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.
Cool. The NYTimes Magazine printed a (much truncated) version of this!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/magazine/the-12-29-13-issue.html?ref=magazine