I was listening to the radio this morning, as I usually do, to hear the news, and then I drifted back to sleep and failed to hit the off button before Ryan Tubridy came on, which I do automatically, every day at 9am, as I’m allergic to him.

In theory, I should like him, he’s a pleasant open geeky guy, but there’s something about his deliberate efforts to be middlebrow in his radio show that grates with me, as if the producers have aimed the show at a particularly dim demographic group that they are afraid of frightening off with anything disturbing like intellect. But this morning he was talking to film critic Antonia Quirke about leading men in movies, as she’s just written a book about her favourite leading men, Madame Depardieu And The Beautiful Strangers.
It sounds quite fun, as she is a connoisseur of men and masculinity, an unashamed (one might say brazen) enthusiast. But I nearly threw the radio out the window in rage, as Tubridy consistently refused to acknowledge his own appreciation of male beauty and star quality, and felt it necessary to repeat ad nauseam how “women love” so and so, or how “the ladies go mad over” someone else. The repetitive disavowal of any personal appreciation of male glamour or charisma seemed more about shoring up Tubridy’s own status as red-blooded hetero than any meaningful discussion about what makes a great leading man.
Paradoxically, it made him sound like an impotent little boy rather than a full-blooded passionate man. What does it cost a man to acknowledge that Robert Downey Jr is sexy, or Marlon Brando is a god?
In the world of movies, it is all about fantasy; nothing is real, by definition. Those men that catch our imagination on celluloid, in a stellar way, do so because they appeal to something archetypal in the collective unconscious, which varies from culture to culture and which morphs over time. Sean Connery as Bond epitomized our culture’s sense of the masculine in the sixties, as surely as Daniel Craig does now.
It is those men that have a mix of masculine and feminine in them that take pride of place in the pantheon; no cardboard cutouts representing one dimension of gender, but a fluid mesmerizing mixture of action and sensation, strength and emotion. The title of Quirke’s book speaks to the desire in us to fantasize about these unreal archetypal figures, imagining that these strangers could be our lovers/husbands.
The old chestnut is that the best male movie stars appeal to women for sex appeal, and that men want to be like them – but I would question that. There are women on screen now that are extremely powerful, from Sharon Stone to Sigourney Weaver to Jody Foster to Helen Mirren, who embody a ballsiness and intelligence that men can just as easily identify with as find attractive. (This is not a new phenomenon – pace Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn.)
Similarly, the vulnerability (and sometimes passivity) that actors like George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law and Daniel Craig bring to their roles invites a different kind of attention from the viewer, male or female; voyeuristic, compelling, triggering uneasy but unmistakably erotic fantasies of domination and submission. (Again, nothing new – Brando and Dean blazed that trail long ago.)
Hollywood stars matter when it comes to romance, because we tend to scatter a dusting of its archetypal glitter on those we are in love with, imbue them with a touch of soft-focus airbrushed and soundtracked glamour. The Hollywood machine (and by that I mean all film-making in the West) is geared, in the main, towards pumping out fantasies that are deliberately fashioned to try and catch the crest of the latest wave of the romantic zeitgeist, as deftly manipulated as sophisticated marketing campaigns that attempt to mine the depths of our psyches and persuade us to meet our unconscious desires – by buying things.
Romance is a state of fantasy, a heady steamy mix of synchronicity when two people believe they have found in each other that which will ease the pain of being alone. It’s an act of the imagination, and completely irrational, in that it’s not sensible or practical.
There is a reason for arranged marriages in the East – the wisdom behind it is that families have a more secure foundation if the madness of romance is avoided. And there are many very contented people out there who have built loving and kind relationships on just such an arrangement.
In some ways, falling in love is as “real” an experience as the experience of being smitten by a movie god, but more exciting because we have them right in front of us, living and breathing, delivering the right lines, setting the right scene, touching the right buttons. We can have the same heady sense that comes from a religious or spiritual experience, disturbing and life-changing, a dizzying trip right back to our adolescent obsessions with the poster pinups on whom we projected all our dreams of adulthood.
Those who come down to Earth after the honeymoon blur, and find themselves relatively pleased with the disappointingly flawed mortals they’ve ended up with, are the lucky ones. But Eros does not play fair; his purpose is not sentimentally romantic, in the fluffy little cherub way he appears on Valentine’s Day cards.
Romance can bring us to our knees, when we find ourselves in love with people who hurt us or seem incapable of giving us what we really need. Romance can be cruel, destructive, taunting us with our deepest cravings for connection and throwing them back in our face.
In some ways, when we fall in love, we are being faced with something we have not yet dealt with in our lives, and unfortunately that can be both good or bad.
Ultimately, it is out of our control. It is for us to make sense of it, make meaning of it, after the mist has cleared and the heavenly choir has packed their bags and got on the bus to their next gig, wherever the arrow has landed from the bow of that blind eejit Eros.
But when it comes to romancing men, or simply admiring men, something is distorted in our culture. What is missing, across the board, gay, bi or hetero, is a way of soberly expressing genuine heartfelt affection between men, a discourse of fondness and camaraderie and admiration. We men are tongue-tied in the West about it, embarrassed, spancelled. We often find it impossible to express such feelings of appreciation and warmth to each other without some twisted apprehension that such sentiments will detract from our sense of masculinity.
It’s our own loss.