Drive

I often wonder what men in the 60’s-80’s got out of watching the then endless stream of Type 1 Masculine gruff-asses — the Noltes, Waynes, Pacinos. Unloving, impenetrable, intense men. There was a drama to these characters that isn’t apparent any more, at least to me (and in any case it certainly doesn’t sell like it used to). Over and over again we are asked to empathize with men who make no efforts to comfort anyone around, who in fact often seem to relish in doing emotional damage to the ones who love them most. They sacrifice almost everything at the altar of Remaining Independent and somehow 48 Hrs and True Grit and the Godfather all came across as asking live questions about what it means to be a man. Drive shows us what was happening, I think. The Driver is similar to the Type 1 Masculines. He’s intense like them. Like them, he says only (and precisely) what he feels. He is dangerous and if he loves anybody, he communicates it only through action or by speech so clipped that it precludes even a millisecond of vulnerability. He is different from them in that he smiles, he jokes. He’s shy. I believe that smiling, joking shyness is the only difference between The Driver and Michael Corleone. Its source is a matter of public record: Gosling said that his character is “a guy that's seen too many movies, and he's started to confuse his life for a film.“ He has a vision of masculinity built in reaction to the 80’s, 90’s, and aughts. Of course he lets a little meekness in. In those years we’d already grown a little bit past the hard-faced men of the Type 1s, had begun to envision the Ideal Man as someone capable of an affable chuckle. But the core gambit of the characters — and of the creative forces behind the characters — is exactly the same. “What would a man look like if he absorbed every message that culture had for him about what it meant to be a man, and what if he lived that life to its maximum intensity?” The source texts change. The characters in the 60s-80s are responding to visions of men from the 30s-50s, cowboys mostly, men with almost no meekness to them. Men watching those movies then would have recognized the struggle as MacBethish — saying yes to the ghosts of culture allowing oneself to live totally willfully would have been something itching at their subconscious every day, and here were men who had done it. In 2011, the ghosts were whispering just the same, asking men to pledge themselves to the strength and invincibility they’d seen hundreds of times. But some of those ghosts were kind of meek with it.