The majestic German film director Fritz Lang in Le Mepris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) gives a very curt analysis of the character of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey: ‘I think it’s stupid to change the character of Ulysses. He isn’t a modern neurotic. He’s a simple cunning man.’
Through this analysis Lang takes us straight to the heart of the modern dilemma, that duality that has always existed with our culture. The separation between the human who thinks to much and never acts, and the human who trusts his own instincts and just acts. Of course, Odysseus, is a man who trusts his own instincts and just acts, while the modern neurotic would just sit there and procrastinate. And procrastinate they most certainly do.
I think I’ve had enough of neurotic’s over the past few weeks. You reach a point where you can’t take anymore of another bore ranting at the unfairness of the world, or listening to people who are so bound up in their own ego that they just can’t reach a decision about what they want to do with their own life. Here they are though on the screen week in week out, and although a few tend to be female, a lot more are male, and this is the problem. Its here that we find the spilt between Odysseus and the modern neurotic to be most acute.
These are men who have lost the will act, and Odysseus has the will to act. Because the modern neurotic has lost the will to act, it is quite obvious that he has been cut off from his own masculinity. Odysseus with his will to act without procrastinating holds on to his masculinity and his place in the world, while the modern neurotic has lost his masculinity as well as having no place in the world. It is because of this that they can only sit there and rant at the world wishing that they were more like Odysseus.
Take for instance the film Greenberg (Noah Baumbach, 2010) This film tells the tale of Rodger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a man who is trying to recapture the essence of his youth and realises that he will never achieve this. At the age of 40 he is still living in the past tense rather then in the present.
It is as if Greenberg has been denied the rituals that in Odysseus’s society, or even his own society, would have allowed Greenberg entry into manhood. Instead he is left in a limbo unable to act, unable to do anything, other then let the weight of the past hold him down. It is the wish for this past that makes him neurotic and keeps him from entering a masculine adult hood – he is procrastinating and cannot make the choice he needs to make.
Where does this kind of neurosis come from? Men such as Greenberg do not just slip into existence overnight. Some kind of pressure in their environment must have created them. Could this be the effects of feminist discourse taking its shape, particularly in the shape of neurotic men who have been not allowed entry in to adulthood because certain rituals were removed from society?
Or could it be the case that modern society does not need anymore the instinctual Odysseus? On the other hand it could be the case that ideas are masculinity are going through a period of reformatting, and the neurotic is just an interim figure on the way to the new form? The fact is the neurotic man exist and we are going to have to live with them on the screen or otherwise regardless of how society created them.
The neurotic man has not always existed on the screen. Hollywood has over the years given us Odysseus rather then the modern neurotic, especially in the form of John Wayne. Characters that are the direct opposites to Rodger Greenberg. In films such as Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959), True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969), and The Cowboys (Mark Rydell,1972), Wayne plays the kind of character that does not have time to think or even procrastinate.
These tough and hardy characters normally have the trickster cunning of Odysseus formed from hard toil in the frontier landscape that created them. They have normally been through the ritualistic process that the neurotic has not received, and always seem to be comfortable within their masculinity. There is no question of how one should act in any given situation, because their own instincts dictate how they should act. After all like Odysseus, if John Wayne’s character spends time thinking about any given action, they most likely would end up dead – you have to act or die, there is no time to defer a decision.
Maybe this is the true essence of the neurotic compared to Odysseus. The fact that within modern suburban culture Odysseus, and John Wayne, is not needed. The environment has shifted and the building of the suburban environment has given rise to the Rodger Greenberg’s of this world.
You could argue that neurotic man is also a obsolete man. He has no function beyond the fact that he is trapped within and cannot make a choice about his life. Because of this he is trapped in a perpetual childhood that will never let him become an adult and connect to his masculinity. Suburbia ad society holds him down and, may well finally destroy him – unless he can find a way out.
This process can be seen at work in the television series Mad Men (Matthew Weiner, 2007.) Don Draper (Jon Hamm) was once a soldier. He was an Odysseus, a man who live by his wits and instinct. Only now we find him trapped in suburbia, dragging his feet about the kid of life he wants to lead, and while married to a beautiful wife, he has a number of affairs. It is, as if he, is trying to prove that he has not been castrated by modern suburban living.
On top of this he is not who he claims to be – Don Draper does not exist – he is a man living a lie. And it is his inability to remove himself from all of this that makes him a true neurotic man. He just sits in his situation unable to find his way out. He finds he cannot act. The modern world does not allow him to be Odysseus. Instead it has removed his masculinity and castrated him. Eventually he will be destroyed, exposed as a fraud, and that will be the end of him.
What would happen to Don Draper once he is exposed? Would we find him 20 years time acting in very much the same fashion as Boris Yelnikoff (Larry David) in Whatever Works (Woody Allen, 2010), just sat there railing at the world?
Boris for one is the kind of neurotic that is quite distinctly different from that of Rodger Greenberg. Greenberg is quiet, not very well connected to the world, for him everything is internal. But Boris is strident. He yells at the world. He rants and raves and insults everybody he comes across. He is most surely not an Odysseus or John Wayne. His impotence and castration has lead him to hate every one and everything. For him the world does not think. He is an angry man just being angry for the sake of being angry, because he has been disconnected from his masculinity.
His neurosis leads him to attempt to commit suicide twice, and both times he fails. He is incapable of ending his continued rant against a society, that has not given him the right to be, to exist, to be human, and to be a male. And it would seem that there is no quick fix for this condition of modern manhood. Rodger Greenberg, Don Draper, and Boris Yelnikoff are what they are, and that is representations of modern neurotic man, castrated and denied there masculinity by the culture they are born in to.
In the end you can only agree with Firtz Lang that it’s stupid to change the character of Ulysses for it only leads to a group of men who are incapable of making decisions – only to become angry and incredibly sad.
I’m fed up with neurotics – in the end there has to be a better way to live then just through the use of the neurosis, the inability to make your own decisions. Its just that we have to go and find it. It’s out there somewhere. Somewhere beyond suburbia and neurotic man himself. I’m off to have a look.
(image: Ben Stiller as Roger Greenberg)
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