Movies are, bottom line, a big fucking lie. Almost every script is written by people who have never experienced anything remotely like the events their movie will depict. Every now and then a director will make a movie based on something he knows — Oliver Stone's Platoon comes to mind — but even then he has to manipulate events to fit into the accepted structure of two-hour storytelling. Which is why Willem Dafoe does that whole Jesus Christ-being-crucified thing at the end after he's been shot and left for dead by a fellow soldier.

Did that ever happen to anyone Oliver Stone knew in Vietnam? Of course not. Is it an amazingly powerful scene? Absolutely.

Even when a movie is based on actual, documented events, filmmakers have to change things to make them work on screen. Remember "Follow the money," the best and most often-quoted line in All the President's Men? The truth is that nobody ever said "follow the money" to Woodward or Bernstein. The screenwriter, William Goldman, wrote that line for the movie.

I say all this as someone who loves movies as much as anybody I know. I spent a bunch of my formative years in L.A., trying to become a screenwriter. It didn't happen for several reasons, the two big ones being my lack of skills and my failure to grasp opportunities to improve those skills.

And I'm fine with that. I consider myself fortunate. While I was diligently writing scripts and trying to break in, I took a job at Men's Fitness magazine to pay the bills. That put me in a career niche that's kept me gainfully and successfully employed for 17 years and counting.

The movie of my life wouldn't be very interesting, but that's why movies create fake lives. Reality doesn't bite so much as it bores.

Which brings me to this article: "Life Lessons from Testosterone Movies." Here at Testosterone Muscle, we've written about Testosterone movies three different times. TC offered us his list of the top T movies back in 1998. Chris Shugart gave us his picks in 2000, and then Ron Harris took his shot in 2002.

We gave you our favorite movies, our favorite scenes, our favorite lines. Which is fun, but it's not exactly heavy lifting to list movies that got our catecholamines flowing or upregulated our steroid receptors or otherwise produced the desired endocrinological effect.

So when we decided to revisit the topic, we chose to go a little further and tell you why these movies changed our point of view in an important, consequential way.

Which, really, is the whole point of drama. For all the hours we spend immersed in the patently fake world of filmed entertainment, we hope to find lessons that carry over into the real world, where shit hardly ever blows up, and when it does, nobody says "yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." — Lou Schuler

Fight Club

Fight Club forces you to consider some hard questions.

How much do you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?
Why the hell are you working at a low-end job, instead of following your dreams?
How many material objects can you own before they start to own you?

The story follows a young, nameless Everyman (played by Edward Norton) as he shuffles through his daily drudgery. You watch him get up, go to work, drive home, buy meaningless shit, go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat. "This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time," he tells us.

But when Everyman meets Tyler Durden, everything changes. Life is now drastic, exciting, heartbreaking, violent. From an underground network of fight clubs where people pummel the shit out of each other to the glorified anarchy of Project Mayhem, every punch is another step back from the perception of the "perfect life."

Who's afraid of a little scar tissue?

Coming out of the movie, I suspect most of us reconsider our own lives, however briefly. Is it better to go with the crowd, or to navigate your own way? Or is it too much to ask for both?

I graduated high school in 2003. Most of my classmates immediately went to college to study things they didn't care about. I decided to work on myself. I trained, ate, read, worked, studied, and saved. I navigated my own way.

But I didn't do it alone. I had a series of training partners who helped push me to become stronger and faster. I solicited and received advice from some amazing people — self-made millionaires, world-class authors and journalists, successful trainers and strength coaches. I spent hours online, reading articles and participating in forums. I even took out a $1,200 bank loan to buy a plane ticket so I could fly across the country to attend a seminar sponsored by Testosterone Muscle. In that case, I went with the crowd.

Making my own way kept me motivated, sparked my creativity, and helped me learn responsibility and self-reliance. Going with a crowd helped me see new possibilities and achieve more than I could have by myself. Both are good. Both are needed. Both are important.

That's what I got from Fight Club: While it's important to be an individual who rejects the things that don't add any value to life, life is better when you find a collection of like-minded people who want the things you want and have no use for the things you reject.

Fight Club is all about finding your own way and denouncing anything that doesn't add real value; it's about finding a collection of like-minded people who are just as pissed off and hungry as you. 

I am Jack's rekindled sense of self. — Nate Green

The Godfather

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are two of the best American movies ever made, but you don't need a musclehead to tell you that — the guys who write about movies for a living have all weighed in with the same opinion, more or less.

Both movies have scenes in which characters lie not only to each other, but to themselves. Just to pick one example, nobody in movies has ever said "I love you" with less conviction than Michael Corleone does when he tries to get Kay Adams back, years after he abandoned her to join the family business. It's almost like you can hear the sediment surrounding his heart as it hardens into coal.

But the line in The Godfather that I keep going back to is uttered by an aging and enfeebled Vito Corleone in complete sincerity: "It was Barzini all along."

To set the scene, the Don and his consigliere, Tom Hagen, have just left a meeting with the nation's top Mafiosi, at which they agreed to go into the narcotics business, against Vito Corleone's better judgment. Vito capitulates to end a brutal war with the rival Tattaglia family, but when he gets into the room with his fellow crime lords, he realizes that another mobster, Barzini has been calling the shots for Tattaglia and the others.

Sometimes you have to look beyond the usual suspects.

Why that scene, instead of dozens of others that are more memorable?

The older I get, the more I see the simple wisdom here: When you encounter a road block — whether it's in your career, your relationships, your health, or anything else you care about — the problem is rarely as simple as it first appears.

Let's say your career is stuck. You assume it's because your boss has it out for you. But when you shut your mouth and open your eyes, you realize it's probably something else. Maybe a coworker, someone you trust, is undercutting you. True, most backstabbers work in clumsy and obvious ways — Barzini's sinister manipulations work better in a movie than they would in real life — but I've been caught by surprise more than once in my career.

I was once in a situation in which a junior colleague decided to make a play for my job. I knew he had issues with the way I did it, but he was far behind me in experience and skill, and I didn't consider him a threat. But then I noticed that he was spending time in the boss's office, behind closed doors. Closed-door meetings were rare at this particular company, unless someone was getting fired. And when people get fired they don't leave the meeting with a smile.

By paying attention, I was able to plan my exit before someone else arranged it for me. Yeah, my own Barzini got the job he wanted, but I got a better one, with an assist from The Godfather. — Lou Schuler

Apocalypse Now

In Apocalypse Now, the line between sanity and insanity is blurry at best, and highly situational. That's a pretty good life lesson all by itself. But it's not the part of the movie that stuck with me. It's a line spoken early in the film by the movie's main character, Captain Willard, an experienced and enthusiastic assassin:

"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another."

To me, this line drove home that if you want something bad enough, I mean really want something, and are determined to do virtually anything to get it, the universe conspires to give it to you.

The catch is, even though it's what you want, it might be the last thing you need.

I've seen this way too often in bodybuilding: young up-and-coming guys with big dreams who're willing to risk their health, careers, and relationships for the sole purpose of obtaining the elusive pro card. (Interestingly, it's often the guys with the least genetic potential to turn pro who want it the most.) Once these guys walk off the posing dais, they have nothing in their lives of any real value. They've subordinated the things that matter most to their pursuit of bodybuilding, but bodybuilding could only get them so far.

That little life lesson is one of the reasons that, as a young adult, I never really bought into the hardcore bodybuilding lifestyle. And as a healthy, reasonably successful, and happily married 35-year-old, I'm glad I didn't. — Bryan Krahn

Good Will Hunting

When I told my girlfriend I'd picked Good Will Hunting for my contribution to this project, she looked at me as if I'd just started lactating. No guns, hardly any blood, precious few badass one-liners, unless you count "How do you like them apples?" This is a Testosterone movie?

It's a good question. I mean, Ben Affleck's in it, for chrissake. But it's not the movie that resonated with me as much as the story behind the movie, which explains why Affleck is in it.

You probably know the plot: Will Hunting is a cocky but emotionally wounded blue-collar guy from South Boston who just happens to be a mathematical genius. He runs with a crew of construction-working, beer-drinking, profanity-spewing buddies from the neighborhood. It's not until his genius is discovered by a professor at MIT that he's sent to a psychologist for counseling, with the goal of straightening his head out so he can enter the world of academia and cash in on his once-in-a-generation talent.

Hunting agrees to counseling for a practical reason — it's either that, or go to jail for an assault on a former tormenter and a subsequent fracas with police — but refuses to play the soul-baring game by any rules except his own.

If you've seen the movie, you know how it works out. If you haven't, I won't spoil it. But the story behind the movie, as I said, is what sticks with me. Matt Damon and Affleck were young actors enjoying some success in Hollywood when they did something young actors just don't do: they wrote a movie for themselves to produce and perform in.

As Damon once explained, "We wrote it right out of frustration. It was like, Why are we sitting here? Let's make our own movie. And if people come to see it, they come; and if they don't, they don't. Either way it beats sitting here going crazy."

Think about it for a minute. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two lifelong friends, co-wrote something that was nominated for nine Academy Awards (it won two) and a handful of Golden Globes. They had friends and mentors on the set, from executive producer Kevin Smith to the amazing Robin Williams. Even Affleck's little brother Casey was in it. It took them many months to write it, and more than a year of negotiations to get it into production. And, by all reports, they had one hell of a time making the film. The process was as much a work of art as the actual product, with constant improvisations and on-the-spot character development.

It takes a village, idiots and all.

Whenever I watch Good Will Hunting, I get excited about the possibility of creating something, anything, that I'll be completely involved in and proud of. And if I can have the help and enjoy the company of some friends at the same time, I'll be happy.

That's why my good friend Jason Lengstorf is my go-to web guy — he not only built my website, but also Lou Schuler's, Mike Robertson's, and Craig Weller's. He tags along with me on trips, video camera in hand, to make me look like an idiot for your amusement.

That's also why I have a great group of training partners and a close circle of friends, and why I'm excited to be a part of the Testosterone Muscle team, where I actually get paid to write about lifting heavy shit under the guidance of colleagues who take the time to teach me how it's done. How do you like them apples? — Nate Green

Unforgiven

Unforgiven offers any number of life lessons, not least of which is the steep price one pays for a life of violence. But the one that resonates with me is the idea of redemption and second chances.

Clint Eastwood's character, William Munny, was once a scumbag — a remorseless, alcohol-fueled gun for hire who by his own admission had "killed just about everything that walked or crawled at one time or another." 

The first time we see him, he's a pig farmer who's trying desperately to maintain the law-abiding sobriety his recently deceased wife helped him achieve. That whole redemption thing isn't working out so well, which is why he needs to go on a final killing spree, embracing his former self in order to purge the evil from his system.

To me, the idea that it's never too late to turn your life around could be the most important life lesson you learn as an adult. Everybody makes bad decisions — substance abuse, the wrong career path, a bad marriage to the wrong girl. Maybe the mistake is not making choices because you're afraid to make the wrong one.

The mistake, whatever it is, isn't as important as the realization that you still have a chance to change your life. Made a bad choice? Okay, now make a better one.

Of course, we hear warm and fuzzy stories like that all the time. The Internet is lousy with "life coaches" offering to help you "awaken the giant within" (for a modest but nonrefundable fee). It sounds great, but as anyone who's actually made a life-changing decision will tell you, it just isn't that easy.

Unforgivenacknowledges this. William Munny may hate himself for what he's done, but he knows he's a lot better at killing people than he is at raising pigs. He also realizes he needs the money to save his children from starvation. So he's faced with an epic choice: Should he be the man he wants to be, even if it kills him, or should he provide for his family, even if it means killing someone else?

Odd as it sounds, Unforgiven inspired me to pursue what I really wanted to do with my life. I had always wanted to write, but told myself I was too old to pick up the skills I need, and too busy with a job that provided a nice living. My excuses made sense, but they also made me miserable.

The minute I said "screw it" and started writing, I was happier, even though most of my early work got rejected in less time than it took to send it out. (A lot of my current work gets bounced back as well.) From a career perspective, I can think of thousands of paths that offer better pay, job security, benefits, and street cred. The night manager at 7-Eleven has more social status than a freelance writer. 

I still need a "real" job to pay the bills, which means I sacrifice my social life, not to mention occasional hours of sleep, to pursue what I really want to do. It's not ideal, and it's probably not sustainable. But, like William Munny, I realized the thing I was good at wasn't the thing I should be doing. — Bryan Krahn

Star Wars

I've traveled from one side of this country to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful life lesson to be plucked from a series of science-fiction movies conceived by a graduate of USC's film school. Mostly, movies are simple tricks and nonsense.

But there is a line  in The Empire Strikes Back that I return to over and over. It's when Luke Skywalker, exhausted and feeling like the weight of the galaxy is on his shoulders (which, unfortunately, it is), tells Yoda he'll "try" to levitate his starship out of a swamp.

"No!" Yoda scolds. "Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try."

Sure, that's easy to say when you're a puppeteer reading from a script and making the words sound like they come from a 900-year-old elf with green skin and hairy ears. But how is it a life lesson?

As Testosterone readers, I think we understand as well as anyone the rewards of hard work. It's what we do every time we grab a barbell with our calloused, chalk-covered hands. But we also understand that hard work can only take us so far in the gym or in life. I could tell you that I'll "try" to bench press 500 pounds, or that I'll "try" to make millions flipping real estate, or that I'll "try" to become the first fitness-book author to win a Nobel Prize for literature.

But I can't actually do any of those things, so why pretend?

I mentioned in the introduction that I spent some time in L.A. "trying" to become a screenwriter. Several people in the business offered advice, which I dismissed as impractical. One time, by pure random chance, I bumped into a writer I'd known when we worked together serving food and drinks at a luxury hotel. I hadn't seen him in years, and had no idea he was enjoying success in the movie business until I asked what he was up to and he told me.

He then offered me a chance to join a group of his colleagues, who met once a week to help each other with their current projects. I never followed up. I had my reasons, which made sense at the time. But when I look back, I know that was the moment I chose not to become a screenwriter. Sure, I kept "trying," but as the little man said, "there is no try." I had a chance to do, and I didn't.

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad I didn't. I love what I do, and I've advanced because I didn't "try" to be an author and editor. I did those things. If I'd merely tried, we all know how that would've turned out. — Lou Schuler

American Beauty

I know what you're thinking: "Is this really a Testosterone movie?"

American Beauty may not have any sword fights, shootouts, or car chases, but it has plenty of what I call "everyday Testosterone."

For everyday Testosterone, nothing beats iron therapy.

Lester Burnham is a man in a career rut, a relationship rut, an emotional rut, a life rut. He describes himself as sedated, just going through the motions of life.

As the movie progresses, Lester has a breakthrough. He rediscovers his balls and takes control of his life again. He starts to lift weights ("I want to look good naked!" he says), he tells his boss off, he trades his boring Camry for a hot rod, and he calls out his bitch-on-wheels wife. He's liberated, free, and happy.

The movie reminds us that true Testosterone is seldom about fighting off enemy hordes or running into burning buildings, but rather about being your own man. It's easy to fall into a rut. Most men who do just stay there because the rut is safe. Sure, you're a living corpse with your "dick in a mason jar under the sink," as Lester says in the movie, but you're comfortable and secure and ... completely forgettable.

There was a time in my life when I settled for a bloodless relationship, a flabby body, and a secure but unrewarding job. It took more than a screening of American Beauty to break out of those ruts, but it made me think. The more I thought, the more I wanted to change all those things. And I did. — Chris Shugart

Groundhog Day

Again a non-traditional "Testosterone" movie, but any movie that has "I Got You Babe" as an auditory focal point ranks way up there on my machismo scale. I only wish that Bono guy wouldn't have left Cher to start that lame U2 band....but I digress.

Cantankerous, corrupt, mean-spirited WPBH-TV9 weatherman Phil Connor (Bill Murray) reluctantly agrees to go to Punxsutawney to cover a story about a "weather forecasting rat" (the famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil). After "mailing in" a lackluster Groundhog's Day TV performance, he and his crew (played by Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliot) are stranded in Punxsutawney by a snowstorm.

A clock radio awakens Connor the next morning to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe", but it's not the next morning—it's Groundhog's Day again. Phil has to relive the previous day over, but he's the only one in the town who's aware of the Twilight Zone-ish repetition.

And the same thing happens every morning! He awakens to Sonny and Cher, runs into the same characters, and nothing he does seems to have any relevance. He begins to test the limits of the situation, first by tricking a girl into sleeping with him, then by stealing money from an armored car, and then, on the brink of madness, by kidnapping Punxsutawney Phil and driving a pick up off the edge of a rock quarry to presumably a fiery death...only to wake up again the next morning in the same bed, to the same song.

He laments, "I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster and drank pina coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters.  That was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day over and over and over?"

Throughout the movie, he tries to get Rita (Andie MacDowell) to sleep with him. Building on each day's experiences, Phil acquires more and more knowledge of her: what she likes and doesn't like, her life story, and her aspirations, but no matter what he tries, she's too smart, too pure to be deceived by his machinations.

Phil gradually accepts the situation but instead of living his life in limbo, he begins to take advantage of it.  He starts taking piano lessons, French lessons, studying literature, learning ice sculpture. Why not? He's got all the time in the world.

He learns everything there is to know about the people in town. When the same bratty kid falls out of the tree and the same time every day, Phil is there to catch him. When the mayor chokes on a piece of meat, Phil is there to Heimlich him. When the three old ladies drive into town and get a flat tire, Phil is there, automobile jack at the ready, to change their tire.

Likewise, when an old homeless man dies, Phil tries everything (trying new strategies each day) to save him, but he's never successful. He asks a nurse why the old man died and she replies, "Sometimes, people just die."

"Not today," answers Phil.

As his skills and worth as a human being grow, he becomes the town's most popular citizen and by the end of the movie, Phil becomes the quintessential self-actualized man in that he's realized all his potentials. A corrupt nature wasn't the way, nor was self-pity or a hatred of life.

He finds true happiness by mastering himself, mastering skills, and mastering interpersonal relationships. In doing so, Rita falls in love with him (how could she not?) and in doing so, he's freed from his February 2^nd prison and he wakes up on February 3^rd with her in his arms.

I want Phil's February 2^nd! I want to relive a day over and over again until I get it right. I want unlimited time to master myself, to learn new skills, to learn how to be a better human being....but of course I can't have unlimited time.

Still, the lesson remains with me: use what time I do have to work on those things. — TC