How the Boys of Lady Bird Represent a Changing View of Masculinity

Okay, stay with me.

Greta Gerwig’s 2017 directorial debut “Lady Bird” is self-indulgent in all the best ways. It is an intimate, semi-biographical picture about snarky high school senior Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson as she navigates the complex worlds of friends, boys, and her relationship with her mother. The way it progresses, it is told through Lady Bird’s eyes, so though it does acknowledge her mistakes, it is always just a little light on them.

Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet, who play the two love interests in the film, have had, to put it lightly, exciting careers in the past few years. In 2017, Hedges was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Manchester by the Sea. His career exploded from there, and in 2017 and 2018 he could be spotted in nearly every big picture, including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where he played a grieving and exasperated brother and son; Boy Erased, in which he is a gay teen forced to conversion therapy; Ben is Back, a turbulent film about drugs and family; and Mid90s, where he was a mean and tortured older brother. At only 22 years old, he’s already made a place for himself in great cinema.

Timothée Chalamet, the subject of countless Instagram accounts that “inexplicably” pop up on my explore page, has a no less impressive resume. After small parts in Interstellar, Homeland, and others, he broke out in 2017’s gorgeous, Italian, gay romance, Call Me By Your Name, for which he received an Oscar nomination and endless praise. This year, he is expected to get another Oscar nomination for his role in Beautiful Boy, where he plays the drug addicted son of Steve Carell. He was also in the largely forgotten A24 pic, Hot Summer Nights, which is more like a Hot Summer Mess, but is wholly held up by Chalamet’s charm. In the near future, he will be in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and he will play King Henry in The King. It’s safe to say, he has a busy year ahead.

These two boys are the poster childs for the indie movies of this time, and represent a strange zeitgeist. In Lady Bird, they are playing the fantastical dream boys of 2002. Greta Gerwig said, “She’s a child of Titanic, so she looks at these boys to be in her romantic fantasy.” Titanic is a strange one to pick, because it clearly had a huge impact on a generation. Everyone and their mother found young Leo DiCaprio wholly irresistible with his charm and blue eyes, the way he showed Rose a new world and made her stronger.

I ran a little experiment with people around me (teenagers my age), and found some interesting results. When asking if Titanic-era Leo DiCaprio was objectively attractive, it was almost always girls that said yes and boys that said no. (And just to be clear, these weren’t the kind of boys that followed it with ‘guys aren’t attractive no homo hahaha’). I think that this illustrates an interesting divide, and I think it can be summed up quite simply.

Leo DiCaprio in Titanic does not have massive muscles or a six pack. He does have a smile and artistic passion. Timothee Chalamet has a chiseled jawline and speaks French. Lucas Hedges has a big nose, and cries often. The view of masculinity is changing. Justin Baldoni said in his TEDTalk, “so while my dad may have not taught me to use my hands, he taught me how to use my heart, and to me, that makes him more of a man than anything.”

In movies made by men, such as Man of Steel, when they are tasked to find the Perfect Man, it would make sense that they go for Henry Cavill, who could be the default for a Mii. But when Greta Gerwig was choosing who would be the two dream boys in her self-indulgent semi-autobiographical picture, she chose a wannabe anarchist and a theater nerd. And that reflects a lot.

Disclaimer: I wrote this in between doing a lot of homework. I did not have time to as much research as I’d like. I’m obviously not an expert and this doesn’t perfectly reflect my thoughts. I just thought it was interesting and tried to communicate it best I could.