Faludi/McCandless

Susan Faludi has a new book coming out, and I want to read it just from the anecdote she told the Times in an interview last week. Faludi won a Pulitzer for her book on the backlash against the women’s movement and followed it with ‘Stiffed,’ about how our society pulls the rug out from under men, too.

After the 9/11 attacks a reporter called Faludi to get a response and at one point said to her gleefully, Well, this pushes feminism off the map, doesn’t it? She was so dumbfounded that she dropped her current project and started researching this new book.

Faludi is definitely onto something.

It’s an ongoing mystery to me how anyone can take seriously the transparent tough-guy posturing by the chicken hawks that has led our sorry world into its present disaster. But there must be a strong appeal in it and one that doesn’t have to be based on anything real (such as military service, for example). The remark Faludi cites suggests that it’s not this or that policy people are responding to, it’s the whole hip-hop posture, the revenge mode, the need to show ‘them’ that we’re not lying down and taking it like any wuss.

You heard the same sentiments after 9/11 in a more buttoned-down version from the commentators like Armitrage and Kissinger, too, as if the entire foreign policy establishment decided to appear at the UN covered in bling. At least now we know what has been happening to us all these years—testosterone poisoning. Is there an antidote?

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Into the Wild

The strange story of Christopher McCandless that appeared in the New Yorker years ago always stuck in my mind, so I was very curious about the film made out of the Jon Krakauer book. It’s long and taxing—and a marvel. I was mostly paying attention to the way the young protagonist, rejecting society and his own family, took chance after chance on the road and kept pulling them off, sometimes brilliantly. Then about halfway through I realized that as a piece of visual art the film was doing the same thing.

Throughout his picaresque journey McCandless stirred affection and love in people, then left them and pushed himself on to more and more extreme situations. The film offers some partial explanation but wisely pulls back and leaves him and his choices in the realm of human mystery.

The only missing piece, to my mind, was any attempt to examine his sense of masculinity. I say this as someone who also wondered what it meant to be a man at about the same age and exposed myself to dangers as a test. Was there something in his make-up that told him he didn’t measure up? Was that part of the foolhardy tempting of the wilderness that ended his life?