In the modern age, male characterization on screen has narrowed into several categories.
The first is the two-dimensional, muscle-bound colossus like The Rock or Jason Momoa, who are such a force of nature they don’t really need too much of a personality.
Then there’s the intense, slender, nice guy archetype, such as Spiderman, the stern, well-groomed institutional figure.
Don’t forget the conspicuously aging legacy character, as played by the likes of Tom Cruise.
At the same time, male characterization from the cinema of the past has taken on a kind of quaintness, it is often seen as wooden, or stilted, the performances having a kind of contrived staunchness.
This is a shame, because modern Hollywood is bereft of compelling male characters, either because the culture has changed, and there is less of an emphasis on the modern leading man, or there are many screenwriters who have an impulse to deconstruct that idea of a traditional leading man, or a disinterest in setting films in places where men are likely to thrive and take the lead, such as frontiers, conflicts and working class laboring contexts.
What I think is most likely, is that these screen writers, who’ve emerged out of the college and cultural milieu of California, with little life and work experience not involving a laptop, don’t really understand or know how to depict inherently masculine identity
Nor do they know much about masculine traits, masculine social dynamics, masculine psychology or masculine apprehension of the world.
Men often have to assert themselves against the scrutiny of other men, who will assess whether there are any pretensions, inauthenticity, affections or fragility.
All of this is done without men being all that demonstrative – men have always ideally carried themselves in an undemonstrative way, they draw attention and even speculation to themselves through a subdued confidence that makes them the social center of gravity.
Unfortunately, in the modern age of Hollywood screenwriting, infused with several decades of clumsily conflating male inexpressiveness with emotional immaturity, these male dynamics have faded a huge deal.
Now you have a whole bunch of characters who are a bunch of things dudes dislike and find tedious in other guys – overly earnest, or full of too much energy, or overly self-deprecating, or tensely fretful.
The great male actors of yesteryear, like Paul Newman, or Robert Redford, or Sidney Poitier, or Steve McQueen, understood the deep registers of irony in interactions, especially with other men.
Oftentimes, they were more silent than speaking, they cleaved to the rule in acting training that a great deal of acting isn’t delivering your line, but how you react to the last line that was just delivered to you.
They would stand into a middle distance of ironic contemplation and continue to size up who they were talking to at the same time as they would deliberate on their answers.
Below the dialogue there would be pushes and pulls, subtle concessions and dismissals.
These male dynamics relied on something modern Hollywood doesn’t make much allowance for nowadays: time.
In male psychology, dominance and assertion has a lot to do with who is controlling the pace and rhythm of an exchange.
Just like in boxing, where one competitor might flail against the other, who is absorbing it by leaning back into the ropes, the more one guy becomes overly-expressive, the pace increases, the more he appeals to reason, the more he can find himself in a passive position, wilting under the quiet ironical assessment of the other.
These kinds of dynamics take time, and intuition to develop and get across.
They also take actors who inherently understand this kind of stuff.
Modern filmmaking has accelerated to such an extent that it is all about hustling from one scene or action set piece to the next, of films overly crowded with CGI and characters that there’s little room or time for any dynamics at all, or the male characters are shunted into delivering one-sided, lecturing monologues.
These ironies of masculine scrutiny aren’t always about dominance.
They can speak to deep tensions and divisions between fathers and sons, of unmet expectations, of conflict between one generation’s rigid perseverance, and the younger’s disaffected prodigal selfishness.
It can also allude to and express deep trauma and regret, which again, modern society and scriptwriting usually conveys as buttoned-up emotional immaturity.
But it often has to do with more complex notions, such as subduing and mastering grief and trauma because the man has to hold himself together in the face of otherwise overwhelming pressures and odds, or the past trauma is profound, and not easily understood or reconciled .
As hard as it may seem for modern screenwriters, you can go too much the other way.
Dwelling upon, discussing, processing and talking at length about trauma and burdens can actually be kind of banal and tedious.
Lastly, this kind of masculine characterization isn’t necessarily about the patriarchy, or traditional masculine roles.
Many classic films feature characters drifting about while bigger forces are turning about them, and the viewer gets a strange sense of pity about their lack of agency or purpose.
It’s great that women are gaining parity in on-screen roles, and I think it’s safe to say that this year has seen the greatest amount of female leads and ensembles ever.
But there shouldn’t be a contrasting reduction in the scope and nuance of male characterization and masculinity itself on screen.
Film is about reflecting society, and if modern cinema isn’t doing that in a way that is proportionate and realistic, then cinema, and society are the worse for it.
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