Slow Your Roll

Slow and steady, my good man, and we’ll get there when we get there.

So seems many of my favorite shows, rollicking character-driven monsters of masculinity like MAD MEN, BOARDWALK EMPIRE, THEWIRE, DEXTER this season. Sure, some like BREAKING BAD have been firing on all cylinders since halfway through season 1 without slowing but mostly, if you want to care when a motherfucker gets his head blown off, you have to care about him in the first place. That can’t happen if action is replacing character study.

So it’s mind-blowing that AMERICAN HORROR STORY, in its second episode has already had an in-home assault which should obviously result in the paterfamilias moving his family out of the house he just bought. Goddammit, it’s haunted on every side, by demons both supernatural and in the flesh. But why do they hasten the action, throw plot up on the wall like an 8-beirut-game-deep projectile vomit? I think it’s because they think it’s what we want. And after talking to a few others in the TV biz, perhaps I’m deeper in the minority. But why?

It’s time to slow the world down, men. There’s a trick to being an effective speaker called a “power pause”. As we move forward and emails become linked to our testicles and we attain wireless internet channeled through our prostates, we lose more and more of what it means to be human and, especially, what it means to be a man.

Slow your roll. A true man doesn’t speed up to match the world – he slows it down to whatever pace he wants, even at times making it painfully slow for some.

I’m not saying men don’t move fast. Working in Hollywood, I’m surrounded by movers and shakers who talk fast, work fast, are so hungry for everything that they have no desire to hesitate, not even for a second when there’s money to be made and deals to be closed. Speaking of hunger, I eat at an appallingly-fast pace. And speaking of hesitate, my dad has a brilliant saying “he who hesitates is lost.” And yes, snowboarding is only fun when done fast enough that you’ll break something if you fall and for football players force equals speed times mass, which also applies to bullets.

What I’m saying is that we need to realize that entertainment is to be consumed like a fine steak. While I eat all my food like a ravenous beast, I know enough to respect a steak. It must be consumed slowly. A man needs to taste each beautiful strand, you need to savor the harder outer flesh with whatever spices and marinades, the blood, the raw pink in the middle (as a man should eat it). And of all media, books, a “dying medium” should be approached this way as only through reading good literature will we ever come close to understanding our own huMANhood.

Let’s take this a bit further. Most TV procedurals, the most action movies, and most supermarket thrillers can best be likened to a McDonald’s cheeseburger. It goes down easy and tastes okay going down but leaves you feeling empty pretty quickly. Watch a show like BOARDWALK EMPIRE, a movie like THERE WILL BE BLOOD or CHINA TOWN, or read anything by Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. Even an 800-page cowboy novel like LONESOME DOVE, a brilliant essay on what it means to be a man in the last years that such a thing truly existed. It can be a little difficult and at times it just might feel a bit overwhelming. But consuming these high works of entertainment is like eating a 64-ounce Filet Mignon, if such a legendary cut existed. They’ll leave you feeling fulfilled, complete, satiated and, once completed, even a bit proud to be a man.

 Slow your roll in your consumption and take time to savor something. It’s all we have before we’re reduced to little more than automaton assembly line androgynous high-speed machinations. Once that happens, we might as well call it a day and trade our balls for hard drives. 

For the time being, start with something easy - watch BOARDWALK EMPIRE, read something other than a detective/medical/legal thriller, buy an old classic like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and, for fuck's sake, raise a hair and call when a show jumps 3 episodes forward on the second showing of the season.

- Ryan