Crazy Horse: Of men behaving badly

2009/10/28

I DON’T know what possessed me to switch from Episode 7 from Season Three of The Unit to Gerard Butler’s and Katherine Heigl’s The Ugly Truth.

Maybe it was the teasers that were constantly playing on HBO, maybe it was Katherine Heigl (which I doubt), or perhaps it was Butler (which I seriously doubt). Whatever it was, I succumbed to it last weekend.

I don’t usually watch chick flicks, preferring to spend my off days on a steady dose of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the Dennis Haysbert vehicle about the men of Delta Force.

I had just finished wrapping up the episode where Hector ‘Hammerhead’ Williams takes a sniper round in the neck that severs his cerebral cortex, killing him instantly, while on a mission to recover a kidnapped journalist in Beirut, Lebanon.

Still reeling from the fact that Hammerhead had just died (the guy was a likeable fella), I pressed the pause button and got up to get a drink from the fridge when I saw a copy of The Ugly Truth, just sitting there, on top of a pile of DVDs.

“Pick me up,” it said. I ignored it.

I grabbed a bottle of 7Up and walked back to the couch. On the way, it caught my eye again. “Go on. Pick me up. You know you want to.”

I stopped for a moment, hovered over it, my fingers tracing faint outlines against the plastic cover.

Without fully realising what was going on, I picked it up, flipped it around and began reading the synopsis. Intrigued, I brought it back to the couch with me, took another swig from the bottle and dropped the DVD on the side table and forgot about it for a moment.

I spent the next couple of hours following Sgt Major Jonas Blane and his band of merry special forces men as they take out an assassin from an elevated position, ferret out a rogue SAS operator in London, extricate the US Ambassador and his staff from war-torn Sierra Leone and foil an attempt to set off a nerve gas agent over St Louis, Missouri.

And then I ran out of DVDs.

I wasn’t really thinking when I slotted the disc into the player and thumbed the play button on the remote.

What followed next was a shallow and simplistic look at the relationship between a man and a woman, which had me rolling my eyes, slapping my forehead and wishing that I had slipped in my three-year-old daughter’s Barney the purple dinosaur DVD instead.

Butler’s character, Mike Chadway, is the host of a talk show called The Ugly Truth, which tells women what makes men tick. Basically it paints men as complete Neanderthals and makes excuses for guys behaving badly.

Try telling your girlfriend that you’d rather be refereeing two girls wrestling in a tubful of Jell-O than having a quiet conversation or a romantic candlelight dinner with her. Or that you’d rather hang out with the guys on a Saturday night instead of going out with her to look for curtains.

You might as well find a perfect perch, preferably a cliff, to hurl yourself off of. It’d be over quicker.

What worries me is that the hordes of men who were dragged to the cinemas against their will by their girlfriends/partners/wives to see this crap probably walked out of the theatre thinking that it’s okay to be crass.

Granted, most guys are denser than depleted uranium and have an EQ of an onion when it comes to relationships and matters of the heart. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no Dr Phil either, and struggle with it constantly.

There are days when I get everything spot on and there are days when I mess up so bad that I sometimes wonder if God had somehow missed me when he was funneling grey matter into my brain cavity.

The truth of the matter is, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to relationships. There are no right or wrong answers. There are no cookie-cutter solutions. What works today may not work tomorrow, even if all the variables remain the same. If the planets and stars align, you’ll live to see another day. If not, you’re the lamb on the barbecue spit and it’s a slow fire.

But the key to salvation may lie in this piece of advice a wise man once told me: “A man is the head of the family. A woman, however, is always right.”

Remember that and you’ll live a long and wonderful life.

Maybe.