Men – the mystifying 2022 film from writer-director Alex Garland and studio A24 – brings to mind the social media hashtag #YesAllWomen, which arose in conjunction with the #MeToo movement and ushered into the online public discourse story after story of women suffering in myriad ways under patriarchal societies.
#YesAllWomen was partially in reaction to the phrase “not all men,” and the subsequent hashtagging of those three words, which cropped up in the wake of the 2014 Santa Barbara, California shootings. The man responsible for this act of mass murder was motivated by his perceived constant rejection by women, and swaths of cis-male reactionaries were quick to proclaim that they never sexually harassed women, never sexually assaulted them or engaged in misogynistic behavior of any fashion, let alone resorting to a killing spree over rebuffed advances. Not all men, these men insisted, were monsters.
This in turn created a third online movement, #YesAllMen, used in some instances as a rallying cry for boys and men alike to acknowledge their inherent privileges in a society that clearly favors them over women and step up to change-making, and in others as an affirmation of the original hashtag, arguing that every man, regardless of their wokeness, has probably engaged in misogyny on an unconscious level because they’re so entrenched in the inequity of the patriarchy.
Men reinforces this notion of unchecked patriarchal privilege by casting every male role (minus one) with a single actor, Rory Kinnear, who all bombard grieving protagonist Harper (Jessie Buckley) with their presence, both in seemingly benign and directly insidious ways. The kick here is that Jessie never seems to notice that all the men in this sleepy village look exactly the same. Kinnear said of this conceit:
[We’re] trying to say, maybe to some men, that there are aspects of male behavior that goes unchecked, that maybe we don’t examine or explore ourselves, however well-meaning… it becomes, however small, an unpleasant experience in the way that minor aggressions are a part of female life.
#YesAllMen indeed.
Of course, Garland is no stranger to patriarchal critiques, having written the 2002 film 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Cillian Murphy as Jim, a man who wakes up from a coma in the middle of a worldwide apocalypse caused by fast-moving “infected” sub-humans. But the real nightmares in this film come not so much from the zombie-like marauders, but rather from an isolated army unit lead by the sadistic Major West (Christopher Eccleston), who has devious sexual intentions toward Selena (Naomie Harris) and Hannah (Megan Burns), as well as all the remaining women and girls of the crumbling world, whether said women and girls like it or not, summing up in classic zombie narrative fashion that humans – or, more pointedly in this case, men – are the real monsters.
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Garland also wrote and directed the psychological sci-fi horror head scrambler Ex Machina, which grapples with means less abstract than Men the root of these negative “aspects of male behavior” alluded to by Kinnear: toxic masculinity. The film’s appearance in 2014 coincided with an explosion of the term in popular consciousness, even if the concept has formally been around for decades. As Michael Salter points out in an article for The Atlantic, the term sprung from a quasi-anti-feminist movement that sought to promote what they considered a healthy “warrior masculinity,” but has since morphed into a kind of catchall phrase for toxic behaviors typically associated with boys and men that are endemic of social learning rather than any “preternatural” male attributes.
Writing for The New York Times, Maya Salam succinctly outlines these behaviors: “Suppressing emotions or masking distress;” “Maintaining an appearance of hardness;” and “[Regarding violence] as an indicator of power (think: “tough-guy” behavior).” She goes on to state:
Toxic masculinity is what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly; that they have to be “tough all the time”; that anything other than that makes them ‘feminine’ or weak.
Just as the term “toxic masculinity” itself has been around longer than most people might realize, the horror and sci-fi genres have used it as a thematic undercurrent since at least as far back as Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein (widely acknowledged as a foundational horror text and the first work of science fiction), with its critique of a scientist who desires to create a “Superman” of sorts (a stand-in for his own perceived inadequacies as a man), but whom abandons his creation when it turns out to be not-so-superior, to say the least. The irony is that Frankenstein is unable to realize his vicarious hyper-masculine fantasy because he is unable to love and nurture his “monster,” both stereotypically feminine traits. (Incidentally, Rory Kinnear played Frankenstein’s creation in the TV series Penny Dreadful.)
In many ways, Ex Machina is an update of Shelley’s novel, as well as director James Whale’s 1931 adaptation. But perhaps its primary influence lies in Whale’s sequel The Bride Of Frankenstein, released four years later, which examines what happens when men attempt to create and control women for their own personal gains and needs. But whereas Frankenstein (played in both Whale’s films by Collin Clive) seeks to de-feminize himself by building a perfect male specimen, the mad doctor in Ex Machina, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) directly adopts a hyper-masculine “alpha” persona, one that often clashes with his houseguest/guinea pig Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), considerably “weaker” and thus “effeminate” by comparison. Nathan stays tucked away in his ultra-modern country home accessible only by helicopter, much like the castle-dwellers Dr. Frankenstein and the military men in 28 Days Later, constructing his idea of the “perfect woman” – one that technically passes for autonomous but is in reality totally under his control, mentally, physically, and sexually.
Nathan also displays all the characteristics of toxic masculinity outlined by Salam. When Caleb (and through him, the audience) first meets the character, he is ferociously boxing almost bare-knuckle against a punching bag, his muscular, “manly” physique on full display.
A24
This introduction immediately telegraphs everything we will ultimately learn about Nathan: he is consistently aggressive, not only in an athletic sense, but toward Caleb, his “servant” Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) and his AI creation Ava (Alicia Vikander), displaying his regard of violence as an indicator of power; he shows little emotion toward Ava’s suffering, whom he keeps locked up in a cell, cruelly brushing off her feelings as inauthentic given her “inhuman” status (maintaining an appearance of hardness); and while he has chosen his isolation to keep prying eyes away from his AI work, Nathan is ultimately revealed to be a sad and lonely man, one who has always felt alienated due to his intelligence, one who, underneath his alpha-jockeying over and manipulation of Caleb, desperately wants to befriend him – he is, in other words, in pain, but he refuses to really feel or even acknowledge this pain, numbing himself instead with heavy drinking and a staunch reinforcement of his “macho” persona (suppressing emotions or masking distress, combined with alcoholism, which is a problem among those who prescribe to traditional notions of “manliness”).
Put simply, Nathan is an embodiment of toxic masculinity’s most overt characteristics. As such, one might assume the sweet, mild-mannered and empathetic Caleb is the antithesis of toxic masculinity. And of course he is, but this does not mean he doesn’t also engage in patriarchal-influenced attempts at controlling women. He quickly falls in love with Ava, objectifies her and projects his own idealizations of femininity onto her, and he positions himself as a White Knight who must save Ava, never realizing until the gut-punching climax that she was in charge of her own destiny all along. She abandons Caleb in Nathan’s fortress, all but ensuring his death by starvation (if not somehow by his own hand) because she sees him as a threat to her safety. With both Nathan and Kyoko dead, only Caleb knows Ava’s secret, that she is an AI creation built in a lab, and even after extensive conversations with him, ultimately does not trust him enough to bring him along on her journey. It is clear to Ava (and to the audience) that despite Caleb’s efforts at heroism and his stated belief that she has a right to live, he ultimately views Ava as a thing and not a person.
The notion that Caleb and Nathan are really only two sides of the same coin, recalls Rory Kinnear’s assessment of Men: “…there are aspects of male behavior that goes unchecked, that maybe we don’t examine or explore ourselves, however well-meaning.” This sentiment is especially pertinent when considering the ending of 28 Days Later, wherein it is up to Jim, the male protagonist of the film, to save Selena and Hannah from the clutches of the evil Major West and his band of sex-hungry soldiers. Perhaps Garland himself examined negative aspects of his own male behavior, however well-meaning because, in Ex Machina and Men, the women must save themselves from all the men.
#YesAllWomen.
