[I am parking this op-ed from The Boston Globe here until I have time to comment on it. Meanwhile, maybe someone else would like to comment on it. Send me your comments: otherbeyond(at)gmail.com]
Where have all the 'real' men gone?
by Jay Atkinson, The Boston Globe, 28 February 2009
IN ITS PUERILE, lowest-common-denominator way, Hollywood has always reflected society. The movies "Taken," starring Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative, and "The Wrestler," with Mickey Rourke as an aging grappler whose life and career have reached terminal velocity, share in their depictions of the Alpha Male separated from his kin by the vicissitudes of the warrior profession.
In "Taken," Neeson's Mills pursues the mobsters who have kidnapped his 17-year-old daughter. Midway through, Mills accuses a former colleague of skimming money from the bad guys, asking the man why he'd do such a thing. I have to take care of my family, says the sleazy agent.
Mills notes that he's doing the same thing, and then shoots the man's wife to clarify his point. "It's only a flesh wound," he says.
In "The Wrestler," Rourke's character, Randy "the Ram" Robinson, suffers an array of flesh wounds every weekend, some of them self-inflicted, in third-rate melees. A gimpy, steroid-addled wreck, the Ram is estranged from his daughter. When she was young, Robinson was in his heyday - a blustery hulk in the era of Hulkamania, partaking in Dianabol, HGH, cocaine, and hordes of groupies.
Just like Mills, the Ram is nearing the end of his tether. Off doing what they were trained to do, these warriors are befuddled when they find their own castles are closed to them. In Neeson's case, his estranged wife requires his expertise one last time. Upon his return, Neeson takes a solo cab ride home. The warrior is trained to work alone, even when he's lonely.
The Ram's situation is trickier, and sadder. It was his job to make a spectacle of himself and now, tired, arthritic, with the sagging muscles of an old circus bear, he wants his little girl to take care of him. But she won't, so the Ram starts training for another bout. He's a man who gave the world nothing, and has nothing left to give.
These days, it's no longer fashionable to be a man - to inhabit one's masculinity as previous generations have done. Compare baseball star Alex Rodriquez, under scrutiny for using steroids, with Red Sox great Ted Williams, who sacrificed the prime of his career to serve as a Marine aviator. (Williams flew 39 combat missions in Korea and crash-landed after taking small-arms fire.) Williams's baseball statistics, including a lifetime batting average of .344, compare favorably with A-Rod's. And in this age of the pseudo-man, it's hard to imagine Rodriquez visiting the troops in Iraq, let alone volunteering to serve there.
CIA agent Bryan Mills and pro wrestler Randy the Ram worked long hours, far from home; as "real" men, their wives and children expected them to be intrepid, warlike, and venturesome. Today, the American warrior is an anachronism - witness how we outsource some of the fighting in the Middle East to companies like Blackwater, then turn their operatives into pariahs when they come home with blood on their hands. In yesteryear, suburban dads taught their sons how to kick a football, or pitch horseshoes. Nowadays, they hire private coaches and personal trainers, then stand aside for these professionals. Meanwhile, soldiers and airmen in nondescript Virginia office parks kill aspiring insurgents half a world away, via predator drones.
There are a few holdouts. Recently I met an out-of-work carpenter in Fitzwilliam, N.H.; because of the poor economy, he and his ex-wife and three children continue to share their modest, two-bedroom home. To give everyone a break, the carpenter, an avid hunter, goes out and sits in the woods until dark; he's killed two deer that way, dressing them out on the back porch so his kids could see how it's done.
Any single dad will tell you that family court punishes those men who persist in doing what men were once mandated to do: range wide in hunting, bringing back the kill at irregular intervals, adorned with its blood. In today's world, you must produce the trophy without being the one who kills it. In Hollywood, anyway, the only acceptable role is man-by-proxy: You must get someone else to do your dirty work, or risk losing everything.
Jay Atkinson is the author, most recently, of "City in Amber" and "Legends of Winter Hill." He teaches in the journalism department at Boston University.
Man in Box
