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Man Movies

When I go home to visit my parents, we try and find activities to do, and because there is nothing to do in Central New York, we tend to see movies.  And because my dad is the pickiest person in the world (god bless), the movies we see are what you might call Man Movies.  Master and Commander, or There Will Be Blood.  Things like that.  I like these movies, but my dad loves these movies, falling into a category with older movies like, I dunno, anything Robert Duvall has ever been in, or the Martin Scorsese oeuvre (minus After Hours, maybe the best movie ever made about New York, but that’s another story).  It’s not that no one else likes those movies, it’s just that men—older men, I guess—really like them, and find something there the rest of us just don’t seem to get.  My mom, and Rachel when she comes, are always underwhelmed by these movies, or actively hostile to them.  Me, I find something in them that tends to stick with me, even if I don’t bring them up much, but it’s very hard to love them in the way I love Hamlet 2 or Glee or Gilmore Girls or something.

Which is to say that we saw Public Enemies tonight, and…it was OK.  But my dad loved it, kept talking about the lighting and the lenses and things like that.  And granted, he’s a photographer.  But still, it just wasn’t that great, I didn’t think.  For some reason, there’s an overlap between man movies and critical favorites, and though it’s a Venn diagram rather than a mirror, the same sort of values are seemingly being expressed.  The NYT review, rapturous, manages to work in Jesus, Satan, and David Fincher, none of which I saw.  The cynical interpretation would be that Michael Mann action films are seen as artistic because they’re not particularly enjoyable or entertaining, and so by the process of elimination must be art.  But again, people seem to genuinely be finding meaning there, and we have to respect that.

Talking with Rachel about this a while back, I made the case that man movies work with a different sort of moral code than we’re used to seeing.  Honor is important, emotion is weakness, and violence is meaningful.  And while none of those things may be true in real life—hey, it’s the movies, right?  There’s clearly something going on in these sorts of movies that gets past my rational brain to tickle something deep and hidden and fundamental that might be called my latent masculinity.  Though it is eminently mockable, masculinity is nevertheless very difficult to navigate—just as femininity is—which is I suppose why I don’t have many male friends.  Dude rules are not my rules.  But they are rules, and at a certain point you can’t argue with rules.  So if you’re going to get art that addresses that subject, maybe it’s better that it be taken seriously, as something like Public Enemies, rather than dealing with it almost ironically, as the Maxim aesthetic does.  Honor and stoicism and violence matter to people, for some reason, and it’s easier to respect when it has the courage of its convictions.  Maybe!