Dear male characters for whom my love has died,
At one time or another, I’ve felt a connection to you all. I’ve laughed and cried with many of you, and even found aspects of myself in some of your milder incarnations. I’ve made allowances for your failings and zeroed in on your virtues, hoping to reconcile my affection for you with my sneaking suspicion that you may be doing more harm than good. But now, the time has come to face facts and sever our ties. Perhaps you’ve changed, or maybe I have, but either way I can no longer look past our differences. So in the interest of closure, I’ll herein outline my feelings towards each of you.
To the schlubby wingman, who offers crude remarks and fleeting distractions in the midst of a dramatic conflict, I say this — I sympathise. Your role is a thankless one, tasked with eliciting both sympathy and revulsion from a single audience. From a screenwriter’s perspective, your slovenly ways can be mined for comic relief, while your innate pathos is an easy source of unearned emotional weight. You kill two birds with one stone, or rather, you mildly graze two birds as your stone flies far wide of the mark. And sure, you’ve been competently played by Kevin James, Jack Black and Jonah Hill, but as each of those actors has grown in stature, they’ve also outgrown you, going on to play leading men in their own right. You’re a means to an end, both in narrative terms, and in the minds of all those who step into your shoes.
To the jealous father, who insists (with the kind of charming bullheadedness that’s made Jeremy Piven a star) that no man is good enough for his ‘little girl’, I say this — I see that you’re coming from a place of love. You want the best for your daughter and it’s this instinct that inspires you to act the way you do. At your best, you’re Julia Stiles’s dad in 10 Things I Hate About You, knowingly playing the role of stern patriarch to moderate the wild abandon of your teenage offspring. But all too often, you’re nothing more than a control freak, oddly preoccupied with the sexual proclivities of your pubescent daughter. If you really cared for her, you’d trust her to know her body better than you possibly can. You’d stop being a shotgun-touting Bruce Willis in Armageddon, a polygraph-wielding Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents, or a grotesquely leering Mark Wahlberg in the new Transformers movie, and start understanding that your jurisdiction ends far short of your daughter’s libido.
To the superhero, who grows both more successful and more soulless with each passing year, I say this — you had everything going for you. In your first act, you were flawed, complex and characterful. You were Spider-man, beating up the bullies who made your high school years a living hell. You were Superman, wondering with maudlin self-regard why you and you alone had been chosen to keep the world from harm. But then something happened — around the climax of your second act — and you became selfless, saintly and wholly implausible. Now, your human qualities take a backseat to your heroic tendencies, or at least coexist uneasily with them (hence the subway car full of threatened lives that just so happens to include your childhood sweetheart) and I find myself longing for the person you were before you became the person you were meant to be.
To the celebrity appearing as a warped version of himself, in an increasing number of self-aware Hollywood comedies, I say this — it was fun while it lasted. You felt right at home when you were Ray Charles jamming with Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers, or the countless Hollywood big shots who showed up to self-satirise in The Player. But now, more often than not, you’re little more a publicity vehicle for the actor who deigns to play you — an attempt to cast off any public perception of humourlessness on their part. You’re Eminem in Funny People, Al Pacino in Jack and Jill, or James Franco in 50% of his recent film appearances. You used to tell us something about yourself; now you obscure the truth even further.
To the lovable bastard, who speaks from the heart no matter the consequences, I say this — you’re just being you. And far be it from me to change who you are. But I can’t help but think that the affection lavished upon you, when you spew your borderline racist, baldly homophobic, and blatantly misogynistic hate speech in the name of comedy, reflects badly on the rest of us. You’re often credited with saying ‘what we’re all thinking’ — even when what you’re saying is merely the word ‘faggot’ over and over again with little justification — and I want no part of it. You may have the excuse of irony, especially when you’re Danny McBride, but there’s a big difference between challenging taboos, and trotting out stale clichés for shock value alone. So feel free to keep being you, but leave me out of it.
To the romantic stalker, who will not take no for an answer, I say this — your world is very different to mine. When you dangle precariously from a ferris wheel in The Notebook, threatening to jump to your death unless Rachel McAdams will accompany you on a date, you are rewarded with a wry smile and a fulfilling relationship. Were I to do the same, I would be rightly considered a manipulative psychopath, and my death — were it to occur — would be ruled an unavoidable consequence of my own rampant hubris. You inspire the same pang of unease in my heart that’s awoken every time an ageing male politician and his wife are interviewed on American television and, when asked about their courtship, say something along the lines of ‘he wouldn’t give up the chase’, or ‘she took some convincing’, or ‘Roger gets what Roger wants’. And your obligatory good looks, while momentarily soothing, do little to ease my concern.
To the ad executive, desperately pursuing the Big Contract that’s sure to turn their luck around, I say this — you are being used. Once upon a time, perhaps, you were a valid modern archetype with your own distinctive hopes and desires, but now you’re little more than a solution to a few decidedly Hollywood problems. You allow wealthy screenwriters who cannot imagine life without its luxuries to visualize a world of easy opulence, thanks to a general understanding that the advertising industry pays well. You allow films to be made with almost no consideration for story, because your ultimate goal is so minimal that it can be resolved within the space of five minutes. And, perhaps worst of all, you’re a conduit for levels of product placement previously unimaginable to even the greediest of studio execs. Because months before you started chasing that Big Contract, your creator had already agreed its terms.
And finally, to the hero, the revolutionary, the man of the hour, I say this — you are not an island. Though your goals and achievements are undoubtedly of vital importance, they do not render those of the people around you invalid. They do not mean that the concerns of your continually downtrodden wife can be reduced to a single belligerent need for you to settle down. They do not mean that the motives of your antagonist can be written off as simple howls of envy and malevolence And they do not mean that the world owes you its devotion, even if you are one of Alexander Payne’s great white middle-class hopes. Never forget: you’re the hero of your own story, but little more than a supporting player in the grand, universal scheme of things.
Signed,
Charlie Lyne
Credits
Text Charlie Lyne
Film still from The Notebook.