Thor: Love and Thunder and The Gray Man, just like No Time to Die before them, are challenging perceptions about what it takes to be a tough guy
One of the overarching themes of The Sopranos itself was the idea of American men confronting their own extinction. Right from the opening episode, Tony Soprano is feeling obsolete. “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end,” he tells his therapist, Dr Melfi . “The best is over.
The arguments around men ceding ground to women, or becoming somehow less masculine in their pursuit of sensitivity and emotional intelligence, are as cyclical as they are absurd. They were spoofed in 1982 in Bruce Feirstein’s bestselling comic account of masculinity,. The figure of the caring, tactile New Man was rife in that decade until it was eclipsed in the 90s by the metrosexual, which was part of the cultural currency by the timeand men began buying guyliner and male-varnish.
No surprise that Feirstein – of Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche fame – was one of the screenwriters on that picture. Since then, it has become de rigueur for Bond movies to destabilise their hero’s previously sturdy foundations. It’s a kind of stress test: how far can you bend Bond without making him something less than himself? The experiment reached its logical conclusion last year in No Time to Die, where the essence of Bond somehow became even more concentrated in the act of killing him off.
This is the point at which the masculine hero and his admirers now find themselves. Bond is gone. The western is now fully queer. Thor is job-sharing with a woman. And one of the biggest action movies of the year is not only a consonant away from being called The Gay Man, but also features a star who has colluded in the glorious feminised makeover of screen masculinity.It transpires that the whole point of The Gray Man is to lay the old macho myths to rest.
It is no spoiler to say that Six triumphs at the end of The Gray Man. But anyone who wishes to be spared the exact symbolic nature of his victory should look away now. After what one female onlooker describes as “two troglodytes bashing each other”, it is Lloyd – the personification of toxic, archaic masculinity – who lies face-down in the fountain. Macho is literally dead in the water.
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