October 23, 2002

FOUR FEATHERS PART 2

IT'S HARD TO BE A MAN

YALE KRAMER

    What relevance does the new film "Four Feathers" have for us today? There are some similarities in the situations faced by America at the beginning of the twenty-first century and Great Britain towards the end of the nineteenth. In their respective times they are/were the most powerful nations in the world. Their respective interests are/were threatened and then attacked unexpectedly by an unconventional army of Islamic fanatics in the Middle East led by a charismatic leader.

Although much of the novel "Four Feathers" is set in Sudan during a period of Britain's military involvment there, it is not a "war novel." There are no battle scenes, no shots are fired in anger, in fact no fighting of any kind takes place. It is essentially a psychological novel with a touch of romance and a dollop of adventure in an exotic military setting. When I say "psychological" I don't mean Dostoyevski or Proust. Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was a Victorian Englishman. And there is just so much psychology to be found in a Victorian Englishman.
But Mason did have a fascination with the dynamics of fear, cowardice, and guilt, and the human complexities they engender. And that is what Four Feathers is about.

In the current version of "Four Feathers" there is a written explanation of the meaning of the symbol of the white feather even before the story begins. The explanation is repeated during an early scene in which Harry Fevesham receives the feathers from his brother officers. These explanations are obviously for the sake of an audience that is unfamiliar with the icons and rituals of honor and dishonor. In the original--the novel--there is no explanation; the gesture is understood by characters and readers alike. This is true as well for the Korda film version. Even as late as 1939 audiences understood that a white feather meant that you were a coward. What has happened in the intervening 60 years to make cowardice, dishonor, and manliness such alien ideas?

Is there any question that American Manhood is on the ropes? A flock of books--some of- them powerful best sellers--on the subject of how to be a man bespeak a perplexity of spirit in men these days. Dazed and disoriented by the cultural upheavals of the last decade or two, men no longer seem to know whether they are coming or going (no pun intended). Women are wearing Jockey shorts and flying F-18s, men are wearing earrings and raising children. Outward manifestations merely? Or do they and countless other trivialities of the current scene, including the latest, mixed-up version of the "Four Feathers," imply a serious psychological drift toward androgyny?

In my boyhood--during the depression and World War II--the one issue we didn't have to worry about was what a man was or how a man was supposed to act. In real life you knew that a man earned a living for his wife and children, like my Dad, and was responsible for fixing things around the house and carrying the heavy stuff when you went to the beach. You knew he was really the boss because the money came from him and he could drive. He was pretty nice and he'd let you do pretty much anything, but there were times when you knew not to mess around with him no matter what because he could shout louder than anyone else in the family when he was mad.
You knew how men were supposed to dress because your dad and Dick Tracy wore the same outfit: a dark suit with vest, a white shirt, a striped tie and a fedora hat--gray in my father's case and yellow in Tracy's. And oh, how you longed for your first suit with long pants, which didn't come until you were about 10 or 11. Until then you wore short pants in summer and knickers in winter.
I also knew that my father had been a soldier in the British Army during World War I, a member, he told me every time I asked, of the Royal Fusiliers. There were old photographs of him to prove it, looking very dashing and handsome in his solar topee and uniform. And at times when he was in a jolly mood--on a trip usually--he'd sing old British Army songs as he puffed on a cigarette which he took out of a dark green package with the name "Lord Salisbury” in gold letters across it. That’s how men looked--cigarettes, fedoras, dark suits with vests--and, oh yes, a fountain pen in the upper left vest pocket.
But that was only real life. You also learned how men were supposed to act from reading, going to the movies, and listening to the radio. You discovered that it was important to be decisive--a man or boy of action--like Smilin' Jack, the aviator, and Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy. Like Tom Mix with his very intelligent horse Tony and all his white-hatted cowboy pals like Buck Jones and Hoot Gibson. (That was before cowboys went soft and began to sing and dress fancy like Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.) And it did not seem perverse to you then that cowboy heroes, even though they risked life and limb to rescue the beautiful woman, in the end seemed to have a more affectionate and intimate relationship with their faithful horses.
You discovered, too, that these men of action were motivated by high principles. Errol Flynn playing Robin Hood taught you that, and so did The Shadow, that mysterious aide to the forces of law and order, in reality Lamont Cranston, the wealthy man about town. And besides being resourceful, they always had some wonderful power or skill: Errol Flynn's ability to split an arrow at a hundred yards, or Lamont Cranston's hypnotic power to cloud men's minds and thus become invisible--a little trick he had picked up in the Orient. Whatever they did, these men were always struggling against insurmountable odds and finally, through acts of cunning or skill, winning.

From there it was only a short step for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor and Warner Brothers to introduce you to Spencer Tracy, who, fighting against insurmountable odds, invented the elec­tric light, and Paul Muni, who, against even greater insurmountable odds, invented Pasteurization and the treatment for rabies, which led you naturally to the rest of Paul De Kruif's wonderful "Microbe Hunters"--scientist heroes, all of whom were patient, deter­mined, resourceful, and adventuresome.

That's how I found out how to be a man when I was a boy.

Nowadays I can see that it's harder. Cultural gurus tell us that a sea change has occurred in the last decade or two. With the end of the sixties and the emergence of the radical feminists, the sexual revolution, and the gay activist movement, what may be an inevitable drift toward androgyny appears to have accelerated.

Enter Professor Gilmore. David Gilmore is an anthropologist who has been studying manhood in many and various cultures, and has assem­bled his reflections on the subject in a thoughtful book entitled "Manhood in the Making." The book asks what it means to be "manly" and sets out to find the similarities and differences in manhood in a wide variety of'cultures from the most primitive to the most developed.

What Professor Gilmore has found out about manhood is, first of all, that in most societies manhood is a challenge, a test. Since life is for the most part nasty, mean, brutish, and often short, males must be forced by inner sanctions and outer conventions to assume their social roIes. And manhood is that ensemble of inner sanctions and ideals and outer conventions which gradually develops in each culture in order to inspire boys to become "real" men. This ensemble of values and mores is akin to an ideology--a gender ideology--that is both socially inspiring and morally compelling. Each culture provides an unwritten script by which the male children and adolescents can guide themselves or be guided by elders. Although each culture allows some individual expression--some more, some less--in the enactment of the manhood script, it must be followed in general, and the culture provides serious sanctions if it is not.

Gilmore found that there is a spectrum along which these manhood ideologies fall. At one end of the scale there are the machismo ideologies; at the other are the much rarer (perhaps anomalous) "flower-children" ideologies in which there is little social distinction between the sexes and all forms of assertiveness are taboo. Between these poles are cultures that provide their men with somewhat more complex scripts that to partake of both ends of the spectrum, like those of modern urban America. In America, there is also a variation in manhood ideologies along socio-economic lines--working-class patterns at the machismo end of the spectrum and upper-class patterns at the androgynous end.

Gilmore found that whatever differences exist between the varied expressions of manliness, certain essential similarities re­main--the universal components of manhood. "To be a man in most of' the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin.... `Real' men are expected to tame nature in order to recreate and bolster the basic kinship units of their society; that is, to reinvent and perpetuate the social order... to create something of value from nothing."

These three imperatives of manliness--impregnation, protection, and production--are difficult, sometimes dangerous, and highly competitive, and boys and men must be induced to master their anxieties and give up the narcissistic pleasures of childhood in order to face pain, hardship, and even death willingly. And it is the whole ideology of manhood from childhood to adolescence that helps to achieve this difficult transformation.

In the light of Professor Gilmore's researches Harry Fevesham's behavior is more understandable. The novel suggests that Harry has been powerfully influenced by his sensitive mother and that this influence has tended to undermine an appreciation for the sterner values of his father. Thus his "manhood ideology" has been compromised. If his father had not been a courageous military officer and a strong influence in the family Harry would have not had a problem, he'd have become a poet or philosopher. But as things develop in the novel part of him wants to be like his beloved mother and part like his admired and feared father. The novel turns out to be a "becoming a man" novel, and the rest of the story is devoted to this passage--his transformation.

The new movie utterly fails in understanding Harry or any aspect of this universal problem, which is perhaps why it has failed so badly with critics and audiences. In the film it is impossible to understand Harry's motivation in resigning his commision and turning tail. The first few scenes show Harry as a handsome muscular hunk of a guy playing a really rough game of rugby, bopping guys and being bopped left and right. No sign of any flinching--he obviously enjoys a good fight. Instead of rendering him as a slender poetic type, quiet and thoughtful as the book depicts him, the movie shows him as utterly, unconflictedly masculine. He carouses with his mates, he wenches with his girlfriend, in short he has already achieved "real manhood" at the beginning of the movie so his cowardice is baffling and unbelievable.

The second important failure in the movie is that he never does what he is supposed to do in order to become transformed from coward to hero. In the book he faces various tests and challenges and surmounts them on his own (with a bit of help from his sidekick, a faithful arab named Abou Fatma). In the movie it is Abou Fatma who becomes the real and only hero of the movie because he is the one who, through his guile, nobility, and courage rescues Harry and his brother officer. In the movie, Harry seems to have no resources at all and thus does not deserve either our admiration or the girl at the end. The transformation has gone on in reverse. Instead of going from coward to "real man" he has gone from "real man" to inept wuss. The final shot in the film shows Abou Fatma, the noble savage and Knight-like hero, (who has been changed from an Arab in the book to a black slave in the film) walking in a stately manner into the desert sunset with his camel, ready to perform more heroic deeds.

Clearly, the makers of the movie were not able to withstand the powerful pull toward androgyny that our modern culture casts over its men.

DON'T MISS IT!

NEXT WEEK--THE CONCLUSION TO FOUR FEATHERS

PART III: TWO CHEERS FOR THE BRITISH