Quiet Competence

There’s a handful of movies that, if I'm channel-surfing and encounter one, I stop and watch, no matter how many times I've seen them and no matter how much time is left. That handful includes Tombstone, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Jaws, both Godfathers, and a few more.

It also includes The Hunt For Red October, a damn-near perfect movie that has a particular element woefully missing from modern fare.

And modern culture, more broadly.

That element is the quietly competent man. Individuals that are good at what they do, and go about doing it without chest-thumping machismo or dude-bro bluster.

Consider the contrast between Will Smith's bluster in Independence Day:

versus the exchange between Scott Glenn and Courtney B. Vance in Red October:

Showboating vs doing-my-job-well matter-of-factness.

That's one of my favorite aspects of Red October. Everyone's good at his job, and while egos do clash, no one's strutting around like a peacock. Even Stellan Skarsgard's Captain Tupolev, the brashest character in the film, reflects the gravity of the situation in "going to kill a friend."

Apparently, I'm not the only one to feel this dearth in modern fare. YouTube movie reviewer The Critical Drinker put it well:

I really miss movies with male actors that look and talk and act like actual adult men who radiate authority and confidence instead of whiny hyperactive children inhabiting male bodies.

Entertainment reflects culture, and we have for decades seen our culture deride and undermine the concept of the quietly competent man.

Why?

I can think of myriad reasons. Some of them rest on the erroneous belief that success comes at someone else's expense, i.e. a "zero sum" view of work and of life in general. Others are based on observation bias. We are more apt to notice the peacocks than more muted people, and if a peacock happens to be somewhere we would aspire to, we might think "be like the peacock." This coincides with the shift in culture towards the visual brought on by technology.

Thus, we have women believing that men need to be torn down if women are to succeed, and we have men feeling that the path to success includes preening and braggadocio. Mix in identity politics and the oppressor-oppressed narrative, and we end up with "grievance hierarchy" movies, TV, and commercials, where the man is invariably less competent. Move on to social-media culture, where validation comes from without (likes, shares, retweets, and positive comments) rather than from within ("I know what I'm about"), and we get a positive feedback loop toward peacocking and "hyperactive children inhabiting male bodies." Along with the girl-boss trope that has cost Disney billions of dollars.

In response, many men are simply dropping out. A third don't bother working for a living, many have opted out of dating, and many are embracing the MGTOW ("men going their own way") lifestyle. The feminist movement has reacted with reinforcement, as in "women don't need men for anything," and the woke-scolds have chimed in with assertions that MGTOW is racist or bigoted or toxic masculinity writ large or the like.

Back in the 1970s, Happy Days brought us Arthur Fonzarelli, and mainstreamed the concept of "cool." The first year of the show, Fonzie spoke very little and kept himself to himself. His "cool" was there to see, but did not need to be declared. Al Pacino's performance in The Godfather (Parts I and II that is - we won't speak of III) was all about quiet competence, as was Brando's. The brief times they broke from that quiet served to reinforce it. And, to repeat, everyone in Red October was supremely competent in a workaday fashion, rather than smashing us in the face with boasts and swagger.

That quiet competence should serve as the ideal. It should be a role model for kids, and an aspiration for men. It is also the essence of individualism, and it's why a libertarian blogger finds it suitable subject matter. It seems a natural draw for male behavior, so it's a crying shame that our culture has stopped even depicting it, let alone celebrating it. This devolution is, I'd suggest, a big part of why men are unhappy to the point of disengagement, why boys are increasingly troubled, and why society feels so fractured. This isn't to suggest anyone else take a subordinate role, because life isn't zero sum. Someone else's competence does not prevent you from pursuing your own, no matter how much the reductive agitators who dominate the conversation would insist otherwise.

Fonzie once pointed out someone to Richie, observing that "he's got the quiet cool" or something to that effect (search engines prove yet again that they are no match for the depths of my TV recollections). "Quiet cool" seems like a pretty good idea.