I am devastated by the news that Bloomington-Normal DSA has voted to dissolve itself and I will write a proper post-mortem about the organization soon. However, I only found out that DSA had decided to dissolve less than 24 hours before returning to America for Christmas with my family, I have not had the time to collect my thoughts. On the plane back, however, I found myself without a book to read and had to resort to inflight entertainment. During my flight, I watched three movies that offer three windows into masculinity in the twenty-first century: 300, The Lighthouse, and Joker.
300 (2006, dir. Zach Snyder) has been talked about to death. The vaguely neofascist mythicization of the ancient battle offers an image of independent, rational, white, and heroic Greeks standing against oriental despotism. The film makes this explicit as the 300 Spartan warriors reject the advice of the traditional Greek oracles who use superstition to elicit bribes from the Persian state. At one humorous point in the film, the Spartan politician Theron (played by Dominic West) denounces King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) for having gone to war in violation of the Spartan constitution, however, near the end of the film his revealed to not be interested in the Spartan constitution (and “Spartan” norms like military honor) but rather paid by the Persians. The Persians themselves are ugly, deformed, and most importantly, not white. But the film offers a simple, and extremely homoerotic, the image of masculine friendship. The men fight for themselves and each other, their higher calling is, to borrow a phrase, “being together with the guys,” and that is why the film is so popular. Erik (Lynch) likes to jokingly describe the “masculine urge to die on a barricade,” but that image is exemplified here. Happiness comes from a place of comradeship, 300 is about that joy.
The Lighthouse (2019, dir. Robert Eggers) strips men of that comradeship and leaves two men (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) alone on a rock. Their psychosexual descent into madness has the two men form a close relationship that keeps them going until Robert Pattinson snaps over Dafoe hoarding the one sexual release on the island. Sex was well represented in 300 as well, however, (and unlike the real Spartans), the heroes receive fulfilling sexual release from their wives while the villains have harams whose women will make love not out of enjoyment, but out of service to the Persian emperor. There is no sexual tension between the men, they find their enjoyment outside the bonds of male friendship whereas the extended isolation of The Lighthouse pushes this primal competition to the breaking point and destroys a male friendship. The implications are obvious, but The Lighthouse is an excellent movie that should be more widely watched and contains themes much deeper than male friendship.
Joker (2019, dir. Todd Phillips) needs no introduction. What happens to men when there are alone? They snap. The isolation breaks them, and they go out into the world, violent. When men are raised expecting 300 and experiencing something closer to The Lighthouse this is what happens to them, this is a movie about incels. It’s no coincidence that the two movies were released in the same year, and they pair excellently. Joker is about a lot more than male alienation, but it is an important theme. In Joker, we see an image of isolation and sadness that is reinforced by the idealization of semi-fascist friendship. It is a fundamentally right-wing image of masculine friendships, yes, but it is also an extremely popular image of how men get along, “boys being boys.” 300 is the masculine ideal, The Lighthouse is an image of lived reality, and Joker is the only visible way out of that horrible reality.
The Air France flight catalog was quite something, I recommend the three as holiday viewing (although not with family).
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 