Grouch/Countergrouch
Apr. 23rd, 2012 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueEsquire is another of those magazines that, like Rolling Stone, we seem to get each month but never pay for, which is all right with me. Esquire sometimes has dispatches by Chuck Klosterman, and publishes a monthly letter from the editor that is actually worth reading. (I wish frontispiece letters from the editor were not so ingrained in publishing. I know they're meant to be welcoming, but most are an exercise in dull vanity - I worked hard, so damnit I get the opening number.) It does good reporting on just about every subject that's not entertainment, as long as you skip any that pontificate on the essential nature of woman. (I don't care whether it's a women's magazine or a men's magazine; that article is always worth skipping.)
This month's 1000-word grouch (and I love a good professional grouching; I seek them out) puts forward the observation that our rebel heroes these days tend to be in the Holden Caulfield model - white extended-adolescents with money to fall back on. It's a double fantasy - not only do we have the insulation of living vicariously through rebels on the screen and in books, but even those rebels are going to be perfectly safe and get bailed out of any rebellious situation that goes south. Which makes it a little hard to call them heroes, or even rebels; they absolutely lean on and exploit the status quo.
All well and good, as observations go. I dig it.
It then veers off into a rant about the neo-indie aesthetics of quirkiness. Which, again, I can get behind. I like a highly stylized point of view. How much do I love Terry Gilliam or Wes Anderson at their best? How fond am I of Edward Gorey, or Adam West's Batman? But those things have substance underneath their style. Their point of view is genuine. You can't make me like a movie just by slapping a bunch of dutch angles on it. It's like mass-produced Arts and Crafts furniture where none of the pieces quite fit together and the veneer is chipping off. Imitation has to go deeper than the surface, or the whole thing falls apart. I was vicious about Garden State before it was cool to be vicious about Garden State.
The grand grouch concludes that we need to reject quirky Wes Anderson heroes and go back to good manly standards like Dirty Harry, and that right there that is the point where it loses me. Even if I was the sort of person who wanted to go backward instead of forward - and I am not; set warp drive to 9 full stop - I would certainly not want to go back to a rebel hero who is essentially antisocial. Give me Robin Hood; I'll take it. Che, even, if you want to give me a spruced-up and camera-ready Che. I don't want that motherfucker from Falling Down.
This is the problem with manly, as currently defined. It doesn't stand for anything except "not girly." Be a man instead of a little girl. Don't throw like a girl. Don't cry like a girl. Don't wear things or drink things that are girly. But we know how little girls are defined. All right, they're little. Little girls are little. I don't have anything against little, but I can also see why you'd want to be able to reach the top shelf without a stepladder. All the counter heights are made for 6 foot men. Little people are more comfortable in the 19th century chairs in old concert halls, but possibly going to concerts is girly. I like going to concerts.
Mostly, little girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. This is what I've been told. They're pretty, and they smell good, and they're friendly, and they invite you to tea parties, and they think flower fairies are cool. You can hand them babies and other small delicate things and they know how to be careful. If you give them half a chance, they will glue lace and sparkles and curlicues on everything. If you hurt them, they will be surprised, and they will cry, because they trusted you. Then they will give you a chance to apologize, and after that you can be friends again.
For manliness to be the opposite of girly, it has to be ugly, smelly, actively unfriendly, drop babies on their heads, and sneer at fairies and tea parties. It has to smash things up. It has to distrust you up front and then hate you forever when you win a game that wasn't really a game, it turns out. Even as I write that, it sounds glamorous, because we have a whole industry glamorizing it and selling it to us. But I don't want that in my life. I don't celebrate it. I don't allow it in my house, and I sure don't want to be it. It sounds exhausting. It sounds lonely. It sounds incompetent.
I want to escape the imposition of girly. I do. I don't think there need to be curlicues everywhere. Glitter is impossible to get out of the carpet. I want chili dogs some of the time instead of just tea parties. I am not myself known to be friendly or forgiving, or even approachable. I like the curves of Art Nouveau, but also the stark surfaces of a science lab. I think a lot of things worth doing are not pretty, surgery among them. Consensus is often wrong, and sometimes things need to be torn down. Other times, things need to be built up. Which is why it's stupid to think about manly or girly. I'd rather think about categories like compassionate, useful, insightful, delighting.
It seems to me the people trying to find that new way, that way that widens girliness into a broader sphere and looks at how it responds to conflicts that can't be resolved through tea parties and apologies, people looking for an adult girliness - those people are making stuff that looks like Wes Anderson's stuff. Sure, a lot of them are drips. The semiotics of girlhood presume both whiteness and money, and trying to solve the world's problems with an assumption of whiteness and money is not going to work. And sure, the heroes of these girly stories are inevitably young men, because the way to show reverence for girlhood is to take it away from girls, who are doing it wrong because they're girls.
But not even Clint Eastwood likes Dirty Harry. That type of masculinity has never been good for society, or the people who practice it. Lone wolves are lone wolves because no pack is fool enough to let them stay around, or because they themselves are so wounded they attack anyone who would help. Let's pack that idea of manliness away. Not just to protect the little girls, but to protect the little boys. Who cry. Who have friends. Who think flower fairies are pretty cool.
This month's 1000-word grouch (and I love a good professional grouching; I seek them out) puts forward the observation that our rebel heroes these days tend to be in the Holden Caulfield model - white extended-adolescents with money to fall back on. It's a double fantasy - not only do we have the insulation of living vicariously through rebels on the screen and in books, but even those rebels are going to be perfectly safe and get bailed out of any rebellious situation that goes south. Which makes it a little hard to call them heroes, or even rebels; they absolutely lean on and exploit the status quo.
All well and good, as observations go. I dig it.
It then veers off into a rant about the neo-indie aesthetics of quirkiness. Which, again, I can get behind. I like a highly stylized point of view. How much do I love Terry Gilliam or Wes Anderson at their best? How fond am I of Edward Gorey, or Adam West's Batman? But those things have substance underneath their style. Their point of view is genuine. You can't make me like a movie just by slapping a bunch of dutch angles on it. It's like mass-produced Arts and Crafts furniture where none of the pieces quite fit together and the veneer is chipping off. Imitation has to go deeper than the surface, or the whole thing falls apart. I was vicious about Garden State before it was cool to be vicious about Garden State.
The grand grouch concludes that we need to reject quirky Wes Anderson heroes and go back to good manly standards like Dirty Harry, and that right there that is the point where it loses me. Even if I was the sort of person who wanted to go backward instead of forward - and I am not; set warp drive to 9 full stop - I would certainly not want to go back to a rebel hero who is essentially antisocial. Give me Robin Hood; I'll take it. Che, even, if you want to give me a spruced-up and camera-ready Che. I don't want that motherfucker from Falling Down.
This is the problem with manly, as currently defined. It doesn't stand for anything except "not girly." Be a man instead of a little girl. Don't throw like a girl. Don't cry like a girl. Don't wear things or drink things that are girly. But we know how little girls are defined. All right, they're little. Little girls are little. I don't have anything against little, but I can also see why you'd want to be able to reach the top shelf without a stepladder. All the counter heights are made for 6 foot men. Little people are more comfortable in the 19th century chairs in old concert halls, but possibly going to concerts is girly. I like going to concerts.
Mostly, little girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. This is what I've been told. They're pretty, and they smell good, and they're friendly, and they invite you to tea parties, and they think flower fairies are cool. You can hand them babies and other small delicate things and they know how to be careful. If you give them half a chance, they will glue lace and sparkles and curlicues on everything. If you hurt them, they will be surprised, and they will cry, because they trusted you. Then they will give you a chance to apologize, and after that you can be friends again.
For manliness to be the opposite of girly, it has to be ugly, smelly, actively unfriendly, drop babies on their heads, and sneer at fairies and tea parties. It has to smash things up. It has to distrust you up front and then hate you forever when you win a game that wasn't really a game, it turns out. Even as I write that, it sounds glamorous, because we have a whole industry glamorizing it and selling it to us. But I don't want that in my life. I don't celebrate it. I don't allow it in my house, and I sure don't want to be it. It sounds exhausting. It sounds lonely. It sounds incompetent.
I want to escape the imposition of girly. I do. I don't think there need to be curlicues everywhere. Glitter is impossible to get out of the carpet. I want chili dogs some of the time instead of just tea parties. I am not myself known to be friendly or forgiving, or even approachable. I like the curves of Art Nouveau, but also the stark surfaces of a science lab. I think a lot of things worth doing are not pretty, surgery among them. Consensus is often wrong, and sometimes things need to be torn down. Other times, things need to be built up. Which is why it's stupid to think about manly or girly. I'd rather think about categories like compassionate, useful, insightful, delighting.
It seems to me the people trying to find that new way, that way that widens girliness into a broader sphere and looks at how it responds to conflicts that can't be resolved through tea parties and apologies, people looking for an adult girliness - those people are making stuff that looks like Wes Anderson's stuff. Sure, a lot of them are drips. The semiotics of girlhood presume both whiteness and money, and trying to solve the world's problems with an assumption of whiteness and money is not going to work. And sure, the heroes of these girly stories are inevitably young men, because the way to show reverence for girlhood is to take it away from girls, who are doing it wrong because they're girls.
But not even Clint Eastwood likes Dirty Harry. That type of masculinity has never been good for society, or the people who practice it. Lone wolves are lone wolves because no pack is fool enough to let them stay around, or because they themselves are so wounded they attack anyone who would help. Let's pack that idea of manliness away. Not just to protect the little girls, but to protect the little boys. Who cry. Who have friends. Who think flower fairies are pretty cool.
