There’s an interesting contrast going on this summer at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater outside of Washington, D.C. Playing to sold-out audiences is a 70-millimeter edition of The Odyssey, the woke re-imagining of the classic poem by Homer. Playing in the same theater is a series celebrating CinemaScope, the ultra-wide screen 1950s movie technology that was supposed to combat the explosion of television sets in America. 

Reviews in Chronicles and elsewhere have noted how The Odyssey’s director, Christopher Nolan, has turned the hero Odysseus into a weak, sexless, and traumatized man, more representative of protagonists from a Vietnam-era drama than a hero from the Bronze Age. Daniel Menaker, a professor and Homer expert whose book An Odyssey I reviewed in Chronicles, has been on social media noting that the Nolan’s Odysseus lacks the characteristics Homer gave him in the poem: cunning, wit, bravery, eros, humor.

“Nolan strips from Odysseus all the character traits he has in the epic,” Mendelsohn wrote on X, “ gives him motivations wholly different from the ones he has in the epic, and produces a work whose values invert those of the epic.” Even The New York Times says the film is missing something.

While Odyssey star Matt Damon sleepwalks thorough his film, the men in the old Cinemascope movies playing at the same time at the AFI, films that are over 60 years-old, are bracingly alive. Consider some of the titles that are now playing: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Man from Laramie (1955), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and The Hustler (1961), among others.

It would be a mistake to argue that when it comes to depicting men on film the choices are the inertia of Nolan’s The Odyssey or movies where guys don’t talk but just blow stuff up.

My favorite among the films playing at the AFI is The Hustler, starring Paul Newman. It’s also the quietest of all of the films. It tells the story of “Fast” Eddie Felson, a pool shark who sets out to defeat Minnesota Fats, played by Jackie Gleason (whose performance earned him an Oscar nomination). The unlikely way Eddie falls in love with a woman named Sarah Packard (played by Piper Laurie, who was also nominated for an Oscar), is a feature of this film. Packard attends college despite being older than the other co-eds and, in contrast to the film’s other characters, is a person who loves art and literature.

It’s incredible how masculine Newman is in The Hustler, even without ever firing a gun. He’s like panther gliding around a pool table. This is balanced by his tenderness towards Sarah. He asks her about her interests and goals. Like Odysseus, Felson is observant, funny, sexually powerful, and always cognizant of his goal. He winds up getting involved with some shady characters, and by going along with them causes a tragedy, but Felson is dramatized as a man whose self-assurance and even arrogance is mostly admirable. He knows he’s great at pool. He’s not moping around. He carries himself like a winner.

In the recent film The Invite, which is the worst movie I’ve seen this year, two characters, played by Seth Rogan and Olympia Wilde, are in a marriage that is falling apart. In the opening of the film, Rogan’s wife tells him that his conversation upon entering their apartment is unsatisfactory and that he needs to try again—this time while lying on his back. Rogan complies. Then there is the titular character in Marty Supreme, a man who knows what he wants but is a seedy, sleazy moral reprobate. These modern-day “heroes” are not men. 

In 1990, the poet Robert Bly published Iron John, a book that became a phenomenon. It birthed the men’s movement, which focused on men connecting with their “Wild Man” side, an archetype from mythology who displayed courage, fierceness, sexual power, and poetic intelligence. Bly used psychology, sociology, poetry, and history to argue that men had lost touch with themselves, largely due to a lack of initiation at the hands of other men. According to Bly, this was the result of two things: the Industrial Revolution, which drew fathers away from home and their sons, and feminism, which—in his view—was positive and necessary but bled men of their fierceness. In Iron John, Bly is careful to differentiate male fierceness from aggression. Aggression is violence without clear purpose. Fierceness is the passion to defend women, family, home, and art without backing down.

Most interesting in terms of men and modern Hollywood is Bly’s assessment of “receptive maleness.” He describes the anti-war feminism of the 1960s, when there was a bumper sticker that read “WOMEN SAY YES TO MEN WHO SAY NO”—i.e., to men who refuse the draft. Bly praised the women’s movement, saying that it is a good thing that men learned to stop objectifying women so much—after all, he writes, “the Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.” This resulted in “a psyche that lacked flow.” 

In reality, the correction has been worse than the problem. In the 1960s, men called for “harder” women who were sexually free and more interested in their careers. Women, likewise, called for men who were more in touch with their feelings—more “receptive.”

But in the “receptive man” we got in the 1960s—and the one we have today—something is missing. Bly writes:

They had learned to be receptive, but receptivity wasn’t enough to carry their marriages through troubled times. In every relationship, something fierce is needed once in a while: both the man and the woman need to have it.  But at the point when it was needed, often the man came up short.

Bly then uses an analogy from Homer. In The Odyssey, Hermes tells Odysseus that in approaching Circe, the goddess of magic and a witch, Odysseus is to lift his sword. Many modern men, Bly argued, can’t even lift their swords. Again, precision is important with Bly: “Showing a sword doesn’t necessarily mean fighting. It can also suggest a joyful decisiveness.”

Today, Bly’s observations about the severe dysfunction that happens to men when they have not been properly initiated into manhood are even more accurate, and depressing. On television, in books and movies, and especially in politics, men (especially white men) who are not receptive males are derided as delusional, weak, crazy, and dangerous. Our culture has tried to eradicate what Bly calls “Zeus energy”—a male energy “which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership.” 

Shortly after The Odyssey premiered, a trailer was released for Blade Runner 2099, the third film in the science fiction franchise. Blade Runner 2099 stars Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh and “transgender” person Hunter Schafer. In the Blade Runner dystopian future, robots, or “replicants,” are genetically engineered androids that are created to be “more human than human.” The original 1982 film centers on bounty hunter Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, who has the job of “retiring” the few remaining replicants. Deckard is a “blade runner.”

Deckard’s biggest challenge is Roy Batty, a blond, blue-eyed replicant with a towering presence and near-superhero abilities. At the end of the film Batty (Rutger Hauer), only has minutes left. He defeats Deckard in a fight but then saves Deckard’s life. As Batty lives out his final minutes, he gives a speech. It is one of the most beautiful and chilling scenes in the history of film.

Batty, sitting in the dousing rain (which has been pouring throughout the film), looks at Deckard and says: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe … attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time … to … die.”

Rutger Hauer has been rightly praised for his delivery of these lines, with some even claiming he steals Blade Runner from Harrison Ford in those few moments

Blade Runner endures because, like The Hustler, it touches on universal themes—what makes us human, the unintended blowback of playing God, the archetype of the urban detective. Today its message is even more fitting for understanding the plight of men in the digital and corporate age. In Blade Runner, unlike most pop culture dealing with robots, the replicants are more fully alive than the humans, who seem anonymous in the dark future world of Los Angeles. The female replicants are artistic. The male replicants express anger, sarcasm, and wit. Their faces convey more emotion than those of their creators—and this is one of the reasons why they must be retired. As Michael Newton noted in the Guardian:

[Blade Runner] is a starkly empty film, preoccupied as it is with the thought that people themselves might be hollow. The plot depends on the notion that the replicants must be allowed to live no longer than four years, because as time passes they begin to develop raw emotions. Why emotion should be a capital offense is never sufficiently explained; but it is of a piece with the film’s investigation of a flight from feeling—what psychologist Ian D Suttie once named the “taboo on tenderness.” Intimacy here is frightful (everyone appears to live alone), especially that closeness that suggests that the replicants might be indistinguishable from us.

In Blade Runner, it’s easy to see a prediction of the digital, therapeutic, and corporate worlds that are now neutering men. Seen today, the replicants seem like the people left behind by iPhones, texting, the end of genuine sexual passion, and the passing of the manufacturing age. In a world run by genetic manipulation and godlike corporations, Roy Batty is raw and primal, a white tiger loose in the Google corporate offices. His evolving emotion is a threat to the modern world, which prefers the sad anonymity of Matt Damon’s Odysseus to the dynamism of a real man. While real humans have lost the ability to feel, Roy Batty is, as the Tyrell Corporation motto has it, “more human than human.”

Then there is Deckard. The detective bleeds, sweats, and falls in love. He seems to represent bravery and genuine emotion. However, all of this changes when you realize something that even people who have seen Blade Runner several times don’t always realize: Deckard himself is a replicant. It was so difficult to find a man to take down Batty that the society had to create one. This explains the line at the end of the film when, after Roy Batty has died, a fully human police officer who has been watching Deckard appears. With a mix of admiration and sadness he tells Deckard, “You’ve done a man’s job.”  

He had to. No one else could.