Man Up, Thumbs Down

Will Keen’s grandfather fought in WWII.  Will Keen’s father fought in Vietnam.  Will Keen plays Call of Duty on Playstation 3.  

Is he a “real man?”

According to creator/writer Christopher Moynihan, the fate of the American man looks bleak.  Set in suburban Columbus, Ohio, Moynihan’s new ABC sitcom, Man Up!, tells the story of three 30-something friends attempting to preserve their manhood and man-kind from those who seek to destroy it.

Will’s son, Nathan (played by Jake Johnson), is turning 13.  Although Nathan is infatuated with his father’s “Old Mohaska” (slang for gun, in this case knife), he exhibits a mildly feminine burst of glee when the girl he likes confirms her invite to his party.  The boy is declared “a work in progress,” and the father, driven by conceived father-son expectations, is more resolute than ever to give his son a gift to guide the boy’s proper transition into manhood. (Later on, those same expectations convince him to fight a mob of disgruntled groomsmen).  His wife, Theresa (played by Teri Polo) has bought their son a violent video game, but Will is determined to find a truly manly gift.  Predictably, the son is given “Old Mohaska,” and accidentally cuts himself with it before Will is finished explaining to his protesting wife that his father gave him the knife when he was Nathan’s age.

The plot of this pilot episode would have been instantly recognizable had it premiered two months later while its inspiration undoubtedly aired simultaneously on a competing network.  The 1983 film, A Christmas Story, based on the 1960s short stories and anecdotes of Chicago-native Jean Shepherd, deals with coming-of-age gifting in a similar way – with a similar result.  Ralphie Parker, a nine-year-old boy in 1930s/1940s Hammond, Indiana, wants a Red Ryder BB Gun, but adults tell him “You’ll shoot your eye out.”  His father does buy him the Mohaska, and explains to his protesting wife that his father gave him a gun when he was Ralphie’s age.  Ralphie takes the gun to the backyard and, on the first shot, nearly shoots his eye out.          

Masculinity is becoming harder to define in our society.  Gender and gender roles are being questioned, and traditional images of manhood are becoming scarce.  Comparing the suburban man of today to the one of yesterday may convince those who care about that sort of thing that men are becoming an “over-evolved generation of panty-waists.”  Will, as his father before him, and his father’s father before him, decides a real man should have a real gun (or, in this case, a real knife), instead of a video game.  Man Up! suggests that this is why men are not men anymore.  Men don’t participate in real violence.  Men don’t use real weapons, and are unable to use even the weapons that have been passed down to them.  Today, most men experience violence solely through games played on a screen or an ice rink or a chalk-lined field.  Their weapons are hockey sticks and remote controls, and their tactics are learned not from war, but from Playstation 3 and Monday Night Football. 

The sitcom identifies another cause of the fall of masculinity: women.  Women are the obstacle to manliness, and yet women accuse men of not being real men.  Women will not let men have any fun.  (“Theresa will kill me” if I do that.)  Women drive men, in this case Craig Griffith (played by Christopher Moynihan), to interrupt weddings in the style of The Graduate singing “Brown Eyed Girl.”  (“I need closure.”  “You need to close your vagina.”)  Women use their power over men for evil, as does Brenda Hayden (played by Amanda Detmer) when she decides to bring her new “soap-operatic, sensitive-yet-sexy” boyfriend, Grant (played by Henry Simmons), to the birthday party to enrage her ex-husband, Kenny Hayden (played by Dan Fogler).  Men cannot be men because women have them by the balls.       

These three amigos attempt to protect and project their masculinity, but, despite their best efforts, they always end up looking like a bunch of queers.

Ha.

Although Moynihan’s writing bares resemblance to thoughtful examinations of the state of modern-day masculinity, such as Howard Korder’s 1988 Pulitzer Prize-nominated coming-of-age play, Boys’ Life, one cannot ignore the message that lies beneath Man Up!’s guise of gender satire: Will Keen needs to teach his son how to be a man so other boys don’t think he is gay.  And how fortunate that this point can be made (over and over and over again) by using the same gimmick employed by Saturday Night Live and countless sitcoms to get laughs – straight people acting like gay people.  What could be funnier than that, right?

Man Up! is centered around immature men and women reacting to unmanly behavior.  Because the show is a satire on masculinity, it is able to make fun of gays exactly as shows of this nature always have, but from a slightly elevated plane.  That matter aside, the characters have no depth, the writing is preachy and the jokes - all of them - are not funny.