I was driving to work today and I noticed a sticker on the back of a beat-up green pickup. The sticker said "ASSHOLE", superimposed on something like the Underground symbol. There wasn't a line through it or anything; the dude in the pickup, wearing a white baseballcap and toting a decent amount of yard equipment in his truckbed. He was simple declaring his affection for his affectation: declaring himself a proud asshole. Or maybe just the vicitim of some grassroots sticker-defamation campaign.
There are, it seems, two broad classes of people who call themselves assholes. People who consciously say, "I'm an asshole." I believe the larger group is composed of those who see it as a character flaw, a troubled mood amongst a relatively well-adjusted persona. "I know, I know, I'm an asshole" after they miss their sister's birthday, or even after waking up after a raucus night of drinking, "Man, I was such an asshole last night." This version isn't far from verbal abuse, the only difference is that instead of your girlfriend telling you, "Mitch, don't be such an asshole, Paint My House!" the agent instead decides to self-apply the title. Now that, friends, is a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
Unless of course you belong to the second group. People who call themselves assholes, believe themselves to be assholes, and who don't really have a problem with that. As always, there's a historical precedent. I could trot out whatever Shakespearean character, maybe Iago, who is aware of not only his foul intentions but his foul nature as well, and given the course of events in Othello, he's fine with that. But I know shit about Shakespeare and I'm not about to start talking about it in a blog. The more modern progenitor of calling yourself a proud asshole is Denis Leary, the recently roasted Irish comic. He sings in "I'm an Asshole":
Sometimes I park in the handicapped spaces
While handicapped people
Make handicapped faces
The song is ostesibly about "some guy" who's an asshole and pees on toilet seats, but really the whole smoking-cynical-eat-my-shorts attitude is sort of his whole act, and we can see he enjoys identifying with the mindset and "is an asshole and proud of it." So we can see Denis as the first guy to make calling yourself an asshole, if not acceptable, at least part of the vernacular. And just in case you thought Denis was just talking about smoking in a restaurant or not helping old ladies, he puts his asshole-perspective within a historical context:
I'm gonna get "The Duke"
And John Cassavetes
And Lee Marvin
And Sam Peckinpah
And a case of whiskey
And drive down to Texas
And-
(Hey, Hey! You know you really are an asshole)
Why don't you just shut-up and sing the song, pal?
The mid-song rant is really a call-to-arms. Everyone he's talking about is either buried or frozen, but their personas were the strongest "asshole" personalities we had before it was OK to say "asshole" in a movie (or even in conversation). The slack-jawed Lee Marvin was usually a great example of brash action without consequence, such as in his late-noir film The Big Heat, as the hood who scars his girlfriend's face with hot coffee because she talks too much. Or Cassavettes as the racecar driver in The Killers (or as the director who put trashy-fabulous women on the screen), who goes against his woman and his friend as soon as his career goes sour, and only comes around to the dame when she offers him a big pay-off. She betrays him, and so with nothing left, no money no woman no friends, he resigns himself to his own murder.
Hollywood has always loved assholes: ruthless characters with few manners and a disregard for the fellow man. The difference now is that they survive till the end of the picture. Take Mel Gibson in Payback, Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs or Tom Cruise in Collateral. Why stick to action flicks? Royal Tenenbaum, Ed Crane (The Man Who Wasn't There), or Johnny Knoxville in The Ringer are all terrific asshole characters, and get celebrated in the movies they star in. And not that men have to be the only celebrated assholes; Basic Instinct, Sunset Blvd, or Sex and the City, anyone?
So how does this showbiz acceptance of being (or being called) an asshole filter down to the common man? In little stickers, aparently, though i guarantee anyone of you know someone (besides me) that's willing to profess their less-than-conciliatory nature. Movies and TV have helped, at the least, make the nom-de-guerre of asshole acceptable as self-applied moniker. I'd say that it still has the punch and force the derrogatory statement it used to be before Denis Leary, but it now seems in a middle ground between insult and nickname.
5 comments:
so, do people who post ads on your blog qualify as assholes? can companies be assholes?
i'm taken with your discussion of the hollywood glorification of the asshole (as opposed to other types of assholes glorified in entirely different types of movies), and your examples (well-known actors who are supposed to be hot in big budget movies as well as lesser-known and sometimes not so hot actors who are still for some reason attractive in tv shows like sex and the city) really bring to mind the incessant failure of the 'nice guy' with women, and how we all tend so often to be attracted to the bad guy, or, sometimes, 'the asshole'. of course, sometimes we don't find out about someone's truly assholic nature until after we've been with them for a while, in which case i must wonder if these guys are aware of their nature and hiding it intentionally, or having suppressed their asshole tendencies...
this all serves to point out to me that not dating has its advantages, and that graduate school is saving me the painful experience of interacting with said assholes.
important to keep in mind i'm not talking really about assholes in general (now THAT's a fun post), but more just the people that call themselves asshole, or that identify with the label.
as far as the ads, i actually put the adds up there myself. presumably, if you and a thousand of your friends click on them a billion times, i'll make three dollars. experiment, i guess.
glad my essay keeps you from trying to get laid. my celibacy is spreading!
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i don't think dick cheney gets in the same boat, just because i've never heard of him calling himself an asshole, though it certainly seems within his vocabulary. It would be interesting to know if he has; a small self-deprecating comment like that might indicate that he's aware of his coldness, that he has a certain humbleness about being so creepy, and that he is OK with being on the 'negative' side of things. But i don't think he thinks he's wrong; the whole bunch seems pretty convinced of their superiority, which is often the most infuriating aspect of the bunch. I just saw Colin Powell speak, and even he seems a little infected with the lack-of-humility disease.
"bitch" and "nigger" are still pretty incendiary. that's the weird thing, is that only by claiming yourself as a special group does the word get preserved, because everyone else is afraid of calling you the word. "Asshole" is sort of the extreme, i think, because everyone doesn't WANT to be a part of that group, and self-appelation of the word still has enough nuance to shock.
i seem to have recently met a number of people (all men, which says more about me than about them) who seem pretty comfortable as self-proclaimed assholes. none of them have, you know, tshirts or stickers or membership cards to prove their status, just their word on it (which is another problem - can one trust the word of an asshole?)
god, i could sit around and ponder this word and its meaning all night.
but faulkner awaits! (speaking of assholes...)
I would agree that anybody who is a self-described asshole is probably not an asshole. I don't think most people would be proud of their asshole tendencies. Instead, I would see it as a sign of insecurity, as a way of letting people know that said asshole is not perfect and that others should not get their hopes up too much. A way of stripping oneself voluntarily off of the pedestal. Either that, or as an excuse for having said something mean and wanting to rescind it without actually apologizing.
And I would also agree that the true assholes are the people who do not openly admit to it, who carry on thinking they're completely in the right. This shares a lot of properties with cockiness or self-righteousness.
Thus, if I thought I was an asshole, what would that actually make me? When does the self-referential suddenly morph into something more? Kind of a postmodern crisis.
Well, i think you agree with my first type of asshole, the one that uses it as an excuse for bad behavior. The second class, which i think is just more honest about things and owns up to his own pattern of behaviors, gets formulated thus:
-we, as a society, have a set of behaviors that would satisfy being an asshole: peeing on lawn furniture, eating the wedding cake before its cut, hitting babies.
-there are also perspectives which we also identify to the "asshole". Hates kids, doesn't believe in the equality of races, or has no manners.
-so, if a person was to recognize these behaviors and moods in him/herself, and make no move or have no desire to change, --because they enjoy it--, then i would say they are a "new" asshole (or just French). One that identifies with the characteristics, and uses them to form their own identity, knowing that they ARE asshole characteristics.
Admittedly, nobody really thinks about it that much, and there are plenty of people who are just assholes. I'm not really interested in those people; at least not the ones willing to call themselves as such. My point is that among that small group within the greater asshole community, there are two types, those with balls and those without.
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