It's (Not) Reigning Men
Our Culture No Longer Depicts Heroes
Trevor Noah, a comic I usually find slightly mediocre and predictable, hired to replace Jon Stewart on The Daily Show mainly because he was a DEI choice, has one good set on James Bond. Noah says he loves James Bond and always has and is saddened whenever an actor decides to leave the franchise. His bit is on the possibility of the first black James Bond, hypothetically played by Idris Elba, and how some fans decried this. Noah said at first he thought this was just prejudice, and then realized that in any movie where a British spy is expected to be both black and to elude super villains in Scottish villages and Swiss ski lodges the movie might be only 10 minutes long, ending with Elba hyperventilating in an alley, unable to escape his pursuers. It’s funny, and in passing he mentions how Bond is beloved by both men and women.
We don’t have James Bonds anymore.
I don’t just mean our current “intelligence community” is run by craven liars who interfere in the internal politics of western republics, rigging elections and censoring news. I mean we don’t have any depictions of heroic masculinity.
Two recent offerings show how far we have fallen.
Tracker is a detective show on the Paramount+ streaming platform, featuring a tall, blondish and handsome Justin Hartley as detective Colter Shaw. Hartley is 6’2”, which is notable because Tracker recalls the detective shows of a more “patriarchal” time, the 1970s. The NBC mysteries starred tall handsome hunks: MacMillan and Wife’s Rock Hudson (6’5”), McLoud’s Dennis Weaver (6’2”), Banacek’s George Peppard (6' even), and Cool Million’s James Farentino (5’11”). (Though there were eventually many detective shows in the NBC mystery line up, a couple even starring women, the most popular all starred tall men, with the exception of Columbo’s Peter Falk at 5’6”.) NBC also had tall detective hunks outside of its “mystery theater” brand, notably The Rockford Files, starring James Garner (6’2”). CBS had among its detective shows Barnaby Jones’ Buddy Ebsen (6’4”) arguably a silver fox.
So Tracker has an excellent pedigree, but it is missing one ingredient shared by these shows of tall, good-looking men who solve murders and free kidnap victims in about 40 minutes every week. One thing they shared with James Bond. Tracker has little or no humor. Colter Shaw is the child of a Unabomber style academic, who took his wife and sons to live off the grid in a forest. Someone killed him, probably one of the members of the family. And then none of them ever talked much about it, went their own ways, and have little to do with each other. Colter Shaw is a trauma victim.
(This isn’t just a U.S. problem. A friend recently turned me onto an Australian detective show Harrow, starring Ioan Gruffudd - 6 foot even - as a coroner/detective. But he’s always anxious, hiding a secret, which slowly slips out during the series.)
Even closer to Bond territory is the new movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. It’s a a gorgeous movie. It’s a caper movie, a kind of Ocean’s 11 reset in World War II, and for good measure reset to a port city that is allegedly unaligned, but falling under Nazi control, much like Martinique in To Have and Have Not (1944) or French Morocco in the better known Casablanca (1942). It’s also Suicide Squad. It’s based on real events and one of the people involved was a young Ian Fleming, then a naval intelligence officer. The people and events involved are where he got the idea for James Bond.
Ministry has lots of humor and a lot of pulchritude. Elza Gonzalez plays a half-Jewish Mata Hari, and Henry Cavill, an all grown up Alex Pettyfer, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, Cary Elwes and others play a group of sociopaths, criminal masterminds, and pyromaniacs who are freed from prisons so their “very special skills” can be used to fight the Nazis. They aren’t just an A Team of soldiers, they are an A-List of male models to whip any girl or boy who likes boys into a frenzy. And the director is definitely appealing to the audience’s erotic interest in the crew: Cavill is all long wavy hair and shirts showing tufts of chest fur; Pettyfer is rescued from Nazi interrogators who have him hanging by his wrists from the ceiling with electrified clamps attached to his nipples; Ritchson, playing a giant blond gay Dane, threatens one of the other crew members with seduction. And the lithe yet curvy Gonzalez has a variety of costume changes, each increasingly revealing.
Guy Ritchie and the other producers and directors need us to be made interested in the crew, including erotically, caring about what becomes of them. Because on paper they are kind of fucking nuts. They happily slaughter Nazi soldiers and Spanish and Italian police and other flunkies by the dozens, enjoying it a little too much, if that’s possible. (Cavill lets one, but only one, seaman who is barely old enough to have a beard leap off a boat to swim to safety.) The script is ambivalent about whether these guys are 100% alright in the head. When first meeting the Eliza Gonzalez character, the Henry Cavill character asks her why she is involved. She tells him her mother’s family were German Jews, already all murdered by the Nazis. He expresses condolences and she disdainfully says “I’m sure you’ll recover.” (In real life the two spies they are portraying went on to marry.)
James Bond wasn’t actually nuts. Though coincidentally the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, appears as a military intelligence officer helping direct the plan (working under Churchill) in Mystery, which is based on real events recorded in once classified documents. (Just to add to confusion the author of the book the movie is based on is Damien Lewis, who is around the same age but NOT the actor Damien Lewis.)
Heroic masculinity isn’t doing well on screen now. Even in sports movies it’s kind of 50/50, with every film about masculine achievement, like The Boys in the Boat, balanced by movies like Challengers, where a manipulative troubled woman plays two star male tennis athletes as her pawns, referring to them as her “little white boys.”
So we do have some heroic masculinity on screen. But apparently you can’t be brave and strong and tall and manly and also sane and witty. That would just be too much. In our current culture, we know there are no men that good, or that men can’t be that great. For that we need to watch old reels of George Lazenby and Sean Connery. At least until they let Henry Cavill play Bond.