The Graying of a Boy
The Mark Hamill thing. A matter of puzzlement to many people. I have an idea about what’s going on with him, which I’ll explain because I’m thinking most people are just chalking it up to projected career disappointments. Which is part of it but not all of it. I know that the language issues surrounding the topics I’ll be touching on are prohibitive, since words no longer mean what they used to, but I’m just laying it out here and everyone is free to take it or leave it as they choose.
There’s an easy answer and a deeper answer. The easy answer is just scratching the surface but should show the value of common sense in a long-distance analysis like this. Easy? For Hamill, Trump is a stand-in for Harrison Ford.
It’s not political, the Trump hatred. Not really. The TDS mania that pervades Hollywood was an attractive nuisance just waiting for him, and others, to fall into. Harrison Ford’s politics are loony too, but Trump hatred is kind of like a necessary fashion accessory in Hollywood, where no leading man worth his salt would be caught dead wearing a buttondown shirt. Hamill’s real target was the colleague who stole all the glory he thought should have been his.
Numbers matter here. Hamill was born in 1951, solidly inside the Baby Boomer generation. Ford was born in 1942, not a Boomer but a member of the forgotten half generation too young to have fought in WW2 or Korea and too old to have reached adolescence during the first wave of drugs and cynicism that swallowed the Boomers. They were the first ‘Tweeners’, registering enormous accomplishments subsequently appropriated by the Boomers who followed. Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, all Tweeners, for example. Same with other artistic and intellectually challenging disciplines. When they made their first Star Wars picture, Ford was 35 and Hamill was 26.
The age difference is significant. Ford too young to be a father figure, loosely qualifiable as a big brother type of friend, if friendship was in the cards. I won’t pretend to know anything about their early personal relationship. What matters is the roles they played and the career arcs the two would experience afterward. Luke Skywalker was the boy hero of a coming of age saga. Han Solo was a franchise action hero, a red-blooded man from first to last. He was also taller, more attractive to women, and a born scene stealer.
Their careers tell quite different tales. Harrison Ford becomes a permanent center stage fixture in the Star Wars franchise but also becomes an A-List movie star in dozens of major productions ranging from romance to comedy to tragedy, with plenty of action highlights along the way. Hamill is marooned in the Star Wars universe, included as a checkbox item, a reliable subplot and narrative device, but never finally compelling enough to be the star of the show.
Why it’s impossible that Hamill did not feels some resentment, envy, and even bitterness about Ford’s much more spectacular success in the movies. If you look at Hamill’s listing in IMDB, he’s one of the also-ran has-beens whose credits contain more entries for appearances as “self” than as an actor. Maybe he couldn’t express his hostility to Ford without looking like a sore loser, but he could redirect his ire at an altogether different tall, rich, lucky superstar winner in the fame and glory sweepstakes. Donald Trump should be a dead man. QED.
Does that explain everything? No. There are deeper issues here which expand the conversation to include many more American males of a certain age than Mark Hamill. He is an archetypal example of the Baby Boomer boy who never became a man.
Was it chance or destiny that Hamill still looked boyish enough to play Luke Skywalker at the age of 26. Interesting age. My own observation and experience suggests to me that for males, 25 is the make-or-break age. If you haven’t at least consciously decided to start growing up by then, you will never make it to manhood. At 25, there’s still time to start over, take personal responsibility for your own juvenile mistakes, learn how to work hard in or for some enterprise, find a direction in line with your abilities and aspirations, and how to put the temptations of instant gratification permanently (or mostly) in the rearview mirror. For many, fatherhood is the catalyst, for others it’s an accumulation of unfunny screwups consistent enough that they can’t be anyone’s fault but your own, and for the luckiest ones it’s finding that one thing in you that was always there waiting to give you a meaning in life and the sometimes hard choices such meaning requires.
It’s different for girls. (My word choice here is consistent with the topic, which is ‘boys.’) Puberty affects them differently. For boys puberty is the exciting discovery of physical sexual pleasure and (ir)resistible desire for it. It’s that for girls too, but this energy burst is accompanied by the unanticipated burden of physical fertility, which changes everything. Why girls tend to mature faster in their dealings with temptation and its costs. There is no constant monthly reminder for boys that the course of their life could be slammed into chaos by one false step. Boys make up for this difference by courting physical dangers that can awaken thoughts about the value they place on future life. Girls don’t need fast cars, football, or fistfights to think about living for another hour, year, or lifetime with the consequences of a single next risky step.
Neither sex has a lock on the best decisions. Girls are generally willing to settle for less than complete freedom from personal responsibility sooner than boys. Boys are generally less willing to settle except for the manhood catalysts described above, which is why so many boys never make the grade and remain, emotionally at least, in the awkward condition of having a 9-yo mind, a 14-yo sex drive, and a body that will only show the costs of bad decisions after some variably timed delay. Why most women are smarter than most men in pragmatic terms. And why most women don’t hit as many homeruns as the risk takers who made the right changes to become men before the deadline. To extend the baseball metaphor just one step farther, there are two kinds of homeruns. The ones hit by your team, the good guys, and the ones hit by the other team on the field, the bad guys. Why there are more serial killers and brutal despots on the male side, in addition to the more breakthrough minds and historical accomplishments since we’ve been keeping track of such things.
Where is a Mark Hamill in this mix? Nowhere. Was it chance or destiny that made him look so boyish all the way into his thirties? Doesn’t matter. The conspicuous fact is that he never did come of age, Even people who want to like him still see him principally as Luke Skywalker. Yes, he is reportedly a family man, but they have been public in their horror at his irrational vindictiveness on the subject of Donald Trump.
He’s by no means alone out there. Lot of stalled boys out there, not just the Boomers but in all subsequent generations in the era of feminism as an ideology. Lots of boys in Hollywood who got famous playing men whose feats of love and arms have all been fictions authored by others. Call it the blue screen effect. As they age, they realize they didn’t make some vital transition along the way and they’re mad at substitute villains they can cast spells on like kewpie dolls. Every profession and institution has its own contingent of anxious, insecure, and ultimately paranoid snipers who have to blame some other(s) for the missing sense of manly fulfillment that aches in them like the memory of aborted babies aches inside the bellies of some women. The road(s) not taken become deadly detours for the soul when they cease to be possible pathways to self respect.
The Mark Hamills, Robert De Niros, Mark Ruffalos, and Bruce Springsteens are just the easiest ones to see. Little boys who have never really walked in a grown man’s shoes.
We can learn from their example or not in the way we bring up our own sons… and daughters.
That’s right. Not letting the girls off the hook here either. They have consistently subsidized the popularity of bad boys who introduce them to risks they were too timid to undertake on their own. Too often their bad boys have joined the ranks of bad guys, as both bad men and permanently ineffectual boys. I even wrote a poem about this puzzling preference in girlish romantic fixations. Here, though, is some opinionating by a couple of people who are not me, a woman and a man. How we’ll end this post on a hopefully somewhat objective note…
At some site called Cypher News…
At 63, This Woman Finally Sees What Years of Belittling Men Cost Her
BRIEFING
Grant here. We've all seen plenty of negative repurcussions from feminism, but probably the most devastating one is loneliness. It's a human and raw emotion, and a recent essay by writer Kate Mulvey really highlights the long-term consequences of so-called "independence." Let’s break it down.
The article is titled “I regret belittling men; at 63, I’ve ended up alone,” and that line is truly the crux of the entire story. Mulvey isn't writing as some dreamy-eyed teenager who just discovered feminism on TikTok. She's writing as a 63-year-old woman who's looking back on the life she built, the men she pushed away, and the family she once imagined but never achieved.
As Mulvey states, “I had always imagined I would end up married with two wonderful children and living in a house in the countryside.” And that line is where fantasy meets reality. Because throughout the piece, despite Mulvey wanting a partner, family, and legacy, she repeatedly puts men beneath her and prioritizes her career advancement above all else.
She goes on to say in her piece that “Men have called me ‘intimidating’, ‘scary’, and ‘opinionated’. I now see that not only was I trying to prove I was their intellectual equal, or superior, I was treating every encounter with a man like he was my adversary.”
And that right there is the real push-pull dynamic that feminism is forcing on women nowadays. It's like women are in this constant state of proving themselves, but as a result, they're losing their feminine energy, which is strong and amazing on its own.
The piece is definitely an interesting insight into not only how feminism is reprogramming women but also seeing it through the eyes of someone who's actually lived through it and is now carrying serious regrets.
As Mulvey says, “I have paid a hefty price for my so-called liberation.”
DEBRIEF
With this piece you get to read through a lot of Mulvey's life, her thought process, regrets, etc. But that final slide could be the most interesting one.
She states that she will never be a “giggly man-pleaser” and has no intention of playing second fiddle to a man. But then she admits that so-called "confidence" she portrayed for years didn't actually match what was going on inside, which is so on-point and brutally honest. She was simply posturing, trying with every fiber of her being to look strong from the outside, but inside, something clearly wasn't working.
Mulvey is actually one of the rare feminists who's actually made mistakes, admitted to them, and is working to learn through them. Which is incredibly refreshing.
I don't think anyone would say she's 100% recovered from her extreme feminist ways, but she seems to be beginning to separate confidence from control. She's realizing that love isn't able to breathe when every moment has to bend towards self-satisfaction.
And once more women (or feminists) realize this, that's when we all begin to heal.
NOW YOU KNOW
Winning every power struggle isn't the same thing as building a life.
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