'The Expendables 2': Masculinity Porn

Still from The Expendables 2 [source]

"You want to man up? I'll man you up." - Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables 2

It's a good thing The Expendables 2 was released after the Olympics ended, or a lot of innocent athletes might have tested positive for testosterone doping.  Where 2010's The Expendables set out to recreate the 1980's tough-guy action genre with a straight face, its sequel is more willing to consciously dip into self-parody territory, finally giving audiences what they had wanted and expected out of the original:  The Travelling Wilburys of action movie stars running through every available cliche from the genre with a wink and a smile. [The sequel currently rated 62% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes versus the original's 41% rotten rating.]

The Expendables 2 strives to be the Most Macho Movie of all time.  Every possible signifier of manliness is on display [spoilers ahead]: Skulls. Guns. Knives the size of small children. Nameless henchmen who explode into geysers of blood when killed.  Hip flasks. Cigar chomping. Feats of brute strength. Explosions. Tanks. Brass knuckles. Gratuitous beret-wearing.  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme.  Chuck Norris himself reciting a Chuck Norris fact.

What appears on screen is not driven by story, logic, or reason, but by whatever is the most Righteously Dudely.  This is the only reason I can account for Stallone's character favoring a single-action revolver in firefights against scores of men with automatic weapons, or Jean-Claude Van Damme's villain using a roundhouse kick to drive one of the aforementioned child-sized knives into the chest of a restrained man, or Terry Crews pausing to announce "we've got company" before diving to safety under a hail of bullets.  Because it looks cool, because it looks manly, because it's how it would have happened in a twelve-year-old boy's imagination in 1985.

To my surprise, The Expendables 2 gets very little mileage out of promoting masculinity by contrasting it against femininity.  The only significant female character, Nan Yu's Maggie, is the Smurfette of the group. Stallone gets some macho points with his absurdly chauvinist reaction to being told to work with a woman ("I don't have time to babysit," yadda yadda), but Maggie shows him up by being smart and competent and tough and even proficient in torture.  She's one of the guys. She even hits on Stallone with an awkward forced pun.  [Her advances are rejected, because of the old Spider-Man excuse of "people I love get killed", not because Stallone is literally twice her age.]

Promotion poster for The Expendables 2 featuring Nan Yu

In contrast to Maggie, when the team comes across a village of only women (the men having been forced into plutonium-excavating by Van Damme), their attempts to defend themselves with firearms are so incompetent that they can't hit any of Our Heroes even after they start deliberately walking into the line of fire.  Women! Can't force them into plutonium-excavating, can't leave them behind to defend themselves either.  Sheesh.

And that's the only scene in the film with more than one woman in it.  The Expendables 2 is actually a bizarrely sexless film, with no nudity, hardly any expression of the male gaze, and only the aforementioned fleeting hint at unconsummated romance. Perhaps the filmmakers were worried about girl cooties.  Or perhaps women are just irrelevant to the type of masculinity relevant to the film: a pre-pubescent hero-worship of larger-than-life tough guys.

Side-stepping sexuality may have been a shrewd move on the part of the filmmakers, or we could have ended up with another Sucker Punch on our hands.  The Expendables 2 is masculinity porn that audiences can walk away from without shame and without further thought.  With its shear over-the-top silliness, it easy to dismiss the whole thing as harmless and apolitical.

But that doesn't mean we should dismiss it as such.  Why do unbridled displays of masculinity in an of themselves provide entertainment value (or at least, why are they expected to)? What would a throwback-y femininity extravaganza of a movie look like?  Is it terrible that the idea of such a film sounds miserable to me, and I genuinely enjoyed my time watching The Expendables 2? How is the collective id of young boys from thirty years ago still such a powerful cultural force that it's apparently imprinted on the mind of this grown-up feminist woman in the year 2012?