The Brotherhood of Men
This is this.
It’s time to move on from the female friendship pillow-party bitch fest. Entertainment is saturated with Real Housewives, Sexed-out City sophisticates, suddenly problematic Girls, Katty Calabasas Kardashians, all-female “versions” of film franchises like Ghostbusters and frankly, any movie starring the insufferably unfunny Amy Schumer. And that’s even before I get to the books. Remember when Fabio graced the cover of Romance novels, looking like he took a dip in a pool of baby oil and proceeded to dry off in front of a power fan with his golden mane tousling in the wind? Well, now it’s kink-for-all, but they aren’t selling romance; literature is selling the niche identity whore: the disabled, queer, oppressed, pan-identifying hobbit and it’s mostly women doing the pushing.
What happened to the art of men? We had a good run of them. Swingers, Reservoir Dogs, Fight Club, “Entourage,” “The Sopranos,” Master and Commander. Then there’s Hemingway, Norman Maclean, Mailer, Carver, Elmore Leonard, Cormac McCarthy, and David Foster Wallace.
Or there never was an art at all.
We took for granted the backbone of society because it became fashionable to disavow anything that comes with “problematic” baggage, as defined by pointy-headed intellectuals who denigrate commonness as if acknowledging being the same species is to soil their crisp, rarified air with the very dirt that makes these men…men.
No one could have guessed the downward cascade into the morass of pettiness, backstabbing, and perpetual catty-clique behavior that is the world of women. At least most of the boys in William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” make it off the island. There are no survivors if this were a gaggle of girls. All you have to do is watch two minutes (if you can stand it) of the daytime “talk” show “The View” to realize the Girl-Boss mantra of “women defend each other” is as fake as their hair extensions and principles. Just look at how the pecking hens treated Meghan McCain and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
Jack Nicholson nailed it as romance writer Melvin Udall in the 1997 film As Good as It Gets. When asked how he writes women so well, he replies, “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.”
This doesn’t mean men aren’t capable of drama. Professional sports and wrestling have disproven that theory. But it doesn’t go to such engrossing, toxic extremes. Women had their chance with the WNBA, and look at how that went to pot. Or maybe playwright David Mamet was correct when Ben Domenech asked him about the dynamic between men and women on his podcast. Mamet responds:
I mean, to look at men in the various settings in which I've lived is interesting, but to interact with them is really not that interesting that often. I've had several very, very good close friends and male friends and several very close male colleagues, but most interactions with men are a boring competition, and it's all the same, right? But women are all very individual and I get a big kick out of them.
As a woman looking in from the outs and as someone without true friendships (so I can be objective on the matter, ofc), I don’t think he’s right.
So we turn to men, and there’s a problem. But it isn’t the men, it’s what a culture has forced when it willingly gives up the thing that makes it strong and trades away for artificial definitions of equality, masculinity, and brotherhood.
If you take all the data from polls, surveys, research studies, and analytical metascored transmographyers and triptoculturometers, mash them together in the chute of a giant, gear-mashing shredder, out would pop some flattened, scientific, sterile profile of the American Man. You can keep him.
I’m not interested in what a man appears to be on paper. I’m interested in what makes a man. What does he live by, and what does he do? Where has he gone when we need him the most?
In solitary form, a man can be dissected and probed and analyzed, whipped into a concoction seething with resentments or regrets or simplified into a tee-vee dad caricature: the incompetent dopey dud who gets harassed by his smarty-pants wife and railroaded with eyerolls from his ungrateful teenagers.
I want to get away from the cartoons and tired tropes and recycled data — a specimen scrape of the D-N-A of Male, American.
But what makes a man interconnected to and in the sphere of Men? There is something more profound and broader at stake, and it is borne of a certain spirit.
The Brotherhood of Men and what that means to America.
It’s impossible to capture the full meaning of it. Literature and film have come close, conveying the essence of what is between the lines, as if the very being of Man depends on what is unsaid.
It’s in the unspokenness that brotherhood forms its deepest and most forthright bonds. And as an appendage of themselves, a hand that has guided the American Spirit through dark and light eras, of wildness and violence, and of peaceful optimism and accomplishment.
It is the ultimate paradigm and one uniquely American: That we can be a country of men whose restless pursuit of greatness, exploration of the nation’s wilds, and dogged, brash, “victory or nothing” attitude both clash and form a perfect union with being the constant underdog, the Cowboy, and the Defiant One. America’s men can be the lawmen, but rely on the foundations of a Code to build an empire — and be wary of it.
The comradery of America is bound in the fellowship of men. When these ties are weak, America is unsure of itself. When the bonds are unbreakable and seem rooted in an imperceptible ethos — the esprit de corps — that need not explain itself or give justification for its being, America is unstoppable.
Where are the men? You know the ones; the kind of man Tammy Wynette wanted us to stand by. And who could forget her blazing response to Hillary Clinton’s 60 Minutes insult to the country queen and the type of life and relationship she belted out in rhinestone-glimmered lyrics?
With all that is in me I resent your caustic remark. I, with no apologies, am as angry as I can be with your statement. Mrs. Clinton, you have offended every woman and man who love that song – several million in number. I believe you have offended every true country music fan and every person who has “made it on their own” with no one to take them to a White House.
In her 1979 autobiography, she writes about what the song means to her: “Be supportive of your man; show him you love him and you’re proud of him, and be willing to forgive him if he doesn’t always live up to your image of what he should be.” Foreign concept for women’s libbers whose default view of men is always toxic, always oppressive, always bad.
This goes double for men who travel in groups. Hollow ideology bred disdain for the men who dared to explore the seas, establish a nation, end slavery, and save the Union; for those who helped liberate Europe (twice!), suffered silently in Korea and Vietnam while their tumultuous nation seethed with division — but they went, they sacrificed, they died, and others went on to live scarred lives. They went to the moon, they defeated the commies, they defeated the fascists, and they defeated fear. They are warriors, teammates, and at the core, brothers.
Something happened to the American belief in men for which I don’t have an answer. Some may say the welfare state replacing fathers, the feminist movement of the mid-20th century, or disco. Perhaps it was the drastic shift in cultural attitudes, including changing views on families and social roles, and a post-war liberation of America from an ideal of principled strength, courage, defense of the defenseless, and a good measure of masculine recklessness, the kind Chuck Yeager lived for. The “Free Love” 1960s gave way to Don Siegel movies, Dirty Harry, and vigilante justice.
But in the midst of the extreme swings, something honest was lost, something rooted in the soil of yearning for plainer times, when communities relied on themselves and each other. When a tragedy occurred to one and to all. When celebrations were events, and causes were just.
“The Deer Hunter” is a cinematic showcase of community, family, the bonds between men, the burden of tragedy, and the power of patriotism and loyalty. The 1978 film, directed by Michael Cimino, was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning Best Film, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken. It stars Robert De Niro, Walken, John Savage, and John Cazale as Slavic-American steelworkers in Clairton, Pennsylvania (a working-class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh) whose lives are upended by fighting in the Vietnam War.
The film is perceived as being about the Vietnam War, and is often compared with “Coming Home,” a film starring and headed by Jane Fonda based on the book “Born on the Fourth of July” — the same source material for Oliver Stone’s 1989 version starring Tom Cruise. It was also nominated for the major category Academy Awards that year, going head to head with “The Deer Hunter.” But where “Coming Home” is an antiwar film of that era, emphasizing the brokenness of veterans and more than subtle messaging about America and the war, Hunter is an endearing tale of how the bonds between men and their larger ties to their community are impacted by tragedy and how these bonds help them survive.
Cimino, heavily influenced by the movies of director John Ford and who idolized the gunslinger Westerns of his youth, talks about what that film meant to him and what he hoped to convey through the story. In this 2007 interview before he died, Cimino explains:
No it's not about Vietnam at all I mean of course Vietnam is very much a part of it but it's nothing like Apocalypse [Now] is a movie about Vietnam centered in Vietnam…No, this is a story of people who are all kind of in a way social outcasts in a small town but form a kind of a nuclear family of their own, and as people who are outcasts generally do, you know, people on the outside, and it's the story of what happens to this family when traumatic events take place in their life, how it affects them, how it affects their relationships, how it affects them as individuals, how it affects them as a group, family, and Vietnam happened to be because it was so much in the news at the time but it's really a story a very simple story about how ordinary people deal with great tragedy in their personal life, how they can survive it, how they're wounded by it, how they deal with it and survive it with an abiding love for their country.
At the same time, the ending is really not meant to be so much a statement of patriotism but a statement of communion. When people are in trouble as they are when they're very troubled and sick inside spiritually, they need some time to do something together.
In this case it's “make a sound.” And they sing that song [“God Bless America”] because it's a song that every American child knows by heart because you were taught it in school, everybody knows the words of “God Bless America” and so it's a communal sound and they begin to sing the one song they all know from grade school. And you never forget those words as long as you live, and so they sing the one song they happen to know, which happens to be “God Bless America.” It reunites them as a family; it becomes a family communion instead of a Last Supper. It becomes a First Breakfast.
[The final scene, “God Bless America,” is here.]
In a separate interview shortly after the film was released, Cimino explained the role of working-class men in particular:
[The film] did not begin as a Vietnam War film, I think that it began more as a film about people, about working-class people who are in fact the people who fight the wars in every country of the world. They're the people who do the dying, the suffering, and the people who have to go on after the war is long over.
I will speak for America, I think that the working people in America have a great deal of courage and have a lot more intelligence than they're normally given credit for, and a lot more dignity.
I think that they suffer the tragedy of war and the crises of war and their lives with an amazing amount of courage. I think that they were greatly maligned and characterized by the press during the years of intense feeling about the war as being right-wing or whatever, unfairly.
I think that in many cases their motives were quite simple and quite pure.
This is in contrast with another film made a few years later about a Vietnam veteran who was ultimately abandoned by his community, “First Blood,” the 1982 film starring Sylvester Stallone as Rambo and based on the 1972 novel by David Morrell.
In an emotional conversation between Rambo and his commanding officer, Col. Samuel Trautman (played by Richard Crenna in the film) explains the turmoil of a man who finds himself alone, without his brothers, without a family:
[Trautman]: You did everything to make this private war happen. You've done enough damage. This mission is over, Rambo. Do you understand me? This mission is over! Look at them out there! Look at them! If you won't end this now, they will kill you. Is that what you want? It's over Johnny. It's over!
[Rambo]: Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me, huh? Who are they? Unless they've been me and been there and know what the hell they're yelling about!
[Trautman]: It was a bad time for everyone, Rambo. It's all in the past now.
[Rambo]: For you! For me civilian life is nothing! In the field we had a code of honor, you watch my back, I watch yours. Back here there's nothing!
[Trautman]: You're the last of an elite group, don't end it like this.
[Rambo]: Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment, back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!
It’s amazing to live in a country with layers of myths and tall tales, heroes, martyrs, villains, and clowns. No other place runs with reckless earnestness, innocent courage, and a plainness that is never simple, sometimes humble, always bold. Of men and boys who grow up to be them.
Something happened after the closing of the American Frontier. A myth changed shape but not its form. There were Doughboys and Rocketeers, astronauts, Leathernecks, gangsters, heroes, televangelists, rock ‘n rollers, dreamboats, Muscle Beach heavies, skaters, surfers, greasers, and NASCAR drivers. Stuntmen, gunmen, and Hollywood leading men. Presidents, speechmakers, history breakers, and dreamers. Fathers, brothers, and sons.
Brotherhood is as much standing watch over solitude as being a fellow traveler. There is an Americanness here that is too often ignored in favor of a narrative that the company of men is about wisecracks, rabblerousing, and general knockabouts.
There is no other sacredness like that of brotherhood. Men of an inner faith in watching over the solitude of his brother, his friend, his friend. Kings among men and the richest, even in poverty. There is no virtue, no honor, no dignity without brothers.
America needs heroes, its men, and the brotherhood that keeps them together, and just as importantly, the lessons they teach us about how to strive for greatness, virtue, and truth.
The epigraph Ernest Hemingway chose for his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a selection from British poet John Donne, a poem of the same name:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Every man belongs to the community of men. They live and die for each other, they are silent sentries present in times of strife, and support in times of grief, and soldiers together in times of war.
So, American Man, where are your brothers — your countrymen, and your country, still needs you.
In an act of fate and faith, Michael Cimino received his Best Picture Oscar from his hero John Wayne, in what would be Wayne’s final public appearance before his death from cancer two months later. Here is the recording:
There have been many notable representations of the power of brotherhood, unsung heroes, sacrifice for friends and country, and the virtues of the warrior ethos and masculinity — “Band of Brothers,” “The Great Escape,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Tombstone,” “The Right Stuff,” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” are just a few. Maybe you have a few of your own.
Thank you for being a part of this community, however small. Sometimes it’s just an unspoken promise to stand watch in bad times, to tell the truth when it needs to be said, and do the hard thing when there is no other option that can make all the difference. Brotherhood does matter.
Sincerely, Jenna
This is this (strong language):
Hi Jenna, this is exceptional writing - the way you cut through stereotypes and TV caricatures to examine what authentic masculine brotherhood actually means is both insightful and necessary. Your observation about the “unspokenness” that forms the deepest bonds really captures something profound about how men connect and support each other.
What strikes me most is how you’ve identified something that goes beyond individual men to the broader cultural fabric. As someone who’s lived through these changes since the 1960s, I share your concern about what we’ve lost. The brotherhood you describe was once sustained by the very communities that have been fracturing - the small towns where men worked together, worshipped together, and knew each other’s families. When neighborhoods were actual communities, when extended families stayed close, when faith provided common ground and shared values.
The “esprit de corps” you mention thrived in contexts we’ve systematically dismantled - local civic organizations, church communities, multi-generational families living near each other. Men learned to be men in the company of other men who had stakes in their success, not just as individuals but as fathers, neighbors, and community members.
Your writing gets at something essential: that American strength has always depended on these invisible bonds between men who shared not just geography but genuine investment in each other’s wellbeing. When those ties weaken, we all feel it.
Thank you for tackling this difficult subject with such thoughtfulness and clarity.
"Something happened to the American belief in men for which I don’t have an answer."
I think that great Russian zek, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, hit it right on the head: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.