Television
Grown men crying
John Diamond
It is commonly understood that the American language takes its rhythm and its cadence, as well as much of its vocabulary, from the various languages of its founding European immigrants and its ex-African slaves. In fact the single tongue common to all Americans and the one they seem to learn within days of coming across the Rio Bravo and into the barrio, is Modern Gestalt, the language of the encounter group and the therapy session. With one exception, none of the highlighted partici- pants of Wild Men (BBC 2, 9.50 p.m.,Tues- day) had been through the psychothera- peutic mill before, yet all of them spoke its language like natives.
'God damn, I needed you and you weren't there,' and 'It's goodbye, dad — I don't need that part of you,' they cried, having been told by their group leader each to draw a circle in the frozen mud of the Texan outback and invite the ghosts of their father into it for a chat. 'You might have to bring him in with a stick,' said the leader, and most of the men, not wishing to trust anything to luck, picked up a stick at once.
These weren't members of the Green- wich Village or Camden Town therapy set, those wimpy geezers with scrappy pony- tails and dog-eared copies of Jong and Laing in their batiked shoulder bags. These were real men, middle-aged and clad in LL Bean parkas and good ol' boys baseball caps. They were no-nonsense prosecution lawyers and construction foremen and swaggering Latino engineers who had all come on the Wild Man weekend to learn manhood's new creed.
In essence the creed was much the same as that preached by a stop-smoking thera- pist to whom I once paid £80. His simple line was that instead of waking up in the morning and saying 'Christ, but I could do with a smoke,' you woke up and said 'Whoopee! How lucky I am not to have a cigarette in my mouth'. Here the theory was not 'How terrible it is to be a man and want to cry, which is by definition a horri- bly female trait' but 'My tears are men's tears and honestly shed at that. Rejoice!'
To get from the first stage to the second involved a lot of hugging and beating of drums and yelling at the moon and farting and cod-Indian processioning and confess- ing and, of course, crying. It was all terribly American, and not just because of the American Indian initiation rites that had been abducted into the group's code (`Other cultures teach you to be a man in strict, formal ways: ours doesn't,' said the leader). I imagine that such groups will eventually start in Britain, taking the wimpy geezers to camp on Dartmoor for the weekend where they will dress in woad and recreate the rites of passage of the Picts, but only in America would the parti- cipants perform without embarrassment in front of the television cameras.
I had expected to be embarrassed myself watching them at therapeutic play, but in the spirit of confession that the film engendered — I have to admit that I was moved, at times joyfully so, by the specta- cle. The leader made the assumption that all 100 men had suffered physically or psy- chologically at the hands or mouths of their fathers, and it seemed to be a valid assumption. Not a man there didn't have a tale to tell of a father who routinely sat down to eat with a scowl and his belt slung round his neck. The only person for whom I did feel vaguely embarrassed was a work- mate of the construction foreman who was shown listening to a description of the forthcoming weekend at the start of the film: 'I'm goin' there to get rid of some of the rage in there. To get stuck to my feel- ings.' His workmate digested this bemused- ly. 'Your family going with yer, then?'
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