Nicholson, Jack – Senses of Cinema

b. 22 April 1937, Neptune City, New Jersey, United States

The Affective Structure of Furious Feeling: Masculinist Anger in the American New Wave and in Its Wake

It goes without saying that Jack Nicholson (b. 1937) is one of the most celebrated stars that Hollywood has ever produced. For obvious example, the three-time Oscar winner (two Best Actor, one Best Supporting Actor) holds the record for acting nominations for a male actor (with twelve, only Meryl Streep has more), and he probably earned the most money ever, total, of any actor from a single film (for the Joker in Batman, 1989). But, beyond these mere markers of mainstream successes, Nicholson is also unusual for a major star for having established himself with innovative films by auteurist directors, from whom the praise is consistently effusive.¹ The famously demanding Stanley Kubrick compared Nicholson to Hollywood golden-age stars Jimmy Cagney and Spencer Tracy and highlighted his acting talent, calling him “one of the truly great actors Hollywood has produced.”² As one of the key directors of the American New Wave, the filmmaker/theater director/sketch performer Mike Nichols declared Nicholson “one of the giant film stars of all time.”³ And Roman Polański, the exacting director of Chinatown, was even more specific in identifying what made Nicholson unique, even astonishing: “Any lines you give him sound right, even if they’re awkward or badly written. When he says something, it sounds authentic. He never asks you to change anything. . . It’s amazing, really.”⁴ Even during the vaunted 1970s period during which Nicholson ascended to major star status, he was already being celebrated as the dominant performer for that era, with Charles Chamblin labeling him “probably the most irresistibly watchable performer now [in 1975] working in the movies,”⁵ and Tony Richardson declaring (in 1976): “We may all be entering the era of Jack Nicholson.”⁶

There is always something magical, simultaneously inexplicable and inscrutable, about who becomes a star and who does not. But, in assaying to assess the stardom of Jack Nicholson, I would pose the question: has there even been a more famous and celebrated actor who more embodies the power of affect – especially suddenly and satisfyingly eruptive anger and aggression — for audiences? The role of affect in stardom has been too little examined and understood, with a couple of notable exceptions (Lorraine York, Marco Abel) – this lacuna holds, even as the “affective turn” has taken hold of media studies in the last twenty years or so.⁷ Nicholson, I would submit, is the most affectively driven major US star of the last sixty years – a phenomenon that a historical examination of his rise reveals, particularly as that rise unfolded amid one of Hollywood’s most critically celebrated and industrially transformative phases, that is, during the “American New Wave” or “New Hollywood” era (roughly 1967-c. 1978/80). Stars, as I have explored elsewhere, have intriguing relationships to historical transformations and that was certainly the case with Nicholson and his affect-driven stardom.⁸ It is often forgotten, as Donna Peberdy has pointed out,⁹ that Nicholson was actually half a generation older than the baby boomer generation, which, I argue, would help his career register these historical changes all the more. Nicholson’s enormous skill and impressive range come, in this celebrated period, to deploy this affect of anger expertly in stunningly divergent and consistently revealing contexts. But the engine for his uniquely affective ascendancy was the increasingly expressive anger and the externalized aggression of male, even masculinist, aggrievement – all wrapped up in an irresistibly charismatic package.

These observations should take nothing away from the hustling actor and thoughtful performer Jack Nicholson, who, by virtually all accounts, has been a dedicated, hard-working, and highly intelligent professional. And it is to Nicholson’s credit that he put this performed affect to work in many of the seminal films of the American New Wave. But stars’ traits, skills, and successes always concern more the moment in which they emerge, something Nicholson’s remarkably long wait for stardom makes very clear. Looked at historically, his late rise to prominence parallels the historical transformation in mainstream US cinema, such that his career can serve as an allegory for the transformations of that period. By the time of his astonishing 1973-75 – including, among others, the milestones The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973), Chinatown (Polański, 1974), The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest(Milos Forman, 1975) — Nicholson had come to embody the wider transformations in both stardom and culture generally, particularly in the broader, changing attitudes toward men and masculinity. His career trajectory from the 1970s into the 2000s only confirms the centrality of this affective core of his stardom and of anger/aggression in the culture. His film roles and his media-honed stardom beyond them highlight the many contradictions around gender and sexuality at that early-to-mid 1970s to the 2000s period that I trace herein. If his landmark American New Wave films point to the intriguing contradictions of masculinity in that period,¹⁰ many of the best-known later films come to traffic, sometimes cheaply, in this masculinist anger and aggression, reducing the complexity of their emergence in the American New Wave that I highlight in this essay.

Anger as Affect in Film Plotting

Amid Nicholson’s 1970s late but, finally, very rapid ascendancy, critics were already flagging his ability at acting anger as a key element of his performances and of their significance for the era. The association of his stardom with the affect of anger in particular was much stronger than for stars of the era like Warren Beatty or Robert Redford, who were more celebrated for their looks than any specific range of feeling they conveyed.¹¹ For example, Alan Warren noted in 1976 in Filmbuff: “Nicholson can take almost any dialogue and shape it, mold it into an honest observation or into a frighteningly real and angry tirade against the injustices of life. When Nicholson gets angry onscreen, one can see the complacency slip away from his expression and the volume of his voice drop, not merely from well-observed acting, but from within himself. . . his temper is the temper of our times”¹² This impression of a remarkable, even personal, anger was also flagged by some of the directors mentioned above, including by Polański: “You cannot believe how angry he gets in a scene. . . It’s unbelievably scary. He cannot stop. He goes into a kind of fit and you don’t know if he’s really acting anymore.”¹³ It is worth noting that it was explicitly with (authentic) anger or fury in the foreground that he became famous, not with self-conscious mischievousness, with which he was often later credited.¹⁴ Around this time, critics were noting how Nicholson’s approach, including an indulgent attitude toward his temper, would even help change the star-image of leading men: “Male movie stars no longer need to be a pretty-boy. . . [Nicholson’s] drooping eyelids, the New Jersey twang, the easy, apparently effortless manner of speaking — everything, it seems, but the explosive temper that seems to cascade within him from anger to madness.”¹⁵ That this anger on the edge of madness is part of his stardom seems indisputable – I term it his “crazed fury” herein — but I want to explore here: how did this affect function in in the crucial works of the American New Wave in which Nicholson rose to prominence? And how did it change historically in ways that made him such a critically celebrated and popular star in an era of marked transformation in both the film industry and culture more broadly?

Within the various affect theories of cinema, Carl Plantinga has likely been the theorist who has most discussed the relatively undertheorized forms and functions of anger within film plots. Plantinga’s work falls in the cognitivist corner of affect film theory, which seems appropriate for Nicholson’s verbally dexterous performances of fury. Striking in Nicholson’s performance is not only the “primary emotion” of face-twisting fury that he performs, but also the cognitive phenomenon of articulating the anger consciously and even eloquently, for the audience to hear and to comprehend.¹⁶ Basing his work here on the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Plantinga argues that the angry reactions of principal characters have become a key force in contemporary cinema. In his analysis particularly of revenge plots, Plantinga highlights how filmic anger functions as a social phenomenon, one in which its affective charge is inflected in and through an individual but functions socially.¹⁷ In fact, following the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild on anger in contemporary capitalism and in today’s politics, feelings of fury serve as an important interface through which individuals negotiate their social contexts. As Hochschild has detailed in her influential The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (2012), managing emotional responses and their sundry performances are core aspects of late-capitalist economy. For example, Hochschild sat through flight attendant training and experienced entire sessions on how to handle “irates,” that is, angry passengers, while self-consciously defusing one’s own anger¹⁸ — feelings of anger, and the strategic handling of them, are cornerstones of the affective economy of late capitalism.

There might be many triggers for the eruption of personal anger (frustration, hurt, disappointment, at one’s self or others, etc.), but, for Plantinga, film plots deliberately contextualize anger socially and morally, rendering it a righteous reaction to the collectives that the films construct. Plantinga argues that contemporary films often deploy anger as a “moral emotion,” thus, not only as a key primary emotion for a given individual, but also one that is carefully morally and ethically justified by the plot, usually by way of revenge or some (other) narrative rationalization. Cited in this context by Plantinga, Haidt’s notion of a moral emotion highlights how even non- or pre-cognitive affects can function within more deliberative moral and/or ethical situations, situations that Plantinga suggests film plots deliberately construct.

If, in cinema, anger frequently serves as a form of (morally-justified) interface with the social, anger’s changing contexts and justifications can reveal broader transformations – historical transformations both social and affective-emotional. In this vein, Hochschild highlights how societies consistently cultivate a prevailing sense of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” affects – e.g., norms and rules about anger — that happen to be carefully managed (and commercialized) at any particular historical moment.¹⁹ And these rules are predictably gendered in their management of affect and emotion, an unequal application that Plantinga also highlights.[20 Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 81-82.] Both the social rules and the gendered question of “appropriate” affects will be central to Nicholson’s popular and acclaimed fits of anger and aggression. If Hochschild and Plantinga identify this kind of society-negotiating affects at our contemporary moment, the trajectory of Nicholson’s career highlights how the affect of crazed yet articulate fury emerged and unfolded historically – including at the core of the American New Wave and what followed in 1980s-1990s US cinema in some of its most commercially explosive films.

Early Career: MGM, Classes with Corey, and Collaboration with Corman

Born in 1937 and raised in Neptune, New Jersey in a working-class family – with a largely absent, probably alcoholic father — John Joseph “Jack” Nicholson had good enough grades and impressive enough test results (albethey self-reported) to attend college on a scholarship in the mid-1950s. But he deferred further formal education to join former Earl Carroll review performer June – ostensibly his older sister who would turn out to be his biological mother — in Los Angeles. In this way, he joined the monumental migratory wave to southern California (Los Angeles, astoundingly, went from being the 135th biggest city in the U.S. in 1880 to the fifth biggest by 1930), and he soon landed a low-level job at MGM’s animation department, even working toward a career in cartoons. In further storybook and generally good-luck fashion (also self-reported), he made a positive impression on the personnel at the studio there and recounts how producer Joe Pasternak asked him “Kid, do you want to be in pictures?” According to Nicholson, the offer was real, and he was given an ill-fated screen test: he had not realized he had to memorize his lines and flunked the test.²⁰

More happily, a colleague at MGM – the future actor Luana Anders – suggested to Nicholson acting classes with Jeff Corey. Those classes, along with further study with Martin Landau, changed the direction of Nicholson’s life, both in the artistic skills acquired and the professional networks cultivated. Corey had a philosophy that drew on a number of acting traditions and dogmas – although Nicholson would later be loosely associated with the famous Method-oriented Actors Studio, his early, formative schooling by Corey was much more eclectic.²¹ In these classes, probably more importantly, he made a number of contacts with future industry players who would influence his career, highlighting the changing industrial contexts and broader historical transformations surrounding his ascendancy. The blacklisted Corey was offering acting classes out of his renovated garage at the time that the studios were, in the wake of their 1950s/1960s crises, cutting acting instruction. In Corey’s classes, Nicholson met his future roommate, Robert Towne, one of the most celebrated screenwriters in Hollywood history, including on films like The Last Detail and Chinatown that would have indelible impacts on Nicholson’s career and the American New Wave in general. Towne recounts how much he learned about writing by seeing, first-hand, how Nicholson executed exercises for Corey’s class, particularly by improvising when the subtext (for example, seduction) could not be directly articulated. This kind of circuitousness required that the actor be “inventive,” and, observed Towne, “good writing was the same way.”²² Such improvisational skills would prove crucial in Nicholson’s career, both in his Corman-quickie phase and in later films like Cuckoo’s Nest. Corey also helped Nicholson secure his first substantive movie role in the Corman-produced The Cry Baby Killer (1958), after which, also in good Hollywood fashion, he did not have work for a year.

For Nicholson this would be the crucial second phase of his professional career: working in Roger Corman’s ever-evolving ensemble, a circle that continues to be admired as a phenomenal accomplishment, at least in terms of its remarkably consistent low-brow profitability.²³ Nicholson’s meandering slow rise highlights, perhaps more than anything else, how Corman’s filmic fringe made its way into the mainstream by the late 1960s, a crucial development in the tectonic shifts in the industry. As the so-called King of the B Movies, Corman’s youth- and genre-driven, “underground” films — Nicholson called them at one point “stinky”²⁴ — made an indelible if underestimated contribution to the celebrated American New Wave cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nicholson’s work with Corman had already offered him ample opportunities to act, write, and, ultimately, direct. These wide-ranging opportunities included, for example, penning the LSD-psychedelic film The Trip (1967), which starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, so more Corman-fostered connections that would prove fateful for Nicholson’s relatively late breakthrough (at age 32) in Easy Rider (1969). Read this way, Nicholson’s career, not only as an actor but as a well-connected writer and director, highlights the broader collaborative networks (rather than mere auteurism) that pushed the contrarian, youth-pitched pictures into studios’ marquee productions, a core feature of the American New Wave.²⁵

Mainstreaming the Fringe: The Easy Rider Breakthrough, Five-Easy Pieces and Carnal Knowledge

By 1968, these diverse efforts and numerous networks outside the major studios yielded a pivotal place for Nicholson in Easy Rider, a surprise smash and a countercultural bellwether that proved to be one of the key works of the American New Wave. Accounts vary, but interviews from the time suggest, given his experience on Corman productions in sundry capacities, Nicholson was dispatched by recently formed Raybert to help with the early, chaotic days of the (in)famous location shoot of Rider, Hopper’s directorial debut.²⁶ Understandably, given Hopper’s reputation and proclivities, there was some concern from the Raybert home offices about the discipline of the production. When Rip Torn, for whom co-writer Terry Southern had conceived the character of the southern attorney George Hanson, withdrew under murky circumstances – did Hopper perhaps pull a knife on Torn or vice versa? — Nicholson stepped into, and eventually stole, what would become one of the early landmarks of the watershed era. Rider became a milestone for its countercultural attitude, pop music soundtrack, and, perhaps above all, its astonishing box-office performance. It earned some $35million on a B-movie budget of c. $400,000, with a reported additional $1m for the musical rights.²⁷ A Life magazine piece at the time dubbed Rider “a milestone American film,” highlighting Nicholon’s role in these broader industry transformations: “it made a fortune and changed Hollywood’s thinking about what would sell. . .”²⁸

In this watershed work, Nicholson plays George, who is the son of an important figure in his hometown, played football, and is now a semi-alcoholic attorney discouraged by the racist narrowmindedness of his small town. Armored in his football helmet, letterman sweater, and suspenders supporting a white linen suit, he looks a bolted-together social contraption of middle-class dreams for its young.

Easy Rider

He also owns probably the most quoted line in the film, “this used to be a hell of a good country, I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it . . . ,” a line that he infused with, Nicholson reported, the characteristic, Texas-twangy intonation of Lyndon B. Johnson. Nicholson’s brief turn in Rider as the ACLU-affiliated George ended up landing him his first Oscar nomination (here as Supporting Actor) based on his c. 20 minutes of screentime. Watching him steal virtually all of his scenes from the subdued Fonda and twitchy Hopper, one can see the impact he had in a role for which he was not even initially intended. Remarkable in assessing Nicholson’s historical stardom is how far this breakthrough performance seems from his later mega-stardom: subdued and saddened but notably not at all angry, Nicholson’s George shows how historically conditioned and contingent the extreme anger of the actor’s later career would prove – parallel to his performance as documentarian David Locke in The Passenger, which also lacks this kind of fury, opting instead for Antonioni’s modernist, fragmentary subjectivity that highlights, too, how (historically) contingent and even contrived Nicholson’s performances of fury are.

The actor’s breakthrough as the sensitive George in Easy Rider brings into focus how his star-image would metamorphosize in accord with the changes arriving in the American New Wave. For telling example, in discussing Nicholson’s fateful casting as Cuckoo Nest’s McMurphy – the work that would finally bring Nicholson his (first) Oscar – producer-actor Michael Douglas mentioned how one had to keep in mind that, in the early 1970s run up to casting Cuckoo’s, Nicholson had a reputation of playing sensitive young men who stray from the middle-class path.²⁹ In fact, Douglas recounts how he, co-producer Saul Zaentz, and director Milos Forman pursued the presumably rougher-hewn Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman before offering the role to Nicholson, one of the great acting what-if’s in Hollywood history. That the co-producers and director of Nicholson’s career-changing role as Cuckoo’s McMurphy would have been looking elsewhere underscores how the actor’s image had not fully congealed by the early-mid 1970s.

In voicing his skepticism about a convincingly working-class and social-rogue Nicholson, Douglas seems to have had in mind not only George from Easy Rider, but also Bobby/Robert Dupea from Five Easy Pieces, who enjoys a similarly privileged background to George — yet their personalities and behavior differ widely and wildly, underscoring Nicholson’s arc toward anger and aggression in his leading performances of the American New Wave. In a mansion on an isolated island in Washington, Bobby’s father has raised his children at a far remove from distraction to hone their classical-musical skills. Viewers of Easy Pieces, however, only learn of this privileged upbringing after watching the opening 30 minutes of Bobby inhabit a very different working-class life as an oil rigger outside of Los Angeles, complete with manual labor during the day, trailer park friends in the evening, and an undereducated girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), at night. When Bobby learns of his father’s illness, however, he embarks on a surreal road trip up the west coast and back to the privileged paternal home in Washington. The three plot parts of Pieces underscore the complexity of the cultural moment and the generational anger it produced: the nine-to-five grind of working lives, the young strangers in a strange land of a road-movie milieu à la Easy Rider, and then the clueless yet condescending elites cavorting atop the society. Here, Nicholson’s fits of anger are carefully contextualized within his confusion about class and generational inheritance, as the film’s fragmentary narrative suggests a certain nomadism and rootlessness for its angry young man.

It is clear from interviews at the time that Nicholson thought of the film as an effort to subvert mindless (upper) middle-class values, a subversion that was celebrated by critics. For example, in declaring Pieces the best American film of that year, Richard Roud of the Guardian observed that Nicholson “must now be regarded as one of the few truly gifted actors we have.”³⁰ But the grotesquely conflictual relationship between Bobby and his girlfriend Rayette — with his fits of fury at her and then subsequent shock seduction of his brother’s fiancée Catherine (Susan Ansbach) despite the nearby presence of Rayette – underscores how gender and sexuality became the arena onto which these class and generational tensions were displaced at the time. As the dramatic anchor and young hero of all three parts of the film, Nicholson refigures the masculine models here and then subsequently elsewhere in his work. Along similar masculinist lines is one of the film’s most cited scenes in which Nicholson unleashes his performative fury at a stranger in an everyday social situation: ordering in a road-side restaurant, he asks an unhelpful waitress to hold the chicken on a sandwich – and when she resists, he suggests she hold the chicken literally, between her knees, before sending the table’s dishes, glasses and silverware all crashing to the ground.

Five Easy Pieces

Here, again, quotidian anger at class and generational tensions are displaced onto a shockingly misogynist tirade – and the ubiquitous praise for this role as groundbreaking underscores the troubled gender politics of the era.

Those disquieting gender politics, driven by the affect of male anger, would be in the foreground the very next year, in 1971, with Nicholson’s first collaboration with wunderkind Mike Nichols. With Nicholson’s controversial role in Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, the rising star confirmed he would remain at the center of debates about contemporary masculinity and its fury-ranting proclivities. Knowledge was Nichols’s fourth feature film after the runaway successes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate (1967), but Carnal Knowledge shocked critics and viewers alike for the misogyny of its main characters, two (Amherst) college roommates, Jonathan (Nicholson) and his best friend Sandy (Art Garfunkel). Jonathan, for instance, summarily sleeps with Sandy’s girlfriend Susan (Candace Bergen); verbally brutalizes his later live-in paramour Bobbie (Ann-Margaret); and, at the end, memorably engages in physical intimacy with a sex worker (Rita Moreno) who, he vehemently insists, should declare throughout the paid act how “powerful” and even “perfect” he is. The nine-minute scene of the breathtakingly cruel fight between Jonathan and Bobbie became the film’s most famous sequence and gives full vent to Nicholson’s arresting performance of hyper-articulate yet sadistically searing anger (“Where the fuck is my shoehorn?! . . .You want a job? I got a job for you – fix up this pigsty!”). Parallel to Five Easy Pieces, Knowledge’s most cited scene was one in which Nicholson delivers an apoplectic fit pairing bottomless rage with verbal dexterity, underpinned by both entitlement and aggrievement. Although the film flirts with reproducing the misogyny it purports to criticize, Nichols and Nicholson were, in fact, subjecting male emotional abuse of women to a critical view.³¹, I become that character.”] But the depiction may have been too incisive, even inviting: to witness aggrieved male anger so charismatically channeled by Nicholson is both fascinating and disturbing.

A Transformed Star Image 1973-1975: The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Carnal Knowledge’s Jonathan was at some socio-economic class distance from Nicholson’s humble beginnings in New Jersey, and the role only confirms the actor’s considerable abilities in playing across the social spectrum of the US. In Knowledge, the star from humble origins remained the college-educated, white-collar professional of Easy Rider and hinted at in Five Easy Pieces. Its accomplishments notwithstanding, Nichols’ film also highlights how Nicholson’s star-image would have to change en route to his era-defining roles in Chinatown and Cuckoo’s Nest, and a crucial station along that path would be Hal Ashby’s third film, The Last Detail. The Last Detail not only transformed Nicholson’s star image, but it also exhibits the potential complexity of his crazed fury amid the contradictions of masculinity in the 1970s. It highlights how anger, when correctly cast and contextualized, can test the limits of social norms and rules in complex ways. The film follows two naval shore patrolmen, “Bad Ass” Buddusky (Nicholson) and Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) who escort a younger “swabby,” Meadows (a young Randy Quaid), on his way from a base in Virginia up the eastern seaboard to a military prison in Maine.

Carnal Knowledge

Sketched at a decided dramatic distance from George in Easy Rider, Bobbie/Robert in Pieces, or Jonathan in Knowledge,Detail’s opening has Buddusky drunk or hung-over, passed out, and slumped over in a base lounge – altogether, a foreshadow of how the detail will unfold. Although Mulhall similarly contests what he comes to call, repeatedly, “this [chicken] shit detail,” he is introduced meticulously ironing his shirt. While Mulhall also empathizes with the young Meadows’, he is clear eyed about not scuttling “his years in” by allowing the younger man to escape. It turns out that the late teen Meadows has tried to steal $40 from a collection box for fighting polio, for which he has received eight years in prison. In a Kafkaesque turn, the sentence for the (failed) minor theft was so severe because polio was the favorite charity of the base commander’s wife. Such a pointless abuse of power neatly allegorizes the wider political and cultural context of the war-time early 1970s and its broader anxiety about the U.S. military.

In the film’s largely realist approach, masculinity and masculinist initiation provide for many of Detail’s most memorable moments. Pitying the naïf Meadows, “Bad Ass” Buddusky insists on obtaining (underage) Meadows alcohol in D.C.; initiates a detour to the young man’s mother in New Jersey (not home); and then engineers Meadows’ first sexual experience in Boston (with a sex worker, credited disturbingly as “young whore,” played by early-career Carol Kane). Increasingly, Buddusky mentors Meadows, and his fits of rage usually erupt when someone stands in the way of this well-meaning, masculine role modeling. For example, a screaming Buddusky pulls his gun on a barman who denies Meadows alcohol even though he is old enough to be sent to war and is now being sent to military prison. Here, too, Nicholson’s anger and aggression are triggered to explore the contradictions of the early 1970s historical context.

Nicholson’s comparatively diminutive body and contrarian attitude here highlight the transformations in masculinity in this era of the war, an era of both a broad military draft and violent protest against it, even as those specific events get very little direct mention in the film. The contiguity of war-time and post-war masculinity crops up again toward the end of the film as they await Meadows to finish his session with the sex worker. The conversation between middle-aged Buddusky and Mulhall turns for the first time to the women in their own lives. Mulhall has apparently never been married – he cites how he supports his mother back in Louisiana — while Buddusky admits he was married once, to a woman from near San Pedro (screenwriter Robert Towne’s hometown). But she wanted him to go to trade school, become a TV repairman, and settle down “fixing TV’s out of the back of a VW van.” He observes melancholically: “I just couldn’t do it,” a self-diagnosis of his incongruity with masculine norms of the post-war economic and especially consumerist boom. Concluding with “I guess we’re just a couple of lifers,” Buddusky’s surprisingly melancholic observation confirms that it is not for patriotism or glory that they serve, but rather for their general misalignment with masculine norms. Notably, Buddusky’s most shocking episode of anger occurs shortly afterward, when Meadows, despite all the well-meaning mentoring, tries to escape and Buddusky brutally pistol-whips him with a ferocity complicating the affections the film had been fostering. Buddusky’s fury is bred of the masculine contradictions that his abrupt biography had shortly before revealed: the gyrations between the melancholic and the mad offer another seismic registering of postwar tremors in masculinity. Anger against Meadows and Buddusky’s failed mentorship of him underscores the limits of the intergenerational solidarity at that particular historical moment, here marked by militarized masculinity and its malcontents.

Now regarded as a classic of the American New Wave, Chinatown highlights how a work seen as a masterpiece of both screenwriting and direction also intersected Nicholson’s ascendantly angry career arc. Looked at from the perspective of Nicholson’s metamorphosing stardom, his Jake Gittes in the retro-noir Chinatown elaborates on the conventional moral anger of a private detective navigating a corrupt U.S. society. More precisely — and recalling his class-recasting in Last Detail — Nicholson’s bouts of fury highlight how a more modest social background clashes with the comprising, contradictory circumstances in which American socio-economy situates its ambitious and upwardly mobile individuals. On the one hand, as a former cop now on his own, the narcissistic Gittes indulges in conspicuous consumption, sporting slick suits, a well-appointed office, and amusing associates in his employ. But, on the other, he has to learn his place before and below the city’s true elites. Such is the arc of film: it opens with Gittes’s lower-brow divorce work (“All right, Curly, enough’s enough, you can’t eat the Venetian blinds”) scaling up to city- and region-wide conspiracies amid the upper-middle class, and even super-rich, elites recasting postwar America in their own suspect image.

The arc of these struggles is registered by Towne, Polański, and Nicholson as successive scenes of the detective learning to stifle his anger and aggression at these social and personal contradictions – probing precisely what “appropriate” affects are to be in this disturbed and disturbing context of the US postwar boom.³² This milieu is not his usual masculinist metier. Early in the film, Gittes explodes in a barbershop when his divorce-work is condescended to by a banker (“Tell me, did you foreclose on many families this week?!” echoing the aforementioned LA’s booming growth in those years.

Chinatown

And then, in a series of key scenes, Gittes’ eruptions of moral fury are carefully restrained by the rules and norms of “proper” postwar society like the allegorized “Albacore Club” — rules and norms that deliberately obscure the brutal exploitation, and shocking casualties, of the postwar economy. The muzzling of his madness comes, in fact, to be famously visualized in the phallically overdetermined bandage on Gittes’ nose, affixed there diegetically by the director Polański himself – Gittes’ anger and aggression are certainly appropriate to these sundry personal and public attacks, but unremitting restraint rests right at the tip of his nose

As Gittes interacts with (the actual) Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and Noah Cross (John Huston), his subsequent episodes of anger have to be increasingly stifled and sublimated. For example, in a memorable, upscale restaurant scene with Evelyn, he carefully curtails his aggression that then, subsequently, comes out violently, and gender inflected, when he learns she has understandably misled him about Katherine, her daughter-sister.

Chinatown

For a moment, his masculinist, angry indignity at the femme fatale duping him would seem to direct the plot to a just, if noirish, ending. But his fury toward Evelyn, as well as toward the increasingly ghost-like “Okies” in the vanishing orange groves, pales in the presence of the looming, venal Noah Cross. By the end, Gittes is almost entirely hollowed out of the anger, and agency, that he so charismatically channels earlier in the film (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”). The explosive temper that Nicholson’ typically embodied in the film would be entirely justified by Cross’s grotesque crimes against the city and against his own progeny — but the film carefully constraints, eventually entirely evacuates, Gittes’/Nicholson’s fury to underscore how even a righteous anger will not save him, Evelyn, or the polis.

In Milos Forman’s 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey’s best-seller One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson’s Randle P. McMurphy was among the most celebrated performances of the broadly heralded period, affirming Nicholson as probably the key actor of the American New Wave.³³ Cuckoo’s Nest finally brought Nicholson an Oscar, here as Best Actor, after four nominations, with Best-Actor co-nominee Walter Matthau reportedly muttering “It’s about time” when Nicholson was announced the winner at the 1976 ceremony.³⁴ Nicholson’s was one among the five “major” Oscars that Cuckoo’s Nest won that year (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay), a feat managed by only two other films in film history — and the first to do so since Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night. Adapting a counterculture literary classic into an independently financed film, Cuckoo’s Nest was produced by two novices and directed by a recent immigrant – and it nonetheless had reached Hollywood’s highest heights. As one of those novice producers (and fellow actor) Michael Douglas would say later, Cuckoo’s Nest would always be the first item on all of their resumes.

Nicholson’s performance as McMurphy well encapsulates both the crazed and the furious that brought him to prominence in this New Wave period: in fact, his character arcs from the crazed (if not really crazy) to the furious over the course of the film. Nicholson seems to have had a personal affinity for Kesey’s novel and the McMurphy role – he had, in fact, tried to acquire the rights to the literary property in the early 1960s before realizing industry heavier hitter Kirk Douglas already had them.³⁵ In the early parts of the film his jubilant unpredictability dominates the plot, including kissing the hospital guards; gambling with a pornographic card deck; lecturing on basketball to Bromden, the allegedly deaf and nonspeaking Indigenous “chronic.”

One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest Image

But McMurphy’s feigned insanity then arcs to his anger and aggression in the later part of the film, a critical response to the institutional strictures of the Oregon State Hospital and society at large. Forman deployed Nicholson’s increasingly famous moral anger and aggression to critique many of the key targets of the era: generational tensions, sexual repression, out-of-touch and racist politics, and a general insanity in/of the US. Once again, however, these targets, and Nicholson’s performance, are interwoven with the complex, even disquieting gender dynamics of the time — female threat and masculinist aggrievement are, notably, the key bases for McMurphy’s anger. Crucial (literally, unto crucifixion) is when “Big Nurse” Ratched denies Randle and the men the chance to watch baseball’s World Series: McMurphy’s finger wagging “you’re not going to do that now!” at the nurse’s station when Ratched turns off the game, anticipates Nicholson’s later explosion in anger

One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest Image

Ratched’s threat, climactically realized in Billy Bibbit’s suicide, is depicted as an emasculating force in the ward, for which she, in the end, is physically attacked by the raging McMurphy, one of Nicholson’s most indelible cinematic moments.

The 1980s-1990s: Solidifying the Crazed-Fury Star-Image in The Shining, Batman, A Few Good Men and Late Career Comedies

In retrospect, Cuckoo’s Nest seems a transitional film: it was the rare box-office smash from the American New Wave “counterculture” films, as it became the second top-grossing US film of 1975. The US film to earn more that year, however, was Jaws, which is widely seen as transforming the industry for the late 1970s and 1980s.³⁶ The years after Cuckoo’s Nest, and after Nicholson’s (first) Best Actor Oscar for it, were not as active for him, at least not until 1980. In fact, between 1975 and 1981, his filmography only includes four films (over the five years), whereas 1970-1975 had included around ten films over those five years (and thirteen between 1969 and 1975, a surfeit of roles after his 1969 Easy Rider breakthrough).³⁷ It is not clear if his slowing down between 1975 and 1981 were coming off the customary habits of a Corman-bred career, electing to work less after his hyper-productive and -praised 1973-1975, or pausing after the milestone of Cuckoo Nest’s Oscar wins. In this later, quieter 1970s, certainly some of his energies, creative and otherwise, were dedicated to his second directorial effort, Goin’ South (1978), a period comedy that reunited him with Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd from Cuckoo’s Nest, although in a post-Civil War, western milieu. Like The Missouri Breaks and The Last Tycoon from the same period, Goin’ South attracted relatively little attention and/or box office, although both Breaks and Tycoon do highlight Nicholson’s commitment to working with specific personnel, especially directors, who interested him. As Nicholson made clear in many interviews, his goal was consistently to collaborate with visionary directors,³⁸ reinforcing his late 1960s and early 1970s commitment to auteurism. Breaks afforded the opportunity to work both with the American New Wave auteur Arthur Penn and his elusive acting hero (and LA neighbour) Marlon Brando, while Tycoon starred Robert DeNiro and was directed by the controversial Elia Kazan, who, of course, had directed Brando in his breakthrough roles (Nicholson claimed to have seen On the Waterfront [1954] about forty times as the assistant manager in a local movie house as a teenager).

After this relatively slow period of the mid-late 1970s, the next highwater mark in his career arrived via another celebrated director, Stanley Kubrick, in the director’s famed foray into horror, The Shining (1980). Accomplished though the film is, especially in retrospect, Nicholson’s Jack Torrance offers high-profile evidence that the actor’s stardom was ossifying, calcifying into performed anger subtended by suspect, openly misogynist male aggrievement. In this regard, the complaints of The Shining’s author, Stephen King, about what Kubrick had done with Jack (Torrance and Nicholson) are illuminating. King, famously, did not find much to like in Kubrick’s adaptation of his best-selling novel, even though he would later admit it worked well as a film. One of his core complaints concerned Kubrick’s decisions about the Torrance family’s father figure, Jack, for whom the family moves to the Overlook Hotel: “In the book, there’s an actual arc where you see this guy, Jack Torrance, trying to be good and little by little he moves over to the place where he’s crazy. And as far as I was concerned, when I saw the movie, Jack was crazy from the very first scene.”³⁹ That non-arcing and abiding craziness underscores how Kubrick was more focused on the hotel as an allegory for the corruption and venality of the United States, rather than on the unfolding family dynamics that the novel foregrounds (understandably, as King came to comprehend important autobiographical elements that he, apparently inadvertently, had written into the Torrances’ Overlook struggles).

The Shining

For Kubrick’s purposes, then, Nicholson could play, as he puts it, “Jack,” his increasingly reduced and simplified star-image: the masculinist anger is there from the beginning — already simmering and barely stifled — as he deals with his stalled writing career and displaces his disappointment, frustration, and fury onto his wife and son. For example, driving to the Overlook as a family, Jack responds to Danny’s precocious knowledge about the Donner party contemptuously and sarcastically: “See, it’s okay. He saw it on the television!” As emerges on that first family drive to the hotel, Jack’s aggression erupts as their very presence reminds him of his duties as husband and father, duties that highlight his failures in both family and work life. These eruptions of furious and eventually violent affect build on the misogyny of Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby (failed son, worker, and boyfriend), Carnal Knowledge’s Jonathan (failed lover and husband), and Cuckoo’s Nest’s Randle (failed member of productive society) but here lacking the earlier films’ subtly, critique, or self-reflection — the notable non-arc of Jack Torrance’s aggrievement and fury underpin Nicholson’s performance and The Shining generally. The many meme-able moments from The Shining that have entered the pantheon of film lines all belong to Nicholson’s fuming Jack and all suggest the aforementioned affect of perceived victimization, parodying professional or conjugal roles and manifesting malevolent masculinist aggression in the wake of it: “Wendy, I’m home”; “Here’s Johnny!” (68th on AFI’s list of greatest movie quotes); or “I’m not going to hurt you, I’m just going to bash your brains in”.

The centrality of this performance of a family man’s anger at his wife, child, and career highlights his entwinement of masculine “responsibilities” (a vague notion that Torrance repeatedly invokes) with the core corruptions of the luxury hotel, the (allegedly) “best people” who stay there (as Ullman recounts), and the United States in general.

The Shining

Tellingly, as opposed to the earlier, more considered deployment of masculinist anger in Five Easy Pieces, Last Detail, and Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining climaxes in Jack’s rage taking the plot over entirely. Although engaging as always, Nicholson chews the famously meticulous scenery of The Shining, anticipating his more one-note performances of the late 1980s and early 1990s in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992), films in which he played Satan, the Joker, and the caricature of a tough military man in quick, albeit highly-paid, succession. To comprehend the masculine distance traveled by Nicholson since the early 1970s, one might consider the gap between the furiously scene-stealing “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men(29th on the AFI’s list of greatest movie quotes) to Last Detail’s militarily melancholic “I just couldn’t do it.” These reductive but redolent rages nonetheless brought rewards commercially: Batman reportedly bagged Nicholson an estimated $40-50million or as much as $60million (that is, over $150million in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars) — Nicholson had signed for a percentage of profits and even a piece of the monumental merchandising action. Given the multiple revenue-streams, one report recounted, Nicholson’s Batman take probably represents the most any single film had ever paid an actor, at least until that point.⁴⁰

By the mid-1990s, looking back, Nicholson seems to have realized that Batman, as influential as it would become for the looming age of cinematic superhero films, suggested a direction with which he was ultimately uncomfortable: “Around the time of Batman I realised I was fooling around careerwise. It was great work and a great film, but I didn’t want to be seen as this crazy, Joker figure anymore. I think I had a conversation with myself, a real heart-to-heart. . . I think I was kind of losin’ it a little in the quality department”⁴¹– notably, he never chose to appear in a comic-book film again, including his friend Warren Beatty’s star-studded Dick Tracy (1990). Since Batman, Nicholson has worked primarily in two directions: on comedies that play on, even ironize, the crazed-fury image that had emerged by The Shining and the later 1980s; and on the kind of auteurist projects he preferred in the Hollywood high-point of his late 1960s and early 1970s. He was rewarded for the first direction with his second best-actor Oscar in the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets (1997), in which the aggrieved, aggressive male is now a middle-aged misanthrope of the mid-1990s: all that angry affect and its eruptive aggression have been channeled into contempt for his urbane neighbours and into obsessive-compulsive behaviors, even while fury bubbles barely below the civilized surface. In the opening scene, apparently to set the anger-varying tone, his character, Melvin Udall, drops a neighbour’s small dog down a garbage chute of his well-appointed New York apartment building. Also in this direction of satirical perspectives on the aging alpha male were his Anger Management and Something’s Gotta Give (both 2003).

As Good as it Gets

***Late Career Work with Auteurist Directors: The Crossing Guard, About Schmidt, and* *The Departed***

If these comedies play Nicholson’s aggrieved and crazed-fury image for laughs, his later-career work in service of independent-minded auteurs has proven more interesting – and have yielded self-consciously critical opportunities to dismantle these volatile, affective reactions. Most noteworthy here would be his work with Danny DeVito (Hoffa, 1992), multiple films with Sean Penn (The Crossing Guard [1995] and The Pledge [2001]), and with Alexander Payne in About Schmidt (2002). The Crossing Guard is an intriguing case for Nicholson’s self-reflexive post-Batman trajectory. As opposed to the Ur-comic-book as ensemble film, Penn’s second directorial effort is undoubtedly a small film – it is an example of the more “independent” and auteurist projects fostered especially by the (subsequently controversial) Miramax in the mid-1990s. Nicholson may have taken the role in part to help his ex, long-time girlfriend Houston, in her acting career (they were famously together, on and off, 1973-c. 1990). As he recounted, he knowingly signed on for many lines of her on-screen antagonism, as they are playing a divorced couple and all their scenes are, as he recounted, “vicious.”

The Pledge

The Crossing Guard intriguingly ruminates on the affect-driven anger for which Nicholson was cashing enormous checks at that point in his career (not only for Batman, but also for the Aaron-Sorkin-scripted A Few Good Men, for which he received a reported $5m in 1992 for a supporting role, around $11million today). In Penn’s film, Nicholson plays Freddie Gale, a modest jewelry store owner in LA who spends his evenings at strip clubs and nights with the performers from said clubs, whom he subsequently kicks out of his bed in the morning. Freddie, it turns out, has a single obsession: murdering John Booth (David Morse), who was driving drunk, struck, and killed Gale’s young daughter. The film opens with Booth’s imminent release weighing on Freddie’s mind. He divulges his vigilante-parent plan in Nicholson’s first scene with Huston, whose Mary divorced Freddie for his harboring, even nursing, this murderous rage — despite their having two other young children to tend. In their first scene together, as Freddie announces his plan to kill Booth, he explodes in anger at Mary and her new husband, whom he quickly, almost comically, puts in a headlock as he unleashes his lines of familiar face-twisting fury at his former wife. As Plantinga has argued, anger in revenge plots has become a ubiquitous feature of Hollywood films of the last 30 years, but here its use proves self-reflexive and self-critical. The denouement of the film commits to dismantling his vengeful, vigilante anger, underscoring the suffering and empathy it can paper over. By the end, and its tearful redemption, Freddie has relinquished both his plan for murder and the familiar fury driving it.

Batman

Nicholson’s record-breaking twelfth and, to date, last Oscar nomination arrived via his 2002 work with another independently-minded director, the most famous auteur of the US Midwest, Alexander Payne, About Schmidt. Primarily set in and around Payne’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, About Schmidt is a paean to middle America as embodied (generously) by its eponymous recent retiree, Warren Schmidt. The film opens with Schmidt watching his office clock opposite his meticulously packed papers on his last day of (insurance) work, and then segues to an orange-hued retirement party with the expected toast by his much-younger office successor and much eating by all. In a telling touch for the usually slick-backed-hair and sunglassed Nicholson, Schmidt sports a modest, somewhat mangled comb over a constantly perplexed expression that, taken together, accentuate his age – the former actuary is a much more meandering, subdued, even depressed male than Nicholson usually plays. Schmidt and his wife Helen (June Squib) planned to travel, post-retirement, in their block-busting Winnebago “Adventurer” RV, but when she dies suddenly, Schmidt finds himself in a tailspin of indulgent overeating and disheveled waywardness.

About Schmidt

Depression is, as Freud said, anger and aggression turned inward, and, here, as in his accomplished Sean Penn films, Nicholson riffs on the longer arc of his in-your-face fury by showing how Schmidt, under his placid façade, represses the anger that viewers expect from the long-time star. Nicholson even cited his deliberate “un-Jacking [sic]” the character in his subdued performance.⁴² Although far from the sustained crazed fury of his earlier roles, momentary affective iridescences do flare up at his late-life circumstances. In confessional letters to a charity “adoptee” in faraway Tanzania (“Dear Ndugu . . . “) and in a few uncharacteristically heated conversations, Nicholson’s fits of anger are rendered emphatically fleeting, with a focus much more on a self-control and self-censorship that border on his self-abnegation. Many of Payne’s comedy-dramas are about middle-Americans overcoming their perceived slights and accumulated disappointments, here most manifest in the discovery that Helen had an affair with a friend of Schmidt’s and the prospect of their only daughter Jeannie (Hope David) marrying a waterbed-selling, mullet-sporting, investments-pushing fiancé played by Dermot Mulroney (“A lot of people think it’s a pyramid scheme, but it’s not”). As in his Sean Penn films, Nicholson uses his advancing age and ballooning body to play off his earlier angry young man star-image, although here, with considerably more affection and appreciation for how people overcome aggrievement, and even apoplexy, every day – they overcome them to smooth the abiding human comedy of frustrating work, failed friends, and ultimately disappointing family. Part of the film’s considerable appeal and subtle social critique come in viewers’ expectation that Nicholson, as Warren, will erupt in his familiar fury at a key moment, but then witness how often that anger is deliberately defused. In fact, the film builds to a wedding climax all set up for the public airing of his anger and frustration, but then completely peters out in peace-making platitudes. That potentially pointed public diatribe ends, along with the film, with the proverbial whimper rather than the familiar Nicholson bang.

A cannier redeployment, rather than rethinking, of the angry “Jack” star image arrives in another late-career auteurist project, albeit a curious one: Martin Scorsese’s 2006 The Departed was based on the early-2000s Hong Kong hit trilogy Infernal Affairs, a rare but heavily rewarded remake from the influential director of Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990). The Departed highlights how Nicholson was willing – unusually for A-list actors – to accept supporting roles throughout his career,⁴³ here as the Irish-American gangster who has corrupted and now controls one of the two police protagonists, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon). Even though Nicholson’s Frank is not the lead, his gang and his persona are central to the milieu conjured at its outset as social and criminal context. The Departed’s arresting prologue focuses on Nicholson’s Frank and highlights how the latter’s masculinist anger and aggression structure the world in which the later plot (between the two younger policemen) will unfold – here, too, masculinist anger and aggression are immediately contextualized and thereby thematized as reactive. This prologue, set to the otherworldly tones of the Rollings Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” builds on Frank’s angry reaction to his context, although here his is clearly an immoral emotional reaction to said context, commencing as it does with stock footage of Boston’s controversial, combative busing integration in the mid-1970s. To these disquieting documentary images of 1970s social unrest, Frank aggressively growls that “I don’t want to be a product of my environment – I want my environment to be a product of me” – an echo of Nicholson’s angry star-image in the same, early-1970s period. After Nicholson’s graveling voice-over, his young Frank enters a store, flirts lasciviously with an underage girl, and then commences his corruption of then schoolboy-aged Colin.

The irony of The Departed is that Nicholson plays Frank as furious “Jack” throughout a film in which two younger stars, Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, take center stage with more varied performances. It is tempting to see Frank’s final, furious, fatal interactions with his corrupt cop charge Colin as the older actor’s inability to adjust to the ambitions of his younger, ascendant underlings. The older man’s thinking is as inflexible as the commodified and calcified anger that Hollywood extracted from Nicholson’s more complex performances of the 1970s.

The Departed

If Scorsese similarly has Nicholson play a fairly one-note, crazed-fury “Jack,” at least he had the good sense to siphon the plot off into the two ascendant stars DiCaprio and Damon and their more multifaceted performances. By way of telling narrative contrast, Damon’s Colin is similarly furious, aggressive and even murderous, but he hides those tendencies expertly, performing affectively for the more middle-class state-police habitus he deceptively inhabits. It is very much an affect-negotiating performance in line with the “managed heart “of which Hochschild writes.

The Departed’s complicating of Nicholson’s affective performance in the actor’s last celebrated role brings into relief the complex masculinist anger and aggression from his early-mid 1970s. Films like Easy Rider and The Passenger highlight how contingent, even contrived this instrumentalized anger and aggression were and how his career could have moved in a different direction. Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Last Detail, Chinatown and Cuckoo’s Nest all build upon, but also critique, the eruptions of anger and aggression at which Nicholson became so accomplished. But notable in those films is how the eruptions of articulate anger — of crazed yet verbose fury — unfold in the complex contexts of regret (Easy Pieces), of rakish refiguration (Carnal Knowledge), and of ultimate resignation in the face of larger social forces and institutions (Last Detail, Chinatown, Cuckoo’s Nest). His most interesting late career work similarly dismantles these eruptions of angry affect as part of US culture’s normative masculinity (Sean Penn’s films, Payne’s About Schmidt, even Brooks’ As Good As It Gets). And the big-budgeted hits like Batman or A Few Good Men highlight just how commercial such affect and its unbridled performance can prove, even if the person Nicholson seems (at least from interviews) to have been uncomfortable with it – an affective star-image ascendancy and subsequent professional adjustments that the era-defining career of Nicholson highlights.