Actor John Leguizamo, breaking down while receiving the Career Achievement Award from the Critics Choice Association:
Leguizamo has been in a hundred movies and is fresh off a gift gig in the representation Olympics that was The Odyssey. He once boasted that voicing a dipshit sloth in the Ice Age series “got me a brownstone. It got me two extra homes, it got me a beautiful beachfront house in the Hamptons, it got me two pools!” and the next movie might buy “a helicopter” — and that was before he said that even if you “write like Shakespeare” but “look Latino,” the “odds are against you in Hollywood.” He’s whined that Spain’s Javier Bardem (thirty times the actor Leguizamo is) got parts in Before Night Falls and Being the Ricardos, railed against Antonio Banderas being cast in El Mariachi, and decried the choice of James Franco for the coveted role of Fidel Castro (“No more appropriation Hollywood… he ain’t Latino!”). He complained about Carlito’s Way co-star Al Pacino’s iconic performance in Scarface, moaned that John Turturro’s Jesus helped make The Big Lebowski comedy legend, and even blasted the great Eli Wallach, who once received a residual check for two cents (“I’m not a rich man”), for helping turn The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly into an international hit.
Forget that “long-dead British guy” Shakespeare can’t even stay in English departments in America (his portrait was pulled off the walls at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016), Leguizamo is the latest high-profile American male to demonstrate that crying and playing the victim is how a man gets things done now (he should be digitally removed from John Wick for the offense). This is especially true in Hollywood, where Boys Don’t Cry has no meaning, beyond of course being an Oscar-winning role for a woman.
Most men know crying as a real show of emotion is fine, encouraged even, but making shows of loss for material gain has always been considered despicable, from Coriolanus through Kipling (“If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn at minute nine…”). There is such a thing as manly behavior in a positive sense, and Leguizamo embodies the increasingly common phenomenon of its complete absence in a technical specimen.
Who cares about one actor? No one. I do care about the adult world my sons will soon join. Take a more serious example, the “Cornell 7” case. If any of my boys were involved in a sordid episode like that I’d be horrified for a hundred reasons — because it’s undignified and shows a lack of respect for women, yourself, even your housemates to dance with a girl for five minutes before shopping for a third to play drunk wiener polo, because ketamine makes you dumb as a squirrel, because if you’re too high for sex, she probably is, too, because if you text “free pussy” about any woman you’ll deserve it if her brother shows up to throw you out a window, because no man worth admiring has ever agreed to be the fifth or sixth person to climb on a woman in a night, and so on.
At the same time, it’s outrageous that women have somehow won the right not be named in court papers or media reports after making accusations, or that no one in the intellectual world since Camille Paglia has suggested it’s wrong to allow people to selectively surrender “agency” and personal responsibility (two years ago Jane Doe was voluntarily “ten shots deep” and high as a kite, now she was “plied with alcohol and drugs”). The next generation of boys will have to compete with men and women in an era when “positive masculinity” has been devalued almost out of existence. That’s thanks in significant part to the craven wimphood of American men, who spent most of the last four decades smiling nervously and waving on the transformation of university humanities teaching into one big seminar on men as historical oppressors.
As a result, the taxonomy of male public figures is littered with absurd caricatures like Leguizamo. There are many types, each representing a different spineless strategy for how to compete in a world that tells them their sex is dangerous and superfluous:
