THE MAN WHO WAS OVERLOOKED IN THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Kari Hotakainen: Juoksuhaudantie - novel (2002)
Veikko Aaltonen: Juoksuhaudantie - film (2004)

[Translation by Yvette Mead]

 

Markku Soikkeli

 

In today’s society, men can choose who they want to be. But that is where the problem lies – at least in Finland. There are so many role models that men don’t know which one to believe in. The war heroes from their grandparents’ generation represent a world that no longer exists. On the other hand, the model cherished by the younger generation – that of a successful career man who likes team sports – doesn’t suit everyone either. The writer Kari Hotakainen has taken a close look at this male crisis, and his point of departure is the myth of the battle of the sexes. His novel Juoksuhaudantie (The Trench Road, 2002) tells the story of Matti Virtanen, who, just like a soldier who stays behind the trenches, stayed at home while women waged their ‘war of liberation’. That is how the novel was filmed, and we could finally visualise Matti as a person.

 

In Trench Road, the emancipated woman is portrayed as a sentry guarding the frontiers of the masculine identity. However, when she refuses to carry out her orders, the man is left to establish the new boundaries himself. During his divorce, Matti Virtanen realises that his belief in the equality of the sexes was groundless. The fact that he stayed at home and looked after the house did not result in a happy marriage; his wife is unhappy because he is not interested in building a life outside their home.

When Matti’s wife leaves him, taking their daughter with her, he thinks he can save the family by buying a detached house – the type of house owned by men who make no concessions in their marriage.

Hotakainen overturns the traditional male and female roles. Matti Virtanen is a man who, with all the rage of a war hero, fights to keep his family together. All possibilities are open to him: he moonlights as a masseur, steals from the warehouse he works in, and acts a fence for stolen goods. Hotakainen’s representation of emancipation is as one-sided as it is in his other works, but it fits in with the comedy of this book, the comedy of exaggeration. Hotakainen is one of those writers whose comedy evokes more than just laughter.

The property market: guerrilla warfare

In Hotakainen’s novel, Matti Virtanen perceives the housing market as a theatre of war; the ideal house is a scarce resource. The heaviest battles are waged for possession of a ‘veteran house’. After the Second World War, the government made subsidies available for these wooden houses, which were built at the end of the 1940s by soldiers who had fought at the front. Matti Virtanen infiltrates this wooden ‘front line’. He spies on neighbouring houses that are for sale, to check their quality. While Virtanen is busy living his life as a househusband, the Finns are forming tribes that are united by the type of home they live in. People who live in single-family homes jealously guard their plots. Civil rights have become residential rights. Building a house is seen as a form of merciless guerrilla warfare: men lose their composure, and families form ‘tribes’ that are suspicious of each other. ‘The Homeowner tribe appears to have a strong feeling of solidarity, despite the fact that they hardly know anything about each other’s lives’, thinks Matti Virtanen. ‘They were united by their mode of living and a fear of change.’

The diplomats in this new society are corrupt estate agents. Hotakainen uses these building blocks to construct a gripping story in which the reader sees events through other eyes than the main protagonist’s. Although Virtanen proves to be untypical, his neurosis clearly represents the modern Finnish dream. The only difference is that Virtanen takes it seriously. The discussion surrounding the realism of the book – and the subsequent film – arose partly because the story is set in parts of Helsinki that actually exist. The high cost of housing in Helsinki reflects the high cost of living throughout Finland: on average, housing accounts for one-third of expenditure by Finns.

Property boundaries determine human boundaries

The Trench Road is a merciless satire of modern life. It reminds the reader of another of Hotakainen’s novels, Bronks (1993) in which bureaucrats from the city clash with the residents of a commuter belt. Bronks is a nightmare scenario for Finland, where people have merged with their environment to such an extent that they have become mere components driven by the engine of society. This is also reflected in The Trench Road. If you work, you become a machine; if you build a house, you begin to look like it. The individual’s identity is defined by the boundaries of his property. Reversing the roles of the sexes is an equally creative solution. Hotakainen’s work has a dual focus: men and women who live apart, and couples who can no longer live together.

Hotakainen’s satire is directed at feminism and feminist emancipatory literature. Finnish feminists have also criticised the traditional stereotypes that place the woman at home and the man out in the real world. At home, the woman’s body is no more than a piece of equipment. By contrast, the workplace and public life are traditionally seen as settings in which the men enjoy their freedom and regard their body as a adaptable resource. In Hotakainen’s society, it is the man who sacrifices himself for the privacy of the home. It is the man who, in the battle to maintain his family’s self-respect, sacrifices his sexuality and his body. Matti Virtanen works as a masseur in order to save up for his new house. He cries when the women he massages become aroused; that is not his intention.

 

Putting a face to the myth: the film

Summer 2004 saw the première of The Trench Road, the film based on the novel, directed by Veikko Aaltonen. Although the book was extremely popular, the film did not develop into such a phenomenon in terms of contemporary morals and male identity. The Matti Virtanen from the novel is, first and foremost, a literary construct. He talks about life as if it consisted only of living in a house. In the film, Virtanen does not speak, so his traits have to be portrayed in other ways – through his physical appearance, for example. It is a credit to the makers of the film that they did not portray Matti Virtanen as a hero. The scenes in which he hits his wife and spies on the neighbours are darker than in the book. On the other hand, the somewhat ‘weak’ film version shows how a mythical character such as Virtanen is based on a belief in complementary yet contrasting gender roles. This type of generalising idea cannot be translated into images because the characters in the film are fixed in age and time, and lose the ambivalence they have in the book.

However, the film has an important new element: ‘commercial breaks’ that interrupt the storyline. These can be seen as a description of Matti Virtanen’s inner thoughts, but also as a comment on the male and female stereotypes so often used in advertising. At the beginning of the novel, Matti Virtanen is indeed like the ‘feminised man’ in the adverts. Because the language of the advertising industry is based on universal (western) myths, audiences outside Finland identify much more readily with the Matti Virtanen of the film than with the main protagonist in the novel. On the other hand, the ‘veteran house’ he wants to buy is such a typically Finnish phenomenon – a sort of open-air museum of ‘natural’ masculinity – that foreign readers and audiences may not fully grasp its significance.

(Published in Scandinavian Newsletter, 2005. Groningen, Holland.)

 

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