The date is May 16, 1983. A national television audience, watching a recorded broadcast of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of Motown, has an encounter with 24-year-old Michael Jackson. His album "Thriller" has been selling well for five months, and his single "Billie Jean" is topping the charts, but until this night, he is just another highly successful recording artist. Then he performs "Billie Jean," and his dance moves are so impressive that the next day everyone is talking about Jackson and his "moonwalk."
Sales of "Thriller" go through the roof, and Jackson becomes the coolest thing on the face of the earth.
Which only goes to show: Sometimes cool doesn't last.
But most of the time, it does. Styles of coolness may change, yet the specific personal attributes that we respond to as cool have been more or less the same for generations.
Here are two examples:
The first takes us back to 1933 and the film "Going Hollywood." Bing Crosby plays a crooner, hung over in a morning recording session that's taking place in his own apartment. Still in his pajamas, he sings and walks around mixing a hangover cure, while a technician follows him with a microphone. The song is "Beautiful Girl," and Crosby is clearly the most relaxed man who has ever lived. He exudes good will and a kind of guilt-free and blithe acceptance of his own superiority (he's not the guy chasing another guy with a microphone). Even today, it's impossible to be a man and watch that scene without wishing to be more like Crosby.
Our second example moves us ahead to 1947, to a beach in Mexico — or to what RKO thought might pass for one in "Out of the Past." Robert Mitchum has tracked down Jane Greer, at the behest of a gangster, and to keep from being dragged back to the United States, she's trying her one play: seducing Mitchum. She tells him that she didn't mean to shoot the gangster and didn't steal his $40,000 — and she's even less convincing than Bill Clinton was when he said he didn't have sex with that woman.
"Don't you believe me?" she says.
"Baby, I don't care," Mitchum answers and kisses her.
That's cool.
It wouldn't have been cool if he'd turned her in. And it definitely wouldn't have been cool if he'd actually believed her. But he doesn't believe her and doesn't care — that's cool.
So what do we have? Coolness is relaxation. Coolness is courage. Coolness is knowing what's going on. Coolness acknowledges the limits of life, while affirming that life is worth living. Coolness is the freedom to be yourself. Cool is also something that women can be but that men are almost obligated to be — or at least to try to become.
Yes, it's possible for a woman to be cool — and it's even possible for a woman to be cool in the exact ways that cool men are cool: Gina Gershon and Lauren Bacall are just two examples. But Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn were anything but cool, and they were no less attractive for it.
It doesn't work that way with men. For a man to be attractive, he almost has to be at least a little cool. For both sexes, coolness is an assertion of selfhood in the face of tyranny. But because men and women experience that tyranny differently, their same-sex icons of cool are inevitably different.
Male cool is the subject here, and the first question that must be answered is, "When did it start?"
Like a lot of things in our popular culture, our modern notion of cool is an indirect product of the consciousness change that came over Western civilization in the aftermath of World War I. Paul Fussell in his book "The Great War and Modern Memory" shows how irony pervaded every aspect of art, discourse and consciousness in the wake of World War I.
Before the war, the ideal young man was a hardworking go-getter, a believer in unshakable verities. But after four years of slaughter and the attendant collapse of governments and social structures, the ideal young man was a doubter. He was someone who couldn't be fooled.
Rudolph Valentino is a transitional figure. From his breakthrough performance in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1921), he embodied a dark, smoldering quality, and his willingness to play men who were on the outside of society pointed to the beginnings of the modern style.
But modern cool doesn't really make it onto the big screen until the early talkies — and then, soon, it's everywhere. Clark Gable is probably the single most important figure in the establishing of modern male cool. His screen persona suggested a fundamental cynicism about everything, including himself. He scowled a lot, and when he smiled — which was fairly often — there was a knowing quality to it, an irony. The old-time hero smiled as if everything was great. The modern hero smiled as if he knew exactly what was going on. That was cool.
With World War II, the picture darkened further. Humphrey Bogart became the emblem of the disillusioned man, doing what's right but not expecting much to come of it.
In the 1950s, Elvis Presley, in his first photo session for a magazine, told the photographer that he didn't want to be photographed smiling. He had made a study of James Dean and Marlon Brando and had decided that rebels don't smile. He was right, but no male icon stays cool without incorporating a smile into the repertoire. Elvis eventually did, and—in the tradition that began with Gable and continues today with George Clooney — it was a certain kind of smile. It was the smile that suggests that the smiler knows more than those he is smiling upon.
We're living in generally the same culture that began circa 1925. We know this because we can look at William Powell and Brad Pitt, John Barrymore and Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra and Clooney, Bobby Kennedy and Kirk Douglas, Steve McQueen and Prince, Eminem and Montgomery Clift and realize that they all partake of cool.
They're not interchangeable, and yet if we take them out of their respective eras, change their haircuts and give them a different suit, they'd probably hold up. But eventually this will change. Cool will change when the qualities needed for survival change. It will change the next time the world changes in some big, cataclysmic way.
When that happens, it won't be cool.
E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com