Even the squarest heterosexual knows about drag queens by now. They may even know how theorists like Judith Butler have used drag queens to talk about the constructedness and performativity of gender. Though drag kings receive less attention, their satiric power is even more pointed. As theorist Jack Halberstam argues, “kinging reads dominant male masculinity and explodes its effects through exaggeration, parody, and earnest mimicry.”[1] Drag kings use their craft and a healthy dose of humor to critique mainstream masculinity. Just as drag queens’ camp can be found outside of drag, so too do the motifs of drag king comedy show up in the mainstream. Halberstam points to the Austin Powers movies. In horror, where the usual performances of male heroism are futile at best, the male heroes who do appear come with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor. There’s no better example than Ash Williams from the Evil Dead franchise, with his boomstick, his chainsaw, and his groovy swagger.
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One strategy of king comedy is to find humor in “the frailty of the male body,”[2] that is, in the cracks in the façade of masculine strength and power. One way to achieve this humor is by pairing a strong man with a weaker one, not to emphasize the stronger man’s power but to reveal his own limitations.[3]
In the Evil Dead franchise, Ash is often doubled with himself. Viewers who watch Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and Evil Dead 2 (Sam Raimi, 1987) back-to-back will notice that Ash undergoes quite a transformation between films. He starts out overwhelmed, frightened, and meek before, in the second film, becoming the cocky and competent hero we know and love. But vestiges of Ash’s old vulnerability remain. His hand and, later, his whole body, become possessed by demons. In Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi, 1992), he has to fight his own mocking double. He is often quite literally at war with himself. Evil Dead movies love to put Ash through the ringer, whether it’s spraying him with a gusher of blood or striking him with his own possessed hand. Fans love to see Ash win, successfully slaying Deadites, but it’s also a lot of fun to see him suffer. He is as often the butt of the slapstick humor as he is the hero. Her heroism is endlessly fallible, always to comic effect.
Ash confronts his double
Ash’s body is penetrable, fragile, and unreliable, vulnerable to possession and liable to betray him, but over the course of the Evil Dead series, Ash makes modifications to his body to turn that vulnerability into strength. When Ash severs his possessed hand, it’s not a castration. Instead, it allows his ordinary hand to be replaced with his iconic chainsaw – weaponized, comically oversized, and more than a little phallic. King comedy revels in “emphasizing the prosthetic nature of male sexual appeal by using overstuffed crotches, chest rugs, and wigs.”[4] As drag kings have dildos, so Ash has his chainsaw. But prosthetic doesn’t mean fake. Ash’s cyborg masculinity is effective; his chainsaw serves as a prosthetic masculine enhancement, yet one which augments his virility rather than undermining it.
The birth of the chainsaw hand
In the 2015 television series Ash vs the Evil Dead, Ash is reintroduced to viewers as he prepares for a night on the town, revealing the effort Ash puts in to his manhood. Here, Ash is combatting the vulnerability not of demon possession but of something far more relatable: aging. The scene opens in a tight close-up; it seems Ash is strapping on his chainsaw, before the camera pulls back to reveal a girdle, simultaneously a joke on Bruce Campbell’s age and a peek behind the curtain to reveal the work that goes into Ash’s latter-day sex appeal. Ash completes the look with a dash of cologne, a dance in front of the mirror, and a wooden hand. Once again, his prosthetics are strength; a cockamamie story about how he lost his hand saving a child from a runaway train earns him a one-night stand. Lest anyone accuse Evil Dead of subtlety, Ash asks his new lady friend if she likes his wood, equating his prosthetic hand with his penis.
Ash in progress
In king comedy, a display of prosthetic masculinity reminds the viewer that dominant masculinities do not emerge out of nowhere but are produced through the participation and performance of the people who embody them. By revealing Ash in the process of constructing his action hero persona, Evil Dead denaturalizes that persona by “exposing the elaborate mechanisms that prop up seemingly normative masculinity.”[5] Like a drag queen in her boudoir, Ash puts in the work to serve butch hero realness.
One of the reasons Ash is such an iconic character is because he’s essentially unique within the horror genre. Horror’s stock male types are more the ill-fated boyfriend, the ineffective dad, and, of course, the killer himself. Ash feels transported from a different genre entirely. Drag kings are often imitative, taking as their inspiration dated male icons like Tom Jones or Elvis,[6] and there’s plenty of Elvis in Ash, from his coiffed hair to one of his most popular catchphrases, “hail to the king, baby.” His ripped shirt and heavily armed silhouette recall a Rambo-esque action hero, though never as buff, nowhere so much as in the iconic poster design of Army of Darkness.
Action hero Ash
But Ash’s heroism is ironically underscored by its quotidian backdrop, highlighting its absurdity. When Ash says “hail to the king” in the final scene of Army of Darkness, he is referencing his choice to give up the possibility of kinghood in Medieval Europe to return to the present day. There, he is king of his own little kingdom at S-Mart, the big box store where he bought his “boomstick” and now slays the occasional Deadite. His masculinity is quite literally a historical relic. This ending imagines a return of this mythic ideal and yet, in delighting in its silliness, admits its impossibility, alluding to what Halberstam calls “the failure of the masculine ideal”[7] in a world in which blue-collar workers like Ash are stuck in the less butch world of retail.
“Hail to the king”
Like Halberstam’s drag king Elvis impersonators, Ash is at once an earnestly enjoyable hero and an affectionate parody of normative masculinity. Employing king comedy strategies like doubling, prostheses, and imitation, Ash’s masculinity lovingly reveals the foibles, vulnerability, and absurdity of the form of heroism it imitates. In a genre where traditional forms of power are unreliable at best, it’s only appropriate that its most traditional hero is also a sharp satire of that heroic tradition – and a lot queerer than he seems at first glance.
NOTES
[1] Jack Halberstam. “Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 428.
[2] Halberstam, 426
[3] Halberstam, 428
[4] Halberstam, 433
[5] Halberstam, 436
[6] Halberstam, 433
[7] Ibid
Sara McCartney, an M.A. student at Lehigh University with a special interest in horror studies and queer studies. She’s loved horror since she convinced her parents to buy her Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark at the Scholastic book fair and used the illustrations to upset her friends. Currently, she’s spending quarantine with her girlfriend, watching a horror movie every day. Her favorite horror tropes are doppelgangers, scary woods, and female monsters.
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