Rifling through Old Files: A Treatise on Cool

Steve McQueen and the Marlboro Man: The Decline of Caucasian Cool

Just what makes Steve McQueen so cool? To ask the question precludes your part in his company: if you don’t know it already, you’re not going to talk it into your possession. It’s innate or it’s not. But outsiders still want to figure cool out, with the vain hope of crossing the gap. If nothing else, to guess at what you’ve been missing for your adult life. With McQueen there are a few guesses.

First of all, it is not the acrobatic feats he seems to will into his automobiles. He could race professionally. The chases from Bullitt along with the motorcycle jump from the Nazis in The Great Escape reflect the eager and reckless side of his persona. But Robbie Knievel actually performs those stunts—for a living no less—and he’s just crackers. That or a grisly punchline: an unscripted 1000 foot plummet waiting to happen, mental fodder to push out the mundaneness of the next week at the office.

Nor is it just the blue eyes like big sapphires. However, this avenue may be closer to approaching the proverbial essence of cool. How do you remember Steve McQueen? Rapidly confabbing? No. That look, those cobalt eyes. You remember most the quiet image of the man. Perhaps in that black turtleneck from Bullitt or watching the sun set across the desert in Tom Horn or that hunt by the Nazis, fifteen minutes without dialogue, punctuated by his motorcycle vault over the Bavarian barbed wire. Always, that is, arrayed in silence.

Cool, like funny, is one of those categories that refuses complete atomization. At some point you have to look at cool the same way you look at the universe and exclaim, "Well, it just fucking is." Nevertheless, with McQueen we may have hit on a necessary ingredient: cool looks, not talks. It’s a face staring through you.

There is some authority on this issue. In Cool Hand Luke (an obvious text for researching cool), George Kennedy’s character dubs Paul Newman’s "Cool Hand" after Luke has quietly bluffed his way to a poker pot. Luke plays a cool hand; he’s silent, unnerved; he won’t let you know what’s really going on his head. The epithet and all its power sticks until the last third of the film when a humbled Luke grovels to the "boss" and shouts down the Lord. Until he breaks the collected veneer and displays his vulnerability and becomes like you.

In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Paul Newman as Butch concedes the element of cool to Robert Redford’s taciturn Sundance (perhaps the coolest name ever). Butch is funny and witty. He’s a rational man, scheming his way from predicament to predicament. He’s attractive—thanks in large part to Newman’s good looks—but not cool like Sundance. The quietness of Sundance magnifies him. The quickness of his pistol-hand is all the wittiness he needs.

Others among this reticent group are Mel Gibson’s post-apocalyptic gunslinger; the real Sterling Hayden, who’d as soon sail his boat around the world three times over before submitting to a press junket; the Blues Brothers trafficking in black culture. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger belongs, albeit less estimably. For the mid 80’s The Terminator was the acme of cool—"bad" if you prefer the parlance of the times. Nothing shouts confidence or purpose like a robot. The Terminator knows his mission; he’s not going to hem and haw about value-statements. He doesn’t equivocate about a viable future under Reaganomics. Schwarzenegger retains this cool in Commando and Predator. He’s still the automatic warrior, memorialized by the firing action of an assault rifle under oily, vein-webbed arms. But as soon as the man begins to speak, the steeliness that had your attention evaporates. He descends down an increasing awkwardly line from Twins to Kindergarten Cop to Junior. By the time Terminator 3 arrives, he’s lost all credibility for cool. It’s not that he pronounces English words poorly, which was actually exotic when he spoke less frequently. It’s that he has talked too much, revealed too much of himself. Schwarzenegger becomes the least cool thing of all: a politician, a man who constantly wants to ingratiate himself for the sake of self-preservation.

Admittedly, cool may be a rather large phylum, and we’re only discussing a certain species, one with perhaps the greatest sense of self-respect. This cool is independent, assured, and possessing a lurking capacity for destruction. McQueen suddenly slaps down Ali McGraw in The Getaway; Luke decapitates the parking meters and spars with George Kennedy; Sundance draws; Schwarzenegger rampages. His unpredictability and proneness to sudden physical violence electrifies the moment. As Hunter S. Thompson says more generally, "Most people are not accustomed to solving a situation by immediate and seemingly random applications of force. And the very fact that you are willing to do it—or might be—is a very powerful reasoning tool." You might say his brand of cool is inextricable from being tough. Most of all, this kind of man is quiet, and such solidifies his mystique. It allows you to impute the most fantastic strengths to him, like the charismatic aura surrounding a dead man’s name or, say, Matthew Brady’s photographs. Mythologically, he’s the Western cowboy archetype—the Man with No Name. He’s also white, a fact that will return briefly.

If the examples given here are evidence of anything, it’s that this type of man has disappeared from the popular iconography of this century. He died with the banishment of the Marlboro Man, one of the truly great American figures. In his image you could surmise all of the hallmarks of cool: an unsheltered life, an exchange of physical hardship for social freedom, an implicit manual prowess. His cigarette represented his independence, his fearlessness, his courtship of annihilation—even for himself. The silence of his picture barricaded any more intimate and demystifying disclosure.

After the disappearance of the Marlboro Man, who has filled the vacuum for this cool-tough type? This may not be an applicable question for black men. They have never exactly partaken in the mythical Western type. Besides, they supply their own version of cool: gangsta, thug. They’re constant antagonists to the hegemony. Like 50 Cent, individual idealizations of white anxiety about the established order. Lawlessness as subject of rap threatens the civil code. More than that, the form of expression—rap itself—poses more fierce a threat. Its apparent disharmonic patterns and tribal argot seem poised to unhinge the majority discourse of middle-class America into complete deregulation.

White boys run to "ghetto" to escape the confinement of their regnant culture, but they never quite saturate themselves beyond an ersatz stature. Vanilla Ice obviously comes to mind. The twerp from 90210. Aaron Carter. Even Eminem. In ten years will Eminem’s respectability be anything higher than Vanilla Ice’s today; will people laugh because he named himself after candy? The problem with Eminem is that he’s still plagued by whiteness. If you’re counting chinks in his armor, racial difference and authenticity is always his first one. No less, though, is a popular culture that attempts to homogenize, financially or morally, everything that enters it into a palatable figure of the white middle-class—in other words, into a news anchorman. The more Eminem talks the easier it is to juxtapose him next to Peter Jennings. And because of his intelligence, his urbanity, Peter Jennings may be respectable, but he is not cool. Peter Jennings is not the Hell’s Angels; he is not suddenly going to smack you across the head for no reason. Neither is Eminem; his black bodyguards might, but not Eminem himself (he’s a little guy with bleached hair anyway). Black rappers at least can still go back to the nebulous "streets" to recharge their credibility.

If he didn’t own a mansion, if he weren’t probably slated for an upcoming episode of MTV’s Cribs, Eminem might go back to the trailer park. White trash is still an operating insurgency. Kid Rock has traded on it with success, embracing his redneck Country roots, cutting duets with Hank Williams Jr. and Jerry Lee Lewis. He even attached himself to a sufficiently tasteless mate in Pamela Anderson. Pornography is, of course, the third minor class, and it is expected that pornstars are rappers’ and other seemingly rebellious incarnations of rock ‘n’ roll’s favorite accoutrements. Lil’ John makes his own porn video; Janine Lindemuller, former lesbian par excellence, graces the cover of a Blink 182 album.

Note the lack of pornographic affiliations in Nashville. Besides staking itself out as the last bastion of American traditionalism, Country music may also be the most flagrant propagator of middle-class whiteness. Is there any substantial evidence of racial diversity on Music Row? Country music songs repetitively espouse canonized values: the family unit, the 4th of July, generalized patriotism. If Toby Keith thinks he’s continuing in the vein of Merle Haggard, he should consider that Merle Haggard opposes the current occupation in the Middle East and that his "patriotic" songs of the Vietnam era were written to give voice to a dissenting opinion among the increasing hostile media portrayals of the war. While Haggard may have been reminding the frustrated public of the individual soldiers, Keith is only reinforcing and capitalizing upon a hackneyed, standard notion. Gretchen Wilson, who was glorified by some critics for her unabashed avowal of redneck ways, is no real populist of the economically disenfranchised. The pull for her audience has all the subtlety of legerdemain. She sings by in large to a group of women with only redneck vestiges, girls who have passed the material threshold into middle-class certification. Their echo of Wilson’s redneck affirmations evokes a folksy pedigree and defines them against the ubiquitous semi-sophisticated cultural image (once again the strait-laced, region-less newsperson). However, her audience has probably jettisoned their real redneck traits long ago and both of the aforementioned acts are specious: quick fixes of rebellion for an ever worsening national commonality. What’s more, Wilson’s idea of redneck is only middle-class-light—unless she’s championing abject poverty, entrenched racism, and methamphetamine abuse.

There seems to be an unsatisfactory quality about the Marlboro Man’s replacements. You might call it a lack of integrity and veracity. But the blame’s not all theirs. The media engine inevitably overexposes them. After the trivial vetting on the Tonight Show and Good Morning America; with Paula Zahn, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer; in all the print and web articles and the idolatrous temples of E! and VH1; how could anyone emerge with a nugget of dignity, independence, or mystery? Harrison Ford once seemed perched to occupy the same lofty space as Steve McQueen. That was before he met with one of Entertainment Tonight’s anonymous legion to discuss his film with Anne Heche. Or before Extra caught him at a premiere, Calista Flockhart on one side, the earring on the other.

Even McQueen, blues eyes and everything, might succumb to the cultural machine. He’d have to. Immolating yourself before the publicity gods is now a requisite for measurable success among artists. McQueen had too much megalomania to go the independent film route, to content himself simply with work well done. We can hope otherwise. Bill Murray once said that if he could revise his life, he’d keep the wealth and lose the fame. He was speaking of the practical constraints of living, the incursions into his privacy, the everyday wariness of the public appetite for celebrity. But he was also suggesting the manner in which the media extracts the self for the same public appetite—that the ultimate price of stardom is confession.

Some still hold to the Marlboro Man’s banner, hanging out of the limelight. Sam Shepard exudes the rugged Western type. Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven helped initiate his visual persona, as he wandered day by day silently through the grain of his Texas panhandle farm. It didn’t hurt that in The Right Stuff he played Chuck Yeager, the coolest motherfucker of all. Shepard also awarded extra points for being a writer, as rogue and rare as Yeager is cool. On the page he can create any existence, enact any number of romances or roustabouts he fancies. His picture and biographical paragraph are spare enough for you to imagine his personal life twice as outstanding as reality, and for your own. Cormac McCarthy falls even more severely in the same mold. In fact, having given only one interview in his career, McCarthy may be the last heir to the Marlboro Man’s mystique. Admirer of the solitary cowboy, he has relocated himself from east Tennessee to the desolation of El Paso; his books are not populated so much by human beings as by the most gruesome acts ever perpetrated by one animal against another; and of himself he has given the public a few austere photographs—a square, chiseled, impatient face to be your grail.

Shepard and McQueen, as all writers are currently destined, are cult figures. They maintain their integrity by virtue of their aloofness. Other kindred, non writers, come to mind: Billy Crudup perhaps, David Gordon Green, certainly Terence Malick, Ralph Fiennes, Tommy Lee Jones. Bob Dylan before he went autobiographical and a host of musicians, especially after the internet made music a more democratic art than film. You can’t help but think of the "singer-songwriter" Will Oldham, the reality TV participant’s absolute negative, who distances himself with a variety of conceptual avatars in his own hillbilly-alternative style of Kierkegaardian glee.

These men are all cool; the respect they command surpasses that for Peter Jennings into more genuine emulation. Unfortunately, except really for McCarthy, none has the full menacing air of toughness, of unpredictability and destruction—a statement of independence at all costs. None has the iconic gravity of the Marlboro Man. The conclusion may be devastating. If the Marlboro Man is defunct, so is the Western hero. If the Western hero is defunct, so is the Jeffersonian prototype—and such marks the end of an essential American character. It seems as if there is no recourse to redeploy this kind of cool into culture unless the chatter subsides or someone appropriates the conversation altogether—transforms it into something leaner, less invasive, less zealously humanistic. Where is Steve McQueen? We need the currency of his wild, quieting stare.

Babies Can't Wait...

...to eat you. Dan, sent this website. If you don't like your child's eyes in her glamour shot, just pay someone to photoshop inanimate "doll eyes" over them. I've always said that little girls look much prettier when they don't look real. Enjoy.

How Could You Resist Saying Something after Tuesday?

I'll make it brief, although I've got to give Jim Webb a quick cheer for winning one for the smut-lovers.

First of all, from Slate: Donald Rumsfeld's poetry. A true master of the caesura. I see hints of Rilke and even O'Hara.

And from Salon: A play-by-play of the bumfuzzlement at Fox News throughout election night. Also, a cool new word in there: meme.

It looks like Georgia may be one of the few shining lights for the GOP in a stygian liberal universe. But why? Is there something particularly conservative about Georgians themselves? Well, Republicans have gained ascendancy in this state rather late in the game. Perdue's our first red governor since Reconstruction, Chestnut Mountain's own Case Cagle our first red lieutenant governor ever. It may be that, confronted with this relatively new challenge, Georgia Democrats haven't yet learned how to fight back. Frankly, they'd better organize something soon and parade out some figures of leadership (no, Tommy Irvin doesn't count)--because Tuesday almost voided the party inside the peach state.