"It takes a man to do something like that": Power, Penetration, and the Production of the Transmasculine Phallus in Scream (1996)
ed. Ong Yuan Hao, Benjamin Chew, Genesis Phan
Abstract
In horror cinema, Carol J. Clover’s seminal conception of the Final Girl as “not fully feminine […] just as the killer is not fully masculine” (204) in part centres around the “brutal employment of the phallus” (211) in the interaction and inevitable confrontation between her and the killer. While, as Clover points out, the slasher killer’s “masculinity is severely qualified” (209) by his transgressive gender or sexuality, he must still necessarily possess the singularly powerful, masculinising phallus of the iconic penetrative weapon. This essay exposes how this particular dynamic of phallic masculinity is performed, embodied, or constructed to invoke a transmasculine power via the motif of the artificial phallus. In a twisted parallel to Clover’s androgynous Final Girl, the unique meta-horror of Scream (1996) implicates the killer in a similar gender transformation represented by the distinct iconography of the knife. By functionally overlapping with the characteristically transmasculine, surgically or materially constructed phallus, the knife as a central motif of Ghostface’s identity then implies a transmasculine reading of Billy Loomis. Explicating this dimension of the feminine male killer offers an expansion of Clover’s theory, where inverting the focus on the masculine female Final Girl may then lead to a re-gendering of her killer counterpart as not merely “in gender distress” (194), but potentially (and powerfully) transgendered.
The slasher killer’s knife, as Clover writes, is an extension of his body (198). Universally recognised and necessitated in the slasher film as a phallic symbol, the knife is the ideal executor of the killer’s violent, predominantly masculine will. Violence as a “substitute for and a prelude to” (Clover 196) sex thus invests the knife with an erotic purpose, made into a “personal” object superior by virtue of its “closeness and tactility” (198). Taking this sexual suggestiveness in hand with physical domination, it is not difficult to envision the penetrative blade as symbolic of a particular phallus. The transmasculine phallus is as flexible in its manifestations as the slasher killer’s phallic weapons are varied: Lal Zimman examines how vernacular terminology ordinarily used to describe normative male genitals such as “penis,” “dick or cock” (23) may for trans men equally refer to literal, embodied surgical reconstructions (18), artificial prosthetics, as well as genitalia that has not been modified from its gendered ‘female’ biology (23). Here, I emphasise the knife as a symbolic artificial object, a physical affirmation of the bearer’s masculinity precisely in the same way that the trans man’s penis “serves as the material base […] for ‘restoring the body to the self’” (Prosser qtd. in Cotten 86).
Furthermore, the “difficulty of sustaining a masculine identity” that arises from “the impossibility of measuring up to the fantasy of the [symbolic] full phallus” (Ussher 161) is an exclusively cisgender shortcoming. Whether surgically constructed or artificially manufactured, trans men possess penises that are “indomitable, infallible, perfect,” (Evil Faggot Posse, emphasis original) without the need to “worry about size, premature ejaculation, unplanned pregnancies, or erectile dysfunction” (Cotten 94). Within a heterosexual matrix where “male sexual identity is so closely tied to the performance of the penis, that a man is not a ‘man’ if his penis does not work” (Ussher 159), the “true phallus” (Evil Faggot Posse) attained by trans men effectively “disrupt[s] and destabilise[s] the norm (and normalization) of cisgender male penises [used] to judge trans men’s penises as inadequate replicas” (Cotten 94). It then stands to reason that as an omnipotent “signifier of sexual difference, of mastery, and of power, and arguably of masculinity itself” (Ussher 160), the knife-as-phallus may just as well stand as the transmasculine killer’s penis, performing penetration without fail and establishing him undeniably as a man.
Fig 1. The camera focuses solely on Ghostface's raised knife before an imminent stab. (Scream 00:11:38)
In Scream, Ghostface’s every appearance is marked by the visual motif of the knife as much as it relies on his signature mask. His figure language accentuates the knife, whether he is in a chase or a struggle: the camera frequently pans to his outstretched arm raising (00:11:38; 01:22:53) the knife, and theatricalities such as the knife wipe (01:20:50) contribute to its significance as iconography and a recognisable marker of the Ghostface identity. If the knife’s artificial phallicism establishes the killer’s “phallic purpose” (Clover 209) as a transmasculine one, then Ghostface functions as the persona that performs masculinity in terms of both sexual and homicidal conquest, at once “deeply disturbed” (Sonntagbauer 10) yet a “radical affirmation” (11) of his male identity.
Ghostface himself is knowingly constructed out of the violent phallic masculinity derived from slasher films— Billy openly quotes Psycho at the moment of his reveal, and Tatum mocks his Ghostface as “play[ing] psycho killer.” (Scream 01:06:08) In the iconic scene where the horror movie’s ‘rules’ are stated, a shot of the killer’s raised knife stays frozen on the television central to the frame, establishing “this theme of the naked blade” (01:13:28, director’s commentary) as another unspoken rule of the film, and of the genre at large. Once again, the slasher film demands that its hallmark phallic violence is made prominently recognisable in the symbol of the knife, the synonymity of a naked blade with an exposed phallus reinforcing the fundamental importance of its sexual and lethal suggestiveness.
Fig 2. Another slasher film is shown within the film, frozen on a similar frame of a brandished knife (Scream 01:13:28)
Relevant here despite his limited focus on cis-heteronormative masculinity is Stefan Sonntagbauer’s assertion that the slasher’s mask signifies “visible transition” (4) to a hyper-masculine identity in response to “[incompatibility] with common notions of masculinity” (3), a sentiment which has plainly transmasculine connotations. By intentionally occupying the position of the killer “that horror film so stubbornly genders [as] male” (Clover 209), Billy’s masculinity is invoked as something which is shaped by societal perceptions of phallic dominance and reliant on an assumed, rather than inherent, maleness. Within the context of Scream’s meta-horror slasher narrative, with its self-awareness and manipulation of its own “rules,” (01:13:13) Billy Loomis thus emerges as a trans-coded killer whose “dick” is his knife.
This transmasculine coding of Billy’s character is entirely dependent on his double role as Sidney’s boyfriend and killer. The original gender dynamic that Clover identifies positions the killer far more distantly from the Final Girl [1]: He is “often unseen, or barely glimpsed,” and is repulsive or feminised in a way that denies any empathy or audience identification (207).
Fig 3. Billy first enters the frame through Sidney’s window, at an angle obscured from the camera. (Scream 00:13:23)
In deliberate contrast, Billy is able to present as masculine via his role as Sidney’s boyfriend throughout the film. He is overtly and normatively male from his first appearance, sneaking through Sidney’s bedroom window (00:13:23) in what is acknowledged as a recognisably cliché romantic gesture (00:16:24). This is further emphasised by his expression of heterosexual attraction to her because of “what [she] do[es] to [him]” (00:15:27-00:16:05) while the soundtrack romantically frames them as “Romeo and Juliet” (00:16:16) and that “[he’s her] man” (00:16:39). Notably, he is perceived as the one initiating sexually in their relationship, occupying the ideal position of the “active controlling man” during sex (Ussher 162) while also seeming sympathetic by being “patient […] with all this sex stuff” (Scream 00:16:32; 00:59:12) in response to Sidney’s “sexual reluctance” (Clover 210) that is typical of the Final Girl.
Consequently, Billy’s reveal as the killer corresponds to an undermining of his gender that has, up to that point, been ‘seen’ as male narratively and cinematically. Once his performance of masculinity is shown to be for the purposes of the killer role, his male identity predicated on heterosexual intimacy is called into question; He is merely following the “rules” of the “game” (01:31:21-01:31:29) where killing and “fuck[ing]” are synonymous. Recognising the staged nature of Billy’s desire for Sidney then disputes the heteronormative ideal of male gender and sexuality that he previously represented. Instead, this suggests Billy’s possession of a “subordinated masculinity” (Gottzén & Straube 219) that is itself transgressive, in that it is “transvestite or transsexual” (Clover 209).
Fig 4. Billy’s second entry mimics his first. (Scream 00:29:49)
By visually referencing Billy’s actions in scenes that focus on Ghostface and vice versa, his two personas are established as two sides of the same transmasculine identity. This is most evident in his repeated action of climbing through Sidney’s window: While the first occasion is perceived as boldly romantic (00:13:20), the second immediately throws suspicion upon him due to his sudden appearance at a moment of high tension after Sidney has been chased and cornered by Ghostface (00:29:47). The recurring use of the window as a frame for Billy’s appearances effectively suggest a connection between boyfriend and killer, both visually and thematically.
This pattern is then mirrored in the scenes of sexual intimacy between Sidney and Billy. While “sex equals death” (01:13:27) is the “generic imperative of the slasher film” (Clover 200), Scream’s only depiction of on-screen intimacy unexpectedly involves Sidney as half of the sexually active couple “scheduled for early destruction” (199)— with Billy’s dual role “ally[ing] her, ironically, with the […] killer himself” (204). But this alignment goes both ways: Sidney’s virginity makes Billy similarly virginal, or “sexually disturbed” and immature in a way that is characteristic of the slasher killer (Clover 195). While in the conventional slasher film, boys die not because they are boys but because they make mistakes (Clover 200), Billy is a boy who dies because he is the boy(friend). In deliberately manipulating Sidney to “[give] it up” (Scream 01:33:18) and thus justify her death (01:33:24), Billy is equally implicated by these same rules.
We now return to the concept of violence and sex as alternatives to one another (Clover 196) in order to understand Billy’s staged “postcoital death scene” (200) as the first instance of his “shared femininity” (210) with Sidney, that foreshadows a similar later eventuality. To begin with, their sex scene is at once a mirror of both their more ‘innocent’ opening scene (Scream 01:15:32, director’s commentary) and the classic slasher film playing on the television (Halloween, 1978), once more undercutting the seemingly conventionally heteronormative relationship with an implied perversion. The “obligatory tit shot” is completely obscured from the camera (01:15:54) and both Sidney and Billy descend out of the frame once they undress (01:15:56) which then immediately cuts away, giving the scene a curious sense of sexual indifference. The crucial act of sexual penetration is achieved entirely off-screen, leaving them almost fully clothed once the camera returns to them (01:18:51).
Fig 5. 5. Billy’s back fully blocks Sidney once they undress, neither of them offering the “obligatory tit shot” to the camera. (Scream 01:15:56)
Fig 6. In the next shot they appear, Sidney has reworn her jacket and Billy is putting on his shirt. (Scream 01:18:51)
It is at this point that violence enters as the alternative to sex, when the penetration initially only implied to have occurred is finally displayed to the camera in Billy being repeatedly stabbed. While the scene is still shot from behind his back (01:20:34) and hidden from view due to its diegetically faked nature, the spectacle of Billy’s ‘death’ is made clearly intentional in physically turning him to present a frontal view of his blood-drenched, white shirt (01:20:38) with a lingering shot as his bloodied hand reaches out to Sidney (01:20:42). Here, the narrative takes advantage of the slasher film’s conventions to produce Billy, not Sidney, as the penetrated victim of sexual intercourse.
Fig 7. Billy is deliberately turned to display the stark bloodstains on his shirt. (Scream 01:20:40)
The gradual undermining of Billy’s assumed masculinity culminates in his placement as the feminine subject of the camera in the final confrontation between the Final Girl and the killer. Upon Sidney’s escape, their roles as Final Girl and killer are abruptly reversed and reconstructed cinematically. Billy takes on the “active investigating gaze” (Clover 210) that, while connoting masculinity in the Final Girl, is transformed into a feminine trait once attributed to him. The camera pans past walls and through rooms in a tracking shot focused on Billy (Scream 01:39:24-1:39:37), stalking him in a similar way as it has been used to track the killer’s predominantly female victims (00:03:19-00:03:27) and lingering at the end of the shot to show him approach in medium close-up (01:39:37). In this sequence, Billy is notably divested of the anonymising and masculinising mask, revealing his identity, his motive, and his emotional instability. In many ways, he is exposed for his true self. He is recognisably still dressed in the bloodstained white shirt from his ‘death’, which continues to serve as a visual reminder that he is a man who has been, and may potentially be, penetrated despite retaining his possession of the knife-as-phallus.
Fig 8. The camera begins tracking Billy from a doorway beyond the kitchen. (Scream 01:39:26)
Fig 9. The camera continues to follow Billy into the corridor by panning between rooms. (Scream 01:39:33)
Once more, the scene in Halloween playing on film is both a backdrop and a mirror of Sidney and Billy’s actions, with the Final Girl hidden in the closet while the killer searches for her outside it (01:39:53). Yet it is Billy whom the camera insistently tracks (01:39:43-01:39:52) as he becomes the one looking for the ‘killer’, with the interior of the closet hidden from view completely. This allows Sidney to subvert their established dynamic by temporarily performing masculinity the same way Billy does— by putting on the Ghostface persona. Dressed in the mask and costume and armed with a phallic umbrella of her own, she bursts out of the closet to stab Billy (01:39:56) with the camera cutting to a close-up of the knife (i.e. phallus) dropping to the floor (01:39:58) in an image that may be perceived as symbolic castration.
Fig 10. Phallus lost. (Scream 01:39:58)
Crucially, while Sidney is able to “address the killer on his own terms” through violently explicit penetration and a “shared masculinity, materialised in ‘all those phallic symbols,’” this neither “unmans” Billy nor truly castrates him (Clover 210). The nature of his transmasculine phallus as a constructed one allows him to be “a man without a penis,” as he continues to occupy a “fixed gender […] without a specific feature of anatomy” (nash 131) in the same way transgender men can make reference to “a continuum of trans male genitals” (Zimman 21). Unmasked from his aggressively masculine Ghostface identity, Billy is left to confront Sidney as the self-made man he is— the carefully constructed boyfriend persona now openly and unavoidably marked with the slasher killer’s characteristic visual signifiers of gender deviance. While he may literally “lose his own cock” (Evil Faggot Posse), “the loss is not a loss” but rather a means of “resignifying the notion of a man” (nash 131). In Billy’s transmasculine body, the socially constructed knife-as-phallus functions as his preferred “material base” with which he cruelly affirms his masculinity, a symbolic object which may be ‘lost’ yet restored again at will without fear of emasculation. By disarming him, Sidney instead sets the stage for an explicit demonstration of the potential penetration that may be enacted upon his body, one that can occur in spite of his wielding of the omnipotent phallus.
Billy’s final struggle with Sidney subsequently takes on the sexual implications deliberately invoked and inverted from their past intercourse, the ‘sex’ absent from their sex scene perversely reappearing as physical brutality instead. Sidney’s fingering of Billy’s stab wound, gruesomely emphasised in an extreme close-up shot (Scream 01:41:30), not only indicates a sexually charged penetration in an “intimate reverse lovemaking” (01:41:38, director’s commentary) but also a uniquely transmasculine conception of sex in the imagery it evokes of a “bonus hole or front hole” (Zimman 22), trans-specific terms used to refer to the vagina (Zimman 28).
Fig 11. Sidney penetrates Billy in a similarly violent way as he intends to penetrate her. (Scream 01:41:30)
This “(illicit) sex” that arises from their interaction of compromised genders and sexualities is the primary factor that leads, through a “cause-and-effect relationship” (Clover 200), to Billy’s eventual defeat and death by Sidney’s hand. While physically retaining his earlier appearance of cisheteronormative masculinity in the form of the handsome boyfriend, yet progressively becoming cinematically and symbolically perceived to be ‘feminine’ or potentially ‘female-bodied’ as the deranged killer, Billy’s identity is thus disclosed alongside the “embodied history” of his transmasculinity (Gottzén & Straube 219).
The deliberate and sustained focus on gender as a “permeable membrane” (Clover 208) and the exploration of the Final Girl and killer as passing across and between this membrane therefore introduces a deeply fascinating facet of Clover’s gender theory, where the power that she suggests arises from “masculinity in conjunction with a female body” (221) may be equally attributed to the killer as a characteristically transmasculine, sexual and gendered “Other”. While this essay does not seek to draw direct connections to audience identification, I propose that a continued exploration of Clover’s theory from a much-neglected transmasculine perspective may open up similar analyses to investigate how, as much as the Final Girl’s “gender [as] theatre” (217) affords Clover’s cisgender male audience the experience of “what [it would] be like to be […] a woman” (217), any closer examination of the convoluted masculinity and femininity within the various killers of the slasher film— who have historically been dismissed under the umbrella of psychosexual deviance or a noncommittally “transvestite” identity— may then answer the question: what would it be like to be trans?
Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations, Special Issue: Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, Vol. 20, 1987. 187-228.
Cotten, Trystan T. “Hung Jury: Queer Verdicts of Sex Reassignment Surgery Versus Trans Men’s Surgical Journeys,” Performing the penis: phalluses in 21st century cultures, edited by Meredith Jones and Evelyn Callahan. Routledge, 2023.
Evil Faggot Posse. “The New Flesh: Or, Why Only Trans Men Possess the True Phallus,” https://open.substack.com/pub/corium/p/the-new-flesh?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (15 October 2024)
Gottzén, Lucas & Straube, Wibke. “Trans masculinities,” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2016. 217-224.
nash, margaret. “the man without a penis: libidinal economies that (re)cognize the hypernature of gender,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1992. 125-134.
Scream. Directed by Wes Craven, Dimension Films, 1996.
Sonntagbauer, Stefan. “Disturbed Mask-ulinity: The Mask Motive in the Slasher Film,” No More Haunted Dolls: Horror Fiction that Transcends the Tropes, edited by Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar. Vernon Press, 2024, 1-22.
Ussher, Jane. “The Case of the Lesbian Phallus: Bridging the Gap between Material and Discursive Analyses of Sexuality,” New Sexual Agendas, edited by Lynne Segal, Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997. 157-168.
Zimman, Lal. “The Discursive Construction of Sex: Remaking and Reclaiming the Gendered Body in Talk about Genitals among Trans Men,” Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, edited by Lal Zimman, Jenny L. Davis, and Joshua Raclaw. Oxford University Press, 2014. 13-34.
Footnotes
[1] The essential “survivor figure” of the slasher formula identified by Clover, involving a female victim who fights against and escapes the male killer: “She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued […] or to kill him herself.” (35)