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ake a look at Hollywood’s top 100 movies of 2004, and you’ll notice that sex was largely ignored, soft-pedaled or demonized, particularly when it came to American men. The year’s two biggest surprises were provided by cinema’s two most asexual characters: Michael Moore and Jesus. And, as far as I can recall, there was only one sex scene in the top thirty-five films.
That scene was in Troy. Yes, Hollywood’s two sexiest leading men could only get laid in the past: sex was an anachronistic pastime, like swordplay or jousting. In Troy, Brad Pitt held orgies in his battle tent. In Alexander, Colin Farrell humped Rosario Dawson and caressed Jared Leto. Which would be fine. But in both Troy and Alexander, sexuality is a kind of Achilles heel, a marker of each man’s insatiable pride and appetite, his — lemme check my Cliff Notes — hubris. If this were a high-school English paper, I’d get an A for noting that, for Colin and Brad, fucking everything that moves was a tragic flaw.
And this was a trend in the year’s historical biopics. In Kinsey, the title character was cheered for talking about sex but chastized for having it. He wowed the lecture halls with pedagogy, but the film’s domestic scenes portrayed him as a kind of clueless, abstracted lunkhead whose sexual desire brought tears to the eyes of Laura Linney and Peter Sarsgaard, two of film’s sweetest faces. The meanie!
Likewise, in Ray, Ray Charles was a musical genius but a womanizer who broke his wife’s heart with his philandering. Jamie Foxx was sexier than I’d ever imagined Charles to be, but director Taylor Hackford filmed Charles’s sex exactly as he filmed Charles’s heroin addiction: Illustrate the illicit allure in the first few sequences, then punish him for it later with shots of his angelic, wounded wife.
Oliver Stone claims that Alexander flopped because American puritanism is on the rise. I think it has more to do with the rise of the dork and the fall of the stud.
At the outset, 2004 looked hot. It was supposed to be Brad Pitt’s year, and Colin Farrell’s year — but, above all, it seemed like 2004 would belong to Jude Law. The chisel-chinned, sun-kissed Brit was in six movies, including
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2004 was not the Year of Jude Law, or even Jamie Fox, at the box office.
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Patrick Marber’s dark and sexy Closer, the sci-fi romance Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and the ultimate male-slut film, Alfie. But Sky Captain didn’t catch wind and Alfie, which seemed bizarrely out of joint, flopped. As Chris Rock and Sean Penn have made clear at the Oscars, Jude Law is still not a real star in Hollywood — at least not at the box office.
I think he’s just too charming, too handsome and too capable, no matter what flaws he may pretend. In Alfie and Sky Captain, Law was about as plasticene-perfect as the suave robot gigolo he played in Spielberg’s A.I. He always looks hot, so he’s hard to believe and nearly impossible to sympathize with. His brand of Cary Grant/Paul Newman/Robert Redford smart-pretty-boy charm has slipped out of fashion. (Perhaps even the filmmakers don’t believe in it anymore. In both Alfie and Closer, Law played a male slut who got punished for sleeping around, most brutally in Closer. As Mike Nichols told me in an interview, “We like to see beautiful people ruined.”)
So 2004 was not the Year of Jude Law, or even Jamie Foxx, at the box office. At the multiplex, it was the year of Ben Stiller. The same audiences that skipped hot Jude Law action raced to watch the neutered Stiller whine. As cinema’s most asexual leading man (Paul Giamatti included), Stiller walked away with the box-office crown. Jamie Foxx grossed $75 million; Ben Stiller grossed more than half a billion.
Not so long ago, we might have said that Ben Stiller did Tom Cruise numbers in 2004. Now we say he did Mike Myers numbers. I think this says a lot. Both Stiller and Myers are similar leading men — ugly, funny, self-mocking — who have made a career of skewering pretty boys like Jude Law. Mike Myers lampooned Bond in Austin Powers, Stiller mocked superheroes in Mystery Men, jocks in Dodgeball, models in Zoolander and ’70s machismo in Starsky & Hutch. This year, he gained the most success by playing fumbling, inept dorks in Along Came Polly and Meet the Fockers.
Myers, of course, voiced the number-one film of the year, Shrek 2. In some ways, the recent history of leading men is the story of Shrek: A fairy tale in which a farting, klutzy, insecure troll becomes the prince of the kingdom.
Last year Hollywood, like Dr. Evil, stripped many pure leading men of their mojo. Matt Damon’s girlfriend was gunned down at the beginning of Bourne Supremacy. Joaquin Phoenix was cast as an honest-to-God Puritan in The Village.
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Dorks dominated the year’s big movies.
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Leonardo DiCaprio, formerly of the Pussy Posse, developed a purely platonic friendship with Cate Blanchett in The Aviator. We even had to watch Brad Pitt and George Clooney settle down into solid, sexless monogamy in Ocean’s Twelve. (And if you read Us Weekly, I don’t have to tell you what a stretch that was.)
While hotties like Gael Garcia Bernal flourished in indies, dorks dominated the year’s big movies. Think Tobey Maguire as the bespectacled virgin superhero in Spider-Man 2. Jim Carrey as the emotional wreck of Eternal Sunshine. Adam Sandler in 50 First Dates. Jon Heder in Napoleon Dynamite. Matthew Broderick in Stepford Wives. Topher Grace in In Good Company. Yes, comics have always played the leads in romantic comedies, but Paul Giamatti, wonderful as he is, is a very different kind of character, than, say, Cary Grant.
It’s possible that Sideways is a hit because of the way it distilled Hollywood’s two icons of masculinity: the dork (Giamatti) and the dick (Thomas Haden Church). If leading women once were trapped playing either virgins or whores, leading men now seem to be playing either dorks or dicks.
The dicks were everywhere in 2004, and aggressive alpha men were profitable punching bags. Ben Stiller lampooned gym guys as insane horndogs in Dodgeball (and was eclipsed by the dork squad); Will Ferrell sent up ’70s men as the corduroyed letch in Anchorman. Romantically, at least, guys like Achilles of Troy, Ray Charles, Alexander, and Kinsey ran over their lovers like so many pagan warriors. But the two most glaring examples are Sideways and the terrible Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the worst film of the year to earn $40 million.
As in the first Bridget movie, Colin Firth plays goofy beta male Mark Darcy, who wears ugly sweaters and suffers silently while the asshole philanderer Hugh Grant has all the fun. But in the sequel, Grant’s no longer just a charming cad. Reunited with Bridget, he tells her that he’s in therapy for sex addiction. As the sloppy plot moves to Thailand, it
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The dork/dick dichotomy bothers me.
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becomes clear that Grant is worse than a sex addict — he’s an actual sex tourist who hires a teenage Thai prostitute. (It’s perhaps the first time third-world child prostitution has been used as a punchline; if only Benny Hill had lived to see the day!) In the film’s only shred of plot, Bridget must make a choice: the dork (Firth) or the dick (Grant)? Like American moviegoers, she picks the former.
As might we all. The dorks are winning, which is good news for four-eyed film geeks like me, but it could be bad news for cinema. I like the whole messy-human-experience thing, and I’d normally cheer on these incompetent, good-hearted, bumbling everymen as a rebuke to all those serious, capable leading men who unerringly get the job done. Except there were fewer and fewer of those capable, competent men onscreen. This dork/dick dichotomy bothers me; I’m beginning to feel like the rock purist who worries that whenever Mick Jagger decides to leave the stage, They Might Be Giants will storm it.
Of course, every trend has its champion. For the virgin/whore dynamic, that was Julia Roberts, who played both virgin and whore in Pretty Woman and made box-office history. Now, men have Ben Stiller, of Neil LaBute and dodgeball, a guy who’s able to play dork and dick in a single bound. In Meet the Fockers and Along Came Polly, he’s reprehensible but also pitiable. And that, for some bizarre reason, seems to be just what we’re looking for. A dorky dick, a guy who’s clueless and cruel, obnoxious and incompetent. Hollywood knows this. And so, apparently, did Karl Rove. n°
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Logan Hill is a contributing writer at New York magazine. He has contributed to Wired, The Nation, The New York Post, The New York Press and The Village Voice. |