The tragic death of Heath Ledger -- just determined to be an overdose -- has robbed Hollywood of one of its Australian stand-ins for American machismo. Never mind the trade deficit, or even Barack Obama's "moral deficit"; Hollywood is suffering from a macho deficit, and it's having to turn to the land of beer-swilling, sheep-shearing men-in-denim to find its cowboys and cads.

When Hollywood first flirted with all things Aussie in the 1980s, it was a bit of a po-mo joke. "Look at Crocodile Dundee with his big shiny knife and taste for lager - how quaint!" laughed cinema audiences. It's no joke today. At a time when American stars have been feminised, preened and plucked, it's Australia that is providing the muscle for the grittier acting jobs.

Crocodile Dundee: A joke, not a man In recent years, Ledger had joined Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman and Eric Bana as a Real Bloke who could play gruff cowboys, lascivious bastards or any other role that required the leading man to have hair on his chest. In his breakthrough film 10 Things I Hate About You, a high-school spin on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Ledger looked like he had been shuttled in from another planet rather than simply another hemisphere. Where the hairless, super-tanned jock (Andrew Keegan) was boringly arrogant, and the geek with a crush (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was predictably nervous, Ledger's scruffy, unkempt and slurry-voiced Patrick Verona was a complex macho character - nasty to begin with, but later opened up by the love of a good woman. The director even allowed him to keep his Aussie accent, as if to accentuate this untidy, unruly character's exoticness amid the cardboard cut-out boys and girls of a typical high-school movie.

In later films, Ledger played American rather than Australian; his rugged Down Under temperament meant he was frequently more convincing as a manly American than many of the prim and waxed actors who are actually American-born. He even played cowboy better. In Brokeback Mountain, Ledger's tortured and mumbling Ennis Del Mar is far more believable than all-American Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist. (In one scene in that film, Ledger and Gyllenhaal were required to leap naked off a cliff into a lake. Ledger did it, but Gyllenhaal was replaced by a stuntman because he is scared of heights. If you want an actor to take risks, look Down Under.)

Traditional masculinity: Untraditional lifestyle In Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, in which six actors play characters based on Bob Dylan, Ledger's "Robbie Clark" is the most convincingly American. Half-James Dean, half-Jack Kerouac, Ledger certainly makes a far better fist of his role than Brit actor Christian Bale, whose American accent and demeanour are so contrived that he ends up sounding like George Bush with a quiff. Amongst the ragbag of American and British actors tackling Dylan in I'm Not There, Ledger best captures the swagger and sexism of the American male with a 1950s mentality who is desperately trying to adapt to life in 1960s America. It is striking that Haynes employed an Australian woman - Cate Blanchett - to play the character most clearly and literally based on Dylan. It seems even women from Down Under, otherwise known as "Sheilas", are better at playing American heroes than American men are.

Again and again, Hollywood looks to Australians to inject testosterone into a movie. Like Ledger, Russell Crowe recently played a cowboy: Ben Wade in 3.10 to Yuma. If an American actor was to play Wade, a coach-robbing outlaw, he would first have to put on weight (and then give numerous interviews telling everyone how difficult it was to "be fat") and then do some method-style research with menacing men who have been involved in hold-ups of one kind or another. Not Crowe; his jowls and his sense of menace are real; attributes of his Australian manhood.

Who wants a piece of this?: Do not call this man a sissy It is striking that Ridley Scott called on Crowe to play a hard, 1970s drug-busting cop in his epic American Gangster. Young American actors only seem interested in playing 1970s crime-busters for post-machismo laughs; think of the awful Starsky and Hutch and Dukes of Hazzard remakes. It took a full-bodied, croaky-voiced Australian to breathe life back into that old American character, the committed, flares-wearing cop, who was a staple of 1970s TV shows and cinema. And let us not forget Crowe's greatest cinematic moment, as General Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator, a role many said was symbolic of the true American values of valour and loyalty over backstabbing corruption. Hollywood, if you need an American symbol, phone for an Australian.

Australian men are called upon to play Hollywood's edgier superheroes, too. Sure, pretty but dull American boys can safely play Superman and Spiderman (Brandon Routh and Tobey Maguire respectively); but if you need a superhero with hair on his chest and mad thoughts rushing through in his head, only an Australian will do. Hugh Jackman's fearsome Wolverine, huge, hirsute and with sideburns to die for, is the spiritual leader of the pack in the X-Men movies. Surrounded by young men and women who experience their superpowers as mental and physical afflictions (all played by young American actors, of course), Jackman's cocksure and principled Wolverine is the natural American leader, the steady-minded figurehead of this band of freaky rebels. It took Eric Bana to play the Hulk, American pop culture's most obviously tortured macho soul. Part shy scientist, part raging beast, Bana played out America's own crisis of masculinity on cinema screens, bringing both his notable acting skills and his innate Australian swagger to a role that required him to be both wimp and whack job.

In our PC, flaccid, image-obsessed times, new American actors seem to lack the personality and resources to play hard American, crazed American, tortured American or heroic American. Instead that faraway land where old masculine values still survive is having to send its young men to American shores to roleplay American virture and fury. Heath Ledger's death is not only a great tragedy for his family and friends; it has also lowered Hollywood's quota of blokes.

Also in Jewcy: So many of Hollywood's American-born macho men have been Jews that we had to make a slide-show to hold all the pictures.

Sissy Nation: How America Became A Culture of Wimps And StoopitsSissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps and Stoopits (Virgin Books, on sale February 6) is one of the funniest books you will ever read -- if you aren't a sissy. Author John Strausbaugh, a contributor to the New York Times, unloads on every target that has infuriated him over the last fifty-six years of his existence: left-wing political correctness, right-wing religious fundamentalists, the obesity epidemic, the anorexia epidemic, the neutering of NASA and the death of brazen American individualism.

If you believe in anything whatsoever, Strausbaugh will probably offend you, but the fact that you are offended is his point. Jewcy interviewed Strausbaugh by e-mail. (Some of his answers are cut-and-pasted from the book, but we're too Sissy to ask him to paraphrase.)

The book seems like a primal scream, something that has been repressed for a very long time. How long has this rage festered inside of you?

Sissies repress. You calling me a Sissy? I've been ranting about our increasing Sissitude for years, but I didn't know that's what it was. It took time for me to realize that these separate rants were all reactions to mutually reinforcing aspects of one big trend. So I wrote Sissy Nation, my unified field theory of Sissitude.

Continue reading...

"My mudda didn't love me enough": The cracked masculinity of Tony SopranoIn the pilot episode of The Sopranos, mob captain Tony Soprano and his teenage daughter Meadow sit in an old, empty church. Tony marvels at the place—its grandeur, its history—and tries to get his daughter to do the same. “Your great-grandfather and his brother Frank—they built this place. Stone and marble workers,” he says with pride. Meadow is skeptical—just the two of them? “No,” Tony explains. ...

Thanks to user SimpleLiquid for the tip-off on this mindboggling interview.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), famous (and infamous, in some quarters) for translating Arabic-language media into English, brings us this video of a Lebanese television station's fawning (but informative!) interview with Abdallah al-Bishi, "Saudi Arabia's most famous executioner."

As they explain part way through, they started the interview a tad late because Al-Bishi ran late at work and had to finish one more execution. Ah well, better too much work than not enough, I always say. So they open with some stock footage of Abdallah complete with a groan-inducing metaphor about his being a harvester of "ripened heads."

Questions from the interview include:

What was your most difficult execution? (Answer: I've had to execute personal friends.)

How is executing a woman different from executing a man? (Answer: women are more stoic, men freak out and don’t stand straight, that's a real a pain in the neck for Abdallah)

Do you feel compassion for the people you execute? (Answer: no)

And of course, "Abdallah, tell us about the day you executed so many people that your sword broke." (He does.)

But my favorite part is when the giddy male interviewer gratuitously praises Abdallah's manhood.

Enjoy.

Dmitriy Salita, an undefeated welterweight boxer and Golden Gloves champion, is an Orthodox Jew. His personal website describes him as “a famous Jew boxer,” and he climbs into the ring to the thumping bass of Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae star. If Salita gets his way, he’ll be the next Jewish media icon. He’d better be careful what he wishes for. With his Hasidic music and exhibitionistic piety, Salita may awaken a dangerous and venerable beast: hagiographical journalism that sets messianic expectations for Jewish athletes, musicians, or anyone else who fits neatly into the timeworn narrative about the Jew who thrives in a goyish ...