THAT'S MEN:In real life, we dont take the thugs on. We sit there, keeping our thoughts to ourselves, in case we get hurt
WISH FULFILMENT has always been a hugely important function of the movies. But what wishes are fulfilled by films like Harry Brownand Gran Torino? In both films
men – old men, played respectively by Michael Caine and Clint Eastwood – use violence and the threat of violence to sort out terrifying local thugs.
Mostly though they use their manliness. These are real men. They have been to war but that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that they are men – and the thugs they sort out are not real men, but perverse losers heading for an early grave.
The wish that’s being fulfilled, I suppose, is that all decent men could be Harry Brown or Walt Kowalski (the Clint Eastwood character). And the reality is that the average man is nothing like these guys.
Minor example: the other day on the Luas a couple of thugs played harsh music very loud and swore obscenities at each other. You could see on the faces of the evening rush-hour crowd that they really didn’t need this carry-on at the end of a hard day.
It struck me as interesting that though we outnumbered these two thugs by, perhaps 40 or 50 to one, the option of going up to them and ordering them to cut the crap or get off the tram simply didn’t exist for us.
We had a sort of Gran Torinomoment of relief when two very serious looking black-clad security guys got on at the far end of the tram. At last, we thought, Clint and Michael have arrived. Bye bye thugs.
Not quite. Clint and Michael stopped halfway down the tram, and glared now and then at the thugs who had stopped cursing at each other, but whose music was at an aggressive pitch designed to tell everyone else that they couldn’t care less about them.
The glares didn’t work because the thugs were sitting with their backs to the security guys who got off a couple of stops later. When I reached my stop, the thugs were hassling two girls for their phone numbers.
I’m being unfair to Clint and Michael. The thing is this: in real life there are no Walt Kowalskis (who sorts out thugs hassling his neighbours) or Harry Browns (who cleanses the neighbourhood of a bunch of terrifying drug dealers).
In real life, we don’t take the thugs on. In real life, we sit there quietly, occasionally glaring but generally keeping our thoughts to ourselves in case we get hurt.
It’s fascinating, though, that the male tough guy who takes on the world is still a fantasy of ours, one we flock to movies to fulfil. And this has been going on for a long time.
Countless Westerns celebrated the lone gunfighter who vanquished very bad guys. Sometimes the lone gunfighter was John Wayne, then the young Clint Eastwood came along in the so-called spaghetti westerns as a meaner and more deadly kind of hero. In the 1974 movie Death Wish, Charles Bronson blasted away at muggers and other lowlifes to the satisfaction of audiences everywhere.
Actually, I think these movies are more than just wish fulfilment. They exploit that niggling worry so many of us have that we are not real men because we don’t
settle our arguments with fists or guns. In doing so, they keep that niggling worry alive: we become real men in fantasy only during the 90 minutes or so of the movie and then return to our wimpish selves.
Yet, and disappointing as it may be, it’s probably a good thing that Walt Kowalski, Harry Brown et al exist mainly on the screen. A world in which every angry old man on the block got out his gun and started blasting away would probably not be a healthy world to live in.
The ultimate outcome could be a planet inhabited by one old guy with a gun and a bad temper.
The world belongs to wimps. But you have to admit that it’s great fun to be Clint or Michael – even if only for a little while, even if only in a movie.
- Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Thats Men, The Best of the Thats Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas