Thoughts on Heroism, masculinity and such.

For the record this is old. Apparently I didn't hit a button or something. One of the many reasons I suck at blogs but it's short and it's maybe worth a minute of your time and a thought or two so...

http://www.warhistoryonline.com/articles/a-bridge-too-far-when-masculinity-mattered-at-the-movies.html

Hum. Wow.Where to even start? ABTF has been an icon of my past for...four decades give or take. It's one of the 713 movies on my all time top ten list. Two things leap out. The obvious watering down/dumbing down dare I say, liberalization of true heroics and heroism and the assumption that heroism is and should be the exclusive province of men...if I needed a motivation to write more and write louder, this would do nicely.

So. I've put more than a little thought into this sort of thing. The seachange from John Wayne as American male Icon to Clint Eastwood from Clint Eastwood to something closer to Kurt Russel as Snake Plissken and then as pointed out in the above article the Bill Paxton in Aliens model.

First I need to echo the cavalry charge sounded by among others Joss Whedon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoEZQfTaaEA) Heroism isn't just a male thing, but That's maybe a different discussion.

The question, are we losing an important heroic archetype culturally? Yeah. We probably are in many ways. more and more the stoic John Wayne, Gary Cooper a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do character is fading away. Do we need that character, are we losing something irreplaceable in our cultural psyche if or when that archetype fades away for good?

That's hard to say, but I suspect we are.