The path of the (movie) hero

In fact, men do not exist. And there are people. Cute, invigorating, sometimes somewhat infantile, experiencing very keen feelings for their mothers and weaker — for us, the rest of the women. People who are desperately trying to live up to the ideal of a Real Man — a breadwinner, a breadwinner, an intercessor, a fearless hunter and a lover who never fails. In a word, “male people” are victims of a stereotype, an ideal image prescribed by the entire past culture. The main consumer of which are we women. Our expectations impose standards on men that they must fit into. And they try to squeeze into this standard of the Hunter, the Getter and the Super Lover just as desperately as we do into the notorious «90-60-90».

Special way

Women who drank Soviet everyday and cultural experience formed their own masculine ideal, which was very different from what dominated the minds of women in Western culture. In the USSR, as you know, “there was no sex”, hypocrisy regarding intimate spheres was all-encompassing. At the same time, things were tight with contraceptives, abortion was the norm, and therefore a man is the eternal culprit of women’s troubles. All the more passionately, at the request of women, mass culture sought the male ideal. And away from reality. After all, we did not experience the impact of the blast wave of the sexual revolution of the 70s, and the very creation of the male image in our culture was done with an ideological aim. It came to a paradox: the brightest object of women’s desires of the 30s (and indeed the totalitarian era), the athlete Ivan Martynov from the film «Circus» performed by Sergei Stolyarov, was created by a homosexual Grigory Alexandrov.

Let’s add here the Soviet cultural isolation and the fact that for decades samples of Western cinema penetrated us in a strictly dosed form. As a result, we didn’t develop our own relationship with, say, John Wayne, the premier American cowboy, the eternal symbol of masculinity. With Jean Gabin, a rude knight without fear or reproach, who already in 1947 provided in his acting contract that under no circumstances would he be filmed bending down — a genuine dominant male cannot appear before the viewer in a pose of vulnerability … We did not see the tragedy the heroes of Marlon Brando — their transformation from beautiful rebels into fat receptacles of hopeless depression as a result of the revision (or loss?) of all spiritual values ​​by society. We barely knew Dirty Harry’s Clint Eastwood, the vicious, lonely, melancholic wrestler. And not for Good, but simply against Evil.

While our layman collected symbols of Western freedom and abundance in the form of collections of “dark glass cans from imported beer”, we missed the bigger symbols: the handsome Visconti, Helmut Berger and Alain Delon, who languished in their existential longing with special cynicism. How did they express the loss by a man of dominant positions in life and culture, already deformed by the sexual revolution, and the emergence of a new type of man — deeply and dramatically feeling his own imperfection in an imperfect world … In a word, we did not see how the most courageous heroes began to combine strength and fragility, invulnerability in one and weakness in the other. How models of masculinity began to become human.

But we have gone our own way, and it has led us to the same new man with whom world culture as a whole is now dealing.

A vague object of desire

In general, the Soviet screen until the end of the 50s was the realm of asexuality. Citizens and women of the USSR had more important things to do. That is why the men of the cinema of the 40s and 50s are only parts of a mighty whole, an illustration to the «moral code of the builder of communism.» Sometimes the imagination of the spectators was shocked — by the unearthly, inexpressible beauty of foreign men. Here the citizens of refined France were in the lead. In the 40s — Gerard Philip, a wonderfully aesthetic young man, gentle and courageous, chivalrous and subtle. And with this subtlety, he subtly corresponded to the attitudes inspired by the women of the Land of Soviets about the worthlessness of sex. He was inaccessibly aristocratic and embodied in himself a disembodied dream. And barren too.

But in the 50s, another “distant friend” came to us — a seemingly exemplary male Yves Montand. He had courage and pressure, he was a lover in the most vital role and this turned the brains of many Soviet women, but was soon debunked for political infidelity and blotted out from cinema screens. However, it was he who showed with all his appearance that men of flesh and blood live behind the Iron Curtain. What prepared the local women to enter into direct — carnal — contact with this flesh.

Shurik without rose-colored glasses

The Soviet 60s, with their political warming and weakening of the ideological grip, began with the Festival of Youth and Students in 1957. Here came the era of Shurik — a deeply positive, but funny hero, romantic, but charming precisely with his absurdity. From now on, the Soviet girl was not ashamed to fall in love with an intelligent young man with complexes. And he didn’t have to fight the bourgeoisie, identify enemies, chop furniture with his father’s Red Army saber (as the hero of Oleg Tabakov did recently in the film “A Noisy Day”). Shurik was loved and so. And later, by the mid-70s, he was replaced by another favorite bum of the Soviet screen — Zhenya Lukashin from 3rd Stroitelei Street. They — Shurik and Zhenya — were not fighters and victors, intercessors and breadwinners. But they were honest, generous and sincere people — without pathos and ideological falsehood.

• They always come back

Alexey Batalov as a mirror of a Russian woman

It was Batalov who, for almost four decades, was the most expensive image for a Soviet woman. This image has changed, remaining perfect. He embodied protection, warmth, comfort, understanding, but just attention. He replaced the brave guys of the «native totalitarian» — Nikolai Kryuchkov, Boris Chirkov, Nikolai Rybnikov, who had everything: to become, and energy, and sexy, and charm. They could rightly be considered sex symbols, but the spectators had no personal relationship with them. They were infallible and inaccessible in their cinematic quality. Batalov, on the other hand, left the celluloid cinema world, returned to life as a character made of flesh and blood. It was not without reason that his most stellar and most touching film of the late 50s was called “My Dear Man” (“mine” is important, since Batalov’s hero meant a lot to each of the spectators individually). He stumbled and made mistakes in “The Man …”, he was framed in the “Rumyantsev Case”, his beloved left him in “The Cranes Are Flying”. All this is not conducive to glorification … But he became the embodiment of male humanity, gentleness, an example of a thawed — that’s why the thaw — male movie hero. By his very unheroism, he rehabilitated private life, separate from the accomplishments of the masses, which again received the right to exist.

But Batalov accomplished his main feat in the 70s. At the time of the climbers and rogues who approved double standards, Batalov became a Knight. To those who said: “Everything and always I will decide for myself. On the simple grounds that I am a man.» «Moscow does not believe in tears». This Batalov-Gosh was so awaited by a Soviet woman, wrapped up in a tedious life and a heroless environment. It came along with the Louis Philippe mascara. Together with French perfume, which cost everything — everything! — a typical female salary (J’ai Ose — 80 rubles). Together with tights for seventy, elegant and so vulnerable-thin … But, like all these excesses, which are becoming more and more necessary in an era of total scarcity, Gosha was also needed. At a time when a woman had no one to rely on (but she had to — single women in the hypocritical and unsettled 70s survived painfully), Gosha became the support of millions.

Cologne «Alain Delon»

The era of commodity shortages and «enemy voices» deified in the eyes of compatriots and the once hostile, but abundant West. Through the insidious blue eyes of Alain Delon in «Two in the City» looked through a different life, different behavioral norms, the face of a society where everything is arranged. This later became an aphorism for the line «Nautilus Pompilius» «Alain Delon does not drink cologne.» In the meantime, Alain Delon himself has become synonymous with heavenly scents. It became clear that my grandmother’s ironic formulation «A man must be fierce and smelly», behind which was hidden «A man must be whole and simply arranged», has lost its relevance. Delon was handsome, and beauties fell at his feet, but he could hardly be considered a male. There was a decadent ambivalence in him, an insidious duality: the devil knows, what if this man needs more than THIS? He was obviously not simple — not whole, and the former Real Man was made from a single piece of marble …

• Men who don’t want sex

And besides, he had twins-mockingbirds: at the same time, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Adriano Celentano came to us, victorious boors, the embodiment of male pressure, with all their freedom, carelessness and irony — the hunting pressure was already ridiculous.

The hoped-for male humanity by that time was firmly associated with the man of the West. There they were intellectual, courteous, aristocratically restrained. And there was a bridge between the Western ideal and Soviet reality — the Baltic actors: Budraitis-Adomaitis-Banionis. They were ours, but with a Western veneer. Excuse me, Stirlitz, a rare brainchild of a female director, also enchanted with the same. He was a well-groomed man and a reasonable person, he did not climb on the rampage, he did his job with precision. The masculine, impudent, sexual receded in him in the face of intellect and good education.

With the help of these brave — foreign and «ours» — such a simple dream of a Soviet woman of the era of stagnation was embodied — about a civilized and educated man. Just.

AIDS snores

The 80s, the era of home video and our penetration into the space of open sexuality, finally showed us the actual male body. The bodies of Stallone and Schwarzenegger built by bodybuilding… And the body of Mickey Rourke from 91/2 weeks with his willingness to undress and… self-expose. It turned out that a man can be dangerous not only physically: undermined by complexes, doubts about his destiny as a winner, he is psychologically dangerous — he is able to destroy the foundations of the female world, where they are looking for reliability in it in the old fashioned way …

But the sexual revolution has already taken place, the woman has gained new positions in reality and continued to advance. Hollywood was the first to react, giving out a whole gallery of images of treacherous seductresses. Their most frequent victim was Michael Douglas — a seemingly Real Man, a male whose role is to leave a genetic mark on the earth. But in fact, in Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, this superman retreated before female aggressiveness. The role of a man in society has changed: it was not yet clear what was new, but the old one — a hunter and protector — was clearly a thing of the past. The era of AIDS has begun — the era of sexual responsibility and the search for a partnership agreement between the sexes.

The same 80s presented us with a man who insulted tradition — Woody Allen, an intellectual, a hypochondriac, a frequenter of psychoanalytic couches. He did not coincide with the traditional male patterns so much that one of my colleagues then said about his comedies: “I don’t understand what’s funny here. When I see him, I want to cry.» She lamented that ideal of a muscular body and an unbending spirit, to which every man on earth was obliged to aspire. And Allen refused to participate in the race for the myth. And that was his heroism.

A few good guys

Our sexual revolution took place in the post-Soviet 90s. And it took the form of an economic revolution. Women have learned from the experience of reforms that they can do it themselves, they can do everything without the help of men who have fallen into confusion. The man did not fulfill either the role of a protector or a breadwinner. He still swaggers in television series, but this is not serious. But seriously, a new person appeared on the forefront, fresh, seeming to have just emerged from adolescence. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose features show through a serene childhood. Brad Pitt with his trademark «twist» in the face. Johnny Depp — Edward Scissorhands, Willy Wonka. It is no coincidence that his hero goes further and further into the realm of fairy tales, making a journey from a woman’s dream to the world of sexless fantasies of Alice in Wonderland. And he refuses his own face for the sake of computer-generated or make-up artists. In Western psychology, this type is called a post-teenager — he can already take on a lot, but what can you take from him?

So finally and irrevocably the movie dealt with the man. He lost his heroic halo, began not only to bend down, but also to bend into three deaths at the slightest social whiffs. The verdict to be a Real Man, once passed on him, is being reviewed. «Male» people got an amnesty. Congratulations.