Like so many bastards sons of the sixties, I was raised without a persistent male role model. While I was blissfully unaware of the devastating effect this would have on my psyche (I own five colors of nail polish, and still carry liquid eyeliner around in my murse like it’s a survival tool), it’s clear to me now that in my own way I’ve been filling the Man Gap with fictional characters since the earliest age I can remember.
I expect many people do this to some degree, regardless of the context and gender of their upbringing. But since I like talking about me, I’ve decided to analyze three particular How to Be a Man influences from different stages of my life. The first is so ubiquitous that his name practically represents his archetype. The second is a niche lead character with a strong cult following. The third is recent, also nichey, and easily the most emotionally accessible of the selections.
All can in some fashion be classified as adventurers.
Han Solo
Years active: 1978-1999
Occupation: Smuggler; Alliance General
Quote: Never tell me the odds.
When I was young, there were two types of boys: the Luke Skywalkers and the Han Solos. I was a Luke.
I was bored and anxious and certain that there was something important going on somewhere from which I was being kept apart. I had great expectations of future grandeur, but was barely equipped to understand what was going on around me. Out of my element, without even really knowing what that meant.
There were probably a lot of Lukes who were captivated by the character of Han Solo and who aspired to be like him. Here, it seemed, was a way of making peace with a chaotic world. Or, more precisely, to dealing with the emotion of being in that chaos. (It makes me wonder if the natural Hans I knew – the boys who were adept at getting into and out of trouble, who were more comfortable with riding the waves than pursuing a path – secretly longed to be Lukes.)
Being Luke is fine when you have an Obi Wan to guide you. Luke wasn’t shy about getting out into the world, but he would have lasted about ten minutes in Mos Eisley without Ben lighting a path for him (and babysitting him when required). Since my own grandfather was less of a mystical warrior and more of a duck hunter, I would need to develop myself independently. So what better way than to look at the dude who already has it going on, and just copy him?
I’ve never really stopped being a Luke at my core. Still looking for hints of a path, still convinced I belong to the magical part of the world. But Luke doesn’t provide a sense of emotional growth to any kid who isn’t enrolled in martial arts.
Han the scoundrel, on the other hand, was a model for how to use humor and coolness to distract folks from realizing that he (I) was also growing and changing and trying desperately to figure things out. Please note that the only time Luke ever approached being cool was when he flipped out on Vader in their final battle – and that counted as a failure.
(Tangentially, this is partly why I have no patience for those who react to the Han shot first controversy with “it’s only a movie”. If Han shoots first at the start of the saga, and by the end is not only a crucial part of the team that saves the known universe from the Evil Empire, but is also a person valued enough by his friends that they put themselves through considerable danger to rescue him, it means that one man on his own can rise above the hand that life has dealt him and become a better person than he was “meant” to be. Anyone, by this telling, can be a hero. Conversely, if Han was always so principled that he was compelled to wait until an opponent had fired a shot before pulling his own trigger, then Han was always a hero – and one with impossible reflexes at that. The revised message: don’t even try, because if you were not to the manor born your aspirations are no longer worthy of note.)
Will I mention at this point that he’s a character in Star Wars so that I have an appropriate place to add a link, Halo? Yes I will, other Halo.
Summary:
- it’s better to be funny than to be earnest – embrace your inner doofus
- leather vests are cool
- proper vehicular maintenance will help you avoid future trouble, but it’s too much work
- the danger of trusting other people is outweighed by the value
- Malcolm Reynolds had it right: commanding your own ship is the only way to be free
Dale Cooper
Years active: 1992-present
Occupation: FBI Special Agent; Tibet enthusiast
Quote: When a man joins the bureau he takes an oath to uphold certain values, values that he’s sworn to live by. This is wrong, Audrey, and we both know it.
Wow, did I ever go the whole nine yards with this one. By my mid-twenties, I was out in the world and had enough experience (a.k.a. “crushing personal defeats”) to know that I couldn’t afford to just keep pinballing my way through life. Special Agent Dale Cooper was exactly the guide I was looking for.
I had grown up reading enough Bertrand Russell to be comfortable calling myself an atheist by the time I was fifteen. Despite my longing to believe there was something larger at work than the physical mechanics of what I saw around me, a boy who grows up in his head will be inclined to reject anything that can’t be intellectually explained, and atheism seemed a perfect fit.
Then, all around the same time, three things disrupted my confidence. First, I started playing music and had to confront the mysterious energies one is exposed to through such a process. Second, I started researching “recreational” psychopharmacology, which I had read was a doorway to Expanded Understanding, two words I found irresistible. And third, my roommate came home with some VHS tapes she had borrowed, containing the entire series of Twin Peaks.
I had already seen the prequel in a cinema a few weeks earlier, and it impressed me as an odd piece of filmmaking without making any deeper impact. But now that I was exposed to the entire story from the start – I had missed it during its initial television run – I was sucked in immediately and totally.
Here was a man who was accomplished and respected in his field, but didn’t wear a cloak of pride about it. A man who was interested in the veil between our world and other worlds, and who seemed to have the strength and discipline to keep one foot on each side of the curtain. A man who marshalled the resources he had gained through the pursuit of an honorable life, and used them to build a platform from which he could reach higher.
Cooper was everything I felt I ought to be but wasn’t yet. When faced with the unknown, he pursued it with a thoughtful but boisterous curiosity – not just to solve the mysteries on the surface, but to explore the deeper ones as well. Faced with a teenage temptation in his bed, he doesn’t deny his attraction, he gently draws them both through the acknowledgement of their sexual tension to a new level of friendship. When there’s no clear path ahead, he is willing to flip a coin, trusting in the intentions of the universe to guide him. (As his literary brother Dirk Gently said in explanation of his own random tailing technique, it doesn’t necessarily take him where he expected, but it always gets him to where he needs to be.)
His main weakness seems to be his regrets over letting down people through insufficiently calculated “recklessness”, but he takes strength from the support of his friends and confronts those weaknesses as best he can. Of course this would be his tragic flaw – how else was he going to lead me to my own understanding of that pain?
As a result of this “failed” television show, and my subsequent immersion into the oeuvre of David Lynch, I’m a funnier conversationalist, a better flirt, more accepting of my own strengths and weaknesses, a more confident psychonaut, a less selfish nurturer, and generally a better and more principled person.
My atheism, meanwhile, grew upward and outward into a wonderfully blooming agnosticism. The acceptance that there would always be Great Unknowns as active participants in my world has allowed my intellectual and spiritual selves to begin a comfortable and constructive peace with each other, the kind of peace you experience when you finally recognize your home.
There are so many personal lessons that I’ve taken from my repeated viewings of Twin Peaks, from writing and reading about it, from my engagement with online communities of fellow obsessives. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Achievement is its own reward; pride obscures it. When two events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention. I could quote a dozen more, verbatim.
Essentially, Twin Peaks is my Bhagavad Gita and my Farmer’s Almanac. As a final illustration… I became an adherent of Discordianism in my late twenties. It’s a pseudo-religion based on Aleister Crowley’s observation that magical and religious ritual has a funny way of working even when you don’t believe in it. The core premise: build your own spiritual pantheon according to your interests and influences, and keep some silliness in it – that way, you get the benefits of belief without attaching yourself to something believable, thus avoiding the dangers of fundamentalism and intellectual arrogance that come with any One True Way. I built mine, and named it after Dale Cooper.
Summary:
- a path really is formed by laying one stone at a time
- suits are actually fun to wear
- objects have power, and it pays to respect that
- coffee should be black
- a mirror can be a dangerous thing
George Christopher
Years active: 2011-
Occupation: Publishing mogul; incorrigible pothead
Quote: Think about it… I’m in your movie, and you’re in mine. Two different films, really. We don’t really know each other, we just make a guess at knowing each other. Right? And I think the same’s true about love.
So, by my early forties, I should have grown out of this whole thing, eh?
George Christopher, mentor and friend to one-hit wonder Jonathan Ames in Bored to Death, convinced me that the answer is No, both by being my most recently-adopted fictional role model, and by why.
George is not a complicated man. He lives his life close to the surface. A successful magazine publisher in his sixties, he pursues his enjoyments with childlike delight. Yes, he has a cynicism about the great questions of existence and about human nature, but he is able to compartmentalize his shadows and keep them aside. If achievement is its own reward in Twin Peaks, here in George Christopher’s New York experience is enough.
As protagonist Jonathan schemes to make sense of his life in the weirdest way possible – his next novel is overdue and unstarted, so he decides to distract himself by becoming a Craigslist detective-for-hire – he more often than not relies on George for guidance. Since George lives his life “like a demented god”, the lesson plan is seldom linear.
But despite his ostensible status as sidekick, George definitely has his own stories unfolding. He is facing a present with none of the comfortable trappings of a lifetime of success (other than his personal wealth). He has no close family – a daughter, who pointedly lives in Seattle, not New York – and a lifetime of temporary relationships. His industry is becoming obsolete, and his magazine is becoming Village Voiced. Age has forced him to confront his mortality, which seems like a cruel joke to him, and through a smile and a perpetual cloud of marijuana smoke he struggles to reconcile the questions of life with the pattern of Maybe by which he has lived up to now.
He shares his aversion to the unexamined life with Jonathan, which allows for some remarkable conversations, and no matter how dark those may be, he always emerges with a lightness and zest for life that propel him forward into the unknown.
George’s peace with that unknown comes from his acceptance of the inevitability that he will never settle his invisible score with existence. In season two – spoiler alert for this paragraph – he is diagnosed with prostate cancer, and his tension and fear cut straight to the heart of the matter: the unfairness that as human beings, one day we will simply be “shut off”. This is an intolerable state of affairs, and lays bare his emotional frailty when faced with the possibility that soon he may no longer be around to torment himself with these questions. But when he is wheeled into surgery, his final exchange with Jonathan shows who he really is.
His generosity and commitment to his friends tempt me to call him the heart of the show, but really all three leads (the third being Ray, a semi-successful cartoonist) have their own heart. What George brings to the mix is weary experience, living alongside the cynicism he’s earned but undulled by it. Whenever a “should I?” question arises, his characteristic answer is “of course!” Sure, it may lead to disaster, but at least it might be fun.
In a more bleak narrative setting, that cavalier attitude would carry the burden of Famous Last Words. But this story is about how to find a way to engage with life when things seem hopeless and the will to go on has faded.
When Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories was asked what motivates him to work on giant fire-breathing robots, he replied that any way you can get to your desk and do your work is valid – whether that means discipline, or drinking, or ambition, or self-flagellation. The point is to work. The three gentlemen of Bored to Death are to varying degrees trying to find a way to fuel themselves forward, and as the title suggests, boredom is both a symptom of the problem and a signal of how to beat it – find a way to not be bored.
I feel like I’m not quite doing justice to the value of this character, and maybe this is because he’s new to my personal pantheon. I haven’t been living with him as long and haven’t yet internalized him to the same degree as I have with Han Solo and Dale Cooper and Jim Rockford and Albert Campion and Macaulay Connor and Hannibal Lecter and Frank Bullitt and Ian Rutledge and V and Tyler Durden and Chris Stevens and Guido Anselmi and the Dude and all the others.
But this also puts me side-by-side with George, who has been living his life in his way and knows that the chance to change who he is at a fundamental level expired, for him, long ago. And the lessons and techniques of the past are no guarantee of particular results in the future.
Experience lends George the perspective to truly understand that all paths lead to the same place anyway. Instead of being daunted by the range of possibilities as a younger person (or a younger self) might be, he is in fact given the freedom to know that he is playing out the end stages of his grand experiment, and this allows him to take every setback in stride and to feel undiluted joy at the wonders of existence. Even when – especially when – that means an indulgence of his artistic ego, his craving for novelty, or his armpit fetish.
All part of life’s rich tapestry.
Summary:
- the New Yorker caption contest judges are a bunch of jerks
- when something you built (and which you love) no longer has room for you, it’s no longer the thing you built, it has become its own thing – you can accept it and move on now, or not accept it and wait for it to expel and destroy you
- cool toys are a must at every stage of life
- don’t have an affair with your urologist
- even if we never really know each other, it doesn’t mean we’re alone
To conclude, I don’t get to hear the words “it’s too long!” very often in real life, so feel free to indulge yourself in the comments.
