House of Eratosthenes

Poor Rick was asking What’s Happened To Men?, and I happened along. Heh. You might as well have asked Rosie O’Dumbell about what brought down the World Trade Center. Just because I’ve opined on this over and over and over again, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s some finite reservoir somewhere that has been bled off. I’m just hitting my stride.

The setup is the author of Seraphic Secret taking his laptop into a computer shop to get it fixed and running into an unlikely fan trying to get her iPod repaired. I’m not familiar with this book, or the author, or his blog. Seems he wrote a great deal about how he met his wife, and his fan found it quite touching.

And she despaired…Why are the men like you all taken?

“Anyway, here’s what I want to know: what’s happened to men? They’re like all pussified—excuse my language—they’re so sensitive they’re barely men. Look around the store: half the guys in here are wearing more jewelry than I am, and that guy over there—”

She points to a man who looks sleek as an Italian sports car.

“Metrosexual. Uh-huh. That’s like code for gay, right?”

I say nothing.

“Wisdom, wisdom, I need some wisdom in my life.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the way you dress and display yourself attracts a certain kind of man?”

“Oh-oh.”

“Look, I don’t know you. I’ll shut-up.”

“No, I wanna hear.”

“The ink, the dye job, the piercings, they present an image. A face to meet a face, so to speak. I’ll be honest, I saw you before you spoke to me and I was put off by how you looked.”

I really liked this post Rick linked, because it raises an issue so complex that any way I try to attack it has to start out like the blind man trying to get a “look” at an elephant. There’s lots of facets to it. I’m afraid in my bloated and meandering response, I failed to adequately highlight what really fascinates me about this.

Manhood is dying. I’m not the first to notice it and I won’t be the last. (I’m pretty sure I’m among the most poorly-compensated individuals, among those who have written about it.)

And…in tandem with that unfortunate phenomenon…womanhood is on her deathbed as well. They’re both in hospice. Real men are disappearing because real women are disappearing — and vice-versa.

My observation about the movie culture, either is, or looks like, a huge tangent. I do think it’s important. I think noticing what Hollywood has been doing throughout the years has a certain “pay the piper” attribute to it; if you don’t take it into account up front, your thesis will be incomplete unless you factor it in later. Popular viewpoint is in kind of a box-step waltz with Hollywood. Hollywood gives us what we want, and as they give us subtle deviations from that, they mold and shape what we’ll be wanting the year afterward. What’s even more important than that, is that Hollywood consciously knows this, and they use it.

In replying to Rick, I identified this post-modern Hollywood phenomenon I called “Die Hard syndrome.” A man does something manly, which has a direct affect on dozens of people. Saving them from being blown up, or burned up, or whatever. It’s exactly what Matt Dillon did every single week, back in the day. But following the Womens’ Lib stuff, it is treated like something that was never done before. Wow…a good man finds himself in a position to thwart a bad man, and he does it. Movie-making is changed overnight.

But it isn’t. If you’re in your seventies now, when you were a little kid you saw good guys duking it out with bad guys all the time. If you’re older, maybe you had to make do with hearing it on the radio. The fascination was then, as now, that the timeless battle between good and evil was captured here.

And this is my point: We never get tired of this. We are told that we should, and we believe it.

When someone comes along and pops the bubble, we’re fascinated. But we aren’t discovering something new for the very first time; instead, we are slaking a long thirst, after being denied for a long time what we always found captivating, and were told we didn’t want. But we never stop craving this.

I first had my epiphany about this years ago. It was a couple of years after Star Wars came out, and I realized as I gradually matured that the spaceships and the explosions and the lightsabers had very, very little to do with what I loved about that movie. It was the Hero’s Journey. Luke, just like King Arthur and perhaps hundreds of other fictional and legendary heroes, grew up in obscurity and came to realize he held the hope of an entire people to escape darkness and oppression. It’s a story of hope.

And this is my main point.

We love hope. But there is this counterforce — conscious or not, I don’t know really — that continually rises up to make sure we don’t get hope, we aren’t even told stories that involve hope, and we should be lulled into believing we don’t really like it when we do.

Never was this more evident than in the longest gap between James Bond movies, the 6½ years between License To Kill and Goldeneye. There are reasons for this. James Bond has always been ensnared in a messy processing of legal disputes over ownership, and after Timothy Dalton’s latest this had overheated the 007 engine block and siezed it up tight. A rebuild was unavoidable. Besides, I’m told, Dalton was something of a dud. These explanations were laced with more than a kernel of truth, so they seem valid.

But they don’t explain everything. I can see things for myself and I can tell when I’m being sold a bill o’goods.

Before Bond’s hiatus, and since, there has always been this whining background noise that the superspy is a “relic.” It’s time to “move on.” Lately, this has taken on a surreal dystopian fantasy-world quality as Bond has become a steady, reliable, and growing multi-million dollar franchise. The critics say one thing about what we want, the market says the opposite thing. The critics won’t shut up. They keep preaching at us that we’re tired of watching a six-foot white guy save the world, and we’re too stupid to grasp the message.

But the effort to supress, does indeed supress. For all of us who like to watch the good guy thwart evil, even if we’re willing to accept ethnically diverse heroes in this role, we’ve still got a bit of a wait. The little freckle-faced boy of yesteryear, waiting in anticipation of the next Tom Mix episode, got a steady diet. His grandson of the same age, now, receives a grudging, pulsating series of burps.

But “Die Hard Syndrome” isn’t about the pusating and the burping, and it isn’t even about Hollywood’s peevish resentment at dishing out to us what we want to consume, that they say we don’t or shouldn’t want.

It’s about the second, third or fourth installment of each of these masculine heroes. The weakening. The watering-down.

It’s about the revelation, in Bond’s eigtheenth installment, that the suave MI-6 operative jumps out of his mistress’ beds, not to confront some spine-tingling adventure that lays in wait for him ahead — but to abandon, in fear, what he just left behind. This is true of masculine heroes across the board. The strength must give way to weakness. ALWAYS.

McLane himself has to whimper to his new sidekick what a lonely business it is being a hero. You eat a lot of meals alone, he says. Two things are going on here, and they’re both bad. One — someone, somewhere, is mighty unhappy with the idea of a hero saving the day, and proving himself to be up to the challenge when it confronts him. The strength that was involved in saving lives, has to be shown to be compensatory for some related and interlocked weakness somewhere else. Two — you can kiss that implied post-scripture of “if he can do it, you can too” — GOOD-BYE. No longer is John McLane some randomly chosen specimen of manhood, showing what manhood can do, and how badly we need it something bad goes down. He’s some kind of a cursed Messiah. His blessing is a curse, and not only that, but he no longer represents the rest of us. The Die Hard storyline becomes a series of funny things that happen that show how unique McLane is. He can save the day because he’s different from, rather than similar to, the more “usual” guy.

The decline was even more rapid with Indiana Jones. Oh thank goodness, a virile quick-thinking American man was in the right place at the right time to keep Hitler for catching the Ark of the Covenant! By the next installment he’s off on little more than a slightly gory Scooby-Doo adventure. The one after that, he’s whimpering about not getting due attention from daddy.

And then there’s my favorite example…since it’s happened many, many times now…
Thing I Know #203. Superman’s adventures are only fun to read about when Lois is still clueless about who he really is. As soon as Clark Kent lets her in on The Big Secret, everything gets lame.

Think about it. When did the comic book series get lame, both pre-crisis and post-crisis? When did the Dean Cain series get lame? When did the movies get lame? It all turned soft and brown at the same event. Lois, I think it’s time I told you something…

Further examples could be forthcoming, but I don’t think they’re necessary and this is long enough already. And oh, I do appreciate the need to define a character further after he’s appeared in a plurality of installments. The audience has a natural desire to know; the storytellers have a natural desire to flesh him out.

But a background story is not one-and-the-same as a chronicling of personal weakness. Superman’s weaknesses, James Bond’s weaknesses, John McLane & Dr. Jones’ weaknesses…they seem forced. I have doubts that anybody was yearning for a catalogue of these. I perceive a differential between what was ordered and what was delivered.

We have commoners who know what they want, like what they like, dislike what they dislike…and then we have elites who are always trying to correct the commoners, to mold and shape their individual tastes. It seems to me the elites have been trying to go cold-turkey on the male save-the-day action hero, to inform us that we hate him and never liked him to begin with. That didn’t work, so now the new strategy is to ration him. We can only see a strong man define manhood by using resourcefulness and cunning to save the innocent from the wicked, every couple of years or so. If that. And then, we have to be told it’s not in the stars for us to be like him. He’s not a role model…not like Rooster Cogburn or Matt Dillon.

We have this belief that a little of him goes a long way. We’ll get tired of him. He’s a spice, just like ginger, horseradish or wasabi. Main courses, of which we get a steady diet, are…other things. The Doofus Dad. The strong-willed woman. Gangsta rappers. Punk and pop singers. And I’m left to wonder — what evidence is there that people really have an unquenchable thirst for such dysfunctional things, or that their apetites are so weak for what is arguably more wholesome?

Looks like a case of the few dictating the tastes of the many, if there ever was one. Hollywood spends billions of dollars a year making movies. They should be conducing research, one would think, into what we really want. It would be worth a pretty penny, would it not? Well, then where is the hard evidence that we’re ready to nibble around the edges of the strong resourceful manly-man, with long intervals between samplings, while we long to glug-glug-glug away from sunup to sundown, on all this other crap?

I doubt there is any such evidence. Surely if we can watch a quartet of shrill, scatter-brained women talk over each other every damn day on The View, we’ll not be suffering nausea if we see manhood constructively applied more often than every twenty-four months or so.

And as the Seraphic Secret post makes clear, our plutocratically-controlled diet does more than just screw up the boys. A generation of weak men makes for a generation of weak women. Both sexes reach adulthood, tragically, being virginal to the simple adventure of seeing something messed up…coming up with their own plan about how to fix it…and following through. “Solving a problem,” to them, means there is a multiple-choice question on a test, some authority figure knows what the right answer is already, and they’re supposed to echo whatever that answer is.

Assuming that’s all there is in their worldview by age eighteen, and I have little reason to think there’s more to it than that, ponder how incredibly disabling that would be. Our children are being told that yes, from time to time, the world must be saved. Maybe. But they shouldn’t envision themselves as being up to answering the call. It has to be some unfortunate antihero, specially designated for this task from birth, compensating for a related but oppositional weakness.

So “eat your meat and vegetables so you can grow up to be just like him,” suddenly, seems an awkward thing to say now. Why would the little moppet want to do such a thing? Even if he finds the adventures inspiring, he’s bound to see them from without, as somebody else’s adventures. But decades ago, mommas said that to their li’l boys that very thing about meats-n-veggies. All the time. And half the time they were talking about Superman, who isn’t even human.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Manhood As WasabiSunday, October 14th, 2007

Manhood As Wasabi
Sunday, October 14th, 2007