Raining macho men
It’s been an enormous, sweaty, vein-popping week for extravagant demonstrations of manliness.
Moving backwards in time from the sublime to the ridiculous: Friday brought the release of “The Northman,” a Viking epic based on the same story that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and starring Alexander
Skarsgard (who has already played Tarzan) as a decidedly grubbier incarnation of the vengeance-minded young prince. My son and I saw the trailer last weekend playing before “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which is your average woman-centered science-fiction martial-arts family drama, and we both agreed that Skarsgard looked pretty cut.
Indeed, the actor looked like he had been cast from the same front office that had provided the personnel for another trailer, this one for an upcoming “Tucker Carlson Original” documentary, or “documentary.” Another product of the Fox News grievance workshop, the extended clip is so ridiculous that it seems impossible to satirize. We first see archival footage of President John F. Kennedy using the bully pulpit to push physical fitness and talk smack about “soft, chubby, fat-looking children,” followed by his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — reviled in his own family for his conspiracy-mongering — warning of a catastrophic drop in sperm count.
And then comes the peroration: Against the unsubtle bombast of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the viewer is subjected to slo-mo images of shirtless guys doing pushups; a shirtless guy firing a largecaliber weapon; a guy reaching for a cow’s udder, his intentions and possible shirtlessness unclear because of the angle; a hand turning what appears to be meat on a barbecue; and two shirtless guys wrestling.
These shots are all very short — but then we get a slow pan up to a naked male figure standing on a rocky plinth in front of what appears to be a charging station for his genitals, which are illuminated by the device. One possible explanation: Carlson subsequently did an interview about the potential salubrious effects of exposing one’s testicles to “red light” — apparently an element of what’s known as “bromeopathy.”
Oh, you want more? We next get images of a shirtless guy flipping over one of those big truck tires that seem to exist only as Crossfit props; an especially jacked shirtless guy swinging a well-polished ax; a maybe-shirtless guy taking an outdoor ice bath; and a guy drinking deeply of a glass containing ... well, something. Vodka? Raw eggs and prairie oysters? His own tears?
“Once a society collapses,
then you’re in hard times,” intones a suspiciously British voice as these images unspool. “Well, iron sharpens iron, as they say, and those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive — and then they go on to reestablish order, and so the cycle begins again.” The final image shows the back of a shirtless guy in soft focus against what looks like the wall of a disco flexing his biceps as the title appears: “The End of Men.”
The reaction was swift, and probably wasn’t what Carlson’s team was going for. “This is so gay,” actor and noted gay icon George Takei said on Twitter.
The author Mark Harris (whose World War II history “Five Came Back” is one of my favorite books on American cinema) wrote on the same website, “I am sitting here next to my gay husband living my gay life reading a gay novel as research for my new gay book ... and yet I am not and will never be as gay as whatever is haunting Tucker Carlson’s fantasies.”
The trailer contains no significant images of men doing anything with, y’know, women — like embracing them, or working alongside them, or surreptitiously letting the air out of their tires in order to get them into your car so you can attempt to ensorcell them even though you’re married to someone else. If that last one seems both problematic and rather specific, it’s because that was the form of male behavior modeled by Carlson’s Fox News colleague Jesse Watters in the very same week on an episode of “The Five.”
Watters revealed that he used this technique on his current wife back when she was merely a much-younger co-worker and he was a married father of twin daughters. “So you’re basically the Zodiac Killer,” the equally odious Greg Gutfeld told Watters.
Watters, of course, used to work for Bill O'Reilly, who in 2017 was jettisoned after the New York Times reported that he and/or Fox News had settled five-count-'em- five lawsuits in which women connected to his show — as employees or guests — had made sexual misconduct allegations against the host. (Later the same year, Watters was obliged to inform his bosses about his affair after his wife filed for divorce.)
O'Reilly later said his one regret was not fighting back after a horde of advertisers abandoned his show in the wake of the Times' reporting.
Also last week, it was revealed that O'Reilly had been recorded earlier this month profanely bullying a JetBlue employee. (“You’re threatening me with violence, man,” the worker says at one point, to O'Reilly's sputtered denials.)
These are, apparently, some of the things that men do.