From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity

The Masculine Mystique

With his new book on war and masculinity, USC jack-of-all-letters-and-arts Leo Braudy chronicles the man that got away, just where he came from and where he’s going.

"Thank goodness he was signaling,” Leo Braudy deadpans as an ordinary van careens around the corner, pursued by a posse of driverless cherry-tops and a homicidal construction rig in the most over-the-top car chase to come out of Hollywood in – well, in months.

It’s some 30 minutes into last summer’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a movie that the New York Post calls “pointless and mind-numbing.”

Later the hunted hero and heroine opportunely find themselves in an Air Force hangar. The damsel (patently undistressed) exclaims: “My father’s plane! I trained on it.”

“Nice bit of quick exposition,” Braudy chuckles.

Afterwards, nursing a Starbucks decaf, he explicates the blockbuster in recondite lit-crit terms. He doesn’t sneer. He uses adjectives like “elegiac” to characterize the film’s mood; he talks about the “intertextual self-consciousness” of sequels. You know, like that glimpse of a big-rig crossing an overpass in the aforementioned chase scene. It’s a quote from the first Terminator movie, explains Braudy – “as if the filmmakers are saying: ‘There’s the old truck. We’re going to up the ante.’”

He goes on to deconstruct the gender-inverted twists on heroism and masculinity implicit in the film’s Barbie-dollish predator (mascara and lip gloss just so) wreaking havoc on the sulkily ineffectual savior-to-be and his oh-so-obsolete cyber-bodyguard, a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

To Braudy – USC’s Leo S. Bing Professor of English, respected authority on the films of Jean Renoir and François Truffaut – this is no mere escapist fantasy. It’s the real world, writ large in caricature. Serious study of such light entertainment as a summer action flick, he believes, lays bare beliefs and tensions that “high art” sometimes misses.

When You first meet him you think: Here’s a regular guy. With his shy smile and unpretentious air, there’s little to give him away. Then you catch a glimpse of his CV, and you think: Here’s a guy with a multiple personality disorder.

Is he an 18th-century English literary critic or an authority on the Wild West? A connoisseur of French cinematic realism or a B-movie maven? An expert on Western art history or ’50s rock ’n’ roll? A scholar of classical languages and civilizations or an anthropologist of counterculture? (Answer: all of the above.)

He is one of 15 USC faculty members to hold the title of University Professor, a designation denoting faculty superheroes able to leap disciplinary walls in a single bound. Braudy is perhaps the archetype of the species: With appointments in English, cinema-television and art history, his eclecticism bleeds into classics, philosophy, history, psychology and beyond.

Crack a few of his books (10, so far) and his nearly 150 articles, and you’ll find a further Sybil-esque trait: He speaks in many voices.

There’s the theorist, who holds a magnifying glass to the corpus of Gibbon, Fielding and Hume, not to mention Norman Mailer and Jean Renoir – writing in prose dusted with intimidating words like “generative” and “solipsistic.” There’s the telescopic historian, zooming across great swathes of human experience to reveal unsuspected patterns and trenchant truths. The philologist, parsing Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots; the psycho-sociologist, baring the souls of Alexander the Great, George Custer and T.E. Lawrence. Sometimes he adopts a confessional first-person voice, resurrecting his beloved bad-boy 1950s, four-letter words and all, with the gritty candor of a J.D. Salinger or Barry Levinson. Listen again, and he’s the committee stalwart who literally wrote USC’s academic blueprint, the 1994 Strategic Plan. Or the popular teacher whose General Education course, “The Monster and the Detective in Literature and Fiction,” draws close to 200 students a semester clamoring to find out just how Poe and Mary Shelley set the stage for Freddy vs. Jason.

This fall, Braudy adds a new line to his vitae – one that blows the lid off the question of just what he’s a professor of. With the November publication of his From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity, behold Leo Braudy, authority on machismo.

“Masculinity and terror! Of all the subjects to attract Leo!” laughs longtime friend James Kincaid, an English department colleague and Victorian scholar. “He’s so sweet. A gentle, kindly person: quiet and shy, a pacifist. It doesn’t seem to fit.”

Indeed. Braudy, 62, is soft-spoken, medium built and walks with a bit of a shuffle – the legacy of a childhood bout with polio. You’ll find him at art galleries and peace rallies, but he’s just as likely to turn up on Muscle Beach or at a monster-truck rally.

“It’s so interesting that we have this gentle, introspective man writing a history of war and masculinity – which is about as aggressive a subject as you could come up with,” says another longtime friend, Selma Holo, who is director of USC’s Fisher Gallery and a professor of art history.

Holo has known Braudy since the early 1980s, when he chaired the advisory committee overseeing the Fisher, then a museum of modest ambitions. She credits him with encouraging bold expansion and propelling the gallery to its present high profile.

The friendship goes well beyond a shared appreciation of the visual arts, though. “Leo is the person who calls up and asks: ‘How’re you doing?’” Holo says. “He’ll come sit in my office and tell me, ‘You need to slow down or you’re going to kill yourself.’ Who does that?” Holo pauses, genuinely stumped. Then she supplies her own answer wrapped in gender-bending praise:

“Usually you think – a girlfriend might do that.”

Braudy would have no problem with such a compliment. It goes right to the crux of Chivalry: that Western culture has for many centuries been moving away from a concept of male and female as polar opposites, toward a view of the sexes as degrees on a continuum.

To understand what he argues for, it helps to understand what he’s arguing against. Here it is in a nutshell: Braudy rejects the biological determinism that considers manliness absolute, war some primordial destiny encoded on the Y chromosome, brutality a basic fact of human nature.

“I’m against the idea of an unchanging human nature,” he says. “So many of these socio-biological arguments are fatalistic: ‘Men have testosterone, so war will always happen.’ It doesn’t have to,” Braudy contends.

He argues that manliness and war are not Platonic forms etched in stone but fluid, culture-bound concepts. “I’m very dubious,” he writes, “about the claim that all masculinity is the same, either across history or in a particular era.”

Leo Braudy’s interest in war might be explained by his membership in a generation called “war babies.” Born on the eve of Pearl Harbor, he grew up with the Korean War and the Cold War as the backdrops to his childhood, while the Vietnam War framed his young-adult perspective.

As a boy he collected war cards from bubblegum packs, read war comics, watched war movies, lost himself in war novels. Once his parents took him camping at Gettysburg; he recalls finding a musket ball fragment lodged in a rock crevice. Decades later, researching Chivalry, he trudged across battlefields at Marathon, Agincourt, Little Bighorn and the Somme. He steeped himself in the literature of war and warfare, until, as he puts it, “I could tell a hackbut from a howitzer.”

The history of weapons, uniforms and military strategy had already been done, but Braudy set himself a more subtle task: to tease out the history of cultural attitudes surrounding a thousand years of conflict. How had these attitudes changed over a millennium, and how do they shape modern beliefs ranging from Vietnam-era pacifism to post-September 11 Ramboism?

A work of exploration, synthesis and analysis rather than of settled opinion, Chivalry is “primarily meant for people like myself, curious amateurs who have had the relationship of war and masculinity dinned into them,” Braudy writes.

It had started with an odd assortment of essays – as scattershot as Braudy’s myriad interests. A long review of a book on Custer; an article comparing a pair of 17th-century poems on premature ejaculation; an essay on 20th-century “method” acting as a metaphor for other art forms.

Disjointed as these seemed, Braudy noticed a common thread. He kept writing, and pretty soon was embarked on a ridiculously ambitious project. Why not dissect masculinity the way he had dissected fame in his best-selling The Frenzy of Renown? That earlier undertaking – charting the changing nature of fame across two millennia – became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named the year’s best faculty book at USC. Novelist and classical scholar Erich Segal, reviewing it for the Washington Post in 1986, called Frenzy “remarkably ambitious” and “an impressive tour de force.”

Chivalry – tracing patterns of the male ideal, with war as its touchstone, over a thousand years of art, anthropology, literature and history – was no less daunting. Weighing in at just under 600 pages, the book surveys everything from medieval-to-modern rules of engagement and emerging war technologies to cloning, male sexuality and pornography.

At first blush, Chivalry seems to come out of left field. Braudy’s first book had focused on the blurred line between history and fiction at the dawn of a new narrative form called the novel. (“It’s no accident that Fielding called it The History of Tom Jones,” he says.) That had been the subject of his dissertation though, interestingly, Braudy never took a course in 18th-century literature either as an undergraduate at Swarthmore or a doctoral student at Yale. But Enlightenment history: Now that was a passion. So was film and “pop culture,” a discipline that even now elicits pained grimaces in some academic circles.

“Right from the beginning Leo had a very strong interest in film,” says collaborator Marshall Cohen, USC emeritus professor of law and philosophy and co-editor of Film Theory and Criticism. “He’s a rather independent person; his work is not just a result of culture studies becoming fashionable.”

Growing up Jewish in Philadelphia at a time when a ticket to the movies cost 10 cents, Braudy and his friends from Central High (the second-oldest public school in America, he volunteers) had combed the city looking for rare films. Communist Party showings of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Japan Society screenings of Ozu’s and Mizogushi’s oeuvres, art museum showings of films by British director Michael Powell. “If the Klan had sponsored Birth of a Nation, we probably would have gone there as well,” he quips in his film book, The World in a Frame.

Though strictly self-taught, Braudy’s clique of juvenile cineastes “could feel superior to the newspaper film critics, whose familiarity with film seemed to be – and actually was – so much less extensive than our own,” he notes.

As a lowly junior professor of English at Yale, Braudy continued to flout convention. There were the New Critics, approaching literature with a scientific objectivity that left no room for warmth or enthusiasm, let alone the pronoun “I” or an active-voice verb. And later there were the deconstructionists, who – while recognizing the inherent subjectivity of questions like “what is art?” or “what is a primary text?” – were so lost in a fog of meta-theory that only another theorist could grasp what they were talking about.

“On the one hand historical study was barely tolerated, and on the other hand few academic literary critics thought that much could be learned from popular culture,” Braudy writes, reflecting on a career that took him to Columbia and Johns Hopkins before he settled down at USC in 1983.

“I had brought myself up on movies, comic books, trash fiction, rock and roll, as well as the classics and whatever else I could find. Now contemplating a career in literary study, I wondered how I fit into this world that seemed to reject virtually everything that had nurtured me,” he explained in his 1992 book on pop culture, Native Informant.

“What is masculinity,” Braudy asks in his new book, “when it is much easier for the computer nerd to get a job and support a family than it is for a brawny factory worker?” Photo by Philip Channing

“When I think of a scholar, I think of a boring person locking himself away,” says Dorothy Braudy. Her husband is an exception. “He’s fun to be with. You should see him dance.” Photo by Philip Channing