Men Mastering the Elements

Backdraft, 1991 / The Perfect Storm, 2000

In both Backdraft and The Perfect Storm, the elements might figure as a useful narrative device for exploring masculinity and heterosexual desire. We occupy the male characters’ perspective, broadly defined as being thrill-seeking (a true man can never be tamed, can never settle), with a fraught but monogamous relationship with women due to the thrill-seeking, while maintaining deeply loyal to his bros (he has conservative values).

If we see the elements as a stand-in for female desire, or the terrifying possibility of endless orgasm which no man could satisfy, then watching men dressed in strippers’ outfits risking their lives to tame the elements is exhilarating: the vast void of unconquerable sea, the wily ways of fire moving through a building. In both these films, the tragedy - facing the elements with fatal consequences - is relayed both “on the ground” and through the mass media of the time. On the one hand, there is witnessing tragedy at a distance through mass media, which is possibly the more familiar position for western audiences. On the other hand, there is the terrifying but seductive immediate experience of brute determination against the odds. While we follow our masculine men around, we also see the woman waiting with equally fraught devotion for her hero to return. In the Perfect Storm, our hero’s woman sits in a small town bar and watches the TV with other women who have accepted man’s primal need to be facing death as often, and as profitably, as possible. In Backdraft, there’s a photographer on scene for the particularly tragic firefighting incidents who takes the familiar Nat Geo trauma-porn photo that circulates across papers, magazines and TV screens. While The Perfect Storm retains a respectful reverence that seems reasonable considering the scale of the tragedy, Backdraft benefits from not being based on a true story, and revels in it’s excesses. It features a sex scene directly cutting to the foreplay of finding a fire. There’s a Heat-esque threat of crossing over to the dark side, as the two types of men who love to play with fire in this film are psychos and firemen - the only ones who understand what it really means to be a male man that loves fire. This macho psychosis gets in the way of our hero Kurt Russell’s hetero romance, but only fuels his drive to protect his little brother, who is still green to dancing with death. All this against the omnipresent background of budget cuts threatening the sanctity and righteousness of their work, and pushing them even closer to death! The stakes are incredible!

Backdraft is an excellent movie I can recommend for the thrills, The Perfect Storm is an excellent weather movie and best watched on a rainy day in February.