Metro-Warriors

Mark Simpson on how the 'retrosexual' backlash to metrosexuality is just delivering more metrosexuality.

[This is an edited version of an article originally written for Dutch Playboy in May 2004.  Footnotes full of the instant wisdom of post-electoral hindsight in November 2004 have been added]

As you may have noticed, the press has had rather a lot to say lately about ‘my’ bastard child with perfect skin the metrosexual.  Apparently though the media have begun to run out of things to write about him, as in some quarters there is now talk of a ‘metro backlash’. 

Or at least, I recently read some fashion writers twittering about how the cheek-sucked male models sashaying on the catwalk displaying the new season’s togs were ‘retrosexuals’.  Why?  Because some of them had chest hair.

Hilariously, when I first wrote about 'retrosexuals' on Salon a couple of years ago (according to Wordspy.com this was the first sighting of this term) I simply meant men who were not metrosexual, men who refused to get with the programme and pluck their eyebrows and cultivate their cuticles.  Men who were, I suppose, ‘real’ – at least in the sense that they weren’t produced by the false/self-consciousness of advertising (though of course they may have been just ‘really’ unattractive).  But now things have gone so far and so fey, and have become so metrosexualized, that a retrosexual is today nothing more than a metrosexual with (shaped) chest hair.

 

In keeping with this phoney retrosexual backlash, uber-metro magazine DETAILS have apparently banned the use of the word ‘metrosexual’.  Meanwhile, MENS HEALTH, the magazine that valiantly campaigns against sex discrimination in the field of eating disorders, by encouraging men to develop them too, recently ran one of those articles whining that metrosexuality had 'gone too far' and yet somehow 'never existed anyway'.  Hypocrisy and metrosexuality in the fashion and men’s magazine market (not to mention Hollywood and politics), have ever been bosom bedfellows.

The metrosexual may be a copy of a man who never existed (except in ads), a simulacrum of masculinity that has been made pumped, primed flesh.  But in the process, he has turned even the man who really did exist into just an accessory.  Behold the retrometro!  Available at all good menswear shops near you.

This reveals something truly terrifying about metrosexuality.  It is much more than a trend.  It is in fact nothing less than an epoch.  Metrosexuality is such an integral part of a mediatised and consumerist world that even what is sold as its anti-thesis is still metrosexuality.  The metrosexual trend, whereby the male body is transformed (‘transfigured’ if you work in the fashion industry,) into an aesthetic commodity, is apparently irreversible.  As is the neurotic male anxiety caused by Adam’s newly-discovered nakedness.  Barring a nuclear winter, or the exhaustion of the earth’s supplies of lanolin and loofa, or, even less likely, the unionising of personal fitness trainers, metrosexuality – love it or loathe it, or call it by any other name – is here to stay. 

This seeming permanence is further underlined by the fact that metrosexuality has been around much longer than most people realise.  I first wrote about the phenomenon back in 1994, but metrosexuality actually had its origins in the 1980s and the male narcissism that was paraded in that decade’s ads, films and the newly arrived glossy men’s magazines.  For the most part, it wasn’t until the 90s however that non-film star, non-professional model, non-gay men began to become metrosexual, that life began to imitate bad art – albeit on a much smaller scale than today when metrosexuality has become utterly mainstream.

There are of course other contemporary trends that might be seen as part of a wider ‘retrosexual’ – or rather, retrometro – backlash.  Such as the fact that there is a veritable stampede of GLADIATOR style sword and sandal epics thundering our way at the multiplex.  Or that in the US the presidential election is being slugged out by two candidates arguing over the new war (in Iraq) and each other’s credentials as a warrior in the last major war (in Vietnam) and as a leader in the ‘war on terror’. Or, most saliently of all, metrosexual pin-up David Beckham recently shaved off his long locks in preparation for the football campaign of Euro 2004.  The warrior, that most reassuring and timeless of masculine archetypes, is back in fashion – literally.  2004 is clearly the year of warrior chic.

What most observers overlook when discussing or condemning the metrosexual is that metrosexuality is not necessarily effeminate or girly.  Most metrosexuals are in fact very interested in masculinity, or rather the media’s version of it, which is in fact pretty much all that’s left of it.  The metrosexual is above all an avid collector of fantasies about the male, sold to him by advertising and fashion – and Hollywood.  Those fantasies can be androgynous or butch, but they're equally fetishised.  Russell Crowe for example insisting to interviewers that he didn't work out to get his muscles in GLADIATOR (2000), but instead just ‘practised sword fighting' is extremely metro in its self-consciousness, not to mention rather camp.  (In a similar vein, my local corporate gym has been offering TROY workouts with swords: 'have a body like Brad Pitt - the warrior way' shriek the posters in my changing-room, illustrated with a possibly CGI enhanced still of Mr Pitt).

Hollywood has had several phoney ‘metro backlash’ moments – which merely succeed, of course, in selling more metrosexuality.  Most famously in FIGHT CLUB (1999), wherein  men rebel against consumerism, emasculation, inauthenticity and Calvin Klein ads by worshipping the former Calvin Klein model turned film star – Mr Six Pack, Mr ‘Fab Pitt’ – who told Edward Norton that men need to get in touch with their inner ‘warrior’.  Beautifully shot, and looking as it did like a ‘grittily’ expensive FHM fashion shoot, FIGHT CLUB was actually a film about getting in touch with the outer metro-warrior. 

In order to present something ‘really’ masculine, Hollywood likes nothing better than retreating into the past, hence Mr Pitt battling with Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom in the leather skirts a-go-go epic.  The only problem here is that all three male leads are much prettier and much better groomed than Diane Kruger’s Helen, the woman they are supposedly fighting over; Achilles is the face that launched and led a thousand ships.  Male vanity not female is at the heart of the story.  Much of TROY seems nothing more than a rather expensive and elaborate attempt to justify our interest in Brad Pitt’s body (it could hardly be his acting).  Bana, the most traditional hero, the only family man of the three and the least pretty, is defeated by Fab Pitt as a self-obsessed Achilles, slaying all before him with his looks and sense of style.  But in the end, the even prettier (and younger) Orlando Bloom’s Paris triumphs over ‘invulnerable’ Achilles, finding his Achilles stiletto with his poisoned arrow (when his agent dipped him in the River Styx she held him by that heel).

TROY of course was a film that was inspired in part by the huge hairy success of GLADIATOR.  However, GLADIATOR is less an edifying retrosexual spectacle than SHOWGIRLS set in Ancient Rome instead of Vegas, with Crowe as Nomi Malone on steroids.  Unlike SPARTACUS, which was written on a social, religious and political canvas – a true ‘epic’ – GLADIATOR is as phoney and hyperreal as the CGI crowd scenes.  Kirk Douglas would crucify Russell Crowe.  Granted, Crowe battles devoutly if somewhat tediously against the world of cruel illusion and betrayal that he finds himself in.  But arguably it is his co-star Joaquin Phoenix who upstages him as Emperor Commodus.  Commodus is the real connection to the present (and not just because the US is more and more frequently compared to Imperial Rome).  A playboy, he fancies himself a gladiator, and likes to take part in staged fights in the Coliseum, loves the attention of the crowd.  He’s coded faggy and pervey in the film, and gets his comeuppance, but we know he’s the metro future. 

The runaway success of GLADIATOR and the boost it gave Crowe was also noted by Tom Cruise, a star who shot to fame in the 1980s in TOP GUN, a film about young muscular airborne gladiators who liked nothing better after a good dogfight to stand around chatting to one another in jock straps and perfectly gelled hair in steamy bath-houses/locker rooms.  TOP GUN was the most important proto-metrosexual movie of the 80s, one that eventually turned Tom into the most famous metrosexual actor in the world, not just because it is a film that sells very modern, very ‘perverse’ male vanity (and homoerotics) as something traditional and Republican, which it does in gelled aircraft carrier-loads, but because it is drenched in the codes of 1980s men’s advertising and pop promos (A Gillette commercial crossed with a Calvin Klein and a Levis ad – and a US Navy recruitment film – it was directed by adman Tony Scott.)

Worried by the success of Crowe’s GLADIATOR and wondering whether he might be about to be ousted from his Hollywood throne, forty-something Tom finally grew facial hair and appeared in his own Gladiator movie called THE LAST SAMURAI (2003), set in Nineteenth Century Japan.  In it Tom, who once was the poster boy for American sexy-technological mastery of the skies, and the way in which it has rendered old-fashioned combat obsolete, plays a former US Army soldier who decides to help the virile, retro sword-wielding noble Samurais resist the Emperor and his American-made unmanly hi-tech gattling guns, with predictably messy results (especially for Tom’s box office ratings: the film was not a hit). 

The quest to accessorise the masculine authenticity of the past a la warrior chic continues.  Later this year young Colin Farrell conquers the world with his profile as ALEXANDER THE GREAT.  However, as TROY and the stills from ALEXANDER show, on-screen hairiness, Maximus and some male models non-withstanding, is still a bridge too far (like today’s Hollywood audiences the Greeks preferred most of their heroes – and their male lovers – smooth).  Spectacular muscularity is still all the rage – and so are leather skirts to show off those flashing thighs.

Hollywood of course is not really going retrosexual at all, but is instead merely offering us more metrosexuality in the form of the metro-warrior.  In the metro-warrior movie, the audience can enjoy the usual visual pleasures of male metrosexuality – and some – but this time projected back in history, when men were men and boys were worried. 

It is worth pointing out here that, whether or not the metro-warrior movies choose to acknowledge it, the Ancient World had some ideas about masculinity that do not readily fit those of contemporary America, at least not without plenty of lubrication.  To escape anxieties about the feminisation of contemporary men, Hollywood has run straight into the burly arms of warrior homosexuality.  Achilles was almost as famous for his (full-on, according to some accounts) love for his soldier bud, Patroclus, as he was for his soldierly prowess.  Alexander’s ‘Greek’ love for his life-long companion, Hephaeston, was almost as celebrated as his Empire-building.  In Ancient Greece, male youths were considered to be the natural object of men’s passion.  The ephebe, a young man of military service age (18-21), on the cusp of manhood, was considered the acme of desirability. (So perhaps Ancient Greek ideas are not so alien to Hollywood after all…).

In a metrosexual world, as we have seen, life imitates bad art.  Sometimes though, it’s really bad art.  Most would agree that Jerry Bruckheimer’s glossy blockbuster special-effects war movie, PEARL HARBOR, was bad art on a historic scale.  Truly, to paraphrase the famous Rooseveltian lines (ab)used in the trailer, its release on 21 May 2001 was a ‘date that will live in the annals of infamy’.

Yet, because we live in a consumerist, mediatised age of prophetic aesthetics, it proved to be eerily visionary.  PEARL HARBOR of course used the Second World War in general and the Japanese ‘sneak attack’ on the US Pacific naval base in particular as a lavish set for a retro-forties fashion-shoot starring pretty-vacant metrosexual boys Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck. The death of thousands of US sailors by drowning and fire was turned into a vanity vehicle for a couple of fly-boys with moussed hair, perfect skin and impossible cheekbones who were both in love with their make-up artist (who moonlights as a Navy nurse). 

Granted, this aspect wasn’t so visionary or unusual.  This was in fact the metrosexual world that we already live in, where the traditional forms and sufferings of stoic, self-denying, self-sacrificing old-fashioned masculinity are merely cutesy, quaint props for the new, aestheticised, moisturised self-regarding variety.  Speaking of Ben Affleck, even with all the CGI that money can buy, he is certainly not the kind of GI that won the War.  Ben Affleck is the face of America after it won the wars – World and Cold and class – and was left with nothing more to do than admire itself in the mall: a post-industrial affluent America of appetites, in which – get used to it – consumption and celebrity is the measure of a man rather than his martial (or marital) prowess.

It wasn’t until later in 2001 that the movie’s prophetic aspect was revealed.  On September 11^th, the dramatic, unexpected, horrific and yet very cinematic aerial attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington DC, and the thousands of deaths this produced, immediately evoked the ‘infamy’ of Pearl Harbor – the last time America was attacked successfully on this scale.  Or rather, the infamy of PEARL HARBOR (most Americans are now too young or too unschooled to remember the actual historical event).  Not only was life imitating bad art – DEATH was imitating it too.

9/11, was effectively PEARL HARBOR meets INDEPENDENCE DAY, the 1996 film in which the World Trade Center is destroyed by aliens intent on taking over the word.  Sometimes it seemed as if the most awful thing about the events of 9/11 was their nightmarish wish-fulfilment, the dream work-made-real, the sado-masochistic urge for violence and destruction that Hollywood movies express more or less safely, in the dark, turned grotesquely into something that happens when you leave the cinema, in broad daylight.  The way that we couldn’t stop watching those appalling images over and over again.  (One of the most appalling things about those images was their irresistible aesthetics)

Other parallels were less obvious and more ironic, such as the American revenge bombing of Tokyo that was the coda to PEARL HARBOR, presented as especially heroic because of its suicide, ‘one way’ nature.  Voicing contemporary America’s own anxiety about it’s virility in an era of plenty, the film has (Great Depression era) Roosevelt who personally ordered this revenge attack, announcing, ‘They say that we’re weaklings, playboys – that pay others, such as the Russians and the English to fight for us.  Let them say that now!’ 

Shortly after the ‘Pearl Harbor’ of 9/11 the then President of the United States, following some uncertainty about his whereabouts, appeared in front of the world’s cameras and denounced the ‘cowards’ who had flown airliners into the side of the World Trade Center.  As one US commentator was brave or foolish enough to point out at the time (and promptly lost his job as a result), you can call hijacking an airliner with boxcutters and flying it into the side of a skyscraper, but ‘cowardly’ isn’t one of them.  Of course, a shocked George Bush had in mind the appalling mass-murder of US citizens he was trusted to protect, but I think his words also reveal something else, a concern that is not merely humanitarian or patriotic – one that brings us back to the issue of metrosexuality and masculinity in a mediatised world.

The ‘sneak attacks’ of the terrorists not only levelled the double-headed phallic fertility-prosperity symbol of American global economic dominance, but also penetrated the famous defensive ‘ring’ of the Pentagon building.  In the space of a few hours, the most powerful country on the planet, the hyperpower, had not only lost thousands of its citizens in appalling act of terrorism, America had been symbolically emasculated before the world.   Visually.  Little wonder then that the President saw fit to attack the masculinity of the hijackers by suggesting that they weren’t proper warriors.  Little wonder that later there would be fatuous stories circulated in the US press about how some of the Islamic fundamentalist hijackers were ‘gay’.  Or how they were bored ‘playboys’.  Little wonder that when the US later bombarded the Taliban and Al Quaeda in Afghanistan we saw on TV pictures of bombs on the decks of carriers waiting to be loaded onto aircraft returning from sorties chalked with messages like the ones we saw dropped on Tokyo at the end of PEARL HARBOR – but this time the message was less 1940s: ‘SUCK ON THIS, FAGGOTS!’  Little wonder that after the ‘failed state’ of Afghanistan had been pacified, Bush decided to target a secular Arab country that had few if any connections with terrorism and none with Al Qaeda and, as it turns out, no weapons of mass destruction or ability to threaten the US, but a country which had defied the US and had rather more infrastructure to bomb than Afghanistan (US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld apparently complained that there were no ‘good targets’ in Afghanistan and was impatient to start bombing Iraq).  Little wonder that some of the Iraqi prisoners of war were subjected to sexual humiliation – and carefully photographed by their assailants; some of these pictures were used as screen-savers.  (Interestingly, it seems to be the images of this rather than the acts themselves which seem to excite most condemnation – and of course, if they didn’t exist then probably there would have been no scandal.)

Given the disappointing reality of human nature, let alone the precarious condition of American and Western masculinity, it’s likely that 2003’s smash-hit blockbuster OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (Dir. Donald Rumsfeld) was, at the unconscious level at least, neither about oil nor about freedom, but revenge.  About making an example of a largely toothless country that could be made an example of – so that the world would see that America was not a country of ‘playboys and weaklings’.  (Ironically, if Iraq had actually possessed the massive stockpiles of WMD it was portrayed as hoarding it might not have been invaded).  Having been shocked and awed by September 11^th, the world was to be really shocked and awed by the television footage of American firepower, technology and resolve when it used its ‘special effects’ on  Baghdad.  The Second Gulf War was the most televised war in history – the First Gulf War, the second most.  Precisely because Iraq wasn’t the terrorist enemy, the neo-cons around Bush were entirely correct when they asserted that the invasion of Iraq was part of the so-called ‘War on Terror’.  The main part of it, in fact.  ‘War on Terror’ is a hyperreal, Orwellian concept.  As 9-11 showed, the US war machine was utterly impotent when faced with that kind of warfare. 

The cycle of life imitating bad art was brought full circle a year ago when the President of the United States took part in an event that most Presidents, perhaps even including ex-moviestar Ronnie, would have found demeaning to the office of the presidency.  Bush became a ropey Tom Cruise impersonator.  Landing on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in a combat jet (rather than the more usual and more dignified helicopter) Bush jumped out in a flight suit to give a grinning ‘thumbs up’ and congratulate the troops on a ‘mission accomplished’, declaring major combat operations ‘over’ – almost as if he had defeated Saddam Hussein personally.  Hence we were told that Bush, who trained as a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam Wa,r ‘took the controls’ for a while on the flight to the carrier.  Unsurprisingly, some of the press dubbed this electioneering photo opportunity moment ‘Op Gun’, reminiscent as it was of the rousing flight deck finale of  TOP GUN after the raghead MiGs have been defeated (PEARL HARBOR was clearly based in large part on TOP GUN, also produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and the film that really made him).

It later emerged that the Abraham Lincoln had been just a few miles off the coast of the US at the time and had in fact had to change course and steam out to sea so that the coastline would not be visible in the footage of the day, so that the President would appear to be closer to the ‘frontline’.  Stories began to resurface about his strange non-appearances at his posting during his time in the Air National Guard (which was anyway a soft posting for rich boys who wanted to avoid combat duty in Vietnam – the North Vietnamese Air Force was even less of a threat than the Iraqi Air Force). 

Republican, god-fearing George, sold to the electorate as a ‘guy’s guy’, traditional and ‘retro’ compared to the new-fangled ‘metro’ democrats, was another metro-warrior like Tom and Ben and Josh, but rather less convincing.  Whether his flight suit was actually stuffed that day as has been rumoured, Air National Guard absentee George Bush had flagrantly used the USS Abraham Lincoln and its complement of brave men and women as a giant nuclear strap-on.  Operation Iraqi Freedom itself had been turned into a film set for Bush’s vanity and his re-election campaign.  It was almost like Commodus entering the arena in the Coliseum.

However, those who think that this kind of behaviour will turn the electorate against Bush may be mistaken.  The Democrats, terrified about being called unpatriotic for daring to criticise a ‘war’ President (and about their ‘shrinking’ male vote) have responded by selecting a presidential candidate John Kerry, who is neither a chicken-hawk nor, apparently, a metro-warrior, but a real, live, actual, decorated Vietnam Vet. 

While the Republicans have tried to attack Kerry’s record as a war hero and cast him as unpatriotic (because he opposed the war in Vietnam), and unmanly, the Democrats have continued to draw attention to Bush’s peculiar absence from the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.  In effect, the Democrats have elected as their candidate the guy that Bush has sold himself as being but isn’t.  This may turn out to be a ticket to failure, not least because it allows the Republicans to define what masculinity is.[i]

The Democrats overwhelmingly rejected Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard Dean, once the clear favourite, not because they disagreed with his fierce criticism of Bush and the invasion of Iraq but because they worried about his masculinity, or rather, how his masculinity would sell.  Ironically, he was, at heart, the most pugnacious and warrior-like of the Democratic candidates.  Yet his passion and open-ness was somewhat unnerving in an American male.  He came out of the metro-closet, ‘I’m a metrosexual,’ he told reporters at the height of the term’s fashionability (and then subsequently rushed back in: ‘I’m not sure what it means’, he said later), didn’t help his cause (though the impeccably groomed Kerry who has notoriously expensive tastes in wives has also been called metrosexual[ii]).  Dean’s ‘I have a scream’ speech marked the total meltdown of his political chances, giving life to Democratic worries about how ‘unmanly’ Dean’s conviction and commitment looked.

Another example of America preferring metro-warriors to the real thing can be found in California, which recently elected the ‘ultimate fighting machine’, the Terminator, as the Governator.  While Arnie may have done a year’s national service when he was a teenager back in Austria, since then he’s been devoted to the ‘virtual war’, triumphing in the gladiatorial arena of Hollywood and the media, which is the battlefield that most men are interested in these days.  He himself grew up watching too many Steve Reeves sword-and-sandal movies, worked on his body and turned himself into a spectacular commodity, moved to Hollywood and became a movie star who persuaded millions of boys around the world to turn themselves into commodities – and turned masculinity into a spectacle.[iii] 

Likewise, Bush the metro-warrior – the guy who played, and still plays, at being a soldier, though less openly than Arnie, has more in common with most voters than Kerry.  Since the draft ended over a generation ago, most American males have no experience of military service.  Kerry the war hero is a curiosity to most Americans – they may admire and respect his military service, but they do not identify with it.  It makes him almost as remote and curious as his wealthy Ivy league background.  Bush’s pretend military service in the 70s (like his swagger and cheesy machismo), by comparison, is something with which most young American males can identify.  Not least because, like most of them today, he is clearly his mother’s son; his father was, like most US fathers today, absent.  Bush is a ‘corporate bastard’ – in the sense that dad was much too busy being an oil magnate/head of the CIA/Vice President/President of the USA to be a father; whilst corporations such as Nike and Sony rapidly became surrogate fathers to a generation of bastard boys.  Like them, he has grown up thinking that masculinity is something you can accessorise, like a (possibly) stuffed flight suit.  (Emphasising the dressy-uppy nature of Bush Junior’s antics, Bush Senior was a baseball star and also a decorated Navy fighter pilot in the Second World War – his absent father was a man that Bush Junior, and perhaps a whole generation of men, can never hope to be.)

Nor can it be a coincidence that the craze for short hair, big boots, combat trousers and tattoos in the last couple of decades has coincided with the end of the draft, the receding threat of ‘real’ war (as opposed to the nonsense ‘war on terror’) in the form of global confrontation with the Soviet Union, and the increasing civilianisation of the military itself.  When military service was a general expectation and direct involvement in armed conflict a very real possibility, the barracks look was not chic: long hair, flairs, flowers and impractical footwear were all the rage.  Now that the Armed Forces in the West have been professionalised, privatised and largely automated, warrior chic is a street fashion.  Metrosexuality is as (designer) tattooed, gym-pumped, crop-haired and ‘butch’ as it is manicured, styled and ‘femme’.  As has been pointed out, if America still had the draft the Iraq invasion might never have happened (part of the reason why Bush doesn’t do military funerals – and why the recent smuggled pictures of rows of Stars and Stripes draped coffins on military transports caused such a scandal).

There are still some men (and women) who do choose to serve, who are not metro-warriors but the Real Thing.  Most are of course from poor backgrounds and arguably have little choice.  But some even leave professions which are the height of desirability in today’s glamour-fixated world to become grunts.  After 9/11 Pat Tillman, a 27-year-old NFL star amazed a nation by rejecting a $3.6M contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers and serve his country for $18,000 a year.  "My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor," said Tillman to NBC News the day after the attacks on New York and Washington. "A lot of my family has... gone and fought in wars [but] I really haven't done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that."  Some cynics pointed out that Tillman’s selfless gesture guaranteed him even more attention than his NFL job.  Whatever the truth of this (and Tillman seems to have been anything but a superficial guy) the problem with putting your masculinity to a an old-fashioned, un-ironic test is that it can cost you something even more precious than a multi-million dollar contract.  Tillman was recently killed by ‘friendly fire’ near his base in Khost, Afghanistan. 

George Bush is unlikely to attend his funeral.  Given his star background, Hollywood might one day make a movie about Tillman – but they’ll definitely want to run some focus groups on the rather downbeat ending.[iv] 

© Mark Simpson 2004

Footnotes added Nov 2004

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