"Is that a man?"

THE RIGHT STUFF reminds us that America needs masculinity, and that there's nothing "toxic" about that

There are things that are true… no matter how hard they may be to believe, or how hard we may wish that they were not.

One of those true things, perhaps the saddest of all the true things, is that in America here in the early 2020’s we have 10-year-old boys committing suicide, 14-year-old boys dying of opiod overdoses, and 18-year-old boys shooting up schools and gunning people down in our streets.

It’s fair to ask… it is, in fact, critical to ask… what the hell is going on?

This question had been rolling around in my mind for quite some time… and then Fred Ward died.

Fred Ward was a fine actor and a steady and consistent presence many of the movies I loved growing up. He had a career almost any actor this side of Tom Cruise would envy, and lived to be 79 years old. He had, one could say, a hell of a run.

I’ve never understood the “god, what a tragedy!” approach we often take when we hear of the deaths of famous men like Fred, men who lived full and exciting lives and who were the envy of millions… lives that deserve to be celebrated rather than mourned. And in any case, my family is from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz funerals and Second Lines, and so my instinct has never been to focus on the tragedy of death but rather on the glory of a life well-lived.

So let’s celebrate Fred Ward’s life. And think about what his passing means when considered alongside that great unhappy truth with which I opened this essay.

Fred was in a lot of great movies, and his resume is as eclectic as any actor of his generation. Most obituaries have understandably focused on the high-end dramas and star turns. But Fred was such an appealing guy, even in the “B-movies” he made, that if you told me that I could only watch one movie for the rest of my life and that it had to be TREMORS, I wouldn’t hate you for it.

But his best film was THE RIGHT STUFF, and it’s not even close.

THE RIGHT STUFF is about men… men of grit and ambition and ego… it’s about all the things that men can accomplish when their natural aggressive masculinity is focused in a positive direction, on a common goal. It wasn’t Bell Aircraft that broke the sound barrier, it was Chuck Yeager. And it wasn’t NASA that put rockets into space, it was the Mercury Astronauts who did that.

Those feats couldn’t have been accomplished without technology, that’s true enough as far as it goes, but it was guts and balls that fueled the race to fly planes faster than anyone else on Earth, and it was guts and balls that made men strap themselves to the top of giant firecrackers and ride them into space like Major Kong on his bomb.

Men thrive on competition, they have a need to challenge one another in order to get better… they need to be pushed. And sometimes, they need to fight.

It’s that relentless need for forward motion, for competition, for combat that drives men to excell. And the men of the Mercury program were no different. Indeed, it was probably the extra aggressive nature of their masculinity (test pilots, in general, are not your average every day joes) that first drove them to become pilots and which eventually compelled them to risk their lives to be better and faster than the guy in front of them in the launch cycle.

Truth is, they didn’t even get along very well much of the time. Within the Mercury Program, as portrayed in the film, there was a major rift between the forthright, upstanding “nerdier” guys like John Glenn and Scott Carpenter on the one hand and the more libertine id-driven guys like Alan Shepard, Gordo Cooper, and Fred Ward’s Gus Grisholm on the other.

But that’s always been the thing about guys, we compete with each other, we argue, we fight… but when the chips are down we put our difference aside and we get the job done. This natural fact of the male makeup has been a staple of every ensemble dude movie from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN to THE DIRTY DOZEN to HOOSIERS to REMEMBER THE TITANS to TOP GUN to THE RIGHT STUFF.

Just a few scenes after the one where Glenn and Shepard almost come to blows, the astronauts are able to come together for a brilliantly choreographed effort to leverage their power and popularity with the general population to force NASA to make critical changes to the “spacecraft” that will allow them to be the pilots they know they can be.

Hard to believe these guys were fighting with each other a few minutes before this, isn’t it?

What does any of this have to do with the crisis American boys are currently going through? Well, perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.

The thing about masculinity is, it must be harnessed and channeled in the right direction. A good man will run through a wall to get the job done, but that same energy can be dangerous if it’s not first molded by wiser men who know what it means to be a Good Man. Boys must be taught how to be men, it doesn’t just happen. Good men are made, not born. You can’t just wind them up and let them go, because sometimes when you do, you get Columbine… or Parkland FL… or Uvalde, TX… or My Lai.

I can remember exactly where I was the first time I saw THE RIGHT STUFF and, more importantly, I remember who I was with. I was 13 years old, sitting with a handful of my closest male friends in local suburban Virginia movie theater, and we’d all been brought there by my Dad.

A lot of my friends were troubled kids… some did not have dads in their lives and others, who had dads who were drunks or abusive or who simply didn’t care, might as well have not had one at all. But my Dad wasn’t just our ride to the movies, he was also our Cub Scout leader, our Soccer Coach and, for some of those boys, he was the closest thing to a Father any of them knew. When I was 16, I caught one of those boys robbing our house. A few days later, that boy tracked my Dad down on the street and publicly begged him for forgiveness through tears. I can’t help but wonder if either the Buffalo or Uvalde shootings would have occured if either of those boys had benefited from having someone like my Dad in their lives.

Look, we all know how bad the statistics are regarding the number of American boys living without fathers in the home, and we all know that the numbers are getting worse not better. It doesn’t take a scientist or a psychiatrist to understand that there is an ugly reckoining coming for a generation of boys who are more likely to be on psychoactive drugs that to have a Dad in their lives. The trajectory is obvious, and has been for a long time. Anyone who doesn’t see it simply doesn’t want to.

But back to THE RIGHT STUFF… I can’t remember how my friends felt about it, but I loved it. I know that at least one of those friends and I watched TRS many times over the years on cable, and so I can only assume he loved it as much as I did.

But would a 13-year-old boy here in 2022 love THE RIGHT STUFF? Would he even be able to sit still for the two hours it would take to watch the movie?

My instinct is no… unless Iron Man were to shown up deep in the second act to save John Glenn as he plummeted to Earth with nothing between him and certain death but a busted heat shield.

Which is a shame. I enjoy superhero movies as much as the next person, but I doubt that all of the Marvel and DC movies put together contain as much wisdom about what it means to be a man, than the one scene in THE RIGHT STUFF from which I pulled the title of this essay.

The last 45 seconds of that clip are so damned iconic… the ambulance races towards Yeager’s crash site, no one expecting to find anything but a grease spot where a once great pilot used to be. And yet… as they peer into the distance, a figure emerges out of the heat shimmer, his bleeding-edge jet burning in the desert behind him.

“Is that a man?” asks the ambulance drive.

“Yeah… you’re damned right it is!” says Ridley… answering two questions at the same time.

It’s not just a man who walks out of that stinking plume of oil smoke… it’s a “Man.”

But the Safety First! crowd will complain… that scene doesn’t show a man, it shows a reckless, toxically masculine idiot who failed, and destroyed a multi-million dollar airplane in the process.

OK so what about that? Did Yeager fail? Yes he did… but so what? Failure is how we learn… it’s how we push the boundaries of our knowledge… how we expand the envelope of what’s possible. . Yeager’s was an audacious effort to discover the alitutde limit of a jet engine, and that kind of audacity is what built America.

I’ll tell you what, if there’s one thing America needs more of right now, it’s audacity.

Or not…

There’s an old saying…

“Hard Times make Hard Men

Hard Men make Good Times

Good Times make Weak Men

Weak Men make Hard Times…”

Maybe there’s no good way to get out of the cycle other than to just ride it out, and maybe you and I just have the bad generational luck to be living through the last line of the cycle…

On the other hand, what if we were to take a page out of the Female Empowerment movement of the last twenty years?

Around the turn-of-the-millennium, the dominant culture observed that there were not enough women in traditionally male education and career fields, like STEM and Business Management. What developed in response to this perceived inequality was a massive public and private effort to create programs, agencies, and advertising to support and empower young girls in hopes that they would begin to close the gap with men in these career pursuits.

But while this was happening, the dominant culture was telling young men and boys something very different. They were accusing young men and boys of embodying toxic masculininty, telling them that they needed to stop manspreading while mansplaining, that if they continued to behave like boys in school that they would be put on psycho-active drugs, or demanding that they step aside in favor of female candiates for the same colleges, jobs, and political offices… some of this was done out of pure neglect, but a lot of it was something much more sinister… the idea that Men have had it too good for far too long and that it was high time society took them down a peg.

Developing girls into strong empowered women and boys into well-adjusted men is not a zero sum game. We can do both at the same time. If we do not, it is only because we don’t want to. I’ll leave the reasons for why that might be to others to debate, but there can be no doubt that our young men are in crisis and we need another Moon Shot Program to fix it, just like the one our entire culture swung into action to create back when we decided we needed more women in the STEM fields.

Like it or not, there just aren’t enough Good Men around who are willing to coach soccer teams, lead Cub Scout troops and drag kids to screenings of THE RIGHT STUFF to make up for the sheer lack of competent Dad-ing that’s going on out there in Modern America these days.

Because you never know what kind of Strong Men are going to be created when those Hard Times finally arrive… sometimes it’s Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or George Patton… but other times it’s Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler. And that’s not the sort of thing we want to leave to chance.

The Mercury Program was designed to bring out the best in American Masculinity… a similar Nationwide commitment to support Dads and the development of their Sons might well achieve the same spectacular result.

We certainly can’t rely on the culture to do it… THE RIGHT STUFF was a long time ago, Fred Ward has passed on, and Hollywood just isn’t interested in making movies about American exceptionalism anymore.