Screen test(osterone)

How many ways can a man be manly in the movies these days? The film historian Robert Sklar once wrote that “each generation exaggerates its own crises of masculinity.” If this is true, we must be in a doozy of a crisis right now.

There hasn’t been this much industrial-strength machismo, both as cause for celebration and denunciation, since the post-Vietnam Reagan ‘80s superhero heyday of Rambo and Gordon Gekko. Consider, for starters, that the “Superman” and “Die Hard” franchises, long dormant, were recently revived; a sequel to “Wall Street” is being readied; a new Indiana Jones movie is in the pipeline; and that, come January, Sylvester Stallone, having already revived Rocky, will once again be wearing the Rambo muscle suit. Not one to press his luck, Rambo will be touring Myanmar, not Baghdad.

I don’t want to overplay the parallels between the Reagan and George W. Bush years, but might the backwash of a colossally unpopular war have something to do with the fact that so many of our movies are -- how can I say this politely? -- atavistic?

On the far side of the blood-and-biceps “Beowulf,” consider the gallery of actors today who represent throwbacks to a relatively uncomplicated male mystique. When Russell Crowe or George Clooney are talked about or written about, the tone is often almost strenuously adulatory, as if they stood for an old-style Hollywood machismo that must be preserved at all costs. Crowe was on the cover of “Men’s Journal” last month as “Our favorite S.O.B.” A new Colorado magazine called Shine featured Clooney on its inaugural cover and inside announced that he “embodies the courageous John Wayne spirit of the Westerns” (which is probably the last thing Clooney wants to hear).

Still, it can be deeply satisfying to watch these actors preen. A little masculine confidence goes a long way in the movies and, in the right roles, these men remind you of what you loved about, say, Bogart or Mitchum or McQueen. Crowe can be sluggish and inchoate in a Depression-era retread like “Cinderella Man,” he can be thuddingly heroic in “Gladiator,” but at his best, in “L.A. Confidential” and “3:10 to Yuma” and, to a much lesser extent, in “American Gangster,” he has the bully-boy insolence of male privilege down pat.

Clooney, in particular, is associated in the public imagination with Golden Age Hollywood icons. In his self-deprecating savoir-faire he is seen as a burlier version of Cary Grant, while his Danny Ocean routine has some of the Sinatra finesse. In films such as “Syriana” and “Michael Clayton,” he plays the standard Bogart cynic turned do-gooder. It’s easy to imagine Clooney fitting into any number of Hollywood classics, from “Casablanca” on down. (Clooney is a godsend to all those women who, during the pre-”Departed” reign of Leonardo DiCaprio, despaired of ever seeing a leading man on the screen who looked to be past the point of his first shave.)

But a retro-ness clings to Clooney that, especially for a younger generation, may ultimately work against him. He’s a new movie star in an old mold as opposed to, say, Johnny Depp, who has a satyr’s pansexual appeal and the shape-shifty genius to fully inhabit, even unify, mind scapes as disparate as Tim Burton’s and Jerry Bruckheimer’s. Depp is the most original male presence in the movies in large part because he is the most original sexual presence.

By comparison, actors such as Clooney and Crowe, or Denzel Washington, rarely get to play out their sexual dynamism. Is it because Hollywood thinks there are no women who are their match? Despite their high whammo quotients these men have starred in alarmingly few erotic dramas, let alone romances, and that’s a deprivation for us all. The Golden Age icons may have been men’s men, but they were overwhelmingly defined by their maddening/ornery/blissful relations with women. The sullen gravitas of Clooney, Crowe and Washington in “Michael Clayton” and “American Gangster” represents an overvaluation of the strong-and-silent mystique, and it reminds me of what Gore Vidal once wrote about the humorlessness of American society: “What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?”

Muscle men

If atavism is truly your meat, you’ll find it most blatantly on view in the brawnfest “300,” where Spartan beefcake enthusiastically disembowels wounded Iranians -- oops, Persians -- before expiring valorously at Thermopylae. It’s there in “Beowulf,” where, thanks to motion-capture technology, the hulky, ovoid Ray Winstone is transformed into a warrior with miracle abs. Brad Pitt must be wondering why he spent all those months buffing up to play Achilles in “Troy.” No more is it necessary for an actor to put in quality time with a personal trainer. In the future, all the personal trainers in Hollywood will be CGI technicians.

These big-screen blam-pow epics tap the same market that caters to World Wrestling Federation smackdowns and male-niche TV shows such as “Lost” and “24” and all-testosterone, all-the-time cable channels like Spike TV. They appeal to men who tune out regular boxing but tune in to extreme boxing. This he-man swagger, of course, takes in a lot more than the movies these days: It’s also the preferred stance in our presidential politics, where the candidates who come out swinging get the most ink. (Now that “Invasion U.S.A” ’80s action star Chuck Norris is soldered to the Huckabee campaign, who’s waiting in the wings? The Rock? The Hebrew Hammer?)

The “actors” in “300” and “Beowulf” fly the banner for a movie business that may one day rate the annual Comic-Con convention in San Diego as highly as Cannes. But they’re not the only screen stars who seem like replicants these days. Matt Damon in the “Bourne” movies is a heat-seeking missile who incises his way into mayhem with an almost preternatural velocity. The new James Bond, as played by Daniel Craig, is a feral assassin who doesn’t blink an eye while electroshocking himself back from the dead. Craig doesn’t have the suaveness or the square-cut facial planes of his immediate predecessors (and that’s a good thing). In the past, the Bond movies were never really about violence; they were about how stylish you could look while being violent. “Casino Royale” changed all that.

The nauseating uptick in carnage on display in “Saw IV” and all the rest is a low-rent manifestation of the same hyper-violent syndrome often found in big-ticket “Bourne”-style action pictures. In both instances, we are witnessing a worst-case scenario of male aggression -- maleness and murderousness are twinned. (In the case of a lurid art film like “The Brave One,” Jodie Foster’s Charles Bronson-ish vigilante is the Frankenstein monster created by male murderousness.)

It’s easier to dismiss this scenario in the slasher cheapies, which were also quite big in the ‘80s, than in the more serious current fare. In many of the Iraq-themed films, the psycho soldier, so familiar from Vietnam-era movies, is once more a featured player. The traditional all-American good guy is the bad guy again. In the centerpiece to Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” which is inspired by a real incident, American soldiers in Samarra rape and murder a 15-year-old girl and then kill her family. In Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah,” also inspired by a true story, a recently returned American soldier who served in Iraq -- the son of a Vietnam vet played by Tommy Lee Jones -- is ultimately discovered to have been murdered by men in his own unit. In both movies, the perpetrators are portrayed as hollow-eyed thugs. The implication is clear: These men were zombified by an unjust war (or conversely, an unjust war attracted zombie recruits). Instead of going after the policy makers who put these men into that war, the filmmakers demonize the soldiers themselves.

If there is a more all-American male icon than the fighting soldier, it’s the Westerner, and he too has undergone an extreme makeover. Traditionally Jesse James has been touted in the movies as a mythic hero in much the same way that he once was in the dime novels. In “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” Brad Pitt’s Jesse is a sociopath whose antennae are tuned to the tiniest quavers of betrayal. His murders are swift and remorseless. In one sequence, seeking vengeance, he savagely beats an innocent boy. This Jesse James is one of the very first casualties of the American fame industry and, as such, Pitt, who has a sly knowingness in the role, is perfectly cast. The legendary Westerner has been transformed into an icon deranged by his own celebrity. His murderer, Casey Affleck’s Robert Ford, is ultimately also annihilated by his own notoriety.

Modern masculinity

Joel and Ethan Coen have said that in their “No Country for Old Men” -- which is set in Texas in 1980 but feels contemporary -- the classic Westerner is split into three archetypes at war with one another. Josh Brolin’s hunter Llewelyn Moss is the scruffy Everyman who makes off with somebody else’s millions from a drug deal gone wrong; Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, whose massive head looks like a carved chess piece and whose weapon of choice is a cattle stun gun, is the sagebrush Terminator who pursues him. Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell is the local sheriff who tracks them knowing full well that a new malevolence has entered into the West that he cannot survive. Bell may be Old School, but Chigurh is Old Testament.

It’s significant that even people who admire this movie feel cheated by its fatalism. They want a happy ending. (Don’t they know Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novel, doesn’t do happy?) These are the same folks who complained that the killer wasn’t captured at the end of “Zodiac.” Without Chigurh’s rampant, unpunished depravity, which is so ghoulish it’s comic, the movie has no meaning. He represents the sheer animality of male aggression. His triumph in this most masculine of genres certifies his ascendancy in a terrifying modern world where we no longer feel protected.

A generation ago, in his “Eyes of Laura Mars” days, Tommy Lee Jones himself might have been well cast as Chigurh. But with this movie, and “In the Valley of Elah,” he’s eased into a more sanctioned tradition -- the strong-silent man of principle. In both films, his weathered antiquity is perceived as on the way out -- and more necessary to America than ever.

The comedy of the horny brigade in the Judd Apatow films, of Sacha Baron Cohen in “Borat,” or even the guys in “Wedding Crashers” acts as a fizzy chaser to the heavy bourbon of the big boys. (Vince Vaughn is the opposite of the strong-silent type -- he’s weak and never shuts up.) Clooney in his movies may have all the right moves, he may look like there was never a time when he didn’t have them, but it is Steve Carell trying to hold on to his virginity, or the buddies from “Superbad” desperately trying to lose theirs, who capture the imagination of Geek Nation -- which, it turns out, covers a large swath of the male population. Leaving aside the raunch factor, the men and boys in these movies are innocents -- blood brothers to Tom Hanks’ Josh, the 12-year-old 30-year-old in “Big,” a key ‘80s movie about the wonders of arrested development. Not surprisingly, “Big” is being talked about for a remake.

In the end, there can’t be all that much of a masculinity crisis in the movies if Clooney and Carell can co-exist in the same eco-system. There is, however, one species of movies that is largely AWOL, and it’s the same one that flourished just before the primal heroics of the Reagan era took hold. Films as disparate as “Dog Day Afternoon,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Deliverance” and “Raging Bull” didn’t rubber-stamp the prevailing macho orthodoxies, they challenged and subverted and worried them. It’s difficult to be a man, these films said, and by their willingness to embrace moral ambiguity, they honored that difficulty. At a time when we are at war and masculine force in the movies is being trumpeted or pilloried, I have a suggestion for Hollywood: Why not give Rambo a rest and revisit the realm of films like these instead?

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Peter Rainer is the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and DVD critic for Bloomberg News.