Something struck me the other day as I was watching Ford v Ferrari on HBO the other night. I'd been trying to put my finger on it for a while, but it occurred to me that there was a quality to the performances by Christian Bale and Matt Damon in particular, something that felt very of-our-current-time. And about 90 minutes into the movie (side note: movies are too fucking long), the best I could come up with was a certain self-conscious quality to their masculinity.
It's a reasonable movie, by the way. I knew when I first saw the trailers the kind of portrayal they'd give the Italian characters, and indeed, there's a bit of skullduggery and cheating, and people saying things sneeringly in languages that our plucky American heroes (like, er, Lee Iacocca) don't understand. And of course, Henry Ford II gets away with calling Enzo Ferrari a "greasy whop", which, um, yay for casual racism - imagine a "good guy" figure in a movie saying the equivalent slur about a Black character...
Still, it's a fun movie, the racing scenes look gorgeous and the performances are entertaining. I joke about Lee Iacocca, but he's played by the ever-reliable Jon Bernthal, an actor I really appreciate. Matt Damon and Christian Bale are good too, though as I say, there's some tic to their performances that I'm trying to figure out.
The best I can put it is, as I say, self-consciousness. Possibly because being a man, in a world of men such as racing, is freighted with a bunch of associations that are a little outdated now. In the 1960s an actor like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen could stride across the screen knowing his place in the world, and the audience knew what kind of guy he was. Two-fisted, quick-drawing, irresistible to the ladies, etc etc.
John Wayne was expected to be the stoic rock upon which the world broke, and to protect the women around him, though "around" was a relative term because they were frequently not around (with the exception of something like True Grit or Stagecoach). He could play his roles that way because women weren't expected to be public, weren't expected to be doing stuff. Women in the 1960s were more likely to be homemakers (white women, at any rate), so movies tended to be made for the people with the buying power in the household, aka the men.
Ford v Ferrari has exactly one female character with a name: Mollie Miles (played by Caitriona Balfe), who is the wife of Christian Bale's character, Ken Miles. I'm not saying this to criticize the movie - after all, in that decade there likely weren't that many women in the actual racing scene, so you want to keep things close to accurate.
Nor am I saying it's a great thing, as the lack of women in spheres like that came from decades and centuries of diminishing the capabilities of women and actively keeping them away from such activities. It's simply the fact that because there likely weren't that many women working at Shelby American in 1966, there won't be many roles for them in this movie.
But it's hard to escape the feeling that Damon and Bale's performances are acknowledging these cultural aspects from the perspective of our supposedly more enlightened times. They don't go as far as Mad Men in depicting just how different those times were from now, nor are they as blatant (which is fine with me, because I've never been able to get past the third episode of that infernal show).
What stands out for me is the scene where Shelby and Miles fight each other on the corner in front of Ken Miles's house, and Mollie sets her lawn chair out to make sure they don't get up to too much mischief. At the end she brings them each a Coke, and they clink bottles and make up.
It's hard to imagine a scene like that in a movie from even 30 years ago. There were probably fistfights, but Mollie bringing them bottles of Coke afterwards is meant to underline that they're being childish, which is the default assumption of male characters in media nowadays.
As another example, there's Chris Pratt's character in... I was going to say Jurassic World but that's the same character as Star-Lord in the Marvel movies. He alternates between super-competent (bragging to the nerdy kid that he's the "alpha" for the velociraptors) and childishly stupid, especially in his interactions with Bryce Dallas Howard.
Again, it's hard to imagine a female character in a John Wayne movie dismissing him as being childish - at the very least I haven't seen it in any of his films I've watched. If anything, he's usually portrayed as the mature one, compared to his female costar in something like The Quiet Man.
Probably the other reason I'm thinking about male maturity and immaturity is a podcast I listened to recently. Because I've gone through most of my backlogs, I decided to check out The Art of Manliness, in the hopes of hearing people talking about interesting or useful subjects. One episode, from about 2012 I assume, featured an interview with a researcher who talked about a trend of immaturity among men in recent years.
He seemed to boil it down to them playing video games or reading comics, in lieu of setting up meaningful relationships with women or getting high-powered jobs or whatever. The discussion was fairly interesting, if a bit limited - he declined to talk about what female immaturity looks like, for example (his research is exclusively on men), and didn't really examine the role that our consumeristic and media-driven culture has had on infantilizing everyone.
And I think because of that he missed a key point about immaturity. Or rather, because he actually researched it and I'm some dummy writing about it on his blog, he failed to give the fully nuanced picture it deserves. Strictly speaking, video games and comics and sports aren't enough to drive a man (or any gender, frankly) to be immature - it's the role these things play in a person's life. I'm a grown man with a full-time job and a long-term relationship, for example, neither of which is affected by the fact that I read comics or sometimes play video games.
To put it another way, if I'm immature, it's because of certain things I haven't had to worry about in my life - raising kids, for instance, or illness or grappling with real poverty. And I don't deny a certain amount of immaturity - I'm sure I've said to my girlfriend that if I'd met her six years ago, when I moved back from London, I wouldn't have been quite as mature as I am now, or generally ready for the relationship, however we want to define readiness. At the very least I was a different person from now.
I don't doubt that a large number of people really are immature - unable to make sensible decisions about their money, their relationships or their jobs (and this is, again, separate from people who've had properly hard lives, and who haven't had the luxury of deferring these decisions). But I also suspect that now men are expected to be immature in certain things - to balance being competent in one aspect of their lives with being completely helpless in others.
This is, of course, kind of regressive against women in itself. To assume that women are the only ones who can properly take care of the home or the kids is both a weird backsliding to so-called traditional gender roles and ammunition in the Mommy Wars, where people shame women for not doing everything effortlessly.
To return to the original point about portrayals in Ford v Ferrari... I called the performances self-conscious, but it also feels like a trend you see in a lot of actors. It's cliche to say that men have "lost their confidence", and I think that some of that confidence deserved to be lost, but more than any value judgement, the reason I note this style of performance is that in future it'll be a clear indicator of the time period, just as surely as Robert Altman's overlapping dialogue is an indicator of the time period he worked in. I'll leave it to the sociologists to draw the real meaning from Matt Damon and Christian Bale's performances.
And hopefully by then it won't be okay to say "greasy whop" onscreen anymore...
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