Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO

Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling.  Moviemaking is a recklessly expensive venture to begin with (CASINO cost $50 million, enough to build a casino in itself) and no investor/producer ever knows for sure that the film won't bomb and they'll lose it all, baby. It's a roll of the dice. And the mob's been associated one way or another with Hollywood since the beginning, from Al Capone's boys acting as technical advisors on the 1932 original SCARFACE to "this is the girl" in MULHOLLAND DR. Wherever there's big money and trade unions, the mob is there, and Hollywood has both, so rolling the dice on a film about the mob rolling dice on a plan to lure ducats out of America's pockets is so meta it can't fail... it's a sure thing baby, a hot tip, a combo blackjack table and funhouse room of mirrors. 

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as online poker lets you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. If it's meant as a lark, perpetrated by attractive people, robbing a casino is far less evil, somehow, than the actual operation of one. CASINO is way different: Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling is to  keep your tells in check and your calculation of odds on point, ideally without cheating.

In other words, to be lucky at cards you must be unlucky at love--for love makes those things impossible. No one knows why except that some karmic law of averages is involved. Heartbreak and misery on the other hand, increases your luck. "You don't have a girl pining for you somewhere," a sharpie consoles William Demarest after winning all his schmeckles in LADY EVE, "that often explains it." He does (remember "So long, Lula - I'll send you a postcard.")

It's just the karmic law of averages, baby. So what in the end, is a priority for a wise guy? To keep his love life ever in shambles, intentionally (albeit unconsciously). Thus the career gambler invariably has to continually sabotage his chances at a happy love life, as Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO--marrying a hottie hustler who says up front she doesn't love him--in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes it's not just that he's too blind to his own lack of self-awareness, or compassion for others in the process. One hopes in vain. He really seems to think he'll change her feelings, will come around, but all he's doing is buying her off.

I've already covered the delights of Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here) but those were happy gamblers - in love with the thrill of riding a streak - and falling into despair as soon as they cash out. CASINO is the opposite, the view from the other side of the one-way mirror -- and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers and Sinatra nightly constitutes real class. For them, Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, but on a small manageable scale (without jail or death at the end). Who wouldn't want that kind of rush, even if it's on a scale suited to their small potatoes lifestyle? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia and the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds and loved ones, grateful to not be so lucky at cards after all? We're the gangster's fair-weather friends - there to share his glory, gone when it's time to face the music.

Giddy rushes aside, CASINO is fraught with problems, none more glaring than the shadow of its predecessor, GOODFELLAS. From the punchy wiseguy narration to the long tracking shots packed with period rock music and beautiful-ugly old Italian faces, the Scorsese aesthetic we all fell in love with is back, but there's been so many imitations in the interim it seems like Scorsese is just another schmuck imitating himself. Now Joe Pesci is now so typecast as the rabid animal the only way he can outdo his legendary role as Joey (see one of my very first-ever posts on Acidemic, 'That Joey, he's a wild one) is to up the shocking violence ante. Pesci doesn't drop the ball here so much as hold it so tight it deflates. He looks older and stockier, his make-up more orange (to indicate a desert tan?), his belly paunchier, his sneer flash frozen, like a Madame Tussaud piece swollen from being left too long in the vat. When he throws his massive tantrums he's not scary-fun like he was in GOODFELLAS, just alarming. He's as trapped by the irresistible momentum of Scorsese's period gangster rhythm as a fly on an express train. The force of the forward movement broadens him around the edges until he splats.

The Orangeman

With the critics primed to dutifully if joylessly adore her all the while, Sharon Stone takes over the last chunk of the action, turning a sad vixen's shaking the bars of her cage marriage into a shrill and humorless bid for Oscar respectability. She's intense but the whole thing smacks of effort. Do you think Barbara Stanwyck ever 'tried' to blow us away with her raw force? She merely released what was always inside her, the tigress. Stanwyck knew that before she unleashed her raw tigress force her audience needed modulation, dynamics, some wit and warmth amidst the rock formations. Stone just wants us to see how Joan Crawfordianly hard she's trying. But hardness without softness, darkness without lightness, what is that? It might be Great Acting, but it's not riveting, more like watching a strange couple fighting at a restaurant -feeling only a mix of embarrassment, weariness and concern.

Whatever she's supposed to be conveying, it doesn't deserve the acres of tantrum space Scorsese carves out for it in the final act of CASINO. Verhoeven in BASIC INSTINCT and TOTAL RECALL knew how to use Stone's Bette Davis imperiousness and Jane Fonda insecurity combo as part of a comic book tapestry. He knew she was a delicious villainess rather than an 'identifiable' heroine. A director like Sidney Lumet or Nicholas Ray, or George Cukor might have helped Stone reign in some of her less successful ideas and enable her to win an Oscar, but without a genius who loves and can direct powerful women (and Scorsese is about as far from that as a great director can get), Stone falls into the same morass that snared Annette Bening in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the morass wherein female rage against the patriarchal machine comes out as abrasive, ineffectual spite, all while the infantile, unconsciously misogynistic director smiles and nods.

But it's no secret- everyone knows romance and female characters (ALICE aside) aren't Scorsese's strong point. He lives and breathes cigar smoke from the boys in the back room. His films about dangerous hoods work because he truly 'feels' the threat of violence, knows the texture of the mean streets, hires actual Little Italy characters (including his own mother) and makes effective, occasionally sickening, use of cattle prods, spittle, baseball bats and beatings. In the lengthy kinetic montage wherein De Niro's narration takes us through the process of the skim we're off into the blissful realm of pure cinema, and a solid hour of running time evaporates like crack, but we still have two hours to go and by the home stretch of the film, the woman has landed.

Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen) for emotional support. We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in coke/booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself once or twice, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy in public before collapsing into tantrums at home. Instead De Niro's schmuck of a casino manager doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she won't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start--he bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't like him any better even after having a kid.

Thus the only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.

Maybe he's right. 

While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for that great opening hour or two, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.

That's why CASINO is De Niro's last brilliant film, as well as the first of his bad ones. You can feel the gambler's luck turning halfway through, right around the time De Niro fires Joe Bob Briggs, nephew of a Nevada gaming commission bigwig, and refuses to even hire him back "somewhere farther down the trough," though the politician makes it clear De Niro's going to wind up losing his license if he doesn't comply.  How did someone so smart get suddenly so stupid... twice? Why would De Niro fuck up a good thing with the gaming commission just by insisting on firing a dopey relative of a high end Nevada politician? De Niro then seems surprised when he loses his license appeal, just as he's surprised when Ginger tries to run away. It just doesn't fit that a schmuck this dumb would be smart enough to get so far in the first half of the film. He been takin' stoopid pills? He go to Vegas to get stupid? 

By the same token, why did Marty think his next project after GOODFELLAS (and before CASINO) should be AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)? I'm not saying one should never wander from his own back yard (though technically I guess he didn't), but if you can't find anything new to talk about within it, maybe your just not looking hard enough. The man who found Shakespeare within the language of a Brooklyn gangster movie doesn't need to do actual Shakespeare. What does he find, then, except that his fan base can be pushed just so fur and no further?

For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and doomed drive for bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Yuck. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle the way gangsters might a flush chump to their upstairs poker game. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the adoring floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING, his grass-is-greener class envy is showing.

I can only presume that karmic law is still at work, sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your winning formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and termite art genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. I can't even watch my old GOODFELLAS DVD anymore as it seems derivative and played to death (not unlike SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) thanks to BLOW, SNATCH, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice)

And that's that.

Quilty Makes This World: 12 Tricksters (CinemArchetype #1)

This post commences a series on Jungian archetypes in film and media, wherein we gather an assortment of characters, icons, and public figures who all fit the same functional mold, the better to unravel our iconographical lexicon. The first archetype celebrated here on Acidemic is, naturally, 'The Trickster' for he is the most psychedelic. Just ask Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary, if they weren't dead....Trickster makes this world (by Lewis Hyde).

For sake of polarization of type we've limited this to males, but of course the trickster is by nature beyond gender, beyond personal gain as well. He lives in a state of identity flux, bound to no one persona (though perhaps he can be in service of an abstract cause, like 'the paper') and is seldom on the level as far as sincerity and yet this allows him perhaps greater leeway in his altruistic ambitions, for he need gratify no urge, for him there there is no one persona to 'want' anything. You are most likely to meet him on the road to knowledge, and if a trickster helps you on your way, be grateful but not indebted. And beware: for every two or three favors he gives, one wry screw-over is guaranteed. But you can't just walk away after two favors, what if the third is legit, too? Dude, turns out none of them are favors, they're gin and tonics. He'll confuse the simple and clarify the incoherent, and never justify anything, let alone means or ends. Take Elliot Gould's doctor in MASH for example,who seamlessly incorporates an operation on the child of a prostitute into his Tokyo boondoggle and just as effortlessly employs blackmail of the resident officer to make it happen. He expects no reward from the mom and brooks no condemnation from the Army, he demands neither a freebie nor accepts a guilt trip; he doesn't think ahead or crave validation - he's just a dancer in the Shiva flame. That's a trickster.

1. Peter Sellers as Clair Quilty - Lolita (1962)

"The woman always goes for the trickster, because he cannot be shamed; he is too transparent, always able to drop his 'story' the moment it gains any weight, embodying instead a series of roles each easily discarded for the next. The James Mason types by contrast inevitably resort to violence, for they presume their warped idea of dignity and ownership is an essential right, worth killing over, no matter how abstract. They feel justified in the use of firearms against the trickster who mocks them — and in the 1960s it was because the repressed guy was closeted, or abused, or a mélange of the two like in Bertolucci's The Conformist. The trickster's game involves exposing these straightedge characters for the damaged bullies they are, and so they can't help but leap across the mess hall table and start strangling Donald Sutherland (Burns in MASH) or shooting Quilty, so we realize the whole time said losers have been festering in their self-made prison of masochistic desire. But even here the trickster's power is healing and transforming — his opponent's straightedges have been rounded off against their will. Maybe after some time in the booby hatch, Burns will learn to smoke pot and lift weights in his garage, like American Beauty or get a motorcycle like in Wild Hogs!" (All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives)

2. Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice (1988)

"Instead of accepting 'the fate' as is, Beetlejuice attempts to create his own rules. Beetlejuice's ostracism is the result of his anarchic 'supernatural' politics; his mindless rebellion against any mediocrity (both worldly and underworldly) and, ultimately, his powerful unpredictability."-- Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film (Routledge)

3. Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) 

The meta-textual similarity of Joker's burning money scene to the wasteful expenditure of the film's vast budget and its justification via huge box-office profit -- all for what amounts to a big loud explosion of nothing -- is eerily prescient. Dark Knight pays lip service to how "Gotham needs a hero" but it's just a really a big, loud, leftist version of Death Wish, with our sympathies reversed. When Joker sets fire to his half of the money we can imagine Batman rushing in to save it, cradling it in his arms and screaming to the sky: "Damn you, Damn yoooou!!"In this one scene, Joker proves he's the only truly sane man in Gotham, the only "true" soul in this dark mess, the only one with inner Zen stillness and joie de vivre; the only one not hypnotized by his or her "life story." No matter how harshly he's screamed at (Batman growls and shouts until he's hoarse), the Joker never loses his mellow-gold cool; he's already at peace with himself and his mania. He's in the flow like one of those old drunken masters in the Shaw Brothers films. (see: "Burn your money!")

4. Groucho Marx

"Let me know when you want to be attacked and I'll be there five minutes later to defend you."

5. Bugs Bunny

"Bugs Bunny gets a charge out of driving people crazy. And that may be why he lasts. He doesn't seem like a character of the '40s, but rather a character of today. His wisecracking, gender-bending, anti-authority antics broke ground long before punk rock, or David Bowie, or Jerry Seinfeld. He's impossible to pin down in any specific sense."  --J.J. Sutherland, Trickster, American Style

6. Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow

"Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly, stupid."

7. Eli Wallach as Vacaro - Baby Doll (1956)

Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression, a flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Genuine play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex he forces her to sign the statement against her husband; she's disappointed. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "under-developed" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly - one dissolve between a kiss fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards-- and then move on with the story. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out. The "did they or didn't they" ambiguity is allowed to drive the censor stand-in (Malden) to a point of sweet insanity. --The Tell-Tale Dissolve

8.Robert De Niro as Conrad Brean - Wag the Dog (1997)

Conrad: 

And it's most certainly NOT about the B-3 bomber.
Aide:
There is no B-3 bomber.
Conrad: 

I just said that! There is no B-3 bomber. 

I don't know how these rumors get started!

9. Elliot Gould as Trapper John  - MASH (1970)

Peterson:

You can't even go near a patient until Col. Merrill says its ok
and he's still out to lunch.
Trapper John: 

Look, mother, I want to go to work in one hour.
We are the Pros from Dover and we figure to crack this kid's
chest and get out to the golf course before it gets dark.

10. Cary Grant as Walter Burns - His Girl Friday (1944)

Walter Burns: 

Look, Hildy, I only acted like any husband
that didn't want to see his home broken up.

Hildy Johnson: 

What home?

Walter Burns: 

"What home"? Don't you remember the home I promised you?

11. Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway - Naked Lunch (1991)

 "You'll see how elegantly this works (he mixes black powder into water or juice for Bill to drink). The black will disappear completely. There'll be no smell, no discoloration. It's like an agent, an agent who's come to believe his own cover story. But who's in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out."

12. Max Von Sydow - The Magician (1958)

Bergman's film itself refuses to guess whether Sydow's character is a poor beardless blonde actor begging alms for his attempt to entertain and terrify, or the actual mystical creature he appears to be in the beginning and by the end. Even the embittered empiricist for whom most of it all is being performed can't tell which if either are the act, but he's at least wise enough to see that the denuded magician / beggar is just another persona. There is no 'single' true self with him.

One Pill Makes You Corporate: LIMITLESS (2011)

LIMITLESS, or AMERICAN PSYCHO-PHARMACOLOGICAL, is about that drug so popular amongst investment bankers, Adderall, disguised as a wonder pill that turns its taker into a super genius, based on the idea that we only use 10% of our brains, so what if we could use all of it? And have total recall of even the most mundane moments in memory? Such is the gift of the magic pill, which then our hero sleepy sad sack novelist Bradley Cooper gets hooked on and needs more of, and so do a lot of other (bad) people. The chase is on and the hangovers accrue, paranoia steps up, loose ends are tied behind people's backs, and sheer stupidity rears its head.

The problem here is that Bradley Cooper and the filmmakers are afraid to go full AMERICAN PSYCHO, so a hinted at black-out murder is just a plotline dropped in time for the big climax of battling the usual baldheads. So instead of some bitter downward spiral wherein Cooper -- who plays a self-absorbed novelist initially too stupid to take an offered pill from his ex-brother-in-law--goes insane, we have him become a Tom Cruise-style action star. Once he does make the grade, so far so good, but on his big day presenting his portfolio to Robert De Niro's power-talking tycoon, he decides now's the perfect time to not to take a pill, like a first class dumbass, so he's sick from withdrawal, and almost throws up on De Niro's thousand dollar loafers. Turns out he has a stash of pills at his girlfriend's house, but of course never dreams of getting it, because that would be too easy. Instead she (Abbie Cornish) has to get it, on her lunch hour, while he shivers like a crackhead in her office.

Trust me, no addict is that unprepared.

Don't doubt that I personally am similar and, as we say in AA, really ID'ed with Cooper's rise and fall. I myself was once a horribly blocked writer, tortured with longing, until my shrink put me on Effexor, and now I'm super-human on the keypad, writing so damn much my fingers fall off, smoking Camel Lights and guzzling diet coke and staying otherwise sober but always riding that low throbbing train of chemically-enhanced motivation and focus. Drugs have been overcoming writer's block since the dawn of recorded history, of course (those shamanic mushrooms), but that's not Bradley's problem. What sinks him and what is most unbelievable is that his girlfriend could be so dismayed that his newfound confidence isn't 'real' since it was boosted by a substance.

Listen lady, substances are the core of existence! We wouldn't even have civilization if not for coffee. We'd still be asleep, and cranky, in our thatched huts, hoping and dreaming that someone else will bring us some breakfast. But Cooper's refusal to remember he has pills around until it's time to try to take them to fight Russians is just not believable...

Imagine Popeye spending hours trying to open a can of spinach, his hands shaking, finally needing Olive to do it while he stammers through his teeth, an empty pipe in the corner of his clenched mouth. Not good. Popeye needs an open can ever at the ready, and so he has it. Has Bradley ever tried spinach? From a can? No, too cool for that; his spinach is fresh from Balducci's. All he needs is a little pill, and he's such a genius he can't even remember he's dead in the water without one.

 

I won't give away the ending, but I will tell you it's needlessly happy, a validation of Hollywood's fetish for solipsism's comely victims. What the story cries out for is a finale reflecting the terrifying loss of control and sanity that comes from tampering too long with your brain chem--as in AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000, top, bottom) which finds our 'hero' trapped in the vapid clutches of Reese Weatherspoon with no idea if he's been dreaming or actually living all his murders, and she'll never even stop talking about herself long enough to notice how much he loathes her. Instead of that kind of murky ambiguity, LIMITLESS bears out the creepy douche bag feeling I used to get hanging out on certain Upper East Side AA meetings listening to a certain class of rich snobs fawn over their sobriety like humility is the very latest Coach bag. Why doesn't our super-enlightened Bradley figure out a cure for AIDS, or how to levitate, or remote view, or make some draconian decision to wipe out half the population in a plague he's designed, carefully by hand, in order to make the world less crowded, ala LATHE OF HEAVEN? No, he drops his writerly pen and goes right for the long green. What a tool. And what a validation for Wall Street. If only Gandhi had possessed Cooper's level of enhanced confidence and brain power, imagine the great things he could have done with financial gains market share manipulation!

In the end, this drug just kind of turns you into Tom Cruise, and for the Los Angeles power worshippers, assertive narcissism and total fearless confidence is everything. I guess they figure New York is like that too. Here we love that trait like we love gangster movies, or mad scientists, or Hannibal Lecter, but you can't have your face and eat it too; you can't expect that Bradley alone is rising in the ranks in the realm of pill abuse. Where are all the others struggling for their smarty fix? In reality, pills like this come along all the time, but trouble is, everyone finds out about them and within a year taking it doesn't give you a leg up on the competition so much as barely keep you in the running, hence steroid testing is a kind of unilateral treaty.

Fact is, Cooper's character seems pretty stupid to begin with, but he loves his drugs and we're supposed to be in awe of him irregardless of Abbie Cornish's disappointment. If we come away from the film angry at our own sloth and trapped potential we should remember there's a reason we shuttered the upper rooms of our brain mansion: thar be monsters. Tread lightly, and bring a good therapist, or sponsor, or sword, or suffer the consequences. Unless, of course, you're Bradley Cooper, for not even the darkest demon can compete with the gravitic drag of such black hole vanity.

Have we got a tough guy here? Have we got a tough guy from the streets?

In this hipster overrun time of ours, we've been slowly losing our dangerous man persona, ever since THE GRADUATE made it hip to be sullen. Men of earlier decades were real, complex, intelligent and tough: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, Brando,  Lee Marvin, Sinatra, Bronson, Bogart... badasses not afraid to show intellect and wit, to pick fights and help others with their brains, fists and--when needed--guns.

We've still got some tough guys today, but most of them are pretty boys with glazed eyes. They toughen themselves up with military haircuts and grimy armor and CGI high contrast. For lack of a better all-around representative of this style, I'm using Channing Tatum, who I like a lot, actually, as far as this kind of new male goes. In all fair prejudice,  I'm looking at movie star males who are a whole generation younger than me, a generation that's grown up neck-deep in real war (Iraq and Afghanistan) video game war (too many to name, but most recently TOUR OF DUTY IV) and online fantasy war (W.O.W.). They celebrate the new sincerity and new virginity, and it scares me to death. Theirs is a bizarro-world, more conservative than their great grand-parents in the 1950s! At least the grandparents smoked cigarettes and had unprotected sex in drunken blackouts... for awhile..."cough"

 

At least Tatum has a fairly deep voice, but look at his baby face and his brow furrowed with dopey concentration, the kind of blank face that helps smart kids fit in, which is fine considering the callow war heroes he specializes in, but now, dear reader, now let's think of real tough guys, and how they don't have to pretend they're not witty, crazy and full of venom and vinegar. Imagine the original STAR WARS if there was NO Harrison Ford to add a real 'dangerous man' energy to the role. Instead, imagine if Hayden Christensen played Solo, or Freddie Prinze Jr. You have fallen asleep!? Welcome to the 10s! 

  

Just to prove it's got nothing to do with face and hair color (i.e., apple-cheeked and fair-haired callow) check out Angelina Jolie's dad (below left) in an old photo. He's got a baby face too, but take a deep look into those eyes. Even squinted shut you can tell there's a man in there, he'll fuck you up and not need to call for back-up and body armor before he does it. 

What you get with Tatum is more like a male model --a mix of tough guy posing, bedroom twinkle and the vacancy of a kid whose used to being stuck in classrooms and churches and not fathoming a word the teacher or preacher is saying and no one cares because there are kids worse off and louder.

Also, you have a kind of military professionalism. In the absence of actual fathers in the home, these kids have adopted military ethics and leadership as the de-facto non du pere (or "no of the father" - the prohibition of enjoyment that constitutes acceptance into the social order, away from the realm of the mother). 

That's all well and good until you remember just how dangerous, how far outside the box, our stars used to be. Our men used to be so dangerous that Harvey Keitel was the callow pretty boy (below). Now of course his hair and eyelashes are longer than Tatum's, but why is that? WHY oh WHY does every young thug-lite now have this awful mix of 50s crewcut and 80s gel hair? Oh, don't get me wrong, the actors of old could still bring the danger with no hair or even a self-inflicted Mohawk. Just look at De Niro's eyes (left) and you get a chill right down your spine.

I've been getting into The Dog Whisperer and I think he would call this trend an example of "bad leadership skills" or lack of assertiveness. A passive little boy lostness has infected our young men due to a crisis of fathering that's been getting worse since the dawn of the industrial age, and which they can't shake no matter how many CGI buildings they demolish...

As a final illustration, let's compare the new 3-D CLASH OF THE TITANS hero's look (GLADIATOR/300-style) with the original Harry Hamlin (whom I originally hated even seeing it in theaters as a kid back in 1983, for being also too smarmy). But compared with the harsh nihilism of the near-bald mercenary version of Perseus at left, freakin' Hamlin's a small miracle.

That said, we know where the Hamlin look comes from, and the first "tough guy pretty boy" from which the title of this blog entry comes (Randy Newman's "Pretty Boy" from 1979's Born Again) but it launched a thousand seamy/sexy NYC youth ships, and made glazed-eyed, pouty-lipped mono-syllabic working class boyhood into a sexual commodity that still sells today, even though the original is all but forgotten. I refer of course to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977).

P.S. for an antidote and return to full cool toughness, I recommend Kim Morgan's Dangerous Soulful Sexy Deep Freeze: Lee Marvin.