“Babies to Heroes: A Field Guide to Big-Screen Men”
A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis with an interesting piece in Sunday NTY. Subtitle: “Male Archetypes in the Movies.”
THERE are times, particularly during the summer, when the big screen seems overrun with the alpha and omega of contemporary masculinity: the big babies of comedies and the hard-bodied manly men of superhero fantasies. There are a handful of other types in play, yet even these represent a fairly limited spectrum, from the idealized to the abject. The movies may be male dominated, but images of men are surprisingly narrow: often missing in action is the regular guy who wakes up every morning, kisses his wife (or husband) and manages not to do anything especially silly or heroic in the course of his working day.
The male archetypes populating contemporary movies don’t line up with reality, yet they offer clues about what the men of our dreams look like, or at least what moviemakers are trying to sell us. What do men want? What does it mean to be a man? How does a man relate to other men? And perhaps above all, how does he relate to women, who increasingly occupy a separate sphere on the big screen even as they appear to have more room on television, for themselves and in their relationships with men? There are no simple answers to these questions, but following many grueling, air-conditioned, popcorn-fueled hours of research, we have assembled enough data to offer an abridged field guide to the Hollywood male animal.
His list includes:
THE BIG BABY “Today’s soft, squishy men with their jelly-bellies and superegos built for laughs and high jinks, may not be new, but their resurgent, nay, ballooning presence is food for thought… Maybe these recent tubs of guts exist to reassure Americans of their own ever-increasing waistlines, are embodiments of the new infantilism or just a recycled familiar type. At the very least, their soft bodies tend to render these characters as sexually unthreatening and cuddly, redefining male sex appeal and shifting the burden of attractiveness entirely onto their usually hot female love interests.”
THE BRAVE BOY “The heroes of fairy tales tend to be youthful orphans cast out into the grown-up world to fight evil and seek their fortunes, triumphing through a mixture of guile, courage and luck. In American literature the descendants of these princes include Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Horatio Alger’s characters and Holden Caulfield, and… Harry Potter… The young hero (Joel Courtney) of “Super 8” — with his dead mom and distracted dad — is another fine specimen of this type, one concocted by the writer and director J. J. Abrams in tribute to the American cinema’s own ageless Brave Boy, Steven Spielberg.”
THE BACHELOR “Bachelors in comedies tend to party in groups that are alternately festive and comically, even flat-out pathetic. In Mr. Apatow’s laugh-ins, the touchy-feely brotherhood bonding can at times resemble 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups, except with guys sitting around yammering about their lives and relationships (or lack thereof) while passing around a bong instead of a speculum… The Bachelor is desired by women who want him and men who yearn to have what he has, namely women who are neither wives nor girlfriends.”
THE HUSBAND “Since the 1970s and women’s liberation the figure of the Husband has changed, and in today’s comedies of male sexual panic to be a husband is a more ambiguous state. Some of these hubbies are more like the Big Baby, with their wives as scolding, comforting, tolerant or impatient mommies. To be a married guy — see “Hall Pass” and the “Hangover” movies — is to be henpecked and undersexed, but also to be protected from dangerous libidinous impulses… A man rearing children in partnership with a woman is barely a man at all, but a man raising kids by himself is perfect.”
THE HERO “The Hero is an evolutionary stage reached via one of the earlier archetypes, which often persists as an alter ego… While the Hero’s relationship to evil is relatively straightforward — he’s against it, though occasionally tempted by the corrupting perquisites of power — his relationship with women is ambiguous and almost definitively unfulfilled… But the Hero’s main bonds, brotherly or antagonistic, are with other guys. The nemesis, in particular, is a secret sharer — “you’re just like me,” he says, in silky, seductive tones — with whom intense, sustained physical combat is a form of intimacy and release.”
THE WIMP “Born to be mild, the Wimp exists to have sand kicked in his face and submit to wedgies and worse, or, like Woody Allen, to overcome adversity by being smarter and funnier than everyone else in the room. The Wimp — subsets include the Nerd, the Geek, the Nebbish and, often offensively, the Gay Guy — serves a variety of useful narrative functions as the sexually neutered sidekick, the nervous ninny (the Cowardly Lion) or resident genius. Every tough guy has a Wimp to bounce off, sometimes violently, as does every Hero.”
What’s your reaction to this list? Does it resonate with you as reflective of current trends in Hollywood movies and perhaps contemporary culture in general?
A more intriguing proposition: Is there a way for a writer to use these ‘types’ in brainstorming concepts and developing story ideas?
Before we go there, let’s acknowledge this: You may find this character as function thinking reductionist. And it can be if you simply play to type. However two notes:
* Whether you like these particular types or not, there is a shorthand of this sort that goes on in Hollywood all the time in the story development process. When you pitch a story, whether you are intentional about it or not, you will invariably have to compress a character down to their essence so a buyer can hear that information and distill it into a type. “Ah, a wimp, I get it. Who’s the hero?” Moreover in script notes meetings, this way of referring to characters goes on all the time. Partly due to the fact that everyone in Hollywood is in such a damn hurry and has so many things going on, the default mode is to jam through everything as quickly as possible. But part of referring to a story’s characters in terms of their types is the studios recognize this is largely how moviegoers assess a movie, both in terms of marketing and as they experience it in the viewing process, a fast mental assessment of the various characters to sort them into various categories in order to interpret the story.
* This last point speaks to the universality of archetypes as per Carl Jung. And this is a much more fruitful area of discussion in terms of a writer’s creative process. We can use archetypes to drill down into the essence of a character, then once we understand the core of their authentic self, build them back up and out into fully realized, multidimensional individuals. If you simply use archetypes as a tool to determine their narrative function, that is reductionist. If you use archetypes as a tool to determine their narrative function, then use that as a foundation to explore them more deeply, learn the breadth and depth of their psyche, and evolve them into Being, that is constructionist.
Archetypes are value neutral. It’s what you do with them that matters.
A final question: What about a field guild to big-screen women? What current recurring female types do you see in contemporary movies?
For more of the NYT article, go here.
UPDATE: Corrected to include Manohla Dargis as co-writer of the article. Thanks to DeafEars for picking that up for me.