DOUBLE TROUBLE:

INTERROGATING MASCULINITIES

IN THE WORK

OF ASAF AND TOMER HANUKA

I. Who Are you Anyway?

The crisis of male identity is a central feature of

postmodern culture. Thomas Byers sees this crisis as

challenging the very notion of male identity, which is a

precarious convergence of specific fears:

The traditional subject, particularly the masculine subject, is in the throes of an identity crisis. Moreover, this crisis is a particularly radical one. [...] [I]t is not simply a matter of discovering or choosing for oneself a single, unified, coherent identity from a range of cultural possibilities. [. . .] Rather, the current crisis threatens to transform or even overthrow the whole concept of identity. This is the point of convergence of fears of late capitalism, fears of feminism, fears of any swerving from the path of "straight" sexuality (7).

Postmodern masculinity is increasingly aware of itself

as performance, of the ways in which, in Judith Butler’s

phrase, the male “repeats or mimes the discursive gestures

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of power” (108). This has created a profound performance

anxiety, conscious of the fissures between what is said and

what is felt; the “convergence of fears” that Byres

mentions, leading to the possibility of fragmentation and

collapse. A new model of masculinity needs to be

established, which responds to these challenges.

Comics, with their alternation between speech and

silence, action and stasis, and their dependence on the

reader negotiating gaps and fissures between the panels to

create their meaning, would seem an ideal context in which

to explore the representation of postmodern male identity,

and potentially suggest a different mode of engagement with

identity that might lead out of the combative mode

engendered by this sense of crisis. Yet there is little

discussion in comics scholarship of the representation of

postmodern masculinity. Jeffrey A. Brown’s exploration of

masculine identity in comics focuses on the superhero genre,

with specific reference to race and ethnicity, but he

retains a modernist binary of male/female to articulate the

relationship between a hypermasculine superhero and his

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feminised alter ego. This alter ego, who functions as the

point of identification for the reader, is undercut and

undermined throughout the narrative, enhancing the sense of

fragmentation and crisis rather than resolving it (Brown,

31).

For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the

work of the Hanuka brothers, Tomer and Asaf, twins who have

been producing the collaborative anthology Bipolar (A five-

issue mini series published by Alternative Comics) and are

currently collaborating on a joint project. I will focus on

Asaf’s rendering of an Etgar Keret novella, Pizzeria Kamikaze,

and Tomer’s short story collection, Placebo Man, both drawing

on work originally published in Bipolar. As Asaf comments, “I

think we are both interested in questions like self-

definition, self-identity and polarization, simply by being

twins, similar and different” (Email 06). As twins, the

sense of male doubleness and alienation described above is

especially evident in their work. Born in Tel Aviv, the

twins soon split and were each nurtured by a different

comics tradition:

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Asaf and myself grew up in Israel in the 70's where we consumed trashy super-hero comics, with bad production values and cheesy story lines but it was the best escape. In a way some of them felt really deep and philosophical. I think that was the formal foundation for how we ended up drawing comics. Asaf went to a University in France. By the time we finished with the army he was already set on European Comics, which is what he is doing now as well. I went to NY to study illustration and was thrilled to find the American Indycomics scene. This point of separation: New-York vs. France might shed some light on the differences in style (between us), keeping in mind that we are indeed two different people (T. Hanuka, Email 06).

Despite their stylistic differences, there are marked

similarities in their thematic preoccupations. Tomer focuses

explicitly on the constructions of “heroic” male identity

and the superhero myths through which they are often

expressed in comics, releasing their buried subtexts for our

scrutiny. The repressed aspects of masculine identity

fascinate him; “I'm drawn to stones I'm not supposed to turn

over. If I feel there is a mental taboo there, I want to see

why. I think most men in their early twenties think about

these sort of things, not in a gay/straight sort of way, but

testing your own borders of masculinity in a metro sexual

world. We live in confusing times” (T. Hanuka, Email 06).

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Ihab Hassan sees indeterminacy as a key aspect of the

postmodern condition: “Indeterminacies pervade our actions,

ideas, interpretations; they constitute our world”(Hassan,

504).

Tomer’s creative process is often an attempt to

discover and analyse his own unconscious fears and

anxieties, in which an image and its framing context are

brought into dialogue:

The image comes to me in the form of a drawing that suggest a context. I explore the context with a needle pricking around my head and when it feels uneasy I moveto that direction to see why... I try to push as hard as I can to the source of that unease and when I touch the bottom, or what feels like it, that is closure for me… Like life, you never really get closure. If you're lucky you get home in one piece (T. Hanuka, Email 09).

His fascination with “unease” recalls one of the key

critical analyses of masculinity by Calvin Thomas, which

“concerns an unease about the male body as a material site

of linguistic production, a corporeal tension between

(gendered) identity and (self-) representation. This tension

troubles the construction of normative, hegemonic

masculinity”(Thomas, 3). This “troubled construction” is

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Tomer’s thematic focus, which suggests that he aligns

himself with Thomas’ project, which is “to produce anxiety –

particularly in its male readership – rather than to assuage

it, for I argue that the foreclosure of anxieties secures

male identity within the parameters of masculine domination

(Thomas, 3). As Tomer indicates with his comments on

“closure”, this anxiety is reflected both on a thematic and

a structural level. Apparent lack of control and authorial

shaping, and the impossibility of closure, stand in

opposition to the superhero comics against which he defines

himself, with their reification of hegemonic masculinity.

The first story in Placebo Man, “Time Strips”, sets out

the thematic preoccupations and stylistic tropes that thread

through the chronological collection. The title takes on a

double meaning, as time, and the authority of their adult

“protectors”, strips away the coherent identity of the male

protagonists, who range in age from a boy, to a young man on

military training, to a middle aged man who has abducted a

schoolgirl. Flannigan Saint-Aubin claims that “Patriarchal

ideology takes the male body, or rather a fantasied version

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of the male body, as its metaphoric basis, as the metaphor

for its generating and structuring principle” (11). “Time

Strips” exposes the violence implicit in this structuring

principle, both in the violence of what it excludes and

represses, and the potential for this repressed violence to

flare up in acts of aggression against the feminine, both

within the self and projected onto the female “Other.” The

mother of the young boy wants him to shave his head, become

more masculine and lose his beloved hair, a subtle re-

reading of the Samson myth as a castration of male power.

The dangerous implications of this attack on masculine

identity are represented by the predatory adult male, who

cradles a silenced, abject girl in a decidedly menacing way,

suggesting that the victims will become attackers, passing

on the cycle of violence which is a hallmark of Patriarchal

society.

The phallocentric nature of authority is a leitmotif in

“Time Strips”. As he sits on the toilet for a moment of

privacy, a soldier leans his gun against the cubicle wall

and reads. We witness a moment of inwardness, of passivity

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and solitude, which is a threat to the established male

order represented by his abusive drill sergeant, who bursts

in, insisting he “pick up his weapon,” and reassume the

burden of a militant and aggressive masculinity ("Time

Strips," 20) (FIGURE 1). The rejected gun represents the

conventional phallic masculinity the soldier has attempted

to relinquish; in this private moment he is receptive to

reading, sitting on an enclosing receptacle, and covers his

testicles when the sergeant bursts in, demanding “who the

hell do you think you are?” (20). In its depiction of the

recruit and his sergeant, this sequence represents the two

contrasting paradigms of masculinity, the “phallic” and the

“testicular”, identified by Flannigan-Saint-Aubin:

Masculinity, in its psychologic and cultural manifestations and implications, is assumed to be the homologue of the phallic genitality of the male with, at the very least, metaphoric connections to it – in part, aggressive, violent, penetrating, goal-directed, linear. Lacking in this perspective in particular is what I shall call the testicular and testerical aspect of male sexual anatomy and physiology. If the testiclesare entered into the equation, an entirely different metaphoricity emerges, stemming from testicular/testerical characteristics: passive, receptive, enclosing, stable, cyclic (239).

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The sergeant and the authority he embodies insist that

the recruit reject his testicular masculinity in favour of a

conventional phallic mode of being. Flannigan Saint-Aubin

suggests a motivation for the sergeant’s hostility:

Everything that is not phallic and in line with traditional masculinity is automatically considered other, that is, feminine; as a result…these other components of and metaphors for masculinity, although they are authentically and intrinsically male, are not viewed or perhaps even experienced consciously as male(239-40).

This attack on the possibility of testicular

masculinity by a phallic authority is internalized and

presented as a kind of castration in the later story

“Squeeze” where a man cheating on his partner shoots the

reflection of his own penis in the mirror (T. Hanuka,

"Squeeze," 71). This recalls Hassan’s comment on performance

anxiety in postmodern identity, where “the characters become

aware of themselves as performances, become aware of the

process of constructing these performances, and the effort

and cost involved.” (507) The exploration of this “cost” is

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a leitmotif in Tomer’s work. He comments on the meaning of

the title of this story that:

The (protagonists) masculinity is being squeezed, or rather they are being squeezed by it. All the (main) male characters in the story are balancing a masculinity to femininity ratio that alters them in oneway or another. You almost have to make a choice, as everybody has both sides, and the choice, independent or forced, has consequences (Email 09).

The narrative explores what choices are available to

its range of male characters, and what the costs of these

choices are, given that they are often “split” between

hypermasculine and feminised

self-representations/performances; “the sign of gender…is

not the same as the body that it figures, but…cannot be read

without it” (Butler, 113). The opening sequence of “Squeeze”

presents a pre-operative trans-sexual male urinating and

shaving (61), foreshadowing what is to be “cut away” from

the men in the story, and highlighting the performativity of

their gender. The subsequent sequence involves a long-

established couple; the male is reading, escaping into a

textual relationship involving “love letters a man sends to

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a woman he’s never met” (62). His communication to his

female partner itself becomes an unsent letter, as she fails

to respond, insisting instead that he “smell”; undercutting

his attempt to connect emotionally and intellectually with

the nagging fact of his embodiment. Like the mother in “Time

Strips”, she is the carrier of patriarchal authority,

rejecting his real body for an idealized, sanitized one. In

so doing, Tomer suggests, this ideology elides the presence

of the real male body, just as the appearance of a superhero

depends on the absence of his “weak” alter-ego. The male

reader duly goes and showers, and in the privacy of the

shower, just like the soldier locked in his cubicle in “Time

Strips”, he imagines a different kind of masculinity, a

homo-erotic embrace with a feminised male other, who

insists, “I love the way you smell” (63). This also suggests

that it is his own lack of reconciliation and connection

with this “feminine” aspect of himself that has created the

unfulfilment in his relationship with the external female

“other”, as he represses an aspect of his sexuality in order

to “perform” his normative heterosexuality. The protagonists

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final “split” self-image is of a vegetable, a sweating

aubergine (70), as this aspect of himself has become

vegetal, inactive. This metaphor arcs through the strands of

this story, and finds its apotheosis in the consumption of a

phallic cucumber by the transsexual that forms the story’s

coda (73). Slices of the cucumber also cover this

characters’ eyes, suggesting that even as this element of

hir identity is destroyed, it remains all s/he can see. So

the love letters that are never sent also double as a

metaphor for the self-estrangement of all the males in this

story. The external world here seems destructive of, and

hostile to, the development of a “testicular” masculinity,

and this hostility is absorbed by the males in this story,

and turned on themselves, as if the only way out of the

double-bind of masculine performance anxiety is self-

destruction (73).

This destruction inscribes itself in the body of the

young boy in Time Strips, who, like Oskar Matzerath in The Tin

Drum (Grass), is unable to grow. Asked about the symbolic

significance of this, Tomer comments that

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“the boy is a threat to the father. There is one man inthe house, who would only allow one man around (himself). Hence, the boy can not grow. The boy's approaching masculinity is what threatens his own senseof survival and safety so his body rejects the process of turning into a man in order to stay safe” (Email 09). 

This is visually represented in the boy’s dream of slipping

through his father’s outstretched arms, while his father’s

own masculinity is visually presented by a pair of legs

protruding from under the protective carapace of his beloved

car ("Squeeze," 68). There is no one there to “catch” him,

to safely ease his passage from boyhood to adolescence;

instead he and the other young men in the collection are

seen as a threat by the older generation who should be

nurturing them.

The damaging impact of both authority figure and

relational other against whom the men are asked to define

themselves forms a leitmotif in Tomer’s stories, from the

drill-sergeant and castrating mother in “Time Strips”, to

the damaging father and the partner disgusted by her

husband’s body odour in “Squeeze”. This external hostility

from the Patriarchal culture in which they find themselves

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leaves the male characters with no coherent identity to

present. "So I said I will be whoever you want me to be," in

“I Love You” (T. Hanuka, "I Love," 30) this time aimed at an

absent woman, a former partner. The lack of a coherent self

renders impossible the desired connection present in the

title. This is enacted symbolically in the closing image of

the story, in which the Superhero aspect of the alter-ego

protagonist is unable to save the woman he loves, and

cradles her dead body, the dead body of his own “feminine”

relational self, while the protagonist himself is slumped

passively in front of the television (32). For Tomer, “the

last panel is where the most extreme contrast emerges

between the hyper-real and the real; the death of the woman

in the super hero story conflates with the most static

and gentle fade out good night wish that is as safe as a TV

blanket” (Email 09). The mediated self takes refuge in the

soporific static of a blank screen, while the super-heroic

myths of masculinity no longer save, they maim and destroy.

The huge gap between the real and imaginary strands in “I

Love You” again suggests a failure to establish a coherent

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identity, of the mutual exile between public and private

aspects of identity, between acting and imagining, speaking

and feeling.

Tomer Hanuka utilises the visual grammar of comics to

create a mode of reading in which the reader becomes aware

of the performative nature of both the protagonists identity

and our own reading. Ihab Hassan argues that the “postmodern

text, verbal or nonverbal, invites performance: it wants to

be written, revised, answered, acted out”(507). The reader

enacts much of the meaning in “Time Strips” and “Squeeze”,

and we also create closure, linking the different strands as

they comment on each other. The narrative of “Time Strips”

concludes with a juxtaposition of moments in which each male

character, including the artist himself appears, yet in

which they still seem isolated, trapped in their respective

panels, spatially isolated from each other on the page to

mirror their state of fragmentation (22-23). Tomer’s own

comments on this ending suggest that is not trying to induce

the “anxiety” of Thomas’ project, but to liberate these

fragments through a postmodern playfulness:

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The leap that needs to be made is that in a sense they are one narrative (person). By nature personalities have diverse sides that contradict, cancel, oppose and ignore other sides.The noise of this interaction has a harmony, the sound of the harmony is ever changing, as the parts keep changing, but it is still music, pleasant or horrendous, it's the music of what makes people who they are. The last spread of the storyis an attempt to compose a sentence using words from different dialects, or rather a verse that is chaotic but also somehow musical (Email 09).

Rather than a cause for anxiety, Tomer presents these

disparate male figures as fragments of the self for the

reader to harmonise, exposing the music of dissonance and

dissent which the authorial and patriarchal system usually

seeks to suppress, and provides a visual grammar for a more

plural and nuanced sense of male identity. The characters

become aware of themselves as performances, become aware of

the process of constructing these performances, and the

effort and cost involved. For the reader, the frequent

refusal of the narrative to make clear links or conclusions

allows us to play out alternative possibilities for the

protagonists, to select our own elements from the flow, and

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participate in shaping and re-shaping the protagonists

identities and the narratives in which they are situated in

an open-ended, playful and ultimately celebratory example of

artists utilising the formal possibilities of comics and

their multiplicity of readings to overturn the hegemony of

patriarchal masculinity.

II. The Fall of the Hero:

A key aspect of Tomer Hanuka’s approach to deconstructing

the mythologies of masculinity is decanonization, as Hassan

points out, “we decanonize culture, demystify knowledge,

deconstruct the languages of power, desire, deceit” (505).

At a formal level in their approach to narrative structure,

and in their approach to characterisation, the brothers

undermine a patriarchal sense of authority and demonstrate

the subjectivity of both the characters and their own

narratives, which ardently resist closure, and insist it is

temporary, arbitrary. Tomer’s approach to narrative

structure dismantles the linear “Hero’s Journey” model of

narrative beloved of Joseph Campbell (Campbell) and

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Christopher Vogler (Vogler), which are a mainstay of the

conventional superheroic narrative.

This is especially marked in two stories that

deconstruct the myths of heroic masculinity, “Elephant

Graveyard” and “Aquaflesh”. “Elephant Graveyard” takes on

the American ‘superhero’ myth directly by exploring the

impact of this myth on the personal life of Jonny

Weissmuller, who played the iconic hero Tarzan. His

cinematic persona is contrasted both with his present life

in a retirement home and with his former life as an actor.

The Tarzan narrative is used to comment obliquely on his

current ‘captivity’ and immobility in an old age home, with

recurring imagery of cages, bars and windows. His macho

heroics in the past have brought him no closer to

fulfilment; this false self-definition has constricted his

development and left him isolated and abandoned. The

narrative is permeated with a sense of loss, focalized in

the loss of the woman he loved. The image of femininity

against which he seeks to define the different aspects of

his identity is itself represented as mediated, controlled,

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a part of the forces that cage and entrap him, FIGURE 2

("Elephant Graveyard," 41). There is an oral focus to this

page, with Weismuller’s wordless caged cry contrasted with

the televised images of a cosmetics advert. The woman cannot

“save” him because she too is acting, her own image is

mediated. We move closer to her lips, suggesting the longing

for connection, to this aspect of his own identity and to

the other, only to segue into an advertisement for lipstick.

The actress he loves leaves him because she wants a swimming

pool; ironic in that his own career began due to

extraordinary swimming prowess which allowed him to combat

polio. Her status anxiety is what drowns him, anticipating

the fate of Aquaman. In “Aquaflesh”, a superheroic figure

loses his ability to breathe underwater, and becomes an

alcoholic, as a result of falling in love. There is a sense

in both stories that in going towards the other, we lose

everything about ourselves that matters. Tomer sees a

fundamental connection between these two narratives:

In the way the male figure is both 'more' than human (Tarzan and Aqua-man) and humanly flawed in the deepestway for it's inability to deal with a reality that

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doesn't care for their supposed greatness, and in turn exposes that greatness to be a weakness; Tarzan is lostin Hollywood, aqua-man is drowning in alcohol. They offer a meaning by way of origin story. There is a search for that tipping point, where things started going wrong. For “Aquaflesh” it's a beautiful day wherehe met the love of his life. For Tarzan it's jumping off the cliff against all odds.”(Email 09).

This motif of falling, of failing precisely through their

attempt to achieve and embody a masculine ideal, is a

feature of the narrative arc and visual symbolism of both

stories. In the final image of “Elephant Graveyard” to which

Tomer refers, the young Weismuller’s heroic leap is ironised

by his present fate ("Elephant Graveyard," 47). He is poised

between the past and present, yet the reader enacts the

inevitability of his fall. In “Aquaflesh”, the protagonist

dreams that he leaps to his death from a hotel window in

order to embrace his former love, and we see his body

floating in the foreground; the image acts as a comment on

the aspirations of both Weismuller and Aquaman, on the

inevitability of their loss of self ("Aquaflesh," 110).

Both men are heroic failures and embody the failure of

heroism; their life, and the narrative arc of their stories,

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seems to involve the sacrifice, and loss of a primal and

coherent self. The site of this loss is their bodies, which

they have attempted both to use and to escape from. In both

stories, it is the women they love who ultimately reinforce

the patriarchy, of which they are also both victims and

products, as the depiction of the mediated images of

femininity in FIGURE 2 from “Elephant Graveyard” suggests.

Under a patriarchal, phallic masculine order, love itself

becomes part of the problem, part of the cage rather than a

source of liberation from it.

Tomer’s dismantling of the ideology of heroism in these

narratives, associated with the Campbell’s linear Heroes’

Journey is mirrored formally by a narrative structure in

which present and past collide. In “Elephant Graveyard”,

Tomer makes bravura use of alternating panels to represent

the fragmentary nature of the old man’s consciousness, in

which past and present meld and collide, as he seeks to

discover what kind of man he was, and is; to come to terms

with failure and loss. The narrative structure of

“Aquaflesh” underlines this, with the final images focusing

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on the moment he “threw it all away”, rising out of the

ocean in a tower of muscle, having “left his home” far

behind ("Aquaflesh," 114). As readers, this tipping point

and potentially romantic meeting is ironised, emptied of all

save the nostalgia of regret by the preceding sequence; the

circular, non-linear structure of the stories echo the

entrapment and self-estrangement of their protagonists. Just

as in “Squeeze”, he has sacrificed his body, here identified

with his unique gifts, for what society convinced him he

desired and needed. The estrangement from an aspect of the

self has led to this damaging projection onto another. This

“other” becomes a focus of an inherently impossible quest, a

quest for wholeness that can only lead to further

fragmentation and disintegration.

IV. Only (Re)Connect!

In the final story in the collection, “Morocco”, the

middle-aged male protagonist lies bedridden in a Moroccan

hospital, having been involved in a car crash, literalising

the metaphor of damage and entrapment that has threaded

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through the preceding stories. “I’m imprisoned in a

situation myself…an SUV cut me off in a slow, condescending

manner that somehow blocked my ability to respond.”(T.

Hanuka, "Morocco," 118). The self-absorption of the

narrator, and the failure of the car, recurrent symbol of

macho armature, to protect its driver from injury, brings

core themes from the collection into sharp focus. The

intellectual and emotional quest of the protagonist is

wholly internal, rather than the macho physical quest

embodied by the male protagonists of the stories we’ve

encountered previously. He ranges freely over his past and

present experience, trying to construct a usable identity

from the fragments of his life to date. This inwardness

gives the language of the piece a more meditative, poetic

quality. His enforced passivity, and the cyclic nature of

his reflections, suggests a movement towards testicular

masculinity, but the protagonist resists this, initially

wedded to his phallic identity.

The opening sequence sketches a paradigmatic

male/female relationship; the woman simultaneously in a

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position of power and distance, represented by her mirroring

glasses:

Every four hours a nurse comes to check vital signs. Atnight I notice her coming from the lit corridor. She isyoung, not ‘hot’ per se but surely a female. She’sworking her routine mechanically, never really lookingat me. If she only gave it a chance…What a bitch. Ihaven’t seen my own face in a week (T. Hanuka,"Morocco," 119).

The sense of self-estrangement present in the last line

suggests why the other has become a mirror for projections

of self-loathing here. The binary male/female dualism and

sense of competition it engenders is amplified by the

nurses’ bizarre theft of the patients’ breakfast eggs later

in the story; it is as if the nurses, carriers of the

patriarchy, are pre-empting the testicular masculinity he

seeks.

Against this fractured present filled with pain, we

encounter his memories of a past relationship; “If you place

a problematic couple in an unfamiliar environment they

become inseparable. But we had something else, I don’t think

it has a name”(T. Hanuka, "Morocco," 120). We are back in

the familiar territory of a present underpinned by the loss

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of something that might have only existed in the male

protagonists’ mind, as was suggested in “Aquaflesh”. Morocco

itself becomes both the site of the quest and the symbol of

the loss, a reminder of the impossible distance between the

present self and the object/state it desires; “what did I

lose in Morocco anyway?” (T. Hanuka, "Morocco," 125). An

arched doorway in Morocco becomes the legs and sex of a

naked young girl, with whom the protagonist was “obsessed”

in High School, as he passes through the arch to discover

the infidelity of his partner; an event still too painful to

be put into words. This underlines both the youthful,

adolescent quality of the older protagonists’ obsession, and

its mythic resonance of estrangement; “It was like

discovering why we were kicked out of paradise. And it was

worth it.”(T. Hanuka, "Morocco," 125). The possibility of

communion, of connection, are always in the past, constantly

receding, recalling Benjamin’s Angel of History (Benjamin and

Arendt, 249), where progress is defined as greater and

greater distance form the Edenic ideal which the (male)

angel is facing, as he is blown backwards into the future.1

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Benjamin’s pessimistic modernist binary sees the male angel

moving ever further from an idealized past; he is a

superhero who cannot save, trapped in linear time. Tomer’s

protagonists break down this linear binary of past/present,

and resist closure, yet like the angel remain unable to

connect to the other.

In the hospital, a possible moment of community and

communication with another patient breaks down into macho

posturing. The narrator meets a wheelchair bound African,

who brags that in his youth, “I carried a gun and would

stick people up.” The narrator counters with “That’s pretty

stupid; a baby playing with toys. When I was in the

army…”(T. Hanuka, "Morocco," 127). The text for the last two

panels on the page reads, “so we bond like this, with mutual

1 “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees onesingle catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future towhich his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Benjamin and Arendt, 249)

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lies…as a result the spaces in the room have changed

significantly.” This equation between the male body and the

space it inhabits is amplified in the depictions

accompanying the text (see FIGURE 3). Although sharing the

same physical space, the psychological defences the two men

have erected push them into separate panels; the female

nurse who was the object of the narrator’s scrutiny patrols

the foreground like a border guard. With current gender

constructions, the narrative suggests, even at moments of

potential intimacy and vulnerability, macho masculine

identity will intrude and block communication.

The final two panels of this, the last story, and hence

the last two panels in the book, contrast the real distance

between the male protagonist and the woman he tried to love,

and an imagined closeness, projected back into a childhood

when “you had no history, I had no future.” (T. Hanuka,

"Morocco," 133), FIGURE 4.The panels are starkly contrasted;

in one, the adult characters turn away from each other, and

from us, their hands filled with rubbish, (Benjamin’s

“rubble”) almost obscured in saturated black. In the final

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panel, the two face us; the girl self-enclosed, laughing

into her hand; the male protagonist gazing back at us,

longing for a connection we already know will never occur.

Tomer’s brother Asaf comments on his own use of black and

white that “black suggest infinity because you can't see

where it ends and how deep it is. White on the other hand is

showing you the space, so even if its big it has an end” (A.

Hanuka, Email 09) Reading the conclusion of Tomer’s

narrative in light of this comment increases its pessimism.

It is the distance between the characters that is endless,

the moment of closeness that is both imagined and finite; it

lasts as long as it takes us to read the panel; hardly any

time at all. As we shall see, this is in stark contrast to

Asaf’s exploration of the possibilities of postmodern

masculine gender identity in Pizzeria Kamikaze.

V. Towards a Postmodern Masculinity:

Pizzeria Kamikaze opens with an emotionally resonant image

that fills the entire page – a funeral seen from the

perspective of the grave itself, narrated by the

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protagonist, Mordy, who has comitted suicide. Asaf isolates

the characters at the graveside in individual panels even

though they share the same physical space, recalling Tomer’s

sense that society and the self fracture in the face of

genuine emotion. Mordy imagines a predatory phallic male

waiting to sleep with his grieving girlfriend; “afterwards

the guy would stick it to her, and it would all be about

making her feel better.” Mordy’s own vanquished physicality

is dwelt on by the text; “kinda shriveled up and pitiful,

like an old chocolate bar” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 3).

It would seem that we once again have the binaries of

hypermasculine and a rejected, feminised masculinity. Yet in

contrast to Tomer’s adherence to black and white, throughout

Pizzeria Kamikaze, Asaf makes use of a mediating third colour,

a luminous silver-grey, which visually underpins the

protagonists quest for a reconciling third term, a different

way of seeing. The third colour also suggests the liminal

location of both the protagonist. Mordy, the protagonist and

narrator, finds himself in Hell, portrayed here as a Dantean

city for suicides that bears a remarkable resemblance to Tel

29

Aviv. Death, in the novel, becomes a metaphor for loss of

self, as, in Asaf’s words, “each of us is already dead

somewhere because he gave up on something along the way…and

we might die while living if we forget we are lucky to be

here” (A. Hanuka, Email 06). In Asaf’s rendering, there is

no finitude even in death; every ending is therefore

provisional. Even the narrative itself, already published in

prose before this graphic treatment, was collaboratively

revised; “we are long time friends and collaborators so

there is a mutual trust. Etgar was willing to change parts

in the story to make it fit better the graphic novel” (A.

Hanuka, Email 09). The creation of the work itself is

underpinned by the kind of male community and collaboration

the text comes to celebrate.

Just in Tomer’s stories, the subversion of the

iconography of macho masculinity is central to Etgar Keret’s

oeuvre. He has explained that the catalyst for his own

forays into fiction was the suicide of a friend in the army

and the official speech at his funeral, praising his

heroism. He wasn’t a conventional hero, Keret insists, but

30

the army had no frame of reference for someone it deemed

“too sensitive”(Keret). In Pizzeria Kamikaze Keret and Asaf

Hanuka collaborate to critique this macho attitude to gender

identity. The narrative focuses on the pairing of the

passive Mordy with Uzi, an army suicide and closet racist.

The authors invert the focus of conventional comic depiction

of masculinity; here it is Mordy, the “weak” alter ego who

becomes the focus, the hypermasculine Uzi who is ultimately

rejected, his limitations evident.

In contrast to the predatory Uzi, (named after a

phallic, snub-nosed machine gun) Mordy doesn’t understand

his own initial reluctance to pursue women he meets; “but

who knows, maybe I’m just repressed” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 9).

Uzi has his own perspective on the contents of Mordy’s head,

and on the silver-grey that is a feature of the

illustration; “You’re up to your eyeballs with sperm, got

that? Everything you look at is grey”(A. Hanuka, Pizzeria,

30). This recalls Flannigan-Saint-Aubin’s definition of

testicular masculinity, rather than the phallocentricity of

Uzi’s own approach, and intimates that Mordy might represent

31

“another way”, another mode of defining and representing

masculinity.

The two men initially bond over a game of pool(A.

Hanuka, Pizzeria, 11) , which for Asaf, has specific symbolic

resonance:

The pool was a bit of a metaphor for the fragility of the family. When the game begins all the balls are aligned in a perfect shape and once you start playing they disappear and splatter. Like family members leaving the house or others dying. So there is a bit ofan illusion in the starting point that falls apart during life and specifically with the family in this moment in the story where they reshaped it after the death, found each other again (A. Hanuka, Email 09).

The fragmentation and dissolution of family, group identity

stands in for individual identity; if one can be

reconfigured, so can the other. The balls “disappear” just

like the eggs in Tomer’s “Morocco”; (this association is

intensified on p.62, when one of the snooker balls becomes a

raw egg that Uzi shatters) yet in this case they reappear.

Uzi lives with his parents and his brother, “who shot

himself in the middle of basic training …we were so stoked

when he got here” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 12). In Hell, the

32

disturbing subtext of conventional family dynamics becomes

overt as Uzi’s family react with delight to the suicide of

their youngest son; all of them are reunited through their

failure to live up to societal demands.

Mordy and Uzi begin a road trip across hell to find

Mordy’s lost love, Desiree, whom he hears has also committed

suicide, in a battered Volkswagen Beetle. On their road

trip, Mordy and Uzi stop in the Arab quarter of Hell. The

issue of race, only touched on in Tomer’s “Morocco”, becomes

central here as the political implications of the

patriarchal construction of masculinity are exposed in this

key scene in the novel. Through Mordy’s eyes, we view a

neighbourhood scene, in which a man is playing with his dog.

Uzi’s reflective glasses isolate the man from his context,

creating an image of the menacing phallocentric male, which

is clearly a projection of his own damaged self-image. Asaf

maps this process of projection in three wordless panels (A.

Hanuka, Pizzeria, 35), FIGURE 5.

The two men enter a Bar called “Djin”, and Uzi engages

the barman in conversation; his initially provocative

33

stance – “let’s drink to the good ol’ security forces”(A.

Hanuka, Pizzeria, 38) is punctured when the genial barman

turns to reveal that the previously hidden side of his face

is a grinning skull; the shadow of death that as an Arab, he

embodies for Uzi. He reveals he was a suicide bomber, at the

same moment that he joins them for a drink. Uzi tries to

goad him with the false promises that led him to his death;

“Is it true that when you people go out on a job they

promise you seventy virgins in kingdom come?” To which the

rejoinder is “Sure they promised, and look where it got me.”

“So you’re just a sucker in the end.” The barman exposes

Uzi’s act of projection by mirroring this statement back at

him – “Sure thing. And you, what did they promise you?” (A.

Hanuka, Pizzeria, 39) FIGURE 6. Hanuka presents this dialogue

in alternating black and white panels, representing the

absolute way the two initially see each other. Hanuka and

Keret expose the mutual framing of the other as aggressor,

and self as victim in visual terms, exposing this ossified

binary as unhelpful and shallow. Gradually the panels begin

to focus on the faces of the two men until they are side by

34

side, visually signifying the extent to which each ideology

mirrors the other; “Arab masculinity is acquired, verified

and played out in the brave deed, in risk-taking, and in

expressions of fearlessness and assertiveness.” (Peteet,

107) Uzi’s bullet wound is clearly visible; the rest of his

face, of his identity, is in shadow; he still defines

himself by the system of which he is a victim. The barman,

in contrast, is framed by the darkness which Uzi has

projected onto him; while his broken face is illuminated to

suggest the insight he brings to both Uzi and the reader; a

common vision of the loss to self resulting from the

construction of a masculine identity based on violence. Uzi

is confronted with the parallels between himself and the

Other despite his efforts to deny them. For Asaf, this was

always a key scene in the novel “I really liked this scene

because it deals with both sides’ mythologizing of death by

proposing a new one. I think it’s more of a question than an

answer” (A. Hanuka, Email 06). This notion of comics as a

mode for questioning received binaries of both political and

gender identity, seeing them as coextensive.

35

VI. In Good Shape:

The narrative contrasts the dreams of Mordy and Uzi

after this extraordinary encounter. Mordy dreams of

domesticity, an argument between Desiree and himself over

furniture; “the one Desireee wants is really gross, and I

want something else. Initially, their divergent views lead

to conflict and recrimination, but then, “in the dream,

suddenly I get a hold of myself and I stop short. Let’s not

fight, the only thing that matters is that we’re together.

She smiles, and instead of smiling back/I wake up in the

car” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 40). Mordy still wakes up in the

masculine space he shares with Uzi, and is unable to fully

reconcile the gap between his dream vision of Desiree, and

his other self. The dream suggests the polarity of his own

identity, the divided aspects of his self, and reveals that

he is striving to reconcile them, but has not yet found a

way to do so. The four panels of the dream are rendered

exclusively in silver, the elusive third term he and the

reader are seeking. Mordy and the reader are then voyeurs to

36

Uzi’s sleeping self “cursing all sorts of people bugging him

in his dream; One more word and you’ll have a mud pie on

your head” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 41). Despite his encounter

with the barman, Uzi is unable to escape his them/us binary,

unable to escape the desire to define the self through a

parodic, childish act of violence. We do not inhabit this

dream, only observe it, critically, from without, just as in

Tomer’s “Morocco”, where the passive narrator critiques his

“childish” fellow victim’s former macho posturing.

It is at this crucial moment that a new character

appears in the novel, one who seems to embody the

possibility of reconciliation, of wholeness. The two men

stop to pick up Leehee, a female hitchhiker with whom Mordy

falls deeply in love; her name means “she is mine” in

Hebrew, already suggesting that she will bring a key aspect

of his identity to the surface; the struggle to own and

define the other. One of the most powerful moments in Pizzeria

Kamikaze, signifying the role and impact Leehee will have,

on both Mordy and on the narrative, occurs when she takes

the wheel of the Volkswagen that Mordy and Uzi have been

37

driving, and causes the lights, which had been broken until

this point, to suddenly illuminate. Just as the barman

illuminated the ideological present, she becomes a source of

light as to the direction they must now take, allowing them

to use this vehicle associated with a painful past to

negotiate their future, as she allows them to see their way

through a landscape through which they have been travelling

blind (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 49). James Corrigan explores the

way a protagonists identity is “displaced onto the

mechanical vehicle as that vehicle becomes transformed into

a human or spiritual reality”(Corrigan, 145) . In Pizzeria

Kamikaze, the female Leehee, penetrates this “male”

vehicle, and it is this vulnerability on Mordy’s part that

allows her to become a source of therapeutic vision; even

Uzi grudgingly calls her “The Florence Nightingale of

vehicles” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 49).

She has a key role to play in Mordy’s self-realization.

In a touchingly intimate scene, she and Mordy discuss the

world they left behind. Mordy says that “maybe I miss myself

a little. The way I used to be” (70). We see his face

38

reflected in the plate he is drying, as if he is just a

shadow, a mere reflection of his former self (FIGURE 7). The

image recalls Uzi’s picture of the Arab, of a self divorced

from its context; implying that Mordy’s self-image is a

product of the same ideology. “Just as male identity (and

subsequently masculinity) is predicated on separation from

an original, feminine source, within patriarchy, knowledge

in general is achieved through differentiation, through

separation, and through a polarization of opposites that can

be experienced only as conflictual and

hierarchical”(Flannigan Saint-Aubin, 240). Leehee tries to

steer both Mordy and the narrative away from this unhelpful

binary, asserting that “I miss everything, even the things I

used to hate” (70). In other words, her definition of self

includes what was once “other” and this is what she

challenges Mordy to emulate.

When Mordy finally meets Desiree, the desired other,

he realizes that in fact he doesn’t want or need her; she

represents an outmoded view of himself, and of

39

relationships. This allows him to realize what Leehee has

come to signify for him. He and Leehee discover a moonlit

beach which blurs the binaries of land and sea. Leehee

confides that “most of the people I knew, even before I

offed, were either half dead or completely dead, so you are

in pretty good shape”(A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 77). They

consummate their relationship on the beach, and Leehee is

able to convince Mordy of her own view; “that night I knew

she was right and I was in pretty good shape actually”(A.

Hanuka, Pizzeria, 78). Mordy’s “shape” here is both his male

body and his feminised, testicular identity, which have

become congruent here. In the expanded panel depicting their

sexual encounter, their two figures, and the unity they

represent, are distant from us, and seem lost in the

blackness of space, redolent, for Hanuka, of eternity. Yet

when they awake, “In daylight, we discovered the whole place

was covered in used condoms…suddenly everything began to

smell like used rubber” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 78). It is as if

the dream of wholeness is being tested against a sordid,

prosaic reality; will they be reduced to their biological

40

identity, will sex here be transformative, a real encounter,

or will there always be a prophylactic boundary between

them? They are informed that this beach “used to be a

hangout for hookers and druggies, except that it became so

grody that even hookers and druggies couldn’t take it”(A.

Hanuka, Pizzeria, 79). Yet this debasement of their activity,

the debasement of dreaming and the commercialization of sex

doesn’t deter them; they have gone back precisely to this

abandoned, soiled location, physically and symbolically, and

reclaimed it.

We discover at the novel’s climax that Leehee wasn’t

meant to be in Hell after all, and a group of military

angels parachute down to take her away, reimposing the

patriarchal order she has tried to critique. At this crucial

moment, Mordy fails to communicate with her, finding no

words that can unselfconsciously convey his new

understanding of himself and their relationship; “I wanted

to shout to her that I love her, but it felt too much like

the kind of thing they do in the movies, so I just smiled

41

and signaled that we’d talk later” (A. Hanuka, Pizzeria, 90),

FIGURE 8. In this scene, Mordy is depicted as being hemmed

in by other male figures, trying to see past them and the

constructions they represent, to Leehee herself; when he

signals, it is to the reader who has taken her place; for

they never meet, or talk, again.

Yet Asaf’s narrative precludes the pessimism which

entrapped Tomer’s protagonists. Leehee has transformed Mordy

into a different kind of man, one who can act playfully

rather than violently. On the concluding page, he inserts

tiny acts of rebellion, of destabilizing individualism, into

his rigid routine at the pizzeria, “so if she ever comes in,

she won’t be sad” (100). She “is his” precisely when he is

able to let her go. She has taught him to live outside the

binaries of self and other, masculine and feminine. Saint

Aubin wonders:

Is a nonpatriarchal conception of masculinity possible?Is it possible to predict how masculinity would construct itself non-patriarchally? How are patriarchalideology and discourse inflected by displacing the concept of the phallus from its central position? Can one conceive of masculinity as if one were no longer

42

constrained by the contingencies of socialization and cultural biases? (Flannigan Saint-Aubin, 242)

Framing this conception of unconstrained masculinity is

central to the project of both Hanuka brothers. Whilst Tomer

exposes the conventional paradigms of masculinity to

critical scrutiny, Asaf begins to suggest an alternative

model, displacing the phallic Uzi and allowing Mordy to

transcend his shaping contexts. In the final panel of Pizzeria

Kamikaze, character appropriates narrative structure, and

subverts the possibility of closure. Mordy’s last act is to

overturning the“closed” sign of the Pizzeria in which he

works, literally inverting the “end” of the book. In the

work of the Hanuka brothers, there is no patriarchal

closure, but an opening to new possibilities of individual

and collective male identity.

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