In Media Res did a week of videos+commentary recently on the topic of "men and masculinity." My favorite of the posts was this one, which does a short analysis of a video clip, of two men joyously dancing, from the 26-hour (is that right?) miniseries Centennial, which was shown on network TV in 1978 and tells the story of America’s westward expansion.
The series, as Allison McCracken of Depaul University explains, was not your typical patriotic claptrap. Instead:
Centennial directly, repeatedly, even exhaustively indicts the American government, military, and big business for, among other crimes, the destruction of Native American peoples, rampant corruption and ineptitude, and doing permanent damage to the environment. Centennial’s heroes are post-Vietnam, countercultural, god-in-nature 70s liberals whose struggles to stand up for the oppressed are invariably thwarted by greedy career-men and the institutions they serve. Centennial embraces feminine values both ideologically and structurally: our heroes privilege their emotional connections and the community good over any professional ambitions. Moreover, the serial form that frames these men never allows for any conventionally masculinist forms of closure, triumph or real progress. Centennial’s two-hundred year time span, in fact, continually reinforces the long-term devastating effects of American policies, and its central males are deemed heroic because they struggle for justice in the face of ceaseless frustration and almost certain defeat.
…I offer this sneak peak of a representative scene that also highlights one of the series’ greatest pleasures: the long and close relationship between the sensitive Scottish trapper McKeag, played by Richard Chamberlain in his first mini-series, and Pasquinel, the fearless but greedy-for-gold (and therefore deeply flawed) French-Canadian trapper, played by the macho Robert Conrad. McKeag is the series’ first hero and an icon of 70s masculinity: beautiful, compassionate, wise, a peacemaker capable of both intense joy and anguish but whose life is, in typical Centennial fashion, marked much more by the latter than the former. His dance with Pasquinel in this scene is predictably interrupted by the pain from a long-embedded Pawnee arrow in Pasquinel’s back, which requires McKeag to plunge a knife into his friend’s lower back to remove it. After the makeshift surgery, a grateful Pasquinel praises McKeag with the series’ greatest compliment: “you are the most gentle of men.” This scene exemplifies a specifically 1970s media masculinity, both for the way in which emotional, even homoerotic, connections between men are celebrated rather than denigrated and for Centennial’s insistence that such affective ties can never truly be removed from the ache of history.
I have to say that, although I’m all for the "post-Vietnam, countercultural, god-in-nature 70s liberal" hero, I think my heart will always reside more with the post-post-Vietnam, post-countercultural, slacker-stoner, highly bemused hero of the 1980s — your Val Kilmer in Real Genius, your Curtis Armstrong in Revenge of the Nerds, your John Cusack in Say Anything, your Bill Murray in Stripes, your Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, your Bill Murray in Meatballs, etc.
