It’s our Question of the Day: You’ve fallen from grace and lost your reputation. What do you do to start living the life you always wanted, as the man you always knew you could be?
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Last night we saw the film Chef starring Jon Favreau.
I will be honest, I loved it. Maybe I’ve spent too much time at The Good Men Project the last few years, but this is a movie that’s about men and what it means to be a man in the 21st Century.
Favreau’s character is a famous chef at a famous restaurant in Los Angeles. He’s also a divorced father of a 10 year-old and the ex-husband of Sofia Vergara (whom I actually started liking because of this film). Things seem good, but you get a sense that he’s a bit panicked, a bit frenetic, and very disconnected from his life – especially his kid.
A lot of shitty things happen to Favreau’s character in this film, and nearly every single one of them loops back to how a man forms his identity in our society: His career, his reputation, his standing with beautiful women, and his role as a dad. And they all fall apart.
But in falling apart, our guy gets to start again. He gets to be a new chef once again, a chef starting from scratch, and a guy who can be daring because he has no further to fall. And in that process, he rediscovers who he is as a boss, as a dad, as a partner, as a friend and as a chef.
He does this all in a food truck selling cubano sandwiches out of a truck, on a road trip with his kid and his best friend.
The movie isn’t perfect. But it’s good. And it’s a good movie about masculinity in all its beauty and glory. It’s a movie about what we do to men when we expect them to be both trailblazers and breadwinners.
And it’s a movie about fresh starts.
So I ask you, if it all fell apart and you had to start again… what would you do?
It all fell apart several times for me. Having grown-up in a life-threatening environment, I learned to always have a lifeboat, in the water, engine running, traveling along side my current ship. When I’d see any sign of the current ship faltering – off to the ready lifeboat I went.
The final blow – the final ‘disaster’ did not have a lifeboat. Having to dive into the water came as a shock. It seemed I was ‘all out of lifeboats.’ So you adapt and become a funny-looking fish.
I look around at the people I admire and respect, take the aspects of those people I like and slowly and steadily build those aspects into myself. I have some good friends now and there are bits of them in me I can never truly thank them for.
I think that some of the most respectable, stable, “grown” men I know are those that have hit bottom at one point of another. I am not talking about the slowly spiraling down, but the life shattering, spirit breaking defeat. It is a humbling experience. After you finish cursing fate/god/destiny/chance at the top of your lungs, you realize that maybe, just maybe you needed to get knocked down to keep that Ego in check. As you get back up, you learn to appreciate everything and everyone around you. The sad part is that sometimes you need that rebirth to become… Read more »
Despite a divorce because of which I went into substantial debt, I’ve been fortunate enough to not have been torn down to ground zero, as it were. Some might question if that is a blessing or a curse..and in my case it’s a blessing, else I would never have met my wife and have my eyes opened to all the possibilities life has to offer. An outstanding question, Joanna.
I did, it did, and while I’m still rebuilding, I’ve got a long way to go. The best part, of leaving my house with a mortgage, and losing my job, has been the stripping away of all pretense. Now there’s just me.
Thanks for your post. I’ll have to go see the movie.
I feel like I’ve already done this three or four times in my life. In each case, I just kept on going until things got better and somehow they always have.
What he said.
Good morning, Joanna: Great question. I’ve had a similiar experience as the protagonist in the film. Not a fall from grace. Different circumstances, but the effect was the same. After getting out of the Army, I moved home, mostly to protect my mom from my step-father, who was a violent alcoholic and drug addict. We were living in my deceased grandmother’s house. I had taken to sleeping in a recliner in the living room, with a rifle or shotgun in my lap. One night, he was making threatening calls, drive-bys, etc. Escalating. We called the police. No help forthcoming. About… Read more »
Sorry for typos/grammatical errors. No time to edit the above.