masculinity – Three Guineas

June 1, 2013August 29, 2013

Hey Girl, You Need a Hero?

Just when we thought that sword-wielding, damsel-saving white knights had gone the way of Mitt Romney, here comes Ryan Gosling to prove us wrong. In The Place Beyond the Pines, director Derek Cianfrance reteams with Gosling for a dream-like short film featuring his kinetic, richly colored visual style—which happens to be followed by two hours of mundane family drama that’s only marginally less depressing than Blue Valentine. A note to all directors: do not cast Ryan Gosling and then kill him a third of the way through your film unless you want viewers to spend the rest of the film wondering why they paid $12.50 to not watch Ryan Gosling.

Clearly, I was fully on Team Gosling before the film began, but even I was a little disconcerted about the fact that he appeared to be playing the same character from Drive. I realize typecasting remains a common practice in Hollywood, but STUNT DRIVER WHO SIDELINES AS A THIEF IN ORDER TO PROTECT A WOMAN AND HER CHILD is a pretty specific type. Both Gosling incarnations—the driver and Luke—are at turns sweet and psychopathic. While you understand the leading ladies’ attraction—it’s Ryan Gosling after all—you also feel the need to warn them that this guy will probably kill you in your sleep—and then compose you a poem—written in your own blood. It’s all very confusing. But what truly connects these two men is their sincere belief that they are twenty-first century knights slaying twenty-first-century dragons for twenty-first century damsels. The damsels in question, though, have very little to say in the matter. Continue reading “Hey Girl, You Need a Hero?”

February 3, 2013October 23, 2013

The End of Men

Perhaps 2012 was the year of the aging hero. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the The Dark Knight Rises’ limping Batman while watching James Bond repeatedly fail his physical tests in Sam Mendes’ Skyfall. Although the film was trumpeted as a feminist Bond, an intellectual Bond, an artful Bond, it is, more than anything, an elegiac Bond. During the first three-quarters of Skyfall, it appears as though we are witnessing not just the decline of Daniel Craig’s Bond but the decline of Bond himself—that eternally youthful masculine archetype who uses physical strength and gadgets to fuck and kill his way across the globe. But the film clings to this archetype, yearning for the past even as it looks warily to the future. Elegy and nostalgia have always been interrelated concepts: you can’t long for the past unless you are mourning its passing. It should then come as no surprise that a film questioning the need for Bond should so fetishize the totems of Bond. Watching Bond and M travel through London in an Aston Martin initially thrills the audience, but the viewer is also jarred by the sight of a powerful woman sitting in the passenger seat of this mid-century masculine toy. This relic has no place in the modern world. Mendes hints at this possibility—that the 21^st century no longer needs Bond—but after stepping toward this precipice, he immediately stumbles back onto more comfortable ground. Continue reading “The End of Men”

August 13, 2012August 28, 2013

Men at Work

Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), the titular figure in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, is perhaps the nicest man I have ever encountered on screen outside of a Hallmark Christmas film. Although I initially found it easier to believe that a half-lizard man was stalking Manhattan’s sewers than that someone with Tatum’s looks could be so kind, I quickly realized that Soderbergh was using this hyper-sweetness against Mike. It’s the initial warning that he’s not your father’s hero. When Mike first saunters across the frame, he is nude. I point this out not simply as an excuse to include this gif but because it’s significant that Mike first exists as mere body. This body underscores his physical masculinity (he does in fact have a Y chromosome—a very, very nice one), but the film calls into question the cultural signification of this flesh. He may be male, but does this make him a man?

Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949 and drag queens burst onto the pop cultural scene in the 1990s, people have acknowledged that femininity is something you do, not something you are. As Judith Butler taught generations of gender studies majors, femininity is an act that must be continuously performed in order to have meaning. Masculinity, on the other hand, has mostly remained the default position. Men are assumed to be masculine—unless they act in an obviously feminine manner—and women who are not performing their proper feminine roles are immediately derided as masculine. Masculinity itself is, therefore, taken for granted, the natural gender at odds with feminine artificiality. With the help of a few rip-away pants and leopard thongs, Magic Mike attacks masculinity’s unassailable position by revealing that it is no less a performance than femininity. Indeed, in Magic Mike, masculinity is entirely a performance—one centered on money. Continue reading “Men at Work”

May 8, 2012October 23, 2013

Are All Men Gay?

If you went to a college like New York University or have lived in New York for even a brief period of time, you have likely asked yourself this question. Not only does NYC have a higher than average gay population but even the straight men seem a little too willing to wear scarves. Girls is located within this confusing sexual landscape as it explores the eternal dichotomy between the nice, effeminate guy you should like and the sexy douche you keep sleeping with even though you know you shouldn’t. Although Dunham described this conundrum using the Brian Krakow/Jordan Catelano analogy, you know she really wanted to reference the Aidan/Big dilemma but felt it would be uncool to do so.

The show keeps inserting sly, visual references to Sex and the City (e.g., the girls sitting on a park bench eating ice cream or Hannah typing on her computer late at night), but the literal hue of the composition is darker. Where S&TC was awash with bright colors and streaming sunlight, Girls is NYC viewed through a dim brown lens. Similarly, Girls focuses on the dark underbelly of modern sexual politics, which S&TC hinted at in its first three seasons but then discarded in favor of more shoes and an emasculated Big. Girls complicates the linear nice guy/asshole dichotomy not by turning all of the men into unthreatening rom-com ken dolls but by simultaneously reiterating and troubling this formula. Masculinity, like everything else in this amber-colored Brooklyn, is decidedly in flux. Continue reading “Are All Men Gay?”

April 25, 2012August 29, 2013

Masculinity and its Discontents

Mad Men has now firmly entered the America of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, a time when masculinity moved from grey-suited respectability to youthfulness, danger, and overt sexuality. Pete Campbell is pretty much the opposite of all these things. I suppose he’s still young, but his youth has always seemed less a marker of coolness and more symptomatic of his sniveling entitlement. Even though he is the only true WASP at Sterling Cooper Draper Price, this privilege only makes him squarer and less sexually appealing in the world of 1966. When Trudy—not Pete—is able to get Don to come to the country for a dinner party, Pete is embarrassingly excited as though the high school quarterback deigned to come to his thirteenth birthday party. He may believe this makes him cool by association. But it does not. He’s playing classical music at a party in Connecticut and bragging about it. We are a long, long way from Don’s white-carpeted loft and “Zou Bisou Bisou.”

The party further reinforces the distinctly physical allure of Don Draper—a raw sexuality characteristic of Mick Jagger, the Brit who was always more akin to the American Brando than the British Bond. Even though Don is older than Pete, he still appears more culturally relevant and thus more masculine simply because he looks so damn good with his shirt off. It’s not just that he is able to fix the faucet that Pete could only fiddle with (read: obvious sexual metaphor); it’s that all the women are clearly aroused just by his mere physicality. Pete will always be a blue blood, and Don’s identity will always be a lie. But in America, in 1966, this doesn’t matter. Masculinity has been severed from heredity, and sexuality is much less about class and more about primal sensuality and physical power. Continue reading “Masculinity and its Discontents”