Get the Feed
|
D E P T H
The first modern blockbuster movie in American history begins curiously with a disembodied voice speaking to us through a dark, empty screen. The voice states firmly, “I am an American.” Then, a headshot of a man emerges and he begins to tell a story. The story is full of male rage and, ultimately, impudence. The man is Bonasera, and he is discussing the rape of his daughter with Don Corleone, the lead character in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic The Godfather (1972). We eventually learn that the police and the courts were unable to bring his daughter’s attackers to justice. He is powerless to enact his vengeance. In that opening scene, Bonasera takes an event that threatens his individual manhood and elevates it to a national crisis. He is not just worried about what his ability (or inability) to respond will say about him as a person; he is worried what it says about the country as a whole. He is ultimately disappointed and dismayed that his new-found national identity (being a recent Italian-American immigrant) does not convey the power that he feels was promised him. Over the past three decades men in movies, television and politics have been making this rather arrogant leap of logic. If their way of life is threatened or if their individual power to shape the world in their image is dwindling, it is not their problem - it’s the nation’s problem. The characters portrayed by Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver (1976) and Michael Douglas in Falling Down (1993) are the obvious cinematic examples. The sustained Republican backlash against feminism and affirmative action has provided the political context for this phenomenon. It should be remembered that the construction of the "Angry White Male" was, first and foremost, a way for political consultants to define a particular disaffected portion of the electorate. As the century turns, this extrapolation of male anxieties to the level of a national emergency seems to be gaining added cultural momentum. The present presidential campaign - and its overdetermined demands for traditional aggressive and assertive male leaders - is a response to this perceived crisis. The most articulate response, however, is quite possibly HBO’s acclaimed television series The Sopranos - in many ways a postmodern retelling of The Godfather.
The opening scene of The Sopranos sets the same tone as its predecessor. Instead of taking place in the office of Don Corleone, this scene takes place in the office of a psychiatrist. Like Bonasera, Tony Soprano, a leader of the Northern New Jersey mob, introduces himself through his own peculiarly male laments: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I am getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Tony is referring, at least in part, to nostalgia he feels for the glory days of his father’s mob generation: “I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better.” The psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, responds, “Many Americans, I think, feel that way.” Once again, through the collusion of the two actors in the opening scene, we learn that one of the chief preoccupations of The Sopranos will be men’s feelings of inadequacy, and those feelings are considered a reflection of a long-standing national struggle. As The Sopranos progresses, especially through it second season, we also come to understand the chief method that men use to compensate for their feelings of inadequacy: violence. But in the case of The Sopranos, the violence is always tinged with irony, almost tongue-in-cheek. Maybe, in a Quentin Tarantino-esque way, we are supposed to be critiquing our own casual responses to the violence, but the empathy we feel for the most violent characters in the show (Tony and their gang) prevents that critique from really occuring. We laugh our way (sometimes involuntarily, sometimes under our breath) through several of the scenes of violence - such as Tony and his nephew Chris chasing down one of their debtors across the manicured lawn of his office complex or Chris intimidating a clerk at a local bakery. We grimace at other, more disturbing scenes - but we accept them in order to see how the normally contemplative men are able (or unable) to cope with the sadistic side of their personalities. Violence, in this newer sense, has become a spectacle. It is not as intensely brutal as the famous baptism scene at the end of the first Godfather or the eruption of death at the end of Taxi Driver. This culture of “celebrity masculinity,” as author and journalist Susan Faludi calls it, prevents men from finding constructive and creative solutions to their problems. She summarizes the change in attitudes toward violence in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man: “By the end of the American Century, every outlet of the consumer world - magazines, ads, movies, sports, music videos - would deliver the message that manhood had become a performance game”and that male anger was now part of the show. An ornamental culture encouraged young men to see surliness, hostility, and violence as expressions of glamour.”
A remarkably direct example of the spectacle of violence occurred in this summer’s first blockbuster - The Gladiator (2000). As in previous examples, one man’s personal and familial crisis becomes a crisis for the entire Roman Empire. The solution to these parallel crises is for the lead character, Maximus, to recover his masculinity (and the stability of the Empire) in an orgy of spectacular violence inside the most public arena of his time - the Coliseum. While the director Ridley Scott takes pains to reconstruct (digitally, if necessary) the full splendor of the Roman world, it is very much a modern tale. Faludi’s argument in Stiffed is ultimately about providing context for our present “crisis of masculinity.” Instead of men seeing this crisis through a reactionary angry-white-male perspective, they need to see it historically, as a product of a variety of causes centered around the betrayal of the multiple promises made to boys growing up immediately after the Second World War. What televison series like the Sopranos or epics like The Gladiator provide, instead, are ahistorical outlets for classically violent representations of masculinity to be glorified. As Faludi continually emphasizes, these representations are inaccessible to most men and only add to their feelings of alienation. The political reprecussions of these representations are evident in the ongoing presidential campaign - an arena in which, by its very nature, the candidates’ portrayals of their own masculinity are intimately tied to their political ideas for shaping the nation. Democratic candidate Al Gore has been assaulted for his perceived “weakness’ both personally and politically. His unanimated rhetorical style and his ability to engage in lengthy, policy-oriented discussions are almost universally seen as negatives in the context of the campaign, signs that he is not as forceful, assertive, or aggressive as a male leader should be. His wavering on key issues - whether motivated by thoughtfulness or the latest polls - is even further evidence that he is not very ‘masculine.” Al Gore, in other words, is the kind of guy who is actually willing to ask for directions if he is lost. Through our leading men, America takes account of itself. After Richard Nixon, we came to see a post-Vietnam War America riddled with corruption and false ideals. After Bill Clinton, we see a baby boom America that has lost its moral compass. Looking into the future, America’s desire for an old-fashioned vigorous and indiscriminate man possibly reflects our anxieties that the strength of the generation that fought in the Second World War is slipping away. As Faludi presages, men are reacting to this crisis not (as women did in the feminist movement) by envisioning new gender roles but by attempting to recover a transcendent masculinity based on power and violence. But how does this explain the strategy of Republican candidate George W. Bush? Before and after the Republican primaries, Bush has relentlessly emphasized his “compassionate” side, talking about traditional Democratic issues such as education. In a recent poll, moreover, the potential vice-presidential candidates who would give the biggest boost to Bush are former Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole and New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman. Does this mean that the electorate is altering its expectations for male leadership? To come full circle, we can look at Bush’s strategy in much the same way we watch Tony Soprano revising The Godfather’s ideals. In many ways, America has contradictory desires. We cannot face the straightforward brutality that characterized earlier versions of our leading men, yet the public wants men still to possess an underlying comfortability with being the bully. By taking on softer and gentler “feminine” issues such as education, Bush has almost completely closed one gender gap (with women), but by continuing subtly to hearken us back to his frat-boy and rancher past, he has opened up a gender gulf - leading Gore among white men by close to 25 percent. Those white men might be in therapy, but they know a boss when they see one. Bernie Heidkamp owns neither a brown suit nor a baseball team. See comments on this article in the Pop Forum Related Sites
|
