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Top 10 movies for men are ka-boom!
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I won’t mention the name of the magazine, because I know
that’s what its editors hoped I would do.
They sent me an e-mail the other day promoting the
magazine’s December cover story titled “The 50 Best Guy
Movies of All Time.”
Here are the Top 10: “Dirty Harry.” “The
Godfather.” “Scarface.” “Die Hard.”
“The Terminator.” “The Road Warrior.”
“The Dirty Dozen.” “The Matrix.”
“Caddyshack.” “Rocky.”
What? No “Love Story?” No “Terms of
Endearment?” No surprise.
The criteria help explain the choices. The editors wrote:
“Violence trumps sex. War beats peace.” Anything with
Meryl Streep was automatically disqualified.
“We believe,” they wrote, with testosterone pumping,
“that a true guy movie is a movie only a guy can love. A
crucial distinction. Pop one into the DVD player and your wife or
girlfriend should run screaming from the room. We frown upon films
that are too serious or sensitive.”
A great guy movie, they said, is one with memorable lines worth
repeating in real life. I guess they mean on the golf course or the
racquetball court.
Lines like “Go ahead, make my day.” Lines like
“All I wanna do is go the distance.” Lines like
“Say hello to my leetle friend.”
Wham! Bam! Pow!
The editors continue: “Great guy movies are distillations
of the male experience, reduced to the essentials. For good reason,
nearly all of them tend to be about soldiers, athletes, cops, and
every kind of loner. They are unapologetically male, and often
politically incorrect: Cathartic violence is practically a
prerequisite – gunfights, sword fights, firefights,
fistfights – whether cartoonish (`The Matrix’) or
brutally realistic (`Goodfellas’).”
I read that paragraph 10 times over, with increasing
bewilderment and despair. Do violence and chosen solitude really
comprise the essential male experience? Is violence, even on
screen, what men need to purge their rage?
Oogah-boogah, hunh!
Ten thousand years ago, men roamed the land hunting game to drag
back to the family cave. It was brutal business. Four hundred years
ago, men fought off bears and cougars. Those who looked too long at
another man’s wife were lynched. Going to war against enemies
was not an option. You weren’t a man unless you stepped
forward with your gunnysack ready and a Bible in your breast
pocket.
But today, in the 21st Century, the allowances for men, as for
women, are liberating. You can be manly – you can even be
president – without ever having gone to war, without ever
killing a deer or a duck or a squirrel. You can be respected for
home-schooling your children. You can refuse to compete with men.
You can love one so well that you share your bed with him.
The Top 10 guy movies listed by that men’s magazine make
sense only for heterosexual men of a certain age, unable to think
(or feel) beyond themselves and their instincts. Older men escape
to those movies when they’re weary of preachy women,
especially ones they’re married to.
That magazine’s editors might now take on a bigger
challenge: to list the Top 10 movies every man ought to see to
become the best he can be. Not as a soldier or a loner or a
posse-of-one, but as a father, a partner, a lover, a son and a
citizen. A modern man, allowed to step out of uniform and out of
the box he was put in by hormones, history and tradition.
I’m not sure what those movies are. Men, you tell me.
And I’ll be back.
Susan Ager is a lifestyle columnist for the
Detroit Free Press. Write to her at the Detroit Free Press, P.O.
Box 828, Detroit, Mich. 48231, or send e-mail to her at
“mailto:ager@freepress.com”>ager@freepress.com
prohibits personal replies.
Susan Ager
Knight Ridder Newspapers