Has Our Society Even Corrupted Masculinity?

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, our society is horribly corrupted — not because we’re bad people but because bad people have been trying to destroy us. They’ve tried everything they can to undermine western, particularly English speaking nations and it may surprise you to know that one of their key aims is to subvert our conception of what our own masculinity is.

There is a character archetype of the action villain in the nineties that it serves well to look at because it tells us a lot about the essence of male-female relationships. There is a degree of contrast in modern movies between heroes and villains and how they deal with male-female relationships. The villains’ embodiment of cool, capable masculinity, especially back when Hollywood made great action movies, is frequently better than that of the main protagonist. It is often compelling. Even so, the villainous archetype of masculinity is so often missing a vital piece — an element that is all too easy to miss if we’re not actively on the lookout for it.

What is typically missing in the villains’ conduct is the natural progression of sympathetic circumstance and mindful conduct that would exemplify an excellent hero’s approach to love. Sadly, all too often, this is missing in the hero’s conduct nowadays as well.

Maybe this is deliberate, maybe it is not but I feel like Hollywood probably understands this principle very well and has inverted the principle to make the hero a villain — or at least less admirable. I mean we’ve all seen how Hollywood’s villains are usually strong capable men with a sort of integrity —with an almost holy quest mentality in how they approach their missions. Main players in many modern movies, by contrast, tend to be led around by the nose by women in trying to win their affection. It should really be the other way around as it mostly was in the past. In James Bond, which pretty much has the masculine thing worked out, the women often pursued him and voluntarily provided him with help to complete his missions.

So, the challenge is to come up with a pure distillation of the principal of a true hero. It is a universally accepted truth that being cool is attractive, especially in men. Conversely, being confused about what masculinity is can be very unattractive on the outside and hard to overcome on the inside without mental discipline. So, the key to understanding this hero character archetype is to work at understanding what actually makes a man capable and clear.

In one Japanese version of the villain archetype, the mental discipline dynamic is clearer than in most of Hollywood’s tripe. With Albert Wesker there is a lot of information in the backstory that hints at a set of traits that would be of great importance in rounding out a positive main character.

The trait is in essence to encompass contemplation — perhaps through the focus of being a writer, a scientist or a thinker. Yet one of those character examples could detract from the others and that is being a scientist. Scientists are often uncritical about their own body of knowledge perhaps because they are usually so specialized. 

 have a great fondness for Resident Evil because Albert Wesker defies this tendency and becomes a true thinker. The kind of science Wesker does as a biologist limits his thinking and eventually he begins to understand that. It is a tunnel like vision where he can only see the problems in front of him but in the end he abandons his path as a scientist to seek higher truths and answer the questions that scientists do not always consider.

So, Albert searches for the hidden truth and writes about that. He then contemplates on what he has seen and discoverers a truth that few see — the truth that big pharma is insidiously corrupt and dangerous.

Even in an occupation so counter-intuitive to contemplation as it is in spying, the simple act of writing can turn a fierce man of action and servant of authority into an independent thinker. A good example of this is the author of the James Bond books, Ian Fleming. He was a spy during the second world war but in his writing about his hero, Bond, he demonstrates a real flair for philosophical thinking and development of positive main character attributes.

 

If you want another example, Julius Caesar also wrote his experiences down and became famous from that. Part of the reason for his success is because it is actually very difficult to face either your failings or really, even your victories but a real man is honest with both himself and the world around him. Writing consistently and editing that work over time is the only effective way for man to have any chance of being honest with himself. It’s a true mirror that takes ego out of the equation. The ego can make us ignore our losses and magnify our victories in our mind. I know this well for as a writer I can look at my work that I once was conceited enough to be Impressed by and wonder how I ever was.

There is an action movie from the nineties, Screamers, that provides further insight as well. The hero in that movie listens to classical music. He is completely calm and in a meditative state when he does. A principal unto himself.

We see many different types in this movie. Some are humans and some are advanced AI. All have varying degrees of non-masculine traits. The elite soldier that the hero saves watches bad movies. The other soldier is constantly worried and shows it. The AI that is definitely a machine is neither seduced by the images of woman on a VR device or fearful of the unknown. However, he does have a fatally flawed trait, being far too controlled by his anger. The machine tries to be masculine but is really just emulating righteous anger in a futile way.

The classic blockbuster epic, Interstellar, is an excellent example of a modern movie with an essentially and strangely un-masculine hero. Cooper is heroic in combat and times of immediate danger but is feminine in the way he thinks. 

Cooper accepts Doyle’s assessment that water and organics can’t be passed up and provides them with a plausible plan to retrieve Miller and her data from her planet in 15 minutes, which will take 2 years of Earth time. He does not stop to think that any single small mistake could ruin all their chances at this point. Nor does he stop to consider whether or not it would be wise to set up a colony on a world so close to a black hole. The underlying idea is that that they are all deeply persuaded with the idea that they must rescue Miller if nothing else but none of them even think to try to contact Miller by radio as soon as they enter that world’s gravitational well. If they had and had at least been forewarned that she was not alive, they would have thought more carefully about going all the way in and landing and wasting decades.

 Later, after this huge disaster, they debate whether to go to Mann’s planet, the closer, or to Edmond’s. When Amelia Brand uses logic in this crucial debate about which planet they should explore first, he resorts to emotional manipulation to try to demonstrate that she is wrong in choosing the most distant planet because she has feelings for the scientist sent to it. Cooper thinks that Mann is the safe bet despite Brand’s argument that both Miller’s and Mann’s are too close to the black hole to allow for the proper development of a sufficiently complex ecosystem.

Cooper thinks it is feminine and unreliable to listen to your feelings for someone but is swayed by the general opinion held by others that Mann is the best of them rather looking at the logical evidence given to him and making a decision using that. He never seems to read or contemplate and perhaps because of this may not be capable of forming his own well-considered view.

This is all done by the directors in a classic case of Deus ex Machina to achieve his greater goal — a goal that is never really properly articulated at any point in the movie until shortly before it happens. 

There are two major goals for Cooper. One is completing the mission and the other is getting back home to his son and daughter. When the mission turns bad on Mann’s planet, he decides to go back to his family, which is in essence an emotional decision. That he is emotional about Murph, at least, is obvious because whenever she shows her displeasure with him, he becomes deeply distraught. This is a great weakness in him to be so emotionally dependent on her.

With respect to completing the mission, going inside the black hole is hinted at as a possibility in the movie often but never planned for. It feels as if it were the goal all along but Cooper would never intentionally choose an option that would keep him from his daughter. A series of bad decisions lead to this outcome being forced on Cooper. Mission success can only be attributed to a process of Deus Ex Machina and all the pseudo-science black hole nonsense.

So, that’s it — Cooper is certainly not a character who is the embodiment of cool, capable masculinity. Any such character must read first then learn to write so that he may know himself. He must then contemplate on this to further his understanding. He must understand that he needs to have principles and be true to them to truly express masculinity.

As an extension of this idea, it would be fair to say that a truly masculine character will understand that relationships should come about through sympathetic circumstances and good conduct rather than through manipulation or active persuasion. Some Hollywood characters in the past demonstrated that sort of behaviour but very few do now and we are left with an increasingly degraded idea of what it is to be masculine. Do movies still influence us? I hope not but cannot help thinking that they do. The fact is, we all really need to work at knowing ourselves to avoid corruption and if we’re going to do that, we need to boycott the modern corporate movie industry.

 

Article co-authored  by Alex Mason and Matt Mason