One of the last truly great philosophers of the 20th Century once said (well, sung) ‘Boys don’t cry…’
With the greatest of respect for Robert Smith of The Cure, he’s wrong. Boys can and should cry and decades of emotional suppression have conditioned us to believe that we’ve failed when we do. We’re taught to choke our emotions down, to express nothing other than brotastic joy, ironic snark or, in some cases, macho anger—and it’s toxic in every way. Believe me, I know, I’m a Brit. If Emotional Suppression were an Olympic event, we’d win every time. And then send a polite note apologising that we didn’t really feel like we should be at the ceremony and there was no need to make a fuss.
It’s even worse in genre TV and cinema, where we encounter so many of the emotional role models that shape us. Far too often “emotion” is portrayed as “angst,” and the closest thing we have to characters expressing their feelings is epic banter. Which is fine in and of itself but you need a little more roughage in your emotional diet.
And now, at last, you’re getting it.
More and more, genre TV shows are giving their male characters something to do other than quip and yell. The most recognized instance of this phenomenon is The Flash, where Detective Joe West has become the crumpled, beating heart of one of the sweetest shows on TV. There’s a lot to say about Joe and his relationships with his kids which I may cover in a separate piece. Likewise, The Librarians has done some brilliant work in this area that I’d to talk about in-depth and at length in the future. For now, though, I’d like to concentrate on two other key examples that demonstrate just how much the emotional depth of male characters in the field has improved in the current crop of SFF shows.
The first is Supergirl and how the show approaches Jimmy Olsen. Jimmy, at least on screen, has been pretty badly served over the years. He’s usually the comic relief or the audience stand-in, asking the obvious questions so we don’t have to. At times he’s even been the substitute damsel for when equally-badly-served versions of Lois were already busy falling off, through, or into things.
The Supergirl take on Jimmy James changes that completely. Mehcad Brooks plays him as a centred, focused man rather than the shrill boy he’s been at times in the past. He’s the perfect foil for Melissa Benoist’s magnificently nervy take on Kara, too, and the relationship between them is this fascinating push-me-pull-you where they take turns being the calm, focused, strong one.
They also have remarkable emotional honesty, and that’s led to several of the best scenes in the show; James openly tearing up when talking about how his father inspired him to become a photo journalist was a standout. But it’s the boxing scene in “Red Faced” that really brings this into focus. James, working a heavy bag, and Kara, working a CAR, take turns throwing punches and talking about what’s making them angry. The scene speaks directly to the pressures modern Western society puts on women and black men to not express anger—in Kara’s case because it’s not considered “feminine” and in James’s because doing so has a very good chance of putting his life in danger. To see a show, any show, deal with those issues is impressive. To see one deal with them with such honesty and nuance is frankly astounding. The scene also cements the friendship between the two and drives home just how open a book this version of Jimmy is. He knows what pushes his buttons, knows that sometimes he can do something about it, and tries to make his peace with it when he can’t. He’s inspirational without being unattainable, idealistic without being an ideal.
That’s extraordinarily nuanced and clever writing. It’s also a really positive three-stage lesson for male viewers:
- It’s okay to have emotions.
- It’s unhealthy to bottle them up.
- Expressing them in a healthy way will always help.
There’s no grim-faced angst, here—just a decent man trying to work on what’s bothering him and a strong, positive lesson for any man watching trying to do the same.
That’s also true of Limitless, which started over here a few weeks ago. The show cleverly swaps out Bradley Cooper’s charming and just-a-little-ruthless Eddie Morra for Brian Finch (played by Jake McDorman). Brian is an amiable, late-20s drifter who, like Eddie, is given the mysterious wonder drug NZT-48 as a “favor” by a friend. Like Eddie, he’s instrumental in saving a family member’s life but, unlike Eddie, Brian gets noticed by the authorities. The FBI are investigating NZT and thanks to Agent Rebecca Harris, they bring Brian aboard as a consultant.
However, Brian has also been discovered and snatched up by the now-Senator Eddie Morra. Eddie has big plans and he needs a man in the FBI. Which means he needs Brian. Which in turn means Brian is now leading a triple life…
It’s a really fun, smart show and a huge part of that is down to how little Brian is allowed to get away with. That comes to the fore in Episode 3, “The Legend of Marcos Ramos”. The episode’s B-plot sees Brian run into his ex-girlfriend on his way into work. He’s taken his NZT for the day so he’s brilliant and charming and they re-connect. He finds out she’s being evicted, helps her find a solution and save her building, and they pick the relationship back up. Then, after not remotely veiled threats from Senator Morra’s new aide, Brian is forced to break off the relationship to save her life.
So the episode ends with Rebecca finding him alone, crying his eyes out.
It’s a tiny little scene that’s completely unlike the wacky brain japes that define the show and it hits all the harder because of that contrast. Not only does the moment move the plot along but it solves the show’s main problem: Brian’s always the smartest person in the room, but he’s still very much a human being—capable of being wounded and broken, in spite of his enhanced abilities. If anything, this moment gives him a far clearer view of his own damage and the uncomfortable fact that even with NZT, he can’t solve every problem. It gives him a unique vulnerability that influences both character and plot and reveals a downside to the use of NZT that’s far more visceral than the eventual death Eddie has saved him from. This is Brian’s “with great power comes great responsibility” moment.
It’s another example of a male character being completely open with their emotions and becoming all the more likable for that. Brian’s just had to do an awful thing and feels lousy about it. Just like James can’t talk about his dad without getting choked up or Joe West can’t view Barry Allen as anything other than his son.
In all of these cases, these men have done something they’ve not been allowed to do before, for the most part: feel. In feeling, and expressing emotion, they’ve become more nuanced, more relatable and better characters. Instead of having clay feet, we see their shoes are just as worn as ours. Which means when they do something good it’s not only more admirable but more relatable—they’re no longer simply paragons for us to aspire to.
They’re us. Tired, grumpy, frightened, frustrated and doing it anyway. Not just the heroes we need but, at last, the heroes we deserve.
Alasdair Stuart is a freelancer writer, RPG writer and podcaster. He owns Escape Artists, who publish the short fiction podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and the magazine Mothership Zeta. He blogs enthusiastically about pop culture, cooking and exercise at Alasdairstuart.com, tweets @AlasdairStuart.
Love this. We watch Supergirl with my sons, and I never really thought about that aspect before, but I guess it’s another good reason for him to keep watching it :) My older son especially tends to be very intense/emotional so we’ve been spending a lot of time with him on being able to be in touch with his feelings, articulate them, and express them in a productive/healthy way but without being ashamed/afraid of them. It’s good to see that there are more examples of this than just the ones we model at home.
I was thinking of the episode of Deep Space Nine where Sisko plays a 1930s writer who has his tale of a black space station captain ripped up before he gets fired. The man has a full blown nervous breakdown, weeping and shouting that he is a human being and they can’t deny what he made, what he imagined. It was powerful and tragic. Avery Brooks at his best. I kind of wish they’d done that series ending where the black writer sells that story as a script to Paramount….
I’ve just started watching the X-files. I was surprised to see the male lead get a scene to cry in season 2: I didn’t think men had emotions in 1994.
I remember sitting in the theater watching Fellowship of the Ring and realizing, as Aragorn shed tears over Boromir, that this was something I had rarely, if ever, seen in cinema. Our action-hero lead expressing genuine naked sadness, crying over the death of his friend. That moments still destroys me every time, and P. J. went on to fill his trilogy with men openly showing and sharing their feelings.
Sorry for the double post. I don’t know why I keep double posting on this website.
Here’s an instance of a male character in a genre show who should have cried on screen, because that’s what he does in the source material: in A Song of Ice and Fire, Sandor “The Hound” Clegane has three major and very memorable PTSD-driven emotional breakdowns during which he cries, as witnessed in POV chapters by Sansa Stark and Arya Stark. This is all the more interesting because the character is a 6’6″, muscular, scary warrior/bodyguard who does his best to play up the angry, nihilistic and ruthless persona, but who is really a deeply traumatized and unhappy person who was horrifically abused and disfigured by his elder brother when he was 6, lost the rest of his family (sister and father) to deaths caused most likely by the same brother, and has lived a life of violence in service of his liege lords since he was 12, which he took to get away from his brother when the latter inherited the family estate after their father’s death in a hunting “accident”.
However, the showrunners of Game of Thrones, which is supposed to be an adaptation of Martin’s saga, and resembled that in the early seasons, always did their best to ignore Sandor’s vulnerability and emotional volatility, and instead wrote him as a stoic, funny badass with a sad backstory. He never cried on screen – because, I guess, manly men don’t cry. The first of his emotional breakdowns never happened on the show, the second was completely changed – instead of crying, he is laughing defiantly (!), while Arya Stark is the one crying instead (which she does not do in that scene in the book); the third one was mostly faithful to the book, but again…no tears.
At the same time, women,particularly young girls, cry a lot more in GoT, cry a lot more than they do in the books. There’s the example of Arya in the above mentioned scene, Sansa cries a lot more often or more loudly and openly in some situations where she was stoic and not showing her feelings in the books, and Myrcella is shown crying in season 2 on leaving King’s Landing, when the equivalent scene in the book emphasized that she had the bearing of a real princess and did not cry, unlike her younger brother Tommen (to be fair, at least the 9 or 10 year old Tommen was allowed to cry on the show, as well).
GoT does its best to make allcharacters conform to gender stereotypes that the books, written some 10-15 years ago, subverted with those same characters. On the show, Samwell Tarly brags about his kills and the sex he had, Jon Snow is primarily a sword wielding action hero instead of a political reformer, and even one handed Jaime Lannister gets a B movie action subplot where he hilariously uses his artificial hand in a fight, instead of realizing he can’t fight well anymore and focusing on using his brains to solve problems instead, as he does in the books. The only male characters who are changed into not being traditionally masculine on the show (whereas in the books they are, to quite an extent) are… you’ve guessed it – Loras and Renly, the gay guys.
@@.-@. I’m right there with you. That scene of Boromir fighting the Orcs and eventually falling with Merry and Pippin watching helplessly, finished by Aragorn over his body weeping for him just kills me.
My favorite male character on TV right now is Fitz from Agents of Shield. He’s cried on screen on more than one occasion, and it hits me right in the feels.
I agree: men should cry more on television. Sisko did it episode one. Just sayin’.
Maybe the title of this article should be “More Men Should Cry in YA Television,” because I’ve seen several macho men break down in tears in adult dramas in recent years, and in older shows for that matter.
“They’re us. Tired, grumpy, frightened, frustrated and doing it anyway.”
That’s the best line here, I think. To merely supposed that more men should be blubbery crying is like supposing that more women should reacting with violent anger to emotional cues – it doesn’t serve to realistically display human emotional responses to just flash between Culturally Conditionally Male Response and Culturally Conditioned Female Response. There’s a far wider range of agitation, anxiety, fugue, dissociation, et cetera that are rarely ever considered but that many – if not most of us – are far more familiar with as natural responses to traumatic or emotional situations. It’s still painful how many friends I lost over my “not crying” after my mother’s death (I instead responded with going into a sort of fugue and suddenly dropping my refusal-to-ever-drink-alcohol), because none of those other twenty-somethings had ever dealt with that sort of trauma and were only responded to the cry-or-punch-something options they saw on television.
What you’re suggesting here serves to do little to actually replicate reality – if anything, given the way that men tend to react to situations, using full-fledged crying (a tear or two is something different in both meaning and physiological response) as more of a shorthand for anxious or agitational reactions actually furthers the problems that you’re seeking to resolve.
@11: Yes, there should be a wider range of emotional responses. We should also see things like people not expressing their grief in any obvious way, people going into a sort of frozen state with no response (that was the response of one of my classmates in high school, a teenage girl who was attached to her mother, at the funeral of her mother, who had committed suicide). But why do you assume that this means men should not “blubbery cry” on TV or women react with violent anger? Some women do tend to react with anger to an emotional crisis, and you can’t convince me that men don’t cry more than two tears in real life. Or, why can’t someone react with violent anger and cry at the same time? This happens, too.
@8 – ireadgoodbooks: That’s cool about Fitz, but he’s still the nerdy scientist, not the manly man action hero. Nerds have cried on screen in the past, and it only serves to reinforce a stereotype too.