The Limp Dick: Hollywood’s Latest Obsession

In most instances, laughter is not the best way to greet a penis. Bruno, the new Sacha Baron Cohen film chronicling the risqué pranks of a gay, politically incorrect fashionista, is not one of those instances. One of the film’s most memorable scenes involves a long, tight close up of Bruno’s package, hairless, except for a well-manicured landing strip, bopping up and down like some possessed pogo stick.

The gag goes further than Borat [2], in which a naked Cohen wrestles with his naked manager, intimately, for a seemingly endless period of time, in a scene that inaugurated a golden age in cock-related sight gags. Movies such as the satire Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story [3], romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall [4], teen romp Superbad [5], and most recently the buddy film The Hangover have followed Borat’s example, establishing flaccid penises as the comedy icon of the moment. (See this Salon story for a fuller gallery of the penis’s greatest cameos [6])

Through the 1980s, penises were taboo in Hollywood. The first instance of male nudity in a mainstream movie came, thanks to Tom Berenger, in 1991’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord [7]. Films like the Crying Game [8] and Boogie Nights [9], among others, soon followed, and more recently there was Eastern Promises [10]. In these movies, penises were often visually shocking, intriguing, unsettling, occasionally erotic, and always meant to be taken seriously. As the novelty wore off, and audiences became more inured to seeing cocks in art house cinema, it became increasingly difficult to escape the truth: The flaccid penis doesn’t convey power or eroticism. It looks like a finger puppet.

Maybe this realization was inevitable. Unlike women’s bodies, male nudity has rarely been appreciated, simply, as beautiful. As Jason Segal, who went full monty in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, put it, "When a woman does nudity in a movie, men immediately switch into a sexual mode. For women, from what I understand, it's not like that. They see a naked, out-of-shape man crying and it's funny—something weird, disturbing and disgusting we can all laugh at." A recent New York Times story on the science of desire [11] found that women, more than men, were turned on by pictures of heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, monkey sex, naked female bodies, and naked male bodies if the fellow in question was erect. Just about the only thing they weren’t turned on by? An attractive man without a boner.

Judd Apatow, the director of films like The 40-Year-Old Virgin [12] and Knocked Up [13], has most fully, and successfully, exploited the penis’ lackluster appearance. After inserting an entirely gratuitous dick (his own) into a scene in Walk Hard, a send up of music biopics like Walk the Line [14], Apatow vowed, “I'm gonna get a penis in every movie I do from now on ... It really makes me laugh in this day and age, with how psychotic our world is, that anyone is troubled by seeing any part of the human body."

But that’s a bit of swagger. Flaccid penises are more than just another body part to Apatow; they’re the perfect metaphor for his characters: sissymen and overgrown boys who willfully avoid growing up and pay for it with their inability to get it up. Erections are what men have—limp dicks belong to the stoners, virgins, and perpetual adolescents that populate (very charmingly) Apatow’s universe.

Yet because Apatow has enormous sympathy for his characters, and the pain they suffer in leaving childish things behind, he eventually redeems their weens. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segal’s character Peter elects to be broken up with while he’s naked. He and his wilted wang are humiliated and slide, together, into full blown, crying after sex, loserdom. Later, the woman who broke his heart, Sarah, tries to get back together. In a hotel room in Hawaii, they start to fool around:

Sarah: Get hard for me Pete. Get hard for me.

Peter: I know what I’m supposed to do.

S: What’s wrong with you?

P: Nothings wrong with me. Something doesn’t feel right anymore. Maybe the problem is that you broke my heart in a million pieces and my cock doesn’t want to be around you anymore! EVER!”

Peter’s cock, once an embarrassment, now has all the wisdom; it knows Sarah’s a bitch. If his flaccidity once proved he was an overgrown kid, it ultimately helps him retain his hard won, newfound manhood.

Recently, however, there’s been less redemption for the droopy dong. Ray Drecker, the main character in HBO’s new series Hung, could be based on one of the men interviewed in Stiffed [15], Susan Faludi’s 1991 book about the erosion of masculinity in the last recession. Drecker, played by Thomas Jane, is divorced, broke, and living in a tent in front of his burned out house in Detroit. In need of cash he turns to his only asset, his very large penis, and decides to become a prostitute. Like Apatow’s films, this series hovers between a gross-out comedy and a serious drama about male anxiety. But in Hung, the tension is darker and more fraught. For Ray, emasculated by his circumstances, impotence could never be a joke or a revelation; it would be a financial disaster.

Observe and Report has a similarly dark take on the exposed member. Seth Rogen’s Ronnie Barnhardt is a violent, creepy, unhinged security guard with a life more dreary even than Ray’s. He doesn’t know how to be a man (everything he’s learned comes from violent movies and an absentee father), but he desperately wants to be one. He becomes obsessed with capturing the one guy who is a bigger loser than he is: a gross, overweight flasher harassing customers at the mall. The movie ends with a chase scene that’s as hilarious as it is gruesome—Ronnie hunts down and shoots the pervert, with his guts and nuts flopping all over, a particularly bloody overreaction unless you consider that the flasher and his lame wiener represent what Ronnie most fears becoming, a useless prick.

Bruno features the most subversive penis yet. It’s got nothing serious to say; it’s just funny—an animatronic, de-sexed toy that barely belongs to its owner (the shot is a close up on Baron Cohen’s groin; this dick could belong to anyone). It’s not anxious. It’s not in the throes of a masculinity crisis. It’s not wise. It’s not embarrassed. It’s not overdetermined. It doesn’t even behave like a real penis—it talks! Bruno’s junk is like a body snatcher: It looks like a cock on the outside, but its soul, and its meaning, have gone missing.

The previous comedies milked laughs out of the inherent dissonance between a penis’ appearance and its importance, but Bruno ignores that imbalance. His johnson is all appearance, and no importance. This is the ultimate disrespect, the most nihilistic take on penises ever set to film—they’re nothing but a punch line. Men, don’t laugh too hard.

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