The first time I watched Fear, the movie was already almost a decade old and I was about 12. I had no prior interest in it, but watched it because my brother and his then girlfriend had it on, so I wasn’t expecting it to have one of my favorite bondage scenes in a movie. So, seeing the cute dad character in the movie in a dress shirt and slacks, handcuffed with his mouth taped shut encapsulated my entire MO at the time. I basically salivated when the camera cut to the parents' looks of horror after showing the daughter's friend getting beaten by a home invader and the dad was gagged. Then, the wife gets gagged before finishing the word "mother fucker" as she screams at the hoodlum to stop hitting the teenage girl. Something I've always liked about this scene was the fact that the husband was gagged before his wife.
Aside from the bondage itself, there are other things going on with the story that make the bondage scene so good. The whole movie centers around a Freudian, Oedipal complex dealing with different masculine forces that compete and butt-heads for a girlfriend/daughter character. Conflict intensifies, leading to the bondage scene, which includes the most overt visual depictions of male dominance as the girl’s father is bound and gagged next to his wife as his house gets ravaged by her boyfriend and degenerate friends, then is eventually lifted over the boyfriend’s shoulder. All while this is taking place, the boyfriend keeps calmly reassuring the dad that everything’s under control, making his concerns for his kid’s safety seem hysterical and essentially implying that he isn’t capable of controlling what’s happening both because he’s physically outnumbered and physically incompasitated, as well as because he doesn’t match the boyfriend’s demonstrated primitive masculinity.
Summary
Basically, this movie is about a 16-year-old girl, Nicole Walker (played by Reese Witherspoon), falling for 23-year-old bad boy, David McCall (Mark Wahlberg). David is exciting and charming, and despite the wide age gap, he wins over Nicole's step mother and little brother, but not her father, Steven Walker (William Petersen). When Steven meets David, he’s understandably suspicious of David, but tries to play it cool. There is some debate over the appropriate time to bring Nicole home, then we get to see how manipulative David is when he changes the time on Steven’s desk clock to trick him into letting Nicole stay out longer. Throughout the movie, things escalate as we see David one-up his friends, outright demean and abuse Nicole’s friend, Margo (played by Alyssa Milano), become increasingly possessive of Nicole, murder Nicole’s only male friend who gives her a shoulder to cry on when things get rough between her and David, then go after Steven and the rest of his family when he intervenes, telling him to stay away from Nicole.
So, Steven's concerns about David and his daughter's relationship are realized when he investigates David's man cave and finds a stolen picture of him and Nicole with a picture of David sloppily taped over Steven. This prompts Steven to trash the place out of outrage, giving David and his gang an excuse to seek revenge on Steven and his family. Soon after, it's discovered that Margo and Nicole's friend was beaten to death, then David and his friends terrorize the Walker home. When the one security guard shows up with no police backup, it seems like everything is under control, so Steven leaves the house to address the situation. However, the guard gets killed, his guns and handcuffs are taken, and Steven gets beaten, cuffed, and used as bait to make the family let them into their house. Once they're in, David demands that one of his minions cuff the wife then look for tape, so he can tie up Steven's and his wife's legs and gag them. After the minion has fun ravaging the house and the two helpless teenage girls, David carries tied up and helpless Steven over to Nicole, so he can give away the bride, kill Steven, and run away with Nicole.
The Battle Between Masculinities
Beyond Fear just being a run of the mill psycho, obsessed stalker/killer movie, it grapples with different concepts regarding masculinity and the home invasion scene seems to make these concepts extremely apparent. As usual, bondage tends to make power dynamics more easily defined and obvious because it deals with one person having ultimate power and control, and another person who is completely helpless and at the mercy of the other person. So, it should go without saying that masculinity and femininity factor into this dynamic with the aggressor filling the masculine role and the victim assuming the feminine role. Throughout this movie, we see two different kinds of masculinity butting heads for Nicole. On one hand, there's her father who wants to protect his daughter and has a nice job and house with a state of the art security system (for the time). On the other hand, we have David who is younger and in much better shape than Steven, and doesn't follow the rules as a young adult with no definitive job, who lives with his rambunctious friends, and just seems to party all the time.
So, Steven's masculinity comes from being a patriarch who provides for his family, his age, and his place in civilized society as an educated, man of the upper class. On the flip side, David's masculinity is a bit more primal because he has youth on his side, he's physically stronger, and he manages to get by in the world without abiding by adult conventions, like marriage or family, or following the rules. To take this further, Steven is starting to feel like he's losing his little girl, which makes him want to protect and shelter her as much as he can, while David wants ultimate control over Nicole for himself. Steven is trying to protect his daughter from predators like David and David is actively trying to strip Nicole away from all the people who kept her safe, so she can depend on him completely. Therefore, when David invades the Walker home, these two masculine roles are heightened because David aggressively goes for what he thinks is his, which leaves it up to Steven to defend his family and save the day.
At first, David tries turning Nicole against her father by pretending to be the sensitive and reasonable one and trying to make Steven seem like the macho goon who physically attacked him. Before any homes get invaded, Steven confronts David, telling him to stay away from Nicole or else, then we see David beat his chest like King Kong. Later, Nicole confronts her dad for physically attacking her boyfriend, exclaiming that David showed her the bruises on his chest. However, this charade only lasts so long and Nicole realizes that he's the primitive goon, which leads to the home invasion scene. Since David couldn't seem to pull off the manipulative sensitive shtick, he fell back to his roots as a hyper masculine degenerate. When terrorizing Nicole's home, David gets to act on his most primitively masculine desires that he seemed to be suppressing throughout the movie by getting to emasculate the one man who has been standing in his way.
Coolness vs. Hysteria
As an affluent man with a big, stylish home, Steven relies on a hired security guard, a digital security system, and even a German Shepherd to protect his house, but David and his crew bypass all of those barriers. This seems to demonstrate that the only thing that should effectively protect the house is the man of the house, which Steven doesn't do because he exits the house unarmed and winds up beaten and handcuffed. When the crew threatens Steven's life if the wife refuses to let them in, he tries protecting everyone else by telling her not to open the door. So, David not only gets to rough Steven up and render him helpless, but gets a guaranteed ticket inside. If Steven were more of a primal man, he either would have exited his house pointing a shotgun, ready to go out Rambo style or he wouldn't have trusted the situation and stayed inside, preparing to retaliate if their security guard couldn't handle the situation. However, as a more civilized man, he assumed that the situation was as bad as it was going to be when he went to greet his hired security.
Once inside, David casually throws handcuffed Steven onto the couch, like a discarded coat. While removing Steven's tie, one of his accomplices bends over Steven's wife while cuffing her, then proceeds to grind on her as she cries out to Steven. David tells him to find some tape, then he leaves. After he retrieves a roll of duct tape, he says that he's going to check out the rest of the house, prompting Steven to threaten the guy if he touches any of his kids. In response, David calmly tells him not to worry because everything is under control as he tapes up his legs. At this point, Steven is understandably concerned about his family’s safety, but his futile threat appears pathetic in the eyes of the men who are in charge of this situation because Steven is in no position to be convincingly threatening. Furthermore, David’s cool demeanor during all of this makes Steven seem even more pathetic and hysterical because it emphasizes that David has nothing to fear since he’s holding all the cards while Steven is probably having the most terrifying and vulnerable experience of his life.
The different forms of masculinity are very apparent in this moment because all of Steven’s more modern lines of defense were breached, which allowed the more primitive David to take charge. When a man’s lines of defense for himself and his family are breached, he’d obviously feel insecure and threatened, while the primitive man is in his element because he isn’t being held back by more civilized conventions (law enforcement, technology, social status, etc.). Moreover, it’s common for someone who is primitively macho to emasculate other men by pointing it out when their emotions are expressed because it isn’t macho to be emotional, which is why David is always calm. When a person is overtaken by emotion, it signifies that they aren’t in control of themselves or the current situation because emotions are thought of as weak. So, even though anyone would find Steven’s position during the home invasion horrifying, Steven’s apparent horror that was thinly cloaked with threats was enough leverage for David and his friends to understand as weak. Not to mention, Steven had no control for the entirety of this scene until his wife eventually untied him before the big showdown.
Emasculating the Patriarch
As I briefly mentioned above, after David throws Steven onto the couch, he undoes a few buttons on Steven’s shirt and removes his tie. This action isn’t rare in mainstream male bondage, but it is truly a display of dominance. Getting back to the clash between masculinities, this tidbit is another sign of that because it not only illustrates David’s utter control, but also emphasizes how David’s primitive masculinity is calling the shots over civil/modernized masculinity because ties are symbolic of the latter. In the primitive world, the strongest are the fittest for survival and control of the flock. If this sounds animalistic, that’s because it is. In the animal world, there is no technology, organized bureaucracy, or class structure. Therefore, uniforms and dress codes aren’t implemented to distinguish social standing because those things are very human conventions that were established in the civilized, urban world. So, when Steven’s more civilized lines of defense are breached and he winds up handcuffed and helpless, David is able to establish a new order of things by removing Steven’s tie, which symbolized his masculine status in the civil world, but meant nothing during a home invasion.
Even though the breadwinner concept stretches across most understandings of masculinity, the free-flowing, womanizing, “lone ranger” type that refuses to be tied down by the conventions of society and family appears to display a more heightened version of masculinity because it doesn’t let anything like feelings or obligations get in the way of their pursuits. The apparent limitations of the responsible patriarch role seem to be emphasized in the movie when Steven offers to sacrifice himself to keep his family safe, as well as when he’s rendered defenseless in front of his wife and children when he was supposed to be in control and protecting them. This is made especially apparent when it shows the parents as Nicole’s friend is being beaten, Steven’s mouth is already gagged, David gags Steven’s wife, then the couple looks at each other and acknowledges that they’re both equally helpless. By the way, one of my favorite things about this scene is the fact that Steven was gagged first, which makes me think that David must have been eager to have the man of the house completely silent and helpless before taking care of the matriarch. Then, to add insult to injury, when the time comes for Steven to “give away” his daughter, he’s squirming on the couch when David effortlessly stands him up and lifts him over his shoulder to take him to Nicole.
There are so many things to unpack from this scene because the mere idea of a man being tied up in front of a woman is very humiliating and emasculating, especially if the woman is his wife, girlfriend, or daughter because tradition has it that men are supposed to protect “their” women. So, seeing Steven and his wife equally as scared and helpless together, especially when they look at each other in this state, is very arousing. Then, the woman of the house gets to see her husband lifted and carried off, while all he can do is lightly grunt and squirm pitifully as he’s lifted and dangled over a stronger man’s shoulder, like Nicole’s friend was before David had sex with her in an earlier scene. This resembles the image of cavemen carting off women to their layers to force them into sex, which really illustrates a man’s powerlessness when he’s tied up and in this position. This is extremely emasculating because Steven obviously can’t do anything about what’s happening to him, and it’s rhetorically placing him in a feminine position by showing that he can be carried over another man’s shoulder the way that a woman can.
Conclusion
Beyond this just being one of my favorite bondage scenes, I feel that it emphasizes male bondage’s appeal because the displayed clash between two different forms of masculinity is very characteristic of enthusiasm for male bondage. Since most of us are obviously attracted to men, we are attracted to masculine attributes that most males possess. However, since we also like the thought of being rendered helpless and/or seeing other men in rather helpless positions, we tend to be drawn to challenges to masculinity as well. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, whatever female bondage may be seems to reinforce traditional power dynamics by making a woman helpless. Male bondage appears to subvert that power dynamic by celebrating the image of men being made helpless, which doesn’t conform to traditional standards of masculinity.
So, even though the bondage scene in Fear basically reinforces a need for primitive masculinity by making all the modernized forms of security useless, which leaves Steven to defend his family and save the day by physically fighting and killing David, fans of male bondage appreciate Steven’s helplessness. Even though men like David actually exist, it seems as though most of us have encountered and felt dominated by men like Steven, who resembles most men who are in control in the industrialized world like our managers, teachers, politicians, etc. So, it’s a treat to see them being taken down a bit in their suits and having to squirm. For those of us who are these authority figures, it might be tantalizing to picture being humiliated and brought down in front of the people you have authority over just out of pure taboo, or maybe to be a little relieved from all the responsibility and status we’ve acquired. I especially like knowing that Steven might have continued to act tough and bark threats if he never would have been gagged because a lot of men’s masculine egos don’t seem to have an off switch regardless of how defenseless they are, which shows how masculinity has a lot to do with artifice and performance. Once gagged, Steven’s facial expressions even seem to convey more compassion for his daughter and her friend, as well as his own feelings of utter helplessness. Not to mention, Steven wouldn’t have been able to save the day if it wasn’t for his ten year old stepson sneaking around without being caught, killing one of the home invaders, and freeing his mother who ultimately freed Steven in the end. So, I guess we can say that team work, and not just primitive masculinity saved the day in this movie.
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