This roundtable discussion was conducted over lunch one afternoon at Sunset Grill. Jim enjoyed liver with fava beans and a nice chianti. Noel had chicken salad on wheat toast. Adam had the remarkable Timpano di Macaroni. The editor has taken the liberty of dividing the discussion into three acts, just like a movie.

The First Rule of 'Fight Club'

ADAM ROSS: Maybe a good opening question would be: Is there some kind archetypal male identity running through American film, one that’s subject to small tweaks and changes, but remains consistent nonetheless. Or is male identity something that’s being overhauled in recent movies? Are the men we see in film these days a reflection of changing male identity, or are they a projection of what we hope it might become?

JIM RIDLEY: The short answer is yes.

AR: I’ll give you a perfect example. In Heat you have men whose work is so consuming that it destroys the possibility of family. De Niro’s thief lives by an ascetic code of self-preservation and discipline: “Be prepared to leave anything and anyone around you in 15 minutes.” Pacino’s detective is worried that home life will “rob him of his angst”—which is what keeps him sharp on the streets, and, therefore, alive. His marriage breaks up over the course of the movie while De Niro ditches his love interest to save his own hide. Both are very different conceptions of male identity than, say, Gary Cooper’s in High Noon.

JR: Except in both cases they represent a thread that runs through American movies, which is that what you do is what you are—and that’s especially true of men. And yet American movies do a generally poor job of portraying what work is like. A movie that I thought had a really interesting take on this was U-571, because every conflict and every amount of suspense comes from men doing their jobs. The dialogue is completely terse; every thing you find out about these men comes from how they respond to crisis situations.

AR: Well, if an operating definition of male identity in film is “man is what he does,” then Fight Club is the perfect example of male identity gone schizophrenic. I’d argue that Fight Club is saying something like, “man isn’t what he does—which is consume. Man is something else, something that’s deeply repressed by a culture that defines him this way.”

JR: I think a lot of these themes we see in film are borne out of the different ways people think about their jobs. It used to be that when you got an occupation it was cradle to grave. You thought your job would always take care of you: You’d put in your 30 years, then cash out. Now, the threat of downsizing hangs over your head in almost any kind of work you do, and I think that uncertainty makes men in particular feel a lot more threatened.

NOEL MURRAY: Sure. And in the case of Fight Club, you have the Edward Norton character who has a generic Joe job. He’s a recall auditor who makes a lot of money, but the job itself doesn’t really matter to him because he doesn’t take any pride in it. So he has to define himself by other things, which are the things that he buys. But that turns out to be empty as well. So he goes to all these 12-step groups but feels threatened when a woman encroaches upon his male bonding. So ultimately he defines himself by saying, “I am a man,” and he finds the group women can’t possibly get into, which is a group where men punch each other.

AR: I thought Fight Club is saying that in a consumer culture, men are cut-off from their essential nature. It’s not that they’re fighting to get away from women, but to get back to themselves as men.

JR: Or you could argue the flip side, which is that fighting is the only expression of men that is sanctioned by society. Sixty thousand people will pay $70 a ticket to see men slam the hell out of each other any Sunday at Adelphia, but a big portion of that crowd would be horrified to see two guys holding hands in Hillsboro Village. Take Beau Travail. Parts of that movie seemed way over-the-top, but as a portrait of male desire run amok in isolation, it’s probably not far off the mark. You have all these bare-chested legionnaires pounding each other in sweaty embraces, in this ritual that’s part calisthenics and part collision. And it isn’t a hug exactly. It’s like two trains smacking into each other. But the impression you get is that these legionnaires have all this emotion they want to express, and the only way they know how to do it is through combat as opposed to affection.

AR: What about American Beauty in all this? Jim makes the point that in times past one’s job was secure from cradle to grave. And yet it seems like in American Beauty you’re rooting for Lester Burnham because he responds to this new uncertainty by giving The Man the finger. There’s a way in which Burnham is seizing control of his life, but there’s also an element of nihilism to it. It’s as if Burnham says, “Well, I can just kiss this off,” and in the movie it’s treated as an act of heroism.

NM: Sure, because he’s figured out a way to screw the system. He can stay at home and get paid and not do any real work.

JR: Same thing in Fight Club too.

NM: As opposed to going to work and not doing any real work. Burnham has basically freed up eight hours a day and is still getting paid more or less the same money, but now he has eight hours a day to do what he wants with himself. And I think the question in both movies becomes, “What are you going to do with your time?” If you’re not defined by your work, what are you going to do with those eight hours a day? I mean, everyone’s dream these days more or less is either to be a millionaire by answering questions on TV, or to find a rat in your coke and strike it rich. But people don’t have a sense of what to do afterwards. Especially if you’re a man. If you’re a woman, you still have that socially sanctioned position that you can stay home and take care of kids and raise a family. But if you’re a man, and you don’t have a job to go to every day, but you still have disposable income, what you do with your time becomes a very interesting question. I think it’s odd that both those movies came out at the turn of the century.

JR: I think it’s interesting both those movies came out at the same time too. Because in both movies, you have consumer culture defined as feminine. In Fight Club, everything that’s wrong with the Edward Norton character at first is what’s most feminine about him.

AR: It’s deformed one character into a guy with “bitch tits.”

JR: Exactly.

AR: And in American Beauty, it’s suggested that Annette Bening’s spirit has been killed by this same crass materialism. She’s the one who is more concerned about staining her couch than reconciling with her husband.

JR: And she’s the one who’s always linked with selling and becoming the Queen of Real Estate. Lester is the one who buys all the toys, but it’s Bening’s character who’s portrayed as greedy and grasping. It’s OK for him to haul off and buy a muscle car, but she’s a bitch for buying this houseful of fancy furniture.

AR: Every male character in American Beauty is somehow bucking the system. You have the King of Real Estate, who may proclaim that you have to project an aura of success to be successful, but he’s not beyond using his success to screw someone else’s wife. You have Lester. You have the kid, who appears to be living by this code of discipline that his father mandates, but really he’s a drug dealer on the side. The only male character who isn’t bucking the system is the ex-soldier, and he’s still living so deeply within the system that his repression has driven everyone else away from him.

JR: Or driven them crazy.

AR: Or driven him to murder.

NM: Beating the system seems to be a recurring theme. Men present one face to their boss or their father to avoid a hassle, then go on and try to do what they really want to do with their time, which they’re not sure about.

JR: In the construct of American Beauty, the drug dealer is the hero of the movie, not Lester. He’s the romantic hope for the future. “We’ll escape with our $50,000 to the city,” he tells Lester’s daughter. I think that character represents a real shift in the way men are beginning to be portrayed in movies. At least young men. There’s a world of difference between the roles you saw young John Wayne or Gary Cooper or Lee Marvin play as opposed to the young male stars now. In the ’30s, Freddie Prinze Jr. would have been the ingenue in a musical.

AR: He would have been a wuss.

NM: Yeah, he might have been the sissy character. Or he might have been the nerdy guy the love interest is supposed to marry until she meets Cary Grant.

JR: But something else American Beauty is saying is that if you’re a man it’s less corrupt to be a drug dealer than it is to buy into this corporate system. It’s a watered-down version of Easy Rider, a kiss-off to suburban values. If you look at movies in the ’50s—Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? for instance, or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—the executive suite is held up as the American man’s dream, however satirically. He gets into a corporation for the rest of his life, works his way up till he gets a key to the executive washroom...

NM: All the way to The Graduate and plastics.

AR: But certain filmmakers in that era were already questioning this conception of male identity. There’s that great little wink Hitchcock gives the audience in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant’s character—who is a man completely defined by his ad exec job—lights a cigarette for Eva Marie Saint, and the initials on his monogrammed matchbook spell ROT. And if you look at the arc of the movie, Grant doesn’t rid himself of this rot inside of him until he leaves his mother and his job, and starts doing things to clear his name like climb the face of Mount Rushmore and beat up spies. Maybe that’s one of the early signs of fissures in the traditional idea of male identity.

JR: But there’s also this thread in American movies that men aren’t really men unless they’re bludgeoning somebody.

NM: I think we saw a whole lot of movies in the ’90s that used the crime genre—the pulp fiction genre—to comment on men and the society of men, and their jobs. You had Jackie Brown, which was about aging gangsters going in for one last score. And the movies were as much about these men and the way their romantic gangster jobs have turned into routine jobs where they have to report to their bosses. There seem to be a lot of movies playing on the ridiculousness of the idea of guys who wield guns for a living having to have supervisors and report in.

JR: But it’s also saying how little difference there is between killing people for a living and working for a corporate firm.

NM: Murders & Executions. Wasn’t that what “Mergers & Acquisitions” was called in American Psycho?

AR: And in Grosse Point Blank there’s the comic bit that Dan Aykroyd is trying incorporate all assassins. But in that movie, Cusack wants to get back into everyday society. He romanticizes the life of the everyman as a way out of his own corporate nightmare. He no longer wants to be defined by what he does—which is kill people.

JR: John Cusack pulls that off because he seems like such a regular guy. It’s Cusack’s big strong point as an actor. He doesn’t have the movie-star definition of charisma; he doesn’t look like someone who is genetically bred above his peers. But he has this quality that always makes your heart go out to him.

AR: You know, I’ve never admitted this, but my heart goes out to John Cusack too.

NM: Yeah, so does mine.

JR: Bite me.

Why can't we be friends?

JR: There haven’t been that many movies that explore what it’s like for guys to be friends. Like really close friends.

NM: High Fidelity had to do with male-bonding—the geeky-obsessive sub-genre—but bonding based on confrontation.

NM: I know more obscure Brit-pop albums than you do. And it’s that sort of one-upmanship that’s very much a part of male relationships at times.

JR: I think the male friendship movie has been folded into the gangster movie, or the posse movie.

AR: Because that kind of macho dressing and gun-toting hides any discomfort men have with sensitivity.

JR: Exactly. The prototype of the genre is Mean Streets, which is a gangster movie in the classic tradition. But it’s also a neo-realist account of a bunch of guys hanging out: the one buddy who drags you down, and the one buddy who feels compelled to look out for everyone else, and the one buddy who’s the badass. And there’s always a tension that these friendships are on the verge of something deeper, which is why the characters are all so anti-gay.

AR: The Deer Hunter is about male friendship, though it’s dressed up in fatigues.

NM: And fatigue.

AR: But the group of friends have the same configuration Jim described: You have De Niro, the warrior; Savage, the guy who brings them down; and then the innocent, Christopher Walken, who’s overcome by the world. He’s the one De Niro tries to save, but can’t. In a way, by saving him, De Niro’s trying to save his own innocence, trying to “bring the boy home” and return things to the way things were before the war. But he can’t. And there’s this strange thread of nihilism that runs through all these movies. You see it in Walken’s character, and De Niro’s in Mean Streets. There’s always one guy who has a death wish.

NM: Well, the fact is that in a society that operates by accepted norms, the approved match is a man and a woman, because a man and a woman can be partners and lovers. When you have a man, woman, and another guy, that throws things off. That’s the other thread in all of these movies where guys are friends. They’ve got their woman at home who doesn’t like them staying out late and is suspicious of the relationship. The underlying anxiety is that no good can come when two grown men are hanging out together and leaving their women at home.

AR: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid speaks to that point. No good does come from leaving the woman at home—so they take her with them. In fact, it’s Katherine Ross’ character who leaves them in South America. “The one thing I promised myself never to do is see you men die.” So she splits. And Butch and Sundance go down together in a blaze of suicidal glory.

JR: Well, sure—theirs is the movie’s real love story. Another example of Noel’s point is The Last Late Night, which is, other than Chuck & Buck, the most interesting movie I’ve seen this year about what it’s like for men to be friends. What it means to have a past with somebody who you’ve known for a long time who knows everything that’s wrong with you.

NM: And those secrets that you probably don’t even want your wife to know—those few secrets that are still left that you haven’t told her yet.

AR: But you don’t really think that male friendship taken to a certain degree is a threat to the species.

NM: Well that’s what’s unspoken in these movies. But looked at another way, it’s a staple of the caper film and the crime film: The loyalty to that one guy and how it screws you. “We can get out of here if we just stick together.” Look at Reservoir Dogs. Someone gets shot and now the friendship you’ve struck up with another “professional” is testing the limits of what you’re supposed to be doing for a living. You’re supposed to be a cold callous guy, but this affection for this other guy who it turns out is lying to you the entire time has endangered your life. Most film critics have pointed to the trends of a lot of postmodern, hip, ironic crime movies in the ’90s as being sort of goofy ways to play with genres. But maybe it’s also a way of talking about both work and about male friendship in a such a way that makes it both absurd and very real.

JR: I think one of the reasons that you’re finding this in a gangster movie is that the gunplay adds an element of heroism that maybe no one else considers is there.

NM: True. You certainly can’t make a war film these days because there’s no contemporary wars. Except for in Three Kings.

AR: Cutter’s Way is a perfect example of a film that explores male friendship. And like Heat, it ends with two men holding hands. Except they’re holding a gun together, and in that case, their woman has been killed because of John Heard’s almost nihilistic pursuit to get at the truth of a murder. And it ends with them committing a murder.

JR: So Noel’s right. No good can come from any of us getting too close.

AR: A movie that kind of surprised me was American Pie. The way men weren’t portrayed as sex-crazed partners in the all-out pursuit of trim, like in Porky’s. It’s not who’s going to screw first, but, “You know guys, I’m a little bit afraid of screwing.”

JR: But it’s both. I guess I’m kind of cynical. I think it has as much to do with the size of the female audience as it does with a shift in the way teen sex comedies view male sexuality.

NM: But that movie’s also about that break that has to happen at some point. This movie seems to acknowledge that once a teenage boy has sex with a woman he’s made a kind of commitment to that two-person relationship that we’re supposed to be in—man and woman. And all that time hanging around with your buddies—that’s gone. And that’s part of the fear men feel about intercourse with a woman. It’s like, “I’ve shared this intimate moment with you, and now I guess it’s you and me.” As opposed to me, my buddies, and occasionally you.

JR: But doesn’t American Pie end with all the guys back together?

AR: Yeah, but they’re toasting how these times are about to end.

JR: But the support group is men. You still get the idea that women are essentially unknowable. They’re at as much of a remove as the girl all the way over in Central Europe over the Internet.

NM: There are lots of movies like that. There’s Diner.

JR: There’s Barry Levinson’s career.

AR: Diner is contructed around the impossible trivia quiz the fiancée has to pass to become Guttenberg’s wife. If she fails, Guttenberg doesn’t have to marry her and he can still hang with the guys. And if she passes, well, essentially she is one of the guys.

JR: Noel’s wife is one of the guys.

AR: Mine too.

JR: I wonder if our wives think we’re one the girls.

TOUGH GUYS

JR: When I was growing up and would watch old movies, there were certain stars who represented different brands of masculinity.

NM: Jimmy Stewart.

JR: The gentle, conflicted family man, but who has a real backbone.

AR: But whose image Hitchcock completely deconstructed in both Rear Window and Vertigo.

NM: And Anthony Mann.

JR: Who did the same thing with Stewart in the ’50s, in these great psycho-Westerns like The Naked Spur. That’s one reason It’s a Wonderful Life is such a terrific movie. You get the Jimmy Stewart before the war, who’s this gawky ingenue; and the Jimmy Stewart after the war, who’s this paranoid, neurotic, scary character.

NM: Sean Connery.

JR: Bond, James Bond.

AR: Which is a kind of masculinity in and of itself. And which Hitchcock deconstructed in Marnie. The husband as animal tamer.

JR: He starts out in Marnie as this cool seducer, and when it doesn’t work he becomes a monster. He forces a woman to marry him, and then rapes her on their honeymoon. The only decent thing about him is that he loathes himself for it and learns from it. But it really punctures the whole James Bond mystique.

NM: John Wayne.

JR: The rugged westerner who settled the West—but because he settled it, he could never be part of it.

NM: And even he got deconstructed in The Searchers, showing the violence beneath that archetype.

JR: Clint Eastwood.

NM: Who deconstructed himself in Unforgiven, and showed the violence that lay beneath all those archetypes.

AR: Cary Grant.

JR: The last movie star I can think of that men emulated for both his manners and his elegance.

NM: And yet didn’t resent in some way, the way men might resent someone like Brad Pitt or George Clooney because they’re handsome. Cary Grant was handsome, but he was cool.

AR: Handsome, but not a pussy. I can’t respect Brad Pitt. He’s too pretty.

JR: I can respect him after Fight Club. I can respect anybody married to Jennifer Aniston.

AR: Maybe I’m just attracted to him and I’m repressing it.

NM: Jeff Bridges. He generally appears in films where he’s not carrying a gun or swaggering around, but in films where he’s sort of a passive observer of what’s going on, or is trying to effect change by his wit.

JR: In a ludicrous fashion in The Big Lebowski, when he tries to play detective and does things like the little rubbing on the pad that turns out to be a doodle of a penis.

AR: He’s passive-observer masculine.

JR: As am I.

AR: Woody Allen.

NM: It’s still hard to believe that Woody Allen was ever popular or a sex symbol, and yet in the ’70s, there were plenty of odd-looking people who became sex symbols.

AR: The standard of male beauty changed for a while and it became more a question of how witty you were than how rugged you were.

JR: Woody Allen made self-deprecation into a weapon. By being such a self-effacing shlub, he could get away with a lot of sexual aggression. It’s sort of like Spike Lee’s routine in She’s Gotta Have It.

NM: Elliott Gould.

AR: Donald Sutherland.

NM: And even though you had leading actors like Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood playing rugged male characters, they all had a loser streak to them. Think of Reynolds in Hooper or The Longest Yard. Broken-down, shambling guys.

AR: Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty.

JR: Nolte’s amazing in that. He’s a big strapping guy, with that kind of worn, weatherbeaten manliness you used to get in the ’50s from actors like Robert Ryan or Sterling Hayden. But he can play defeat, inner and outer, better than anybody. Especially in something like Affliction or The Prince of Tides. It’s even sadder coming from him, because he looks so indestructible.

AR: Alan Alda.

NM: Now in his movies, he played the sensitive guy to the hilt. At that time, the films that Alan Alda made, the character that he played on M.A.S.H., was wildly popular, but I find his character really a jerk, and I find his movies, which I loved as a kid, really hard to watch. Like Same Time Next Year or The Four Seasons.

AR: Because they’re so earnest.

JR: In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen uses Alda to represent everything that’s reprehensible about masculinity. The guy on the make who uses the phony sensitivity act.

NM: I wish people would use him more now.

AR: Woody Allen is pretty suspicious of the sensitive male. He gives Michael Caine’s character a good drubbing in Hannah and Her Sisters, the way he uses poetry to get laid. Then again, all guys use poetry to get laid.

JR: You think Allen never name-dropped Rilke to bag a babe? It’s all part of the mix. Allen presents himself as a screw-up, but never a sissy. He’s a big sports fan. He’s into jazz records.

NM: And beer. Every interview lately he plays down the Bergman-intellectual thing and talks about sitting around, watching the Knicks, and drinking a beer. That may still be a distortion of who the true Woody Allen is.

JR: That explains Small Time Crooks.

AR: Russell Crowe.

JR: Crowe has some of that gruff, solid masculine presence that Aldo Ray or Robert Mitchum had.

NM: Here’s a funny thing about Russell Crowe. Women love Russell Crowe, but male entertainment writers don’t seem to get him.

JR: Which is funny, because in real life, apparently, Crowe is a badass. He’s a rocker; he has no compunctions about jumping another guy’s wife or punching somebody out. On screen, he doesn’t have anything like Mitchum’s lazy menace or sexual magnetism. Off screen, Crowe sounds like a great Mitchum character.

NM: We’ve left a million guys out. Like Nicholson, Bogie, Hoffman.

JR: Like Voight, Lemmon, Kirk and Michael Douglas. Like Duvall.

AR: Like Hackman, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. Like Kevin Costner.

JR: He’s the perfect male archetype in Bull Durham. He’s part bookworm, part overgrown kid, but at the same time he has a kind of rueful sophistication about women, relationships, and life. He knows about all that sensitive stuff, and he’s not going to hit you over the head with it. But when the time comes, he can unsnap a garter belt without consulting a manual.

NM: Best performance of his career.

AR: And then he grew gills and drank his own piss.