Masculinity, violence and the expectations of a male dominated society

Yesterday I watched a movie called ‘in a better world’, it is a Danish movie, it is so amazing and beautifully heart wrenching that it made me shed a tear or two. From a couple of months I’m watching a lot of foreign movies and upto this date I watched 2 more Danish movies- the hunt and after the wedding. Both these movie and yesterday’s movie that I watched have one thing in common that they are filled with a melancholic atmosphere, they are difficult to watch because they are heart wrenching drama about family lives. I’m NOT going to review this movie but I’ll tell you what it taught me.

The film poster

This movie, in a better world tells us the stories of two adolescent boys named Elias and Christian who share a risky friendship. Both these characters are poles apart from one another. Christian has just recently lost his mother to cancer and he is deeply disturbed by it, while Elias is a boy who is picked upon by a merciless bully in school. This film also shows the lives of their respective fathers, Christian’s father is a man who is filled with grief and guilt, he is worried about his son and his behavior, while Anton Elias’s father is a man who switched between two countries- an African country and the beautiful Denmark countryside. He too is disturbed as a result of violence during his doctor job in Africa. This movie taught me a lot of things.

The way the adolescent boys are depicted is brilliant, it makes me remember of my own mental state when I was an angst filled rebellious teenager who had hate for the entire world and was equally ineffective in distinguishing between what is good and what is bad. It also surprises me that this world is a patriarch world, where men who resort to violence are favored. This movie speaks about this and also highlights our inner dark urge for violence against a fellow human being just to exhibit dominance. This society expects that the man should be strong, dominant, cold hearted and also insensitive to emotions. These expectations are very wrong, when a man cries it doesn’t mean that he is weak it just means that he is sensitive to his emotions, and that does infer anything about his maleness at all, when a man backs out of a fight, it doesn’t mean he is coward, it rather tell his courage to not to get into trouble for the wrong reasons. All these expectations are that of a male dominated society, and they are not really the criteria for a perfect male, rather they are all signs of an irresponsible man. We should remember that man/male/boy is also a human being, he too feels emotions like pain, he is not cold hearted he too is scarred by the real world moreover he also has the right to express them. I think it is time to move on from such a hypocritic expectations, that produces a highly irresponsible man who takes up violence at the slightest instance, and gets into a fight, and move on into a world, where this society accommodates a man’s feelings, his freedom to express it and at the same time accept a man who solves problems by his wit and brain than his fist and adrenaline rush. Let’s move on to a better society and be peaceful. 🙂