The White Male Fragility Movie Era Is Upon Us
There's a scene in the new movie Cat Person where Robert, played by Hollywood's favorite derp (complimentary) Nicholas Braun, recounts every single text message the female character Margot (Emilia Jones) sent him that made him think he liked her. He's taken the time to count the messages that gave him a false impression, and there are over 100. In the moment, the reveal is terrifying, and it's used to show Robert's unhealthy obsession with Margot and his unwillingness to let her go. But when I was going over the film afterwards, I had to laugh because I couldn't stop thinking about Nicholas Braun scrolling through hundreds, maybe thousands, of fictional text messages counting every time this girl seemed interested in him. Like, who has the time?
This film, along with another that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week called Fair Play, prove that the male fragility movie era is upon us. Particularly, the white male fragility film. And frankly, I'm thrilled, because in these trying times, we need to be able to make fun of men who are flops. (Not all men are flops, but many of them are. It's like saying not all apples are red. Sure! That is technically true. But, like, come on.)
Fair Play follows a young couple working in finance. They're recently engaged and seemingly madly in love, but when Phoebe Dynevor's character Emily gets promoted over Alden Ehrenreich's character Luke, he very quickly turns into the Worst Guy Ever. He subtly sabotages her at the office because he can't deal with her success, and he starts to lose it. In Cat Person, college student Margot meets thirty-something Robert at her job. They text, they go on one fairly lame date, and she breaks it off afterwards. Similarly, he loses it. He just can't deal with the fact that she was interested in him at one point and isn't anymore.
These films are not classified as comedies. In fact, they're both psychological thrillers, and they even have violent plot points. (Both of them feature scenes where the male character perpetrates violence against the female character, a rape scene in one and a physical fight/domestic violence scene in the other.) The violence is in no way funny, please don't misconstrue my point. But both films demonstrate what women already know: Men are insecure. And they can't handle rejection. And ultimately, they're... embarrassing themselves.
To be clear, the idea of the troubled white male has been around in film and TV for a long time. See: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976), or more recently, Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019). But these two—and Joker in particular—paint the men as victims of society around them. We're meant to feel bad for them and see their side of the story.
This new generation of work asks us to do the exact opposite. There's nothing about these men that is supposed to make us feel sorry for them. In Fair Play, Ehrenreich's character Luke lives a life of extreme privilege, making more money than most people would hope to make in a lifetime. As you watch him unravel, you don't think, Wow, poor guy. You think, Damn, that guy's an asshole. And there's no redemption arc. We don't have to sit through a third act where he tries to make everything right. The filmmaker (Chloe Domont, in her feature debut) is smart enough to know we won't believe it and we also don't care. He doesn't deserve it.
Cat Person does something similar. Robert is made out to be a loser and we can assume he's not a guy who "gets the girl" very often. And the character clearly wants us to feel bad for him, but the movie itself doesn't want us to buy it. His attempts to gain sympathy are so cringey that at one point I audibly groaned. And when Margot tells him she's not interested anymore, we feel relieved for her, because the anxiety of having to tell a man you're not interested in him and wondering how he might react is a very real fear.
These films don't see the women in them as the real reason for the men's frustration and downfall. They see the men as people who probably would have had the downfall regardless because they are insecure, and these women just happened to be unlucky enough to be around when it happened. Their success and rejection of these men isn't held against them. The onus is on the men, and the men alone, to behave better. And that's exactly how it should be.
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