Abandoning Cliches in Films About Men
First of all, let’s abandon one idiotic cliché about men’s movies:
They’re all shoot-em-up, sexist, unconscionably violent sublimations of violence that appeal to the barely-latent homosexual that resides in all macho tough guys. And that’s the polite way of saying it. Do these other ways sound familiar?
Guy Movies Are Violent – Violence Drives the Storyline.
Violence Has No Consequences – Two Thousand People Die in the Opening Scene but We Don’t Notice Because Our Hero is Still Alive
The World is Good or Bad – Forget Subtle, Forget Crying, Forget Love. Shoot those fuckers. Unless you can fuck those fuckers. Then fuck ‘em. Then shoot ‘em.
The problem a lot of men have with these ideas isn’t that they’re wrong.
There’s a lot of movies that seem pretty hell-bent on displaying the worst of the Y chromosome. And the fact that some of these awful films are big hits is something to either celebrate (what diversity in cinema!) or lament (you dumb motherfuckers will see anything that blows up, won’t you?).
So it’s not because these descriptors are wrong. That’s not the problem.
The problem is that they’re incomplete.
Yes, guy movies can be shoot-em up gorefests where tough guys look about a 40oz away from making out with their cop partner or road trip buddy. And if your girlfriend or spouse or even your boyfriend wants to go to a movie tonight, you probably have a few of these movies to choose from.
But here’s why it’s incomplete.
These are crappy movies.
Believe it or not, not every moneymaking movie is a good choice. And not every direct-to-video flick is awful (although most of them are). The “guy movies” that are the easy layups for clichéd headlines are guy movies.
Godfather I and Godfather II were men’s movies. I do not know what the hell happened with Godfather III. But we won’t be talking about it.
We will not be including Bat Pussy in our exploration of men’s sexuality.
We will politely pretend that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was never given wide release in cinemas.
The Bill Cosby film series will also be ignored, not out of revulsion for his personal behavior, but out of revulsion for his actual films. This includes an explicit reminder that neither reason would strike us so deeply if he hadn’t reached us so beautifully on television and stage.
We must always remember that Paul Verhoeven is Dutch, and little else needs to be said about that.
Subtitled films are rare for our lists. Not because world cinema doesn’t have some incredible men’s movies – Cinema Paradiso, for instance, is a man’s man film, and if you can watch it without feeling, then you are a bastard – but because aesthetics is culturally specific. Some of the stuff made for native audiences (any of Gerard Depardieu’s comedies in French, for instance) don’t succeed in translation.
So, Let’s talk about movies for men.
Film school kids have their criteria, and so do their professors. Gaffers have theirs. Lawyers have theirs. But those lists wind up to be life-view-affirming lists. In other words, movies that show me people I know and like are usually the main qualification for the lists.
We’ll get to some examples of where that bias makes recommendations seriously flawed – but that’s the subject for another list.
Our recommendations are based on the idea of a spectrum. I suck at top ten lists; I can’t narrow anything down, and the endless arguments about what film is left out or what should be number 1 just drain a person’s soul for no reason.
In the spectrum of men’s movies, we have two extreme ends:
On one side resides the “self-indulgent prick” type of film. The auteur oeuvre. The kind that people talk about when they think they’re talking about men’s films. At their worst, they are the Guy Films; but at their best – and some of them are damn good, the truths they tell are revealing about misplaced passion, frustrated dreams, and confusion about a man’s role in the world.
So, one side of the spectrum tends to display unmoored, violent passions –
And that’s a hard topic to do well. For every “Point Break” (1993), there are dozens of “Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever” abominations. (There’s only one “Ecks vs. Sever,” thank all things holy for that.)
But the keynote is people struggling to control crazy levels of passion – for women, for revenge, for past wrongs, for deep losses – and while fantasy wish-fulfillment is part of what keeps us going to these movies, the worst ones confuse the action for the wishes it makes real.
A B-movie director, retired on Maui, told me there that he could sell any film, no matter how bad, if the video box had a big-titted woman in a bikini holding a gun. “So if you can sell that many bad movies, what the hell are you wasting your time trying to make good movies for?”
Because craft matters to men, and we have the films to prove it.
On the other side of the spectrum, the films are about as different as you expect. Men have a desire to see calm, rational expressions of passion through art, jobs, and relationships. (By the way, we always have. For as long as stories have been told, heroes have been at their center). If you had to assign a quote to the topic, it would be “the world does certainly seem to run fairly well when people know what the fuck they’re doing” genre.
You can doll up the genres that this end of the spectrum brings to mind: the Warrior’s Journey is a popular way of looking at it. The story of what men can achieve together (and not because women aren’t there, that’s another message entirely) – but tropes and genres aren’t quite sufficient to label this end of the spectrum. Because these films, like films about passions and pain, are represented in all genres.
You could go nuts trying to organize so many lists. But the truth is simpler than that:
The farthest point on the spectrum away from “actual porn” is in fact “confidence porn.”
Despite how easy “Apollo 13” makes it look, this kind of film is tough to make properly. Films that aspire to confidence porn can veer into cliché so easily that there’s a whole slew of films that are simply unwatchable.
If anyone on the producing team loses confidence in the film, you wind up with the “coaxing the super-competent-but-depressed-and-drunk guy off of a barstool and getting him to do his job again” scene, which almost never works.
That’s it. After all the slicing and dicing, it boils down to this:
Almost all films for men exist somewhere between actual porn and confidence porn.
There are genres in between, but if you look closely, most of them lean decidedly toward one or the other of these two poles:
- Disaster flicks
- Cop Movies
- Superheroes
- Sports Movies
- Fantasy Movies
- Sci-Fi Movies
- Courtroom Dramas
- Biopics
- Road Trip Movies
- Melodramas.
That’s a lot of different types of movies.
Thank god we have professors studying them for us.
Actually, there’s more than one industry dedicated to studying them. But we do have academics parsing film by film to determine where each title belongs (Is “Field of Dreams” a sports movie or a melodrama?). This is a noble effort which allows academics to feel like filmmakers without ever having to subject themselves to the risk of making a film. Or, more importantly, it’s an industry that allows us to remain generally unbothered by the shitstorm of bad movies that academics make whenever somebody funds them.
Because You Liked “The Shawshank Redemption,” We Recommend “Powerpuff Girls.”
The second industry is more interesting at the moment. The field of data science is enjoying the work you can do with movies. Netflix is famous for its “recommendation engine,” which takes note of what you watch, how long or how often you watch it, and compares that data with the same small choices from millions of other subscribers. So when it says “recommended for you” on the main menu, it’s not an accident, and it’s not based on movies you took the time to actually rate (it used to matter more if you rated the movie – but that was always a dubious measure).
You Don’t Watch What You Say You Watch
What makes the Netflix engine more interesting than most academics’ work is that Netflix is based on choices you make when deciding how to spend unmeasured time. Put another way: it’s based on decisions you make when nobody’s looking. As a result, it tends to be more reliable.
Remember, PBS used to do much better in the ratings when ratings were collected by response books. Actual booklets were mailed to “Nielsen Families,” who marked what they watched every week, and PBS did pretty well. “I love me some Great Performances! Gimme more ‘dat opera!” And then people were more than a bit surprised when cable boxes came out and revealed that the National Anthem airing at the end of the night on network TV was far more widely watched than anything on PBS.
And it turns out that such recommendation engines aren’t even that tough to write. I’m writing one. This subsection of the website is the beginning of the project.
You Don’t Watch Movies from Lists
And I don’t particularly like writing them. But when you’re a psychotherapist who works with men, eventually, you realize that you spend a lot of time answering questions motivated by movies. Sometimes it’s straightforward: “Dude, is there even a movie that talks about this?” Or sometimes it’s “do you know ANYTHING I can watch with her without me falling asleep or her calling me an idiot?” Or even “Can you recommend a movie that *I* can recommend so my wife will think I’m interesting?”
At first, I’d go to the movies I knew and liked best – like most of us do. And I have the luxury of having some experience in the field, both as a lapsed academic and a maker of bad movies. So my suggestions were fairly wide-ranging.
But after a while, I realized I was trying to pigeonhole the same movies for different purposes. Or I’d go to one of my favorites a bit too often, and suddenly, the session was about my taste in movies and not the needs of the man in front of me. And that’s how you get a crappy counselor.
So, when I boiled down what I was really most clinically qualified to recommend in films for men, I realized there was only one criterion:
Don’t Waste Your Time on Shitty Movies
There are exceptions to this commandment. If you deliberately decide to watch a shitty movie – which should be a group activity, like drinking champagne – then go ahead. If you watch crap movies alone, you’re effectively drinking Mad Dog 20/20 out of a paper bag. And that’s an offense.
And never apologize for liking bad movies. Just don’t mistake them for good ones. And know that the more lousy movies you watch, the harder it will be to spot the good ones.
