I appreciate the short article/essay "Guy Friends Rule" at Salon.com, about the value of male friends for women, and co-ed friendship in general - because it acknowledge that men and women have different approaches to intimacy, and gives the male approach some credit, for a change.
It also asks, where have all the co-ed friendships gone... an interesting question.
One thing I've noticed recently is that there are plenty of clever and topical woman-centric blogs and websites - feministing, jezebel, double x, broadsheet (at Salon)... but if there are similar blogs for men out there, I'm not aware of them. Feel free to send links if you know of any good ones.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Default Status
I'm finding that it's still hard for me to describe this impetus behind this film project - so far every time I try to talk about it I end up tripping over my own tongue with qualifiers and generalizations, and I wind up sounding like an idiot.
I actually think this is a good sign - because, hopefully, part of the learning process is learning how to articulate my thoughts and intentions about the project. The filmmaking itself is a process of articulation, in a way.
So I don't know that I can state my intention outright, this early on - but I can certainly begin to work toward clarity about it.
One part of the basic premise is that we haven't found a way, culturally, to talk about men. "Male" is the default setting in America, the same way that "white" is. Feminists have worked for a century to bring awareness to the fact that this default doesn't serve women, and minorities have done the same for the dynamics of race - but what is missing from the discussion is the fact that being the default doesn't necessarily serve men, either.
This is where the conversation tends to get tricky - because the point is NOT to complain about how hard it is to be a white male, even though I see how it might sound like that's where this is headed.
No, that's exactly my point - it seems that there are only two points of view in the discussion currently. One is that men and women are exactly the same, should be treated the same in every circumstance. That acknowledging any difference between the sexes is automatically sexist or chauvinist.
The other point of view is that men are from mars, women are from venus - that men should celebrate the superficial and crude distinctions between themselves and women, which seems to generally lead to an embrace of infantilizing fratboy "culture" - drooling over big boobs, fascination with sports and fast cars and explosions, a pathological inability to groom oneself or maintain one's apartment, etc. etc..
What's missing - for me anyway - is any kind of nuanced discussion of the complex emotional lives of men in our culture. It seems to me that even acknowledging the idea that men have complex emotional lives, or that there's any value in exploring them, is outrageous in a way - I don't know that I've ever heard that stated in the mainstream discourse.
So, that's what this movie about - the radical idea that men have feelings, and that it's actually healthy for them to express them rather than keeping them buried deep inside. That men might be more whole if they could share their feelings with each other.
I guess that's why "Masculine Myth" feels appropriate to me, as the title of this blog - it's going to be about the old myths of being a man - King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, for instance - and our new myths, in post WWII America - and the ways in which they serve us and harm us.
That's a start, anyway.
I actually think this is a good sign - because, hopefully, part of the learning process is learning how to articulate my thoughts and intentions about the project. The filmmaking itself is a process of articulation, in a way.
So I don't know that I can state my intention outright, this early on - but I can certainly begin to work toward clarity about it.
One part of the basic premise is that we haven't found a way, culturally, to talk about men. "Male" is the default setting in America, the same way that "white" is. Feminists have worked for a century to bring awareness to the fact that this default doesn't serve women, and minorities have done the same for the dynamics of race - but what is missing from the discussion is the fact that being the default doesn't necessarily serve men, either.
This is where the conversation tends to get tricky - because the point is NOT to complain about how hard it is to be a white male, even though I see how it might sound like that's where this is headed.
No, that's exactly my point - it seems that there are only two points of view in the discussion currently. One is that men and women are exactly the same, should be treated the same in every circumstance. That acknowledging any difference between the sexes is automatically sexist or chauvinist.
The other point of view is that men are from mars, women are from venus - that men should celebrate the superficial and crude distinctions between themselves and women, which seems to generally lead to an embrace of infantilizing fratboy "culture" - drooling over big boobs, fascination with sports and fast cars and explosions, a pathological inability to groom oneself or maintain one's apartment, etc. etc..
What's missing - for me anyway - is any kind of nuanced discussion of the complex emotional lives of men in our culture. It seems to me that even acknowledging the idea that men have complex emotional lives, or that there's any value in exploring them, is outrageous in a way - I don't know that I've ever heard that stated in the mainstream discourse.
So, that's what this movie about - the radical idea that men have feelings, and that it's actually healthy for them to express them rather than keeping them buried deep inside. That men might be more whole if they could share their feelings with each other.
I guess that's why "Masculine Myth" feels appropriate to me, as the title of this blog - it's going to be about the old myths of being a man - King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, for instance - and our new myths, in post WWII America - and the ways in which they serve us and harm us.
That's a start, anyway.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Fifteen Hours
I got a text message this afternoon from Dain - he and Nick are on their way back from the Mankind Project (MKP) Leader's Conference in Wisconsin. I would've gone myself, but there were too many important things going on in my life here in Minneapolis for me to get away - and I was fortunate to be able to recruit Dain and Nick to haul cameras to Kenosha and document the unfolding events.
The text said that they had shot 15 tapes - fifteen hours worth of footage - and just like that, the project is underway. There's a big difference between a film as potential energy - as ideas and plans and intentions - and a film as actual video frames recorded on tape, which have the potential to be part of the finished product.
For Journeyman, we shot something like 150 hours of footage over the course of two years - sometimes months would go by without me picking up the camera, but there were a few fateful weekends where dozens of tapes were shot, representing significant fractions of the final film.
It's too early to say whether Dain and Nick's experience will figure substantially into the film, but fifteen hours is a hell of a decisive start to the process, I think.
What happens at an MKP Leader's Conference? I don't know - but I'm eager to take a look at the tapes and find out.
The text said that they had shot 15 tapes - fifteen hours worth of footage - and just like that, the project is underway. There's a big difference between a film as potential energy - as ideas and plans and intentions - and a film as actual video frames recorded on tape, which have the potential to be part of the finished product.
For Journeyman, we shot something like 150 hours of footage over the course of two years - sometimes months would go by without me picking up the camera, but there were a few fateful weekends where dozens of tapes were shot, representing significant fractions of the final film.
It's too early to say whether Dain and Nick's experience will figure substantially into the film, but fifteen hours is a hell of a decisive start to the process, I think.
What happens at an MKP Leader's Conference? I don't know - but I'm eager to take a look at the tapes and find out.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Background - Journeyman
This blog is going to serve as a film journal for an as-yet-untitled documentary about Men, which is beginning production now, in July of 2009.
First, a few words about my background, and what brought me to this point as a filmmaker.
I am one of the directors of the film Journeyman, which is an hour-long documentary about mentoring, rights of passage, and the emotional lives of teenage boys. Journeyman was made from 2005-2007, and has been an encouraging success as a documentary film project - it has won some awards at festivals, it has screened in a dozen cities, and it has been broadcast on public television in several states. It also has an educational distribution deal - you can learn plenty more about it at the website www.mirrormanfilms.org, and order a DVD, if you so desire.
This new film - the first frames of which are being recorded this very weekend - is a follow-up project, in a sense. It won't have any of the same characters but it'll further explore many of the themes that we began to dig into with Journeyman. So, I guess I need to talk about Journeyman a little bit first.
Journeyman was about men and teenage boys rebuilding emotional connections to one another through the structure of mentoring - it followed two boys without fathers, and the two mentors who came into their lives to provide them with some much-needed support from caring adult men.
It's striking how quickly people's minds tend to jump straight to pedophilia at this point in the conversation, whether they admit it or not. I realized, while making the movie, just how perverse that is: that our default cultural assumption is that any adult male who is interested in spending time one-on-one with a teenage boy must be a sex offender.
When did that get broken? When did the idea of men and teenage boys in the same room become suspicious and sexualized? It quickly became clear to me that the subject was ripe for a documentary - if for no other reason than to reintroduce the idea that a meaningful, healthy relationship between an adult male and a teenager he's not biologically related to is even possible.
Because, historically, that relationship was central to the process of growing up. Before there were trade schools there was apprenticeship in all manner of skilled labor, and boys began to work alongside their fathers on the farm pretty much as soon as they were big enough to push a wheelbarrow. Another revelation to me, working on this project, was the idea of the modern school as a product of the industrial revolution: if you think about it, what is a seven-hour class schedule, where students shuttle from classroom to classroom to be instructed in math, science, English, Spanish, etc. - but an assembly line?
The greatest triumph in the making of Journeyman, for me, is the simple fact that we asked 15 year old boys to talk about their feelings, on camera... and they did. Everything else was gravy, beyond the simple fact that these boys shared their feelings with us, on some pretty heavy subjects.
That project was immensely satisfying, and I think it really worked, which is to say that it brought all of these questions to the attention of the audience, and it provoked some excellent discussions, and arguments, about these issues.
In the next post, I'll start to address the intention for this new film.
First, a few words about my background, and what brought me to this point as a filmmaker.
I am one of the directors of the film Journeyman, which is an hour-long documentary about mentoring, rights of passage, and the emotional lives of teenage boys. Journeyman was made from 2005-2007, and has been an encouraging success as a documentary film project - it has won some awards at festivals, it has screened in a dozen cities, and it has been broadcast on public television in several states. It also has an educational distribution deal - you can learn plenty more about it at the website www.mirrormanfilms.org, and order a DVD, if you so desire.
This new film - the first frames of which are being recorded this very weekend - is a follow-up project, in a sense. It won't have any of the same characters but it'll further explore many of the themes that we began to dig into with Journeyman. So, I guess I need to talk about Journeyman a little bit first.
Journeyman was about men and teenage boys rebuilding emotional connections to one another through the structure of mentoring - it followed two boys without fathers, and the two mentors who came into their lives to provide them with some much-needed support from caring adult men.
It's striking how quickly people's minds tend to jump straight to pedophilia at this point in the conversation, whether they admit it or not. I realized, while making the movie, just how perverse that is: that our default cultural assumption is that any adult male who is interested in spending time one-on-one with a teenage boy must be a sex offender.
When did that get broken? When did the idea of men and teenage boys in the same room become suspicious and sexualized? It quickly became clear to me that the subject was ripe for a documentary - if for no other reason than to reintroduce the idea that a meaningful, healthy relationship between an adult male and a teenager he's not biologically related to is even possible.
Because, historically, that relationship was central to the process of growing up. Before there were trade schools there was apprenticeship in all manner of skilled labor, and boys began to work alongside their fathers on the farm pretty much as soon as they were big enough to push a wheelbarrow. Another revelation to me, working on this project, was the idea of the modern school as a product of the industrial revolution: if you think about it, what is a seven-hour class schedule, where students shuttle from classroom to classroom to be instructed in math, science, English, Spanish, etc. - but an assembly line?
The greatest triumph in the making of Journeyman, for me, is the simple fact that we asked 15 year old boys to talk about their feelings, on camera... and they did. Everything else was gravy, beyond the simple fact that these boys shared their feelings with us, on some pretty heavy subjects.
That project was immensely satisfying, and I think it really worked, which is to say that it brought all of these questions to the attention of the audience, and it provoked some excellent discussions, and arguments, about these issues.
In the next post, I'll start to address the intention for this new film.
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