Crisis of Masculinity in Art

  

Man Up! Visualizing Masculinity in 19^th-Century America

Addison Gallery of American Art

Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

{Click on image for larger viewing size}

All art galleries are closed right now. Rather than trying to entice you to get to an exhibit, I thought I’d post something that you can contemplate intellectually.

A recent Addison Gallery show was a bit misleading in its title, as many of the works were from the 20^th century. Nonetheless, its major point was well made and well taken. It’s no secret that American men have major issues. Men are far more likely to carry out acts of aggression/violence, lie, abuse alcohol and drugs, commit crimes, violate norms, transgress rules of civility, harm family members, objectify perceived social inferiors, underachieve academically, and act without empathy. This isn’t my opinion; it’s a problem that has been discussed since Antiquity and is standard discourse in contemporary sociology. You have but to Google “crisis of masculinity” to see what I mean.  

Is that crisis resultant from nature or nurture? Put another way, is it hardwired in the male Y chromosome, or is it a matter of how boys and men are socialized? No art show can resolve that fiery debate, but the Addison Gallery collection intrigues in that it suggests maybe we should pay a lot more attention to men’s roles in society. It is hard to become what cannot be imagined and, at least from the 19^th century on, men haven’t had a lot of choices to help them visualize a broader range of gender roles. More pernicious still, men have been raised to define themselves by what they do rather than who they are. That’s not mere semantics. Even positive virtues such as honesty and character are rooted in an individual ethos rather than social/community soil. That’s among the reason men’s psyches too often fracture when they lose their jobs. (Or have to spend too much time at home during a quarantine.)

Eakins

What’s striking about the Addison collection is how limited male options have been historically. Men can become soldiers and/or political leaders–like Samuel Waldo’s portrait of a determined-looking Andrew Jackson or nearby statues of figures such as Henry Clay–or intrepid sailors and fishermen risking life and limb, as Winslow Homer often documented. Power can also be expressed in the business or academic realm, as we see in Thomas Eakins’ portrait of physicist Henry Augustus Rowland. Notice the commanding presence of Rowland seated in a chair as others toil in the background. 

Muybridge

Bellows

Kuhn

Mainly men beat the crap out of each other and display their muscles. George Bellows boxing graphics and paintings are savage and raw; Eadweard Muybridge–a pioneer in photographing motion–showed that Bellows wasn’t exaggerating. Muybridge’s photo also suggests homoeroticism, but the very mention of that probably would have led to fisticuffs in the early 20th century. Rudolph Valentino, who was likely gay or bisexual, probably died from internal injuries suffered in such a fight. Paul Cadmus was irrefutably gay, but even his eroticized male bodies, such as those in “Horseplay,” emphasize powerful muscles. Ditto Walter Kuhn's "Acrobat."  

Hopper

Gropper

The Addison also challenges us to consider the double crisis experienced by men without defined roles. It’s hard to conjure a female parallel to Edward Hopper’s lonely paintings that ooze alienation.
William Gropper’s “Unemployed” is another poignant example. We observe men queuing for benefits before the gates of a closed factory in the distance, but the foreground consists of military recruitment posters, soapboxers, hucksters, beaten protestors, and a hooded Klansman with a rope awaiting a convenient scapegoat.

Empty Sleeve

 Perhaps the most striking of all is Winslow Homer’s print “Empty Sleeve.” A young man–certainly a Civil war veteran–sits beside a young woman who has the reins of the horse carriage. The man sits in the seat a woman would usually occupy, but her companion’s empty left sleeve makes him unable to command a horse team. That arm was no doubt removed by a battlefield surgeon and is a symbolic emasculation. To further that effect, note that the woman’s veil flies by his head, suggesting that the ex-solider has been both castrated and feminized.   

It is tempting to imagine these images as mere relics of an earlier age. Would that it were so, but there is a considerable body of sociological data that suggests there is much left undone. If recent history is any guide, we shall see elevated levels of the crisis of masculinity when we emerge from COVID-19 isolation.

Rob Weir

Three Unusual Films

Are you an adventurous movie viewer? Do you enjoy offbeat films? Here are three to try, all of which are available for download or online. I wouldn’t declare any of them masterpieces, but each is cut from a hard-to-sell bolt of fabric, which means they’re not what we see all the time.

A Girl Cut in Two (2007)

Directed by Claude Chabrol

Pan Europeene, 114 minutes, Not-rated (adult situations)

In French with subtitles

Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) was one of the last of the French New Wave directors. I doubt he’ll be remembered for La fille coupée en deux/A Girl Cut in Two, as structurally it’s one of the more conventional he ever made, but you will see echoes of the iconoclastic style of the New Wave. In particular, the New Wave wasn’t particularly interested in realism per se; more emphasis was placed on inner conflict and existential crises. This is important to remember, otherwise you might think Chabrol another Harvey Weinstein in his views of the distaff side.

Ludivine Sagnier stars as Gabrielle, the lovely young weather girl for a Lyons TV station. She is equal parts ambitious and naïve, the latter her Achilles heel. She becomes the simultaneous object of desire of Paul (Benoît Magimel), an overbearing son of privilege living off his private income, and Charles Saint-Denis (François Beléand), a famous writer. Paul has toys and money to burn in his pursuit of Gabrielle, he’s actually a shallow little shit. Though he’s much older, the sophisticated Charles is Gabrielle’s preferred sexual, intellectual, and psychological match. Three problems: He is married, has a kinky side, and also a track record of collecting then discarding young lovers–with the full knowledge and cooperation of his wife, Dona (Valeria Cavalli). Gabrielle is like a moth caught in a web with spiders converging on two sides.

This film takes a sanguinary turn evocative of Ragtime and contemporary “affluenza” cases. Some may bristle at Sagnier’s role as a girl trapped in a woman’s body–not to mention that her willingness to be demeaned for the right deal isn’t exactly feminism’s definition of women’s opportunity. Frankly, one wonders if any director would touch a script like this today. But think like a New Wave director. The film isn’t really a battle-of-the-sexes tale. It’s about hubris, with Gabrielle playing the part of Icarus in drag.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

Directed by Joe Talbot

A24, 120 minutes, R (language, drugs, brief nudity)

This film was the darling of the 2019 Sundance festival and is the semi-autobiographical tale of director Joe Talbot’s friend, actor Jimmie Fails–emphasis on the term “semi.” It’s like a cross between Blindspotting and Downton Abbey and if that doesn’t pique your curiosity, nothing will!

It opens weird and stays there. We meet Jimmie and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) waiting for a bus in the Hunters Point section of San Francisco that never comes, while a soapbox preacher raves about a conspiracy against black people. Jimmie and “Mont” are both well-spoken young men who mostly ignore the street corner trash talkers, though both are living with Mont’s blind grandfather (Danny Glover) and hope for a break. Jimmie’s dream keeps them both going. Whenever there’s no bus–Hunter’s Point is the area near where Candlestick Park used to be–they tandem ride Jimmie’s skateboard into the Fillmore section of the city where they maintain the exterior of a handsome Victorian home, despite the owners’ desire for them to go away. Jimmie can’t; he claims that his grandfather built it in 1947, but slipped out of black hands and into those of white gentrifiers. His dream is to one day reoccupy the family homestead.

As it happens, he and Mont will get such a chance. Imagine two young black men sitting in smoking jackets amidst Downton-like furnishings and befuddled white neighbors. Let me emphasize, though, that Fails and director Joe Talbot have not made a cheesy black kids-scare-the-white-bourgeois film. Nor are they simply messing with stereotypes by reversing customary black/white roles. The film is more serious and less obvious than that.

Actually, it’s often too layered for its own good. Talbot can’t quite decide if he’s making an idiosyncratic comedy, giving us a look at tragic black street life, engaging in a Spike Lee-like veiled rant, or appropriating white drama motifs. One can do all of these, of course, but it is a delicate balance and Talbot often totters. What this film does best is keep us continually off-guard and guessing about relationships, motivations, and expectations. Even the final scene is ambiguous–an ending, or a new beginning? This unorthodox film is akin to a grab bag filled with things both silly and sublime.   

The Man Without a Past  (2002)

Directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Bavaria Film Productions, 97 minutes, PG-13 (some violence)

In Finnish with English subtitles

I’ve saved the most peculiar film for last. There are a handful of directors–the Coen brothers, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, John Waters, Wes Anderson, Taika Waititi–whose movies are so singularly unconventional that even when they misfire, they intrigue. Add Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki to the list. It speaks volumes that The Man Without a Past is a favorite of Jim Jarmusch, the most outré director of our times. Think of it as a Finnish version of Mystery Train (in spirit, not content).

It’s often unclear in Man Without a Past whether it’s meant to be poignant or totally absurd. Spoiler alert: It’s both. A man arrives at the Helsinki train station at 4 am, makes his way to a park, falls asleep on a bench, and is violently robbed and beaten. He revives, but collapses in a rest room, is taken to a hospital, and is pronounced dead when his monitors flatline. Not quite! He again awakens and staggers away, only to collapse along the harbor in a section of the city so poor that folks are living in castoff cargo containers. He has no idea where he is, who he is, or why he’s in Helsinki.

This film is about outcasts, survivalists, indifferent bureaucrats, those who prey on the poor, and those who pray with them. Speaking of prayer, how about a romance between a hapless amnesiac and Irma (Kati Outinen) a female soldier in the Salvation Army? If that’s too plausible for you, how about Salvies’ musicians remade as a skiffle band? Our unknown principal (Markuu Peltola) adapts well to cargo container life and awkwardly pursues Irma, but he also endures one misadventure after another, each odder than the one before. Because he has no name or recoverable past, he stoically endures whatever comes his way.

Kaurismäki is absolutely Jarmusch-like in his approach. Reactions, conversation, and emotions are as sparse as the tundra and the pacing is deliberate. Stick with it. At first as it seems the film is going nowhere, bit it gets more absurd as it goes on. The humor is droll and dry. Its tone touching and sweet, but not of the sentimental fireworks-in-the-sky variety. By the time it ends, it’s a toss-up whether you’ve been in the presence of masked brilliance or advanced weirdness. But you’ll never again feel the same way about the Salvies.

Rob Weir

The Goldfinch: Great Book, So-So Movie

The Goldfinch (2019)

Directed by John Crowley

Warner Brothers, 149 minutes, R (drug use, language)

★★★

Movies often borrow from books, but literature is a problematic source. Even a short novel has more room to develop plots, back stories, and detail. A 300-page novel will take an average reader more than eight hours to finish; most script writers and film directors get 90 minutes to two hours to bring the same story to the screen. So what does one do with Donna Taart’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch, which checks in at nearly 800 pages? It doesn’t help that the book was polarizing; there were those—including me—who thought it riveting and others who and bailed before finishing.

If you see the phrase “Inspired by” at the beginning of a film, it usually means that liberties have been taken and that the book provides a seed from which the film blossomed; if it says “Adapted from,” most directors seek to be as faithful as they can to the printed word and excise as little as possible. Director John Crowley and script writer Peter Straughan opted for an adaptation of The Goldfinch. In retrospect, a reimagining might have been wiser. The Goldfinch was a major box office bomb last year. It’s not the turkey some critics considered it to be, but it is uneven. It’s worth a watch if: (a) you have actually read (and liked) the novel and (b) if you don’t expect a masterpiece.

The story unfolds when 13-year-old Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley) has dawdled and his flaky-but-chilly mother, Audrey, must walk him to his private school. They detour to the Metropolitan Museum of Art so that she can show Theo a painting. Theo is more interested in a girl he spies and decides to hang out near the gift shop while Audrey goes off to view another painting. Suddenly a terrorist bomb explodes and scores are killed, including Audrey and a man named Welty, who expires just as he places his partner’s business card into Theo’s palm. Amidst the rubble, dust, cacophony, and mayhem, Theo impulsively absconds with the picture Audrey wanted him to see: The Goldfinch, a 1654 painting from Carel Fabritus (1622-54), a Rembrandt student who was killed when a gunpowder magazine blew up in the Dutch city of Delft. (Taart did not invent Fabritus, the painting, or the explosion in Delft.)

This is merely the start of Theo’s journey. He is temporarily placed with the Barbour family: Chance, his moody socialite wife Samantha (Nicole Kidman), and their three children: Kitsey, Platt, and the geeky Andy, to whom Theo is kind though Andy is really annoying. Just when it looks as if Theo is about to be orphaned, his father Larry (Luke Wilson) appears to take him to Phoenix. Larry is every bit the small con man/big-time loser Theo’s mom said he was, and neither he nor his waitress girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson) has an ounce of couth or a clue on how to raise a kid. Theo is cast adrift in a desert wasteland—a housing development that went bankrupt before completion. He is out of place in a public school and friendless, until he meets Boris (Finn Wolfhard), who might be either Russian, Ukrainian, or Hungarian—his tale changes. The two do what you might expect feral children to do: smoke, drink, do drugs, and commit petty larceny. Larry is a compulsive gambler so desperate for money that he tries to bilk Theo out of his trust fund and it’s implied that Boris’ father is a mobster. Theo and Boris plan to runaway to New York, but Boris gets cold feet and Theo sets off on his own.

Here is where Crowley makes a big decision and perhaps not a wise one. He has already pared to the bone Theo’s relationship with Welty’s business sidekick Hobie (Jeffrey Wright) and Pippa, the girl from the museum over whom Hobie has guardianship and Theo’s unattainable flame. Likewise, Theo’s friendship with Andy is glossed. Instead of continuing to telescope, Crowley chops. We next meet Theo as a young adult helping Hobie with his antiques and restoration shop in the Village. Somehow­—the novel explains it—Theo has been to college and looks and acts the part of a young entrepreneur. He still pines for Pippa, but is engaged to Kitsey Barbour and adored by her entire family. There’s nothing like a Boris sighting to stir the pot. What about the painting, you wonder? Yeah, there’s that and much more to resolve. By then, The Goldfinch is already working overtime.

It doesn’t help that the young actors portraying Theo and Boris are way more compelling than the adults who assume those roles (Ansel Elgort and Aneurin Barnard). There is also a jarring tonal shift: from character development to caper film. What the movie does best is raise questions about how much ugliness a life can endure before it corrupts the soul, but is a truncated adaptation needed to accomplish this?  One of the better reviews of The Goldfinch summed up the film nicely. If you’ve read the book, the movie will be eye candy; if you’ve not, you’ll probably be lost. Its best gift is to remind you why Donna Taart won the Pulitzer.

Rob Weir