Has Hollywood Outgrown the Tough Guy? No. It Just Asks More of a "Man"

Superheroes set the tough-guy standard for a new generation. We still expect them to be strong enough to save the world, but muscle is no longer enough: they must master cutting-edge technology and have charm, wit and a clear head, and they must respect women. What makes a "man" stopped being a matter of looks long ago.

"I'm old, but I'm not obsolete."

When Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 robot says this line in Terminator Genisys, it seems to speak for more than a machine worn down by the years. It speaks for Arnold himself.

Schwarzenegger, now 70, stands for an aesthetic Hollywood has long prized: bulging muscles, a massive frame, an unsmiling face and a hard, steely presence.

For a long time this seemed to be what a man should look like, and that era produced plenty of such tough guys. Besides Schwarzenegger, the list includes Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Gary Cooper, John Wayne... and if we cared to, we could make it very, very long.

Today, though, this kind of hero seems to turn up less and less on screen. A glance at Hollywood's big films of 2015 makes the point easily.

In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the male lead, Finn, wants nothing more than to escape the First Order. In Jurassic World, Owen is a goofball. Mad Max is a feminist blockbuster. And in The Avengers, Iron Man, Thor and Captain America may save the world, but next to Schwarzenegger they look a little soft.

Against this backdrop, Schwarzenegger's line, "I'm old, but I'm not obsolete," takes on a tragic ring. Has the "tough guy" he embodies really lost his market?

There is no need to mourn. The core of the tough guy has never gone away. As times change, new themes and new ways of telling stories simply present him in new forms.

Schwarzenegger

The cowboys of Westerns were cinema's first tough guys

The tough guy can probably be traced back to the Western. Ever since the first Western, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903, he has been the genre's dominant figure.

A Western usually goes like this: on the vast plains of the American West, where you can see the horizon, in one isolated small town after another, cowboys, sheriffs, outlaws and Native Americans live side by side. Our hero carries the burden of the lone gunman. Unafraid of the outlaws, he uses his revolver to punish the wicked and protect the good. Every element fits a masculine ideal.

The Searchers (1956) created just such a tormented hero. The veteran tough guy John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a returning soldier whose brother and sister-in-law are killed and whose niece is carried off in a Native American raid. For years afterward he hunts obsessively for his niece and takes his revenge by slaughtering Native Americans; when he finds that she has been "assimilated," he even wants to kill her. In the end, though, he does the audience's soul-searching for them and grows into a true hero.

The Western's very premise comes from the great westward migration of Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On that frontier, anyone who was not as tough and brave as a tough guy could easily die in the wilderness. Heir to that spirit, the Western was naturally full of tough guys bursting with testosterone.

Look closely at the tough guys of different Westerns and you notice small differences, all rooted in the American history of their day. When Westerns began to flourish in the 1920s, the United States had just come out of the First World War. Pride in victory and lingering dread of the war combined to turn the cowboy into a thoroughly conventional hero, a man who goes to war against the enemy to defend his home.

In 1929 the Great Depression struck and the whole American economy began to collapse; in the worst years, the unemployed made up more than a quarter of the population. Doubt about society crept into Westerns too. There the cowboy, who stood for America, often appeared as a wrongly accused suspect, struggling endlessly to clear his name.

Then, after the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, as the United States slid into one seemingly unjust war after another, the cowboys of Westerns took on more of the traits of the "anti-hero." They had moral flaws of one kind or another; they might be loners, or too flamboyant. But in the end they still acted like heroes and saved their towns and their way of life.

Though these cowboys each had a different personality, they always faced their troubles head-on and ultimately overcame them. For Americans, the cowboy was a symbol of America. He carried people's hopes, so he could not fall.

So in all these cowboys we see the same qualities: the ability to overcome hardship and defend oneself, courage and determination. Together, these qualities make up the standard "tough guy."

The Searchers

Gangsters are tough guys too, but not quite like cowboys

The gangster film, which rose at roughly the same time as the Western, has no shortage of tough guys either. But because these men live in a different world, they look very different from cowboys.

They usually appear as leaders, which demands more brains and more social cunning, and their morality is darker and more complicated. So they come across as more elegant, more romantic and more mysterious.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Godfather films, long since enshrined as classics. Marlon Brando's Mafia boss breaks the law, yet he lives by a code of his own, like a Robin Hood. He makes enemies of New York's other crime families precisely because he refuses to deal in drugs that ruin lives. And when the old Godfather dies, his son, played by Al Pacino, calm, composed and shrewd, takes over the family and carries out his revenge step by step.

Gangster tough guys are more polished and cowboy tough guys more rugged mainly because gangster films are more realistic, and real gangsters were more or less like this.

In the late 19th century, gangs gradually took root in the United States. Formed mostly by Sicilian immigrants, with some Jews and Irish among them, these gangs were no rabble but tightly organized criminal enterprises.

A Mafia organization is usually called a "family." Its head is the Boss, and its number two the Underboss. Below them, by rank, come the Consigliere, the Caporegime and the Soldato. There are also informal collaborators who serve as muscle, known as Associates.

In suits and ties, suave and polished, strictly obeying the family's rules, they look no different from Wall Street bankers when they are not killing people.

Ritual adds to the mob's mystique. According to the testimony of Joseph Valachi, the first former mobster to admit publicly that the Mafia existed, the boss would call a dinner whenever someone joined. A dagger and a gun were laid before the new member, who then held out a finger, pricked the tip and let the blood drip.

Films polish all of this further into a romanticized tough guy, and nowhere more obviously than in the Godfather films. Whenever Marlon Brando or Al Pacino appears on screen, he looks like an elegant king or prince.

But underneath, they are still tough guys. Many historians of the American Mafia concede that in many places the mob served as an unofficial police force. It kept order, and violence was how it did so. Think of the opening of The Godfather: when the undertaker cannot get justice through proper channels for the harm done to his daughter, he goes to the Godfather instead.

In this respect, screen gangsters are just like cowboys. Each has his own values and beliefs, and each will give everything to defend what he holds dear.

Only their surroundings differ. The Western wilderness bred the cowboy; the scheming and infighting of the city created the gangster. The gangster is the more tragic figure: he stands against the machinery of the state, and his methods are too brutal to be tolerated.

The Godfather

Later, we needed superhero tough guys to save the world

Today both the Western and the gangster film have declined. Similar films still appear now and then, such as Django Unchained in 2012 and Black Mass in 2015, but compared with the genres' golden age, both their number and their quality have fallen sharply.

Have people stopped caring about tough guys? No. People still love tough guys; they just no longer love Westerns and gangster films.

Look at the hits of the past two years. The male lead of Jurassic World may be something of a goofball, but when a genetically engineered hybrid dinosaur breaks out of its enclosure, he still steps up to hunt it down. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the all-powerful artificial intelligence Ultron wants to destroy the world, and the Avengers, led by Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, take the battlefield to stop it.

The plots of these films are no different from those of traditional tough-guy films: the world faces a crisis, and tough guys step forward to save it. So why can't we call Iron Man and Captain America tough guys, just like Schwarzenegger? Only because these superheroes are prettier and seem less macho (the Hulk excepted)?

As long as there is fear in people's hearts, they will pray for a tough guy to appear. The traditional tough guys were cowboys, gangsters and spies, because people feared war, crime and terrorism, and the tough guy stood for justice. The fear is still with us; only its object has changed. Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant prospect, and space exploration keeps advancing. When cowboys, gangsters and spies could no longer help us conquer these fears, superheroes of every kind were born.

In James Cameron's Avatar (2007), the male lead, Jake Sully, is a soldier whose legs are paralyzed; his mind is linked into the body of a cloned Na'vi, and he gains a primal strength. The female characters matter too: the Na'vi princess he falls in love with is just as formidable. Together they lead the Na'vi against the human invasion. Their role, once again, is to defend and to save.

Avatar

Today's tough guy, or "man," is a more complete person

One "man's man" has been popular for decades. His name is Bond, James Bond. But count from the first Bond to the latest, Spectre, and much has changed. Pierce Brosnan's Bond went for elite romance for a while; by Daniel Craig, the series had borrowed some of the gritty, brooding realism of Matt Damon's Bourne films, giving Bond a more complex character who has to work through his childhood trauma in every installment.

Then there is Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, who plays the dashing bad boy. In David Fincher's The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg: a mop of curly hair and no fighting skills at all, yet formidable in combat of another kind. Smart is the new sexy.

The romance (500) Days of Summer tells the story of a failed love affair. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, slight and gentle, doesn't fight; he only falls in love, and even then gets dumped. But along the way he comes to know himself, and once he is clear-headed and happy, he naturally meets the girl meant for him.

And in Mad Max: Fury Road, the coolest film of 2015, Tom Hardy is at his most "man" precisely when he changes his mind and decides to back Imperator Furiosa's feminist cause.

By now it is clear that muscles, a stern face, a powerful build and a heart as hard as rock are not requirements for the tough guy of a new era. Even without any of them, anyone who takes responsibility, holds real values and keeps working toward his goals is quite a man.

Of course, that is what we should ask not only of a good man but of a good woman too.

(500) Days of Summer