A lone wolf slavers down the trail of a thrilling scent. It doesn't look left or right. It's preoccupied in its single-minded pursuit. It shuts out everything from its consciousness except for the lure of that scent. The wolf can only satisfy the ferocity of its longing through the remembered sense of cornering its prey. So the lone wolf goes on resolutely stalking through an inner city landscape of dark puddles and cobbled streets towards its prize.
The prize, in this case, turns out to be a pint of Banks' bitter. The scene is from a television beer commercial (and advertising bill-board) put out by Banks' Wolverhampton brewery round about September/October 1990. The voice over and the billboard caption both read 'Follow your instinct'.
In my head I'm scornful of this crude, biological approach to masculine identity and desire. However, at a level of fantasy and emotional longing, I'm pulled towards the 'lone wolf' image more than I want to admit. It seems to hold up the promise of getting away from the routine drudgery of everyday living, and opens up the possibility of a world where sensual appetites can be pursued and immediately satisfied without being constrained by long-term commitments and responsibilities.
I've always been haunted by this fantasy imagery of breaking out: of being a restless wanderer. Especially at the times in my life when the actual circumstances were stiflingly restrictive. Or my imagined surroundings seemed about to lock me in.
In 1963, we discovered that my wife was pregnant. Unreasonably, I now felt my horizons closing in, as we prepared for the approach of our first baby.
I felt ambivalent towards the birth - excited about the possibilities of the new arrival, but feeling hemmed in by the conventional responsibilities of fatherhood. It was at that difficult juncture that I decided to go on a hitchhiking trip to Scotland just before the birth of my son.
My reasons for going were deeply irresponsible but tangled. At the time, it might have felt something like a last, partly regretful, lungful of icy air. However there were always anxiety and fear for me mixed up with the elation. I was worried about disrupting and possibly forfeiting the cosy security of my home.
In the way we present our 'lone wolf' adventures to the public world, especially in genres like travel writing or rebellious declarations like Easy Rider or Kerouac's On the Road, there's always the temptation to split apart the longing for independence from the longing for dependence. The human cost of that splitting is the loss of an emotional balance in our lives.
In my notebook from that time, the heroic posturing is achieved by leaving out the background of domestic support I was getting, and my constant hunger for closeness. All through this journey I was ringing home, and day-dreaming of the warmth I could return to, even in the middle of manly adventures.
Indeed to experience the rare intense emotional highs of that trip I had to have a reassuring framework - usually my wife as emotional and physical caretaker - that made me safe enough to carry on.
Nowhere are these 'lone wolf' fantasies and desires more clearly seen than in the Clint Eastwood film, High Plains Drifter.
Here, in a popularly memorable form, is a precise catalogue of the myths of 'lone wolf', manly independence. And it's these myths, experienced with such intense pleasure, that often bind us to damaged and damaging models of masculinity.
The film's story works within a familiar, Western narrative convention. Clint Eastwood, a 'range bum' (also known as 'the man with no name'), is the bringer of justice and revenge to a town called Lago. The whole town is implicated in the cover-up of the brutal murder of Jim Duncan, the town sheriff. Jim Duncan had stumbled on the secret that the town mine - the Lago Mining Co. and the chief reason for the town's existence - was on Government property, and he knew that Government officials would have closed down the mine if the secret had got out. The town folk had stood by and not tried to help when Jim Duncan had been publicly whipped to death by three hired killers, in order to keep him silent.
The Drifter rides in from the desert and sets about stripping away the hypocrisy and corruption of the town. He stirs its hidden conscience through his actions in the main plot. These centre around the desperate defences of the town, orchestrated by the Drifter, in anticipation of the release from jail of the three hired killers who had destroyed Jim Duncan. The Drifter is reluctantly hired by the frightened town to protect its interests but he manages to turn the tables on the arrangement and publicly humiliates the townspeople (except the dwarf Mordecai). He shows up the town in its true colours -in this case, hellish, nightmarish red!
The Drifter organises the town into trying to defend itself against the expected arrival of the three, professional killers. He then appears to leave them to fend for themselves. The final humiliation of the town comes with the easy destruction of the defences by the hired gunmen and their cowardly capitulation.
At the last minute the town is saved by the re-appearance of the Drifter. He draws the threads of the revenge plot together by intimidating and then destroying the killers. The film ends with a shot of the new grave for Jim Duncan in the town cemetery, and the High Plains Drifter disappearing into the hills again.
| Unlike ordinary men, the Drifter isn't controlled by his emotions |
The seductive appeal of these fantasies and desires can be very intense in the lives of many men. They suggest that the rugged, self-sufficiency of the Drifter can be actually achieved. The main myth of High Plains Drifter is that self-sufficiency can be achieved without our debt to our invisible networks of support from women being fully and clearly acknowledged.
The Drifter doesn't appear to be dependent on anybody else. He isn't dependent on a woman. He just comes out of the mountains, rugged and weather-beaten, when he wants to. He isn't answerable to anybody else. He's not weighed down by domestic ties or attachments that sap his energy and his strength. He can get by through his own emotional self-containment. And he's free to return to the mountains at his own pace.
Unlike ordinary men, the Drifter isn't controlled by his emotions. He doesn't feel fear. He never panics. He just shows an unruffled calm when confronted by trouble. He clenches his cigarillo in his teeth, screws up his eyes, and doesn't need to say much. It's almost as if he doesn't have an inner world, that he's all robust action in the outer world.
The Drifter's power and authority is also seen in sexual matters. He is sexually irresistible to all women, like Kelly - the saloon bar siren - and the hotel manager's wife. He enacts a confirmatory rape fantasy to all men who have difficulty in recognising the separate needs and desires of their women partners. On the surface, women might scream and protest but secretly they want to be firmly possessed. Just as the Drifter takes Kelly in the stables. Initially they might kick and snarl at you, like the hotel manager's wife, but he seems to be saying that they can all be reduced to obedience through sexual mastery in bed. The hotel manager's wife ends up, after clawing and biting, by saying to the Drifter, 'Mr., whatever-you-say-is-fine-by-me'.
The Drifter's sexual prowess also offers the fantasy of anonymous or uncommitted sex for men. By his actions he suggests that you can follow up any random sexual desire, when it occurs, without having to bother about long-term responsibilities. So the Drifter enters the strange town, fucks a few women, enjoys what he can get for the moment, and then leaves the town, at the end of the film, without any sentiment or forced promises. It's not a responsive sexual contact he wants, but one where he can sustain the illusion of phallic supremacy by silencing his needs for intimacy.
Finally the Drifter also offers the fantasy of the street-fighting man, identifying himself through heroic action. He is prepared to risk his life for an honourable cause (revenge for Jim Duncan), without support from anybody else. He has an obsessive, single-minded energy, alone representing the voice of moral integrity and conscience in the film. His sexual encounters are conveniently forgotten. Here he champions the causes of the excluded and the powerless in the community (except for women) - native North Americans, Mexicans, dwarfs.
In the film the audience are presented with an idealised masculinity that has an unwhining power and endurance that doesn't need to take a rest or ask for help. It's a masculinity that can battle and win through disciplined self-sufficiency. The Cause and the Goal are everything, and they're always put before people's needs. So he can detach himself from the human messiness of such actions. Because he limits himself to the accomplishment of a goal he can ride off into the hills at the end without lugging behind him the real sweat and tears of ordinary men.
Why do these 'lone-wolf'/High Plains Drifter fantasies have such a commanding grip over men's lives, and why do we actively participate in our own self-imprisonment through partly buying in to them?
To answer these questions it's necessary to explore the psychological roots of masculine identities. In order to build a masculine sense of self, boys have to separate themselves from the merging closeness of the early mother/son relationship, so that they can identify with the independent power and desire represented by the father. But, in reality, this transition is never completely achieved.
| I hear men speak of their paralysing fears of being wiped out by women |
Many men go on being haunted for the rest of their lives by a fantasised fear of overwhelming, maternal power that threatens to erode their precariously achieved masculine identities. In reality, mothers don't possess this kind of power in a 'men-on-top' society, but they often have projected onto them men's terrors of being re-absorbed into that early, merging fusion between mother and son.
These fears are visible everywhere we look. In counselling sessions I hear men speak of their paralysing fears of being wiped out by women - of being entombed, of dying, of losing sovereignty if they allow women to come too close to their emotional lives.
To counter these linked fears of dependency and loss of identity, many men try to assert their difference and superiority over women. They try to do this through setting up and patrolling rigid boundaries between their own 'masculine' and 'feminine' elements, and by stressing 'difference over sharing, separation over connection, boundaries over communion, self-sufficiency over dependency'. As a result many men's 'feminine' elements (a vital resource usually formed by early contact with the mother) are split off from them, and often projected outside the masculine self to become idealised, objectified, or viciously put down.
This is where the distorting myths of the High Plains Drifter and the 'lone wolf' come in. These enticing fantasies provide a defence against feeling weak and helpless. But men who emotionally invest in them, often unconsciously, become willing prisoners of their own fantasies and desires.
In the cultural sphere some of the same forces and pressures are at work. There are corresponding divisions that concentrate power in men's hands. The public/private split in the cultural/social sphere allows men to go on dumping their projected 'feminine' side onto women in the private domain. By playing up manly risk and adventure in the public realm, and by off-loading their own dependency needs onto women in the private sphere, some men not only gain and sustain power but also keep some women firmly in their place.
Although many women are moving into the public sphere and some men are developing more nurturing relationships at home, a power imbalance between men and women is still very much there. Excitingly independent desire is defined as a traditional, masculine characteristic, 'naturally' owned by men achieving success and going for goal in the public realm. The domestic/nurturing sphere is emptied of independent desire. So that for many women, grappling to centre power and desire in themselves and break out of 'feminine' traditions of self-sacrifice, achieving greater equality and self-respect is that much harder.
It seems to me that many changing men are very muddled about how to rework traditional masculine desire in their own lives. Many men are stuck in the contradictions of trying to become Mr. Nice Guy. It's as if they want to become caring, gentle and vulnerable overnight without reconstructing their anger and desire. It's the loss of vitality and spontaneity represented by those lone wolf images that they appear to be mourning underneath their disorientation.
At this moment where feminist women seem to have stolen men's energies, and where men lack vigour, the lure of Robert Bly's Wild Man is superficially very appealing. Even though Bly distinguishes very carefully between Savage Man and Wild Man, his concentration on the energy-giving qualities of the 'deep masculine', and his linked repudiation of the 'feminine' in men appears to be very close, in spirit' to the distorting myths of the High Plains Drifter.
In his book, 'The Pillow and the Key: Commentary on the Fairy Tale of Iron John. Part One'. he says:
'We have to conceive the possibility that the deep nourishing and spiritually radiant energy in the male lies not in the feminine side, but in the deep masculine,...the instinctive one who's underwater and who has been there we don't know how long...'
It's this defensive segregation of an innate, essential masculine identity and desire that takes us straight back to the biological determinism of the 'lone wolf' image, however unmacho Bly's claims for the Wild Man are. This approach keeps us tightly locked into the old, binary system of masculine energy and activity and women giving invisible support from the margins.
These images can't help men to overcome the sexist, binary order that they are shut within because they fundamentally over-value independence over dependency, and they also separate adventurous desire from an equal desire for closeness.
Many men go on over-valuing the importance of going it alone over the need for relatedness. The question not asked in all of this is, 'Autonomy and freedom for what?' The false quest for masculine independence can often prove to be destructive. It can end up in individual isolation and self-estrangement, or even death or despair.
The first step in contesting these sexist divisions is to stress the necessary coexistence and interweaving of independence/dependence in both women and men. Then men need to urgently address the public/private imbalance in their lives. That might mean taking greater responsibility for our emotional lives, and reworking our personal histories to excavate our buried, inner worlds. Through this kind of reconstruction a new, inner strength is capable of being born that gathers back into our mainstream lives our emotional needs and wants. We don't have to go on dumping our needs for intimacy outside ourselves and onto women. We can make a start by learning to look after ourselves and developing nurturing relationships with other men. We can refuse, through the gradual taking of alternative choices, to go on splitting our swaggering behaviour as 'real men' from our weakness.
Perhaps we need a fresh definition of independent desire in men - not the compulsive drive to go on proving and confirming traditional manhood but the more centred desire needed to interrogate, challenge and change conventional, heterosexual masculinity. A desire that continues to assert manly difference from women can't be useful in the struggle ahead where men need to learn how to work with women in antisexist politics.
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
If you've enjoyed reading this article on-line please consider subscribing to the magazine.
