The Unruly Man?

Masculine aggression in film and tv has been puzzling me lately.

As part of my thesis, I've been working through Kathleen Rowe's theory of "The Unruly Woman," a transgressive character type in the genre of comedy who disrupts gender conventions by exhibiting an unbecoming physicality. The unruly woman is slobbish, loud, and funny. Think Roseanne Arnold and Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids and you've got the idea. Thanks to her comedy, the unruly woman is able to pose her female physicality as problematic and laughable in order to subvert expectations of women on screen, thus occupying a feminist position.

Is there such thing as the unruly man, though? If we try floating the idea of gender conformity to men in film and television, we get figures like James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Edward Cullen, who rather become their physicality and use it to assert their masculinity. In other words, their bodies are never at odds with their characters, and these bodies actually trigger or reinforce their character's causality.

I'd like to examine cases, though, where physicality goes to the extreme and ends up possibly subverting these characters' own power. We watch them move from protagonists to antagonists when this happens. Perhaps this is where we find the unruly man.

One actor portrays this principle beautifully (or brutally). Matthias Schoenaerts, star of Rust and Bone (2012) and Bullhead (2011) is a burly 6'2" and gained a massive 70 pounds of muscle for Bullhead, in which he plays a cattle farmer who gets mixed up with illegal testosterone.  Similarly, in Rust and Bone, he is an underground boxer who smashes competitors' teeth out for a living. I won't give away any plot details of these films, because they are excellent and you should watch them, but I will say that in both instances, the third-act story arcs involve Schoenaerts's physical strength in tricky, dangerous situations.

Schoenaerts in Rust and Bone

Another classic example of this physical brutality indicating a mental spiraling is Fight Club's Tyler Durden. He starts off as a sexy, violent ideal, but his (imaginary) presence has damaging physical effects on his alter-ego's body. And more recently, there's Adam in Girls, who is often shirtless, takes out his aggression issues on his woodworking projects, and escalates to unhealthy, borderline sexual assault in the end of the second season. He is the only one of my examples to be somewhat redeemed, when he runs (again, shirtless) across Brooklyn to save Hannah from her crippling OCD. By the way, Hannah is another unruly woman - she and Adam make a great unruly match.

Of course, men's self-destruction through fights, drugs, alcohol, or other means happens a lot in movies and television (Hank Moody, anyone?) but I think what's different here is that in the characters I describe, their physical nature does not coincide with acceptable forms of masculinity. Instead of being commended for their strength, and their ability to use violence to overcome the bad guys, they have traits of the bad guys brewing in them. They are too strong, too agressive, too threatening. Most of all, they can't keep this agression in check, and it costs them the viewer's sympathy as favorable representations of men. When I watch these men, I am constantly negotiating my own distance from them, trying to forgive them for their corporal mistakes, and trying to dig into their interiority which their bodies so problematically eschew.

I have no idea if others have this reaction when they watch strong, conflicted men who take their emotions out using violence. But I am definitely glad that these characters exist, however threatening they feel, because underneath their exaggerated hypermasculinity lies stirrings of the current crisis of masculine identity that deserves more attention in the media. The question remains, though: can the unruly man take up a feminist position that advocates for a more nuanced portrayal of men in the cinema?

I am a Media Voyeur

I spent this past weekend away from media, in a summer house in Birkerød, Denmark with some of my hallmates. Good food, beautiful views and more than enough cultural immersion (some of it exhausting, namely the 48-hour imperative to speak Danish) left me liberated from my media-saturated lifestyle in Copenhagen. But like any addiction, I found myself craving film as soon as I got back yesterday. So I watched Soderbergh's first feature sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which left me as conflicted about film as ever.

There's us, waiting for the bus. 

In the film, Ann is a prudish newlywed, John is her cheating husband, Cynthia is her sister who is sleeping with John, and Graham is John's friend from college who invades and disrupts their lives with his voyeuristic sexual fetish. He calls himself impotent ever since he admitted he is a pathological liar, and his only sexual activity is to record women talking about their sexual activity. When Ann finds out that her husband is cheating with her sister, she decides to make a tape for Graham, which is the fastest way to splitting up their marriage as she can think of. The film is eerie, introspective, and sensitive, and while it's a film whose style normally would affect me positively, I found it made me uncomfortable. 

Not because of the sexual content, but because it made me think seriously about how much media I consume. This is an undercurrent that has been bothering me for a while now, and it, strangely or not strangely enough, came to a head when the film exposed its characters for being voyeurs. Now, the concept of voyeurism in film is not new, nor is it new to me--Hitchcock and Mulvey come to mind--but what's new for me is the realization that perhaps all media is a type of voyeurism, albeit a non-sexual type. Well, maybe I'm not a voyeur but a gleaner of experiences through media that I ought to be having on my own. 

I've written about this vicarious adventuring and loneliness before here, but now I'm starting to worry that I rely on film and television to teach me lessons instead of living them. This comes particularly into my worldview with regards to interpersonal relationships; like the episodic structure of television, I expect resolution at the turn of every new emotion, experience, interaction. This impulse to rely on stories to give structure to my experiences is even more intense when it comes to romance (damn you, romantic comedies!). I remember seeing Garden State in high school and subsequently expecting my romantic connections to be as instantaneous and deep as they were in that film. My friend Kristian who limits his television consumption to "only things that are funny" tells me that I think in very "macro" terms about how men and women are instead of just learning about individuals, and I worry that media representations and generalizations of gender have a lot to do with this.  Media even helps me imagine a future I may or may not have decided for myself yet, but I can't see it any other way than what's portrayed in the stories I consume. 

I think observing Kenneth Burke's idea that "stories are equipment for living" is a totally useful and necessary practice, but the problem for me happens when I use stories as a crutch, or when my self-worth and identity are too formed by external stimuli. This became clear this weekend, when in the midst of a full-blown experience (read: party) I found myself lagging back and not fully engaging, because I felt uncomfortable not being able to be myself in a foreign language and place. So instead of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and trying to embrace the moment, I observed the behavior of others (which was of course amusing). I kept coming back to a certain question, though. When you don't feel like yourself, what's better: leaning into this discomfort to try to make the most of it and eliminate your 'voyeurism,' or listen to your feelings and come to terms with them? This is a question I usually don't have to ask, because media provides the escape. 

So, maybe in order investigate what I really enjoy doing apart from consuming media, I have to stop consuming media!