3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What Is Wrong With Men? Let Michael Douglas Explain.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH MEN: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything, by Jessa Crispin
Michael Douglas is one of the last actors who could 'open' a movie, back when movies were something that opened and shut firmly rather than flowing and receding into a general pool of content. He is an original nepo baby: a sapling carved after his mighty oak father, Kirk, down to the indentation on their chins. And to the author Jessa Crispin, he is a symbol of how everything started to go terribly wrong for men in our time.
Crispin's byline has long made me sit up straighter. At 23, in 2002, she founded Bookslut, one of the earliest literary blogs, declaring when she shut it down 14 years later, 'I just don't find American literature interesting. I find M.F.A. culture terrible.'
She has also dissed The Paris Review and The New Yorker, calling the latter a 'dentist magazine.' In The New York Times's Opinion section, she likened Ivanka Trump's book 'Women Who Work' to 'the scrambled Tumblr feed of a demented 12-year-old who just checked out a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations from the library.'
She's like the Patti LuPone of literary critics.
Crispin has produced hybrids of memoir and cultural analysis about her upbringing in Kansas and travels in Europe, and a feminist manifesto provocatively titled 'Why I Am Not a Feminist.' She almost lost me with an 'Artist's Way'-type book about tarot, but 'What Is Wrong With Men,' which argues that Douglas's portrayals in the '80s and '90s provide a kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis, has reeled me back. Like Absolut and cranberry: What a pairing!
Douglas's most durable role, the one that earned him a best actor Oscar, is Gordon 'Greed is good' Gekko, the rapacious, pinstriped, slick-haired investor and corporate raider in Oliver Stone's 'Wall Street' (1987). Disturbingly, 21st-century finance bros find that performance inspiring. And yet Crispin's chapter on the movie, which discusses the consequences of banking deregulation, monster mergers and the decline of unions, is her most glancing.
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