Movies of My Misspent Youth: "The Outsiders"

I was five the first time I saw my father cry. My grandfather had died unexpectedly, in a car accident. I wouldn’t see him cry again until seven years later, when my mother announced that she was leaving. That was less unexpected than my grandfather’s death, but he seemed to take it harder, ugly sobbing in our just-before-dawn dim living room. The next time I saw him, that raw display of emotion had been replaced by barely restrained rage. Somehow that seemed to be the better, healthier, more manly way of dealing with an impending divorce.

Around that same time, Anthony D_____, a boy I had a crush on, was “playfully” punched in the chest by another kid. The kid hit him too hard though, and the air seemed to be slowly sucked out of the room as we all watched Anthony wage a losing battle against crying, finally breaking down in tears. He was clearly injured, but all we could do, a bunch of shitty tweens, was stand there gawping at him, like he had just wet himself. Finally, someone did something: a kid piped up “Look at the baby! Look at the baby cryyyyyyyying!” Anthony had been a popular kid, but the mere act of crying because he had gotten hurt caused to him slip down a few pegs, and it took him months to get it back.

Generation X grew up with Free to Be...You and Me, a progressive for the time record album that encouraged tolerance and gender equality. Girls were encouraged to be anything they wanted to be, while boys were encouraged to play with dolls (if they wanted to), and that, more importantly, it was okay to cry. Heck, if a big tough football player like Rosey Grier said so, it must be true. Did it take? Not really. Boys my age were far more inclined to pay attention to what their fathers said, and their fathers, raised by Depression-era parents on John Wayne movies, knew one thing: boys didn’t cry. Not for anything, not for anyone. Anger, sure, express that all you want, but sadness, grief, fear, physical pain, you swallow that up and you let it sit in your chest like a lead weight. Drown it in alcohol, if you have to, but never, every, shame yourself by crying.

This is my roundabout way of saying that Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of The Outsiders is the movie that made me realize that crying is the bravest thing a man can do.

Let me pause for a moment before going on to say that if you’re reading this hoping for a smug takedown of a decades old movie, as what seems to be the lifeblood of most mainstream “film writing” these days, you’re going to be disappointed. There won’t be any discussion of whether The Outsiders has aged well, or if its timeless themes of toxic masculinity and the poor getting a raw deal should be dismissed because some of the characters have silly names. It’s perhaps Coppola’s most tender, earnest film, and it’s not at all reluctant to wear its heart on its sleeve.

When revisiting The Outsiders as an adult, it’s baffling that anyone, whether in the film or watching it, could believe the protagonists, a bunch of working class teenagers referred to as “Greasers,” are intimidating. At an average age of about 17, they all look as harmless as a basket of puppies. C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy and Ralph Macchio as Johnny both look like they’d crumble if you hugged them too hard, while Rob Lowe as Sodapop is so delicately beautiful he appears to be carved from a bar of Ivory soap. Tom Cruise (long before Scientology took over and when he still had his original, charmingly crooked teeth) and Emilio Estevez are a couple of amiable goofballs. The only member of the gang (if you can even call them that, they’re really just a bunch of kids drawn together by common circumstance) for whom a case could be made that he’s “bad” is Dallas (Matt Dillon), and even he’s just bad in the rebellious, smoking in clear view of a “no smoking” sign sense.

But, of course, that’s the point. Society has deemed these kids, because they’re poor, because their parents are no good (or, in Ponyboy and Sodapop’s case, dead) as undesirable, and it’s assumed that by their mere standing around in groups of two and three they mean to cause some trouble. Though it seems to be the rich “Socs” who are doing most of the bullying and intimidating, it’s the Greasers who get hassled by the cops, or threatened with being sent to a foster home.

Ponyboy, the youngest of the group, has a poet’s soul, and while the “bad boy with a heart of gold” is a tried and true movie cliche, it doesn’t quite follow through here. It must be restated: Ponyboy isn’t a bad kid. It’s just assumed that he’s bad, because of the company that he keeps. He’s embarrassed by his daydreaming tendencies, not just because it’s something Greasers don’t do, it’s something men don’t do either. Johnny is envious of Ponyboy’s knowledge of literature and poetry, but, a couple years older and having experienced an even rougher upbringing than Ponyboy understands how the world works: you hide that shit, deep down, where no one can find you and hurt you with it.

All of these kids — and again, they are literal children, high school age — are raw nerves of emotion, trying desperately to put on tough, manly faces, and yet, when they finally break down, it’s the most “manly” thing they can do. I’m not sure I want to meet the person who is unmoved by Ponyboy weeping at his best friend’s death, and yet there are plenty of those people out there in the world, men and women alike, who mock such displays of emotion as weak or unmasculine. 

I’m an easy crier — I could win the lottery and if you were to put on, say, Band of Horses’ “The Funeral,” tears would immediately begin to spray from my eyes like a front lawn water toy. It’s not just puzzling, it’s downright incomprehensible to me that men are embarrassed to cry, let alone that, as we stand on the edge of the year 2020, they’re made to feel as if they should be. Men are taught to fear and loathe not just their own feelings, but the feelings of others, to dismiss sensitivity as a “feminine” trait, to value a phony concept of “being strong” over everything else. We do that, while also wondering why men end up hurting themselves, or worse, other people.

Perhaps the most interesting character arc in The Outsiders is that of Darrel (Patrick Swayze), Ponyboy and Sodapop’s older brother, who looks after them while the constant fear of foster homes hangs over their heads. Darrel is a hard-ass at the beginning of the movie, criticizing Ponyboy for his daydreaming tendencies and even pushing him around in one scene. It’s only after faced with the possibility of losing Ponyboy that he breaks down and cries, and becomes a better, more sensitive person after that, the father figure Ponyboy needs. Thanks to this, Dirty Dancing, and Ghost, Swayze became the platonic ideal of strong but gentle masculinity, even becoming openly emotional during an interview with Barbara Walters when she brought up his deceased father. It’s disheartening to note that, if Swayze was still alive, and the interview took place today, he’d probably be laughed off Twitter, much like Armie Hammer was for a little while when footage leaked of him dancing in Call Me By Your Name, another thing “real men” aren’t supposed to do.

It’s been a long time since I was impressed with a man’s ability to hold his emotions in, if I ever was. I’d dare to say that if you’re punching walls, or greeting displays of genuine feelings with cynicism and sarcasm, you’re not really holding anything in, you’re just expressing it in an ugly, toxic fashion. At the best of times, my father was a sarcastic asshole who never met a person or a thing he couldn’t make some sort of snide remark about. At his worst, the things that came out of his mouth, mostly about my mother and his own mother, could have rivaled Mercedes McCambridge in The Exorcist. He rarely directed that anger at me, but in my presence was quite bad enough. He’s been dead for a decade now so I can’t ask, but I guess he thought that that was the proper way to deal with the hurt and grief of his divorce from my mother, instead of just locking himself in the bathroom and having a good cry. That’s how he thought a man handled it.

Gen X’ers, y’know, we’re getting a little better about it. When you get to a certain age you figure out that drinking your sadness away or hurting yourself in other ways eventually becomes untenable — you either address those parts of you that are hurting, or you die trying. Every man I’ve ever been in a relationship with has cried in front of me at least once, and while they’ve always a little sheepish about it, it’s never done anything but raise their estimation in my eyes. It’s brave. It’s bold. We have one shot in this world, and it’s a tragedy to bury our emotions in a thick, choking layer of judgment and phony propriety. “I’ve been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green,” Johnny, faced with his impending death, writes to Ponyboy. “When you’re a kid, everything is new, dawn. It’s just when you get used to everything it’s day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep it that way. It’s a good way to be.”