The Rise of True Men: Embracing Wholeheartedness
You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.
I love Star Wars. This is evident even in my fashion choices, hipster minimalism be damned. This picture above is yours truly on Halloween at the ripe age of 8. Prime Star Wars loving adolescence.
So I was definitely super nervous when Disney bought Star Wars. I grew up on the prequels, and found myself not really in the “they’re great, haters be damned” camp and not really in the “they’re awful, lovers be damned” camp.
Jar Jar only became less insufferably annoying after the Sith Lord theory, Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen were both trash as Anakin (but didn’t need the personal vitriol of the haters), and they kept killing the coolest characters too quickly. They did Darth Maul dirty, and Christopher Lee wasn’t allowed to be Christopher Lee enough in his role as Count Dooku.
It’s been said dozens of times but I’ll reiterate it again; Lucas is a great big picture story guy but an awful writer, particularly dialogue..
I don’t need to pull up any romantic scenes between Anakin and Padme to prove this point. They are lodged into our collective brain and undoubtedly will never leave us.
Yet, on this point of Anakin, let’s circle back to those ugly kinds of masculinity.
Though very flawed in execution, the fall of Anakin, in a ten thousand feet, big picture kind of view, is pretty brilliant. Plucking a talented, gifted, and emotionally fragile boy from his mother, only for him to eventually fall to the dark side, or a full fledged turn to both hegemonic and toxic masculinity, is worth re-examining. Few popular stories fully explore the pitfalls of the hero’s journey and the subsequent pressure of attaining the status of legend. But more on that and it’s connection to Luke and the twin suns later.
As previously mentioned, we meet Anakin in an already impoverished state. Slave to a cruel master but son to a kind mother, Anakin manages a semblance of decency from the latter but a short temper from the former.
And yet, upon coming to Coruscant, plucked from his mother in a very bittersweet manner, the first thing the Jedi assess of him?
He dwells on his mother too much. His feelings are too strong. And he is too old and therefore too… tampered to fully adopt the path of the Jedi. Much of this is reinterpreted from the Pop Culture Detective’s YouTube video, “The Case Against the Jedi,” which I’ll post here and which I highly recommend watching.
The Jedi are Lucas’s mixing of various cultural concepts from ancient and pre-modern civilizations. Space Japanese samurai with laser swords, medieval knights with telekinesis, etc. They are a distinct blend of east and west, with the characteristically eastern aspects not fully formed or represented accurately. And yet, the Jedi have a chosenness apparent to them, a chosenness I will attribute and compare to the myth of the good man, the man’s man, the alpha male as it were.
To their credit, the Jedi are not outwardly egotistical, outwardly sexist, or outwardly hierarchical. To an extent. Their role, specific to the prequel trilogy, are as a band of holy peacemakers if there be civil unrest. They acquire and attain great power, but they do not use it, explicitly, to lord over others. As Yoda says in Empire Strikes Back, “a Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.”
But they really failed Anakin. And it was due to their passivity, not their activity.
This is how our patriarchal, misogynistic, and sexist world continues to function.
It is not toxic men ruining maleness. It is not hegemonic men reinforcing hierarchy. Rather, it is the passivity of “good” men who choose not to be “true” men that allow this distorted and dysfunctional form of manhood to persist.
Anakin fell to the dark side primarily due to his own pent-up anger and incapacity to express it, but the Jedi exacerbated his struggle by never giving him room to be a “true man” and express what really was going on internally.
Yet Anakin wasn’t the only male Skywalker to not embrace true manhood. His son and grandson failed in this way too. Initially anyway (there is still hope for Ben yet). Anakin’s dark if redeemed legacy heaped a huge burden on his offspring.
In the fandom of Star Wars a huge rift arose over the latest saga film The Last Jedi. The divide between critical and fan reception was gaping, and I’ve spent the better part of the last two years obsessively nerding out as to why this discrepancy occurred.
Yet for the sake of your sanity, I won’t mention it too much more in detail.
Regardless, I loved Luke’s characterization in the film. Though the actor Mark Hamill himself struggled embracing this grizzled, world weary version of Luke, I loved all scenes of his describing the pitfalls of Jedihood. In particular, his retelling of the religious group’s obsession over their own status and it leading to their blindness of the presence of true darkness and subsequent downfall because of it.
Emotional suppression coupled with stoic, moral arrogance is a devastating combo.
The fictional Jedi aren’t the only group that has fallen prey to this archetype.
In the world of business, the world of academia, the world of film, and the world of religion, men, usually on the top of their respective hierarchical fields, thrive by minimizing their emotion and preserving their status and reputation at any and all costs.
Harvey Weinstein was the indie film guy. 45 was the business guy and is now the guy leading the free world. I need not mention the several men in the Christian world (likely in other world religions too) who were the pastor influencing thousands and thousands of people to do the Jesus thing well.
Yet by hiding emotion save anger, and relishing in their status, these men wreak havoc in their respective worlds because the true men are nowhere to be found who might stand opposed to such false manhood.
So while the Jedi might denounce anger, a sole positive element of their emotionally suppressing philosophy, a complete denial of emotion coupled with an obsessive abiding to ancient rule and text is what ultimately led to their undoing.
And what led to the fall of Ben Solo (for now).
Kylo Ren is one the best modern villain in popular media we have seen, Star Wars or otherwise. From his opening massacre in The Force Awakens, to his emotionally charged outburst and combat with his uncle Luke in The Last Jedi, Kylo represents a better written and fuller picture of toxic masculinity than Anakin and the more popular man in the suit.
The most common complaint about the character is his unhingedness, his immature tantrums we get to see front and center that so accurately show the real childishness of unprocessed male anger.
And yet, how is this much different than reports on Weinstein? 45? Fill in the blank ranting and raving pastor?
“I just like Darth Vader more” is what I’ve heard most from Ren detractors.
And it makes sense why they prefer him more.
Most of Vader’s scenes in the original trilogy are him in a mask. As he kills person after person, often of his own faction, over the smallest or largest infraction, and the booming, iconic theme plays, we sit in our living rooms with equal parts glee and terror.
Who will he kill next? Who will be spared? Is he man or is he machine? Is he in between?
Yet, the greatest moment of this character is when he chooses to be a man. The greatest moment of the original trilogy is when Darth Vader stops being Darth Vader and becomes Anakin Skywalker once more. The true Anakin Skywalker.
If not for this scene and if not for his connection to Luke, Vader is a boy playing a man who looks like a machine. A machine with instance after instance of very petty anger.
We see how petty Kylo’s anger is every time. Yet the only time we enjoy it fully is when he wears the mask. A mask he wears in a continuing tradition of his grandfather.
So too do we enjoy the anger of men, even when it’s petty, because it lies behind toxic and hegemonic masculinity. Behind every twitter rant of 45 is a reinforced agreement of the adolescent tyranny of men in charge. Behind every #metoo account of predatory behavior is the persistent affirming of men pursuing women even after the woman’s denial, my own beloved Star Wars a culprit of this harrowing trend too.
But anger isn’t all bad. Far from it. Righteous anger as described in the Bible is intentional. Isn’t protecting status. And is always on the behest of the downtrodden and oppressed.
Neither is a pursuit of romance bad. The Bible explicitly calls for men to do so, but I don’t think in the way modern men are choosing to do so.
The flaws of the Jedi, of the Sith, of the myth of the good man, the man’s man, of “being the man,” is it’s perverted sense of self.
With an emphasis on performing something legendary, something iconic, something ‘ahead of the pack,’ men lose what it means to be men. We never learn how to be a man because we don’t live into the truth. We forget who created us as men to begin with.
Jesus is the truest man to ever live. He was completely unselfconscious, entirely motivated by His quest and the One who gave Him His quest. The ultimate Hero of the Hero’s journey, although Jesus was without fault, He was entirely with raw vulnerability and compassion.
His encounters often began with a feeling. His responses never belittled or ridiculed anyone underneath or comparable to His own social status. Rather than trading eyes for eyes, Jesus taught and enacted love of enemy, praying for those who persecute.
Often this can be interpreted as a form of passivity. At a glance, it’s almost as if Jesus reinforces the third kind of masquerading masculinity; a bizarre, stoic compliance to the evils and corruption of the world until eventually His Father comes to smite all the bad guys in one fell swoop. Even that framework would confirm all three ideologies in one.
But this isn’t what the truest man meant. To summarize what I expanded upon heavily elsewhere, rather, this is how we win. Jesus was saying it for a reason, in a similar way that Luke emerged on the planet of Crait in a vapor for a reason.
We can’t overcome toxic masculinity through the means that toxic men become toxic. We can’t affirm the hierarchy of men ahead of women and certain men ahead of other men. We can’t passively sit by while Weinstein, 45, and other false men teach, show, and shame other men to conformity to performed masculinity.
In order to be true men, we have to come to the Truest Man. In order to overcome masqueraded masculinity, we have to die to our own false manhood.
So then, if Jesus is the Truest Man, how then do we become like Him?
A good starting place is to look within your own borders of masculinity. Ask yourself; who am I outside of what I do? What I think? What I feel?
Often men operate on some external standard of doing (rather than being) for fear of confirming an internal sense of failure. Yet suppressing the fear of failure only exacerbates failure when it does come.
And experiences of failure in life are a when, not an if.
Something Luke learns at the end of The Last Jedi.
At the onset, we learn Luke’s self-decided stint of seclusion is due to some kind of mistake on his part. But we don’t know what it is.
Only through force connection is Ben Solo, not Kylo Ren, able to tell Rey, a true woman and true Jedi, about what compelled him to turn to the darkness.
Rather than explore with Ben about why he was troubled and confused, Luke assumed the worst about Ben, in part due to his Jedi teaching to suppress emotion. Rather than empathizing with his nephew, and sharing with him his own vulnerability and frailty, Luke instead focused on a fear of failing his own legacy as Luke Skywalker. He focused on the self, and not on his student.
Too often men fail their fellow man by self-preservation, a beautiful irony through through. It is tragic because what men are preserving often isn’t real; it is a projection of who they wish they were and who they want others to see them as.
Meta, isn’t it then, that through force projection, Luke redeems himself and indeed becomes the Luke Skywalker that we remember. He was Luke before too, when he resisted striking down his father, who projected an image of mechanic, “toxic” masculinity, and said he would never turn to the dark side. It was Anakin, seeing his son become a true version of himself, that allowed him to be, from his own son’s words, “the true self you’ve only forgotten.”
We see Christ giving men a path to true manliness all over scripture. To Paul on the road to Damascus. To Moses through a burning bush. To Zaccaeus in the sycamore tree. Jesus called all people yet specifically men in these stories and others to put to death their image of who a man is supposed to be in favor of the man Jesus created them to be.
True men, rooted in Christ and His ways, embrace and learn from failure. Not afraid to reach out to other, true men about their struggles and shortcomings, true men lean into the strongholds where the enemy reinforces toxic or passive masculinity, and embolden their brothers to step out and risk destroying those strongholds, knowing they will be there with them if they might fall along the way (which they will).
True men, rooted in Christ, engage women with intention and respect. Not afraid to taste the gremlin they call rejection, true men (bolstered by other true men) step out to acquire what their heart desires; love and affection and understanding from women. This happens neither with abrasive, belittling , and devaluing women nor by waiting for women to give men all the right signals or when the fear or rejection has little traction in reality. True men understand that loving a woman well is a huge risk but a risk worth taking.
And finally, true men, rooted in Christ, understand that apart from Christ, they are powerless to resist the “dark side” of masculinity in its toxic or passive form. True men understand the wiring God gave them: introverted or extroverted, creative or entrepreneurial, logical or empathic, a business like drive to become a CEO of a thriving business or powerful sense of humbleness to pursue a hard working custodial position at a public school to support their loved ones. Your worth isn’t dependent on what you do. Your worth is dependent on who you are in Christ. That worth is fixed, and like Christ tells us in the gospel of John, nobody or no thing can pluck us out of that place.
It was Luke’s fear of tarnishing “Luke Skywalker” that caused his near turn to toxic masculinity in striking down his nephew. It was Luke’s despair that caused his turn to passive masculinity, a denial of the force’s prompting to redeem himself and redeem the merits of what Jedi should actually stand for.
So when Luke peers out on his island and sees the two suns, his death cemented after his sacrifice to protect others, he passes in peace, a final rest from the anxiety of the question of “who am I” when he first peers at the twin suns in A New Hope.
Christ is the twin suns for the true man. In Him we find the answer of who we are as sons of God. Not in our projections of ourselves, but in the reality of our life rooted in the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
So then… what is the response from women of this improbable problem of masqueraded masculinities? How can they spot the difference between passive and toxic men? What if they can’t find any true men? Rather, what if true men won’t pursue them?
I’ll tackle that whopper next blog with the title, A New Hope for Women: The Return of True Men.
Cheesy… but tonally consistent.