A Star Wars Man

Alyssa Rosenberg has a nice response to a weird article by Wesley Morris in the Boston Herald. Morris is dredging up the tired argument that Hollywood has a representational void of the American brand of masculinity. Alyssa addresses the absurdities of the argument well -

He sees elements of it in everyone from Clark Gable to Clint Eastwood, and complains that it, whatever it is, is lacking in younger men of today. If he had a firm definition to work from, it might be possible to make that exclusion definitively. But Gable and Eastwood are really only two points on a continuum, and not even definitive end points of it...But just because we've moved beyond once kind of dominant performance for men doesn't mean a total loss: if you lose one kind of role, but gain many others, I think that's probably a net benefit for male actors across the board.

Morris sees the beginning of the end for the Gable-era masculinity with the popularization of the Method form of acting, which doesn't make much sense at all. I can't be certain at all, but were people complaining about the loss of real men in Hollywood when Paul Newman and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino were the leading men? Instead, I think, like most things in my lifetime, the argument can be traced back to Star Wars. As Chuck Klosterman put it -

Studied objectively, Luke Skywalker was not very cool. But for kids who saw Empire, Luke was The Man. He was the guy who we wanted to be. Retrospectively, we'd like to claim Han Solo was the single-most desirable character - and he was, in theory. But Solo's brand of badass cool is something you can't understand until you're old enough to realize that being an arrogant jerk is an attractive male quality.

But the argument that the new generation of American male actors was not masculine enough, at least in my lifetime, I think started with Titanic and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. You could try, like Morris, to validate your argument by couching it in historical comparisons, but a more defensible argument would be to say that Kate Winslet looked too old for DiCaprio, and that turning Darth Vader into a whiny brat and casting Hayden Christensen were two decisions that even my 13-year old self knew was completely wrong. And so, when all those kids who grew up wanting to be Luke Skywalker realized that Han Solo was the cooler character (and the only one with a chance at getting the girl) they were forced to watch the single most evil character of the trilogy turn into Luke Skywalker Sr. It might even lead people to speak in rhetorical circles trying to argue the lack of stoically cool male characters years after the fact - and especially whenever DiCaprio has another movie coming out like The Aviator where his youthfulness can be a distraction - when there is no such crisis at all.