Day 16: Do not forsake me, oh my darling...
When our dads were young, in movies, their heroes were guys like Steve McQueen, Bruce Lee, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne.
All of their heroes were smart, tough, and capable. Have you seen the Great Escape? The entire movie is about guys imprisoned by the Nazis and effectively out of the war. Instead of lying down and waiting for one side to win, they instead do everything in their power to hamper the Nazi’s war efforts the only way they can: by being giant pains in the ass. They dig tunnels, cut fences, blackmail guards. By being themselves smart, tough, capable guys, they tie up elite Nazi troops and Third Reich resources to guard them, keep them contained, and hold them down. They have no help from the outside, no actual equipment, just their own cunning and resourcefulness.
Gary Cooper is an icon because of movies like High Noon where he’s walking down the lonely streets of some nothing little frontier town, waiting to die. A criminal he put away has been released from prison, and is coming straight for him, and the entire town is so afraid of the guy that no one is willing to help a person they called a friend, and a man who’s risked his life to keep violence and crime from touching them. The bad guy, Frank Miller, isn’t scary looking, in fact, one of his gang is played by Lee Van Cleef is a million time scarier than the main bad guy.* What’s scary is what the bad guy represents in the movie. He’s fear, and violence, and lawlessness, and the savagery of the Old West and Cooper is the voice in the wilderness, the uniting and civilizing force. Then his town abandons him. The second things get tough, he’s alone. No one would chide him for chickening out. No one would hold it against him if he left, ran, and hid. But he can’t run. Catching this guy and putting him back down is the right thing to do. It just is. You do what’s right, without complaint, without a need for recognition, because it’s what we’re supposed to do even if your life is on the line.
*that might just be because I’ve seen him in all his other roles as an unstoppable bad guy before I saw High Noon.
Now look at today. Every guy is either a loveable loser with no drive or a whiny little wiener kid who could never get anything done.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of the loveable loser movies, but where are the movies about guys getting stuff done? Why’s my generation have to be exclusively shiftless layabouts?
My dad’s hero was John Wayne, and mine has to be some skinny little shit in girl jeans wearing eye liner.
How’s that fair?
Matt