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Eroica, Major Eberbach, and Body Language
Eroica, Major Eberbach, and Body Language
Or, an excuse to post a whole bunch of pictures of their bodies
From Eroica With Love constantly invites us to compare and contrast the heroes of the series, Dorian and Klaus. Consider this sequence on how they get up in the morning (bearing in mind it is manga and therefore should be read right to left):
(Knowing Klaus, he went to bed at six.)
(By the way, there is no fourth wall in this series. They comment on how many lines they got per episode and such.)
We're meant to notice a few particulars: Dorian lazes about unless dragged from bed while Klaus gets up on his own; Dorian sleeps nearly nude while Klaus wears an undershirt (pointed out to us by the narrator!) even under his pajamas.
But here's the thing that caught me about this sequence: Dorian sleeps all folded up, twisted, knees bent, arms around his head, while Klaus sleeps on his back with his legs spread.
Klaus is supposed to be the repressed one, right? To an extent, sleeping on his back supports that, but that his legs were spread doesn't. Also, Dorian's pose doesn't suggest his freedom of personality, it suggests he's curled up into a small space, possibly uncomfortably. He has room to stretch out, but doesn't in his sleep. And the sequence ends with him being balled up as tightly as possible.
When our narrator invites us to notice body language (and I'm actually unsure if this is Aoike or the translator) she points us at the hands:
Stranded in the North Sea, Dorian, Klaus, and Caesar (never to be seen again) huddle together for warmth. After being cajoled into singing a bit and discussing his love of tanks, Klaus stops freaking out quite so much:
From a later volume:
Trust me, there was a good, solid, work-related reason for Klaus to demand Dorian strip and give him his underpants.
Anyway, while the narrator points us at hands, I'm going to be focusing a lot on knees and elbows. I find them to be a lot more telling.
Klaus most usually sits with his knees open. Dorian, with his legs crossed.
And Klaus usually gets a comfortable slouch going, too.
While Dorian reigns himself in, Klaus spreads out and takes up as much available space as he can. Tall men do this--I should know, I have to fight my six-foot, fourteen-year-old brother for space all the time. Thing is, Dorian's only like half an inch shorter than Klaus; by all rights, he should be doing this too.
This one's kind of an odd one, in that he's in a formal situation and therefore stiff-backed. Yet even now, his knees are open.
Compare Dorian.
Dorian sits a lot, more than Klaus, which is something in and of itself. A bunch of these are the intro pics at the beginning of each volume; Klaus is often standing in his, while Dorian reclines. More on this disparity later.
Here, even Dorian's arms are crossed:
Even when Dorian's putting himself on display, his legs are crossed:
(Note that Dorian DOES smoke, just not like a chimney like Klaus. He's subtler about it...)
Which is not to say that Klaus never crosses his legs. However (watch the hands, heh) he has to hold them closed when he does:
Similar comparisons can be made in how they stand and walk. Klaus stands with his legs apart, even when his hips are akimbo, while Dorian crosses his legs standing. Klaus walks with his feet shoulder-width apart, while Dorian keeps his legs together.
Dorian even runs with his legs pulled up tighter than Klaus does.
Dorian's not always so prim though. He can stand like Klaus--when he's being aggressive.
So my point is: Klaus seems like the more relaxed one, the one more comfortable in his own body, while Dorian gets himself knotted up. Not that he looks tense, usually--just controlled. And you'd expect it to be the other way around.
Klaus is such a control freak with his body. He makes incredibly unreasonable demands of it, like sleeping in half-hour increments.
He's trained himself to be able to fire a .44 Magnum one-handed.
Now, admittedly, I know nothing about guns, so I'm kind of taking the manga's word for it that the recoil on a .44 Magnum is so bad that only Iron Klaus can fire the thing one-handed. However, I did google the gun, and in the ten minutes I spent reading, I found that they do sell an awful lot of accessories to make its recoil more manageable. I also found out that the .44 Magnum can cause permanent hearing damage to the shooter, pierce body armor at close range, and also slice, dice, and julienne fries. I'm convinced that Klaus is bad-ass.
A bad-ass who's most comfortable with a gun in his hand:
Because of the way Klaus controls his body so much in some respects, I found it startling that he'd ever let himself be at ease enough to slouch and sit with his knees apart. One theory I had about his usual spread-legged positions was that he uses his sexuality like a weapon, which would fit in with his utilitarian treatment of his body. It's a bit of a threatening stance--kind of a "Fear my giant cock!" thing.
Of course, it would be more a threat if he ever touched people. Instead, he completely flips out at touch, Dorian's or anyone else's.
Although he'll do a lot for a mission. Here, he tries to shoot a target a half a mile away from a moving train.
But the train lurches and...
Yeah, okay, that was pretty much completely gratuitous. Moving on.
My theory is that Klaus's control issues have an "all or nothing" flavor. Either he's totally in control of the situation with his spread-legged manly posturing, or else someone else has actually expressed interest in being touched and he has no control at all.
Or possibly that he actually has a giant cock and is only comfortable sitting with his knees six miles apart.
Your choice.
Now, Dorian. Why does Dorian sit all folded up? Looking at all of the pictures of Dorian bent up, I was reminded of something I once read about how men and women are pictured in art or advertising. Men are shown looking at the camera, standing straight. Women are shown looking away, sitting, laying down, curled up, or even with their faces cropped out of the frame. I couldn't find the thing I'd read, but I found another essay on the social construction of gender which discusses how men and women behave this way even when not externally posed:
Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body....
It's Dorian's effeminate nature that's on display. This shouldn't surprise me as much as it does, considering the strict seme/uke construction one finds in manga and anime. Dorian's being drawn as the 'woman.'
Many times, Dorian's balled up while Klaus stands straight, showing the disparity in the relationship--
Even when Klaus is in a vulnerable position, he's out-stretched while Dorian's balled up.
Here's the kicker.
Woman's space is not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined. The "loose woman" violates these norms: her looseness is manifest not only in her morals, but in her manner of speech and quite literally in the free and easy way she moves.
Dorian doesn't read as loose, he reads as prim and proper. So much for slutty Dorian...
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