It was suggested to me that, as a sort of continuation of Mark Strand’s posting about beautiful women in Hollywood, I could write something about attractive men. It’s an interesting opportunity. For one thing, I think of myself as a male lesbian — with that identity’s idiosyncratic response to men. I’m not turned on by them either as objects of desire or of identification. But maybe that gives me a useful objectivity about what makes men attractive to other people, especially to women. And I do wonder about how that works.
To get our feet wet in this vast topic, I will consider the film Giant — in my opinion a gigantic masterpiece that deserves much fuller discussion than it can get here. In this film we meet a number of actors whom I believe most people would consider attractive in their different ways: Rock Hudson, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, and even Sal Mineo. But I’ll speak only of the two male leads, Rock Hudson and James Dean.
Rock Hudson initially presents as an old fashioned “hunk,” though without the grudgingly suppressed violence that’s apparent in the hunk of hunks, John Wayne. Hudson is big and strong, rich, good looking, and doesn’t seem burdened by too much intelligence. He’s a fairly conventional handsome man. I believe audiences of all eras would have recognized him as such, whether on stage or screen.
But James Dean is something very different. He’s not physically strong. He looks down at the floor. He sometimes has a kind of stammer. He seems brittle, breakable.
In these two characters, appearing in the 1950s, we have avatars of both the past and future attractive man. True, James Dean-style characters have always been around. Rimbaud was a good one: “I’ve lost my life though sensitivity.” But they were rarely official leading players. The years after Giant saw the ascendancy in pop culture of the skinny, sometimes even flaccid attractive and sensitive male. It really went into orbit with Lennon and McCartney. Meanwhile, the bulky hunk a la Rock Hudson has been devalued in the heterosexual marketplace.
You have to understand that for men in the 1950s the hunk seemed like what you had to be or at least had to want to be. In the famous “Charles Atlas” ad on the back of comic books, the skinny guy got sand kicked in his face by the muscle man — so he had to become a muscle man to win back the girl. After James Dean, the skinny guy gets sand kicked in his face and then he gets laid.
There’s a lot to say about Giant, and we all know that Rock was gay and James Dean was “everything.” In fact, the film is much more in touch with these ambiguities than I may have suggested above. In one of the final scenes, Rock the hunk gets in a fistfight with a bully — and he loses! He gets sand kicked in his face! “Quel étonnement!” (Flaubert) What’s more, Elizabeth Taylor loves him now more than ever, or maybe loves him for the first time. She says something like, “I’ve never seen you so strong as when you got punched by that gorilla.” It’s a wonderful scene, and a forward-looking one, though maybe we’re now in a retro Don Draper era. Whatever, dudes. Onward.
from the archive; first posted September 1, 2009
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Author: The Best American Poetry
