David McCall

On fear and nostalgia

CW for sex, violence, mention of incest

In January, my girlfriend and I drove up to Beacon, NY. I’d never been before, and a visit made for a good excuse to stay in one of those colonial bed-and-breakfasts, the kind you have to call the proprietor on the phone to book. I worked at one briefly during college (the year that AirBnB was launched, in fact, $31 billion ago), and have since developed a weird nostalgia about them.

A good friend of mine, a psychologist, calls nostalgia a toxic impulse, but even though the job was shitty and took place during a shitty time in my life, there’s something about it that I miss. Shabby thought they may be, I still find the bed-and-breakfast’s components—chaise lounges, creaking hardwood, milk glass shepherdesses—irresistible. Despite our reservations (Ghosts? Weird smells? No wifi?), I got us a room. 

It was a pretty drive. Snow was still on the ground, and every hilltop manse loomed like a haunted castle. Our bed-and-breakfast overlooked the Hudson, the shape and extent of which became much more clear to me over the course of this trip; before, Upstate New York was a muddier concept, fluid and obscure, like a dark liquid or Kazakhstan.

The proprietor took us up to a room on the second floor. There were ugly 90s paintings on the wall—grainy portraits of depressed women and incongruous prints of fairies running through large Medieval corridors—but overall it was nice. The bed was king-size, the furniture well-upholstered. The keyholes still had their original brass covers. The best part was the bathroom, tiled in turquoise and outfitted with a big tub. In the wall behind the toilet were four tall conical light bulbs. Heat lamps, the proprietor explained, as old as the house itself. You turned them on for warmth and illumination when you were using the loo at night. 

“And don’t talk too loud in here,” the proprietor added, angling his head at a locked door next to the lights. The door led to another suite. I thought it was a delicate way to ask us to fuck quietly.  

We thought we were doing okay until I received a midnight text from the proprietor’s wife asking us to keep it down. The other guests had complained but it wasn’t the sex that had been disruptive: It was Fear (1996), an erotic thriller about a gorgeous psychopath that terrorizes his teen girlfriend and her incestuous family. Drunk on Prosecco in honor of my first viewing of a movie that every pervert I know was shocked to learn I hadn’t yet seen, we (okay, I) got so enthusiastic about losing my Fear virginity that we (mostly I) couldn’t contain ourselves. 

The campy, robotic wrath of David (a rippling Mark Wahlberg) and his obsession with princessy Nicole (Bratz doll Reese Witherspoon) is pure entertainment. Wound through a chain of increasingly absurd horrors of manipulation and torture, David’s bizarre, violent behavior lampoons mainstream masculinity by being as scrupulously faithful to its conventions as a bad porn plot. He beats up Nicole’s male friend for hugging her. He picks up Alyssa Milano and throws her over his shoulder, cave-man style, to my girlfriend’s horny delight. In a somehow-very-butch temper tantrum of lust, he stick-and-pokes Nicole 4 Eva into the limpid flesh of his hairless pecs.

What wasn’t to love? I laughed. I screamed. I got just as horny as my pervert girlfriend. If our neighbors’ sleep was troubled because of us (okay, me), well—it had all been out of our hands.

It was my girlfriend who noticed that Wahlberg’s character in Fear is also named David. To say that David McCall has enough in common with me to prompt any kind of comparison is laughable, but in a way I guess that’s the point of Fear and movies like it. Had I seen Fear as a teenage girl, I’m sure I would have felt compelled to identify with Nicole, but as an adult, I’m more interested in the ways that I don’t conform what this other David represents. A weakling weighing 98 pounds will get sand in his face when kicked to the ground. I’ve been a gender failure long enough to have a sense of humor about it (something for which I’m actually quite grateful), but going on HRT has tested that resilience by exposing me to a whole new world of ways to be emasculated—which is the best way I can describe <gesturing to self> This Situation—to sense and have feelings about what I am supposed to be and how I have failed to be it.

I always wonder how cishet men feel watching stuff like this. To what extent do they respect David’s behavior, or envy it? How many of them see it as a problem of degree, and not of kind? His violence is sexy until it isn’t, perpetrated as much to achieve ownership of Nicole as it is to pose an existential threat the respective masculinities of the men around him, particularly Nicole’s very biological father. David is a broken person for whose sense of self everyone else is forced to pay, sometimes in blood. He appeals because he can’t be fixed, he can’t be changed, he can’t be turned off. His evil is so ruthlessly sharklike that it paradoxically ceases to be effective—a savvier abuser would have cut his losses long before he found himself in a doomed home invasion scenario, would perhaps not even have pursued a girl with a loving, incestuous family in the first place. Do the cishet men who watch Fear think, like me, “This is bad!” and yet want David’s violence anyway? Can they acknowledge to themselves when they want it in more ways than one?

If I am alienated, I guess I can take some solace in the fact that men are, too. Even if it doesn’t always feel funny, it isn’t not humorous to find myself, as a 31-year-old transsexual, regretting how much I don’t fit into what I am supposed to be (David) after years of regretting how much I don’t fit into what I am supposed to be (Nicole). I was a bad girl and now I am a bad boy, but not the kind of bad boy that Nicole and my girlfriend and even I, I suppose, want, at least sometimes.

I swirled my Prosecco and thought about the title. Why Fear? Because David McCall has discovered that the best way to get what he needs from other people is by making them afraid of him, and they like it (after a fashion and up to a point). In exchange for being willing to frighten, harm, and even kill others, he acquires the love he wants, or thinks he does anyway. I wished that I had seen Fear when it came out, like my girlfriend did—not because I think children should watch this movie, but because I wished I could have known what I, at eight years old, would have thought of it. If nostalgia is toxic, what is regret for something that was never within our control?

(As I write this, it’s too late at night to attempt picking through Linda Williams’ theorizing around the “body genres” of porn, horror, and melodrama for something coherent, but maybe you’ll do the heavy lifting for me. Prompt: affect theory, autonomic arousal, the freedom of full commitment to the bit, etc. You can DM me about it if you want. I probably won’t respond.)