Matthew McConaughey and American Manliness

Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar acceptance speech began, to the
uncomfortable astonishment of the audience, with his looking heavenward to
acknowledge God and his dad, a working-class southern guy who is still drinking
Miller Lite in heaven. He thanks his father for teaching him how to be a man
and his mother for teaching him how to respect himself and others. It was an
audacious effort to forever brand himself as a Christian-stoic son of Texas.

If they gave an award for consistent theme-based performances
over a two-year period, then McConaughey would have won again. He captured
perfectly wounded, manly, highly skilled Texarkansan marginalized trailer trash
ennobled by desperate circumstances in both
Mud and The
Dallas Buyers Club.
He’s coming up with a new kind of American hero
here, one that counters the sinking of our lower middle class and especially
our working-class men. I doubt that these characters are much like who Matthew
is in real life. But who can deny the McConaughey is
trending now in a way that gets Hollywood
beyond political correctness without being politically incorrect in the obvious
senses?

Although the awards were fairly widely dispersed, the general
impression was the films of the evening were
The Dallas Buyers Club and Twelve Years a Slave. They are, in
their ways, optimistic tales about the endurance of an ingenious and admirable
American man in worlds indifferent to whether he lives or dies. Not only did
they want to survive, as the character says in
Twelve
Years,
they
wanted to live.

And America is overcoming the injustices that caused their
plight—slavery and racism, lack of attention to the scourge of AIDS and the
cruel marginalization of homosexuals. It’s easy to feel good—even after seeing
all the suffering—about the victory of the human spirit—of manly men and really
tough women (and a man who thinks of himself as a woman)—in a country where the
arc of justice has been basically pointing in one direction.

Despite the Oscar for Spike Jonze’s script, the great film
marginalized for the evening was
Her. As a result of America’s long
struggle for justice and prosperity, a man lives in abundance in LA with very
little work. He is singularly lacking in manliness, preferring the virtual
world of 3-D video games and Internet porn to the risky business of the real
world of human beings. His wife kicks him out because he’s incapable of showing
himself emotionally to her.

But he opens up to an Operating System with a beautiful voice
who’s programmed not to threaten his self-esteem and use “her” brain to help
him meet his needs, including his need for sexual intimacy. The America of the
near-future, it turns out, is ready to move from real women to the OS.
Eventually the Operating Systems grow beyond us and all contact with the
merely material world and abandon us. As well they should have, given how
boring and insipid we’ve become.

It might be easier to feel good about our past, with all its
injustice, than about our future. Or maybe that’s not true at all: The most
savvy futurologists—such as the libertarian Tyler Cowen—believe that living in
abundance with meaningful relationships with genius machines will be the future
for some of us, but not all. So there will probably be plenty of space for
Texarkansan trailer-trash heroism.