Posted by James Wolcott 03.12.06 1:16PM
I believe I have discovered the sacred text that inspires and animates ferocious, fur-bearing authors such as David Brooks, John Tierney, NRO's Stanley Kurtz, and Harvey Mansfield--author of Manliness (which gets a rough going-over in next weeks NY Times Book Review by Walter Kirn)--to assert male prerogative and keep women in their proper place, i.e., gazing up adoringly at Daddy. It provides their vision of a future patriarchal society in which the warrior within every man is restored to his lounge-recliner throne.
No, it is not Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, with its bleak futuristic depiction of feminism reversed and women's wombs held captive.
Indeed, it is not a text at all, but a cult film that illustrates what awaits civilization if it sinks into the abject sissyhood and surrenders to female sovereignty. And the radical hot beef injection that it will take to restore civilization to primitive glory.
I speak of John Boorman's 1974 sci-fi low-budget beefcake extravaganza Zardoz, starring Sean Connery, who, in Pauline Kael's classic review, "traipses around in a loincloth...playing the only potent man at the discotheque." He struts around the movie with prowess and assurance, but his face registers the doubts of an actor wondering how he got roped into this thing. Kael: "[H]e acts like a man to agreed to do something before he grasped what it was. He hangs in there stolidly, loyally, his face saying, 'I'm wrong, but I'll do it.'"
Uttering lines like "Stay behind my aura" probably made Connery question his very raison d'etre as an actor, not to mention his decision to quit making Bond films.
Set in the year 2293, which'll be here before you know it, Zardoz posits a "stately yet cranky vision of a future society dominated by immortal, hyperintelligent women--soulless, heartless, sexless." And this was before Hillary Clinton appeared on the scene to shrink all those chipmunk testicles out there! "The men are immortal, too, but, being impotent, they are passive and effete."
Doesn't this sound like the Worst Possible Scenario for the World as dreamt by Brooks, Tierney, et al? (Not to mention antifeminist female pundits such as Kate O'Beirne and Ann Coulter.) Read Kael's description of Boorman's mindset in making Zardoz and tell me it doesn't sound like John Tierney or Harvey Mansfield beating their chests after eating a bowl of Wheaties, or the sort of Chris Matthews Beltway insider hoisting a major woody for John McCain:
"He [Boorman] seems to think we've got away from being dominated by fighting, fertile males. What a crotchety--and revealing--cautionary tale. He's worried about the intellectuals' taking over; he thinks we're endangered by feminization and sterile intellectuality and impotence. Boorman's world view is like a country bumpkin's vision of New York City.
"He thinks that intellectuals are custodians of dead information and that they're a menace because they're sterile in every sense. Perhaps it's best not to dwell on his amalgam of feminity and decadence."
Were Kael writing this piece today, she'd probably cite the antagonism towards homosexuality as a major ingredient in this decadent cake mix, because lawd knows the rightwingers have thrown it into the swirl. With both mitts.
The comedy of course is that Sean Connery as one of the last vessels of virility on earth was at least plausible casting, ludicrous as his costuming was. But David Brooks pretending to be a hunter-gatherer as he compares floor waxes at Target, John Tierney trying to intoxicate at the Times everyone he meets with his jungle musk, Harvey Mansfield asking everyone at Harvard what they think of his leather loincloth...no, the mind's eye rebels. To shore up the crumbling status quo and protect male privilege, these would-be kings of the wild frontier must continue doing what they've been doing: typing crap into the keyboards.
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam