one of my favorite story elements is “character way past their prime can still absolutely wreck you, leaving you to wonder just how powerful they used to be”
1. hates donald trump
2. got his ear pierced at claires because why not
3. legit asks people to beat him up in action scenes EVEN NOW AS AN OLD MAN
4. is arguably one of the most iconic star wars characters yet couldnt give less of a crap abt star wars
5. the universe tried to kill him (or at least permanently incapacitate him) twice in 2015 and it only mildly inconvenienced him
6. flies helicopters in search and rescue missions
7. was in his 40s for the majority of the indiana jones series which is insane when you think about all the stunts involved
8. quote “the director yells cut and harrison cracks open a beer and then builds a fucking shed”
9. arguably sexy
10. points angrily and its super effective
11. is just a really sweet person 12. no really my dad worked with him on firewall as the tech advisor and he was just a really swell guy 13. got my mom’s birth date from my dad and sent her flowers 14. he sent my mom flowers for her birthday 15. he didn’t even know her he just wanted to be sweet
this was a beautiful and necessary edition to this post thank you oh my god
When he was asked to be in Jimmy Kimmel’s “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” video, in which he pulled up alongside them in a car and gave Jimmy a little wink and an air-kiss, when he showed up at the set he looked kind of put out. Kimmel was afraid he wasn’t down with what they were asking. But he just said, “I don’t know, this wardrobe…don’t you have anything mesh that I could wear?”
When he was filming “Witness” he rented a small farm from a friend of mine. At the end of the filming my friend went and checked out the property as usual. He noticed the barn door had been leveled so it no longer would swing open on it’s own. Went into the house and saw the closets had been redone, in the kitchen the cabinets had been replaced and all the drawers now opened really well. Turns out that there were thousands of dollars of work and materials put into fixing up everything at the place.
My friend called Ford and asked him how much he was asking for the work. Ford told him doing that kind of thing helped him relax and stay sane when he was filming. Would not take a dime. Plus he paid for a new water heater and got the sewage system cleaned out.
And he paid rent to live there the entire time.
Local Carpenter Stumbles Into Stardom, Worries This May Interfere With His Carpentry
something about the wave of Alfred Molina thirst makes me think of that “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” essay. shan’t elaborate right now but give me a moment.
I’m sorry, the what essay?
so glad you asked
it was this article, “We All Simp for Alfred Molina” by Chingy Nea, that made me think of it, particularly this paragraph that one assumes the Nea must have composed whilst drooling like a cartoon wolf:
But gravity isn’t all Molina brings to the role [of Doc Ock]; he carries with him a stunning degree of raw sexual magnetism. As a larger man, Molina really carries his massive appendages, moves deliberately with a menacing cool and delivers one-liners in a sultry arch tone. The physicality of the role also plays into it with Octavius in an open trench coat with his titties out and with a bit of his paunch hanging over the metal tentacle corset around his waist, letting us really take in the beauty of his body.
it’s Nea’s appreciation for Molina’s physicality, specifically the fond attention drawn to his visible paunch, that made me think of R.S. Benedict’s essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.” it’s a good read but also a long one, so I’ll summarize: Benedict posits that current standards of American attractiveness stem from post-9/11 anxiety - “When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole,” she writes - and has created a national mentality of bodies as commodities to be honed to perfection without indulging in any of the pleasure a body can bring, a vessel disjointed from any sense of self and meant only to be looked at with awe.
she opens particularly by noting the very particular brand of sexless-ness that pervades mainstream media, leading to action heroes whose beautiful faces and implausibly sculpted muscles are attractive in theory but also seem to exist in a world apart from anything like genuine sensuality. their bodies are inhuman in their perfection, and this comes at the cost of doing anything as human as fucking. to quote:
In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russel’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol. And when Isabella Rosselini strips in Blue Velvet, her skin is pale and her body is soft. She looks vulnerable and real.
Benedict mostly speculates about the neutered nature of DC and Marvel’s movie characters, but they’re hardly the only blockbusters falling into this trend. Alison Wilmore’s “Why Doesn’t The Rock Get to Make Out More Onscreen?” calls attention to this with a particular focus on Disney’s new Jungle Cruise movie, describing Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s roles as “characters who are to Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen as Funko Pops are to people,” with their inevitable kiss playing out “as though they’re dolls whose heads are being smashed together by a child enacting a rudimentary idea of passion.”
similarly to Benedict’s point, Wilmore notes that “There’s a striking divide between the body that Johnson is so famous for and the characters who are supposed to inhabit it… his characters rarely if ever seem to take pleasure in this physicality beyond its capacity to intimidate and serve as a spectacle.”
and by now you’re probably saying okay Makenzie that’s swell, but what the fuck does this have to do with people thirsting over Alfred Molina? well, look at him.
take in the tits and paunch Nea loves so much, and compare Molina’s body with the kind that have dominated the biggest movies of the last decade or so, since the MCU set the tone for the future of the superhero genre. Quoth Benedict again:
Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs. And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland.
Molina’s Doc Ock isn’t bland; he has character in the form of features that are, increasingly, written off as too ugly or undesirable for film. I think the reason people may be reacting so strongly to him nearly two decades after the movie’s release is that a pretty-normal looking body has now become a spectacle unto itself, by virtue of being so normal.
the current crop of superhero stars are exercised, waxed, dieted, dehydrated, and quite probably steroided into something the average person could never achieve on their own, a body that’s fun to look at but is ultimately alien to anything most people will ever experience. whereas what we’re looking at with Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock is something like a body that many people actually have, a body that many people have known and loved, a body that, frankly, many people have had sex with - certainly more than have ever had sex with, say, Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers all hairless and shiny fresh out of getting shot up with super soldier serum.
it’s a sexy body because it’s a palpably human body, in a genre that increasingly shuns exactly that.
plus, you know, those are just some nice tits.
Both of these articles are worth a read, but this post sums them both up pretty nicely.
got my first positive review lads :)
Ok I now have one (1) thought to add to this sorry for any typos I’m wearing two (2) wrist braces.
So, another thing about Molina’s physicality is that he is a stage actor. I’ve noticed that stage actors, because of the fact that stage is about the ‘single take’ and there are no cuts, no post-processing, no close-ups, coupled with backstage being communal and stage acting generally having this higher requirement for the present and the reality of inhabiting a human body in a physical space, means that stage actors are a presence on screen that is more magnetic and more sensual, not even sexually just inhabiting the senses.
And not only that, but when you’re backstage you have to get comfortable with your nudity and everyone else seeing it real damn quick, because unless you’re in a really modern theatre building (not very often, most theatres are pretty old and labyrinthine), the space backstage is limited, and there are sometimes super-fast costume changes required. Theatre, also, has always been far more rauncy, liberal, and risque than cinema. There was never a Hays Code for theatre, and the MPAA has no power there.
So I would be surprised if a significant part of how Molina carries himself isn’t to do with the fact that he’s a stage actor, and has had vastly different training and experience with that intense 'you inhabit every inch of a body’ self-awareness without the societally-normalised shame or intense discomfort with one’s own body–a lack of anxiety that the viewer twigs as intensely attractive (after all, confidence is the core of 'sexy’ as a concept).
this is an excellent and insightful addition, thank you for typing through the pain!
