Male Fear.

Detectorists is a gentle drama about two metal detector guys, not the most spectacular hobby in the world, and tenderly exposes a barely conscious fear at the heart of masculinity. Two hundred years of industrialisation have somehow left us in no mans land, our allegiance split between family and employer, between some unholy pragmatism and a connection with the sublime. Our employee status has taken on the facile nature of a video game, enthralling but disconnected, yet in some hidden subconscious corner there’s a yearning to connect. This visceral conflict is our fear. OK we’re used to acceptable fears, bravado, rutting like stags in some financial competition or ski jumping and the like, but these only provoke stress that in itself evidences our deeper visceral conflict. Cricketers love the game but become depressed playing it; how can that be? Some like Trump are totally absorbed into their own video game have no need of air or the earth so long as they wins the next round but even they are driven by this same fear. But how can we admit to it, ‘to be or not to be’? Now there’s a question and yet another problem. Female kind has not been subject to this bread-winner conflict. They haven’t the same history of being conflicted in this respect and now appear the braver sex. We men have a fear we’re barely aware of that we can’t afford to accept that viscerally conflicts us AND we’re out-gunned by our women who have remained more connected. Of course they have a proclivity for blowing smoke up their own arse but that’s not the point here. What are WE going to do about it? What does ‘to be’ really mean? Obviously parlance has moved on since Shakespeare’s day but I suggest it might in todays speak be ‘fuck you’. When faced with monetary seduction, power plays even one’s own ego to refer to one’s inner sense of right and say ‘Fuck you, this is not a game.’ It’ll be hard at first; speaking your truth will feel unbelievably risky, well it is for me, but slowly a healing will occur. The boat may wobble but it won’t sink. The world needs men to reconnect with our own visceral honesty, to lose the fear we’ve been burdened with for two hundred years. It really doesn’t turn on the next deal, the next paycheck, the next win. It turns on the dance moves of your spirit.