Word: clooneys
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Nevertheless, there it was, staring me right in the face. On the cover of GQ was George Clooney. Beneath his sardonically smiling face were the words of truth: "George Clooney and the Meaning of Guyness," an article by Peter Richmond. From the look of the photograph (with a little fashion savoir faire provided by a small insert), it seems that real men wear stripes, lots of them, preferably by Emporio Armani, at a total cost of somewhere in the thousand-dollar range. Incidentally, or not so incidentally, real men are also white, but that's for another time...
...teaser for the article, as if those stripes and that headline weren't enough of a tease, informs the interested reader that George Clooney most wants to act the part of the "Guy" in a "classic leading-man kind of way." His simple request: "Just let me be the guy here." A real guy, taking the anecdotes Richmond relates as sign-posts, drives a motorcycle and/or a black car with leather interior, alternates between cursing and punching people who "disrespect" him or any of his "boys," does 180s on busy Los Angeles streets during the day. And he does...
...Clooney always plays the same character, whether in his movies or in the weekly episodes of "ER." He is a macho guy, attractive, self-confident, somewhat crude, gruff on the outside, moderately warm inside. And, according to Richmond, Clooney can get away with the monotony because "there is something reassuring about George's unspectacular but classic character in an age when the screen is increasingly peopled by young guys...who haven't lived--not really lived--more than a day and a half their whole lives and are therefore about as inherently interesting as garden slugs." Which means, to take...
Dean Martin, we discover, is George Clooney's hero. But Clooney does not want merely to act like Martin; he wants to be Martin, to be this 1950s manly man of the big screen. George wants to recreate the time when "men were men and women were broads but 'broad' was a compliment." Which may be the most honest section of the article. The vision of masculinity that Clooney tries to embody is a fiction of the screen and the novel, circa the 1950s, a disembodied and dangerous ideal-type of what it is to be a real...
That George Clooney willingly, even proudly, admits that he likes some of the "I'm just a hunter, to drag the chick by the hair" mentality is not particularly noteworthy. But that his antiquated and sexist ideals should be toted as the essence of guyness, what real guys believe and what real women, by extension, should want, is wildly disturbing. Guyness is much more interesting than George Clooney, and much more varied. Thank goodness the '50s are over...