The whole "traditional masculinity" as some "cure" for men's crises is just plain weird. I read it and it makes me alternately laugh or be stunned. This is pure reversion to peasantry.
Where does "traditional masculinity" support bisexuality or homosexuality? And that's just the easiest target for this pseudo-religious culture propaganda.
The problem is NEVER solved through some sort of this way or that way. Having been the subject of several of these "interventions" that made no dent, I can attest to their nature as hoogery-magoogery.
The problem that besets American men is provinciality. The more circumscribed your experience with the world and other cultures, the more vulnerable you are to becoming disoriented by either being a great success or a great failure or just in some unfamiliar place or state. CULTURE OF PLACE is the enemy. Displace yourself (anonymously if possible if you're famous) into some place where you are nobody or, better, the real stranger. Americans are the least mulitlingually multiculturally fluent in the world. The "melting pot" thing is a gateway to being marooned when you "rise" above your class or suddenly become successful.
Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" provides the picture and implicit cure to your sense of vulnerability to being "different" after a life of sameness. Like many talented people who are elevated up and out of the world they started in, they are thrown into a space they didn't see coming and did not feel at home. The cure is NOT to give them a choice between one kind of parochialism as a cure for another. The cure is to go off and experience being no one, the stranger and have to learn how to adapt... without your language, without your habits, without your holidays and every other of life's minutiae.
Americans (mostly elite, see Henry James) used to be encouraged to "go abroad". The cure of religion is the absolute worst way to become a better human being. It is a crutch that will enslave you as a cripple for life.
Re: But Deliver Me From Nowhere gives no such catharsis with Bruce’s successes. He’s already a success when we meet him. And when he gets his way with the album–a fight which he didn’t even have to lift a finger, really, because Jon Landau did all the work of fighting the record label for him–we don’t see him enjoy the success. We merely see how empty it feels afterwards.
Worldly success is often empty, unless one is a shallow person whose life revolves around money and popularity. So the movie starts out in an intriguing place. Alas, if all it offers is therapy it hasn't done much to help. "Therapy" is treated like a sacrament by the cultural Left, but it is very limited in what it can handle.
As I point out above, therapy is just a crutch. But a crutch is way better than the wheelchair of religion. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the gurney of religion.
The real problem is you're a prisoner of parochialism.
"About one-quarter of U.S. adults report having a mental health diagnosis such as anxiety or depression or experiencing emotional distress. This is one of the highest rates among 11 high-income countries.
While U.S. adults are among the most willing to seek professional help for emotional distress, they are among the most likely to report access or affordability issues.
Emotional distress is associated with social and economic needs in all countries. Nearly half of U.S. adults who experience emotional distress report such worries, a higher share than seen in other countries.
The United States has some of the worst mental health–related outcomes, including the highest suicide rate and second-highest drug-related death rate.
The U.S. has a relatively low supply of mental health workers, particularly psychologists and psychiatrists. Just one-third of U.S. primary care practices have mental health professionals on their team, compared to more than 90 percent in the Netherlands and Sweden."
I tend to think of these music biopics as essentially a type of "chick flick", despite the male protagonists -- the hit musician being a sort of man that very obviously tends to capture women's imaginations -- but I wonder if this is just my narrow view of things. I've tried to sit through a few of them but have never been able to endure it.
The only one I can really remember people around me discussing enthusiastically was the Johnny Cash one, "Walk the Line," and it was women discussing it. If I look it up on Wikipedia, I notice the poster shown there is obviously targeted at women and is evocative of that chick flick exemplar, "The Notebook".
That doesn't make the analysis here incorrect, but if Hollywood is targeting women with this message on men, it's a somewhat different story than targeting men with this message.
Based on your description, it also seems the film fits the current cultural obsession with trauma.
Without denying that trauma exists, this obsession has created a condition where everyone is searching for a source of trauma in their lives, and therapy provides the mechanism for them to be the pitied victims of their circumstances.
I went through some very hard times in combat with horrible leaders, and had about a year of decompression and anger that I had to work myself down from. I suppose if it had happened now, I would have been encouraged to think of myself as being traumatized by a senior officer who was just a horrible leader, but never inflicted permanent damage to my person.
These days, however, I have to be patient as an Elder when I listen to young adults talk about the trauma from hen-pecking mothers who might have been imperfect and needy but hardly inflicted trauma on their children. I say this because I have other adults in our congregation who were treated in the most reprehensible ways by their parents and quietly resent the open use of trauma in so many contexts.
Turning attention to men in particular, I have noticed that men need a sense of purpose, a group that accepts them, and a sense, especially, that they are valued and respected. In a heartbreaking case, my wife counsels a man who attempted suicide at one point and is filled with so much regret and self-loathing. He lives for his children and regrets leaving the Marine Corps.
Work, family purpose, and respect are not sufficient for a man to be spiritually whole, but they are necessary for our existence as men. We are in-created with a need to be productive and to have others around us, especially our spouses, to value us. No amount of therapy and learning to seek self-discovery can replace that need. It's why men have so many nightmares and fears about being able to provide for their families. It's why so many young men have taken their lives after leaving a tight-knit group in combat. Without diminishing some real combat trauma in many of these men, the real loss was a loss of purpose and belonging within a group.
I know I've waxed long about this, but the culture's blindness to this is manifest in the progressive reaction to Joe Rogan's interview with Mark Zuckerbug. When I listened to Mark's love of Jujitsu and the sense of confidence and strength it gave him, I could resonate. It was more meaningful to him in that conversation than the fact that he owns a large company. He truly believed that his practical combat experience had good things to guide how leadership in his company was formed. Predictably, however, this was greeted by progressives as so much toxic masculinit because it doesn't fit the mold on what makes someone a healthy individual.
Once again, an excellently terrible example: Zuckerberg.
The guy has acute ADD and his perfectly good parents spoiled him. Good for him, since that is what helped him succeed... along with a whole lot of luck in who he chose to actually make things happen.
Still, the real problem, as I point out in other comments above, is that he is a bubble kid. There's the boy-in-the-literal-bubble who is born without an immune system. Then there are the boys (and some girls) who are born in social/parental bubbles. And if you layer on things like ethnicity and religion and you're really riding into socio-pathic certainty.
Jiu-jitsu "helped" a newly sociopathic Zuck jump to Trump's side right away. Along with money. And one thing it hasn't cured is his sociopathy.
It seems to me that this religio-masculinity is an excuse for sociopathy. Right?
BTW, when are you going to speak about things like that wonderful example of "tradtional masculinity" Donald Trump?
The whole "traditional masculinity" as some "cure" for men's crises is just plain weird. I read it and it makes me alternately laugh or be stunned. This is pure reversion to peasantry.
Where does "traditional masculinity" support bisexuality or homosexuality? And that's just the easiest target for this pseudo-religious culture propaganda.
The problem is NEVER solved through some sort of this way or that way. Having been the subject of several of these "interventions" that made no dent, I can attest to their nature as hoogery-magoogery.
The problem that besets American men is provinciality. The more circumscribed your experience with the world and other cultures, the more vulnerable you are to becoming disoriented by either being a great success or a great failure or just in some unfamiliar place or state. CULTURE OF PLACE is the enemy. Displace yourself (anonymously if possible if you're famous) into some place where you are nobody or, better, the real stranger. Americans are the least mulitlingually multiculturally fluent in the world. The "melting pot" thing is a gateway to being marooned when you "rise" above your class or suddenly become successful.
Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" provides the picture and implicit cure to your sense of vulnerability to being "different" after a life of sameness. Like many talented people who are elevated up and out of the world they started in, they are thrown into a space they didn't see coming and did not feel at home. The cure is NOT to give them a choice between one kind of parochialism as a cure for another. The cure is to go off and experience being no one, the stranger and have to learn how to adapt... without your language, without your habits, without your holidays and every other of life's minutiae.
Americans (mostly elite, see Henry James) used to be encouraged to "go abroad". The cure of religion is the absolute worst way to become a better human being. It is a crutch that will enslave you as a cripple for life.
Pointing out, yet again, that the cultural elites are not on the same page as the rest of us.
Well, when you're an elite, of course we are above you. And we are here to lift you up. Not give you a bunch of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
Talk to me. It's free.
Re: But Deliver Me From Nowhere gives no such catharsis with Bruce’s successes. He’s already a success when we meet him. And when he gets his way with the album–a fight which he didn’t even have to lift a finger, really, because Jon Landau did all the work of fighting the record label for him–we don’t see him enjoy the success. We merely see how empty it feels afterwards.
Worldly success is often empty, unless one is a shallow person whose life revolves around money and popularity. So the movie starts out in an intriguing place. Alas, if all it offers is therapy it hasn't done much to help. "Therapy" is treated like a sacrament by the cultural Left, but it is very limited in what it can handle.
As I point out above, therapy is just a crutch. But a crutch is way better than the wheelchair of religion. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the gurney of religion.
The real problem is you're a prisoner of parochialism.
"About one-quarter of U.S. adults report having a mental health diagnosis such as anxiety or depression or experiencing emotional distress. This is one of the highest rates among 11 high-income countries.
While U.S. adults are among the most willing to seek professional help for emotional distress, they are among the most likely to report access or affordability issues.
Emotional distress is associated with social and economic needs in all countries. Nearly half of U.S. adults who experience emotional distress report such worries, a higher share than seen in other countries.
The United States has some of the worst mental health–related outcomes, including the highest suicide rate and second-highest drug-related death rate.
The U.S. has a relatively low supply of mental health workers, particularly psychologists and psychiatrists. Just one-third of U.S. primary care practices have mental health professionals on their team, compared to more than 90 percent in the Netherlands and Sweden."
These are good insights on mental health.
I tend to think of these music biopics as essentially a type of "chick flick", despite the male protagonists -- the hit musician being a sort of man that very obviously tends to capture women's imaginations -- but I wonder if this is just my narrow view of things. I've tried to sit through a few of them but have never been able to endure it.
The only one I can really remember people around me discussing enthusiastically was the Johnny Cash one, "Walk the Line," and it was women discussing it. If I look it up on Wikipedia, I notice the poster shown there is obviously targeted at women and is evocative of that chick flick exemplar, "The Notebook".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walk_the_Line
That doesn't make the analysis here incorrect, but if Hollywood is targeting women with this message on men, it's a somewhat different story than targeting men with this message.
Based on your description, it also seems the film fits the current cultural obsession with trauma.
Without denying that trauma exists, this obsession has created a condition where everyone is searching for a source of trauma in their lives, and therapy provides the mechanism for them to be the pitied victims of their circumstances.
I went through some very hard times in combat with horrible leaders, and had about a year of decompression and anger that I had to work myself down from. I suppose if it had happened now, I would have been encouraged to think of myself as being traumatized by a senior officer who was just a horrible leader, but never inflicted permanent damage to my person.
These days, however, I have to be patient as an Elder when I listen to young adults talk about the trauma from hen-pecking mothers who might have been imperfect and needy but hardly inflicted trauma on their children. I say this because I have other adults in our congregation who were treated in the most reprehensible ways by their parents and quietly resent the open use of trauma in so many contexts.
Turning attention to men in particular, I have noticed that men need a sense of purpose, a group that accepts them, and a sense, especially, that they are valued and respected. In a heartbreaking case, my wife counsels a man who attempted suicide at one point and is filled with so much regret and self-loathing. He lives for his children and regrets leaving the Marine Corps.
Work, family purpose, and respect are not sufficient for a man to be spiritually whole, but they are necessary for our existence as men. We are in-created with a need to be productive and to have others around us, especially our spouses, to value us. No amount of therapy and learning to seek self-discovery can replace that need. It's why men have so many nightmares and fears about being able to provide for their families. It's why so many young men have taken their lives after leaving a tight-knit group in combat. Without diminishing some real combat trauma in many of these men, the real loss was a loss of purpose and belonging within a group.
I know I've waxed long about this, but the culture's blindness to this is manifest in the progressive reaction to Joe Rogan's interview with Mark Zuckerbug. When I listened to Mark's love of Jujitsu and the sense of confidence and strength it gave him, I could resonate. It was more meaningful to him in that conversation than the fact that he owns a large company. He truly believed that his practical combat experience had good things to guide how leadership in his company was formed. Predictably, however, this was greeted by progressives as so much toxic masculinit because it doesn't fit the mold on what makes someone a healthy individual.
Once again, an excellently terrible example: Zuckerberg.
The guy has acute ADD and his perfectly good parents spoiled him. Good for him, since that is what helped him succeed... along with a whole lot of luck in who he chose to actually make things happen.
Still, the real problem, as I point out in other comments above, is that he is a bubble kid. There's the boy-in-the-literal-bubble who is born without an immune system. Then there are the boys (and some girls) who are born in social/parental bubbles. And if you layer on things like ethnicity and religion and you're really riding into socio-pathic certainty.
Jiu-jitsu "helped" a newly sociopathic Zuck jump to Trump's side right away. Along with money. And one thing it hasn't cured is his sociopathy.
It seems to me that this religio-masculinity is an excuse for sociopathy. Right?