“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”
― William S. Burroughs
If we set aside the two films that involve singular British intellects confronting personal catastrophe to enrich mankind with their world-altering achievements, we might define the remainder of the year’s Best Picture race as various meditations on the shifting identity of the American male. With their traditional sense of control rapidly collapsing, American men onscreen are seen in a state of electric desperation, struggling to adjust to new definitions of masculinity and maturity, adapting to new rules made all the more confusing when a man is forced to seize the task of leading but doesn’t yet know where he’s headed.
In three of the year’s best films, the male protagonist plays dress-up in daddy’s business suits, pretending to be the patriarch that the culture has laid at his feet. The irony is that the notion of white male privilege that seems to prevent the film industry from evolving faster is the very thing these filmmakers must confront, because many of these men are not really men at all.
Nightcrawler, Foxcatcher, Gone Girl, Boyhood, Whiplash and to a certain extent American Sniper, are all about boys finding it hard to make that final leap to become men. This topic was brought up by A.O. Scott in the New York Times in his piece “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture:”
In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is a stubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words, there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom.
This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.”
Scott draws from television, specifically Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos to make his point. This year’s race for Best Picture proves that this dire situation isn’t only limited to television — it is far more pervasive than that. Adding another layer of anxiety, perhaps it has a bit to do with how defensive some men feel in the face of so many accusations and demands coming from minorities, men of color who feel they can’t get a leg up.
What we have in this year’s films about the American male are portraits of broken, maladjusted child-men whose familiar concept of control has been removed. Flooding to fill their sense of emptiness is often a subversive urge to get it back. Most savvy filmmakers are not making heroes of these men — quite the opposite. They are showing that the notion of the white male patriarchy is, as Scott, a myth, a concept that has been erased.
In Dan Gilroy’s unforgettable Nightcrawler, we meet one such obsolete patriarch, a man society has mostly rejected despite his seeming to have played by the rules. There is no appropriate job for him. No suitable girl for him. No clear path to the fame and recognition the American dream that was promised to him since boyhood. He can’t cash the check on the white male privilege he was birthed with, that dangling carrot that promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So the Nightcrawler, played by Jake Gyllenhaal invents his own version, his own success story and in so doing erases the moral line of the grand media patriarchs who helped create the notion of ethical journalism. For this new version of the modern American male, all bets are off. He’ll play by his own rules, take what’s coming to him. His birthrights have been stripped so he has no choice but to exploit any gullible person he encounters who’s unlucky enough to take him at his word. “How could THAT guy be unethical?”
Nightcrawler goes beyond the expected indictment of modern media and local news – all that has been corrupted for a while now. If it bleeds it leads. If it bleeds it stays in the 24-hour news cycle day in and day out. Not only that, it shapes how the public perceives reality, how it manages its intake of stress and fear. Renee Russo discovers that a gruesome home-invasion massacre is really connected to drug dealers but she’ll shove the truth aside because she knows what will keep people watching: invent a story that they are all under siege.
Nightcrawler is also about the liberties many of us now take with sensationalized stories, they ways we pluck the fragile feathers off a bleeding bird with relish. The internet has given us an ungovernable society where we can say anything about anyone and it matters for about five seconds and then we move on to the next thing. We are all Nightcrawlers, those of us who willingly participate in a media that’s removed from the ethical lines handed down by generations.
In Gone Girl, Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne never really grew up. He didn’t have to. He went straight from his mother to his wife and was never required to step up on his own. Among his many indulgences are his bar, his affair, his complacency with a complex wife and his cavalier indifference to the woman she really is. Each of those aimless tangents reveal a man who isn’t really a man, no matter how old he is in years. Though the main thrust of Gone Girl is Amy Dunne’s absolute refusal to play the victim, prescribed by contemporary Hollywood’s stricture that women be either victims or saints, upends the traditional notion of the perfect marriage Nick and Amy pretend to have, living out an artificial dream. Throughout the film, both Nick and Amy are manipulating their images in the press — Nick, by refusing to admit what he did and who he is and Amy, by exploiting the lies women tell themselves about the ways good husbands and good wives are supposed to behave. Amy’s desire to have Nick be the man, the patriarch, is an illusion. She made him think he was, perhaps, but her unwillingness to relinquish control over their unified image would never have allowed for a real man to enter the picture. Instead, Nick plays with things. Board games, video games, young students. It came as a big surprise to Amy that he stepped outside the rules by committing the ultimate sin for us women: an affair.
Fincher’s film does not make Nick Dunne the victim of his wife or his marriage, but rather the victim of the dead end where his white male privilege led him. He was born into it, perhaps, but his desire to be a writer has failed. Instead he became little more than the shell of the sort of man that Amy dressed him up to be. As his Missouri hometown collapses economically all around them, what they’re left with is what many of us Americans are left with: the perpetuation of an illusion of happiness.
Fincher does not let up for a second on Nick Dunne, and refuses to turn Amy into a loathsome bitch. He isn’t letting the audience off that easily. Like Nightcrawler, we’re invited inside the hall of mirrors where we dare not turn around because wherever we look we might see ourselves in ways we don’t like. That Fincher doesn’t make it easy to like Nick nor easy to hate Amy is what separates Gone Girl from Fatal Attraction in the end. That was an 1980s fantasy when our economic upturns made us all feel like the worst thing that could happen to us would be an encounter with a psycho bitch. In Gone Girl, there is more systematic decline, coming not just from the inside, but because everywhere you look there’s a camera. Every way you define yourself has a parallel avatar of who you are online.
Both Nightcrawler and Gone Girl echo the empty chambers of modern existence so vividly that they will serve as archeological evidence for anyone wanting to study what American life was really like fifteen years after the turn of the 21st century.
In Birdman, Riggan is a man without a place. He’s failed as a father, as a husband, as a superhero and now, as a stage auteur. He’s failed because he rejected the story as written and now seeks to reestablish a unique identity within that stereotype. Riggan’s unease is made manifest in magical powers, real or otherwise, that help elevate him as the superhero his fans once believed him to be. He can’t find a place in the new America, not with Twitter and viral videos and relevance. He can’t save anything or anyone, not even himself.
In American Sniper, Chris Kyle plays a soldier in a war that was never really right to be fighting in the first place. Kyle’s real world identity is rife with deception. He’s lied outright about things he’s done and people he’s killed but none of his self-delusion makes it into the movie. Instead we’re shown a man fighting a war he thinks was justified. He’s lost within it, more lost without it, increasingly lost in his marriage and ultimately lost when he returns home and tries to live a normal life.
In Foxcatcher, John DuPont is a half-formed person who never had to face any of the challenges most boys face in becoming a man. He has never had to fight or work for anything. It has all been handed to him. This gifting of the ruling class in American society has so dramatically thwarted DuPont that he is virtually incapable of functioning by the normal rules of society. Not only can’t he function, he doesn’t even think he needs to play by those rules. He is an enfant terrible. Taking whatever he wants, while everyone else is being paid to play along. Foxcatcher would not be striking a chord if there wasn’t such a enormous gap between the typical working man and the richest Americans. That helplessness in the face of economic struggle is infused in the characters of Mark Schultz and his older brother David, who is murdered by DuPont as though he didn’t matter, as though DuPont was firing a redundant servant instead of firing a pistol at another human being.
In Whiplash, Andrew is brutally confronted by his drum teacher who wants his student to attain greatness — at any cost. He wants him to be better and more than he is. Or does he only wants to humiliate him and uses the opportunity to do that under the guise of drumming? Some film critics have suggested that Whiplash is about becoming a man and if that’s so, then the definition of manhood is rebellion, refusing to accept someone’s condemnation of your character or your inability to shine. It is much more a reaction to manhood, though, than a story about a character becoming a man. In this coming of age story, or any you see made now, coming of age is less about leaving your childhood behind and more about trying to maintaining the carefree nature of youth.
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood gives us several options to let us observe which type of patriarchal role model the young Mason needs most. None of them are everything they need to be, none of them quite good enough. His own father grows older alongside him but never really grows up. The patriarchal figure in Boyhood is actually the matriarch. Patricia Arquette plays the grown-up who is tasked with raising the boy and guiding him on the right path to become a man. One of the many wondrous things that happens while watching Boyhood is the way we’re reminded of what life was like before social media and the internet. In the film, Mason talks about it in a critical way, as someone who is rejecting the notion of culture’s dominating force. Mason may or not reject the notion of manhood but he is no patriarch. He’s a good person who weathers a rough journey with his soul intact. Perhaps that counts for more than how he’s able to rise up to privilege or manhood.
This is perhaps why films about heroes from bygone eras are popular too. Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, Martin Luther King, Jr., Louis Zamperini — they all came from a time when men were chiseled by experience, when men had to eventually grow up, because how else would they ever change the world?
It is easy to dismiss these films as being only about men. With the sole exception of Gone Girl and The Theory of Everything, they are. But they are more than that. They tell us about who we are now. They express the worry, the fear, the guilt, the lack of faith about what’s coming next. The beauty of reaching into the past is that we know how those stories turned out. The Best Picture slate, if it goes the way the PGA went, will be about rocking the foundations this nation was built upon. All the lost men and all the men we’ve lost tap into our collective consciousness. If art has the power to do anything, it’s to reveal meanings not readily visible at first glance. We look, but we don’t always see. Movies let us watch and rewatch as often as we want, until we discover the meanings we need.
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