Regarding "men behaving badly on film"

A response to this article in the New York Times magazine.

I can understand why Ms. Schwarzbaum (Riff, December 22, 2013) is somewhat put off at the wave of “ingratiating geezer group project” movies featuring aging male characters trying to recapture “one last victory before coming to terms with...death...routine, responsibility, commitment.” It's a trend I find just as irritating for its hackneyed, single-story drumbeat. However, unlike Ms. Schwarzbaum, I don't find it surprising. 

Society prepares girls, from the moment they are born, to be future-looking – the baby dolls and toy cookware they are given train them to take on, to embrace, responsibility. As they grow, they are praised for quietly taking on roles of nurturance, and criticized should they demand space or voice for themselves. As they become women, their challenge is to not fear their own independence, to dare to depart from their role as caretakers and maintainers if they so choose. Boys seem to face an inverse evolution: in youth they are given symbols of freedom and power: cars and other mighty vehicles, toy soldiers and weaponry. Their acts of reckless selfishness are, if not rewarded, laughed off with a “boys will be boys” shake of the head. Is it any wonder that, as adulthood and the very real world of responsibility approaches, it all seems so unpalatable to them? That they would view commitment, of suborning one's own personal desires to the needs of others (as is necessary, constantly, of adults of both sexes) as a terrifying destiny which should be delayed at all cost? That, once in that world, they would indulge in nostalgia for their childhood freedoms, real or imagined? 

On a grander scale, male nostalgia is no recent invention of Hollywood. In the Western literary tradition, past glories have always been preferable to the future for men. As far back as the Iliad, the old warhorse Nestor wishes for the lost days of past generations' heroism, while Tennyson, centuries later, bemoans that “we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven.” Even as the past is romanticized, the future is made terrifying. Jane Austen's heroines eagerly anticipate future marriages, for the stability, financial and emotional, they will bring; for male characters, the future brings the exact opposite. The body becomes less stable - the physical fear of “creaking knees, pouching gut, dimming memory and domestic servitude” which Schwarzbaum mentions, and which Shakespeare's Jacques summed up quite well in his “Seven Stages of Man” speech.  But the Bard's most famous male hero, Hamlet (who, the inverse of an Austen-esque heroine, wishes for the entire institution of marriage to be dissolved entirely), ups the ante: he realizes in the graveyard that even Alexander the Great ends up one day as dust to plug a bunghole, just as Percy Shelley's broken statue of Ozymandias mocks the achievements of the mightiest. The future not only destroys men's bodies, it renders all their works irrelevant. While women have been historically denied a place as builders of empires, an unintended benefit, perhaps, has been immunity from this particular fear. Women are conditioned to fulfill, and to value, their role in maintaining human continuity, raising the next generation of children to continue an endless cycle. Virigina Woolf in “A Room on One's own” is outraged that we do not remember the generations of wives and mothers who made possible the workings of great men; I doubt, however, that those unsung heroines feared the future specifically because of that looming threat of anonymity. 

Should we push for a diversity of stories about both men and women in our cinema? Of course. But a bunch of old fogeyish male characters relishing the chance to act like irresponsible, Homer Simpson-esque manchildren in an attempt to flee the future in the past...that's informed by a tradition as old as the original Homer himself.