The Movies that Made Me

My wife and I sat down to watch Stand By Me, and I found myself doing something I never did when I was younger. I was analyzing the boys on screen. Not just watching the story. Watching what it was teaching me about what it means to be a man.

I grew up in a small town in Maine. Our driveway was a quarter mile long. We didn’t have cable. Just NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and eventually Fox. My parents didn’t get a satellite dish until I was in college. So in the long winter evenings, my sister and I watched the same stack of VHS tapes over and over again.

Those movies shaped me in ways I couldn’t see at the time. Rocky taught me that toughness and tenderness could live in the same person. Rambo’s most unforgettable scene isn’t a fight. It’s a breakdown, sobbing about the pain of war and rejection. The Karate Kid showed me that strength could look like patience and balance, not just force. Footloose showed me that rebellion can be an act of love when it opens space for people to feel and celebrate.

I didn’t realize these films were handing me a picture of manhood. Messy, contradictory, sometimes fear-driven and sometimes love-driven. But they were the map I had.

Now, on this adventure, I keep coming back to the question: what stories are shaping the boys growing up today? And are those stories expanding what manhood can look like, or narrowing it?

The characters on those VHS tapes didn’t give me perfect answers. But they gave me permission to feel. And looking back, that mattered more than I knew.

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Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org