Stories of Broken Men

You flip on the TV to a random show and it opens with a man, alone in a dark room, drinking. He’s staring at a photograph of a loved one who is dead or gone. We see his flashback that keeps replaying because it hasn’t been resolved. Now which show is it? Of course, that’s an impossible question because this very scene has become a well-worn trope in prestige dramas. It’s so standardized that it functions as a storytelling shorthand that tells you exactly what kind of story this is.

Scroll through the listings on any streaming media service and you will find prestige drama after prestige drama featuring broken, brooding men who are angry, hurt, and dangerous. Just to name a few: There’s James Reece, played by Chris Pratt, in The Terminal List; Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, in Slow Horses; David Jung, played by Daniel Dae Kim, in Butterfly. I could go on and on. It’s not a new phenomenon either. Think of Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies or Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies back in the 1980s.

Why do we see so many stories of broken, angry men out for blood and yet so few stories of broken men who find redemption and healing beyond revenge, nihilism, or stoic isolation?

Why is this the story we keep telling and why does it almost never end well?

James Reece in The Terminal List, for example, is a Navy SEAL whose wife and daughter were murdered and he sets out to kill the people who did it, keeping the list of names on the back of one of his daughter’s drawings. At the same time, he grapples with brain tumors caused by experiments done on his SEAL team.

Prime Video’s marketing for Season 2 makes the point even sharper as they say the new season puts Reece “on a journey of violent redemption, finding a new purpose after finishing his list.”

While these are dramatically compelling shows and excellent at diagnosing the wound of modern masculinity, they then prescribe cures that won’t work. They cannot work.

Yes, I know I shouldn’t expect action-hero shows to be reflective of Christian anthropology and morality. But I do want to note how often they are already reaching for redemption language and then coming up empty by their own internal logic. And yet there is real redemption to be found.

What Pop Culture Gets Right

What these stories get right is that there are many men who’ve been wounded by the world. They’ve suffered from betrayal by loved ones or friends or institutions. They’ve been disillusioned by the compromise of principles and ideals. They’re isolated from friends and family and community. They’ve lost friends and comrades. It’s a reflection of the real societal pressures men face, whether they are veterans with PTSD or fatherless or lack purpose in life. Many men feel burdened by the weight of responsibility and expectations. Or they feel unappreciated and criticized.

Reece is betrayed by his country and his friend. David Jung is betrayed by his partner. Jackson Lamb and his agents are betrayed by MI5’s willingness to use them and then throw them away. We embrace heroes who fight back against a world that has betrayed them because so many of us feel similarly about the institutions around us.

Distrust in authority and institutions has become widespread in the last two decades. This is measurable in Gallup’s polling data that shows Americans’ average confidence in 14 core institutions stands at a near-historic low of 27%, with television news and Congress at 14% and 9%, respectively.

And much of the dramatic basis for this woundedness in the shows is deeply rooted in fatherhood. Reece lost his wife and daughter. Jung loses his daughter to his decision to vanish. Lamb lost an unborn child to Cold War espionage. What these all have in common is the understanding that for men, their deepest vulnerability is not their own safety, but their failure to protect the people entrusted to them.

That protective instinct is deeply ingrained in a Catholic understanding of our humanity and in our understanding of God our Father. The Church has always taught that there is the right and duty to protect the innocent and those under our care. (CCC 2265) Our faith also tells us that justice is a fundamental truth about God himself. So these stories work because they reflect a deep truth in our human nature that recognizes that when someone hurts the innocent, someone should do something about it. That impulse isn’t the problem. The problem is the way the solution is formulated.

What’s lacking in these stories is proportionality, legitimate authority, and redressing the disorder caused. Reece should not be judge, jury, and executioner. Vigilantism isn’t justice. It’s “might makes right”. But these shows rarely notice this, which is revealing.

Meanwhile, Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses is a disgraced spy who has been exiled to a dead-end office. He drinks, smokes, curses, is a disgusting slob and weaponizes his own flatulence. He’s mean to everyone, yet he’s extremely effective and often underestimated. He also protects his people at a cost to himself and others. His defining rule is that he doesn’t let his joes get hurt without consequence. That’s a real protective ethic, a loyalty code, operating in a man with no other visible virtues.

Another common element in these men is the loneliness and isolation. In fact, it’s embraced as a virtue and a strategy. David Jung’s protective act was to vanish and sever contact with his daughter. But the show is smart enough to show that he wounded his daughter by doing this, which had far-reaching consequences. Often, self-medication through alcohol or drugs is how they are shown to cope. Lamb’s drinking is his character. Reece’s dissociation is shown as focus. What these story elements do is depict addiction and isolation as toughness rather than symptoms of a deeper problem.

In 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a warning that loneliness and isolation are an epidemic in US society, and is especially acute among men. Another study in 2021 found that a significant number of men were reported as having zero close friends, which was a huge increase from recent decades. And that loneliness is shown to lead to massive health problems, which is compared to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

None of these shows depict isolation as effective in bringing healing and happiness. Reece, Lamb, Jung, Rambo, and the rest always end up as alone as when they started. It’s as if they’re saying that real men don’t deserve or need joy or redemption. They only need to be tough enough to outlast their enemies.

Where Pop Culture Falls Short

But revenge is not redemption and vengeance is not justice. No matter how they wrap the violence in the rhetoric of justice, it’s not. Yes, pursue justice and see that your enemies are punished by the legitimate authorities. But that’s not the same as taking the law into your own hands.

These stories often use the language of cleansing and purification: closure, finishing it, making it right. But that’s not the true form of purification. True purification comes from suffering offered in love, sacrifice made at the cost of self, forgiveness given freely. The way of vengeance is ultimately fruitless because it leaves the avenger as guilty as the one he brings vengeance upon.

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord,” writes St. Paul in Romans 12:19, quoting Deuteronomy 32:35. This isn’t a rejection of our instinct to protect the innocent, but a claim about jurisdiction. A man can’t heal himself through vengeance because he doesn’t have a right to it. Only God is the judge.

Of course, these shows and these characters are written to be tragic, to create drama by showing men who are broken and angry and brought to the very end of themselves. But awareness of a dead end is not the same as showing a way out of it. These shows are great at diagnosing futility but terrible at depicting what comes after it. I’m not asserting that we shouldn’t have tragic dramas at all, but that while we can be entertained by them, we need to understand how they show us the wrong path.

In much of what we see on screen, Christian virtue is often absent or is replaced with competence. We admire them for their skill and doggedness and pain tolerance. Sometimes we get glimpses of tenderness and love, but rarely do we see patience, chastity, temperance, or forgiveness. Those are often seen as weakness or played for comedy. And it’s forgiveness which suffers the keenest absence among the virtues. Sure, the shows may wave at patience and humility, but forgiveness would end the stories before the first act of the first episode.

And yes, we get the other virtues of loyalty, courage, endurance, and fidelity to comrades and those are virtues to be admired and celebrated. These are indeed genuine goods in the natural order. But they are only natural virtues without the higher, theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. They can never be enough on their own.

It would be tempting to diagnose Jackson Lamb as a man without virtue, but he’s more accurately a man without hope. Consider the scene in season 5 where he gives an uncharacteristically sincere monologue about a joe tortured by the Stasi in East Berlin during the Cold War and when Catherine Standish asks him point blank if he is that man, he denies it unconvincingly. In reality, he’s a man practicing fidelity to the dead in a world where nothing can be repaired.

What Christian Masculinity Offers Instead

What Christian masculinity offers instead as a contrast to these stories of broken men is a path of sacrificial strength. First, we need to recognize who Christ really is. He’s not the passive martyr of sentimental piety or the warrior strongman who vanquishes his foes. On the one hand, he drives the money changers out of the temple and on the other hand, he rebukes Peter’s use of the sword in Gethsemane and heals the man he wounded. Both scenes fall within days of each other in the Synoptic Gospels, and both are a sign of manly strength.

In Philippians 2:6-8, we read that Christ, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself.” The Greek verb behind “emptied himself” gives us the word kenosis and it doesn’t mean weakness. It means a capacity deliberately withheld. The model we’re offered in Christ is one of a man whose power is real and whose restraint is chosen.

Jesus tells us that “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13). But note the direction of the love: the man gives his own life, not someone else’s. Yet every action hero in this genre goes in the opposite direction. Others die to make him whole. This doesn’t mean that the average man is being asked for literal martyrdom. Instead, we take up the daily, unglamorous version: Getting up, going to work, loving our wives, raising our children, keeping our promises. This is what true masculinity looks like.

True redemption is gift, not revenge. Revenge is something a man does, but redemption is something done to him. The Catechism frames this as: “Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us.” (CCC 1996). When Saul was knocked down on the road to Damascus, he was working on his own “terminal list” while actively persecuting the church. God gave him that moment of redemption as a gift. He didn’t earn it, complete it, or finish anything first. Grace interrupted everything and set him on a new path.

Reece wants to be made whole again, to have the debt settled, and to stop being defined by his past. Vengeance can’t do that, but the grace of the sacraments can. And without a body count.

Grace can’t undo the deaths. It can’t bring back dead loved ones or comrades or undo the results of evil deeds done to him. When Paul became an Apostle, his victims did not spring back to life. Christianity doesn’t unmake the wound. Instead, it is joined to Christ’s wounds and made redemptive.

Meanwhile, isolation and loneliness are not the answer they seem to be. I often find myself saying to these characters, “Hey, find your brothers. Let them help you find who you really are.”

“Iron sharpens iron and one man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17). This isn’t just a pat on the back and an affirmation. This implies real friction. Sharpening is abrasive and so, brothers, we need to be willing to be honest with each other and call each other out. We have to be willing to tell each other when we’re wrong. Maybe it’s a parish men’s group that meets whether or not anyone feels like it. Maybe it’s finding a spiritual director who doesn’t hold back from diagnosing your spiritual faults. Or it could be a regular confessor who knows your patterns of sin.

Of course, the Church hasn’t always been great at this part. Too often when men look for a place in their parishes, they don’t find a brotherhood, but a sign-up sheet and a coffee hour.

I do like all of the shows I mentioned partly because they do appeal to a part of masculinity that is often overlooked and sometimes not valued in our culture. And the writing often frames the wounds of men accurately. It’s just that they misidentify the cure. Reece finished his list and was left with a boat and a tumor.

These shows are not a failure and I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t be made. I’m saying that they are signs of something we should recognize and pay attention to. Millions of men are watching stories about betrayal, isolation, and unresolvable grief and recognizing themselves. Season 2 of The Terminal List is being marketed as “a journey of violent redemption.” The culture wants redemption, but doesn’t know where to look for it.

Christ doesn’t ask a man not to be strong, or to stop being protective, or to pretend that betrayal or loneliness or thankless labor doesn’t hurt. He asks us to stop being our own judge. He wants us to put ourselves in the same room with a priest who can say the words we cannot say to ourselves.

James Reece has a list. What he needed was a confessor.