10.

1177/0196859903252846
Journal
Memorializing
of Communication
White Masculinity
Inquiry ARTICLE
Brent Malin

Memorializing White Masculinity:

The Late 1990s “Crisis of Masculinity”
and the “Subversive Performance”
of Man on the Moon

This article explores the late 1990s biopic Man on the Moon, discussing the
ways in which the film’s remembrance of Andy Kaufman relates to and negoti-
ates the “crisis of masculinity” that many writers have identified with the 1990s.
With a number of voices noting the ways in which contemporary identity politics
have troubled traditional white masculinity, this sense of crisis had a profound
impact on the masculinities of the 1990s, effectively marking an identity that has
traditionally remained unmarked. Many have discussed the liberating possibili-
ties of such marking practices, however, Man on the Moon illustrates a different
dimension of these negotiations of identity. Man on the Moon remembers Andy
Kaufman as a chaotic, conflicted performance of multiple selves, reflective of
the chaotic identities that came to characterize the 1990s. In the process, how-
ever, Man on the Moon forgets Andy Kaufman’s Jewishness, remembering a
more traditional, white masculinity in its place. Owing to this, I argue that the
ways in which Man on the Moon memorializes Kaufman’s identity serve as an
important caveat for discussions of gender and identity “performance.”

Keywords: masculinity; whiteness; Andy Kaufman; performance

Jim Carrey disappeared into Andy Kaufman’s skin for Man on the Moon. He stayed in
character between scenes to summon—and honor—him.
—J. Giles (1999, 44)

The 1990s were an interesting and conflicted moment for traditional white
masculinity. Certainly, the decade saw its share of sensitive, new male heroes
in actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, and even former tough-guy Arnold
Schwarzenegger gave up killing for a time to become a kindergarten teacher. In
the film Junior, he even gives birth. Outside Hollywood, then-President Bill
Clinton seemed a bundle of contradictory versions of masculinity, demonstrat-
ing the far-reaching implications of this conflicted sense of masculinity.
Journal of Communication Inquiry 27:3 (July 2003): 239-255
DOI: 10.1177/0196859903252846
© 2003 Sage Publications

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240 Journal of Communication Inquiry

According to an article in the Washington Post, Clinton was “Elvis Presley

with a calculator on his belt, an outsized candidate with a drawl as big as his
brain” (von Drehle 1992, 1). A Time magazine writer called Clinton “a vision-
ary leader and a poor manager; a propounder of bold programs and a waffler
who talks on both sides of hot issues,” ultimately asking the question “is
Clinton for real—not only as front runner but as man, as Governor, as candi-
date?” (Church 1992, 16). In an edition of The New Yorker addressing
responses to Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Toni Morrison said of
Clinton, “Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard
the first murmurs: white skin not withstanding, this is our first black President.
Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our chil-
dren’s lifetime.”1
This attention to Clinton’s conflicted masculinity, race, and class seemed to
make very public an argument that gender scholars had been making for some
time, though one made most prominently in the 1990s with Judith Butler’s
(1990) book Gender Trouble. Focusing on “performance” this scholarship has
called attention to the ways in which identity is held up through a series of arbi-
trary conventions reiterated from one moment to the next. Only by troubling
these conventions, the argument goes, can we begin to break out of these estab-
lished and too often problematic notions of identity, “subversive perfor-
mances” such as drag shows helping to demonstrate the arbitrariness of these
conventions and thus to topple them. Clinton’s own subversive performances
seem to fit these ideas wonderfully. That Clinton can be read as black—not
only in Morrison’s performative reading, but in the Clinton campaign’s own
attempts to identify him with the black community—calls attention to the cul-
tural constructedness of blackness and, by implication, that of whiteness as
well.2 That this “physiognomically white” President could be marked as
“black” suggests the mobile and thus unstable contours of whiteness, just as
his conflicted class status suggests the unstable contours of class. Clinton’s
conflicted identity, like that of Schwarzenegger perhaps, seemed to suggest
some subversive possibilities.
A recent essay by John Sloop (2000), however, helps illustrate some of the
problems with prematurely celebrating the fluidity of identity. Discussing
Brandon Teena, the transgendered man depicted in Boy’s Don’t Cry, Sloop
explains,

As has become commonplace in many contemporary discussions of gender and

sexuality, at least since the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, gen-
der and sexuality are assumed in this essay to be potentially fluid, held in check
by each individual’s interpellation into a cultural ideology that maintains male-
female difference . . . [And yet,] while this move to celebrate or highlight poten-
tial disruptions of the gender binary system is indeed a vital project, it can come

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 241

at the cost of focusing on ways that the dominant rhetoric/discourse of gender

continues to ideologically constrain. (P. 168)

Continuing, Sloop (2000) argues that “while cases of gender ambiguity

obviously have the potential to cause ‘gender trouble’ and disrupt bigender
normativity, in terms of the ‘dominant’ discussions that surround such
cases . . . the ‘loosening of gender binarisms’is a potential that often goes unre-
alized for many audiences” (p. 168). The case of Brandon Teena’s death in par-
ticular, Sloop argues, illustrates that “many institutions and individuals work
to stabilize sex, to reiterate sexual norms, rather than to encourage/explore
gender fluidity” (p. 168).
This article extends Sloop’s (2000) discussion still further, offering another
way to think about the possibilities of gender and identity disruption that char-
acterize the late 1990s. Reading the late 1990s biopic Man on the Moon, which
tells the story of Andy Kaufman’s life and death, I explore the ways in which
this particular film negotiates the climate of masculinity in which
Schwarzenegger, Clinton, and DiCaprio are also embroiled. I begin with a
brief discussion of this sense of identity crisis as it has been identified in both
scholarly and popular sources, setting up the conflicted notions of identity that
underpin the film’s own portrayals. With this as context, Man on the Moon
offers an interesting avenue for thinking about masculinity in the 1990s as well
as notions of performance and identity more generally. Because of Andy
Kaufman’s own history as a performance artist and his reputation as a chaotic,
unstable personality, the film’s remembrance of Kaufman speaks both to the
popular attempts to negotiate the crisis of masculinity that characterize the
1990s as well as to ways in which performance relates to gender normativity.
Andy Kaufman (as portrayed by Jim Carrey), I argue below, is made heroic
precisely for the instability of his identity. Bleaching white Andy Kaufman’s
Jewishness, so as to offer a new white hero that denies racial difference, Man
on the Moon uses a mobile racial identity to bleach clean the conflicted identity
with which it deals, remembering a more traditional, white masculinity in its
place.
Whereas Sloop sees in Brandon Teena’s “gender fluidity” a “potential” that
“goes unrealized,” this article takes a different path in exploring the potentials
of identity disruption associated with the 1990s masculinity I discuss. In the
character of Andy Kaufman, Man on the Moon demonstrates a kind of fluidity
of identity that far from “loosening” established norms, works to reestablish a
version of traditional white masculinity. By embracing a kind of chaotically
fluid identity, the film performs a powerful feat of cultural remembering that
capitalizes on the abstract “no-thing-ness” of white, destabilizing traditional
notions of white masculinity only to dissolve back into its abstract, unmarked
selfhood. In this way, the film suggests an important complication to notions of

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242 Journal of Communication Inquiry

gender fluidity, illustrating the ways in which fluidity itself can work to rees-
tablish normative notions of identity.

Identity Crisis and Unmarked Citizenship

Those popular and academic voices that have identified a “crisis of mascu-
linity” have pointed to the various ways in which identity politics and discus-
sions of gender, race, and class, have served to unhinge some of the traditional
standards on which dominant, white masculinity has been built. This so-called
contemporary crisis of masculinity is at least as old as Myron Brenton’s 1966
book The American Male, the first chapter of which is titled “The Crisis of
American Masculinity,” and Michael Kimmel’s (1996) book Manhood in
America in fact suggests that American masculinity has been in crisis from its
founding, when American men attempted to define themselves in opposition
to British masculinity. Still, this sense of masculine crisis seems to have gained
a particular cultural currency in the 1990s. Robert Bly’s popular book Iron
John: A Book About Men was published in 1990, the same year Bill
McCartney’s men’s group the Promise Keepers held their first meeting. Simi-
larly, such magazines as The Nation, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and New
York Times Book Review have also taken up this masculine crisis, essays such
as “The Prejudice Against Men” (Marin 1991), “The Trouble with Male
Bashing” (Stillman 1994), and “What do men want? A reading list for the male
identity crisis” (Schweder 1994), all pointing to this sense of a crisis in 1990s
masculinity. These pieces demonstrate just some of the ways in which this
sense of crisis has gained attention in the American popular imagination.
A number of gender scholars have discussed this crisis of masculinity as
well, excited by the ways in which this crisis has challenged traditional mascu-
line values (Kimmel 1996, 1993; Jeffords 1994; Connell 1993; Messner 1993;
Rotundo 1993; Segal 1993; Miles 1989; Berger, Wallis, and Watson 1995).
R. W. Connell (1993), for instance, asserts that “the fact that conferences about
‘masculinities’ are being held is significant, [for] twenty-five years ago no one
would have thought of doing so” (pp. 598-599). Connell cites the “advent of
Women’s Liberation at the end of the 1960’s,” “the growth of feminist research
on gender and ‘sex roles,’ ” and the “advent of Gay Liberation and the develop-
ing critique of heterosexuality of lesbians and gay men” (pp. 598-599) as fac-
tors in this contemporary critique of masculinity. Segal (1993) supports this
idea, claiming that “anti-sexist men” have encouraged a “less traditional mas-
culinity” by “sharing in some of the joys of traditional ‘femininity.’ ”3 Calling
attention to the ways in which the crisis of masculinity has upset traditional
maleness, these scholars see positive possibilities in crisis of masculinity dis-
courses—discourses that potentially disrupt these traditional masculine
ideals.

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 243

This sense of possibility and promise makes sense when coupled with
notions of masculinity’s traditionally invisible status. As Butler’s (1990) read-
ings of Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig help illustrate,
masculinity is conventionally conflated with the universal and thus remains
“unmarked.”4 “Gender” is associated with femininity, whereas masculinity is
granted an abstracted, universal quality.5 In other words, masculinity proves
“universally generalizable” (Kimmel 1996, 4), such that men are not particular
identities; they are simply citizens. This unmarked character is empowering
for masculinity (in particular, white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity)
and disempowering for the others—the marked—alongside whom this
unmarked identity is exercised. As Richard Dyer (1997) suggests, “the claim
to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” (p. 2).
Unmarked, universal bodies can do that. Marked bodies cannot. Because the
discourses accompanying the crisis of masculinity make masculinity an
explicit topic of critique, they work against this traditional invisibility, and thus
against a source of masculinity’s traditionally oppressive power. Summing up
the effect of these discourses, Lauren Berlant (1997) has argued that

today many formerly iconic citizens who used to feel undefensive and unfettered
feel truly exposed and vulnerable. They feel anxious about their value to them-
selves, their families, their publics, and their nation. They sense that they now
have identities, when it used to be just other people who had them. (P. 2)

The popular sense of this anxiety is clear from even a cursory look at the
mediated men of the 1990s, many of whom, like Schwarzenegger, were made
over to account for this seemingly new climate of masculinity. Observing
Schwarzenegger’s change from 1980s “hardbody” to 1990s Kindergarten
teacher has prompted Susan Jeffords’s (1994) discussions of a 1990s new man
who “can transform himself from the hardened, muscle-bound, domineering
man of the eighties into the considerate, loving, and self-sacrificing man of the
nineties” (p. 153). Again, to the extent that these changes seem to derail some
established sense of masculinity, they may indeed suggest liberatory, subver-
sive potentials. Joe Bellon (1999) reads The X-Files as an act of rebellion
against authority and the character of Fox Mulder as a concomitant rebellion
against traditional masculinity. According to Bellon, Mulder “is prone to
strange moods, strong emotions, and light-hearted comments. Unlike more
traditional male cop characters who flaunt a devil-may-care attitude as a kind
of macho display, however, Mulder represents the emotional and empathic bal-
ance to Scully’s logic and rationality” (p. 150). Similarly, in the “comic men”
of Ally McBeal, Brenda Cooper (2001) sees the development of a feminine
spectator position that appropriates and ultimately subverts the male gaze that
generally characterizes television programs. These film and television charac-

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244 Journal of Communication Inquiry

ters thus seem to respond to the sense of crisis that characterizes our contempo-
rary moment, offering visions of masculinity that may work against tradi-
tional, dominant notions.
Similarly, the performance art of Andy Kaufman embraces a kind of fluidity
and chaos that challenges conventionally fixed notions of identity, an idea that
is captured and celebrated within Man on the Moon. Discussing Andy
Kaufman’s original performance art, performance theorist Philip Auslander
(1992) argues that “more than any other performer working in the context of
popular entertainment and more even than most working in avant-garde con-
texts, Kaufman undertook to deconstruct presence and discover strategies of
resistance from within mass-cultural contexts” (p. 140). Exploring Kaufman’s
constant performances of different and contradictory identities, Auslander
considers the multiple ways in which Kaufman was able to “escape representa-
tion.” As Auslander sees it, Kaufman’s “particular strategy was deconstruc-
tive: to escape representation through an excess of representation itself” (p. 149).
By constantly putting on different personae, Auslander suggests, Andy
Kaufman could never be pinned down to a single, fixed identity, and thus
inhabited the kind of fluid space celebrated by recent performance theory.
Kaufman refused to be any one identity in particular. In this way, Kaufman,
like 1990s wonder boy Bill Clinton, seems a likely hero for a cultural moment
entangled in conflicted performances of masculinity, in that he performs the
kind of instability that seemed the fashion of the 1990s. In remembering
Kaufman’s chaotic performances, Man on the Moon thus celebrates his ability
to elide identity.
Even as the film celebrates the so-called real life Andy Kaufman’s chaotic
identity, the ways in which Man on the Moon remembers Kaufman also work
in favor of traditional, normative values, particularly in terms of whiteness.
Suggesting the importance of exploring masculinity and whiteness together,
Michael Uebel (1997) argues that an “attention to the specific historicity and
textuality of privileged, often ideologically invisible, categories such as white-
ness prevents the acceptance of their uniformity and autonomy” (p. 2). Other
scholars have similarly linked masculinity and whiteness, arguing that just as
masculinity has stereotypically been seen as a universal, nongendered abstrac-
tion, so “white” has been framed as an abstract, nonraced race. In other words,
whiteness, like traditional masculinity more generally, has conventionally
been granted an abstract, universal status (see, for instance, Cuomo and Hall
1999; Nakayama and Martin 1998; Hill 1997; Delgado and Stefancic 1997;
Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1997). Placing this in historical context, Richard
Dyer (1997) argues that Western ideals of whiteness have been characterized
by a striving after a perfected, luminescent glow of purity by, among other
things, dying the skin with “ceruse (white lead) which made the wearer look

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 245

matt white and poisoned the skin,” a technique used from ancient Greece
through the beginning of the nineteenth Century (p. 48). Dyer sees this quest
toward “luminescence” in the context of “the idea of whiteness as transcen-
dence, dissolution into pure spirit and no-thing-ness” (p. 48). This “no-thing-
ness” he links to the ideal of whiteness as self-abstraction: “being nothing at all
may readily be felt as being nothing in particular, the representative human, the
subject without properties” (p. 80). Seen in this manner, the no-thing-ness of
whiteness reinforces the power through self-abstraction associated with the
traditional, unmarked body.
While Kaufman’s own excessive representations seem to unhinge his iden-
tity, suggesting that his conflicted, layered persona encompasses more than
any one performance could encapsulate, through Man on the Moon, this same
excessiveness works in favor of the no-thing-ness of whiteness. In its remem-
brance of Kaufman, Man on the Moon selectively forgets features of
Kaufman’s identity as originally performed. Of course, the film must rely on
this sort of selective memory: we can never know Andy Kaufman once and for
all. Still, the manner in which the film depicts Kaufman tells us much about the
multiple possibilities opened up by the performance of identity. Even as the
film seeks to celebrate the chaos of Kaufman’s identity, its particular remem-
brance ironically reiterates conventional notions of abstract citizenship. In the
end, Man on the Moon’s memorial to Kaufman dissolves into the no-thing-
ness of white masculinity.

Re-membering Andy Kaufman

The Kaufman memorialized in Man on the Moon flows in and out of various
characters from one instance to the next. This Kaufman stages a fight on the
David Letterman Show at one moment and serves milk and cookies to an audi-
ence at Carnegie Hall at another, all the while maintaining a day job as a waiter
in a local coffee shop. Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszweski (1999), who
wrote the film’s script, describe their interest in Kaufman’s bizarrely neurotic
antics, saying, “We loved the way he bent reality, confusing put-on with fact,
and his good and bad sides made for a rich character” (p. viii). Reiterating
Auslander’s (1992) ideas above, Alexander and Karazweski comment that
Kaufman’s “act was always about challenging perception, mixing mainstream
entertainment with performance art” (p. ix-x). As these writers see it, Andy
Kaufman’s chaotic performances translate to a chaotic identity, the “charac-
ter” of Andy Kaufman as multifaceted and convoluted as his act. In preparation
for the Man on the Moon script, these writers had interviewed Kaufman’s
friends, family, and business associates, trying to establish some sense of
Kaufman’s character. As they explain it, however, this proved difficult:

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246 Journal of Communication Inquiry

Andy had clearly manipulated his life to create different, discontinuous pieces
of himself. Thus, he was an introvert and an extrovert. Some described his all-
vegetarian diet. Others related his daily breakfast of bacon and eggs. One girl
was led to believe that he was a practicing Orthodox Jew. Marilu Henner found
him unwashed and panhandling on a New York street corner. (Pp. ix-x)

Simultaneously Tony Clifton, Latka on the television series Taxi, a vegetar-

ian, a meat eater, an Orthodox Jew, Kaufman’s life indeed seems to offer an
extreme version of the mobility discussed above. As I have already suggested,
however, in the hands of Alexander and Karaszewski, this becomes the sort of
no-thing-ness characteristic of a transcendent whiteness.

Will the Real Andy Kaufman Please Stand Up?

This no-thing-ness is an important component of Man on the Moon, ulti-
mately centering the film’s portrayal of Andy Kaufman. This sense of chaotic
mobile identity is evidenced from the film’s beginning, a comical introduction
in which Kaufman (Jim Carrey) addresses the audience directly. Speaking in
an odd, unidentifiable “foreign” accent Kaufman urges the audience not to see
the film.

Hallo. I am Andy. Welcoom to my movie. (beat; he gets upset) It was very good
of you to come . . . but now you should leave. Because this movie ees terrible! It
is all LIES! Tings are out of order . . . people are mixed up . . . what a MESS! (he
composes himself) So, I broke into Universal and cut out all de baloney. Now it’s
much shorter. (beat) In fact—this is the end of the movie. So tanks for comink!
Bye-bye. (Alexander and Karaszweski 1999, 1)

With this final goodbye, Kaufman puts on a record and rolls the film’s final
credits. Once the credits have finished, however, Kaufman loses his mock
accent and begins addressing the audience as the “real” Andy Kaufman.
“Okay, good,” he begins. “Just my friends are left. I wanted to get rid of those
other people . . . they would’ve laughed in the wrong places” (Alexander and
Karaszweski 1999, 1). With this introduction, Kaufman picks up a Super 8
movie projector and “begins the real film.” This opening scene demonstrates
the theme of chaotic identity that is carried throughout Man on the Moon. First,
by reprising this Kaufman character, known simply as “Foreign Man,” the film
points toward an ambiguous and unidentifiable “otherness” important to the
film’s presentation. Likewise, the pretense of “Kaufman’s” dissatisfaction
with “his” film demonstrates the sort of “put on” for which Kaufman has
become famous, a feature central to the film’s memorial. Here everything is a
“put on,” from the film itself to the identities through which Kaufman per-
forms, identities as easily put on as shed.

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 247

This theme also plays out in the film’s depictions of Kaufman’s childhood,
which present him as an eccentric child out of touch with the realities of both
the world and himself. In one scene, the young Andy is “putting on a show” for
an imaginary audience in his bedroom. Working to establish Kaufman’s love
of performance, the scene frames this young Kaufman as lost in his world of
imaginary entertainment. As Alexander and Karaszewski’s (1999) script
details it,

Stanley [Andy’s father] hurries up to Andy’s shut door. We hear little Andy doing
voices.
ANDY (o.s.)
(as WORRIED GIRL)
But Professor, why are the monsters growing so big?
(now as BRITISH PROFESSOR)
It’s something in the jungle water. I need to crack the secret code.
Stanley rolls his eyes. He opens the door . . . revealing ANDY, 8, performing for the
wall. Andy is happy and enthusiastic . . . as long as he’s acting. (Pp. 2-3)

Later in the same scene, Stanley chastises little Andy, telling him “You
should be outside playing sports,” to which Andy replies, “But I’ve got a sports
show. Championship wrestling, at five.” After young Andy motions toward his
“audience,” Stanley rebukes him again, demanding emphatically, “That is not
an audience! That is plaster! An audience is people made of flesh” (p. 3). Only
enthusiastic “as long as he’s acting,” and able to confuse the wall for an audi-
ence, young Andy is here positioned with the same mobile, chaotic identity for
which the film remembers Kaufman’s character.

Performing Elvis, Performing Race

From these opening scenes of Kaufman’s childhood in Great Neck, Long
Island, the film quickly turns to Kaufman’s life as an adult performer for com-
edy clubs and nightclubs in New York. Here we see the early versions of
Kaufman’s Foreign Man (who will later become Kaufman’s character, Latka,
on the television series Taxi) as well as the adult versions of the childhood
games he played before his audience of the wall. As is made clear through the
club audiences’ scattered applause, murmurs, and awkward looks, Kaufman’s
performances leave the crowd confused, his deadpan “humor” and childhood
sing-a-longs leaving them wondering if Kaufman’s act is for real. As Man on
the Moon tells it, it is only Kaufman’s Elvis impersonation that wins over these
early New York audiences, ultimately establishing him for the performance
artist that he is. In one scene, Kaufman seems to magically transform from the
awkward, frightened Foreign Man to a confident, “dead-on” (to quote Alexan-
der and Karaszewski’s [1999] scene notes) impression of Elvis Presley.

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248 Journal of Communication Inquiry

Kaufman rips off a stripe from the side of his pants to reveal a row of rhine-
stones, dawns a white, jeweled jacket, brushes his hair and strikes an Elvis
swagger and pose. Spinning around with a guitar in hand he curls his lip and
begins singing “Blue Suede Shoes.” “Flabbergasted,” Alexander and
Karaszewski explain, “people applaud. This man is Elvis” (p. 10).
It is important that the film frames this moment as the turning point in
Kaufman’s career as a performer, establishing his Elvis impersonation as his
first masterpiece of performance art and thus his big break toward getting him-
self discovered. Indeed, Elvis Presley is himself tied up with a set of interesting
identity and, in particular, racial contradictions that layer onto and complicate
Kaufman’s own mobile and chaotic identity. The subject of countless contem-
porary commentaries, biographies, movies, and so on, the contemporary per-
sona of Elvis consists of a series of contradictory fragments and manifesta-
tions: heartthrob, All-American boy, sexual rebel, overweight Vegas lounge
lizard. Jerry Hopkins’s (1971) classic discussion presents an image of a
squeaky clean all-American Elvis, drawing a picture of a Tupelo-boy made
good.

Elvis was back in Tupelo. It was a model homecoming, so clichéd as to defy

credibility. Already Elvis represented the all-American prototype, the Horatio
Alger hero of the South: the son of a dirt-poor sharecropper who sang in his
mama’s church and went on to massive wealth and fame. (P. 160)

In contrast, Albert Goldman (1981) describes an Elvis that is anything but

all-American.

[Elvis] sure as hell wasn’t the All-American Boy. Elvis looked nothing like the
stock young movie star of the day . . . Elvis was the flip side of this clean-cut con-
ventional male image. His fish-belly white complexion, so different from the
“healthy tan” of the beach boys; his brooding Latin eyes, heavily shaded with
mascara; the broad fleshly contours of his face, with the Greek nose and the
thick, twisted lips; the long greasy hair, thrown forward into his face by his jerk-
ing motions. (P. 191)6

The all-American male by some accounts, and his antithesis by others, Elvis
was and is a bundle of important contradictions. A polite young southern man
who loved his mother and said “Thank you,” “Sir,” and “Ma’am,” and a sexual
provocateur who shook his pelvis to the screams of young women, Elvis’s per-
sona is conflicted in ways similar to Kaufman.
Not the least important of these contradictions is Elvis’s negotiation of
racial stereotypes and expectations. Recording pioneer Sam Phillips’s famous
search for a white performer with a black sound ends in the mythic figure of
Elvis Presley, a crosser-over of musical and racial boundaries. Whether

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 249

celebrating his ability to help put race music on the mainstream, white charts,
or decrying his theft of African American music, popular discourses on Elvis
highlight his problematic racial negotiations in illuminating ways. If Elvis is
seen to be “impersonating” an African American style (whether this imperson-
ation is imagined as positive or negative), then “impersonating Elvis” takes on
added layers of contradiction and negotiation. Man on the Moon’s evocation of
Kaufman’s Elvis impersonation layers these racial tensions with the contradic-
tions of Kaufman’s own chaotic identity. Discussing Kaufman’s Elvis, Greil
Marcus (1991) highlights these contradictory layers:

The country is well aware of Elvis as he’s been worshipfully caricatured by thou-
sands of Elvis imitators, like the TV comedian Andy Kaufman—who, twice
removed, a knowing parody of a parody that doesn’t know it is a parody, in some
aspect of his act wants to get it across that in fact he loves Elvis, would in some
part of his soul give up a limb to feel as Elvis must have felt when he sang as, in
his best moments, he sang, and who, as a comedian on TV, in this context of
camp layered over bad taste, cannot begin to get such a thing across. (P. 33)

These layers are important as they both evoke and bury the racial back-
ground underwriting their performance, highlighting the messiness of identity
that Man on the Moon suggests throughout.

Jewishness in Whiteface
In evoking Kaufman’s Elvis impersonation as the key to his success in being
discovered, Man on the Moon celebrates Kaufman’s ability at “putting on” one
of the great “put-er on-ers.” By memorializing Kaufman’s Elvis imperson-
ation, Man on the Moon references and memorializes a complex chain of
“blackface” performances as well. As Eric Lott (1997) explains, “Himself an
alleged impostor, the historical referent of Norman Mailer’s 1957 ‘The White
Negro,’Elvis inherited a blackface tradition that lives a disguised, vestigial life
in his imitators” (p. 203). Kaufman’s impersonation of Elvis performs a “dou-
ble mimicry” of the blackface aura implicit in Elvis’s own performance. In
mimicking Elvis, Kaufman “[impersonates] the impersonator, a repetition that
nearly buries this racial history even as it suggests a preoccupation with pre-
cisely the blackface aura of Elvis” (p. 203). Man on the Moon puts on Kaufman
putting on Elvis putting on blackface, burying this racial history below multi-
ple layers of parody and repetition, multiply repressing the very history that
allows the performance to take place.
This multiple mimicry of blackface is still more important when considered
alongside another racial referent all but absent from Man on the Moon: Andy
Kaufman’s Jewishness. While the film’s final script describes Kaufman’s boy-
hood home as “an upper-class Jewish neighborhood,” this textual reference is,

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250 Journal of Communication Inquiry

of course, absent from the film itself, as is any other mention of Kaufman’s
Jewish identity. Although Alexander and Karaszewski’s (1999) published
scene notes contain at least one scene that explicitly references Kaufman’s
Jewish background—a scene set during Passover in which a young Andy dons
a black beard, hat, and robe, in order to impersonate Elijah—this scene was cut
before the final draft of the script. As they explain,

In our final script, there’s only one childhood scene. However, we originally had
ten pages of this stuff. From our interviews with Andy’s family, we were inun-
dated with interesting, magical stories. It was clearly a way to round out Andy’s
character: magic, Judaism, eccentric childhood, love of family. . . . But ulti-
mately, we had to conserve our running time for the main character. (P. 155)

While the scene may indeed have been cut in order to offer more screen time
for the adult Andy, this decision also effectively eliminates reference to
Kaufman’s Jewishness.
Taken together, Kaufman’s parodic “blackface” and absent Jewishness
bring Man on the Moon’s implicit theme of whiteness into dramatic relief.
From his impersonation of Elvis’s impersonation of African American perfor-
mance to his ambiguous “Foreign Man” character (from Caspiar, a “veddy
small island in de Caspian Sea”) (Alexander and Karazweski 1999, 11), the
Kaufman of Man on the Moon constantly puts on some other identity. In his
study of the history of blackface minstrelsy and Jewish identity, Michael
Rogin (1996) explores ways in which blackface performances have served his-
torically to “Americanize,” and, indeed, “whiten” Jewish immigrants, an idea
that sheds light on the racial dynamics of Man on the Moon. Discussing The
Jazz Singer, for instance, Rogin argues that “With Jolson cheering for ‘my
mammy’ and Uncle Sam, blackface as American national culture American-
ized the son of the immigrant Jew” (p. 6). Elaborating this process more fully,
Rogin asserts that

In the hands, disproportionately, first of Irish and then of Jewish entertainers,

this ethnocultural expression served a melting-pot function. Far from breaking
down the distinction between race and ethnicity, however, blackface only rein-
forced it. Minstrelsy accepted ethnic difference by insisting on racial division. It
passed immigrants into Americans by differentiating them from the black
Americans through whom they spoke, who were not permitted to speak for
themselves. Facing nativist pressure that would assign them to the dark side of
the racial divide, immigrants Americanized themselves by crossing and
recrossing the race line. (P. 86)

Because “whites who black up call attention to the gap between role and
ascribed identity by playing what, in the essentialist view, they cannot be,” (p. 34)

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 251

blackface has historically served to whiten immigrants, placing them against

the black Americans whom they presumably mimic.7
A similar process of whitening up takes place with Man on the Moon’s pre-
sentation of Andy Kaufman. In one particularly important scene, one that
Alexander and Karaszewski (1999) describe as the “secret to the movie” (p. xii),
Kaufman briefly laments to his girlfriend, Lynne, the public’s misunderstand-
ing of and hostility toward his personality. “I like you,” Lynne replies, trying to
comfort him. “You don’t know the real me,” Andy responds. To which Lynne
quickly observes, “Andy . . . there is no real you” (p. 118). Of course Kaufman
agrees, as do Alexander and Karaszewski. Always in a different face, always
performing some different identity, there is no real Andy Kaufman as far as
Man on the Moon is concerned. A practitioner of Transcendental Meditation,
lounge singer Tony Clifton, a coffee-shop employee, Andy Kaufman is here
but a collection of random identities strung together haphazardly. Like the
Jewish performer in blackface, Man on the Moon offers up a vision of mascu-
linity in other-face, though one made more radically chaotic through the pre-
sumed chaos of Kaufman. Kaufman dons different face after different face,
consistently discarding each of the identities he takes up and leaving “himself”
an empty, identity-less hole in their absence.
Alexander and Karaszewski (1999) describe their film as an “anti-biopic—
a movie about someone who doesn’t deserve one” (p. vii) and, indeed, as
framed by Man on the Moon, Kaufman is a nothing. This is the very nature of
Man on the Moon’s remembrance of Kaufman, the very basis for its heroic
retelling of his anti-heroic life. Whereas Kaufman’s original performances
may be seen to elide identity completely, as Auslander (1992) suggests, by for-
getting Kaufman’s Jewishness even as they celebrate his fluidity, Alexander
and Karaszewski remember Kaufman’s chaos as conventional whiteness. Split
between multiple identities, Kaufman is himself magically freed of the burden
of identity, offering up a new, universally generalizeable subject. In the end, all
that’s left is the blank no-thing-ness of white.

Conclusion
As Sloop (2000) suggested above, notions of the “fluidity” of identity have
often been associated with the liberating possibilities of identity trouble, such
that drawing attention to the performative features of gender, for instance, can
serve to destabilize gender ideals. In the example above, the encouragement of
a kind of “fluidity” of identity itself works to reestablish dominant figures of
identification. The character of Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon is whit-
ened precisely through the performativity of his identity, that is, precisely
through his ability to be “fluid.” It is through his multiple performances, his

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252 Journal of Communication Inquiry

multiple and competing identities, that Kaufman’s identity is washed away,

leaving the film with the impression that “there is no real Andy Kaufman.” But
as remembered by Man on the Moon, Kaufman’s performativity does not so
much liberate us into a realm of utopian fluidity as offer up a no-thing-ness that
whitens Kaufman to the point of forgetting his Jewish identity completely.
Extending Sloop’s suggestions, the example of Man on the Moon suggests that
scholars should be as cautious about “potentials” of gender fluidity “that go
realized,” as with those that do not, always keeping in mind the context and
conditions through which gender and identity more generally are made fluid.
These ideas have larger implications in terms of the white masculinity of the
1990s and are not necessarily unique to Man on the Moon. In the film Titanic,
the lower-class identified Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is carefully posi-
tioned alongside and against the lower-class Irish who populate the bottom
decks of the ship. In the process, the film highlights the more conventionally
white masculinity of Dawson’s character whose own invisible identity allows
him to be comfortable both at an upper-class dinner table and at a raucous Irish
party below deck. The 1990 film Dances with Wolves ushered in the decade
with a similar celebration of white masculinity. Transformed from a white
United States cavalryman to a Sioux-identified warrior, Kevin Costner’s char-
acter, John Dunbar, appears both to critique the powerful hegemony of white
America and to reiterate the nothingness of whiteness. Accepted by the Sioux
as a Native American, Dunbar seems proof of white America’s tolerance and
willingness to assimilate into the lives of native peoples, his character offering
the film’s mainstream, white audience a way to reconcile the horrific history of
whiteness in America. Finally, President Clinton’s connection with the Afri-
can American community quickly became a marketing strategy. For the 2000
election, Bill Bradley and Al Gore debated African American issues and white
privilege at the Apollo Theater and George W. Bush spoke in Spanish in order
to endear himself to Hispanic voters. What may have, in Clinton’s case, served
to disrupt conventional notions of race, here becomes simply a way to call an
audience of voters into existence and thus to win their support.
Each of these cases, like Man on the Moon itself, highlights some ways in
which dominant notions of identity are rehabilitated through the abjection of
some minority identity, reiterating the power of whiteness at the same time that
they might seem to critique it. On these matters Robin Wiegman’s (1995) book
American Anatomies is extremely instructive. Wiegman’s examinations of
popular cultural narratives, and the buddy film in particular, illustrate how tra-
ditional notions of white masculinity are maintained against and alongside
problematic figures of both women and racial others. Concluding a discussion
of the film Lethal Weapon, Wiegman offers the following interpretation of the
film’s concomitant vision of white masculinity:

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 Memorializing White Masculinity 253

In our seduction into the visual realm of culture, in our desire to find the visible
liberating, in our subjective need to reclaim bodies from their abjection and
recuperation, we encounter both the threat and the utopic possibility of contem-
porary social critique. To forge this critique as part of undoing the illusion of
“man,” of refusing the myth of masculinity’s completion in an interracial
domain devoid of women, is to expose the continuing rift within whiteness, that
materially violent abstraction that perversely gathers strength by offering itself
now as a struggling, innocent, and singular voice. (P. 146)

To this we might add an invisible whiteness empowered through multiple

voices, a sense of abstraction attained through fluidity, and a seemingly
schizophrenic putting on of identities, all of which characterize the no-thing-
ness of Man on the Moon. Negotiated, refracted, and rearticulated, such con-
flicted identities are productive moments of possibilities; which is to say, they
make possible the dissolution of dominant identities as well as their rearticula-
tion and remembrance via new and changing forms.

Notes
1. For further discussion of Clinton’s status as the first black president, see Deem (2001). For
discussions of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the implications of this scandal for contempo-
rary gender and cultural theory, see Deem (1999) and Berlant and Duggan (2001).
2. Morrison was not alone in this assessment of Clinton’s “blackness” and more generally
conflicted racial identity. As early as 1992, David Maraniss observed that “the rib joint and the
country club are geocultural icons for two separate worlds in Little Rock, one black and the other
white,” noting that “Clinton seemingly has moved between the worlds with ease and regularity.”
Noting Clinton’s movement between these worlds, Maraniss calls him “a bicultural explorer
with redneck roots, a combination that provides him with stronger empathetic ties to both worlds
than most politicians, but also leaves him open to apparent contradictions” (Maraniss 1992, 1).
3. Yet, Segal (1993) continues, “the increasing more ‘feminine’traits in some men is mocked
by continual production and popularity of all the old hard, assertive, violent images of masculin-
ity—from ‘Rocky’ to ‘Rambo’, from ‘Top Gun’ to ‘Lethal Weapon’ ” (p. 634).
4. Though the nature of this “invisibility” is substantially different for Beavoir, Irigaray, and
Wittig, as Butler (1990) demonstrates in the first chapter of Gender Trouble. While Beavoir
“contends that the female body is marked within masculine discourse, whereby the masculine
body, in its conflation with the universal, remains unmarked,” Irigaray “suggests that both
marker and marked are maintained within a masculinist mode of signification in which the
female body is ‘marked off’, as it were, from the domain of the signifiable” (p. 12). While Butler
(1993) resists embracing any one of these positions too enthusiastically, in Bodies that Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of Sex, she does suggest a way of exploring this “unmarked” masculine
body against, and alongside, a marked femininity on which it depends. “Disavowed,” she writes
in the first chapter, “the remnant of the feminine survives as the inscriptional space of that
phallogocentrism, the specular surface which receives the marks of a masculine signifying act
only to give back a (false) reflection and guarantee of phallogocentric self-sufficiency, without
making any contribution of its own” (p. 39). Likewise, she describes masculinity as “a figure of
disembodiment, but one which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a
masculinized rationality, the figure of a male body which is not a body” (p. 49), indicating a sort

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254 Journal of Communication Inquiry

of “unmarked,” “universally generalizable” manliness. This disembodied, generalizable mascu-

linity “requires that women and slaves, children and animals be the body, perform the bodily
functions, that it will not perform” (p. 49).
5. See also Kimmel (1996, 1993) and Warner (1994). Warner argues that when people partic-
ipate in a public sphere, it is always as an abstracted, universal subject that is masculine and
heterosexual.
6. For a reaction to Goldman’s (1981) conception of Elvis, see Marcus (1991) (especially
pp. 47-59). Likewise, for a discussion of Elvis’s contemporary manifestations and problematics,
see Rodman (1996).
7. For a complementary discussion of Jewishness and whiteness in America, see Jacobsen
(1998), especially chapter 5, “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews.”

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Brent Malin is an assistant professor in the Department of Broadcast and Elec-

tronic Communication Arts at San Francisco State University. An earlier ver-
sion of this article was presented at the National Communication Association
convention in 2002. He would like to thank Bruce Gronbeck, John Sloop, and the
anonymous reviewers of JCI for their helpful comments and feedback.

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