaborated by Lacan, that desire springs from the re-
lation between language and one’s own body. As Dean puts it:
Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 3

masculine interests 3

One desires what he or she does not have, and the loss that initiates de-
sire involves not gender (or the imaginary other) but something more
fundamental, namely, the way language (what Lacan calls the symbol-
ic Other) violates bodily integrity, thereby thwarting the sense of bod-
ily wholeness conferred by the ego, one’s sense of self. Although the
capture of the human body by culture’s symbolic networks functions
differently for different subjects, in all cases that symbolic impact en-
tails a disembodiment that no amount of theory or activism can re-
store. Yet it is also this disembodiment that creates desire.10

This representation of desire as grounded in loss need not be viewed as

tragic; rather, the contrary. As Dean implies, every subject’s relation to the
symbolic order is different, and that matrix of identification, desire, and the
Law in which subjectivity is forged is an infinitely flexible structure. To par-
ticipate actively in the dialectic of embodiment and disembodiment that
creates desire is but a question of learning the language—and using it with
imagination. What follows, then, are readings of some of those models for
identification offered to us by the cinema which I hope will challenge the
notion that sexuality—and the “masculinity” which gives that sexuality a
discursive identity—is a regime involving notions of adaptation, maturity,
and cure.
The title of this book was suggested by a reiterated phrase in Henning
Bech’s original and stimulating work about homosexuality and modernity,
When Men Meet: “the interest between men in what men can do with one an-
other.”11 In a chapter titled “Absent Homosexuality,” Bech writes that
“being or wanting to be a man implies an interested relation from man to
man. This male interest includes the pleasures of mirroring and comparing,
as well as of companionship and apprenticeship. . . . The interest between
men in what men can do with one another is a specification of this” (44; em-
phasis in original). Although Bech quite rightly insists that male homosex-
ual attraction is intimately and inextricably entwined with attraction to
masculinity, he is at pains—as I should be—not to imply that “the social re-
lations inherent in the wish to be a man and in the experience of being a
man [are] at bottom ‘homosexual’ relations” (54–55). Indeed Bech is inter-
ested in the specificity of these relations, their unique and distinctive char-
acter: “But the connections between wish, longing, body, male images, to-
getherness, sharing, security, excitement, equality and difference in relation
to other men which are intrinsic to identification make it impossible to keep
it apart from eroticism” (55). It is precisely this eroticism that is narrativized
Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 4

4 masculine interests

as a problematic in each of the films I discuss, where the male-male eroti-

cism as a symbolically fraught aspect of relations between men in our cul-
ture is given a generic articulation.
As “systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that circulate
between industry, text, and subject,”12 cinematic genres offer the critic a
uniquely accessible approach to a large and complicated object of study. And
as Frank Krutnik observes, they function as “intertextual systems which as-
sert a forceful pressure upon the channels and the limits of readability”13—
which is also how ideology operates generally, to persuade the subject that in
the matter of masculine identity formation, for example, there is some vari-
ety and choice, but there are also norms to be respected.
Genres, however, are never “pure,” a fact we seem to have become more
conscious of since the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the late
1950s.14 The idea of genre, and the paradoxes of genre-mixing, are central to
the controlling thesis of this book—that masculinity itself is a genre forma-
tion. Gender, like genre, is a performative accomplishment. As Judith Butler
puts it in Gender Trouble, “the various acts of gender create the idea of gen-
der.”15 Just as a film genre has no content until a number of genre films ren-
der it visible, gender, we may say, echoing Butler, is “an identity tenuously
constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repeti-
tion of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the
body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily
gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an
abiding gendered self.”16 And so it is that we recognize types of masculinity;
but as soon as we come closer, to identify the type, we find a surprising de-
gree of contradiction in our model of the genre of masculinity it supposedly
represents. Gender, thus, as a regulatory, cultural fiction, is a norm that can
never be fully internalized. In Butler’s phrase: “gender norms are finally
phantasmatic, impossible to embody.”17
This paradox notwithstanding, I have chosen the self-reflexive trope of
men looking at men in some recognizably generic ways as a point of entry for
my exploration of how males become masculine subjects and how that sub-
jectivity is maintained, for it is the subversive potential of the eroticism in-
trinsic to identification (the homoerotic variations of which highlight the
discursive rather than essential character of gender) that engages me in the
first place.
I start with The Lion King because the film proposes itself as a retelling of
an ur-story of how we are all formed within the familial matrix that produces
Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 5

masculine interests 5

and ensures the norms of gender identity. Whether or not the Oedipus com-
plex is universal, The Lion King would have it be so, particularly to the extent
that it encodes the way in which boys become men in patriarchal societies.
The generic power of the oedipal drama is such that Disney’s CEO can call
the film’s story “archetypal” and assume that we (the readers of his autobi-
ography, where he makes this comment, and the tens of millions of people
who saw and enjoyed the movie) will know what he means. The film shows
males (and females) working in the interests of masculinity, with masculini-
ty as a metaphor, or code, that helps to hold in place patriarchal structures
that, among their more baleful effects, keep women and gays in positions of
subordination.
Where the key relationship in The Lion King is between father and son, ac-
knowledged as the productive nexus of the son’s correct identity as a prop-
erly masculine subject, the relationship between the two men in The Most
Dangerous Game, a “classic” jungle-adventure/horror film of the 1930s, is
meant to show what can go wrong when a boy’s identification with his father
is overeroticized and is transformed into a perversion by a trauma of some
kind. Through the metaphor of the hunt, the risk, or temptation—which is
to say, the ever-present possibility—of a perversion of the norm is expressed
by showing a hunter being hunted. Count Zaroff and Bob Rainsford can be
seen as two players in a perverse scenario in which each man’s identification
with the other and the masculinity the other represents is overdetermined,
resulting in a compulsively repeated enactment of a sadomasochistic dialec-
tic. The woman’s presence in the movie is a reminder of a possible earlier at-
tachment (the boy’s love for his mother and/or an ancient memory of pre-
oedipal plenitude) that indirectly helps to explain why the male-male
relationship is surrounded by an aura of dread and desire that usually char-
acterizes incest fantasies.
Unlike the horror film, the western—frequently described as the cinema’s
most “American” genre—might be expected to deliver mainstream images
of masculine norms. More than most, it seems to deal in conservative, icono-
graphically ritualized representations of masculinity, and seeks to articulate
in the western hero a specifically American style of manliness. Robert
Warshow and others have observed that although the westerner lives in a
world of violence (the gun he wears on his thigh tells us this), “really, it is not
violence at all which is the ‘point’ of the western movie, but a certain image
of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence.” Our eyes are
focused, above all, on “the deportment of the hero”: “Watch a child with his
Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 6

6 masculine interests

toy guns and you will see: what most interests him is not (as we so much
fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work out how a man might look
when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero.”18 This invi-
tation to look at the hero, to gaze at him, is offered not only to the film view-
er but to characters within the film—usually other men.
In The Outlaw, the homoeroticism intrinsic to this look is developed by
the narrative in such a way that the nominally heterosexual identity of the
main male characters—usually no more than perfunctorily asserted in the
western, and rarely very persuasively demonstrated—is revealed to be a
function, or effect, of “Civilization” (of which “the woman” in this genre is
a chief representative)—which is to say, of the conscious ego. The woman
(Rio, played by Jane Russell) can offer the hero nothing, not even her sexu-
ality, that he might want or need. She is not a schoolteacher from the East,
who might teach him how to read and write (or dance!),19 or how to behave
in a drawing room. Nor is she proposed as the future mother of his children.
She is, more than is usually so in the western, almost irrelevant to the action
and the film’s deeper meanings: embedded in the film is a nonheterosexual
model of desire which has implications for the genre as a whole, suggesting
that by the 1940s, when The Outlaw was made, it has become possible to pro-
pose the male homosexual as a figure of modernity.
In the film noir detective story, as in few other genres (certain types of hor-
ror film come to mind), a perverse and seductive sexuality dominates the
mise-en-scène. The invariably troubled sexuality of the hero is partly revealed
or explained by his quest, which often involves an obsessive curiosity about
another man. In Kiss Me Deadly, a late film noir from the noir detective
story’s classic period, Mike Hammer’s search for “the great whatsit” leads him
to the mysterious Dr. Soberin and to Carl Evello, the vaguely homosexual
“Mafia King,” by whom he is clearly fascinated. Soberin and Evello are behind
the murder of Christina, the sexy tomboy who makes a fatal pass at Mike at
the beginning of the film. Mike’s interest in Evello is personal, but in his role
as a private investigator he is able to justify it as a professional one, which also
allows him, in effect, to act out fantasies of sadism and tenderness that cannot
be expressed in his uneasy friendship with Pat (who, with apt symbolism, is
an officer of the law), and with Nick, his garage mechanic.
The mark of perversion also dominates the film I discuss in chapter 6,
Midnight Cowboy. Starting with a screenwriters’ term, backstory, I examine
how the film tries to answer its own question of why the protagonist, Joe
Buck, leaves his small town in Texas to become a “cowboy hustler” in New
York City. I focus on the film’s use of flashbacks, which render the unique
Lang-ch01 7/17/02 3:42 PM Page 7

masculine interests 7

complexity of Joe’s point of view, and which are central to the film’s discur-
sive strategy whereby, in effect, Joe tells his “story” in the hope that the view-
er/analyst will help establish the significance of past events as a key to unlock
the meanings of the present situation, which the protagonist himself finds
somewhat baffling.
While flashbacks of one kind or another have long been a part of the cin-
ema’s vocabulary, the use of this technique in Midnight Cowboy turns out to
be metonymic, or emblematic, of the very question that sustains the narra-
tive—the question of where and how to locate the “truth.” For example, we
are given images of Joe being raped by a gang of teenage boys, but we cannot
know, from these images alone—which are presented as Joe’s nightmare—
whether they represent a wish-fulfillment, in the complex manner of dream
distortions, or whether they represent something that really did happen to
Joe, but which is unrepresentable (except as a false memory) because pro-
foundly traumatic; or whether the filmmaker is merely using a cinematic
convention that would render an “explanation” (for Joe’s decision to be-
come a hustler) that is orderly but psychoanalytically false.
The two questions—Whose story is it? and Who is telling the story?—are
precisely ones that must be decided, but which cannot really be answered. If
we say it is Joe who recalls, or fantasizes, this “event,” we must also ac-
knowledge that this story is being told by a filmmaker (who, furthermore, is
not really the sole creator but rather a signifier for the many forces that come
together to make a film). The film is clearly concerned with the question of
the main character’s identity, and understands sexuality to be the mainstay
of identity. But the film does not easily capitulate to those questions that
were important to the gay liberation movement in full swing at the time the
film was made: Is Joe gay? Can we know why some people are gay, and oth-
ers are not? The movie is the first scandalously queer film to come out of
Hollywood, and as such poses questions about sexual-identity formation
that seem more relevant than ever to our own “postmodern” moment in
which some of us have come to see gender as “performative.”
At the height of the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, the kind of self-
consciousness that infects Midnight Cowboy around questions of intimacy be-
tween men becomes increasingly exacerbated in the genre of the buddy film,
and by 1987, with Innerspace, reaches the limit of its own logic as a genre found-
ed on the sublimation of homosexual desire. As a science-fiction comedy and
buddy film about a man who is miniaturized in an experiment and acciden-
tally injected into another man’s body, Innerspace seems pressed to ask (but re-
luctant to answer) the question put by Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the
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8 masculine interests

Closet: “Is men’s desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist
hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent of the threats
against them?”20 The film becomes hysterical in its attempts, on the one hand,
to acknowledge that the homosocial desire which provides the buddy film with
its erotic energies exists in a continuum with homosexuality, while seeking on
the other hand to affirm a determinedly active and heterosexual masculinity
rooted in biology.
Innerspace’s strategies of narration, a giddy mix of comedy, fantasy, paro-
dy, pastiche, allusion, irony, and sentiment, attempt simultaneously to ac-
knowledge and disavow that homosexuality is the issue at the heart of the
film’s meanings. It is an attempt that in many ways recalls the Jerry
Lewis–Dean Martin comedies of the 1950s in which, as Ed Sikov puts it,
“Lewis and Martin play the sexual side of buddyism for dangerous comic ef-
fect, turning a kind of vicarious homosexual panic on the part of audiences
into pleasure by way of nervous laughter.”21 Needless to say, as it comes too
close to openly interpreting the “hom(m)o-sexual”22 laws according to which
the buddy film operates, the cycle of the genre which began in 1969 with Mid-
night Cowboy, Easy Rider, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and flour-
ished in the 1970s with movies like Scarecrow, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and
California Split, more or less comes to an end with Innerspace. Other genres,
or variants of the buddy film, start to emerge, like the queer road movie.23
Throughout the 1980s, the live-action movie based on established cartoon
characters, and movies devoted to the display of the spectacular bodies of
certain male stars, such as Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and
Sylvester Stallone, proliferate on American screens, signaling a desire to en-
gage overtly with contemporary anxieties about how men might behave “as
men,” through parodic performances of muscular masculinity which both
enact and call into question the qualities they embody.24
Among the most publicized movies of this trend have been the Batman
films, starting with the Warner Bros., live-action Batman released in 1989,
which was made to celebrate and cash in on the fiftieth anniversary of the DC
Comics cartoon character created by Bob Kane in 1939.25 One of the reasons
for the enduring and widespread appeal of Batman and his sidekick Robin is
the fact that the two men are clearly fascinated by each other—indeed they
love each other—but never “come out” as gay. For many, Batman’s mystique
is precisely his queerness. He is unquestionably “masculine,” and yet—ac-
cording to popular morality and the laws of desire—his erotic attractiveness
as an embodiment of heroic masculinity must exist in a powerful dialectical
relation to his loneliness, which has its origin in a childhood trauma.
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masculine interests 9

Close examination of Batman’s provenance reveals the character to be a

function of the “family romance,” described by Freud as a (child’s) neurotic
fantasy, in which he frees himself of his parents, so that he might create a
more glamorous story of his origins. In the Batman comics and movies, the
narrator’s fantasy of Bruce Wayne as a rich and handsome man who lives
with his young ward Dick Grayson in an enormous, baronial mansion, and
of how they disguise themselves as Batman and Robin during their crime-
fighting adventures together in Gotham City, can be read as an elaborate
family romance which permits an endless replay of favorite themes, chief
among them being the emotional bond between the older and the younger
man. In the first decades of Dick/Robin’s existence, he is depicted as a boy of
about twelve. Later, he is presented as a college-age teenager, which fre-
quently generates “adult,” homoerotic currents in his relationship with
Bruce/Batman. Contemporary homophobia renders Robin’s presence in the
Batman universe increasingly problematic, and a variety of attempts have
been made in recent years to “heterosexualize” or efface his role.
Whether or not Robin appears in a Batman story, however, the perverse
scenario is always essentially the same: the masked hero “saves” someone in
danger, or must battle the forces of evil which threaten to overwhelm him.
(In psychoanalytic terms, these forces represent the threat of castration,
which are shown to originate in a moment of oedipal trauma.) The domi-
nant ideological reading insists that Batman and Robin are not gay lovers,
because neither of them will, or is able, to make an object-choice that would
resolve his Oedipus complex. And yet . . . they might be lovers—the texts in-
vite other readings. Despite the widespread notion that Batman stories are
made for adolescent males (i.e., for boys experiencing a crisis of identifica-
tion, like the one in which Batman and Robin are permanently inscribed),
these stories can be read as acts of resistance to some of the masculinist and
patriarchal structures they ostensibly celebrate. In this way, precisely—as a
strategy of subversion from within—the Batman-text can function as an in-
spiriting challenge to hetero-patriarchal assumptions about whom we might
choose to love and how we might choose to live.
The serial nature of the Batman narrative, which mobilizes fantasies that
need never be foreclosed by an ending, is inscribed in the structure of the
road movie genre also; and echoing Félix Guattari’s contention that once
there’s marriage, there’s no more desire, no more sexuality, I analyze My
Own Private Idaho as an example of the queer road movie cycle that flour-
ished in the 1990s—a cycle that understands that the opposite of homosexu-
ality is not heterosexuality but marriage. Marriage does not function along a
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10 masculine interests

line of desire, whereas queer (homo)sexuality does. With its “quasi-gay

themes and big stars” (which is how filmmaker Gregg Araki defined its
crossover status), My Own Private Idaho is a watershed film in the (quasi-
mainstream) American cinema for the way in which it deals with the affec-
tive bonds between men, and refuses “marriage” as the telos of its concep-
tion of desire. Like Midnight Cowboy, and like the Batman comics and films,
My Own Private Idaho flirts with the possibility that its protagonists are gay,
but will not, in Amy Taubin’s phrase, “[turn] sexuality into a soundbite.”
Taubin wrote in her Village Voice review of the film that, while Gus Van Sant
is one of the few openly gay directors in Hollywood, he is attracted to “the
liminal, to barely perceptible thresholds between identification and desire.”26
If the queer road movie is epistemologically not very different from the
contemporary straight road movie (at least, not so different from one like
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, 1995), or from the buddy film, it an-
nounces its radical aspiration in a unique way. The road movie genre came
into its own after the collapse of classical cinema, but the queer road movie,
in a sense launched by Midnight Cowboy, challenges traditional notions of
desire as a libidinal force that must find its “proper” (heterosexual) object
and be contained by “marriage.”27
As the queer road movie that seemed to officially announce the arrival of
the new genre, or cycle, My Own Private Idaho explores the truth of Roland
Barthes’s observation that every narrative leads back to Oedipus: “Isn’t sto-
rytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts
with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?” The
Death of the Father, Barthes writes, would deprive literature of many of its
pleasures: “If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories?”28 In Idaho, Mike
(River Phoenix) does not, structurally speaking, have a father (in an incestu-
ous twist of the plot, Mike’s father is his brother), and Scott (Keanu Reeves)
is in flight from his. By the end of the film, Scott has married and taken his
place in the hetero-patriarchal, bourgeois society that is his birthright or
“destiny,” while Mike is still on the road, hustling for love, much as he was
at the beginning. As a truly queer road movie, the film offers no easy answers,
but gestures toward the “impossibility” of desire—toward the problem, as
Guattari puts it, of how to “sexualize the body,” the impossibility of becom-
ing a “totally sexed body”—at the same time that it insists on the powerful
reality of desire as a formation of the unconscious.
Seemingly as a desperate bid to reassert the “norms” of masculine desire
that the independent cinema and films like My Own Private Idaho were
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masculine interests 11

doing so much to upset, Jerry Maguire (1996) is premised on the notion that
it is possible to realize or recover a “true [masculine] self,” and—indicative
perhaps of the decline of Hollywood’s cultural authority in the representa-
tional struggles over hegemonic masculinity—it was the only film in the 1997
lineup of Academy Award nominations for Best Picture that was produced
by a major studio.
Jerry Maguire presents its eponymous hero as a man who feels alienated
by modernity, and who hates “[his] place in the world.” Despite his very suc-
cessful career as a sports agent, and his numerous girlfriends, he is lonely. “I
[have] so much to say, and no one to listen,” he laments. On some level, he
understands that what he wants is an intimate friendship with a man—but a
form of homophobia (inherited from the Father), and his narcissism (as a
defensive response to his inability to construct a secure and stable self), pre-
vent him from developing what sociologists call a “pure friendship” with an-
other man. Jerry (Tom Cruise) tries to forge an intimate friendship with one
of his clients, Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), but they both continually suf-
fer confusions over where to draw the line between friendship and business.
It becomes clear very quickly that the bond that develops between them is
only possible because it is safely inscribed within their professional relation-
ship as agent and client, which supposedly has them both after the same
thing, “the money.” (“Show me the money!” is the film’s catch-phrase and
mantra.) But the “money,” quite obviously, is a metaphor for the “love” that
both men want and need from each other.
As for the question of Jerry’s narcissism—of which all his girlfriends com-
plain—it is interesting to note that among the American and British theorists
of narcissism, there are only rare mentions of fathers. Stephen Frosh observes:

All is maternity: the security of the self, the modification of exhibition-

ism, the establishment of a realistic position in the world, these all de-
rive from the mother’s ability to support and contain her child’s needs.
It is in the maternal twosome that mental health or ill-health has its
source; moreover, the perfect meeting of a subject’s demand, the per-
fect union and relationship—the perfect primary narcissism—is a
simple self-other absorption.29

And so it is that Jerry Maguire tries to convince the viewer that Jerry’s salva-
tion must come in the form of a woman: whatever problems Jerry has with
intimacy, and so on, will be resolved by his relationship with Dorothy (Renée
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12 masculine interests

Zellweger), who will provide him with a “second chance,” as it were, for ide-
alization. But Jerry’s relationship with Rod is as much at the heart of the film
as his romance with Dorothy. The two relationships are dialectically linked,
but not in the way the film explains it. The film acknowledges that Rod rep-
resents much more than a 4 percent commission to Jerry, yet it cannot open-
ly acknowledge the extent to which Jerry’s profound loneliness might be re-
solved by certain kinds of interaction with a man. The film, according to
patriarchal logic and convention, posits that what Jerry needs is a woman’s
love (and what he needs to love is a woman); and that what he needs from a
man is empathy. What we actually see on the screen, however, is more com-
plicated (and impossible to resolve, except in an illogical “happy ending”), as
his relationship with Dorothy founders and fails, and his exclusive contract
with Rod comes inevitably to an end.
In a discussion of therapeutic interventions with narcissistic patients,
Frosh weighs the “relative worth of transference versus empathy modes”
(119), asking, in effect, what psychotherapy can offer—i.e., “on the extent to
which early deprivation can be made good by an accepting and maternal an-
alyst” (119). It is the same question we find ourselves asking about Jerry, a
question about the meaning of analytic “cure”—which, as noted earlier,
must eventually be answered by the film. Can Dorothy, as “an accepting and
maternal analyst” (although the film says it is love between them, i.e., trans-
ference), ever be able truly to make good on whatever early deprivations have
made Jerry incapable of experiencing intimacy with another human being?
The conclusions of Jerry Maguire notwithstanding, this is a question that
will in one way or another haunt all the pages of this book, as I explore some
“barely perceptible thresholds between identification and desire”—for, as
Frosh reminds us, “something outside the merger of self and other is need-
ed if narcissism is to be surpassed—something paternal, in family terms”
(118). Kaja Silverman makes the same point when she writes that she is no
longer as certain as she once was that the primary function of the Oedipus
complex is social normalization. It now seems that its imperative is “to in-
duct the subject into the speaking of his or her language of desire.”30 By forc-
ing us to give up the one we love for a series of substitute love objects, and
the fact that we pay “this exorbitant price” early in our lives, the Oedipus
complex opens up the world for us. Indeed, as Silverman insists, “only inso-
far as we are thrown into a kinship structure, for the effectuation of which
the Oedipus complex is one possible vehicle, can there be a world” (151) She
points out that the terms mother and father do not designate “encompassable
entities”: “Nor do they represent fixed symbolic constructs that largely tran-
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masculine interests 13

scend the actuality of the persons so designated. Rather, mother and father
constitute complex discursive events that can take very different forms from
one subject to another, and even from one moment to another” (151).
The chapters that follow, then, and the experience of watching the movies
that have occasioned their writing, constitute a form of dialogue with the
Other, to find or make a world in which we may satisfactorily take our place.
Like Vidal’s account of his childhood desire to be a twin, and his experience
of “the shock, as it were, of twinship”31 when he saw The Prince and the Pau-
per, they are offered as one way we can actively assume our particular lan-
guage of desire.
Lang-ch02 7/17/02 3:43 PM Page 14

2
OEDIPUS IN AFRICA
the lion king

In his 1998 autobiography, Michael Eisner, chairman and chief executive of-
ficer of the Walt Disney Company, proudly records that The Lion King (1994)
would ultimately earn nearly $1 billion worldwide, “making it by far [Dis-
ney’s] most popular animated film and probably the most profitable film
ever made.”1 Oddly, considering this remarkable fact, Eisner shows no cu-
riosity about why the film quickly became so successful, nor does his expla-
nation offer much insight: The Lion King is “one of those magical films in
which everything comes together,” he writes. “It was visually stunning. The
story of a son trying to live up to his father’s legacy had a powerful archetypal
resonance, and so did the simple themes of betrayal and retribution, respon-
sibility and honor” (341).
What I wish to explore in this chapter are some of the more obvious
themes of The Lion King arising from its self-consciously oedipal cast, which
are revealed as anything but “simple,” and to examine the part the father
plays in the formation of the male child’s sense of self.2
“From the day we arrive on the planet,” sings the narrator in the film’s
opening shots, “the sun rolling high through the sapphire sky keeps great
and small on the endless round . . . ’til we find our place in . . . the circle of
life.” And in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud wrote: “Every
new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus
complex,” adding that “anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neuro-
sis.”3 The song and the film’s opening shots, we recognize immediately, an-
nounce that this will be the story of how Simba masters his Oedipus com-
plex—how his personality will be structured, and how his desire will be
oriented in relation to the loving and hostile wishes he experiences toward
his parents (although in some ways Simba more closely resembles Hamlet,
a later version of Oedipus). The Oedipus complex is a Freudian “story”
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the lion king 15

about human psychic development that has taken hold of the popular imag-
ination, to become, as one theorist has put it, “the special law of the mod-
ern psyche.”4 Indeed, we could say it has colonized the contemporary un-
conscious; and The Lion King does everything within its considerable power
as cinema and as storytelling apparatus to naturalize and consolidate the pa-
triarchal project, of which the Oedipus complex can be seen as the key in-
strument, producing a kind of template for the complicated détour called
life, which leads back to death—or, in Peter Brooks’s phrase, “Freud’s mas-
terplot,”5 according to which the beginning foretells the end and the end
speaks to the beginning (a father announcing the birth of his son: a king
presenting his subjects with their future king).

“The Circle of Life”

The film’s four-minute prologue—which begins with an image of the sun, a

gorgeous orange disk rising over the African savanna, and ends with all the
creatures of the kingdom paying hommage to the king’s newborn heir,
whom even the heavens acknowledge with a benedictory shaft of light—is
striking for its proliferation of phallic imagery and the overdetermination of
the themes of timelessness and the existence of a natural and harmonious,
hierarchical order. It makes a series of connections that all say something
about the origins and order of things (a big concern to young viewers, for
whom the film was ostensibly made). The ideological power of The Lion King
is overwhelming. The movie says, in effect—before the narrative proper has
even begun—that yes, mothers are important (they are the child’s reality in
the domestic sphere); but fathers are perhaps even more important, and they
are certainly more glamorous, for fathers are the link to the public sphere,
where a male child’s destiny will be played out (to the sound of trumpeting
elephants, in this instance). By making the social order reflect the natural
order, the film blurs distinctions that young viewers do not consciously
make—between simile, metaphor, and metonymy (for example, Mufasa
later instructs Simba: “A king’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. One
day the sun will set on my time here and will rise with you as the new king”).
The result is a film that children love, a film that Katha Pollitt in the Nation
noted is “a weirdly sincere defense of feudalism, primogeniture, and the di-
vine right of kings,” in addition to being—as we shall see—“vaguely racist,”
“sexist,” and “anti-intellectual.”6
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16 oedipus in africa

For our purposes, The Lion King is interesting not only for the way in
which it seeks so brazenly to affirm male privilege, but for its “textbook” ar-
ticulation of popular culture’s ideal father-son relationship. It is obviously a
film of its time, and as such tells us what a great many people think the father-
son relationship should, or can, be—its impossible contradictions notwith-
standing. It attempts to do essentially the same thing Robert Bly’s bestselling
book Iron John did at the beginning of the decade—explain what, in Eisner’s
phrase, a “father’s legacy” should be, and how sons might live up to that lega-
cy. Although Bly denies that his book advocates a return of traditional patri-
archy (or to the state of relative grace he imagines prevailed in the United
States prior to World War II),7 the net effect of his project would do just that.
Bly thinks mythologically— much as Disney sought to be “archetypal” in its
approach to The Lion King (by setting the action in a timeless Africa, using
cartoon animals as characters, etc.)—and his symbology is similar to The
Lion King’s. For example, in a chapter titled “The Hunger for the King in a
Time with No Father,” he writes:

The genuine patriarchy brings down the sun through the Sacred King,
into every man and woman in the culture. . . . The death of the Sacred
King . . . means that we live now in a system of industrial domination,
which is not patriarchy. The system we live in gives no honor to the
male mode of feeling. . . . The system of industrial domination deter-
mines how things go with us in the world of resources, values, and al-
legiances; what animals live and what animals die; how children are
treated. And in the mode of industrial domination there is neither king
nor queen. (98)

Like Iron John, The Lion King is a reaction against the kind of undermin-
ing of father-son bonding that began when the Industrial Revolution moved
into high gear in the mid-nineteenth century. Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Be-
trayal of the American Man (1999) similarly indicates what many men in our
rampantly consumer-oriented culture feel they have lost, and to which it
seems clear The Lion King is a response: a meaningful social world. Humans
do not intrude into the world of The Lion King, which is safely set in some
preindustrial Eden. And in the ideal world Bly imagines, men and their sons
spend long hours together (like the “fathers and sons in most tribal cultures
[who] live in an amused tolerance of each other” [93]), while the son’s “cells
receive some knowledge of what an adult masculine body is. The younger
body learns at what frequency the masculine body vibrates” (93). What
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the lion king 17

quickly emerges from reading Bly’s book is that he has a very clear vision of
what “the masculine” is. It is a “mode” or “frequency,” which the boy learns
from his father this way:

Now, standing next to the father, as they repair arrowheads, or repair

plows, or wash pistons in gasoline, or care for birthing animals, the
son’s body has the chance to retune. Slowly, over months or years, that
son’s body-strings begin to resonate to the harsh, sometimes demand-
ing, testily humorous, irreverent, impatient, opinionated, forward-
driving, silence-loving older masculine body. Both male and female
cells carry marvelous music, but the son needs to resonate to the mas-
culine frequency as well as the female frequency. (94)

Bly’s prescription, or fantasy, is equal parts absurd, valid, and distressing.

Absurd, not for its vocabulary of “body-strings” and so on, but for its em-
brace of a popular ideology of masculinity as if it were the one “true” mas-
culinity, and for its bonding activities that most boys living in American
cities today would have no access to—and would probably have no interest
in, even if they did. We appreciate that Bly does not necessarily mean the
reader to take his proposed father-son bonding activities literally, and that
they perhaps only reflect the class background (sexist, anti-intellectual) of
Bly’s imagined readership, but we note their gendered quality, according to
which it becomes a truth that men “wash pistons in gasoline,” but do not, for
example, bake cookies or do laundry, just as it might be seen as natural that
men are “harsh” or “silence-loving” rather than warm or conversational.8
The Lion King, too, attempts to offer a clear vision of “the masculine” (Mu-
fasa and the adult Simba are meant to embody this correct masculinity, which
is probably why they are among the film’s less vivid characters—strictly two-
dimensional). But more interesting than its representation of various ways of
performing masculinity (Mufasa, Scar, Pumbaa, Timon, Zazu, and so on) is
the way the film illustrates the process—with an emphasis on the father’s role,
or function, in that process—whereby Simba, as a normal male infant, grows
up to be, inevitably, a monogamous, heterosexual patriarch. This chapter seeks
to decenter the culturally dominant notion guiding the narrative that identity
follows a developmental trajectory resulting in heterosexual complementarity.
By focusing on what Jessica Benjamin calls “the identificatory, homoerotic
bond between toddler son and father,” which she sees as the prototype of ideal
love, “a love in which the person seeks to find in the other an ideal image of
himself,”9 this chapter tries to identify the part played by the Oedipus complex
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18 oedipus in africa

as an ideologically determined structure that enables society to enforce its

norm of heterosexuality. As elaborated by Freud, and as played out in The Lion
King, the oedipal scenario turns on a dynamic of renunciation: the child aban-
dons hope of fulfilling identificatory love of the parent of the opposite sex, and
renounces object love of the parent of the same sex. This normative goal of sex-
ual identity appears to be achieved quite happily by Simba and Nala in the film,
but we observe how it also reproduces patriarchal structures that encourage
the viewer to accept male dominance as a social fact.
Lynn Hunt’s description of the social order in France before the revolu-
tion of 1789, which resulted in the king’s execution, summarizes the ideolo-
gy of deference that underpins The Lion King:

The king had been the head of a social body held together by bonds of
deference; peasants deferred to their landlords, journeymen to their
masters, great magnates to their king, wives to their husbands, and
children to their parents. Authority in the state was explicitly modeled
on authority in the family. A royal declaration of 1639 had explained,
“The natural reverence of children for their parents is linked to the le-
gitimate obedience of subjects to their sovereign.”10

Hunt then asks: “Once the king had been eliminated, what was to be the
model that ensured the citizens’ obedience?” (3). This question is important
for our analysis because we live in a republic from which the king was elim-
inated a long time ago.
While the improbable “message” of The Lion King is that the world would
be a better place if it were a kingdom or genuine patriarchy of some other
kind, what we face in our society is no longer patriarchy itself, as John
MacInnes points out in The End of Masculinity, but patriarchy’s material and
ideological legacy. The Lion King, with its family model of politics, makes a
fetish of gender, which MacInnes sees as “the last vestige of enchantment, an
attempt, in a godless and chaotic world, to ‘worship’ [sexual difference] as an
anchor for social relations and thus defend men’s privilege against the cor-
rosive logic of modernity.”11 The film encourages the viewer to think of mas-
culinity as an empirically existing form of identity, which is the legitimating
cornerstone of patriarchy. The “correct” masculinity toward which Simba
moves—“through despair and hope, through faith and love, on a path un-
winding”—will at the very least be heterosexual. And Zazu can inform Simba
and Nala, when they are no more than four years old, that they have been
“betrothed” since birth. The hornbill insists they “have no choice”12 in the
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the lion king 19

figure 2.1 The Lion King’s family model of politics makes a fetish of gender:
Simba’s “destiny” as the first-born son of King Mufasa (voiced by James Earl Jones)
and Queen Sarabi (voiced by Madge Sinclair) is confirmed and sanctioned by the
shaman mandrill Rafiki (voiced by Robert Guillaume). (Copyright © The Walt
Disney Company. All rights reserved)

matter: “One day you two are going to be married!” he assures them. Simba
and Nala are horrified. “I can’t marry her. She’s my friend,” he protests.
“Yeah. It’d be too weird,” she agrees. But Zazu is confident: “It’s a tradition
going back generations.”
As Juliet Mitchell clarifies in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, “The myth that
Freud rewrote as the Oedipus complex epitomizes man’s entry into culture
itself. . . . It is not about the nuclear family, but about the institution of cul-
ture.” And culture—all human civilization, according to Freud—is patriar-
chal.13 What Zazu is telling the cubs is that they will not be able to resist the
imperatives of [their patriarchal] culture, the “tradition” that goes back gen-
erations.14 Society will seek to enforce its cultural norms of gender relations
and heterosexuality in the two cubs, regardless of the relative strengths of the
masculine and feminine dispositions in the psyche of each. Thus, while the
oedipal struggles of every individual are in reality fraught with contingency,
contradiction, and a great variety of possible outcomes, the film conceives of
Simba’s story as “a path unwinding” and is structured as a melodrama (with
claims to the grandeur of tragedy, but with a happy ending), which organiz-
es everything into binary terms, the first and most comprehensive being the
binarism of gender.
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20 oedipus in africa

“Life’s Not Fair”

These are the first words of the film after the prologue, spoken by Scar,
Simba’s scheming, green-eyed uncle. Scar explains: “Yes. You see, I shall
never be king.” His dictum refers of course to much more than the law of
primogeniture in the lions’ kingdom. First of all, it is ideology’s way of of-
fering an “explanation” for the overall subordination of women in society
(and also, quite consciously in the film, of gays), and is meant to discourage
analysis. It is pronounced as a truism, as incontestable as the Darwinian fact
that cats eat mice, and lions eat antelope. The Lion King offers an explicit ar-
gument for masculinity and femininity as socially reproduced behaviors, but
as MacInnes reminds us, “to the extent that we become aware that gender is
something that is socially constructed and not naturally ordained, then we
must also become aware that it is not determined by sex.”15 The film, how-
ever, would have us believe that, mysterious as it may be, gender is, in the
final analysis, determined by sex—that (regardless of how Freud may have
intended his aphorism to be understood): Anatomy is Destiny—and little
girls, among others, should just accept that “life’s not fair.”
According to patriarchy’s gender logic, the world is divided into mascu-
line and feminine spheres. Thus, when Simba early one morning bounds en-
ergetically over to his sleeping parents and urges his father to wake up, Mu-
fasa half-jokingly grumbles to Sarabi: “Before sunrise, he’s your son.” In the
division of labor required by capitalism, the mother is relegated to the pri-
vate sphere.16 Not only does the mother in bourgeois, patriarchal-capitalist
society feed, bathe, and toilet-train the child, she is expected to make the
home a haven from the workplace. As in Bly’s cosmology, where the “sacred
King” is associated with the sun, and the “sacred Queen” with the moon,
Sarabi here is identified with “home,” the shadowy cave where the lions sleep
at night.
Mufasa gets up and (Sarabi a few steps behind) leads Simba out toward
the promontory of Pride Rock. As they reach the exit to the cave, Simba
turns back toward his mother, in a moment of anxiety about separation from
her, and excitedly weaves in and out of her front legs. Sarabi gives her son a
gentle but firm push toward his father, who takes him to the edge of the rock.
There follows a shot of Sarabi holding back at the entrance of the cave, a look
of maternal pride and regret on her face, as father and son walk toward the
spot that offers the best view of the sun rising over the Pride Lands. This
image of the abject mother is followed by the most dramatically phallic shot
in the entire film: Pride Rock shooting straight up (as seen from the plain
Lang-ch02 7/17/02 3:44 PM Page 21

the lion king 21

below), its impossibly sheer face dominating the screen. At the top, barely
visible, Mufasa and Simba sit side by side, looking out.
“When a son goes off with his father,” writes Dorothy Dinnerstein in The
Mermaid and the Minotaur, “his mother’s regret is more bearable; the father
cannot replace her in a son’s feelings as he can in a daughter’s.”17 Sarabi sens-
es that her job is done, and that Simba is ready to start learning what he will
need to know in order to command in the public (masculine) sphere. And
this learning about masculinity is best learned from the father. “The mother
supports the active project,” Dinnerstein continues, “but she is also on hand
to be melted into when it is abandoned. She may, indeed, even encourage the
child’s lapses from selfhood, for she as well as the child has mixed feelings
about [his] increasing separateness from her.”18
“Simba, look! Everything the light touches is our kingdom,” Mufasa tells
his son. Simba is thrilled (“Wow!”), and Mufasa explains that one day he will
inherit the kingdom. “This will all be mine?” the cub asks incredulously.
“Everything,” the father confirms. Simba, in awe, tries to absorb what he has
just been told: “Everything the light touches . . . What about that shadowy
place?” Clearly, the mechanism by which Simba will learn what it means to
be male in his culture—i.e., to be properly masculine—is identification. Mu-
fasa is saying, “See what I see.” And in patriarchal/oedipal terms, the father
is telling the son that one day, when he takes his father’s place, the son will
inherit everything the father has, including the mother. (As we can predict,
it will be Nala, who, in an appropriately incestuous twist, appears to be
Simba’s half-sister.) The “shadowy place” (“You must never go there,” Mu-
fasa warns) is the threat of symbolic castration posed by Mufasa, whose pri-
mary claim to Sarabi is indicated in the shot of the two of them sleeping to-
gether in the cave, apart from the other lions.
Later, after Simba and Nala have visited “that shadowy place,” Mufasa be-
comes angry with Simba, and instructs Zazu: “Take Nala home. I have to
teach my son a lesson.” The “lesson” for Nala is that females do not partici-
pate in the public sphere as males do. She will, if the patriarchal strategy suc-
ceeds, always be kept slightly helpless and in need of male protection. And
yet several times in the movie Nala succeeds in “pinning” Simba, which,
among other things, suggests that she is a stronger or more skilled fighter
than he is. When they succeed in giving Zazu the slip, so that they can visit
the elephant graveyard, Simba takes credit for “ditching the dodo”:

Simba: I am a genius!
Nala: Hey, genius, it was my idea!
Lang-ch02 7/17/02 3:44 PM Page 22

22 oedipus in africa

Simba: Yeah, but I pulled it off!

Nala: With me.
Simba: Oh, yeah?

When they playfully tussle, Nala flips Simba onto his back. He tries to get up,
but she holds him there. “Pinned ya!” she exults. “Hey, let me up!” he
protests. She does. He tries to flip her, but she flips him again.
Obviously, at this stage in their young lives, the cubs are equals. They are
in that period of parallel development between the sexes that Freud sees as
masculine, or phallic, for both boys and girls. The engendering process that
will result in his becoming a leader (father/protector/patriarch) and her tak-
ing the role of helpmeet (mother/homemaker/ornament) is just beginning.
Nala’s libido, or sense of self (ego), will shortly be made to succumb, in
Freud’s phrase, “to the momentous process of repression whose outcome, as
has so often been shown, determines the fortunes of a woman’s feminini-
ty.”19 The substance of Mufasa’s “lesson” for Simba is that if he wants to be
king (and he certainly does), he must understand how power works, and
what the basis of his authority will be. He must learn not to “go looking for
trouble,” which might reveal the real limits of his power; and as a male,
Simba must accept the responsibility of protecting the female (“And what’s
worse, you put Nala in danger!”), who will be persuaded that the price she
pays for giving up her independence is worth the compensation of male pro-
tection.20 This “masculine” responsibility is usually felt by males in patriar-
chal societies to be worth it. In Simba’s words: “I just can’t wait to be king!”
He sings in Broadway showstopping style:

No-one saying “Do this!”

No-one saying “Be there!”
No-one saying “Stop that!”
No-one saying “See here!”
Free to run around all day.
Free to do it all my way!

Above all, it is the male’s dependence on the mother in infancy (we see how
Simba hates to be bathed by Sarabi) that he wants to forget, as he attempts
to gain physical and psychological mastery of himself and the world around
him. Adult masculinity holds out the promise of being able to “do it all my
way.” But successful adult masculinity can only be achieved if the male child
absorbs the lesson of “castration” and later resolves his Oedipus complex
Lang-ch02 7/17/02 3:44 PM Page 23

the lion king 23

(integrates into the symbolic). Simba’s feeling of phallic, narcissistic om-

nipotence, expressed so exuberantly in his song, is bound to crash. It is a feel-
ing, Freud remarks in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” that is best ex-
pressed in the phrase: “Nothing can happen to me!” Freud adds: “It seems to
me, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we
can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-
dream and of every story.”21 Simba’s daydream, or fantasy, will come
abruptly to an end when he and Nala arrive at the elephant graveyard.
Simba is humbled by his experience there, and unconsciously resolves to
keep a check on his desires. In psychoanalytic terms, what happens at the ele-
phant graveyard gives rise to the formation of his superego.22 He will subject
himself to its internal authority, not only because he fears retribution in the
form of the loss of his father’s love (for desiring the mother; for his competi-
tive, aggressive feelings toward the father), but because the powerful econo-
my of the superego produces conscience and guilt, whereby action and desire
can no longer be distinguished. The superego constitutes an agency whose
function is to prohibit wishes from being fulfilled or becoming conscious, and
is constructed on the model of the child’s parents’ superego. Freud writes:
“The contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition
and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated
themselves in this manner from generation to generation.”23 (Zazu will be
proven right—according to the “tradition going back generations,” Simba
will eventually obey the dictates of his superego and return to Pride Rock.)

The Elephant Graveyard

There is an important intertext for The Lion King in a much earlier film,
Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932), of a strikingly symbolic use of an elephant grave-
yard. When Jane Parker (Maureen O’Sullivan) arrives at a port in Africa to
meet up with her old father (C. Aubrey Smith), who is about to depart on an
expedition into the interior with a young man called Harry Holt (Neil
Hamilton), her curiosity is piqued by references to “the Mutea Escarpment.”
She asks her father what it is, but at first he is unwilling to say. When she per-
sists, he relents—

Father: Somewhere to the east, there’s a mysterious barrier of moun-

tains called the Mutea Escarpment—and the natives won’t say
where that Mutea Escarpment is. It’s sacred. Taboo. If one of them
Lang-ch02 7/17/02 3:44 PM Page 24

24 oedipus in africa

is found even to have looked at it, he is put to death by the witch-

men of the tribe. Now, Holt and I believe that beyond that Mutea
Escarpment somewhere lies the burial place of the elephants.24
Jane: You do? But, why? Oh, of course, ivory!
Father: Enough ivory to supply the world! There’s a million pounds for
the man who finds it!
Jane: And how much do I get for helping you?
Father: Huh! You’re not going to help! You can’t.

Like Nala, Jane is not invited to join the men in their world of action and ad-
venture, and like Nala when she pins Simba, Jane is revealed to be the equal
of any man in the use of a rifle (she shoots “like an angel”), before she suc-
cumbs to “the momentous process of repression” that will have her scream-
ing for male protection throughout much of the remainder of the movie.
Jane of course does go on the expedition with her father and the hand-
some young Harry (who believes he is falling in love with her). With single-
minded determination, Jane’s father pushes on through every danger, in his
quest to reach the trove of ivory, as if, and paradoxically, to outrun death,
which he feels is fast approaching. Jane is abducted by Tarzan (Johnny
Weissmuller); and on the very morning after Tarzan lures her to his bower
and makes love to her, Jane’s weakened and haggard-looking father stumbles
and falls to the ground.
Later, when the expedition party (including Jane) is captured by a hostile
tribe of pygmies, Tarzan calls for his elephant friends to help them. The ele-
phants succeed in routing the pygmies, and then, guided by Tarzan, they
bear the expedition party away from the scene. Jane and Harry notice that
the elephant carrying Tarzan and her sick father has been wounded. Still, the
old man insists they go on: “[He’s] our only chance! The elephants’ grave-
yard . . . If he’s dying, he’ll take us there.” Tarzan jumps down from the dying
elephant, and Parker, slumped forward and clutching at his chest, leads the
somber procession. Upon arriving at the graveyard, Jane’s father collapses
and dies, as does the elephant that has borne him to this “sacred” and
“taboo” place. Parker’s death has coincided with his half-conscious recogni-
tion of Tarzan’s claim to Jane, and her acceptance of it.
The graveyard represents both death and life, in a dialectical relation.25 It
is the phallus (“enough ivory to supply the world”), which is to say, it stands
here for the libido as phallic/masculine. Jane’s father has clearly been a vig-
orous and glamorous embodiment of the phallic principle all his adult life;
but as he approaches the end of his life (he describes himself as now “a bit
Lang-ch02 7/17/02 3:44 PM Page 25

the lion king 25

more grizzled and moth-eaten”), and as Jane seeks to gain access to the phal-
lic principle herself—i.e., resolve her Oedipus complex—she must, in the
master metaphor of The Lion King, take her place in the circle of life, or with-
er and die (“Listen, Dad, from now on I’m through with civilization; I’m
going to be a savage, just like you,” she tells her father at the beginning of the
film). As a woman in a patriarchal world, Jane’s only means of access to the
phallus is through a man. In choosing whom to desire, she must turn away
from her father. “But the conscious object of desire is always a red herring,”
Victor Burgin reminds us. “The object is only the representative, in the real,
of a psychical representative, in the unconscious.”26 Obeying society’s taboo
on incest, and rejecting Harry as a possible love object, she chooses Tarzan.
But as Burgin observes, “The real object, present—most poignantly, the
‘love-object’—is ‘chosen’ (does choice ever really come into it?—‘coup de
foudre’) because something about it allows it to represent the lost object,
which is irretrievably absent” (32).

figure 2.2 “Listen, Dad, from now on I’m through with civilization—I’m going
to be a savage, just like you,” Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) tells her father (C. Aubrey
Smith) in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932).
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is usually a circular, narrow, white zone between the congested area
and the margin of the transparent cornea.
6th. Examine the Membrana Nictitans. See that its free
margin is uniformly smooth, even, and thin and that there is no
swelling, congestion nor morbid growth on any part of the structure.
7th. See if the transparent cornea is perfectly and
uniformly smooth, transparent and glistening and if it
reflects clear, erect images of all objects in front of it. The
image of a round object which shows any irregularity in the
curvature of its margin implies a deviation from an uniform
curvature of the cornea: the image narrows in the direction of the
smaller arc and broadens in the direction of the larger one (see
keratoscopy, and corneal astigmatism).
8th. A foreign body on or in the cornea may be recognized in
a good light, but better and more certainly under focal oblique
illumination (see this heading).
9th. A corneal ulcer may be similarly recognized. It is made
more strikingly manifest by instilling into the lower cul de sac a drop
of a solution of fluorescin and rubbing it over the eye by moving the
eyelids with the finger. This will stain the whole cornea. If now the
excess of stain is washed away by a few drops of boric acid, the
healthy part of the cornea is cleared up and the ulcer retains a bright
yellowish green tint.
10th. Opacity or Floating objects in the aqueous humor
(flocculi of lymph, pus, pigment, blood, worms) are always to be
looked for. They may be detected by placing the eye in a favorable
light. They may be still more clearly shown under focal illumination
(see below).
11th. Changes in the iris and pupil may also be noticed in a
good light. The surface should be dark in the horse, and of the
various lighter shades in the smaller animals, but in all alike clear,
smooth and polished, without variation of shade in spots or patches
and without bulging or irregularity at intervals. Apart from the
congenital absence of pigment in whole or in part, which may be
found in certain sound eyes, a total or partial change of the dark iris
of the horse to a lighter red, brown or yellow shade implies
congestion, inflammation, or exudation. The corpora nigra in the
larger quadrupeds should be unbroken, smooth, rounded, projecting
masses outside the free border of the upper portion of the iris. It
should show a clear, polished surface like the rest of the iris. The
pupil should be evenly oval with its long diameter transversely
(horse, ruminant), circular (pig, dog, bird), or round with an
elliptical outline on contracting and the long diameter vertical (cat).
It should contract promptly in light and dilate as quickly in darkness.
Place the patient before a window, cover one eye so as to exclude
light, then cover the other eye with the hand and quickly withdraw.
The pupil should be widely dilated when the hand is withdrawn and
should promptly contract, and it should actively widen and narrow
alternately until the proper accommodation has been secured. Any
failure to show these movements implies a lesion in the brain, optic
nerve, or eye which impairs or paralyzes vision, interferes with
accommodation or imprisons the iris. In locomotor ataxia the pupil
contracts in accommodation to distance, but not in response to light.
12th. Other causes of pupillary immobility include: (a)
Permanence of a pupillary membrane, which has remained from the
fœtal condition and may be recognized by oblique focal illumination
and invariability of the pupil: (b) Adhesion of the iris to the capsule
of the lens—complete or partial—in the latter case the adherent
portion only remains fixed, while the remainder expands and
contracts, giving rise to distortions and variations from the smoothly
curved outline: (c) Adhesion of the iris to the back of the cornea—
complete or partial—and leading to similar distortions: (d) Glaucoma
in which intraocular pressure determines a permanent dilatation of
the pupil and depression of the optic disc: (e) The pupil is narrowed
in iritis, and is less responsive to atropia or other mydriatic: (f)
Lesions of the oculo-motor nerve may paralyze the iris and fix the
pupil. The first three and the fifth of these conditions may be
recognized by the naked eye, alone, or with the aid of focal
illumination, the fourth may require the aid of the ophthalmoscope
and the sixth which cannot be reached by such methods, might in
exceptional cases be betrayed by other disorders of the oculo-motor
nerve (dropping of the upper eyelid, protrusion of the eyeball,
squinting outward).
13th. Coloboma (fenestrated iris), and lacerated iris are
recognizable by the naked eye in a good light, or by the aid of focal
illumination.
14th. Tension of the eyeball (Tonometry). Elaborate
instruments constructed for ascertaining ocular tension are of very
little use in the lower animals. The simplest and most practicable
method is with the two index fingers placed on the upper lid to press
the eyeball downward upon the wall of the orbit using the one finger
alternately with the other as if in search of fluctuation. The other
fingers rest on the margin of the orbit. All normal eyes have about
the same measure of tension and one can use his own eye as a means
of comparison. The educated touch is essential. In increased tension,
the sense of hardness and resistance, and the indisposition to
become indented on pressure is present in the early stages of internal
ophthalmias (iritis, choroiditis, retinitis), phlegmon of the eyeball,
glaucoma, hydrophthalmos, and tumors of the bulb.
 Oblique Focal Illumination.
This is so essential to clear and definite conclusions and is so easily
practiced on the domestic animals that every veterinarian should
make himself familiar with the method. The method is based on the
fact that when two perfectly transparent media touch each other a
reflection of luminous rays takes place only at the surface. But in case
any opacity exists in any part of the thickness of one of these media,
it reflects the rays from its surface no matter what may be its position
in the medium. Thus corneal opacities appear as gray blotches and
under careful focal illumination it may be determined whether these
are on the conjunctival surface, in the superficial or deeper layers of
the cornea or in the membrane of Descemet. Similarly cloudiness or
floating objects in the aqueous, reflect the luminous rays, and so with
opacities in the lens or its capsule, or in the vitreous. In the same way
the surface of the iris and corpora nigra may be carefully scrutinized.
For satisfactory examination of the media, back of the iris, the pupil
should be first dilated, by instillation under the lid of a drop or two of
a 3 per cent. solution of atropia, and the examination proceeded with
twenty minutes later. Homatropin is preferable to atropin as being
less persistent in its action, and less liable to produce conjunctivitis.
If it fails to produce the requisite dilatation, it may be followed by a
drop of a 4 per cent. solution of hydrochloride of cocaine, which will
secure a free dilatation, lasting only for one day in place of seven
days as with atropin. The cocaine further removes pain and favors
the full eversion of the eyelids.
The instruments required for focal illumination are a biconvex lens
of 15 to 20 diopters, and a good oil lamp or movable gas jet. The light
of the sun is not satisfactory. The examination ought to be conducted
in a dark room, or less satisfactorily in semi-darkness. The lamp is
held by an assistant at the level of the eye to be examined, either in
front or behind, or first one and then the other, so that the rays of
light may fall upon the eye obliquely. If the lids are kept closed it may
be necessary to expose the cornea by pressing on the lids with the
finger and thumb. The light is held 8 or 10 inches from the eye and
the lens is interposed between it and the eye and moved nearer and
more distant until the clearest illumination has been obtained of the
point to be examined. In this way every accessible part of the eye
may be examined in turn. The examiner may make his results more
satisfactory by observing the illuminated surface through a lens
magnifying three or four diameters. It is important to observe that
the eye of the operator must be in the direct line of reflection of the
pencil of light.
Cornea. By focusing the light in succession over the different
parts of the surface of the cornea, all inflammations, vascularities,
opacities, ulcers, and cicatrices will be shown and their outlines
clearly defined. By illuminating the deeper layers of the cornea
proper, the lesions of keratitis, opacities, ulcers and cicatrices will be
shown. To complete the examination of the cornea the light should
be focused upon the iris so that it may be reflected back through the
cornea. This will reveal the most minute blood-vessels, any cell
concretions on Descemet’s membrane, or any foreign body in the
cornea which may have been overlooked.
Aqueous Humor. Unless the cornea is densely opaque, the
anterior chamber can be satisfactorily explored by the oblique focal
illumination. The cloudiness or milkiness of iritis or choroiditis
furnishes a strong reflection from its free particles of floating matter,
its blood and pus globules, and its flocculi of fibrine. The latter have
usually a whitish reflection, the blood elements a red (hypohæma),
and the pus a yellow (hypopion). The writhing movements of a filaria
scarcely need this mode of diagnosis. Sometimes, and especially in
the horse, detached flocculi of black pigment are found floating free
in the aqueous and are highly characteristic.
By this illumination one can easily determine the distance of the
cornea from the iris and lens (depth of anterior chamber) which is
lessened by the forward displacement of iris and lens in undue
tension in the vitreous (glaucoma, retinitis, tumors, bladderworms),
or of the iris alone, in irido-choroiditis with accumulation of exudate
in the posterior chamber of the aqueous. The depth of the anterior
chamber may increase in cases of luxation or absence of the lens or
softening and atrophy of the vitreous.
The adhesion of the iris to the back of the cornea may be
satisfactorily demonstrated by focal illumination.
 Iris. The lesions of the iris are exceedingly common in connection
with recurring ophthalmia in the horse, and examinations in the
intervals between attacks are of the greatest importance. The eye
should be examined as already stated, at a window or door, and if
available by the aid of a mirror. Any changes in form or color, or
luster should be carefully noted, any tension of the eyeball, or
angularity of the upper lid, and any slight blue opacity round the
margin of the cornea. Then the prompt or tardy response of iris and
pupil to light and darkness must be made out. To complete the test
the eye should be treated with homatropin for three-quarters of an
hour and with cocaine for ten or fifteen minutes, and then subjected
to oblique focal illumination.
With partial posterior synechia the rest of the pupil is found
dilated while the attached portion extends inward remaining fixed to
the capsule of the lens. If the synechia is complete no dilatation
whatever has occurred. The edges of the adherent iris extend inward
as adherent projections, and any exposed portion of the lens is likely
to show black points, the seat of previous adhesions that have been
broken up. In such cases the periphery of the iris bulges forward
from the accumulation behind it of aqueous humor or inflammatory
exudate which cannot escape. The discoloration of the iris as the
result of inflammation, stands out more definitely under the fuller
illumination.
Crystalline lens. In exploring the crystalline lens or its capsule
for opacities (cataracts) oblique focal illumination can be employed
to the very best advantage, if the pupil has first been widely dilated
by homatropine and cocaine. The light is concentrated on all parts of
the anterior capsule in turn, then in succession on the different
layers of the lens at all points and finally on the posterior capsule.
The striking reflection from any points of opacity whether
pigmentary, gray or pearly white is diagnostic, not only of cataract,
but of its exact position—anterior or posterior, capsular or lenticular.
Purkinje-Sanson images. If the flame of a candle is passed in
front of the eye, at a suitable distance, in a darkened room, and the
observer looks into the eye obliquely from the opposite side, he
observes three images of the flame, reflected respectively from the
front of the cornea, from the anterior surface of the lens and from the
back of the lens. The image from the cornea is erect, bright and
clearly defined: that from the front of the lens is still erect, but larger
and dimmer, because the difference between the index of refraction
of the aqueous and lens is very slight: the third image, which is
smaller and clearer than the last, is inverted, because the surface of
reflection on the back of the lens acts as a concave mirror. The
beginner may at first find it difficult to make out the image from the
front of the lens but with a little care he can do so, and then by
moving the light he should cause each image to pass over all parts of
the reflecting surface in turn. Any unevenness or opacity at any point
of the reflecting surface, will cause the image reflected from it to
become blurred or diffused as it passes over it and thus, not the
existence only, but the exact seat of such opacity is easily
demonstrated. Opacities on the cornea cause blurring of the bright,
erect image of the flame as it passes over that part: opacities on the
anterior capsule of the lens blur the dim, erect image when passed
over them: finally, opacities in the body of the lens or on its posterior
capsule, blur the small inverted image as it passes over them.
Add to this method the oblique focal illumination and the images
of the flame reflected from the three mirror surfaces (cornea,
anterior and posterior lens surfaces) are made much clearer and
more distinct than in any other way. To do this effectively the convex
lens should be held so as to focus the flame in the air nearly in front
of the cornea. The Purkinje-Sanson images are made very definite
and clear. If the lens is approached nearer to the eye so as to throw
the image of the flame within or behind the lens, a gray
phosphorescent streak of light is seen in the depth of the pupil. This
is due to the laminated structure of the lens as well as to the fact that
the lens itself is not perfectly transparent even in its normal
condition. The absence of the lens or its dislocation and
displacement downward, below the line of vision may be inferred
from the absence of this gray luminous reflection under this test.
 OPHTHALMOSCOPE.

Principle of ophthalmoscope: Angle of incidence and angle of reflection in same

line, light close to one side of the eye, reflected into it by a mirror, having a hole in
the centre for eye of observer. Opacities show a dense white in transparent media:
if in front of lens move with rolling of eye: if behind in opposite direction. To see
fundus must use biconvex lens. Emmetropic eye: myopic: hypermetropic. Static
refraction. Mydriatics: Atropine, homatropine, daturine, duboisine, hyoscyamine.

In the healthy eye, the pupil and iris, and in cataract, even the
opaque anterior capsule of the lens, can be clearly seen. The
reflection of the pupil, however, is dark and no object back of the iris
can be observed. The reason of the difference is that the rays of light,
entering through the whole cornea, are reflected at the same angle at
which they strike the surface of the iris. The angle of incidence is the
same as the angle of reflection. In the hollow fundus of the eye,
however, the light entering through the narrow pupil, strikes the
fundus at a point which is hidden from the observer, behind the iris,
and being reflected by the concave fundus, in exactly the same line
along which it entered, it remains invisible. To illuminate the fundus
of the eye, for the observer, his line of vision must be made exactly
the same as that in which the pencil of light enters the fundus. This is
best effected by reflecting the light into the eye by the aid of a small
plane or concave mirror having a hole in the center through which
the observer looks into the pupil. The concave mirror gives the
stronger illumination, but the plane article is more easily
manipulated and tends to cause less active contractions of the pupil.
This is the simplest form of ophthalmoscope. For careful
examination of the fundus of the eye, it is best to have the subject in
a dark chamber, with a single large flame of an oil lamp or gas
(electric light with an obscure globe may answer). The light is held
behind and on the same side as the eye to be examined, at the level of
the eye and the perforated mirror and the eye of the observer are
kept from 10 to 20 inches in front of the eye and also at the same
level. For the horse or ox under favorable conditions in a stall, the
light of day coming from a fansash over the door may serve the
purpose. Nicholas assures us that it may be accomplished even under
the shadow of a shed or a tree. In such a case it is better not to have
too much glare of light as the reflection from cornea and lens may
prevent accurate observation. A somewhat cloudy day may therefore
prove advantageous.
In focusing the reflected light on the cornea, and then on the pupil
and lens, any opacities in these will be shown as a grayish nebular
reflection or a denser white according to their degree of opacity. The
opacities in the cornea or aqueous, in front of the axis of vision in the
lens move in the same direction and to the same degree as the eye
rolls, while opacities on the posterior capsule or in the vitreous, move
in a direction opposite to the motions of the eye, and to a degree
corresponding to their distance back of the lens. Thus if the eye looks
downward such opacities move upward; if it looks upward they move
downward; if it looks inward they move outward; and if it looks
outward they move inward.
To secure an image of the fundus of the eye, including the entrance
of the optic nerve (optic papilla), the tapetum, the pigmentary
surface and retina and vessels, accommodation must be made for the
normal refraction of the eye of the patient, and even for that of the
observer.
In the emmetropic (normal) eye, the rays leave the surface of the
cornea parallel to each other and it may be possible for the observer
to secure a good image on his retina, without the aid of lenses. In the
myopic (short sighted) eye they assume a convergent course on
leaving the cornea, and to secure a satisfactory image a biconcave or
plano-concave lens must be interposed between the cornea of the
patient and the eye of the observer.
In the hypermetropic (long sighted) eye, the rays diverge in
leaving the cornea of the patient, and a convex lens must be
interposed between this and the eye of the observer, in order that the
rays may be focused on the eye of the observer.
To adapt the vision to the different eyes the modern
ophthalmoscope is furnished with a series of lenses concave and
convex, any one of which can be moved behind the hole in the mirror
to suit the demands of the particular case.
To make a satisfactory examination the pupil should be dilated as
for oblique focal illumination. A 1:200 solution of apomorphia may
be instilled into the eye (a drop or two) and in 20 to 25 minutes a
satisfactory dilatation will have been secured. The effect of the
homatropin will usually have disappeared in twenty-four hours.
 Determination of Static Refraction.
This can be best done in the lower animals by determining the
strength of the lens required to render clear the image of its fundus.
By knowing the refracting power of the lens, we may ascertain what
deviation from the normal refraction there is in the eye under
observation.
In making this test the mirror of the ophthalmoscope must be
brought closely to the eye of the patient—1 to 2 inches.
If in such a case and without the use of any lens a distinct image of
the fundus is obtained, and if this is rendered less distinct by
interposing the lowest convex lens in front of the eye of the observer,
the eye is emmetropic.
If the ophthalmoscopic mirror without a lens gives an indistinct
vision of the fundus, and if the image is rendered clear by interposing
one of the convex lenses, the eye is hypermetropic. The strength of
the convex lens, +1, +2 or +3, dioptrics will give the measure of the
hypermetropia.
If, on the contrary, the ophthalmoscopic mirror gives an indistinct
image of the fundus, which is rendered even more indistinct by the
interposition of a convex lens, but is cleared up and rendered definite
by a concave lens, the patient is myopic. The strength of the concave
lens used will give the degree of myopia, –1 dioptric, –2 dioptrics,
etc.
The tendency in the horse is constantly to slight long-sightedness,
but the deviation is rarely found to be serious either in this direction
or in that of astigmatism.
 Mydriatics.
Dilation of the pupil by mydriatics (mydriasis dilation of the pupil)
is a most important means of diagnosis, and therefore a knowledge
of the action of the different mydriatics is essential. The mydriatics in
common use not only dilate the pupil, but also paralyze the ciliary
body and the power of accommodation in ratio with the strength of
the solution employed. This determines an adaptation of the eye to
the farthest point of vision and holds it there until the action of the
mydriatic passes off and normal power of accommodation is
restored. In short it renders the subject long sighted, during its
action.
Atropine the alkaloid of atropa belladonna is the most generally
available and persistent of the mydriatics, and is in most common
use. It is usually employed as sulphate of atropine, though some
prefer the nitrate, the salicylate or the borate to obviate the danger of
atropinism. This form of poisoning may show in the occurrence of
conjunctivitis and in case of one attack the susceptibility to atropine
is greatly to be dreaded, so that it should never again be used on the
same subject. The real cause of atropinism is uncertain, it has been
variously ascribed to too great acidity or alkalinity, or to micro-
organisms growing in the solution. Hence the importance of using
the antiseptic salts of atropine, and of testing the solution to see that
it is exactly neutral before it is applied.
The strength of the solution of atropine is an important
consideration. Donders found that 1:120 of water produced a full
effect, while Jaarsma obtained the full effect in one hour from a drop
of a solution of one to twelve hundred of water. The action on
carnivora (dogs and cats) is equivalent to that on man, while on the
herbivora (rabbit, horse, ox, sheep) it is somewhat less, and on birds
very slight indeed. On diseased eyes a large amount may be required,
and with synechia (adhesion of the iris to the capsule of the lens)
dilatation may be impossible. The full effect may last 24 hours, and
accommodation may remain very imperfect for 11 days.
 The direct action of atropine on the eye is shown in dilatation of
the pupil of the frog after the eye has been detached from all
connection with heart or brain, by excision. It acts also in the normal
system through reflex nervous action, since, after division of the
sympathetic trunk going to the eye, that eye does not dilate so much
under atropia as the opposite eye.
Atropine is usually employed by lodging a drop in the pouch of the
conjunctiva (inside the lower lid), and from this it makes its way into
the aqueous humor, for if that liquid is transferred to the conjunctiva
of another animal it causes dilatation. Puncture of the cornea with
evacuation of the aqueous humor lessens the action of the atropine.
Atropine dilatation is increased by following it with cocaine which
causes contraction of the iridian vessels, the antithesis of the
dilatation of the vessels which occurs when the cornea is perforated
and the pressure of the aqueous humor is removed.
Atropine is one of the most potent poisons and must be used with
caution especially in the carnivora and omnivora. The danger lies not
alone in the absorption from the conjunctiva, but also from the
escape of the liquid through the lachrymo-nasal duct, to the nose and
later to the actively absorbing mucosæ of the lungs and stomach.
The symptoms of general poisoning are: rapid pulse, vertigo,
weakness of posterior limbs, general prostration and thirst or
dryness of the throat.
Homatropine is an oily liquid produced by the action of muriatic
acid on the cyanate of atropine. With hydrobromic acid it forms a
readily crystallizable salt, the solution of which acts on the eye like
atropine, but more promptly and transiently. One drop of a solution
of one to one hundred and twenty, usually gives in twenty minutes,
full pupillary dilation and complete paralysis of accommodation
which lasts only for twenty-four hours. Add to this that there is little
danger of constitutional disturbance and poisoning, and
homatropine must be accepted as a more desirable agent than
atropine. It is especially to be preferred in cases of senility with
shallow anterior chambers, and in glaucoma, in which atropine tends
to aggravate the lesion.
Daturine, the alkaloid of datura stramonium is a potent
mydriatic, causing pupillary dilatation in a solution of one to one
hundred and sixty thousand of water. It appears to be identical with
atropine.
Duboisine the alkaloid of duboisia myoporoides is also a potent
mydriatic. Jaarsma found that a solution of the sulphate, of one to
three thousand, paralyzed accommodation for twenty-four hours. It
acts more promptly than atropine but is more poisonous.
Hyoscyamin, the alkaloid of hyoscyamus niger, is also strongly
mydriatic. One drop of an one to three hundred solution of the
sulphate paralyzed accommodation for from seventy-five to one
hundred hours. Risley found it to act more promptly than atropine,
and to be less dangerous than duboisine.
 WOUNDS OF THE EYELIDS.

Traumas: bites, lacerations, blows, penetrating wounds, gunshot, scratches,

kicks. Upper lid or commissure. Reparatory power of eyelid. Danger of distortion.
Treatment: sutures, plaster, shellac, collodion, gelatine, Frick’s gelatine, birdlime,
sterilisation: Quilled and twisted suture. Position in stall. Metallic guard for eye.

Causes. Traumatic injuries of the eyelids are especially common in

the horse mainly because of his exposure in connection with the
services required of him. In a team he is liable to be bitten by one of
his fellows, or the lid may be caught on nails, in turning, or on hooks
upon harness, chains or wagons. It is sometimes injured by a blow
from a club or whiplash, or by knocking the head against solid
objects that he failed to see on account of the blinds. Again the injury
will come from running against prongs of bushes or trees, or of
stump fences. Occasionally a blow with the horn of an ox or cow is
the cause, but this is much more frequent with the bovine races.
Then again gunshot wounds are found in all animals. In sheep the
eyelids sometimes suffer from bites of dogs, while in dogs and cats,
the teeth and claws are the main causes of injury. These smaller
animals also suffer from brutal blows and kicks.
Nature. Wounds of the eyelids almost invariably affect the upper
lid, because of its extra size and prominence. Sometimes one
commissure or the lower lid is the injured part.
Clean incised wounds are rare, while lacerations with or without
contusions are the common experience. The laceration often extends
through the free margin of the lid, and then to one side, mostly the
outer, in a direction more or less parallel to the tarsus. The result is
that the detached flap drops downward exposing a greater or less
portion of the bulb covered with blood. The conjunctiva, the cornea,
the sclerotic or iris may be implicated in the lesion in different cases,
so that such wounds are of the most varied degree of gravity. If,
however, the lesion is confined to the lid, and in the absence of
absolute detachment of the flap, or severe contusion, a good repair
may be confidently hoped for. The vascularity and reparatory powers
of the eyelid are unusually great, and the looseness of the skin,
connective tissue, mucosa, and even the muscles is such that they do
not draw injuriously upon the edges of the wound to disturb the
process of cicatrization. If the two opposing ends of the divided tarsal
cartilage are kept in accurate opposition, the elasticity of his
structure serves to preserve the even contour of the palpebral
margin, and the adhesion or granulation process between the edges
of the wound, soon becomes firm enough to prevent further
displacement. Even when one-half of the eyelid is torn loose,
remaining attached only by a narrow portion, reunion without any
unsightly distortion is not to be despaired of. In case of a mere
vertical laceration on the other hand, the case is very simple and
hopeful. Even when a portion of a lid has been completely torn off
and lost, the loose textures of the remaining part, often appear to
stretch in the process of healing so that a fairly serviceable, though
by no means an æsthetic covering for the eye may remain. This may
serve for a common work horse, but the unsightliness would
necessarily debar him from use in a carriage or as a saddle horse. The
imperfect protection too, exposes the eye to rainstorms, hail and
snow, as well as to dust, and greatly predisposes to conjunctivitis.
Treatment. One can trust implicitly to the extraordinary
reparatory power of the eyelids, yet so unsightly is any distortion of
these parts, that the greatest pains must be taken to obviate loss of
substance, or unevenness or puckering in healing. The points to be
mainly sought for are the perfect coaptation of the divided edges, and
the restraining of the patient from interrupting the healing process
and breaking loose the forming adhesions, by rubbing the eye.
Inconsiderable wounds of the skin may be simply stitched together
with sterilized catgut. Then the intervals between the stitches may be
approximated, dried, and covered with strips of sticking plaster, or
with shellac, collodion or gelatine. Frick’s gelatine is made by
dissolving fine gelatine in a 1 per cent. solution of corrosive
sublimate and adding about 10 per cent. of glycerine, perfecting the
admixture by the aid of heat. When wanted for use it may be melted
by heat and applied on the skin with a camel’s hair brush. Bird lime
may be used as a substitute. Sterilization must be sought by the use
of sublimate lotion 1:2000, or boric acid 2:100. Formerly the edges
were kept in close opposition by the use of quilled sutures, the
stitches passed around the quills being inserted at the usual
distances while the quills, applied against the edges of the wound
kept them smooth and even and obviated puckering. Or, perhaps
better, the twisted suture may be employed, the edges being brought
together by pins placed close together and a silk thread carried
around each in figure of 8, and spirally from pin to pin along the
entire length. If one pin comes out it ought to be promptly replaced
and the whole left in place until a firm adhesion is established. The
points of the pins are cut off short so that there may be no risk of
their pricking.
With any method the horse or ox may be turned in his stall so that
his tail may be toward the manger and his face outward, and he may
be tied by two halters to the two posts, right and left. His food may
be furnished in a sack hung from the ceiling and cut down one side.
In this way the animal may be absolutely prevented from rubbing the
itching sore against any solid body, and thereby interrupting the
healing process. Another method is to apply a hood of stiff material
with a metallic guard for the face, having bars extending from above
downward and arched outward so that they shall effectually protect
the eye in any attempt at rubbing.
 DEFICIENCY OF THE EYELIDS. COLOBOMA
PALPEBRARUM.

The term coloboma representing merely a hiatus or deficiency is applied to

different parts of the eye according as there may be a lack of substance of the part
in question:—Coloboma palpebrarum (deficiency of the palpebræ or lids), C.
iridis (perforation of the iris), and C. choroideæ (partial absence of the
choroid).

Coloboma palpebrarum is usually congenital and takes the

form of a vertical notch on the upper lid, separating its two lateral
parts into independent flaps. According to the breadth and depth of
the notch are the extent of the exposure of the bulbar conjunctiva
and the liability to irritation and infection by foreign bodies. The
same condition of things will occur traumatically and require
identical measures of repair. These consist in paring the edges of the
notch and bringing them accurately together with catgut, silk or
quilled suture, the approximation being rendered more perfect by
the application of collodion, shellac or gelatine mixture (see wounds
of eyelids). The vascularity and extensibility of the tissues of the lids
greatly favor a kindly healing. Rubbing of the eye must be guarded
against as advised under wounds of the eyelids.
 ORGANIC UNION OF THE EYELIDS.
ANKYLOBLEPHARON. NARROWED FISSURE
BETWEEN THE LIDS. BLEPHAROPHYMOSIS.

Complete closure of the palpebral fissure has been seen as a

congenital infirmity in sheep, dogs and cats, while the partial closure
has been found in all classes of animals as the result of chronic
conjunctivitis and contraction of the exudation in undergoing
organization. Narrowing of the fissure gives the appearance of a
small eye, so that a progressive diminution is usually supposed to
come from a reduction in size of the bulb, though no actual atrophy
of that organ has taken place. In drooping of the upper lid (ptosis)
too, the fissure is reduced and the illusion of an atrophy of the
eyeball is induced. The closure of the fissure may come from
blepharospasm, as the result of irritants in the eye, or even of
nervous disorder.
Treatment. In case of complete closure of the palpebral fissure, the
skin is picked up with forceps and an incision is made between the
two tarsi into the conjunctival sac. Then with probe pointed scissors,
or a grooved director and bistuory the incision is carried between the
tarsi to the proper position for the internal and external canthi.
During healing the lids should be frequently bathed with a boric acid
solution, and an ointment of the same with vaseline should be
applied to prevent adhesion.
When the trouble consists in a drawing together of the skin at the
outer canthus, the result of inflammation, the adhesions are
separated by a horizontal incision leading outward from the line of
the angle. The edges of the conjunctiva and skin are then sutured
together, so as to prevent further adhesion and the part treated as an
ordinary wound. This is known as canthoplasty.
 Ptosis coming from tumors on the lid, or excess of fat in its
substance, or from oculo-motor disease must be treated according to
indications. The same remark applies to spasm of the orbicular
muscle (blepharospasm), whether clonic or tonic. In domestic
animals the removal of the cause (foreign body, eyelash), will usually
succeed.
 WIDENED PALPEBRAL FISSURE.

After wounds of the outer canthus the union of the edges may
remain imperfect so that the fissure is enlarged and the eye unduly
exposed. The case is still worse if the wound has deviated from the
horizontal and has involved the orbicular muscle, the divided ends of
which continue to draw the edges apart, and cause a constant
overflow of tears (epiphora). Enlargement of the bulb or its
protrusion by reason of a swelling beneath it may give rise to the
same appearance (exophthalmos).
Treatment. Pare the edges of the upper and lower lids at the outer
canthus and bring them together by sutures.
 LAGOPHTHALMOS. INABILITY TO CLOSE
EYELIDS.

This is called hare-eye (lagos, hare) from the fact that the hare
habitually keeps the eyelids open. It is mostly due to spasm of the
levatores palpebræ, or to undue size of the orbicular opening. It may,
however, accompany ectropion, exophthalmos, and enlargement or
swelling of the eyeball from any cause. Bayer has seen cases in
diseases of the trifacial nerve, in neoplasms in the orbit and in
buphthalmus.
Cases of the kind are especially liable to irritation, inflammation
and ulceration due to foreign bodies falling on the exposed bulb.
The treatment is largely that of the attendant condition ectropion,
tumor, etc., which may be consulted.
 ADHESION OF THE EYELID TO THE BULB.
SYMBLEPHARON.

Causes: Conjunctivitis, burns, operation and other wounds. In front of or behind

the reflection of the mucosa from eye to lid. Prevention. Treatment: section of
adhesion, and vaseline, etc., Two edges of healthy mucosa sutured together over
the sore. When fornix is implicated mucosa is transplanted.

This is liable to occur to a greater or less extent, in all animals, in

connection with violent conjunctivitis, burns and operation and
other wounds. It has been divided into anterior and posterior
symblepharon, the former being an union in front of the normal
reflection of the conjunctiva from the lid upon the bulb (fornix), and
the latter involving the fornix in the substance of the adhesion. The
anterior form by anchoring the lid to the eyeball is much more likely
to induce blindness, but it has the compensation that the union may
be broken up and the parts healed without subsequent reunion. In
the posterior form the eye can be better exposed and vision retained,
its repair is much more difficult demanding transplantation of skin
or mucous membrane on to the sore, and even then the granulation
tissue being continuous from bulb to eyelid may so contract in
healing as to leave matters no better than before.
These adhesions not only restrict the movements of the lids,
preventing their opening and the exposure of the bulb, but they also
anchor the bulb itself, and hamper its movements, necessitated for
vision. In all cases therefore of wounds, burns, abrasions and ulcers,
of the palpebral and bulbar mucosæ it is highly important to take
precautions against the formation of such connections. Any forming
adhesions must be broken up day by day and the surfaces must be
kept apart in the intervals by borated or iodoformed vaseline.
 In a small anterior symblepharon the connections may be cut
through and subsequent adhesion prevented by the frequent
introduction of iodoformed vaseline, and if need be, by the daily
separation of the surfaces by a probe. When this fails a plastic
operation may be resorted to, the mucosa on the inner side of the lid
being incised in a vertical direction a short distance on each side of
the sore and the inner edges accurately stitched together. The raw
surface left on the bulb thus comes in contact only with the healthy
mucous strips on the eyelid, which have been drawn together over
the seat of the former sore, and the two new raw surfaces formed on
the lid are well to each side of the sore on the bulb, and are in contact
with its healthy mucosa only. Thus no two raw surfaces can come in
contact, and adhesion is obviated.
When the fornix is implicated mucous membrane from the mouth,
vulva, the bronchia of the rabbit, or the skin of the frog must be
transplanted after the requisite incision of the cicatrix has been
made.
 INFLAMMATION OF THE EYELIDS.
BLEPHARITIS.

Phlegmon. Causes: traumas, skin disease. Symptoms: swelling, redness,

distortion, infiltration, semi-closed lids, scabs, sloughs, abscess. Tenderness.
Itching. In eczema papules, vesicles, weeping eye. Treatment: antiseptic astringent
lotions, almond oil, vaseline, zinc oxide, salicylic acid, boric acid, starch, xeroform,
pyoktannin; for eczema, mercury oxides, silver nitrate.

Conjunctivitis will be treated later, and under the present head

there will be considered only the phlegmon of the outer structures.
Causes. This lesion may come from two distinct causes,
traumatism and skin disease. The traumatisms in horses and cattle
are bruises sustained in rolling, especially during colics, in striking
the head against posts, poles, shafts and other solid bodies, in
enduring blows with horns or clubs, or frictions by the halter or in
putting on a collar. Dogs suffer especially from blows with clubs and
kicks from men or animals. All may suffer from wounds of the lids,
and from extensions of eczema and other skin diseases.
The symptoms consist in swelling, redness, distortion, and often
extensive infiltration of the lid, sometimes eversion with exposure of
the reddened conjunctiva, usually abrasion, contusion, puncture or
laceration, semi-closed eye, the upper eyelid being comparatively
immovable (ptosis), and the formation of scabs, sloughs, or abscess.
There may be extreme tenderness, or, more commonly, intense
itching. Where eczema exists there may be found minute shot like
papules at times surmounted by small vesicles and the skin disease is
continuous backward upon the face. When abscess forms, the
rounded swelling and manifest fluctuation will betray its presence.
Usually the eye waters and the side of the cheek is wet and the hairs
matted by a whitish coagulated lymph and mucus.
 Treatment. In the early stages without scabs, sloughs, or abscess,
antiseptic astringent lotions are in place. Weak solutions of zinc
sulphate, boric acid and morphine may be kept applied on a light
bandage. Or silver nitrate 1 gram to 1 oz. water may be applied daily
with a fine brush.
When scabs and crusts have formed they may be softened by the
application of almond oil, and then removed. The surface may then
be dusted with a bland antiseptic powder such as: zinc oxide 10
parts, salicylic acid 1 part; or boric acid and starch equal parts; or
iodoform; or xeroform. Or unctuous applications may be used; zinc
oxide 10, salicylic acid 1, vaseline 10; or iodoform 1, vaseline 5. Or a
watery application may be used, such as the silver lotion or that of
pyoktannin 1:1000.
For eczema yellow oxide of mercury 1, to vaseline 10, has an
excellent reputation. It may be alternated with pyoktannin.
When abscess has formed it should be excised in a line parallel to
the free border and the resulting cavity injected with the silver or the
pyoktannin solution.
In all cases the patient must be fastened as for wounds of the lids
so that he cannot rub the eye.
For eczema and other skin diseases the special treatment
appropriate to the disease should not be omitted.
 ŒDEMA OF EYELIDS.

In anthrax, malignant œdema, disease of heart, kidney or liver, distomatosis,

trichiniasis, wasp stings, urticaria, petechial fever. Treatment: correct general
disorder, remove local irritant, antiseptic astringents.

An œdematous condition of the eyelids with or without

inflammatory conditions may be due to local disease or it may be the
result of more general disorder. In anthrax districts any of the
herbivora, but especially cattle and sheep, are liable to a diffuse
anthrax of the eyelid with a special petechial or brownish condition
of the palpebral conjunctiva. Malignant œdema and other local
bacteridian affections affect the loose textures of the eyelid in a
similar manner, but with extrication of gas and crackling under
pressure. Such cases are complicated by local inflammation. When in
the absence of inflammation the lids pit on pressure, one should seek
for some disease of the heart, kidney or liver, also for indications of
similar dropsical effusions in other parts of the body. Distomatosis
and, to a less extent, pulmonary and duodenal strongylosis are
especially common factors in sheep. In distomatosis (liver rot) a
simultaneous dropsy is often present in the intermaxillary space, the
chest or the abdomen. The puffiness of the eye is especially marked
in the palpebral conjunctiva, and is exposed by everting the eyelid
over the tip of the finger. In trichinosis in man and less frequently in
swine, dropsy of the eyelid is often present at the end of the first
week. Other swellings of the lids partaking more of the nature of
inflammation, result from the stings of wasps, hornets and other
insects, from urticaria (in horses especially) and from petechial fever
in solipeds.
In treating such cases the general disorder, if present, must be
first attended to, then the removal of any local irritant, and finally
the antagonizing of any local inflammation or infection. Astringent
and antiseptic lotions are especially called for.
 EMPHYSEMA OF THE EYELIDS.

This has been already referred to as occurring in malignant

œdema, black quarter and other gas producing infections. It may
also come from lacerations made in puncturing the lachrymal sac,
and from fracture of the margin of the orbit—the air entering the
connective tissue in this case from the cavities of the nasal sinuses.
The lid feels puffy and crackles when pressed and apart from a
general infection it requires only soothing and antiseptic dressings.
 DISEASE OF THE MEIBOMIAN GLANDS.
BLEPHARADENITIS. SEBORRHŒA.

This is a blepharitis of the edges of the lids which are swollen, red,
and incrusted along their margins with scabs and sebaceous
concretions. When this scurf is removed the skin is found to be red,
tender and glistening. The glands are the seat of congestion, and
produce a modified secretion in excess, which dries into crusts
instead of preserving its normal oleaginous consistency. As these
glands open into the follicles of the eyelashes, their walls are
implicated and shedding of the lashes is a common result. It may be
assumed that this affection is often associated with the proliferation
of microbes in the glands and gland ducts, while in other forms the
presence of acari is the controlling factor. Wilson found the demodex
folliculorum in the Meibomian glands of the horse, and Oschatz in
those of the sheep.
Treatment. Smear the margins of the lids with vaseline and when
the crusts have been thoroughly softened wash them off with Castile
soap and warm water. Then dress the margin with the ointment of
the yellow oxide of mercury 1, in vaseline 10. If demodex is suspected
they may be squeezed out and the lids washed frequently with spirits
of wine as a solvent.
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