Outdated models of masculinity?

“As Hollywood begins to navigate the #MeToo landscape,” Tatiana Siegel reported, “one of the first casualties appears to be big-screen erotica. [...] Alyssa Rosenberg, writing in the Washington Post, hopes that Hollywood’s embarrassed executives are navigating “the end of a very narrow way of thinking about what’s alluring.”

[...]

This reckoning is long overdue. And it can be extended to another genre that has distorted how men behave: war movies. [...] Some of the biggest war movies of the post-9/11 era don’t just show violence in ways that are often gratuitous and occasionally racist. They model a cliched form of masculinity that veers from simplistic to monstrous."

[...]

Whenever I write about the real-world impact of war movies – and I’ve gone to bat against “American Sniper,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “13 Hours” — I always get responses along the lines of “Relax, these are just movies. Don’t take them so seriously. They’re harmless.” That’s when it becomes necessary to say that movies can create or reinforce narratives of history and gender that influence what people think and what they do. Boys and men develop their notions of masculinity from a variety of sources that include the films they watch (the extent to which this is true is, of course, open to debate).

[...]

What matters is that well into the second decade of our forever war, the combat movies that populate our multiplexes and our minds are devoted to a martial narrative of men-as-terminators that should have been strangled at its birth a long time ago.

  Intercept

I couldn't agree more with that last sentence.  This is a good article.  I say that without having seen the movie it's reviewing: "12 Strong".  And I won't be seeing it, based on the review and the screenshot, and the fact that I've never been a fan of war movies.

But, this is one of the things I appreciated about 'Dunkirk', a war movie that I did go see - it wasn't war porn. It was an intelligent and beautifully shot movie.  I'm not so sure, though, as the headline of the above Intercept article reads, that these models of masculinity are outdated. They're sad, but they seem pretty strong to me. Maybe that's due in part to the movies. But those movies wouldn't make so much money if they had no appeal because they were outdated.

And, speaking of the screenshot, you know of course that's an American movie piece of propaganda where it's the Americans who are always leading the heroic charges in brown people's wars.  The brown people are always the extras.  According to the review, this is a movie about actual events, but this event didn't happen.  Surprise.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.