McConaughey, Baby! Alright, Alright, Alright

On this week’s episode of Pop Culture Boner we’re exploring the rise and fall and potential rise again of Matthew McConaughey. We love to give actors a second chance, sometimes even a third. So what was it about the McConaissance that whipped us up into such a frenzy? Roguish charm, his very short arms or something else?

Visit the website for episode notes and a full transcript: www.popcultureboner.com

Visit the website for episode notes and a full transcript: www.popcultureboner.com

Transcript

I think everyone gets to be famous for 15 seconds on the internet. I know Andy Warhol said 15 minutes, but what with the attention economy being what it is, I think 15 seconds is more feasible. If you listened to the first episode of this podcast, you may recall that I said that my claim to internet fame was the fact that people really hated a post I wrote about Matthew McConaughey’s tiny forearms back when this podcast was a blog. That’s still true – I’m yet to one-up the glory days of the 2012 blog market, unless someone wants to give me a million dollars and endless adulation for making this thing. I am open all hours for both love and bribery. 

Anyway, I’m not cover old ground with more content on Matthew McConaughey’s very short arms, although I may say the phrase a few more times, just to optimise to that search engine, baby! Woo! But if you follow the pod on Instagram - @popcultureboner – you may have seen me do a call out for content, asking if there was anything specific that people wanted to hear me talk about. One of the suggestions I got was about Bill Murray’s career arc from lewd comedies like Caddy Shack to artistically weighty things like Lost In Translation, where he gets to be an at least semi-serious actor. What’s that got to do with our short-armed Southern king, Matthew McConaughey? Well, it made me think about chances for cinematic redemption. Specifically, the opportunity that is often afforded to men as they age to reinvent themselves from like raunchy sex comedy guy or generic rom com guy, to serious actor. 

And you know who rode that career high so hard we even coined a portmanteau for it? Matthew McConaughey! 2014 was the year of the McConaissance! Alright, alright, alright. Seemingly overnight, McConaughey went from roles in rom coms like The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, to Oscar nominated films and a real scene-stealing TV performance in True Detective. Where did that come from? Could he always act? Had we been hoodwinked by his broad chest and muscular (but very short) arms into thinking he was a himbo? What gives? It seems like it’s worthy of investigation, to be honest. 

I’m Alex. This is Pop Culture Boner – the podcast edition – and today, I’m thinking about Matthew McConaughey’s career redemption. 

Matthew McConaughey’s career has gone through a number of phases through the years. He started out as a promising up and comer who was sort of accidentally iconic in one of his first roles. I even quoted it in the intro. Then throughout the 00s he was a sort of middle-of-the-road rom com guy. This is obviously the peak of my high school years, which arguably should mean that I have some recollection of him being a bit hot. Not like heartthrob level – but sort of in a standard rom com way, where I thought he was passably handsome. But I always remember him as feeling a little bit too old or kind of too grizzled to be hot. He kind of lacked the universal appeal that really big rom com stars have and hold. Which is why the thing lots of people remember about movies like How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days is not the perfectly reasonable onscreen chemistry, but the fact that Kate Hudson looks absolutely spectacular in that yellow dress. He was upstaged by a dress, is what I’m saying. But then from 2011 onwards, McConaughey’s career starts to take an uptick and he starts getting better roles. Roles that are outside his usual rom com stomping ground. He is fucking with the formula, so to speak. And it starts paying off, eventually culminating an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. It’s the McConaissance! The press love it. People write endless profiles. 

That should be a happily ever after, but then McConaughey starts making irredeemably bad films again. Basically everything post-Oscar is a pile of garbage. And I do want to preface all of this by saying that, yes, I do include Interstellar in that.  I fucking hate Interstellar. It’s such fake deep “time is a circle” bullshit that I can’t believe any of you fell for it. Also, it’s too long. Jot that down, I guess. This pod is anti-Interstellar.  And even if you like Interstellar, it’s still an exception to the rule. 

Anyway, all of this timeline is to say that we’ve given McConaughey endless chances as he’s aged, to pick complex and diverse roles and redeem himself. To plumb the depths of his abilities and pull out spectacular performances that makes us all go “Wow! Maybe he can act?” So, I wanted to spend some time today examining what ageing as a famous man changes about the types of roles you receive, whether there was anything spectacular about the McConaissance at all and why those kinds of explosive rejuvenations of careers always inevitably fail. Was the McConaissance all it was cracked up to be, or was it just a fever dream with a tabloid title? Let’s find out, shall we?

I’m going to be overly simplistic about something which is ultimately kind of complicated, but I think it’s fair to say that we don’t really let women age in Hollywood. The life cycle of most female stars goes young, beautiful and talented and therefore leading lady material, and then once they’re past their prime they’re either someone’s mum or they’re a terrifying hag and a warning to the rest of us. The bigger the role, the more likely they are to be some haunting reminder of mortality dressed up as a speaking part. There are some notable exceptions to this obviously, but for the most part ageing is something to be feared because it is a decline. That’s why so many talented women’s foreheads don’t move any more – that’s not a judgement call, it’s just a sign the botox is working. 

But what about the men? Are they scared of the impending meaningless fluffy roles as someone’s wise old father? Are they frightened that someone will see their receding hairline and their dropping jowls and cast them as a metaphor for lost dignity? Probably not. If they were, we’d probably see more immobile male foreheads. But as it stands, men in Hollywood tend to have a longer shelf life before they are considered ‘old’, and after they have tipped this point, they’re afforded a certain dignity and wisdom that means that the roles they get have a lot more meat on the bones. They’re not a warning – they’re wise. 

But Matthew McConaughey isn’t old, so what am I even on about? I think to understand the foundations of the McConaissance, and the way we as an audience were primed for it, you have to understand the scope we leave for male actors to improve with age. Or at least, be taken seriously. I mentioned in the intro that the reason I’m even writing this is because a friend mentioned Bill Murray. Now, Bill Murray got his start on Saturday Night Live as a screwball comedian. He went on to star in cult comedy classics like Caddy Shack, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day. But throughout his career he’s also made several false-start attempts to become a serious actor – for example, in The Razor’s Edge which he co-wrote, and which was a commercial and critical failure. They didn’t really start to stick until he was in his 50s, when we saw him do Lost in Translation and begin working with directors like Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson who have a little bit of weight as either serious or cool. Now that he’s in his 70s, we see him pop up in cameos as himself a lot, which kind of goes hand in hand with his kind of icon status, but you also see him doing roles like the Sofia Coppola-directed On The Rocks which rely on his age to deliver a certain gravitas to the performance. 

Compare that with a woman of a similar age – for example, Sigourney Weaver, who I’m definitely choosing because she was in Ghostbusters with Bill Murray. Now, I would never want to discredit anything Sigourney Weaver does because I love her, and obviously her career trajectory is slightly different to Bill Murray’s in the sense that she isn’t known as an exclusively comic actress. But most of the things that I have seen her in recently have been heavily referential to her earlier career successes with the Alien franchise. Having her pop up at the end of a science fiction film about aliens or a horror movie with ghosts in it is like a fun little nugget for audiences, regardless of whether her performance is any good (it usually is). Being sort of unattached to auteur directors the way that Bill Murray is has meant that her appearances are a less consistently meaty in either screen time or substance. 

Now, while Matthew McConaughey is not in his 70s he was facing something of a dilemma pre-McConaissance. Throughout the 00s, McConaughey was the go-to rom com guy. This period of his career produced such weighty performances as Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Fool’s Gold – I’m kidding. Most of them were objectively pretty bad films. Which wasn’t the problem actually – the problem is that you age out of the rom com genre. Or at least, you age out of the rom com genre as it stood in the 00s, where the plot was always some variation of “scumbag learns to love again” or “successful nice guy woos career woman.” And in 2009, McConaughey hit 40. Obviously, 40 isn’t so old that he didn’t still have some rom com life left in him, but it is rapidly careening to the point where people might say something about the age gap between you and your inevitably 25-year-old female co-star. Lead actresses. You keep getting older and they stay the same age.

Presented with a career crossroads, McConaughey turned away from the reasonably well-trodden road of decent-looking-rom-com-guy to decent-looking-genre-cinema-guy (think like Gerard Butler’s switch from rom coms to action movies, or Ryan Reynolds’ admittedly more eclectic comedy-action bent). Instead, McConaughey seemed to be remembering the ‘next big thing’ praise that had been thrown his way after performances in movies like Dazed and Confused, Lone Star and Contact. McConaughey was starting to dwell on what it might mean to be a serious actor doing serious films. Luckily for him, opportunities were forthcoming, although by his own admission, McConaughey had to take a pay cut in order to be considered for these roles. Too many years of cheesy romance had tarnished some of his shine. To facilitate his transition, McConaughey did a film called The Lincoln Lawyer. It may surprise you to learn that the plot of this film is actually the title of the movie. Matthew McConaughey is a lawyer who works out of a Lincoln town car like some sort of Mad Max roving bureaucracy scenario. 

It’s not a good movie, but it is a crime thriller. A crime thriller is a good vehicle to tentatively launch a career revamp because the central character is usually just flawed enough for you to prove some range. I read a lot of pieces about the rise of McConaughey around 2014 that talk about this sort of energy that radiates off his performances – there’s this kind of roguish masculinity that comes off him. In a rom com, that energy seems to be wrestled into a kind of charm point. But it can also be re-directed into something darker. The Lincoln Lawyer has McConaughey has a Southern Lawyer in perpetual motion, making deals, setting up bribes and beating criminal charges. It let McConaughey prove that he could go a little dark, which gave him more scope to go even darker. 

Following The Lincoln Lawyer he does a number of roles which are essentially variations on a the same theme. In Mud he plays a Southern fugitive with a heart of gold, who guides a lost boy through his adolescence. In Magic Mike he’s a Southern male strip club owner who parties hard and loves his work. In his much-lauded Wolf of Wall Street cameo he is a self-serving Wall Street guy raking in the cash. He admits he took his role in Dallas Buyers Club because Ron Woodroof, the real-life AIDS patient who smuggled unapproved pharmaceuticals into Texas, seemed like a ‘wild man’. The parts take this roguish physical quality that McConaughey has and amplify it. 

Which brings me to the next point, I guess. Now have some context for the McConaissance, it’s time to ask ourselves if it was any good. I’ve watched about 9 McConaughey movies back-to-back by this point, and I have to say that my inkling is ‘No’. I’m not being unfair here, and I don’t even really mean it in the sense of McConaughey being a bad actor – I think he’s kind of fine and I’m willing to admit that I did enjoy some parts of the McConaissance, particularly True Detective (although I actually think we should give Woody Harrelson more credit for that, to be honest). Anyway, I think what I’m trying to say is that while McConaughey’s hey-day partially occurred because we were so surprised to see him do something other than “make flirty eye contact with charming female lead”, I think another part of it has to do with McConaughey himself and his life stage. Like I said, in my reading of various McConaissance think pieces from around the time, people seem really drawn to the kind of physical presence that he has on screen and very keen to conflate that with his offscreen persona.

That’s not incredibly uncommon for celebrities – much of the mechanism of fame rests on having a public persona that lends itself to likeability and therefore ongoing employment. We often glean part of that persona from the roles that they play. I was reading about Sylvester Stallone’s rebranding of himself into a so-called geriaction star in late career moves like The Expendables. The article, by Mark McKenna, suggested that there was a conflation of real and on-screen personas for Stallone in the eyes of the public. His career defining roles like Rocky and Rambo have him playing an underdog and used those roles to frame himself as an under-dog in his public persona too, meaning that as he ages, he can still take on the action roles he’s known for because he’s seen as still fighting an up-hill battle against big studios. I think we’ve done the same for McConaughey. 

Pre-McConaissance, McConaughey’s most iconic role was Dave Wooderson in Dazed and Confused – the Southern 20-something responsible for lines about high school girls and giving half-baked life philosophies about the fact that you’ve just got to keep living. While it might have been blunted somewhat with his waltz through rom-coms, something of that role has seeped through everything he has ever done onscreen and off – a stoner philosopher that has somehow tapped into some vital universal truth. Critics said his new choices of roles felt ‘organic’, ‘deliberate’ and ‘bold’. Rachel Syme in The New Yorker said that McConaughey was “tapping into something essential, remaining himself while stretching”. Roles like Dallas in Magic Mike were seen to somehow find that roguish stoner genius of his youth and drive it to the kind of darkness that comes with age. His career resurgence is seen as reflecting something essential or dynamic in McConaughey himself. 

I think the McConaissance led us to believe that McConaughey had taste – he was choosing dark and interesting roles that seemed to reflect his own reckoning with his age and public person. I mentioned in the intro that men age into wisdom rather than decrepitude, and McConaughey’s roles from 2011 onward seemed to be exploring the kinds of fringe existence that his stoned genius persona inevitably hits when left unchecked. While I do think the career moves themselves were a conscious result of a man reckoning with a changing industry and an ageing bod, I think I would be more inclined to believe in the essential and vital nature of the thing if it wasn’t for the fact that the fading years of the McConaissance saw him miss repeatedly. Following his Oscar, he simply stopped doing anything worthwhile… except allegedly Interstellar, but I have made my thoughts on that garbage fire abundantly clear. Find better sci-fi, people. Christ. Anyway. 

Writing for Vox, Charles Bramesco called these post-Oscar miscalculations a common mistake made by one-off winners, “Namely that a good actor is a ‘serious’ actor, and that ‘serious’ acting is necessarily good acting”. A post-award McConaughey has chosen serious films with serious directors, like Gus van Sant’s Sea of Trees, which is about a white guy who inexplicably decides to kill himself in the Aokigahara Forest in Japan but is saved by the ghost of his wife masquerading as a depressed Japanese man. He’s also tried it on with period dramas like Free State of Jones, which covers off a rebellion against the Confederacy during the American civil war and is just a white saviour film; or Gold which is a promising double-cross movie about a goldmine that has McConaughey in a bald cap, but suffers from an unfortunately bad script. As an audience, we were willing to believe that McConaughey’s moves were a calculated re-evaluation of his own career and showed an understanding of how to move forward. What his post-Oscar choices prove is that he ultimately probably understands less than we thought, or at the very least, doesn’t really have the good taste to back it up. 

None of this is a judgment call on McConaughey as an actor or a person. I think some actors will only win one Oscar and some will win many. Some actors will consistently and successfully re-evaluate their own skills to produce nuanced and interesting performances; and some actors will show rare moments of insight before immediately blowing it. It’s an artform, and we can’t all be blessed. Audiences and critics wanted to root for McConaughey because there is something likeable his linked onscreen and offscreen personas, and by making a big deal about it we all had to watch him stack it in real time. Which is kind of unfair to the talent he does possess. 

All this is to say – Godspeed, my tiny-armed Southern prince. May you soon find your niche.

Welp! That was the McConaissance. When I wrote my blog post on Matthew McConaughey’s very small arms, it was in the early throes of the McConaissance. I got so much hate mail and I remember thinking “Wow, people are really passionate about this very average dude”. Then two years later he won an Oscar. Joke’s on me, I guess.  If you have a favourite McConaughey film, or you just want to accuse me of being a jealous man with a small penis (which is an actual piece of hate mail I received), talk to me about it next time you see me at the pub! Peace!