A new book looks at Michael Douglas and the confused American man

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Director Oliver Stone's 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps saw him return to one of the most memorable characters he'd created: the ruthless, glib corporate raider Gordon Gekko from the 1987 film Wall Street. After serving time for insider trading. Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, is supposedly reformed. But soon, he's saying things like, 'I tell you, the government's worse than a wife. They got all the power, they got half the money. Now they're working on getting the other half."
Director Oliver Stone's 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps saw him return to one of the most memorable characters he'd created: the ruthless, glib corporate raider Gordon Gekko from the 1987 film Wall Street. After serving time for insider trading. Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, is supposedly reformed. But soon, he's saying things like, 'I tell you, the government's worse than a wife. They got all the power, they got half the money. Now they're working on getting the other half."
The American right-wingers of today lionize Gekko unironically, completely ignoring the fact that he was written as a cautionary figure. This is not a phenomenon restricted to the social media era. Popular movies have always been used as a loudspeaker to propagate our worst impulses, which is one reason I liked the central conceit of Jessa Crispin's new book of criticism, What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything.
The US ushered in a number of legislative and societal reforms in the 1960s and '70s, the goal being equal rights for women. Crispin locates Douglas as representative of a certain kind of liberal man who struggles to cope with the shifting role of men in such a landscape (in an inspired bit of comparative reading, she likens Douglas to Bill Clinton, who was born around the same time and had much the same personal failings as several Douglas characters from the 1980s and '90s do). Also Read | Longform: Comics that force our attention to the little details
'He certainly wasn't on the side of the conservatives and the religious extremists who were outraged by the feminist movement, condemning the civil rights campaign as a tool of the devil," she writes. 'But he also didn't seem to think that the feminist movement and the changes happening in the political and cultural reality of women had anything to do with him. And in that way, he was a kind of cinematic stand-in for a lot of men of the time: liberal, tolerant and clueless."
This is a brilliant strategy for a cultural critic, because the failings of liberalism are far more subtle and instructive in the feminist context than any evisceration of straight-up conservatism would have been. Crispin rightly compares Douglas to the female 'hysteria" patients of 19th century France, who 'performed" for an audience under hypnosis. In her interpretation, Douglas is the 'performing hysteric" for the men of the 1980s and '90s, confused and disoriented as a distinctly corporate brand of feminism threatens to upend their world order (as seen in the Douglas films Fatal Attraction and Disclosure). A still from 'Fatal Attraction'
Crispin is very good at linking the individual trials and tribulations of the characters played by Douglas to the larger societal upheavals of America. For example, the chapter on Wall Street and its 2010 sequel blossoms into a jeremiad on the sense of betrayal the American public felt when President Barack Obama bailed out the deeply corrupt banking institutions responsible for the 2007-08 financial crisis. Disclosure and Basic Instinct are both revisited in the light of the ongoing 'Andrew Tate era", with a straight line drawn between the incel talking points of today and the more insidious forms of misogyny depicted in those films. Also Read | Bette Howland, the writer who returned from oblivion
Towards the end of the book, Crispin suspends her initial approach of taking things one movie , one issue at a time, and commences a flat-out assault on contemporary 'manosphere' politics. She is a little less convincing in this section, perhaps because her strongest suit remains the extrapolation of popular culture into on-ground politics (how that process works, the danger it poses, the challenges it places before our collective imagination). However, every now and then she pulls out a bravura passage out of nowhere, and this usually papers over any analytical cracks in her framework. 'What Is Wrong with Men': By Jessa Crispin, Penguin Random House, 288 pages, $27 (approx. ₹ 2,367)
In one such passage, she explains how the messaging around domestic work and caregiving completely changed after the 'women's lib" era. Previously, advertisements, songs and movies painted domesticity as a huge positive, and the fictional women who transgressed these boundaries were duly punished—now those same realms of human endeavour were painted as 'emasculating" or 'gay" because men were suddenly expected to find meaning there. This was textbook reactionary behavior.
What is Wrong With Men never loses its sense of playfulness and whimsy as it wades through the filmography of Michael Douglas. The man himself continues to be a cinematic metonym for Uncle Sam—just last year, he portrayed Benjamin Franklin, one of the most quintessentially American men of all time. At 80 years of age, I think Douglas remains mindful of the way his legacy is intertwined with that of America. Luckily for us, Crispin understands this all too well.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based journalist. Topics You May Be Interested In