Et Tu, You Brute

“Men strike back!” was the tag line for a recent VH1 music special. That same ferocious anthem aptly describes Hollywood’s new blockbusters. In recent years, movies have given us goofy guys, sensitive guys, horny guys--but they’ve been short on tough guys since the heyday of Schwarzenegger and Stallone in the ‘80s. Now the he-man is making a comeback.

Testosterone is the hot new hormone of the moment, and a national mood of male defensiveness and defiance--World Wrestling Federation! Maxim!--is being reflected in a wave of aggressively macho movies about soldiers, fighters and killers. Susan Faludi wrote about male resentment of women’s advances in her best-selling “Backlash,” and she returned to the subject of male malaise in her latest tome, “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.”

In that book, Faludi writes of the disillusionment experienced by baby boomers on their “mission to manhood”: “It’s as if a generation of men had lined up at Cape Kennedy to witness the countdown to liftoff, only to watch their rocket--containing all their hopes and dreams--burn up on the launch pad.”

At the movies, this generation of malcontents can vicariously embrace its dreams of glory. Tough guys have taken command of the multiplex.

First “U-571,” a World War II submarine movie, knocked “Rules of Engagement,” a military courtroom melodrama, out of the No. 1 spot at the box office. Then “Gladiator,” a triumphant revival of the long-defunct sword-and-sandal epic, outstripped both of them, taking in almost $35 million in its first weekend.

Unlike these other two guy-fests, “Gladiator” does have one significant female character--the seductive sister of the twisted emperor Commodus. But the bulk of the movie consists of men battling one another with swords, clubs and flaming arrows, with the fiercest and most aggressive of the bunch (Russell Crowe’s Maximus) naturally winning.

These are not the only testosterone flicks to hit the runway recently. We’ve had the boxing movies “The Hurricane” and “Price of Glory,” the wrestling comedy “Ready to Rumble” and the dark urban fantasy “Fight Club,” which also centered on white-collar guys proving their manhood by beating one another to a bloody pulp.

Even the current supernatural fantasy “Frequency” puts two macho men--a cop and his fireman father--at the center of the story and celebrates the kind of death-defying father-son bonding session that might have been dreamed up by Robert Bly at one of his wilderness weekends.

You can find the same nostalgia for yesterday’s fighting man in bestsellers like “The Greatest Generation” and in the never-ending cycle of World War II documentaries on the History Channel.

“In an increasingly complex world, people identify with very simple values,” observes Kevin Misher, president of production at Universal, the studio that released “U-571.”

“We live in an age where valor is a forgotten value,” says Jonathan Mostow, the film’s director. “Everything today is about money and celebrity. We are searching for heroes who embody the values we wish we had.”

Walter Parkes, the co-head of DreamWorks Pictures and one of the executive producers of “Gladiator,” concurs.

“We don’t live in a particularly heroic time,” he says. “There is a longing for more absolute values.”

Not all of these manly movies have been equally successful. “Price of Glory” and “Ready to Rumble” were flat-out flops, and even the heavily hyped “Fight Club” was a box-office disappointment. Perhaps audiences can more readily buy into the myth of the heroic warrior when the character is placed in a more distant time.

The novelty value of “U-571” and “Gladiator” shouldn’t be underestimated, either. World War II submarine adventures thrived in the 1940s and ‘50s with such films as “Destination Tokyo,” “Torpedo Run” and “Run Silent, Run Deep,” but the genre hasn’t really been represented since 1981’s “Das Boot,” and that German film had limited exposure in the hinterlands. As for Roman toga movies, you’d have to go back 40 years to “Ben-Hur” and “Spartacus” to find one that succeeded.

One reason for this revival of guy movies is that the executives and the filmmakers want to recapture the movie experiences they loved while they were growing up. “We have a chance to do the kinds of movies that brought us to Hollywood in the first place,” says Misher, who identifies “The Great Escape” as his personal favorite.

Mostow also traces his interest in “U-571” back to his childhood. “Subliminally, the Second World War was a part of my growing up,” he says. “My parents’ generation fought the war. We played with G.I. Joe and had a U.S. Army surplus tent in our backyard. I never saw a submarine movie I didn’t like. I can still remember the feeling of excitement I had when I saw ‘Das Boot’ 20 years ago. Some movies make that kind of incredibly vivid impression.”

Mostow hopes his film is a tribute not just to war movies, but also to the men who fought the war. “I know it sounds corny,” Mostow says, “but I made this movie with love in my heart for men who went out in submarines. It was amazing how young these guys were and how much courage they had--22% of the people on submarines died in battle, which is by far the highest casualty rate of any branch of the service.

“I could never have done what those guys did. I have trouble getting into an elevator.”

That confession makes you wonder if filmmakers who grew up as 97-pound weaklings have seized the chance to play Hercules in the movies.

David Franzoni, one of the writers who created “Gladiator,” has lived with his obsession at least as long as Mostow. More than 25 years ago, Franzoni discovered a book called “Those About to Die” and became mesmerized by the accounts of the Roman arena. After writing “Amistad” for Steven Spielberg, he persuaded DreamWorks to develop his dream project.

One thing that distinguished his script from most of Hollywood’s sword-and-sandal epics (most prominently, “Ben-Hur”) was that it avoided any reference to Christianity. “I wanted our hero to be a pagan,” Franzoni says. “No Roman general in that era would have been a Christian. And I wanted to make the point that humanity can be good or bad; religion isn’t necessarily what makes the difference.”

Franzoni thought the Roman gladiatorial games offered an opportunity to comment on the contemporary mania for sporting events as violent spectacle, but he also wanted to enshrine values that had vanished from the screen.

“I think there is a need to go back to stories about honor,” Franzoni says. “In the MTV Pepsi generation, truth and honor mean nothing, and money and noise mean everything.”

Even though “Gladiator” exalts male blood sports and relegates women to the sidelines, Franzoni rejects the idea that his movie expresses a reactionary macho impulse.

“I wanted to tell a story that reaffirms that we as human beings must stand up and fight for what we believe,” he says. “But when you’re spending 100 million bucks, you probably have to couch that story in an action movie format. It can’t be a story about the suffragette movement.”

In spite of the films’ masculine armor, women have so far responded strongly to “U-571” and “Gladiator,” which may suggest they’re longing for their own testosterone rush. “I always assumed that our movie would be a guy movie,” Mostow says. “But it tested well with women. I can only guess at the reasons. Maybe women feel maternal toward the young guys on the submarine.”

Parkes reports that at the “Gladiator” test screenings, women gave the movie slightly higher scores than men. “I think maybe it’s because the main character is motivated by the quest to reunite with his family,” Parkes says.

“He really is this ideal male figure because he’s a macho gladiator by day and a devoted husband by night.”

Even if these warrior heroes have their domestic side, a proliferation of combat movies probably isn’t going to enhance the visibility of women on the screen. Last year it was hard to find five women to nominate as best actress (and one of those was Hilary Swank, who played a woman playing a man). Over the next couple of years the pickings might grow even slimmer.

In addition, one can’t help feeling slightly queasy about the rather simplistic values these guy films so bullishly celebrate. “U-571” has the virtue of unpretentiousness, but it’s easy to imagine far more jingoistic movies that its success could inspire. And the notion of honor that “Gladiator” aims to revive has often helped to rationalize appalling slaughter. From the days of the Holy Roman Empire to the civil war in Bosnia, every general who has urged his troops to decimate the enemy has usually done so in the name of a lofty abstraction such as honor.

Shakespeare understood that 500 years ago when he had Falstaff ask sardonically, “What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday.”

These manly movies are undeniably rousing, but they’re also defiantly retro; they’re trying to sell us on virtues that were legitimately and cogently questioned a very long time ago. *