What it means to be a man is getting real
From ‘The Irishman’ to Mister Rogers, films reexamine masculinity
Jane Fonda visited The Washington Post the other day. At breakfast, just before going onstage with Diane Lane to talk about oceans in crisis, she responded to a question about the intersection of environmental politics and feminism. The veteran actress and advocate observed that women have always gravitated toward working together in the collective interest.
“It’s not that we’re better than men,” she quipped, quoting her good friend Gloria Steinem. “It’s just that we don’t have our masculinity to prove.”
It’s a great line — classic Gloria. And it turns out to be apropos, not just in the world of activism, but in movies. Among the dozens of awards contenders that are crowding theater screens between now and the end of the year, a significant number seem to be grappling with men’s roles, reflecting disruptions that are roiling the film establishment itself. At a time when the white male gaze is being challenged as Hollywood’s default setting, the very essence of manhood — the postures, attitudes and behaviors that movies have portrayed as “male” for more than a century — is being reappraised. Films that once might have been positioned as celebrations of brotherhood, bonding and bromance instead are examining their hidden costs.
There was a time, after all, when part of the enjoyment of watching a Martin Scorsese film was being seduced by the same codes of honor among thieves he romanticized so convincingly in films like “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” In his new movie “The Irishman,” which began streaming on Netflix, Scorsese rep players Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci go through many of the familiar rituals of violence and mayhem. But now they’re slowed down, repeated to the point of boredom, leeched of vicarious pleasure. The threats, hair-trigger arguments and ruthless hit jobs that once exuded the thrill of a liberated id feel predictable and pathetic. The film ends not with a bang, but with the whimper of an assassin whose inability to communicate through anything but brute force has left him alone and unloved.
The perfect dinner-table debate for cineastes might be whether Scorsese intended “The Irishman” to be a treatise on “toxic masculinity.” Although the phrase is often used to describe bullying, bellicosity and general bad behavior, it more specifically refers to the damage done to men by social expectations that limit their emotional range to wordless stoicism or explosive aggression, with very little space in between.
One of the chief vectors for those values has been the movies, with the cowboys, vigilantes and gangsters who let their guns do the talking. And nowhere are those values more mythologized than in service to fraternity — the sports teams, military squads, crime outfits and other companies of men where brotherly allegiance permits the kind of unapologetic emotionalism that would be ridiculed in any other context. Think of the “get out your mankerchief ” moments in “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Hoosiers” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Or the hyperbolic firepower and phallic symbolism of a Michael Bay extravaganza. As moving and amusingly escapist as they can be, these films have perpetuated forms of male identity that, for too long, have been relegated to two archetypes: the square-jawed paragon or the overcompensating antihero.
“The Irishman” wants to have it both ways: Scorsese is clearly still fascinated by the impunity and seedy glamour of the Mafioso’s life. But the visceral set pieces have been toned down and muted, not to mention the shiverinducing needle drops (“Layla,” anyone?) that produce that Scorsese-esque blend of queasy admiration. Still, the film’s cipherlike protagonist, De Niro’s lonely, psychologically damaged Frank Sheeran, would no doubt find common cause with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in “Joker,” who is driven to a life of crime by being chronically taunted, dismissed and abused. And they would both recognize the isolation and longing for connection expressed by Brad Pitt in “Ad Astra,” in which he plays an ultracompetent astronaut not as a fearless interstellar explorer, but as a broken man coping with deep-seated abandonment issues.
“I think we need to redefine it,” Pitt told me in September, referring to the remote, shut-down image of masculinity he grew up with alongside his dad, whom he compared to the Marlboro Man. And, in several new movies, we can see it being redefined almost in real time: In “Waves,” Sterling K. Brown’s controlling, competitive character learns an agonizing lesson in the wages of fathers passing down poisonous ideas about manhood to their sons; in the crime drama “Queen & Slim,” Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith flip the script on gender roles, with Turner-Smith’s character emerging as the alpha partner who towers over her male counterpart, literally and figuratively.
Happily, the current crop of movies also includes glimpses of manhood that nudge the paradigm more playfully. In some ways, “Ford v Ferrari” offers a bracing, look-at-the-bright-side complement to “The Irishman.” Both films emphasize their protagonists’ experiences in World War II as being pivotal to their fiercest loyalties, with “Ford v Ferrari” — about the 1966 Le Mans car race and the invention of the Ford GT40 — viewing the generation through a far more forgiving and optimistic lens.
On its shiny surface, “Ford v Ferrari” might look like just another ode to macho strutting and cars that go vroom. But it’s been custom-built to be something more thoughtful: a genuinely touching chronicle of camaraderie, competition and common enterprise that detoxifies masculinity to its purest, most humane elements. In one of the film’s cleverest scenes, lead actors Matt Damon and Christian Bale engage in a hilariously uncool fight that intentionally undermines their invincible personae in the “Bourne” and “Dark Knight” films. As they scrabble and scrap, they look angry, then ridiculous, then sheepish, then just … over it.
In other words: like real men.
Of course, “Ford v Ferrari” also happens to be a marvelously entertaining spectacle, especially when it comes to the cars that go vroom — which surely helps explain why it’s become such a deserving hit. But what about movies that don’t have the benefit of cars, guns, spaceships or other male-coded tropes at their disposal? The biggest referendum on masculinity at the movies this year may turn out to be “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” in which Tom Hanks plays children’s TV host and national treasure Fred Rogers.
Warm, open and spiritually attuned, Rogers is that rare leading character whom even the most divided families can agree to admire together. And as the antithesis of lawlessness, rampant ego and empty swagger, he’s the movie hero millions of Americans need right now — a model of manhood at its most empathic, compassionate and emotionally secure.
Can Mister Rogers go toe-totoe with Arthur Fleck? Will kindness ever be as captivating onscreen as kicking ass? If “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” becomes the big holiday hit it’s poised to be, it will bode well for smart, soundly crafted movies aimed squarely at the mainstream. But it will also confirm that, in movies as in life, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t have your masculinity to prove.