This sadly underachieving decade, which the British tellingly call the "noughts," has been a troubled one for the concept of masculinity. That's been as true of Hollywood movies as it has of the increasingly nebulous entity we call the real world.
As much as any serious actor of his generation, Heath Ledger, the 28-year-old Australian who was found dead Tuesday in a Manhattan apartment, grappled on screen with the shifting, clashing ideals of what masculinity might mean at the start of the 21st century. Whether playing a heroin-addled poet, a goofy but earnest medieval knight who beats time to '70s rock tunes, a British officer determined to recoup his lost honor, a womanizing Venetian libertine or a sheep-herding cowboy who falls tragically in love with his bunkmate, Ledger wrestled, painfully and often very movingly, with trying to reconcile manhood's competing claims of duty, honor, love, sexuality, work and loyalty (to a woman, a man, a country, an ideal).
In contrast to certain of his lighter-weight contemporaries in their 20s and early 30s, Ledger didn't simply make "guy films." He seemed to steer away from the frat-house jocularity and beery "I-love-you-man!" sentimentality that so many young male performers fall back on in order to reassure their fans, their publicists and perhaps themselves that, underneath whatever sensitive, emotionally layered character they may be portraying, they still haven't lost that ol' macho swagger. Tough guys don't dance, the recently departed pugilist-novelist Norman Mailer once wrote. Neither do they tear up on screen very often, at least not if they still want to be seen as tough guys.
Ledger had a basso profundo ruggedness about him, a premature cragginess that already had begun to nip away at his youthful beauty. But he wasn't afraid to show a deeper vulnerability beneath the scrappy Aussie exterior, a self-doubt that apparently mirrored the actor's own soul. "I like to do something I fear," he told The Times in a 2005 interview. ". . . I like to be afraid of the project. I always am. . . . There's a huge amount of anxiety that drowns out any excitement I have toward the project."
It was largely that roiling anxiety and vulnerability -- and the courage to show it to the world -- that set Ledger apart from the plastic action-hero and pretty-boy Hollywood masses, and that made him especially appealing to female audiences. (If you doubt this, check out the copious digital eulogies now flooding the Internet.)
