Three Things Stood Out in ‘Nowhere Special’ About Manhood

Nowhere special was rather special.

Michael and John @Rotten Tomatoes

The other day a friend recommended we should see ‘Nowhere Special’, a Northern Irish, Romanian and Italian co-production inspired by true events. Three things around the issue of masculinity stood out for me from this beautiful movie.

For those who have not seen it, here is what the movie is about. In a nutshell, John, a 35-year-old window cleaner, has dedicated his life to bringing up his 3-year-old son. When John finds out he has a terminal illness, he attempts to find a new family for Michael to shield him from his inevitable death.

The pressures of toxic masculinity

At one point, while talking to his son, John mentions the challenges he faced growing up while in foster care. He confesses the pressures of not being able to show weakness to his friends. Any signs of weakness would have cost him dearly. This sadly illustrates the pressures we men put on each other to portray strength, pressures which enforce the dominant way of doing masculinity (I covered this in a previous post here) and don’t allow us to be ourselves.

For many of us, the pressure to feel and project a sense of strength is rather high. Be it mental, physical or emotional, we struggle to show or receive vulnerability…