This great hulking body

on masculinity, littering, and Jack Reacher

The choice to name his main character “Jack Reacher” happened mainly by accident, so the story goes. Lee Child had a draft of his first novel, Killing Floor, but no name for his hero. Being tall, he was asked by a diminutive shopper at the grocery store if he could reach something on a top shelf: the bolt of lightning from the blue. If he’d named Reacher anything else, of course, I probably would have read the books years ago.

I confess to laziness; my awareness of Jack Reacher has always been muddled together with my awareness of Jack Ryan and I’ve never done much to correct that. There are Jack Ryan movies and there are Jack Reacher movies and the marketing for them is always vaguely the same: tough white guy striding towards the camera, American flag rippling in the wind behind him, maybe an explosion over one shoulder. They look like they’re meant for the people who have a shelf of the complete Bill O’Reilly Killing series (Lincoln, Kennedy, Patton, Jesus, Crazy Horse, the Mob, the Killers, Reagan, the SS, England, the Rising Sun). Amazon obligingly confused me further by recently making a rather jingoistic Jack Ryan series starring a jacked John Krasinski. Suffice it to say, when Amazon dropped Reacher at the beginning of February, I didn’t think it was for me. Reader, I was wrong.

Reacher is a show based on Lee Child’s prolific book series about an ex-military drifter named Jack Reacher. There have been two movies, both starring 5 foot 7 Scientologist Tom Cruise (another reason I never thought this was for me) playing the 6 foot 5 lead character. The first season of this iteration follows the events of Killing Floor, the first book in the series. In it, Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson, noted improvement) wanders into a small Georgia town and is quickly arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. When he discovers the victim is actually his estranged brother, Reacher goes on a quest to avenge him. He is joined in this by a cast of renegade cops, private investigators, and old barbers. The second most important thing to know about Reacher is he’s basically unbeatable. He’s as big as a house and as strong as an ox. He can snap the zip ties around his wrists by flexing and snap a man’s neck almost as easily. The first most important thing to know about Reacher is he is a man who doesn’t litter.

The marketing for this series, and previous Reacher properties, relies on imagery that I can’t help but associate with the conservative right: American flags, law enforcement, guns and explosions and punching, references to the military, heavily muscled white men, fast cars. Marketing like that makes me think of Blue Lives Matter flags, the Capitol rioters, and the Proud Boys (all of which would disgust Reacher). That’s not to say the marketing is really misrepresenting the storyline or characters; Reacher is ex-military and cares deeply about America, most of the other characters are cops, and there is absolutely a scene where Reacher uses his bicep to open a beer bottle. The problem here is that the American right has declared traditional American masculinity its own and coopted its signifiers. It’s there in that weird painting of Trump and Melania on a motorcycle; it’s there in Josh Hawley’s much-discussed speech at the National Conservatism Conference; it’s there in organizations like Operation Underground Railroad and their adoption of conspiratorial and highly inaccurate beliefs about the prevalence of child sex trafficking (the organization is also really into CrossFit so you can be ready to fight off the leftist pedos). It’s there in the vigilantism of Kyle Rittenhouse.

But is the vision of traditional masculinity currently being championed by the conservative right actually embodied by Jack Reacher? Reacher is certainly traditionally masculine in a physical sense, though many of the other positively coded traits he embodies are also there in the women in the show: good with weapons, code of honor, tough as nails, etc. In the conservative talking points on this issue, masculinity is for men alone and it’s a lack of the traditional form of it that’s causing the high rates of depression, addiction, and anomie that American men currently suffer from. But does it really serve us to use this kind of old-school strictly binary language anymore? To be a good man should be synonymous with being a good person; while some traits that have traditionally been coded as masculine involve physical strength more often found in people identifying as men, I don’t think Josh Hawley et al are simply trying to say “to be a good man is to be jacked AF.” Reacher starts the series entirely alone and gets involved with the other main characters because he sees in them traits he values, regardless of gender or muscle mass. Those traits did indeed answer to the name of masculinity at one time, but calling them thus now feels reductive and old-fashioned.

Anyway, back to littering. I am confident in betting my life savings that at no point in Reacher’s life as a character has he or will he ever litter. He is a man with a highly developed moral code that informs every choice he makes. There is not one ounce of carelessness in his character, no moment of exhaustion so deep it would ever lead him to toss a beer can and miss the trash or let a gum wrapper whisk out the open window as he drives after a suspect. At one point in the series, Reacher figures out something important and excitedly grabs a dry erase marker to illustrate his finding. He and his partners are hiding out from the bad guys in the town barbershop, which has a big map of the U.S. hanging on the wall. Reacher takes the dry erase marker and draws on the glass, big sweeping arrows to indicate smuggling routes. His partners get the picture and move on, but the camera lingers for an extra moment on him as he carefully wets a towel and wipes the arrows away. He’s the “leave a place better than you found it” type of guy; think Eagle Scout, not Alex Jones peddling muscle milk.

In Lee Child’s introduction to Killing Floor, he says he wanted to write a character who would always win against the bad guys. He wrote Reacher to be Superman without the alien bonus package (and basically without kryptonite). Reacher is as highly trained as humanly possible, as smart as Sherlock Holmes, and built like a brick shithouse. But he’s also a man who doesn’t litter. He’s a person who has enormous power by virtue of being who he is and he not only refuses to misuse that power, he also actively responds to the onus that power places upon him. As Uncle Ben put it so many Spidermans ago, with great power comes great responsibility. As Reacher wanders the country minding his own business, he chooses to get involved in the plot because he knows it’s his responsibility to fight the baddies as they pop up. It’s knight-errantry masculinity; its noblesse oblige for the 21st century.

Or, to put it more eloquently,

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

One of my favorite novels is Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End. Set in England before, during, and immediately after WWI, Parade’s End tells the story of Christopher Tietjens, a big lumbering brilliant man who wants to do what’s right in every situation he encounters. Although he opposes the war on principle and has a safe job working in the Department of Statistics, when England enters the war he enlists, saying “I have this great hulking body to throw into the war.” Because he has the strength and the wits to fight, he believes he has the responsibility to. That’s Reacher too.

And I think that in a warped way, that actually is what the conservative right thinks it means when it promotes “traditional masculinity.” It’s what they think they’re doing when they bring up the old sheep/wolf/sheepdog paradigm. They’re trying to say that there is a way to be a good man, to be a protector, to use your power to help those who need it. When Hawley calls for the young man of America to stop playing video games and looking at internet porn, and instead become good husbands and good fathers, I think this is sort of what he is trying to say. But a lack of nuance, a stunted understanding of gender coding, and a too-quick dismissal of the harms traditional masculinity has wrought make that message too garbled to hear. Or worse, that message becomes a raised fist of solidarity with the January 6th insurrectionists. After all, isn’t it just so manly to storm the Capitol?

I loved Reacher. The show is fun and funny and it’s just nice to sit down and watch the bad guys lose. It’s nice to feel patriotic and juiced up about car chases and bad guy face-punching and conspiracy theories without feeling like a QAnon convert. But most of all, I loved watching a man I knew would never litter (for littering, of course, insert any of the following: hurt a woman, child, or animal; ridicule the less fortunate; leave a dog with an abusive owner; cheat on a partner; leave a man behind; objectify a woman; vote for Trump). I look at Reacher and I see the sort of person I would want to marry, that I would want some future child to be - someone with honor and ethics and responsibility. I see someone I would want to be, and I can’t punch for shit. At the end of the series, Reacher is saying goodbye to Roscoe, his love interest and partner in stopping crime. She says she’s going to stay and try to rebuild the little Georgia town that’s been torn apart by the baddie shenanigans; he suggests she run for mayor. That’s “great power, great responsibility” talk too.