I never knew you connected so much to Jim Rockford. It's uncanny, because I also have intense feelings about The Rockford Files, in my early 20s, but perhaps it was identification with the actor more than the character. I remember my routine of classes in the morning, afternoon tv with the likes of the Rockford Files and junk food, then off to a shift for an evening retail job. I don't think Garner ever strays far from channeling a figure like Rockford when he's doing Maverick or his role in Support Your Local Sheriff, for example. In my own journey through masculinity awareness and oblivion, I was looking for male models of resilience and autonomy at that age. Another pole was Ian Curtis and Ernest Hemingway. Garner also happens to look a little too much like my father did in the 1970s. I intimately understood how it was possible David Bell (the protagonist of Don DeLillo's Americana) had mirrored his own imago on Burt Lancaster. Jim Rockford as imago at 40, versus 20?
This is so interesting! I wish we could sit down and watch an episode together.
I was pretty confused about masculinity in my twenties. The model my father offered was inaccessible to me, even repellent, tied on the one hand to a basic competence at maneuvering through the world that I lacked and on the other hand to his hedonistic physicality--my dad loved food, sports, sex. I was ascetic enough to be embarrassed by these qualities, and frightened that I would never enjoy the core attributes of resilience and autonomy that you identify. As a result, I whipsawed through extremes, at one point very nearly joining the Marines in spite of my pacifist inclinations. Later in the decade, I decided that my confusion about masculinity and the difficulties I experienced connecting with women meant that I must be gay. Now I see that most of what I thought might be sexual attraction to men was simply an attraction to them--a desire to reconcile with the masculine image by which I'd felt terrorized as a child.
Today I'm much more at peace with my own masculinity and with men in general. Playing with gender is now something I see as completely central to my project as a writer. It's also been healing to be a teacher to the young men who pass through my classrooms at Lake Forest. Now that I'm older, I recognize the tenderness in them, whether they present as football players or with softer personae. In a small but significant way, The Rockford Files helped me get there.
I have a half-written memoir about all this that I should come back to someday.
I never knew you connected so much to Jim Rockford. It's uncanny, because I also have intense feelings about The Rockford Files, in my early 20s, but perhaps it was identification with the actor more than the character. I remember my routine of classes in the morning, afternoon tv with the likes of the Rockford Files and junk food, then off to a shift for an evening retail job. I don't think Garner ever strays far from channeling a figure like Rockford when he's doing Maverick or his role in Support Your Local Sheriff, for example. In my own journey through masculinity awareness and oblivion, I was looking for male models of resilience and autonomy at that age. Another pole was Ian Curtis and Ernest Hemingway. Garner also happens to look a little too much like my father did in the 1970s. I intimately understood how it was possible David Bell (the protagonist of Don DeLillo's Americana) had mirrored his own imago on Burt Lancaster. Jim Rockford as imago at 40, versus 20?
This is so interesting! I wish we could sit down and watch an episode together.
I was pretty confused about masculinity in my twenties. The model my father offered was inaccessible to me, even repellent, tied on the one hand to a basic competence at maneuvering through the world that I lacked and on the other hand to his hedonistic physicality--my dad loved food, sports, sex. I was ascetic enough to be embarrassed by these qualities, and frightened that I would never enjoy the core attributes of resilience and autonomy that you identify. As a result, I whipsawed through extremes, at one point very nearly joining the Marines in spite of my pacifist inclinations. Later in the decade, I decided that my confusion about masculinity and the difficulties I experienced connecting with women meant that I must be gay. Now I see that most of what I thought might be sexual attraction to men was simply an attraction to them--a desire to reconcile with the masculine image by which I'd felt terrorized as a child.
Today I'm much more at peace with my own masculinity and with men in general. Playing with gender is now something I see as completely central to my project as a writer. It's also been healing to be a teacher to the young men who pass through my classrooms at Lake Forest. Now that I'm older, I recognize the tenderness in them, whether they present as football players or with softer personae. In a small but significant way, The Rockford Files helped me get there.
I have a half-written memoir about all this that I should come back to someday.