The Point of Contention
Why does a movie about sword duels call us to guide young men to a proper expression of masculinity, before they find an improper one to put in its place?
If you haven’t seen 1977 Ridley Scott masterpiece The Duellists, I must inform you that your experience of cinema is incomplete. The film is a captivating vignette of the Napoleonic Wars and the attitudes of the soldiers who fought it, with stunning visuals and tense, quiet fight scenes. The Duellists centers around a series of altercations fought over a supposed personal slight upon Lieutenant Gabriel Feraud committed by Lieutenant Armand D'Hubert. Feraud challanges d’Hubert to a duel. The inconclusive fight leads to a series of rematches. The story follows the two men through an ongoing feud that eventually comes to a head over fifteen years after the original insult. In fact, the entire film is based on a true story of two French officers who fought 30 duels over a 19-year period.
Men don’t tend to reconcile their differences by duelling anymore. It is healthy not to let small matters of personal affront turn into life-threatening episodes of machismo- precisely the message of The Duellists. The time of the Napoleonic soldier has passed. As the characters of The Duellists show, they were harsh men living a harsh existence. They valued personal honor above life itself. But I sense something of a longing for that sort of contention in modern men. Young men seem to be reaching for the sort of “piss and vinegar” expression of masculinity on display in Feraud and d’Hubert’s deadly competitions, which they assume to be dead. I think there’s something worthwhile beneath The Duellists’ critique of wonton machismo.
Men are naturally endowed with physical strength. Before, I have stated that the masculine genius is “strength harnessed on behalf of others,” while arguing why all men should build physical strength. Men are meant to compete with their central attribute, and competition is a function of strength. Think of what young boys do on a playground; they're out to see who can run the fastest, throw the farthest, or climb the highest. This is how boys tend to see where they stand in relation to peers. They also gain social acceptance through these competitions. As they mature, young men gain a powerful body along with a good measure of self-confidence.
This power must be properly channeled. Without a robust understanding of masculinity, without knowing the right way to be a man, this strength runs the risk of misuse. In the absence of proper challenges, traditionally expressed through rites of passage and competition, a young man may find wrong answers and disordered modes of competition on his search for identity. He may well presume that his strength is his own and should serve him alone. Lieutenant Feraud, the aggressor in the duellists’ feud, is surely guilty of this. His mistress Laura notices it:
“Nobody understands why you fight with Armand. It's supposed to be a secret between the pair of you. I believe it's a secret of your very own. I believe you feed your spite on him with no more sense than a blood-sucking louse.”
The Duellists is a cautionary tale against the sort of unrestrained, misdirected masculinity that fulfills legitimate masculine desires for challenge, honor, and competition.
Despite the apparent senselessness of the violence, the duels are undeniably cool. There’s something romantic about the sword duel that captivates the male imagination. War movies are popular with men because they display the most extreme versions of male strength and competition. Especially for the modern man who may have never been in a fight, let alone a fight with weapons and the possibility of death, The Duellists dredges something up. Feraud and d’Hubert are concerned with honor, their perception amongst peers, and their sense of self-respect. Although they let that turn into profligate violence, the dynamic of honor is worth noting. The desire men feel for that honor-awarding competition is nostalgic in an environment which culturally enforces more indirect, feminine modes of competition.
Men tend to compete openly with shows of strength and argumentation. Women tend to compete more passively or try to not appear competitive at all. Increasingly, women have been pressed to compete in historically male-dominated spaces. I am not here concerned with the fittingness of that, but acknowledging it as a fact. The nature of male and female competition styles necessitate some sort of mediation when men and women compete in the same arena. Every instance of mixed competition has a body for mediation: the workplace has HR, the university has a DEI committee, the military has both DEI officers and the SHARP program.
For a practical example, it is less acceptable to have an open argument in the workplace than to open a case with HR and introduce a ‘referee’ into the situation. If the referee determines the outcome of a competition, the game is rigged. If the referee is only on the field to protect the interests of one team, that team is far more likely to win. Therefore, the referee is the most important player in the game, and the players are unimportant. The referee holds the most power. This is the opposite of the duel. The mediation bodies I listed above now hold an inordinate position in leadership. Men rightly sense that they are no longer the undisputed leaders of society, that their strength and adversarial fervor is unwanted by these referees.
I do not cite this phenomenon as an excuse to play the victim. This is not to blame women for the crisis of authentic masculinity. This is to name a real dynamic of the modern world which young men must understand as they search for identity. When young men find that masculine strength is discouraged by the ‘referees’ of this society, many look for someone to blame and some way to escape. This tends to manifest in sympathies with movements like the Proud Boys and Men Going Their Own Way or individuals like Andrew Tate or “Bronze Age Pervert”. The latter of these promotes a return to some sort of idealized machismo from the Illiad sprinkled with Nietzschean ideas. The first, the Proud Boys, ironically recommends The Duellists option: fight for the sake of fighting, win personal honor at any cost. We must offer young men something better, truer, and more beautiful.
The most powerful place to meet them is at the core of the masculine, in physical identity. Young men should be given a physical formation. This formation should strengthen their bodies physically while teaching them how to harness their strength in the proper manner. Part of this physical formation needs to be adversarial. Strength harnessed on behalf of others must be sufficient to defend others should the need arise. This may necessitate real fighting for which they should be prepared. Sports such as rugby, wrestling, and boxing should be encouraged. Even fencing! These competitions are (non-lethal) opportunities for boys to gain self-respect and social acceptance while accentuating physical identity. They become stronger not only as individuals, but as a collective whose members have respect for one another. Sports programs as they stand are usually too concentrated on the sport itself. The true purpose of the sport is to simulate real-world competition in an enjoyable, constructive way and to strengthen for future, more consequential struggles.
The Duellists is a good critique of unrestrained machismo and shallow expressions of masculine strength. But it can also be viewed as a warning of what misguided young men could idolize as they feel rejected by a an anti-masculine culture. The marrow of The Duellists, the reason it is so attractive to a male audience, is worth noting: men must maintain a sense of respect for one another and for themselves through physical identity. This respect is held in tension and won through competition.
The masculine genius is strength harnessed for the sake of service to others. Young men must be allowed compete openly to build and channel their strength. We men need to remind ourselves how to strive for excellence and how to handle a defeat graciously or we won’t be strong enough to survive the storms that now beset our society. Boys will fight. Men will be strong. But what will that strength serve? Our own egos? Or the wellbeing of our families, communities, and society?