The Beach Bum and ways of men and women

Spoiler Alert.

I saw The Beach Bum movie last week. The movie is about a writer who is a drug, alcohol and sex addict. He has a rich wife but he lives like a bum to enable his mind to write. A twist happens in the movie, and the world around him wants him to fix his life for good. To be honest, even I felt the main character is just wasting his life. I was also rooting for him to fix his life, just like the supporting characters in the movie wanted him too. But it didn’t feel like there was any change happening in the character’s arc; even after 1 hour he was still the same bum as he was in the beginning scene. The hero though finishes his manuscript in the climax and gets the book published and becomes rich and famous again. He continues to do what he does till the end showing no change in his character – being a bum, living a hedonistic lifestyle, having sex and drinking alcohol and smoking pot all along.

We are conditioned to see in movies that after a twist happens mid-way, the character realizes his faulty behavior and decides to change things around him. A Hero’s journey. We hear in stories and mythology about a hero who shows courage and valor to defeat his enemies, protect his family and finding the hero within himself. But this movie was a change from all the usual stories because our main protagonist does become a hero in the end – he achieves his goals but without showing any valor or courage in the traditional sense. He achieved his goals through a journey of relaxation, comfort, drinking, eating and sleeping.

We are aware of the term Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Men show valor, efforts, fight in wars, and Women prefer comfort, luxury, cleanliness, beauty, vehicles. Men too aspire to covet such Venus traits and want women and beauty in their life. But we don’t prefer to see men embracing such lifestyle. While fighting for honor and wars is looked upon, spending time in luxury, comfort, pleasure of the senses is looked down upon in the society. We want these Venus related things in our lives, but it will be the end goal, not the means to achieve that end. The means are always Martian traits like valor, courage and efforts.

Maybe we are conditioned to believe that only courage and valor are the means to achieve anything in the world, because stories are written mostly about men and not much about women. Ancient mythological stories about women show women handling problems in a different way than men did. Think of Helen of troy, or Aphrodite or in Hindu scriptures, Sati Savitri who argued with Lord Yama in her unique way. Telling glorifying tales of Hercules, and criticizing beautiful women like Aphrodite and their ways in history, we tend to form negative associations with such feminine behavior