Summer Movies and Eternal Questions

Slate has a wonderful feature on this year's Hollywood summer movies, which includes:

1. An almost-relieved Dana Stevens, who celebrates the return of brawny, '80s style action movies such as Live Free or Die Hard. I can understand how the all-too grim realities of severed limbs and faces reduced to so much hamburger hash can make one long for the indestructible heroes of yore. I will admit though that my tastes lean more to Willis' John McClane rather than Stallone's John Rambo, an inclination that is addressed partially by...

2. Eric Lichtenfeld, who joyfully dissects the evolution of McClane's classic one-liner, "Yippee Ki Yay Mo—." Licthenfeld insists that, and I apologize if, by way of quoting Licthenfeld properly, I offend anyone's sensibilities:

A quarter of the line (or half, depending on how you count) is profane, and yet "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" is actually a delicate wisecrack. Underscoring the line's bridging of generations is the symmetry of its construction. On either side of the comma, past and present each get four syllables. This balance is manifested in the evenness of Willis' first—and best—delivery of the line. Subtly, he eases off "fucker," the word that, by virtue of its syntactical position, and its very nature, we might expect to land hardest on our ears. That Willis does not employ the same deftness in the sequels is a pity. The phrase is most effective not as a buildup to some hammer punch, but as one seamless unit of defiance.

3. Which leads us, in the disjointed, barely rational, associative way in which random items are strung along together to "mean" something, to Marisa Meltzer's observations regarding stoner movies, an article that sadly, receives more column space than...

4. Matt Feeney's remarkably lucid analysis regarding the misconceptions regarding loving masculinity and homoeroticism in movies. Feeney writes:

A good way of grasping how the claim of homoeroticism misfires sociologically comes from a more recent example: the Spartan blood bath 300. Critic after critic sneered that 300 was transparently homoerotic. Blogger Andrew Sullivan approvingly cited a (presumably gay) correspondent who wrote, "Everyone in the film is gay." Why? Because of those short shorts and all those exposed muscles. (The correspondent dug the movie because of the hot, sweaty men. Ergo, everyone dug the movie because of the hot, sweaty men. I hope the entanglement of this interpretation in a hermeneutic circle is obvious.)

Now, 300 has earned more than $200 million in America alone, from an overwhelmingly male audience. What more plausibly accounts for this? That 20 million closet cases snuck off to see an illicit fantasy about bare-chested men in Hellenic Speedos, or that young men from the vast heartland of this very conservative, Christian, pro-military country flocked to see an unabashedly heroic tale of Occidental, republican military glory? To believe the latter, all you have to accept is that, in imagining the sort of heroic figures they themselves would like to be, straight men would project onto them not just excellence but physical beauty. Shouldn't a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?

Photo Credits:
Illustration of Bruce Willis as John McClane is by Deanna Staffo.