Author’s Note: The following discourse will concern misogyny as it pertains to men and women. It is worth observing, however, the pertinence of nonbinary gender identities; much of the misogyny that women experience will also affect nonbinary individuals who are interpreted socially as women, whether by dint of their gender assignment at birth, or by dint of their gender expression. I myself am one such individual, and I write extensively on the plight of women, to whom I feel a great political allegiance, on account of our largely shared plight.
I want to talk about men. (Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.) No, I mean, I want to talk about Men, the film by Alex Garland. I read quite a few reviews of this film before watching it myself, and I wasn’t surprised to find that many of them were negative. The title alone, Men, practically begs for the rejoinder—“Not all men!”—as many reviewers saw this film as yet another droplet in the recent deluge of social commentary on toxic masculinity. Admittedly, I don’t think they’re totally off-base; as a metaphor for misogyny, Men can, at times, feel a bit old hat, but what is novel is the viscerality with which it communicates, metaphors aside, that its horrors are literal. In a way, Men is reminiscent of Jordan Peele’s Get Out in that both films, through the genre of horror, provide a kind of phenomenology of oppression.
Phenomenology has, very probably, been practiced for centuries, but it is most closely associated with philosophers (existentialists, especially) from the early 20th century, such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. As a discipline and method of doing philosophy, phenomenology takes first-personal experience as its point of departure, studying things (e.g. objects, events, concepts, etc.) as they are experienced in the ebb and flow of the lived world; much like a newborn infant who responds only to a world of appearances, phenomenology asks experience to speak for itself, rather than adapting it to fit our preconceptions. What phenomenology helps us to understand, in other words, is what it is like to have a specific experience, and what Men reveals is what the experience of misogyny is like for (cis, white) women.
Men is laden with familiar archetypes of toxic masculinity—a peeping Tom, a “nice guy” who quickly turns nasty, a priest who gets a little too handsy—but to accuse the film of being heavy-handed would undercut its genuine subtleties. What keeps Men from being rote is how it uses the modes of horror to achieve a perspectival shift viewers rarely get to see. While the notion of a woman being terrorized by a male aggressor is not exactly new terrain for horror—anyone who is genre savvy knows, for instance, that the slut (who is always a woman) dies first—we are usually positioned as third-personal spectators to some woman, who is the hapless recipient of violence. In Men, however, we take on Harper Marlowe, the film’s protagonist, for our avatar, and, in so doing, we are forced to see men’s behavior through her eyes for the terror it is.
Many of the reviews I read accused Men of exaggerating its relevant thesis about men to the point of ridiculousness, but these critics, I’m sorry to say, misunderstood the assignment. Whereas Garland’s films are typically cerebral psycho-thrillers, Men is “a gut-level film,” one that trades on preconscious emotional reactions, fear especially, to hit its point home. On the heels of a clearly abusive marriage, the newly widowed Harper takes a trip to the country to clear her head. All of the men she meets there (who are, conspicuously, played by a single actor), are less intricate, nuanced human beings than they are fixtures in Harper’s perceptual landscape. Indeed, because Harper doesn’t know any of these men, there’s a serious upper limit on how much they can be humanized without decentering her as the narrator of the story, but each of them marks an iteration in a broader pattern of interactions she has had with men, one she must learn in order to stay safe.
Ultimately, the kind of safety Harper needs to achieve in Men is less bodily than it is, as Miranda Fricker would clock it, hermeneutical; the real bogeyman at the heart of this film isn’t men so much as it is women’s struggle “through a glass darkly” against internalizing blame for men’s behavior. Harper’s ex-husband, for instance, threatened to kill himself if she divorced him, and then, he did. At least, Harper thinks that he did, although it might have been an accident. The point is, Harper will never know for certain what happened to James, and so she wrestles with the guilt of having potentially caused his death. Of course, Harper didn’t kill James—he killed himself—but that doesn’t stop her feeling responsible for what happened, and nor does it stop the men in whom she confides from insinuating that she should. And that’s really the thing about misogyny: it isn’t just an antagonist “out there” besieging Harper, it’s a thing that’s gotten in her head. The call is coming from inside the house.
In the end, the operative word associated with Men is ‘agency.’ This might strike some readers as funny given that Harper spends so much time deflecting the patriarchy’s foot soldiers that there’s none left for a meaningful exploration of her character. (I’ll take “That’s the Point” for $400, Alex.) She is, in point of fact, a pawn in an allegorical construct, albeit one that is being used for aesthetically and politically worthwhile ends. But even a pawn can become a queen, provided that she survives the battlefield—that’s what feminism is all about! “When women become feminists,” as Linda Martin Alcoff writes, “the crucial thing that has occurred is not that they have learned any new facts about the world but that they have come to view those facts from a different position, from their own position as subjects.” Thus, Harper’s vacation (and all the horrors it brings) constitutes an opening for her to discover her experience as one node in the long and horrific yoke of patriarchy. A walk through the woods, for example, calls to mind Simone de Beauvoir, who opined on the bliss a woman might enjoy in nature, where there is no male to gaze upon her. As the camera oscillates, backwards and forwards, Harper smiles from center-frame with an almost childlike jubilance, mirthful claps of thunder rolling across the treetops. Here, we have the sense that Harper is no longer a repository for men’s projections. Here, she is free.
But Harper cannot escape to the natural world forever. When a dark tunnel punctuates the bright cheeriness of the woods, Harper uses her echo to create a jaunty tune. No sooner does her song begin, however, than it awakens something at the tunnel’s end. The foreboding figure of a man appears, and he runs toward Harper at breakneck speed. This melody, which was intended to bring Harper joy, is thus mutilated into an ominous musical force, one that is repeated throughout the film’s score to great effect; women are never more threatening to the patriarchal order than when they supplant men’s tellings about the world with their own, which is precisely why consciousness-raising, the practice of gathering women together to tell the stories of their lives as women, was such a potent tool for the women’s liberation movement. Perhaps that is why Harper’s voice so quickly conjures the Green Man in the woods. Perhaps that is why, shortly thereafter, a video chat with her friend, Riley, is interrupted by technical trouble, and a man’s angry face is superimposed over Riley’s frozen one. And perhaps that is why Harper’s grief-stricken wailing in the church summons the lecherous vicar, who studies her like wounded prey, waiting for his moment to strike.
The finale of Men is a whirlwind of body horror, a Russian-nesting bussy of man giving birth to man so repetitive that I soon found myself numb to its grotesquery. But, again, I think that’s the point: in the face of something that should be terrifying, we are made to feel like so many women for whom male aggression has lost its distinction for its sheer, relentless volume. As she watches the men of Men birthing one another, each new incarnation reaching out for her with the same torn arm that her husband bore after he plummeted to his death, Harper looks less frightened than she does tired. And when James finally emerges from the patrilineal birth canal, she walks, calmly and slowly, back into the house, thumbing the ax in her hand while she waits for him to limp after her. Men, the film seems to imply, reproduce in their relationships with women the same abandoned, narcissistic fantasies of their own infancies. “What do you want?” Harper asks. “Your love,” James replies.
One half-expects a final showdown, but it never comes. Instead, Harper smirks, and the film flashes back, like a punchline, to the title screen: Men. There is no real catharsis for our heroine, and so there is none for us, the viewers, but—and say it with me—that’s the point. In a world where one man follows, rank and file, behind the other, the defeat of James does not mean the defeat of the patriarchy, only a temporary reprieve from its machinations. But at least now, Harper knows the name of the game, and we do, too. And that ain’t nothing.
Sofia Huerter
Sofia Huerter is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Washington, where they are nearly finished with a dissertation on the ethics of domestication. Although their work is focused primarily with issues in animal ethics, Sofia is a magpie, and they will put their grubby little philosophy mitts on any topic, from capital punishment to the metaphysics of gender, provided its shiny. Most of Sofia’s work proceeds from a feminist lens, and with what they hope is an iconoclastic blend of sensitivity and a willingness to push boundaries.
