Every culture has its own unique Rites of Passage. These Rites demarcate childhood from adulthood, separating boys from men and girls from women. As with most sexually differentiated behavior, male Rites of Passage tend to be more dramatic and well defined than the Rites of Passage for girls. Typically, the demarcation of boys and men invovles the full expression of male aggressivity, channeled into socially acceptable and necessary channels. Most male Rites of Passage invovle fighting enemies or a derivative. As we have managed our way to become more civilized, the murderous nature of male Rites has been tempered, so that often such Rites are only distant derivatives of such primitive aggression. Rites of Passgae also become the basis for the culture's evocation of heroism. For example, a society that honors the warrior as the greatest ideal to which a boy can aspire can be sure to contain Rites of Passage that glorify aggression.
This creates a problem for pacifist societies. Since the role of the Rite is to enable the boy to channel his aggression in socially acceptable ways, societies that eschew aggression in all spheres will often find themselves celebrating feminized men who lack the abiltity to express what in more simple times have been known as masculine traits.
Over the weekend, two experiences brought these thoughts into focus. On Saturday night I saw 3:10 to Yuma. This is a wonderful movie on many different levels. The acting is superb and superbly nuanced. Russell Crowe exceeds superlatives for his acting, inhabiting a man who is as appealing as he is contemptible. Yet Christian Bale's even more subtle acting is a revelation. This movie works on so many different levels that the violence, and there is a lot of violence, though often seeming casual, brutal, and gratuitous, is actually essential to the movie and as informative as it is necessary.
The American western is the genre that captures the quintessence of what it means to be an American. The American cowboy at his best has always represented an updated version of Medieval chivalry. The lone Knight/cowboy dispenses rough but fair justice, protecting the weak and defenseless, especially the women and children who otherwise would be left to the mercy of the bad guys. This is an archetypal story and 3:10 to Yuma does a brilliant job, evoking nothing less than High Noon, perhaps the most compelling and emblematic of the kind. Yet the differences between the two movies could not be more telling.
[Minimal spoilers follow.]
In High Noon Gary Cooper's Will Kane is never seen as anything less than an adult Knight doing his job, protecting his people and his fiance from the depredations of the unsocialized sociopaths who seek retribution for the affront to their desires that Will Kane represents. Sociopaths want nothing more than their own gratification and see others as serving only at their pleasure. For having the temerity to oppose them and confront them, Will Kane must die.
In 3:10 to Yuma, Christina Bale's Dan Evans is a troubled, failing, and literally and figuratively crippled man, who is uncertain of his ability to actually function as a man. He fears failing his wife and perhaps even more significantly, failing his son. Russell Crowe's Ben Wade is a failed man, whose failings can be reasonably inferred to stem from the failure of his parents to raise him from being a boy to a man. Men contain and control their aggression and devote themselves to caring for those who are less able to take care of themselves. Watching Russel Crowe/Ben Wade and Christian Bale/Dan Evans in their interplay as one helps the other become something he could never become on his own is exhilarating. Watching as Dan's maturation as a father enables Logan Lerman, playing Dan's 14 year old son William, to become a man before our eyes is equally moving. At the end, Dan, or perhaps William, has become Will Kane.
My Sunday was spent in such marked contrast that the experience was somewhat disorienting. Sunday was the final day for the "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City:
Summer of Love revisits the unprecedented explosion of contemporary art and popular culture brought about by the civil unrest and pervasive social change of the 1960s and early 70s, when a new psychedelic aesthetic emerged in art, music, film, architecture, graphic design, and fashion. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by Richard Avedon, Jimi Hendrix, and Andy Warhol, among others. As well as a rich selection of important posters, album covers and underground magazines. A special emphasis is placed on environments as well as on film, video and multimedia installations. The art in the exhibition is conceptualized through a wealth of documentary material highlighting events, people and places; from the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival to Timothy Leary to the UFO nightclub in London.
The program guide describes the exhibit in more pointed terms:
The emergence and flowering of psychedelic art coincided with one of the most revolutionary and tumultuous periods of the twentieth century. During a time of intense social and political upheaval, defined by the counterculture and the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, artists, filmmakers, musicians, poets, and architects were creating visionary worlds that illustrated a desire for alternative lifestyles. Seeking to eschew rampant consumerism, middle-class complacency, and conservative social and sexual mores, the liberating potential of psychedelia partly stemmed from its ability to convey altered forms of perception and sensory experiences induced by music, light, meditation, and hallucinogenic drugs.
Mild embarrassment was my initial reaction. The exhibit documented a time and place that was ultimately unserious to the extreme. By that I mean that the counterculture was all about prolonging childhood rather than finding new and improved ways to be come adults. For a brief moment, it seemed that growing up had become optional, that the longstanding connection between cause and effect in human affairs had been severed. The free expression of our impulses without consequences was the hallmark of the times. The late 60s were characterized by Free consequence-less sex: the pill made pregnancy a worry of the past, antibiotics made diseases which had once terrified seem mere nuisances (all the while the AIDS crisis was slowly brewing); the exhibit is a celebration of free sex, especially a polymorphous perverse sexually where anything and everything was now within bounds. Further, drugs, shortcuts to enlightenment (though ultimately a faux enlightenment) were freely available and celebrated, their danger minimized. It did not take long before causalities began to accumulate, but the era of Drugs, Sex,a nd Rock & Roll seemed to truly be a time where time was suspended.
The remarkable thing about the exhibit is how poorly the artwork has aged. Much of it looks shabby and dissipated, the vibrancy lost (perhaps because much of the vibrancy was a projection to begin with.)
Of greater interest is that such a time was inflated into a "Revolution" as if free love, freely available hallucinogens, and loud music represented fundamental change in the human condition. Now, 40 years later, superannuated hippies (those who survived relatively intact) try to rekindle the revolutionary spirit, or worse, attempt to rationalize the excesses as a harbinger of a new way for men to behave and relate.
The exhibit remarks upon the explicitly Pacifistic and Utopian sensibilities of those caught up in the time. It fails to reconcile the grandiose and Utopian desire with the reality that was stunningly in contradiction of th avowed goals of peace, love, and brotherhood. While those who imagined themselves fighting the "pigs" for their right to party may have well believed they were acting in a heroic fashion, the utterly narcissistic gratifications being sought and experienced throughout offer a different perspective. The courage of the counterculture youth, whose goal was to inhibit their aggression, resided more in their minds than in reality. There has never been a more indulged generation and almost nothing was risked in confronting "the man," who exercised a restraint that should have been applauded yet was depicted as the "enemy" by those who imagined themselves to be Street Fighting Men. It is an easy conceit for an adolescent to adopt, that his "play" is important and can (and did) change the world, but such a conceit should at least mildly embarrass those who recognize that reality is ultimately a deeply serious place to live.
The 60s of the "Summer of Love" and the "Psychedelic Era" were many things, most of them profoundly trivial, but they were not a heroic time in which boys could learn to be men; they were a time when boys were encouraged to inhibit their aggression and continue to play. Too many who grew up in that time now act as if they need to continue behaving like rebels against a constricting universe in order to feel that their immaturity actually represents a deeper maturity. (How often do we hear from those who claim to "speak truth to power" how courageous they are, when in reality they risk nothing, since they are an integral part of the very establishment they claim to decry?)
The Beatles sang "Love is all you need" but the fatuity of that sentiment should be obvious in a world in which vile misogynistic, racist, anti-Semites would like nothing more than to kill those who "Love" so mindlessly.
Utopian grandiosity is an expectable affectation for adolescents. We expect it and might worry if our adolescents didn't dream of saving the world. The contrast between the growth of Christian Bale's Dan Evans and the perpetual adolescence of the Woodstock generation who Rites of Passage were a sham, could not be clearer.
But at least the music of the 60s was great.
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