Sissy Fatigue

Marketing: Sissy Fatigue

Bradley Cooper's muscling away the Johnny Depps

By Ted Byrne

Ted hangs at Madam T's in NYC

Look, it’s a transitory impulse of adolescents to get weaned. They’re hard-wired to a hormonal clock set to irritate parents enough to kick them out of the nest. Johnny Depp nurtures the irritation-instinct, hell, he’s its avatar. He’s an opiate of the mass-less teenager yearning for some weight … He’s pushing credibility in eye-liner form as opposed to muscular-function.

Johnny Depp’s a simpering wedge-issue. His mask seems to hide a seething complexity where some adolescents can find reason and rules to become naturally obnoxious.

Humans are masters of going dysfunctional. Think about it. We have to eat, but big clots of folks get eating disorders, we need relaxation which many convert to addictions. Survival requires sex and, well … don’t even go there.

Depp’s plugged into the irritant compulsion that normally appears then dissipates as we shed the stages of our lives. If it doesn’t dissolve … When adolescence becomes persistent among some … its symptoms are as aberrant as bulimia. Depp’s found his market in that peculiarity and spent a career nurturing, extending, and legitimatizing it. He’s the bad-boy of nasty.

Sissy-ness is an affectation of people independent of their sexual preferences. In a lot of ways it’s the neurotic extension of a natural tendency to reject the extreme (and equally neurotic) stereotypes of manliness. Normal personalities wobble both left and right of the center of the range between subordination and independence. The sissy stands at one end of the scale, macho at the other.

Over the last half century, women, particularly educated women, have moved toward economic, and hence personal, independence. Which has replaced their dependency upon a provider with a need for encouragement. At the Depp extreme, a soft, cosmetic-ized partner is less a competitor than he is a girl-friend with benefits. The appeal of the sissy is an inverse function of the income potential of a mate. Strong men (of any gender preference) at the extreme gravitate as readily to some degree of the girly-girl as strong women (of any gender preference) find fascination in some degree of sissy.

Now the entertainment industry feeds upon niches. There’re only so many non-working hours available for music, food, reading, viewing, rooting, risking, sleeping, and mating. It’s a zero sum game. Of the 350 million or so American consumers, a 10 share is 35 million. Sell each of them, say $100 worth of something a year and we’re talking billions. Unsurprisingly Hollywood, both in movies and TV, have imagined that the semi-sissy niche is filled with a potential audience of millions of up-market women. And a short-list of profitable romantic movies over the past few decades presents a cascade of male leads morphing from Steve McQueen/Paul Newman to Hugh Grant/Johnny Depp.

How far’s this all gone? Have you noticed the roles played by Oscar’s Best Actor nominees this year (2015)? And have you noticed the box-office for their movies? One, “American Sniper” has in just a few weeks amassed more ticket receipts than all of the others added together. Each of the nominees’ movies are about men. Each is about the way they deal with relationships.

It’s not as if Sniper has found just one profitable marginal niche. It’s apparently rediscovered a significant sissy-fatigue on the part of audiences. Just as family movies have rebounded profitably, particularly in the animated world, and hulking hunks of men are dominating the action/adventure blockbusters of summer, now a lower budget movie like Sniper’s hit a mainstream target. And this time at the direct expense of Johnny Depp’s simultaneous appearance in the box-office bomb, Mordecai, Depp’s fifth big-budget failure in five years.

In fact, if you take Alice In Wonderland, and Pirates of the Caribbean from Depp’s last eight movies you’re left with Depp-charges that returned a MINUS 6.2% on each dollar spent by backers. The bombs are so startling—the theory is he’s auditioning for a gig in Clint Eastwood’s sound-crew.

Remember 2004? That was the year that a somewhat sissy Jude Law opened as the lead in: Alfie, Closer, The Aviator, Sky Captain, and Lemony Snicket. Of course you’re forgiven if you didn’t know, virtually no one did, nor came to those flicks. Law carpet bombed! Since then the guy’s bulked up his shoulders, and washed off the eyeliner, but ten years later he’s still waiting for another top-star role.

Entertainment green-lighters have compromised on a Michael Cera/Ronan Farrow/Oberlin College kind of sweet sissy (remember “Pajama Boy” in his onesie-zip-ups with an eternally adolescent cocoa-smirk over Obamacare?) and with some niche success especially in TV’s Glee, Smash, and About A Boy. I write “niche success” since over the past five years CBS has ruled the ratings with scripted dramas predominately starring strong action (along with relationship driven) males and females. And with the exception of Fox, the top rated scripted dramas on the other nets (NBC’s Blacklist, ABC’s Castle) are built around robust men-of-action … is it the loss of a Kiefer Sutherland’s 24 that explains Fox’s present rating collapse?

There’s a narrative among the C-level media suits about a need for sissy product where, it’s been said, the rule of law is replaced by the rule of psychotherapy. Perhaps the need is based upon a desire to affect social change, or perhaps it’s based upon a misread of audiences who pay to watch heroes reeking of sweat and gunshot residue. Regardless, the success of America Sniper repudiates the PC narrative. Hugh Grant and Johnny Depp are both aging and sissy fatigue’s set in as Gen X and Y leave adolescence way behind. Look for tiny budget, art and niche films, to carry on the sissy narrative this year starring soft-male leads who will continue to get politically-correct award nominations in 2016. But their commercial irrelevancy will grow as the box office prizes seek out; stories like Chris Kyle’s in Sniper, traditionalist directors like Eastwood, and burley-male-leads like Bradley Cooper—not boys but men who are competent to do things that are decisive, productive, and vital.