Breaking Up is Easy: Race and Dysfunctional Masculinity in 48 Hrs (1982)
It doesn’t help that Nick Nolte, especially with lengthier blond, coming-off-the-seventies hair in 1982, looks like what Donald Trump would like to look like. But here it is: tough guy cop taking a wily black criminal (Eddie Murphy, famously found kareoke-ing Sting to “Roxanne” in his cell) out on a furlough, and exploring each other’s territory: Murphy brought to an all-white honky-tonk bar, and then later Nolte brought to a blues bar favored by “the brothers.” Nolte is racist, but he’s fair. And he doesn’t really understand women, but come on—you can’t hold that against him. The movie is a permission structure for dysfunctional masculinity, helping him get to release his violent gut instinct: always shoot the hostage-taking bad guy: never think through the percentages and put down your gun. Afterward all the bad behavior will be forgiven: the black guy will forgive you for using the N word, and your girl will probably forgive you for just being a man.
It’s the sexual side of this that seems more interesting to me, because it attaches itself to parts of my upbringing and my self-conception that I feel like I want to spend more time considering. The racial dynamics of this seem almost too easy to decode. Eddie Murphy is a nonthreatening version of male blackness. In classical terms he is the “clever slave”: that is, the low-class character who is smarter than 95% of the rest of the cast. In Greek and Roman plays this would have been an actual slave; in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, it’s more often a servant. In Stephen Greenblatt’s old-new historicist terms, we circulate some social energy by enjoying the spectacle of someone from the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy running amuck, we laugh at that, and he gets put back in his place in the end.
OK, I take it back—this is getting interesting. Because of course Eddie Murphy really is a version of the enslaved person in that he is in prison, and the formal structure of the film is created by furloughing him for 48 hours in order to help put away Ganz (the splendid young James Remar probably better known as Dexter’s step-dad in the eponymous show), a criminal who seems to get most of his pleasure from killing law enforcement personnel. And at the end Murphy goes quietly back to jail, the only privation of which, from his perspective, seems to be that he will have to wait some more before he can have sex—and he seems pretty reconciled to that too. Wow.
But it’s the O’Toole plot that hits me in a different way. When I watch a film like this, part of the power is nostalgic in that it connects me with my childhood self — the vulnerable little boy who looked on in wonder at the actions of adults and tried to comprehend them. I didn’t see this movie when it came out — I likely saw a version for television released later in the 80s, with the language cleaned up (no N word, I’m sure) and the violence softened. Did I see Nolte and O’Toole as versions of my parents, in their long struggle through marriage? Doubtful. Did I marvel at Nolte’s sexual ease, that he could say, more or less, and with thinly veiled bedroom meaning, “we’re good for each other” as a (failed) attempt to quell pesky questions about living arrangements or consistent time together? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that I read all narratives of this kind with the desire for reconciliation, and with the sense that where, as here, it does seem apparent that these two “are good for each other,” then the only possible satisfactory outcome is one where both live happily ever after.
But that most certainly doesn’t happen. What is the nature of the train wreck of their love? As the “buddy” bond grows in fits and starts between Nolte and Murphy, the bond between O’Toole and Nolte goes mostly south. Her final line to him is a big FU delivered after he keeps her on hold for a while, and nearly forgets to pick up the phone. The blame seems to fall mostly on Nolte’s shoulders, who during the 48 hours is “forced” to spend all his time with Eddie Murphy, making occasional calls to O’Toole to try to explain and excuse his absence. It seems clear that we are meant to read these gruff efforts at communication as comic, that a manly man trying to be sympathetic and sensitive results in comic spectacle: hunched over a telephone at a desk attempting to explain himself rather than cooly aiming a huge handgun at a bad guy. Along the way, Murphy makes various inquiries into their relationship, sometimes sounding like a couples therapist, but also straying into fraternity banter and asking about O’Toole’s breasts, for which he receives an admonitory frown from Nolte. None of this results in any improvement with the couple.
But in the midst of that running conversation I want to focus on one comment, one that is easy to miss as the film makes little of it: Murphy sees that Nolte is upset after a call to O’Toole and when he asks what his girlfriend’s problem is, rather than blaming himself Nolte blames her, but this way: “She’s got the same complaint as half the Goddamn population. She can’t get the job she’s trained for and it pisses her off . . .” Her job seems to be, from the previous shot we got of her during the call, bartender, or perhaps cocktail waitress. But what job has she trained for? We never find out. Is it musical theatre? One is tempted to think so looking at O’Toole’s CV prior to this film, and just listening to her speak — she seems ready to burst into song at any moment. What this hints at is that he has an awareness of her frustrations that is greater than the comic form allows us to enter into beyond this brief hint. But it also hints at a politics, a politics that is not simply a permission structure for dysfunctional masculinity, or, worse, misogyny. Because it certainly doesn’t seem as though the “job” she had in mind was being a housewife, or in some other way entering into endless or more capacious submissiveness to Nolte. No, this seems like a view of women as capable of ambition and of having desire for fulfilling existences not dependent on men.
It makes the ultimate failure, the final FU, that much more painful. In the end the only pleasure Nolte can rely on, and the only pleasure we are given, is the satisfying blowing away of the cop-killing psychopath.
Oh and did I mention that in addition to taking Murphy on furlough for 48 hours, Nolte also loses his proper handgun for 48 hours? The phallus is also retrieved in the end, and all is well with the world.
Postscript, postproduction
The screenplay for this film is available online, which reveals, among other things, that O’Toole’s character trained in psychology. In one of many cut scenes, she meets Murphy (as she never does in the film) and assists in tracking down the bad guy using—psychology. And in the end she and Nolte are reconciled and, as far as we know, live happily ever after.
Why did the happy ending get cut? Whose decision was it? Does it reflect the character of some Weinstein in the production or post-production chain of revision and edits? Or does it reflect the taste of test-audiences? Did 48 Hrs. play a role in the long slide in our gender politics that brought us to 2016? Or did it hold up a mirror to the desire of 80s men and women to give each other a big FU and be done with it?
