The trend would seem to be against manly movies. Responding to fully justified complaints that men (overwhelmingly white men) have been over-served by and over-represented in movies over the years, filmmakers and critics have been shifting the emphasis to movies for and about people who are not men. The results of this shift have been a mixed bag.
But a funny thing has happened. Although there are many fewer movies for men we have also seen the return of very high quality films about manliness, both what it should be and what it should not be. This year I've seen two truly excellent movies about manliness—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joker. I haven't seen Ford v Ferrari yet but I have a good feeling about it.
When I say "return of very high quality films about manliness" it raises the question, "When was the last time we saw such movies?" These movies never truly disappeared. Fight Club is a great movie about manliness. But it was an anomaly. It says a lot that it was not recognized as the masterpiece it is when it came out and two utterly mediocre films about manliness—Magnolia and American Beauty—were widely praised that same year. There were others over the years such as Once Upon a Time in the West but it was an anomaly and would not have seen the light of day except as a spaghetti western. And we should not forget that it didn't see the light of day in North America for 30 years as the version we saw in theatres and at home up until 2000 was brutally edited. This, by the way, was an odd thing for Paramount to have done as the uncut version was one of the most successful movies of all time in France.
I'd argue that you have to go back to the era of Howard Hawks and John Ford (both born in the 1890s) to find movies of the quality we have seen this year. And the difference between them and us is not that we live in a time when manhood is "in crisis" and they did not. Manhood is always in crisis and it certainly was in the early 20th century. The difference is that they had something intelligent and inspiring to say about it while filmmakers of the last 60 years largely have not.
It's not absent in women's literature. It is a predominant theme of the novels of Mildred Wirt Benson. You may not recognize her name but she created Nancy Drew and the better Penny Parker. When Benson got her way, which wasn't always the case, Nancy was a fierce non-conformist. Penny Parker always was. These heroines live in a world where society is in a conspiracy against their womanhood and they fight it determinedly and usually manage to prevail.
It's interesting, in this regard, to compare the Hardy Boys with Nancy Drew and Penny Parker. When one of the Hardy boys is abducted, a relatively frequent event in YA books of the period, he becomes helpless. Indeed, he generally disappears from the narrative until he is rescued, and he is always rescued by the others, and we only find out what happened to him when he recounts his adventures to the others in retrospect. (Even the boys' father becomes utterly helpless when abducted.) When Nancy or Penny is abducted the reader goes along with her. What's more, abduction is always an opportunity for Nancy and Penny to display their resourcefulness.
Benson, as was the case with other independent women writers such as Joan Didion, was fundamentally at odds with feminism. No matter how much these women chafed under sexism, and they chafed a lot, they saw "sisterhood" as just another oppressive yoke and they saw no point in simply switching one for another.
That all helps highlight another troubling aspect of Emerson's quote for, while it's true that some people do sometimes thrive when isolated from society, the brutal truth is that we are first and foremost social beings. We cannot even get started without society and we would very soon lose our grip on sanity if we were permanently separated from others, assuming we managed to live long enough to go crazy in the first place. Society may be a yoke but it is a yoke essential for survival. (And we might remember here that Jesus offers us a yoke that is easy and burden that is light rather than none at all. No yoke at all would be a curse; it would be to be a restless wanderer in a land where anyone you meet might kill you.)
The actual order of things is that we are formed by society and then we attempt non-conformism. And yet the appeal of non-conformism is very real—Penny Parker is a much more appealing character than her YA sisters and brothers and this has become more true over time. Today's YA literature is uniformly awful.
There is something else afoot here. Joker, for example, is a brilliant account of not just what happens to, as Fight Club puts it, a generation of men raised by women but it is also a chilling and convincing warning against simply rebelling against that as we see in the movement that (perhaps*) grows up around Arthur Fleck for, far from being non-comformist, Fleck and the movement are merely nihilistic.
And I'll leave it there for now.
* I say "perhaps" because much of what we see on the screen is clearly the deranged imaginings of Arthur Fleck. The clown-mask-wearing movement is real enough, and is very clearly based on Occupy Wall Street and ANTIFA. What is probably imaginary is Fleck's belief that it has anything to do with him.
But a funny thing has happened. Although there are many fewer movies for men we have also seen the return of very high quality films about manliness, both what it should be and what it should not be. This year I've seen two truly excellent movies about manliness—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joker. I haven't seen Ford v Ferrari yet but I have a good feeling about it.
When I say "return of very high quality films about manliness" it raises the question, "When was the last time we saw such movies?" These movies never truly disappeared. Fight Club is a great movie about manliness. But it was an anomaly. It says a lot that it was not recognized as the masterpiece it is when it came out and two utterly mediocre films about manliness—Magnolia and American Beauty—were widely praised that same year. There were others over the years such as Once Upon a Time in the West but it was an anomaly and would not have seen the light of day except as a spaghetti western. And we should not forget that it didn't see the light of day in North America for 30 years as the version we saw in theatres and at home up until 2000 was brutally edited. This, by the way, was an odd thing for Paramount to have done as the uncut version was one of the most successful movies of all time in France.
I'd argue that you have to go back to the era of Howard Hawks and John Ford (both born in the 1890s) to find movies of the quality we have seen this year. And the difference between them and us is not that we live in a time when manhood is "in crisis" and they did not. Manhood is always in crisis and it certainly was in the early 20th century. The difference is that they had something intelligent and inspiring to say about it while filmmakers of the last 60 years largely have not.
"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."
That's Emerson for those who aren't regular readers of his "Self Reliance". It's a troubling quote. The gist of it is that men should exist as individuals first and as members of society second. That's troubling for many reasons. For starters, why just men? Can't women also be non-comformists? And yet, there is something terribly profound here. When men devote themselves to seeking the approval of others, we do ourselves serious harm. That is the central message of an awful lot of great manly literature ranging from ancient classics such as the wisdom literature of the Bible, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and, my favourite, Augustine's Confessions, right up to the best of modern self-help books such as No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert Glover.It's not absent in women's literature. It is a predominant theme of the novels of Mildred Wirt Benson. You may not recognize her name but she created Nancy Drew and the better Penny Parker. When Benson got her way, which wasn't always the case, Nancy was a fierce non-conformist. Penny Parker always was. These heroines live in a world where society is in a conspiracy against their womanhood and they fight it determinedly and usually manage to prevail.
It's interesting, in this regard, to compare the Hardy Boys with Nancy Drew and Penny Parker. When one of the Hardy boys is abducted, a relatively frequent event in YA books of the period, he becomes helpless. Indeed, he generally disappears from the narrative until he is rescued, and he is always rescued by the others, and we only find out what happened to him when he recounts his adventures to the others in retrospect. (Even the boys' father becomes utterly helpless when abducted.) When Nancy or Penny is abducted the reader goes along with her. What's more, abduction is always an opportunity for Nancy and Penny to display their resourcefulness.
Benson, as was the case with other independent women writers such as Joan Didion, was fundamentally at odds with feminism. No matter how much these women chafed under sexism, and they chafed a lot, they saw "sisterhood" as just another oppressive yoke and they saw no point in simply switching one for another.
That all helps highlight another troubling aspect of Emerson's quote for, while it's true that some people do sometimes thrive when isolated from society, the brutal truth is that we are first and foremost social beings. We cannot even get started without society and we would very soon lose our grip on sanity if we were permanently separated from others, assuming we managed to live long enough to go crazy in the first place. Society may be a yoke but it is a yoke essential for survival. (And we might remember here that Jesus offers us a yoke that is easy and burden that is light rather than none at all. No yoke at all would be a curse; it would be to be a restless wanderer in a land where anyone you meet might kill you.)
The actual order of things is that we are formed by society and then we attempt non-conformism. And yet the appeal of non-conformism is very real—Penny Parker is a much more appealing character than her YA sisters and brothers and this has become more true over time. Today's YA literature is uniformly awful.
There is something else afoot here. Joker, for example, is a brilliant account of not just what happens to, as Fight Club puts it, a generation of men raised by women but it is also a chilling and convincing warning against simply rebelling against that as we see in the movement that (perhaps*) grows up around Arthur Fleck for, far from being non-comformist, Fleck and the movement are merely nihilistic.
And I'll leave it there for now.
* I say "perhaps" because much of what we see on the screen is clearly the deranged imaginings of Arthur Fleck. The clown-mask-wearing movement is real enough, and is very clearly based on Occupy Wall Street and ANTIFA. What is probably imaginary is Fleck's belief that it has anything to do with him.
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