GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Hollywood Did It Right: PREDATOR.

There is no doubt that it has become much more difficult to make relatively inexpensive “one quadrant” movies like PREDATOR in an era where the corporatized major studios only seem interested in movies that can generate a billion dollars in box office (and eight or ten sequels). But the problem is that those billion dollar franchises aren’t working the way they used to. Box office is down across the board, and the big titles like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Pixar and those from Marvel and DC are suffering badly. There are all kinds of reasons why, but I believe that one of the biggest reasons is that Hollywood has spent the last two decades trying to reinvent not just the wheel, but human nature altogether. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood decided that rough male talk is bad, that masculinity is toxic and that part of making ours a better world includes taking those things that appeal primarily to aggressive young men out of the movies they like and replacing them with “better”, woker things.

For instance…

I love how the men of Dutch’s platoon ruthlessly dunk on each other in that way only very close friends can do. Watch the scene on the helicopter as they’re being inserted into the LZ. I hate to break this to all of you non-men, but this is how young men, particularly aggressive Alpha Males, behave around one another when they are alone in an exclusively male “safe space”… in the parlance of our times. If you were in the target audience for PREDATOR, which is to say a young man who grew up in the years before the turn of the millennium, then it’s likely that you found this scene endearing because it’s exactly what you did with your guy friends when you hung out together.

But this kind of male behavior has been branded toxic by the broader culture and it has mostly disappeared from the action genre. Men, it has been decided, cannot be allowed to see other men behaving this way because if they do, well then they might want to emulate it, and we have determined as a culture that this kind of aggressive male behavior must be stamped out.

Of course, this behavioral morality sensor only ever seems to point in one direction. A scene where guys ruthlessly dunk on each other and which includes salty officially unapproved language like “faggot” and “pussy” would be branded toxic and unacceptable today… but women engaging in what is clearly unhealthy or even self-destructive social behavior in shows like SEX AND THE CITY, GIRLS, THE IDOL or EUPHORIA are more likely to be labeled “empowering” or described by critics as “a gritty depiction of the realities of modern dating.”

…Anything but “toxic”… that label, it seems, is one our culture has reserved exclusively for describing male behavior.

Girls are allowed to be girls in any way that they want… but boys are allowed to be boys only within tightly scripted cultural parameters. It seems to me that if Hollywood is serious about getting audiences back into theaters, one way to do that might be to let boys be boys again.

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