I recently took my family to see “The Fall Guy,” starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, which was at some level a hat tip to an early 1980s thing starring Lee Majors as Colt Seaver (shoutout to 1980s character names) who is a Hollywood stunt man by day and a bounty-hunter by night. In the Gosling version, Seaver is a Hollywood stunt man by day, and a clever, ironic guy who makes movie references by night (and also day). It is a fun movie that is also a layers-deep study in self-awareness. Let me explain.
Definitionally, per Oxford Languages, self-awareness is “conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives, and desires.” Per about fifteen additional seconds of research, the term self-awareness originated in 1972. So it hasn’t been with us real long, and for the majority of that time it was viewed as a positive thing, as in, “Kluck is ok to be with because he’s self-aware.” Historically, we have viewed self-aware people through a positive lens, because they typically know how to get along with other people.
Definitionally (again), Gosling’s “The Fall Guy” is self-aware in that it is conscious of its characters – in fact, rather than just telling a story about a bounty hunter stuntman, it is constantly reminding you that it is ironically telling a story about a bounty-hunter stuntman in that it is a movie (duh), about making a movie, which spends the vast majority of its time quoting and homaging other movies[1] for satirical wink-wink reasons. In doing this, it is very conscious (again, definitionally) of its motives (namely, to be clever).
So in this, it is less an exercise in watching a movie, and more an exercise in watching clever people remind you a.) how much they know about movies, and b.) how much they “get” how stupid their thing is, but that they’re doing it anyway. To be clear, this was kind of fun, and I kind of enjoyed it. It was not unlike going to a party with your cinephile friend, at which party he is constantly quoting movies as a means of showing everyone else how clever he is. This person is the very definition of kind of fun to be with.
The question is, which approach to entertainment is more fun?
The thing about the 1980s television version is that it fully and unabashedly invited you to watch and believe a story about a handsome guy who is a Hollywood stuntman who also moonlights as a bounty hunter. You were supposed to, for a few minutes of your evening once a week, believe that Lee Majors was not Lee Majors but was in fact Colt Seaver (again, great name) whose job it was to hunt down bad guys. At the end of the experience you were supposed to be happy that Colt Seaver escaped his brush with death, and that there was one less bad guy roaming the streets. In this, the expectations were relatively earnest and straightforward.
At no point was Lee Majors acknowledging that a television show about a bounty hunter stuntman was a stupid conceit – namely because it was the 80s and nobody believed it was stupid. And moreover, there was nothing ironic about the sexual tension he was experiencing with Heather Thomas, because, in addition to catching bad guys, that was the point of the program. You weren’t supposed to view the sexual tension as some sort of ironic punchline. In fact, you wanted to be someone like Lee Majors, in hopes of creating some sexual tension in your own life.
In the Gosling version, Gosling is never not being Gosling, and in fact never really invites you to believe that he is Colt Seaver – because the very idea of Colt Seaver and the very name Colt Seaver is, itself, a punchline. Even the movie they are making in the movie about movies, is stupid, and features like 30 seconds of Hollywood actor Jason Momoa basically acknowledging and celebrating how stupid he is.
At the end of the night, I felt a little stupid. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I dropped fifty bucks on an “in” joke.
[1]Last of the Mohicans, Notting Hill, Pretty Woman, Miami Vice, Rocky Balboa, et. al.
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