Victory For the Forces of Democratic Freedom

My review of John Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Rarely does a film observe the male gaze with anything but fawning admiration, but Krasinski and Wallace view the behaviors of the 20th/21st century men as deeply diseased. These pathologies have been fostered through the complete aversion of scrutiny of male modes. As a result, men run away from themselves. The majority of violent acts- assault, murder, rape, abuse, suicide- are overwhelmingly committed by men. The men in Krasinski's film are dishonest and hideous because of a template for masculinity, reinforced by capitalist realism, that seems inescapable and inevitable.

But lines of dialogue are finally opening for men. Hollywood has long had a horrendous record of stereotyping and redoubling hegemonic notions of women, blacks, gays, native Americans, Arabs, et al. Yet, through all the critiques of the multiculturalist liberal establishment from the 80s onward, film criticism has scarcely realized that the dehumanization quotient is all-encompassing, and features little wiggle room for white men either. They don't call it the dream factory for nothing. Cinema has long functioned as a byproduct of the spectacle, the sister to advertising, creating not just identity but belief through focused fictionalizations that reinforce existing value structures using sympathetic narrators and the presupposition of an ideal. Moviegoers never "believe" that the action on the screen is real, of course, but it believes the "character" of its characters is real. In order to be sympathizable, a film's themes must be identifiably "true". In order for an ideal to be threatened, we must accept that the ideal itself is not also just as threatening from another angle.

There's plenty else I didn't get to talk about in the review of this fascinating film. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to expand some of these ideas further sometime soon in a larger piece.