The Earthling: Some Observations on "Natural Masculinity"

I’ve talked quite a bit about “toxic masculinity” across his blog, but I want to talk for a moment about a companion subject–“natural masculinity.” I’ve heard several other names and labels assigned to the idea, but the general concept is this idea that men are disposed to behave a certain way and that sOciETy forces them to subjugate this part of themselves.

Maybe some of us were raised by someone, or currently live with someone, who buys into these attitudes. Maybe they’re perfectly fine most of the time, but once they meet up with Brian from sophomore year and go out into the mountains for a “weekend with the guys,” a sort of metamorphosis takes place. Jokes that were unacceptable to them become hilarious. Certain transgressions lose their penalty. Gentle Joe kinda mutates into a jerk. This is all propelled and reinforced by the idea that this is how men just are, and that entitles them to certain actions. And who are these women to infringe upon that God-given right?

Gladiator (2000)

    Let me get it out of the way to say that there are all sorts of valid expressions of masculinity, and many of them probably have something to do with discussing football around the campfire with Cousin Tom. This isn’t a callout for most of what we’d call “traditional masculinity.” I don’t think for a moment that taking away the toxic parts of masculinity has anything to do with asking men to be “less manly.”

I actually think it’s the opposite. Though “natural masculinity” has historically been linked to animalistic behaviors and things we’d find repulsive, even frightening, men are really the most at ease when they are allowed to exhale and not be so aggressive. 

    I looked at this thing in some detail with Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World. That film studied a very raw form of masculinity by saddling it with a young boy who is lacking in … that. But in trying to supply this kid with some traditional masculinity, his own defenses deteriorate and he ends up revealing a part of himself that is soft, that is tender, and this becomes the version of him we like best.

I want to spotlight a film with a broadly similar premise: Peter Collinson’s 1980 underseen gem of Australian cinema, The Earthling. This movie also pairs a paragon of masculinity with a young boy, only in this case, this is literally a life-saving arrangement. William Holden gets to cart around ten-year-old Ricky Schroder through the wilderness trying to keep him alive, and this becomes a token of the responsibility all men have to rescue the rising generation of men from neglect. 

    And when I say “underseen gem,” of all the films I’ve spotlighted with an essay, this might be the film with the least coverage. I’m not even totally sure how it wound up on my watchlist. I was probably just lingering on William Holden’s IMDb page for too long, and that fed into my algorithm. This is not a well-known film. And if I’m being honest, it’s also not even a masterful one either. It’s a personal favorite, but I can also think of other movies that articulate certain points more gracefully. 

So why am I talking about it? Well, one, I’m trying hard to combat that most deadly of ailments lurking over liberal arts majors: elitism. I don’t think that only the top 1% of movies deserve discussion. As film historian, Raymond Durgnat, put it, “Academics are so concerned with proving that certain films are better than others that they sidestep, as it were, into the preposition that films which aren’t le crème de la crème aren’t even milk.” Moreover, there are specific devices unique to this movie that make it worth examining–like its context within both Australian cinema and the filmography of screen legend, William Holden. 

            I went into this essay expecting to write mostly about loving a movie that was maybe a little more sentiment than substance—and maybe connecting that to men and their aversion to emotion. But as I dove more into the film, my interest grew to encompass the movie’s exploration of manhood, nature, and emotionality, which is a lot more novel and much better articulated than I used to give credit for.

So, here I am to say that The Earthling ought to be in more textbooks, and it really ought to feature in the present conversations we’re having around healthy masculinity.

 

The Groundwork

The Earthling sees Patrick Foley, an elderly war veteran, returning to his native country of Australia. Faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis, he intends to meet his end with dignity in the valley he knew as a boy. But Foley’s plan is thrown into disarray when a family of American tourists drive out into the wilderness for an adventure of their own, only for their RV to tumble down a cliff with mom and dad still inside–leaving the young Shawn Daley all alone in the wilderness. 

So, Patrick emerges as Shawn’s only shot at staying alive, but even if he did know the first thing about kids, they’re several days of trekking away from civilization, and he’s on borrowed time. “You’re half dead. Together that makes one of us.” He doesn’t have a chance at taking this kid back to the city. The only way Shawn makes it home is if Patrick teaches this kid everything he can about staying alive in the wilderness before cancer claims him. In choosing to take this kid’s life into his hands, Patrick uncovers something in the twilight days of his life that he never knew he needed. 

Something I’ll establish upfront is that this movie was not super successful. It was not particularly influential. It helped draw the spotlight for its star, Ricky Schroder, who would enjoy a reasonable run of child stardom through the ‘80s. But it was not very well-received, and time has not necessarily been any kinder to it. In its day, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the movie “pretentious” and “empty” saying, “its screenplay will not be boosted.”

It’s greatest link to the zeitgeist is that it was one of the final works of Hollywood legend, William Holden. We’ll get to him in a minute. The film’s director, Peter Collinson, had a fairly steady stream of work across the postwar years in Hollywood, but I wouldn’t say he’d ever really hit it big with critics or audiences. Probably his most revered film was the original 1969 version of The Italian Job. Collinson was also famously hard to get along with during production butted heads with just about everyone involved with the film, including the young star. Andrea Passafiume documented,

According to author Bob Thomas, one day when Schroder was having trouble with how he was being directed in a particular scene, Collinson let him have it. ‘What do you know, little boy?’ yelled Collinson. ‘You're not a good actor. You'll never be a good actor. Today you're doing everything wrong. You're impossible!’

    Graciously, Schroder had an advocate in Holden, who would take him out for ice cream whenever Collinson was too biting with him. Holden continued to be a supportive presence with the kid after production had wrapped, all the way through his death the following year. (Probably the most circulated bit of trivia surrounding this film is that Ricky Schroder named his son Holden after his co-star in this film.)

            Collinson’s unusually sour temperament was in part because he discovered during the production of this movie that he was also dying of cancer. Collinson himself was in much the same situation that Patrick is in this film and didn’t even realize it until he was in the heat of production for this film. He did not even live to see the film released. The studio was unhappy with the initial cut, and did their best to move some stuff around after he died. In the end, no one was really satisfied with this movie.

            If the film does wind up feeling somewhat unpracticed, well, I think part of that is because it was exploring relatively unconquered territory. The Earthling ran sort of countercurrent to the attitudes of the day concerning popular displays of masculinity.  

          Shane, for example, also hinges largely on the relationship between this innocent child and this pinnacle of masculinity, but that pairing doesn’t have the same degree of closeness as what we get here. The sacrifices Shane makes for the kid obviously come from a real place, but the film doesn’t really let us see either party—especially Shane—with their guard down. That's something that The Earthling does very well.

            It would be misguided to give The Earthling credit for instigating this change. It simply wasn’t ever popular enough to really have that kind of effect. But it is a valuable window into the consciousness of the culture at the time. This movie’s window represents a vital intersection between various currents, each in varying stages of development.

            I credit Kramer vs Kramer, for example, for being the first movie to really champion emotional closeness between father and son. Then E.T. would come along two years after to show everyone just how overwhelming it can be to see the world through the eyes of a child. The Earthling was a sort of observer to greater advances more than an active agent in them. But it's also worth noting that not all of the developments in Hollywood at this time were necessarily helpful. The dawn of the 1980s was, for example, probably the worst time in history for onscreen representations of masculinity. Owen Booth mused in Did '80s kids have bad role models? 

Predator (1987)

“It was a decade when men went from bottling up their emotions to barely being in control of them. When we swung between extreme over-indulgence and the extreme pursuit of the perfect physique. When to be a man was to show just how much you could hurt yourself, or those around you … 

"In the Rambo and Terminator films, and countless others, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (not to mention Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and many, many more) did their best to show as little emotion as possible while despatching their enemies in ever bloodier and more inventive ways. Relationships, sex, romance, even friendship were irrelevant, because our invulnerable heroes almost always worked alone … 

“And, because this was the Eighties, the only direction this could go was toward more.” 

    A part of why I wanted to write about this film was to revisit that landscape and survey more of what makes someone manly anyways. The world in which The Earthling premiered had a very clear vision of what that meant, but this film's conclusions ran against the expectations of the day. When icons like Bruce Willis were rising to stardom, a member of the old guard such as William Holden swooped in to offer some final words of wisdom about what it actually looks like when a man is truly in his element.

 

William Holden

William Holden’s heyday was in the peak of studio years of classical Hollywood. Holden was sort of sandwiched between Humphrey Bogart and Paul Newman as the guy who made cynicism and self-awareness look really suave, even hot. His most notable roles include the likes of Sunset Boulevard and The Bridge on the River Kwai in the 1950s. I wouldn’t call his characters chauvinistic, at least not more than what was just de rigueur of 1950s and 60s Hollywood, but he was a face for masculine impermeability.

    His archetypal character might be something like Sefton in 1953’s Stalag 17, the movie for which he would win his Oscar. This story follows a bunch of men in a WWII POW camp, with Holden playing the cynical American who doesn’t think escape is possible. And so naturally, he is the guy who makes it out at the end, but not before telling his fellow captives, “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, let's just pretend we've never met before.”

But Holden was one of those rare classic Hollywood actors who also had a substantive presence during the early days of New Hollywood. He headlined films such as The Wild Bunch, Network, and The Towering Inferno. His penchant for toughness and pessimism made the slide to 1970s cinema much more seamless for him than it was someone like James Stewart. Even when Stewart was “cynical,” as in his darker post-war years, it existed almost exclusively as a lost optimism more than a self-generated hardness. And by the time he's ready for The Earthling, Holden still kind of exists in the popular consciousness as a general grump.

The Earthling would be Holden’s second to last film. Andrea Passafiume noted in TCM’s overview of this movie, 

"When William Holden first read the script for The Earthling, he immediately responded to it. According to his longtime girlfriend at the time, actress Stefanie Powers, ‘...he saw it as a message he identified with and very much appreciated’ …

            The William Holden we meet here feels like a natural extension of most everything we know about him based on his star persona. Basically all of Patrick’s backstory is imparted through vague one-liners, either by him or by someone else. We briefly hear the locals talking about this Foley character and how he was in the war and also used to be a legendary rancher. Both of these have basis in Holden’s filmography.

    We also get to briefly see that he’s got something like a social network, enough that the idea of him walking out into the wilderness to die alone will send his war buddy into shouting distress. “You’ve got friends, people who care.” We can intuit from this that Patrick’s got regular man-pride and even here in his dying days he believes he doesn’t need to take care of himself socially, spiritually.

So right up front, we are also seeing a man who is not versed in emotion, such that making peace with a lifelong friend before his death is just beyond him. And the film puts this pile of manhood in a position to burden himself with not only the physical safety of this city kid but his emotional needs as well.

The kind of manhood that this film deconstructs, that classic stars like Holden floated on, exists in the imagination of the modern public as a sort of vestige of “the older generation,” however you want to define that. Me? I’m not so convinced that we’ve moved that far from this as the representation.

Community (2009)

    Even media that we’d imagine as living on the edge of the pop culture frontier does tend to default to practiced cynicism as the highest refinement of a well-adjusted man. There’s obviously a stratum within society where this flag is waved brutishly. But the common working folk confronts this same dilemma too. Being bold enough to “make the tough call” or “doing what needs to be done” is held as a higher esteem of one’s dedication and ethic.

I’d say there are a few more conduits today for emotional manhood than we’ve seen historically, but the default still reinforces an image of men who flaunt a very impervious, emotionally distant brand of manhood, which can really disadvantage a sappy movie about manhood such as The Earthling. 

Film and Sentimentality

            As I explained in my Charlie Chaplin essay, emotionality in film can have profound application, but it can also be easily abused. A movie spills over from “emotional” to "cheesy" when it tries to force emotion that is not being naturally supplied by the story and the characters inhabiting it. But when the film dares to make itself vulnerable, the audience will be much more willing to drop their own defenses. We know that this breadth of emotion can exist within very weighty films, but because the chasm is so wide, few storytellers are willing to make the jump.

Enchanted (2007)

            Similar to what we talked about with The Notebook, emotion does have a system. That system may be fluid, but you can trace its genesis and development. Even a movie we might call indulgent with these things has to calibrate it that all with both human psychology and the natural rhythm of narrative. And you can detect when a film understands that process versus films that simply try to coast. Trying to detach sentimentality from all rules or logic generally represents a party, in this case a storyteller, trying to escape accountability.

Part of the resistance toward emotionality in films may come from an effort to not fall for such exploits, but what this often leads to is a total rejection of all vulnerability. This can cause one to discount entire bodies of art and in the process deny oneself the chance to explore and refine the capacity for tenderness. We don’t, for example, see a lot of male-targeted musicals.

Rocky (1976)

           More to the point, emotional displays can just be uncomfortable—most of all for male audiences. Men will typically entertain emotionality in film under very specific windows—war films and sports films, basically. Men can let themselves tear up watching a man achieving the peak of his manliness. Outside of that, though, it’s slim pickins’.

            I have on occasion been tempted to classify The Earthling as one of those movies that coasts on emotion; I’m not so sure I would anymore.

The emotional demand is high, yes, but the situation at work lends itself to deep emotion. One half of this pair is a kid who needs someone to look after him, and the other half is a man whose heart has been closed off for basically all his life. This film gives both participants a chance to come together and save each other. That’s obviously fertile ground for emotionality, but not every movie knows how to capitalize on that premise.

            I was, for example, really excited for Samaritan with Sylvester Stallone because it had a vaguely similar premise to The Earthling—old man takes aimless young boy under his wing—but there’s a reason you haven’t heard of it. There are no real scenes of vulnerability between Sylvester Stallone and the kid from Euphoria. Neither do they have any onscreen chemistry, and so this juicy setup winds up feeling entirely like bait.

The Earthling, meanwhile, mostly sticks the landing. Schroder and Holden both show up to bat, and the relationship unfolds organically. There's trial and error to their relationship, which gives their nature trek and their emotional bond a strong sense of progression.

  What really holds the film back are sequences like the one that comes immediately after Shawn realizes he’s out on his own in the middle of nowhere. The way it depicts the onset of panic in the mind of a ten-year-old feels just a little graceless. We could go into the real-life psychology of this situation, but that’s not what’s really interesting to me. I’m more zeroing in on how they didn’t know how to cinematically depict this kid losing his mind. 

Look at something like E.T. and the scene where Elliot first encounters the little alien and thinks he’s like the boogeyman. The scene is framed a lot like a stylized horror movie. Heavy mist, creepy music, slow camera movement, etc. The film makes a relatively benign situation feel dangerous by getting in the head of how it would feel to be a kid in this scenario, and this helps link us to the mindset of the film’s child protagonist.

The camera in The Earthling, meanwhile, is largely impartial to Shawn’s situation. The film winds up leaning on some very confused theatrics to try to get into his head. Shortly after his parents die, Shawn starts talking to himself, reciting little facts about who he is, like how he likes ice cream and how his dad sometimes takes him to Rams games. The film lets us imagine that him disassociating like this is somehow a direct result of the trauma. He is doing this as he wades further into the water. By the time his delirium reaches a peak, he is nearly up to his neck. (See? Metaphor.) This will escalate to the point where Shawn temporarily forgets his own name. Watching Shawn go crazy, I don’t feel scared or concerned, I just feel kinda confused, even a little bored.

We could perhaps imagine that this is somehow the film’s way of targeting a younger audience. Maybe one that doesn’t understand the intricacies of a psychological breakdown or might be frightened by a more realistic depiction. But these are critical moments where we’re supposed to be linked to this kid in the deepest throes of helplessness, and all I end up feeling is annoyed, which is not how I’d characterize my experience with Shawn for most of the movie.

            But I think part of what this failing tells me is that the film has a firmer grasp on how to get into the mind of Patrick than Shawn. The film only knows how to relate to this situation through the eyes of someone like Patrick who is learning how to break his own defenses rather than someone who is just always vulnerable. And so, this film becomes a document on how a man fortified in toughness chooses to break down his defenses in order to watch out for someone who needs him, and that’s where the movie feels much more comfortable with itself.

            The movie forces the viewer to be very, very vulnerable. But it’s not just the violin swells that stock this movie with emotion. The movie understands the elements it’s working with. The movie overcomes its own saccharine devices in part because it taps into something very real, very *ahem* earthy in how it leans on the natural majesty of nature to make its point.

Australia

So here’s an idea: the setting of your story matters. Maybe more in some stories than others, but a good storyteller at least has the sense of the environment and what that might mean for the situation they are writing. And the setting for this movie is the Australian outback. 

    Australian cinema of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was actually largely coming out of a movement which emphasized the country as something dangerous, even sinister. Projects like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Wake in Fright presented the outback as an unforgiving environment, even a boiling pot for a person’s latent savagery. This was also the decade of the very first Mad Max film. And so for William Holden to swoop on in and show us just how spiritual this environment can be, it does pose some novelty.

The film carries a lot with just the imagery of the Australian wilderness and using that to impart the meaning of the story. The film finds a very thin middle ground in its depiction of the Australian bush, just between raw and romanticized, allowing the landscape to speak for itself. There are parts of this film that I am sometimes tempted to say feel a little “direct-to-video,” but you could easily make a screensaver out of like two thirds of the shots in this movie

Moreover, this photography creates a thematic dialogue within the film. The movie actually opens with shots of the Australian wildlife underscored with Aboriginal inspired music, which is then undercut by the sound of an airplane jet, which segues to shots of William Holden’s plane landing. Right off the bat, we’re being exposed to this idea of nature being disrupted by the encroachment of civilization. And it's through this lens that Shawn and Patrick's relationship unfolds.

    Patrick becomes the face for “nature” while Shawn stands in for "civilization." Patrick knows this territory very well, not just the topography, but the spiritual nourishment it offers the weary soul. Shawn, meanwhile, is very much typed as a kid who has been raised away from all that, and this is why he’s so scared of everything.

Shawn’s not what I’d call spoiled, but it’s obvious that city living has deprived him of something. The first thing we really see Shawn do is hang around the edge of the pond because it’s too cold for him to go in. He seems to have a very narrow range of homeostasis, and we can guess he probably did not want to go on this trip in the first place.

    Meanwhile, there is a kind of touristy dressing over Shawn’s family, and this makes them outsiders in this space. Sean’s mother notes. “It makes you wonder if we should even be here. It’s almost too beautiful.” They’re not presented as annoying or willingly ignorant, but their American enthusiasm for leisure does become a contrast against the untamed-ness of the Australian outback. And these two elements do not mix well—mom and dad will die after their RV tumbles off the edge of a cliff.

The film further reinforces Shawn’s foreignness right after his parents die. Most of the creatures that Shawn encounters right after the RV tumbles are baby wombats, echidnas, and the like. Not really threatening, but signature animals of the Australian outback, reminders of his non-citizenry in this space. And so, it becomes Patrick's responsibility to take this kid who is so out of his element and see that he makes it home. He cannot literally take the kid back himself because he has days to live. He has to impart a lifetime of knowledge to a kid who is completely helpless.

    Once Shawn is fully assimilated into this paradise, Shawn gets to have little moments where he’s chasing kangaroos through this little Garden of Eden. He’s not just surviving in this space, he’s thriving. This is what the wilderness has to offer this little city boy if he can find his place within it. We discover that, like Patrick, the Australian outback may be coarse and unforgiving on the surface, but also like Patrick, that harsh exterior conceals life-giving abundance.

            And so there are a couple of currents in this story all carrying the film to the same direction: Shawn and Patrick are both growing closer and closer to nature at its most elemental, its most raw. Makes sense—that’s why dudes like to go out into nature today: to try to get in touch with their most natural self. And we can infer that’s what’s happening here as well.

           But historically, men “getting in touch with nature” has often been used as a blanket covering for men returning to a less civilized version of themselves—an excuse to be crude or uncouth, even vulgar or aggressive. This is them reclaiming something they believe society has robbed them of. But in this film, that return to nature, that shedding the constraints of society, has this beacon of manhood growing more tender, more nurturing. This film puts forth a model that paints love, genuine and emotional love, as a man’s most natural state, and I think there's something to that.

Citizen Kane (1941)

    What’s really stopping a man from being his most emotional self? What really feeds his most savage appetites? Is it being surrounded by mountains and lakes, or is it choosing to lay-off his workforce in order to keep the lights on in the office? Or being conditioned to believe that he needs to climb to the top of the business pyramid at all costs?

Patrick’s perspective on the relationship between human and nature–again diametrically different from how we often think about men “reclaiming their manhood.” His experience with Shawn is less about teaching him how to subdue or conquer nature and more about how to assimilate into it, to invite the wild spaces to reveal their natural gifts.

            This movie kind of takes an opposite stance to what we discussed in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers where civilization becomes a necessary force that tempers a man and forces him to be his more gentlemanly self. The kind of representation we see in The Earthling is more common when the face of that civilization is represented as like a city (as opposed to something more small or communal like a village), something like what we talked about with Train to Busan. This is also similar to what we talked about when we looked at The Banshees of Inisherin where a man’s desire to achieve tends to deprive him of the instinct to connect. 

What this movie really reveals about manhood and emotionality, society and nature, is that modern living has made it possible for people to withdraw behind secure lines that give us an excuse to mind our own business and not look out for someone drowning. The modern system may have opened the door for luxury, but it’s also created this social vacuum where no one is really connected, the same thing we discussed in our Passengers essay. Take all that away, and the only thing sustaining life is people choosing to watch out for each other, which is exactly what Patrick ends up doing.

"Never Be Ashamed of Love--Always Show It"

The lynchpin of every great story about surrogate fatherhood is always that moment where the man’s defenses break. This is the point where he is caught between the familiarity of the stoicism his society has trained him—and which his battles have conditioned in him—and the vulnerability he must display to tend to this helpless thing that stands in need of him.

Leon: The Professional (1994)

    This often has the father figure swoop in and save the child in some display of bravery, not unlike what he’d display on the warfront. But when this dynamic really comes alive, it’s when he saves the child emotionally by opening his heart. This can also run in situations where it’s a father figure paired with a daughter-insert, but I key in on father-son stories because this is where you also see affection as a masculine trait being passed from one generation to the next.

Getting to that point requires the father character to undo years of suppression and make themselves truly vulnerable, which can be very frightening. Hence, Patrick pushes the kid away at first. He rationalizes that he’s going to be dead before he can take the kid back to civilization, and what does Patrick know about kids anyway? But he can only smother his conscience for so long, and he eventually sees it as his obligation to give the kid some steadying.

    These start with very small gestures. He leaves out a coat for the kid without explicit instructions that this is for him. From there, we see Patrick making greater strides to connect alongside his efforts to help Shawn learn how to take care of himseld. One of their first major episodes of bonding comes when Patrick shows him how to catch fish with his bare hands. As time goes on, he softens up and his defenses deteriorate, and by the end, Patrick has unlocked some very real affection for Shawn.

As Patrick's attachment to the kid matures, so does his awareness of his own mortality. Shots of Patrick walking away from the kid see him groaning and massaging his side, a reminder that Patrick is dying. Patrick’s illness escalates once they hit the oasis, and this is where Patrick ends up delivering his most essential doctrine to the kid.

The situation begins with Shawn, the emotionally compromised party, tearfully yelling at Patrick that he hates him for telling him he has to go, and it’s Patrick who gets to help him mediate his feelings, which he does with some basic displays of emotion. This is one way where it appears like the film is leaning on the sentimentality of the situation to force a breakthrough. But this is actually one instance where the film actually really keys in on the emotional chemistry, especially what it means for this helpless little kid, and reveals just how well it understands this territory after all.

That entry conflict of Shawn hating Patrick, it doesn’t really get resolved in the dialogue. Patrick doesn’t really make a case for himself or talk him out of that headspace in any way. But the process that got Shawn here, it had nothing to do with logic or cause-and-effect as we typically understand them. Kids just lack the rhetorical framework for rational argument. Everything with them is pure emotion.

    Shawn "hating" Patrick has nothing to do with anything he did. That was Shawn expressing his frustration over the fact that he’s about to say goodbye to his friend forever and not knowing where to direct that devastation. He's just expressing some understandable anxiety about the loss of his friend, and he fears that his entire connection with this him is going to be invalidated once he's gone. And what resolves that for him is Shawn seeing Patrick offer these final words of comfort. The film follows that non-logical sequencing to its non-logical conclusion, and it absolutely works. We get one final display of love between these two, ratifying their bond and all it has done for them, and that's something Shawn gets to take with him when he returns to civilization.

 

Halfway Home

Writing this essay certainly fits into my wider incentive to generate discourse on movies that time has just forgotten. (Seriously, it was darn near impossible to do research for this movie because it’s just so under the radar.) But there are specific social incentives to selecting this movie that I’m not in the least bit shy about. 

Thor (2011)

A lot of social discontent emerges directly out of how the national male identity sees itself. Because men have historically been the powerholders in society, calls for correction basically always probe the systems that have carved his identity. The fight for social equity has basically been the fight to convince men that it’s okay to let someone else in the driver’s seat sometimes. But because men have always defined their success as men based solely on how aggressively they keep onto that steering wheel, they resist correction.

            History has shown us that what tends to happen is that periods of massive social upheaval tend to be preceded by waves of forceful optimism—“Yes we can!” But after a while, that sustained vigilance grows too demanding, parts of society start to try to wrestle the status quo back into a state of submission. Feeling betrayed that this optimism was insufficient, that energy dilutes into pessimism, and social activism goes dormant until a new generation feels ready to take the status quo to task.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

We saw this exact cycle play out immediately before The Earthling entered the scene. The 1960s saw film giving unprecedented attention to historically marginalized groups, as we discussed in my analysis of Sidney Poitier’s work during this time. But a decade of social turmoil left greater America exhausted, which led to a very fatalistic 70s, a plastic 80s, and a 90s that was just ... bored.

    And seeing where American culture is at now, it does kind of look like we’re on a trajectory of sliding back into a Chinatown-era of filmmaking, and maybe even something much more nefarious. This disillusion with social progress is also how we get the U.S. Secretary of War hyping up brutality as the height of masculine achievement, all while insisting, "It's just common sense, folks."

Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (1993)

"... as history teaches us, the only people who actually deserve peace are those who are willing to wage war to defend it. That’s why pacifism is so naïve and dangerous. It ignores human nature and it ignores human history. Either you protect your people and your sovereignty, or you will be subservient to something or someone. It’s a truth as old as time. And since waging war is so costly in blood and treasure, we owe our republic a military that will win any war we choose, or any war that is thrust upon us. Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision, and ferocity of the War Department ..."

"This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that s**t. I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal."

Fellas, I don’t think we can afford another 30 years of dormancy ...

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

When I think about what a given society needs to correct the flaws in its design, I think about how that needs to come from a place that believes that change is possible, that affords room for things so fragile as sentimentality. And this is part of the reason why I believe in exploring the intricacies of these things and in spotlighting movies like The Earthling. Movies like these are daring enough to step up to the stage with little else but their emotionality—and the belief that that’s enough, that this makes something worth listening to.

More importantly, it champions a vision of manhood that allows for a fuller emotional spectrum. This is a movie that ends with our hero taking this lost little boy in his arms and telling him to never be ashamed of love, and I think that's something that we ought to study further.

Mud (2012)

    Historically, the responsibility to emotionally socialize our sons has fallen exclusively on the shoulders of the mothers or the mother inserts, but I think that only good can happen by involving men in that program. This isn't to devalue the historical contributions of mothers or imagine a future without them, but if we expect our boys to be emotionally literate--and remain so all their lives--then a part of that link has to be forged between men across generations.

Obviously, films about manly men aren’t going away. And I don’t think for a moment that they ought to. It’s a common misconception that purging toxic masculinity is about doing away with things like the action hero. That’s not what your theater-major cousin is actually after. 

Stranger Things 4 (2022)

    The goal has always been a wider expression of identity. That includes a man’s ability to be sentimental, and this is also something that even the Bruce Willises and Kurt Russells of the arena benefit from. Men are at their boldest when they truly let their guard down, when they allow their heart to live outside of them. A man’s ability to defend what is his has never been at odds with his ability to be soft or tender. These things can–and really ought to–coexist within a man. Learning how to house both values requires change, yes, and it absolutely requires courage, but guess what? Men are strong enough to make this transformation.

    They always have been.

                    --The Professor