[COLUMN] I Saw the He-Man Glow | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains major spoilers for the second and third acts of Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe, which is in theatres now and a really good time. It’s a fun, well-made, crowd-pleasing blockbuster that has things to say. So, if you want to see it first, you have the power to bookmark and come back.

It is, perhaps, redundant to observe that a movie about the hero He-Man (Nicholas Galitzine) is a film fascinated by masculinity, but Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe is an exploration of what it means to be the person that one wants to be rather than the man that society expects them to be.

The film begins with a recap of the childhood of Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), the boy who would be He-Man. Adam lives in Eternia, under the watchful gaze of his father King Randor (James Purefoy) and under the tutelage of his father’s man-at-arms, Duncan (Idris Elba). Duncan trains the youth of the kingdom to be warriors, but Adam lacks the aptitude, much to his father’s disappointment. “I’ll make a man of him, sire,” Duncan vows. “Aye,” Randor sighs, “but what kind of man?”

This is the question that hangs over the rest of Masters of the Universe. What does it mean to be a man? And how does it feel to live under the expectant gaze of men with a rigidly-defined vision of masculinity? The prologue ends with the fall of Eternia to the maniacal villain Skeletor (Jared Leto), who seizes the kingdom. Adam escapes into exile on Earth with the Sword of Power, the key to Eternia’s magical reserves. However, Adam loses the sword in transit and lands in Oklahoma.

Throughout the first act of the film, there is a recurring sense that Adam never really developed into the man that he wanted to be, the man that his father wanted him to be. As an adult, he is introduced fumbling a date. He struggles to lift weights at the gym. He wears a bright pink shirt and drives a bright yellow jeep. His searching for the sword that he lost, surrounding himself with childhood drawings of his lost world. He is hardly the stereotypical epitome of masculinity.

When Adam does manage to find the Sword of Power, it has been claimed by a local hobbies and game store, placed in the hand of an absurdly muscled mannequin that feels more like the cartoon version of He-Man. Adam tries to wrestle the sword from the figure’s grasp, but the model collapses on top of him in what feels like a fairly overt visual metaphor for what it must feel like to be crushed under the weight of expectations.

The sword puts Adam in contact with his old friend Teela (Camila Mendes), Duncan’s daughter, who ferries Adam back to Eternia as the champion of the realm, the long-lost prince who might rally the realm against Skeletor. However, the insurgents still fighting the good fight are less than impressed with the young man put before them and bristle at the childish nicknames he imposes on figures like Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang) and Mekaneck (James Wilkinson).

However, during a surprise attack on the rebel base, Adam manages to draw power from the sword, speaking the magic words and manifesting himself as He-Man. This is a masculine ideal, with rippling muscles and physical prowess. In He-Man form, Adam quickly begins to act in a manner more conventionally masculine. He rips the arm off the villainous Trap-Jaw (Sam C. Wilson) and massacres enemy troops. He tries to kiss Teela, who shuts that down immediately.

Fleeing into the wilds of Eternia with Teela and her father, Adam falls under the sway of the alluring vision of masculinity presented by Duncan – the idea of a man who measures his worth in strength. When Skeletor reveals that Randor is still alive and held captive, he goads Adam into a showdown at Snake Mountain. When Teela points out the stupidity of charging headlong into a confrontation with Skeletor, Adam replies, “It’s what a man does.” Teela sighs, “You sound like my father.”

Inevitably, Skeletor’s invitation is a trap. He-Man is caught in a spell by Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie). Desperate to escape, he forces an energy discharge from his sword. This causes a cave collapse, killing King Randor. Skeletor claims the sword, strips He-Man of his power and throws Adam back in the dungeon, in his gangly human form wearing his trademark pink shirt. This is the second act twist of Masters of the Universe, the understanding that this stereotypical masculinity can be a trap.

He-Man is a product of the 1980s in just about every way imaginable. Like Transformers and G.I. Joe, He-Man was a product of the deregulation of the Reagan era loosening the rules around advertising aimed at children. The show was designed to sell toys directly to an audience of impressionable young minds, blending fantasy and science-fiction into a cost-effective animated framework that could be used to market a brand of action figures and playsets.

However, it was also undeniably a product of the larger cultural milieu of the decade. With his bulging muscles and sculpted abs, the animated He-Man had one of the “hard bodies” of the 1980s, typified by real-life stars of the era like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. This performative hyper masculinity fixated on musculature spoke to the male anxieties of the era, whether concerns about feminism or lingering emasculation following the Vietnam War.

It makes sense that these sorts of anxieties would find their way back into the mainstream in the current era of cultural retrenchment. Young boys are falling under the influence of male influencers who preach a very conservative vision of masculinity. Young men are taught to “looksmax”, to obsess over their physical appearance. These modern movements are anchored in very rigidly defined gender roles and very narrow definitions of what makes a man suitably masculine.

Masters of the Universe is not exactly subtle about the anxieties that are simmering through it. Gender roles are a fairly significant recurring theme. In particular, even before Skeletor, Eternia seems to have a rigid understanding of what is expected based on gender. The female-presenting battle droid Roboto (Kristen Wiig), for example, is repurposed by Duncan as a domestic cleaning bot despite her own disinterest in such tasks.

Throughout Masters of the Universe, this sort of expected gender performance is a trap. Adam’s human roommate Hussein (Christian Vunipola) weeps while watching The Notebook home alone, but scrambles to turn off the television and hide the tissues when Adam gets home. Evil-Lyn is quite clearly a better strategist and manager than Skeletor, cuing his soldiers through gestures and nods and proving more useful to his ambitions, but is destined to serve as second fiddle to him.

The Freudian subtext is not buried especially deep within the movie. This is, after all, a film about Adam and Skeletor engaged in a battle over a sword. The sword is quite explicitly and repeatedly framed as phallic. When a colleague points out that it looks smaller than she expected, Fisto awkwardly replies, “That’s just because my hand is so big.” When Skeletor claims the sword, he tries to get it to work, clumsily thrusting it into the air and grunting while Evil-Lyn averts her eyes to avoid making the situation more awkward. She stops short of observing that this sort of thing is a common problem with men Skeletor’s age.

So it feels somewhat pointed that the climax of the movie finds the Sword of Power, a gigantic phallic symbol of masculine dominance, shattered and broken. Skeletor even penetrates Adam with the broken sword. It turns out that the power was never in the long dangling object that Adam kept, as Skeletor notes, “between [his] muscular thighs.” The power was always within Adam himself. That power is not unlocked by Adam’s father, but by the Sorceress of Castle Grayskull (Morena Baccarin).

Indeed, for all that Dun boasts of making men out of boys, it is remarkable how much of the power in Masters of the Universe rests in the hands of female characters. Roboto proves a far more adept soldier than Duncan. At the climax, Duncan embraces Teela and tells his daughter, “You’re the man I wish I were.” Even Cringer, Adam’s loyal green battle cat, is explicitly coded as feminine, with Teela affectionately calling him a “pussy.”

It is interesting that Skeletor is perhaps the movie’s most conventionally masculine character. He has no face, but has the sort of defined bone structure that would make some young men reach for a hammer. Without a human face, his body becomes his defining feature. He is extremely muscular, his six-pack on constant display behind his spandex. He lives in Snake Mountain. As he reaches for the sword in Castle Grayskull, he boasts, “Let me show you how a real man wields power.”

At the climax of the film, the heroes succeed by embracing their queerness. It is, for example, very pointed that of all the myriad characters who could have populated the film, Masters of the Universe produces a second-slate tier of heroes that consists of Fisto, Ram-Man and Mekaneck, the character with an extending neck that stretches the reach of his head. These characters initially reject Adam’s classification of them, clearly uncomfortable with the homoerotic subtext.

However, towards the end of the film, these heroes are following a man wearing a pink shirt into battle. “Let’s fist some bad guys!” Fisto declares triumphantly, instructing his colleague to employ his own weapon of choice. “Ram-Man, give them some head!” It is a joke, but it is also a fairly overt reclamation of the queer subtext baked into so much of this hyper-performative 1980s masculinity and a clear rejection of knee-jerk “no-homo” homophobia.

Watching Masters of the Universe, it is interesting to wonder whether Travis Knight has seen Jane Schoenbrun’s indie hit I Saw the TV Glow. It is another movie about nostalgia for an old television show that becomes a meditation on gender performance and identity, effectively the story of a man named Owen (Justice Smith) who is obsessed with a retro fantasy television show clearly modelled on something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Pink Opaque.

Owen is eventually confronted with the possibility that he is actually Isabel (Helena Howard), the character from The Pink Opaque, who was exiled from that reality by the evil Mister Melancholy (Emma Portner) and trapped in a male body. I Saw the TV Glow is a really beautiful metaphor for the experience of being trapped in a body that is not one’s own, and an exploration of why so many queer people – even closeted queer people – connect to genre fiction like this.

Masters of the Universe is obviously a much more mainstream film produced by a major studio using existing intellectual property in an era of cultural retrenchment. However, it is a movie that openly invites a similar queer reading. It is the story of a man who is told consistently that he is not masculine enough and that he will never measure up to the expectations of his father or his male teachers, who is given the opportunity to present as the most stereotypically masculine man.

Both I Saw the TV Glow and Masters of the Universe understand the futility of such a performance. In a charming cameo from the star of the previous Masters of the Universe film, Dolph Lundgren, Adam learns that what he presents to the world “is just a façade.” Adam grows comfortable in his own skin, wearing his pink shirt and not wielding a massive sword. This even leads to a reconciliation with his dying father. With his dying breath, Randor admits, “I wish I’d had the courage to let you… be you.”

Part of the beauty of I Saw the TV Glow, which is a better and more profound film, is the tragedy that Owen never makes that leap. Owen never transitions, never accepts his true self. Owen remains Owen, even as it seems to kill him. Masters of the Universe offers a much more optimistic ending, Adam wearing his pink shirt and riding off with Clinger between his less muscular thighs. It is a surprisingly sincere and thoughtful framework for an adaptation of a 1980s toy commercial cartoon.

He-Man learns to be his own person. There’s something very sweet in that.