The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - April 6th, 2008
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11:12 am
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Masculinity Is Dead, Say Goodbye To Cigars
There were times I wished my Mom or Dad would just smack me in the mouth and get it over with. But tragically, I didn't come from that sort of family. I came from a family that was very big on therapy, and EST, and reading Dr. Wayne Dyer - so the most frightening words in my family were "Let's talk about this."
This meant we would go in a room, and sit Very Seriously, and talk for three to four hours about our feelings. Everything you had ever said would be flayed out, dissected, and poked from every angle. Your motivations would be questioned, your defensive reaction catalogued, your concomitant sadness wisely nodded at; nothing you could do would allow you to escape The Talk until you had been properly drained of all life and could discuss, dispassionately, the very core elements of your life and how they were not syncing up with the things you claimed you wanted to do.
It was exhausting, and it demolished your self-esteem to see how much you lied to yourself and others.
But then I remembered Charlton Heston.
The annual "Planet of the Apes Week" on the Channel 7 "4:30 Movie" was what I lived for. This was in the days before VCRs and DVDs, so if you missed "Beyond the Planet of the Apes," well, that was it until next year. And so my ape-lovin' friend Bryan and I eagerly planned our week around watching those damned dirty apes and nuclear explosions and social allegory that we utterly didn't get until years later because it came wrapped in a candy shell of machine guns and fistfights.
Charlton was The Man. Because unlike a lot of the other dopey heroes out there, who never talked about anything, he had depth. Oh, he had it in that vainly struggling 1970s way, where he was really still saturated with a lot of chauvinist innuendo and he talked just a bit too much about sticking it to The Man... But unlike every other macho dude with a gun, Charlton understood that the best way to fix things was to talk about them.
But unlike my Mom and Dad and Uncle Tommy, Charlton also knew when it was time to just smack a fucker in the mouth. And in the movies, that worked.
I idolized Charlton, because he was strong and noble and took shit from no one, but he still dated hip black chicks and smoked weed and was goddamned Moses, for Christ's sake. He was the perfect blend of paralyctic 1970s New-Age psychocracy and old-style 1950s manly action. In every film, he was clearly more bad-ass than anyone else in the goddamned country, but he'd still try to talk things out. And if that didn't work, then he'd punch you in the goddamned face.
He was comfortable in his own perfect skin. He had that blaring white grin that always looked like it had a cigar in it, whether he did or not, and that grin told you that he liked you, he really did. He didn't apologize for having sex. He always had the moral compass firmly in his hand, and it pointed straight at him, because he knew how fucked-up mankind was - himself included.
His movies are indefensible - which is to say that I won't ever attempt to convince you they're good. But he was the biggest star, and he still burned his starpower on science fiction "message" films - movies like Soylent Green, which attempted to deal with the issues of overpopulation and ended up in a catchphrase. And Omega Man (a.k.a. "The 'I Am Legend' That Didn't Quite Work"), which talked about loneliness. And of course his greatest work Planet of the Apes, which was all about society and how cruelly we treat things we don't believe.
Sure, these movies had all the subtlety of a hammer pounded into your cranium. But this was the 1970s, for God's sake! We didn't even invent "subtlety" as a concept until somewhere in the latter half of "The Godfather." In those days, your movie had A Message and you sounded it like a foghorn because your public was a bunch of popcorn-eating cretins who'd never see this damn film again and you had to make sure they GOT it.
And I love them. The celluloid in those movies are threaded through my veins, winding through my system shot-by-shot.
And I love him.
Yeah, he's an NRA dude. I don't care. His politics aren't part of what he taught me when I was young - namely, that it's okay to laugh off the crazy overtalking sometimes. It's okay to just be proud of who you are, and assume that you're okay sometimes; sure, you need to keep an eye on your inner turmoil, but you can do it with the light hand of Charlton Heston.
I'd have all the insight in the world. My family's talks were, ultimately, worthwhile. But would I have the courage to get up here on LJ and tell you guys, "Look, here's how it's gonna be?" Would I be able to unashamedly tell you of my wild sex stories and my silly puns and my crazy life?
Without Charlton? I don't think so. In my time of need, he was broadcast across the airwaves, showing me that men could be strong and not overbearing, loud without shouting down. Charlton Heston was every lesson about masculinity I needed to know back then - and though it's mutated a bit over the years, that brawny chest and gutturally-spouted lines will always be the seed of everything I know about how to be a Guy with a capital "G."
Tonight, I'm going to get a bottle of Scotch, somehow. I'm going to find a cigar. And I'm going to look up at the sky, and quote old Heston movies, and smile because the old man is gone and isn't that a shame?
You damn apes. You damn, dirty apes.
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01:49 pm
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Okay, Question For The Crowd -
- and it's useless if you don't provide links.
If you had to pick two essays of mine that summed up what you thought of as my essential personality to, say, a group of Clarion stranger-people who don't know me yet, what would you choose?
I'm trying to figure out what things I should link to, and I know what I'm famous for - either The Blowjob, The Hooker, or The Chair - but if I'm trying to get across who I am right now (with Gini and everyone in my life) and coming up blank. Any ideas?
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