Step aside George Clooneys and Brad Pitts, there are new babes in town. No more cigars and sleek suits, this group of young men is clad in flannels with their Converses untied. Instead of scotch on the rocks, it’s milk with a straw. Ditch the limo to the club for a night of bicycling fun. It’s a bizarre site, but this is the new Hollywood.

What the industry used to expect of young leading men — to be dapper and suave — has turned into a generation of brooding tortured souls. While the studios still bank on the A-list men to bring in the bucks, many are now relying on the prototypes of the guitar-playing tormented artists to lure young women into believing they are ubiquitously standing on the corner or sitting in the neighborhood coffee shop.

Tinseltown has traded its James Deans and Humphrey Bogarts for the likes of Michael Ceras and Joseph Gordon-Levitts. The epitome of the ideal anguished soul, Levitt made bank with his role as Tom in last summer’s blockbuster hit ‘(500) Days of Summer.’ Tom, a true appreciator of architecture and The Smiths, believes in love. But when his heart gets broken by the woman he thought he loved (Summer), Tom becomes bitter and confused … until he meets Autumn.

Though the film is without a happily ever after, women and men everywhere rejoiced in its honest candor about someone not being the one. More importantly, it characterized a new type of role male actors could play without immediately being typecast as the macho: leading men who always gets the girls.

‘(500) Days of Summer’ became the overnight movie anthem and has since created a niche genre of men where being cool and collected doesn’t mean much, unless you have superb taste in books and music with a hidden talent of quoting EE Cummings.

But not all the credit can be given to these top-tier executives for creating the fixture of the ‘tormented artists.’ They’ve always existed, but in mini doses. It was seen in Bogart’s role in ‘Casablanca,’ Marlon Brando’s in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and John Cusack’s in ‘Say Anything.’

S.T. VanAirsdale, Esquire’s pop culture columnist, wrote in his July 2009 column, ‘Hollywood Killed the Macho Star,’ that ‘the film industry is reconstituting the image of the classic lead with guys who are younger, cooler, more affordable representations of the Irony Age — smart actors who confer a crucial relatability for an increasingly anxious era.’

What VanAirsdale writes is true: People in our generation are no longer gung-ho with the picture-perfect idea that life is wonderful. The economy has proven to us that nothing is stable and has made us anxious with the reality that jobs, more than ever, are scarce and competitive. The swagger and poise of glamour has been replaced with the residue of a generation’s dissatisfaction.

We’ve become angsty individuals, and pondering existential questions about living overwhelm our thinking. The sarcastic, cynical outlooks we used as defensive mechanisms have actually turned us into a generation that VanAirsdale refers to as ‘The Irony Age.’

The ball has finally dropped: What once used to be a life sugarcoated by our parents as fine and dandy now comes with complications, dramas and heartbreaks. Just like when we turned to entertainment for requiem, we now want to see those same characters mirror our own lives. Just as we are going through the heartbreaks, they must go through them, too.

These tormented artists’ archetypes currently fit the pace with where the generation is headed, but it doesn’t mean the George Clooneys and Brad Pitts need to be extinguished. They still represent a part of our culture that very much values the fascination of glamour we all need. It’s a matter of choosing which detachment of reality we want to face.

Angela Hu is a sophomore magazine journalism and English and textual studies major. Her column appears weekly and she can be reached at ajhu01@syr.edu.
 

Published on April 25, 2010 at 12:00 pm