A tough year for the hero
The male lead went through a breakdown in 2012 movies
Break out the popcorn Prozac: The year 2012 not only witnessed the American male protagonist in the midst of a nervous breakdown, it offered screen reflections on the Revolution in France — suggesting some wholesale shifts are taking place beneath the pretty veneer of pop culture.
Let’s face it: No one messes with the standard Hollywood hero. He walks tall. He carries a gun. He wears a badge that guarantees him the moral high ground in any situation.
Forever associated with solid and dependable behaviour, and a square, symmetrical physique, the once omnipotent Hollywood hero is fragmenting in the face of a changing culture. Where we once had the confident twinkle of Cary Grant reaffirming the white male’s alpha status in society, we’re now looking at Bradley Cooper losing his marbles as a working man betrayed by every institution in his entire life.
Cooper has been earning great praise for his portrayal of Pat Solatano in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. Ditching his Hangover smarm, Cooper embodies a nervous, potentially raging man who was cuckolded by his wife, abandoned by his football team and berated by his parents.
Pat should be the hero because he is Bradley Cooper, after all. But one of the reasons why the film succeeds is that we do not trust Pat. He is unpredictable and menacing, and the same could be said of many similarly off-kilter heroes that loomed in theatres this year.
Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in The Master stands as an irritating emblem of postwar fragmentation as it tells the story of one man desperately seeking his place in the world, and another man’s insatiable desire to fill his spiritual hole with his own brand of self-forged faith.
As Freddie Quell, a navy man who drinks himself into oblivion once he rejoins the civilian world, Phoenix lets his freak flag fly high. Hunched and twitchy, Freddie is neither square- jawed nor symmetrical. He is displeasing to the senses, and feels as reassuring as a ticking time bomb.
Whether it’s a response to the Occupy idea, or the subtle manifestation of a psychic shift, this year’s many cinematic nods to the French Revolution seem to fit in with the idea of the oppressed, disenfranchised and potentially violent Everyman.
From the clenched teeth of Jean Valjean, a good man who stole a loaf of bread to save his family in a film with direct links to revolution, Les Misérables, to the mass popular uprising in The Dark Knight Rises, which borrowed much of its imagery from revolutionary cartoons and canvases, Hollywood was haunted by the birth of the democratic ideal — as well as the crash of 2008 that swallowed the remaining stragglers in the middle class.