Let Us Now Praise Infamous Men

The male hero, once in ample supply, has entered a period of steady decline, and today our most iconic men are more likely to inspire cynicism than reverence.

If you were to take an inventory of prominent men today, you might wonder what’s become of the male icon. Once minted in steady supply from the best of our statesmen, athletes and entertainers, the genuine icon has become a rare thing. And while the icon used to be bound up in heroism — real or perceived — current contenders to iconic status are now made from darker stuff. Consider Julian Assange, or Kanye West, or Mark Zuckerberg, or the problematic fictional men of cable TV.

To be an iconic man was at one time less complicated. You had to be the president, or a movie star, or a rock star, or the heavyweight champion of the world. Admittedly, none of that was easy; as achievements go, they were among American life’s most difficult, requiring at least as much dumb luck as talent and hard work. But once the hurdles were cleared, divine worship was the reward. It might be James Dean, or Elvis, or John F. Kennedy. The world needed these charismatic men, these otherworldly achievers and transcendent beauties. What came next was the apotheosis: the iconic man delivered unto the heart of the country on the cover of Look, or Life, or Esquire.

Of course, such men had their detractors. Elvis’s gyrations outraged some, and J.F.K.’s Catholicism offended others. The famous image of Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastián, hands bound behind his back and body pierced by half a dozen bloody arrows, showed that not everyone was willing to worship in his church. But by and large, these figures had the nation’s heart, and a consensus prevailed that they were great men. And once they had begun doing great things, a centralized and highly structured tastemaking machine began curating and disseminating their divinity. Control over that dissemination was highly concentrated: it was a time of three network stations, a sovereign Madison Avenue, a stable literary canon. Ours was a dominant culture of suits and ties and a counterculture effectively contained. The machine knew what the world liked and found acceptable. It had a lock on our fantasies and projections and longings. It told us, in the primal language of the photograph, what a man was, a great man, a godly man, and how we might emulate him.

But the machine couldn’t keep its grip. Nixon fell, forever desacralizing high office, and memoirs by Kennedy’s mistresses brought news of a martyred saint’s all-too-human condition. The paparazzi, once lurking among the shadows, crept into the light, helping to narrow the gap between our view of paradise and reality. Privilege would never again be accorded privacy. Irony and cynicism slowly gained on reverence.

As we got savvier and more skeptical, we turned against the machine. We began to understand that what made a man iconic was as much commercial manipulation as it was empyrean merit. The supermarket tabloids undercut the pageantry of glossy cover images. Around the time that rock stars began to sell out to car commercials, the male icon entered a permanent decline. Our more nuanced view of the powerful, the celebrated and the revered gave rise to a more compromised representative man. Ali fell to Tyson. Kennedy ceded to Clinton. Kurt Cobain was my generation’s Elvis.

Then something truly radical happened: the machine’s hegemony was vanquished by actual machines, whose servers brought the last towering male monoliths down to JPEG size. Postwar America’s legacy as an established culture and counterculture shattered into a multitude of subcultures full of shrill-voiced Web sites and viciously opposed narratives. The magazine cover article went into competition with a staggering number of competing stories in the online marketplace of bloggers and gossip sites, while the images on those covers lost their inherent power as a form of communication. They were captioned, manipulated, blemished. They became commodities, no more valuable than pictures on a Facebook page. The cover image now commands all of a second’s attention before it’s forgotten or absorbed via social media into the end user’s personal brand. We are no longer in thrall to the icon; the icon is in service to each and every one of us, and at our individual mercy.

The male icon’s decline is bound up in the destruction of the machine and the impoverishment of the image, but it dovetails with a crisis among the ranks of men. The prospect of a president restoring the role suffered a fatal blow when George Bush took his Potemkin flight toward a “Mission Accomplished” banner. It was resuscitated briefly with a Shepard Fairey print of the candidate Barack Obama and the single word “Hope.” But in no time at all one congressman cried out, “You lie!” during a State of the Union address, and others throttled every prospect of bipartisanship. If Clinton was the icon of ambivalence, and Bush the icon of incompetence, the icon of hope has been transformed into the truly hopeless image of political gridlock and apocalyptic rancor.

Shift to sports, or movies, or music, and the icon is equally as moribund. Lance Armstrong briefly gave us a hero, but in the end he was just Bernie Madoff in spandex. N.F.L. thugs compete with M.L.B. juicers to see who can disappoint us more. Dress Michael Vick or A-Rod up as Saint Sebastián and everyone would know that the arrows were self-inflicted. The homogenizing forces at play in Hollywood — its blockbuster business model, its jones for superheroes, its disdain for anything original — have made the mask, and not the man, the focus of our attention. Who experiences an intake of breath at another cover photo of Robert Downey Jr. or Christian Bale? In an epidemic of cynicism, it signals only another cycle of sequels. And these actors are, truly, among the best of their generation. By contrast, their counterparts in the comedy world are clown-boys who refuse to grow up over and over again, making any attempt to turn them into icons wholly silly.

The male icon’s decline might not matter much. It’s never a bad idea to forge your own original power rather than ape the appeal of others. Still, we should recognize the void left behind. This is the only way to explain the presence of the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on an August cover of Rolling Stone. Has any other magazine anointed more male icons in the past 40-odd years? To see Tsarnaev in the pose of the sexy teen idol served to elevate an alleged mass murderer to the hallowed company of John Lennon and Jay Z.

This explains the uproar that followed. Take the charitable view and say the decision was meant to complicate the face of terror. But the incongruity between the actions of the accused and the cachet of the masthead, the bloody footage of the carnage and the transcendent pose of the suspect, is not only a source of controversy. It’s a reinvigoration of the icon. It’s the final sundering of the heroic from the iconic. Call it misguided, crude, a craven ploy; whatever else, it represents the evolution of a very particular pictorial vocabulary — the terrorist as icon.

Only 22 years ago, Don DeLillo had a character in “Mao II” postulate the following: “In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. . . . Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside.”

The terrorist has been absorbed.