The Role of Isolation, Rhetoric and Vulnerability in the Nature of Masculinity as a Developing Theme in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Major Cinematic Works

The smell of a cigarette mingling with a crisp winter night used to be the most provocative trigger I knew. It would, without fail, revitalize romantic visions of sitting in a dank, sparse apartment at a typewriter, smoking and staring out of a window to a street that, in my head, was itself a romanticized version of Paris, one parsed together from Bill Murray’s version of The Razor’s Edge and the film adaptation of Vonnegut’s Mother Night.

In the former, the world was fresh from the Great War, and Bill Murray’s character, Larry Darrell, was being baptized by fire to a life he was chasing through experience and hand-me-down wisdom. The latter centered chiefly around a misunderstood outcast from the Second World War, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who went from world-wide notoriety to persona non grata in the vast claustrophobic expanses of post-war New York City. In their own ways, each informed who it was I wanted to be: a guy alone with his million thoughts and feelings. For some reason, being that guy seemed like a special and sometimes sacred self-sacrifice.

The two shared these major thematic elements: isolation, rhetoric and mythologized masculinity. By their representation as a sort of “new manhood”—evolving archetypes for a post-modern manliness, recast in historical perspective to appear as ancestors to today’s version—the most painful and negative attributes of their personalities became primary. To fit the bill as these characters embodied it required embracing isolation and manipulative speech as positives. As a confused young man, I mistook these things as goals instead of symptoms. Worse, I believed that these were examples of the man I should be as opposed to explorations into what men were becoming. Maybe Tipper Gore was right about the power of art and its misappropriations.

What I knew when I found Larry Darrell and Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was that they thought too much and felt too much. At the time, I related in a way that made them mentors. Larry began as a carefree goof with tons of charisma who left the cozy environs of early 20^th century suburbia for what initially seemed like a guest appearance in the First World War, ostensibly an opportunity to cross out a line item on the checklist to becoming a man. He found something ugly in it—his morality fast in his mind, death looked like a deadline for a timed test—and that set him on a path to find purpose in finding a purpose. The fact that his friends back home all had their lives turn to shit because of the stock market crash only validated his trajectory. While that remained true to him for the majority of his story arc, it meant he sacrificed closeness to others, namely finding and keeping love. Seldom satisfied, he dove into several philosophies, regurgitated each with the sound of clanging brass, then abandoned it for something else. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be like him, but that I was destined to be like him, and that I was, in fact, acting like him—jumping to and clinging to someone else’s beliefs as a life raft.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was an American playwright living in Germany during Hitler's ascendancy. With his art, he’d built a life that was comfortable and seemingly fulfilling. His parents, who’d taken him to Germany as a child, were ready to leave because of the political climate, but Howard was not. He had a hot German wife and a career to consider. After meeting a mysterious American spy who asked him to serve his native country as a covert operative, Howard was faced with knowing that he’d become a disengaged pawn by the trappings that only really served him superficially. So he became the Third Reich's Rush Limbaugh, secretly transmitting communiqués through his propagandist talk radio broadcasts. Then his wife died in an Allied bombing run, and Germany fell, leaving him a villain with no one to defend him. The passage of time was a saving grace and a jail as he returned to America, no longer reviled because the national attention span had moved to other enemies, forced to live without purpose. His life started anew when a woman came claiming to be his long dead wife. In the end, he was only again being used. The moral of the story was supposedly summed up in this line: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” (Another moral was presented as “Make love while you can. It is good for you.” But that’s a little besides the point, or at least, my point.) What I saw in Howard was that a person is only safe from manipulation when he is isolated from others.

Between Larry and Howard, I’d developed a synergistic sense of unstoppable destiny and cautious deliberation. On one hand, I was that guy who had to journey the world for answers even if it meant being alone. On the other, it was best if I were the guy who stayed apart from the world to avoid being mistreated. Both guys were suckers for love that failed them. Larry had been engaged to a woman that couldn’t handle who he wanted to be, and then he fell for someone he thought he could save. His second chance—he called her his reward—was murdered when she couldn’t fight her demons any longer. Howard lost his wife in real life, and then lost her ideal when the poseur was revealed as a fraud. In each situation, their mistake seemed to be in making a love connection.

My own life seemed to bear this out, as I’m sure it has for many, many others. You only really get hurt when you’re vulnerable. This is the third key in the mythology of this type of masculinity: the inability to avoid vulnerability. The "new man" can't help it.

In a few hours, I will hop a plane to Las Vegas with my girlfriend, an amazing human being who excels on every level I can imagine. To get to this point, we each had to concede—whether consciously or not is debatable—that the risk of being vulnerable was worth the potential reward. What it has made me aware of most is that luck (or timing or whatever you want to call it) ultimately swings the balance in or out of whack. For Larry and Howard, it was really just bad luck (and/or the evil intentions of the author) that made the moral of their stories seem so bleak; it wasn’t that their lot was a universal fact of life. Whoops.

With that in mind—albeit in the back of my mind—I saw There Will Be Blood in an entirely different light than either The Razor’s Edge or Mother Night. As we watched There Will Be Blood I was reminded of Paul Thomas Anderson’s other two big movies, Boogie Nights and Magnolia because the singularity of his focus in this new flick illuminated themes in the other two much more clearly. Isolation, rhetoric, vulnerability and the mythology of masculinity.

In Boogie Nights, Mark Walberg is a kid with a giant wiener who just wants to be loved. Putting that monster wang to use in porn, he finds the warm embrace of community. (It is somewhat ironic that in emotionless sex he comes to the sort of acceptance for which he’d longed.) The bluster of machismo in the choreographed segments of imaginary skin flicks and the hedonism of the lifestyle serves as the rhetorical device. These are the vehicles for export of that subculture’s pathos. Blah, blah, blah. By the movie’s end, he’s a man alone, giving his penis a pep talk.

Though I thought Magnolia was largely boring and featured too much Aimee Mann, it did give me nightmares about a plague of frogs, which was cool. That and Tom Cruise’s character fascinated me. While all of the characters were in varying degrees of isolation—each trying to connect in some way, as my girlfriend pointed out—Tom Cruise’s character was in a self-imposed exile, and he connected to others falsely, generally proselytizing them to become isolated by choice too. His rhetoric was less figurative as he literally stood before others charging them with his ethos of circumventing the pitfalls of vulnerability by pro-actively manipulating women. As the story develops his father appears as the original culprit, the familiar foil for men. The depths to which Cruise’s character went to avoid the pain his father inflicted was really a hyperbolic embodiment of what he hated most in his father. He adopted his father’s manipulations begrudgingly to avoid being at the hands of someone like his father.

What makes There Will Be Blood so fascinating in this context is that the main character, Daniel Plainview, astonishingly brought to life by Daniel Day Lewis, is someone who follows isolation as a goal to its logical ends, utilizing verbal rhetoric as a disguise for his manipulations and his vulnerability. His chief antagonist is a charismatic evangelical of the Elmer Gantry mode, who is as deviously naked in his ambitions, but to his misfortune, not nearly as deft at operating in it. Through the course of almost thirty years, Plainview accrues all the manifestations of success, which he states is only to provide him the opportunity to separate himself completely from absolutely everyone because he cannot see anything worth liking about anyone. It is something he stubbornly abides by despite obviously being moved by the illusion of connection with two people, his son and his half-brother. Even though neither relative is actually as they initially appear, he has the opportunity to remain connected emotionally to them though he harshly rejects it. Ultimately, this is a character study of epic proportions that unmasks this mythologized American masculinity as substantively empty. It achieves this by creating Plainview as a fully realized human being with little back story to explain how became this way, building the assumption that this is simply what some people ARE. That is to say, the character himself is a personified philosophical argument.

So, if I ever had any doubts about actually realizing the romanticized ideals of isolation, eschewed vulnerability and rhetorical shields, I don’t now. Plus, if I did, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy Vegas with my beautiful girlfriend, and that would be a damn shame.